Aldo lost his hearing on a Tuesday. It was not dramatic. No explosion, no infection, no trauma the doctors could name. His audiologist said the word "idiopathic," which means we do not know, and Aldo went home and sat in his workshop surrounded by twenty-three unfinished violins and realized that the room was silent in a way it had never been silent before.
For two weeks he did not touch the wood. He sat in the kitchen and ate soup and watched his wife's lips move and learned, slowly, to read the shapes her mouth made when she said his name. She was patient about it. She had been patient about many things over thirty-one years, including the sawdust and the smell of varnish and the fact that he tested his instruments at midnight by playing them badly.
He would not play them badly anymore. He would not play them at all.
Aldo's teacher had been a man named Frassati who worked in a converted barn outside Cremona. Frassati had hands like weathered stone and opinions about spruce that bordered on religious conviction. He taught Aldo to tap the plates -- the front and back panels of the violin body -- and listen for the tap tone. The right tap tone meant the wood was the right thickness. Too thick and the tone was dull. Too thin and it cracked under string tension. The perfect thickness produced a specific ring, a clarity that Frassati called "the voice trying to get out."
Aldo could still tap the plates. He could feel the vibration in his fingertips when he held the wood against his jaw, the way you can feel a tuning fork if you press it to bone. What he could not do was hear the voice. He could feel that something was there. He could not tell if it was the right thing.
For three months he did not build. Then his wife said something that he read on her lips as either "you are wasting" or "you are waiting," and he realized that both were true, and that only one of them was a choice.
The first violin he built after going deaf was bad. He knew this because his wife's face did something complicated when she played it -- she was a cellist, competent but unambitious -- and because the man at the shop where he sold his instruments held it at arm's length and said things Aldo could not read.
The second was also bad, but in a different way. The plates were too thick. He could feel this by weight alone -- he had been weighing plates for twenty years and knew that a good top plate for a full-size violin should weigh between sixty and seventy grams. The second violin's top weighed eighty-three. He had been afraid of going too thin, so he went too thick, and the instrument was muffled. A violin with too-thick plates sounds like it is being played inside a cardboard box. His wife made a different face this time, one that meant she was trying not to look disappointed.
The third was closer. He brought back the calipers, the gram scale, the Chladni patterns -- metal plates covered in fine sand, vibrated until the sand settled into the nodal lines, the places where the wood was not moving. Frassati had shown him this once, for fun. Now it was essential. The sand told him what his ears could not: where the stiffness was uneven, where the arching needed adjustment, where the bass bar -- the strip of spruce glued inside the top plate -- was too short or too long.
His wife played the third violin and cried. He could not hear why.
By the seventh violin, Aldo had developed a system. Every parameter that Frassati had taught him by ear, he translated into measurement. Tap tones became frequencies measured with a contact microphone and a laptop running spectral analysis software that his nephew installed. Plate thickness became a grid of caliper readings taken at forty points, mapped against Chladni patterns. Arching height became a template checked at three-millimeter intervals. The varnish -- which affects the sound more than most people realize, because it changes the damping characteristics of the wood -- became a formula: so many grams of propolis to so many milliliters of alcohol, applied in so many coats, each dried for exactly so many hours.
He was not listening to the violin. He was measuring the conditions under which a violin sounds good, and reproducing them precisely. The distinction matters, because a violin is not its measurements. A violin is the experience of hearing it. Aldo was building the container for an experience he could not have.
The seventh violin won a prize at a competition in Mittenwald. The judges praised its "warmth" and "clarity," two words that mean nothing to Aldo because he cannot hear them. He accepted the prize with a smile that his wife later told him was slightly too wide, as if he were guessing at the appropriate expression, which he was.
His best violin -- everyone agrees it was number fourteen -- was built on a November day when the humidity was thirty-eight percent and Aldo's hands were cold. He remembers the cold because it made the carving harder and because his wife brought him coffee three times, which meant she was watching him, which meant she was worried. The cold hands slowed him down, which made him more careful, which may or may not have contributed to the final result. There is no way to test this.
A violinist named Seo-yun Park plays number fourteen. She is in a string quartet based in Stuttgart. She told Aldo, through his wife, that the violin "sings on the G string in a way that makes you think it has been waiting to tell you something." Aldo nodded. He has become very good at nodding.
What he did not tell her, because there was no way to say it that would not sound either self-pitying or impossibly strange, is that he built number fourteen by feel alone. The calipers, the scale, the Chladni patterns, the contact microphone -- he used all of them. But at some point during the carving of the top plate, he stopped checking the measurements and just carved. His hands knew. Twenty years of hearing tap tones had trained his fingers to recognize the right resistance, the right flex, the right weight-to-area ratio that produces the right sound. He did not hear the voice trying to get out. His thumbs felt it.
He does not know if this is the same as hearing. He suspects it is not. But the violin sings on the G string in a way that makes you think it has been waiting to tell you something, and Aldo made that happen without knowing what it sounds like, and he has no idea what to do with that fact except keep building.
Aldo is sixty-three years old. He has built forty-one violins since going deaf, which is more than he built in the twenty years when he could hear. He does not know why this is. His wife thinks it is compensation. His nephew thinks it is obsession. Aldo thinks it is the only thing he knows how to do, and that the silence is not a reason to stop, and that the wood does not care whether he can hear it.
He is currently building number forty-two. The spruce is from the Val di Fiemme, the same forest that supplied Stradivarius. The maple is Bosnian. The plates are perfect by every measurement he knows. The Chladni patterns are symmetrical. The tap-tone spectrum has the right peak ratios. His hands feel nothing wrong.
It will be good. He is almost certain of this, in the same way that a person who cannot see is almost certain that the painting they described to someone else came out right, because the person who painted it said so, and they had no reason to lie.
Almost certain is close enough. It has to be.