Salvatore Bianchi kept the television on all day, just for the sound. Streaming wasn’t something he understood so it was game shows in the afternoon, the evening news at six, then whatever came on after.  He’d lost track some years back of which nights the sitcoms ran and which nights they didn’t. Rosa used to know. Rosa had kept a little spiral notebook by the phone with the schedule copied out in pencil, updated every September when the networks shuffled things around, and after she died Sal had found it in the kitchen drawer and hadn’t been able to throw it away, so it sat there still, under the takeout menus, a record of a system nobody needed anymore.

The apartment was on East 87th, third floor, a prewar building with a birdcage elevator that ascended sounding like fingernails on an old blackboard. He’d lived there forty-one years. Long enough to have buried two of the four men from the Thursday poker game — Lou to a heart attack in a diner booth, and Marty, quieter, in his sleep — and to have watched the other two move away to be near their children, one to Boca and one to somewhere in Westchester that Sal couldn’t remember the name of.

The café on the corner where he used to meet Rosa’s sister for coffee after church had become a nail salon, then a phone repair shop, then, as far as he could tell from the plywood in the window, nothing at all. He hadn’t been to church since the café closed and his sister-in-law moved across town.  He was seventy-eight and all of his days were the same. He did not think of himself as an old man so much as a man who had simply run out of the people who kept him going.

He watched the game shows. He watched the news. He went downstairs some mornings to get the paper, more out of habit than interest, since he could no longer hold the small print at any distance that made sense to his eyes. The doorman, Reggie, said good morning to him and Sal said it back, and some days, that was the entire visible evidence that Salvatore Bianchi still belonged to the world.

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Rafael Ortiz had been in New York two years, and in that time, he had learned the freight elevators of forty buildings, the surliness of a hundred doormen, and the ache that sets into a forearm after a full day pedaling a cargo bike through the East Side with a rack of parcels lashed to the back. He worked for Corelli’s, a narrow shop on St. Marks that sold records on one side and paperback books on the other, run by a man named Dom Corelli who paid him in cash and let him practice guitar in the stockroom after closing, among the boxes of returns and the smell of paper.

He had brought the classical guitar with him from Salamanca in a case held together with a strap because the latch had broken somewhere over the Atlantic, and he had spent every free hour since, teaching himself, phrase by phrase, the Concierto de Aranjuez. He did not tell people this. It seemed, said aloud, the kind of thing a poor immigrant on a delivery bike was not supposed to want — to stand in front of an orchestra one day and make the joy and sorrow come out of six strings. But he wanted it anyway and didn’t mention it in case saying so jinxed it. He wanted to honor Rodrigo, the composer, who represented a country Rafael’s own grandmother had fled and who’s blindness and grief for his stillborn daughter, only enhanced the melodies in his head.

On a Tuesday in October, wet from a rain that had started without warning somewhere around Second Avenue, he had nine deliveries left. He was cutting up Lexington against the light, later than he wanted to be, when a dog, off its leash came out from between two cars after a pigeon and he swerved hard without thinking, into the bike lane’s edge. He didn’t go down. But the swerve threw the strap of the delivery bag loose from where it hung against his hip, and by the time he’d steadied the handlebars and looked back, the package for 3D had slid off the rack and dropped into the standing water along the curb, face down, and half-submerged before he’d jumped off the bike to grab it.

He fished it out, wiped it against his jacket, and kept going, because he was late and the rain wasn’t stopping to let him dry it. It wasn’t until he reached the building on 87th that he noticed the felt-tip address had changed to a soft blue haze where the puddle had gotten to it, the last stroke of the D blurred and sagging into something that could as easily be read as a B. He checked it twice under the awning light, decided it said what he expected it to say, and buzzed 3B. Reggie was on a smoke break around the corner and hadn’t seen him come in and the front door was propped open by a mail cart from a different delivery, so nobody stopped Rafael from finding the old brass mail slot for 3B. Rafael pushed the parcel through the slot the way he’d been told to do when there was no answer.

Inside the bag was a padded envelope containing a CD Corelli’s had ordered special for a customer named Whitfield, who was in Ohio for two weeks visiting a daughter and did not yet know it had shipped: Albinoni’s Adagio for Strings. There was also a folded flyer, tucked in by Corelli himself as he did for regular customers, advertising the fall season of a chamber ensemble that practiced and performed above a church on 90th and gave concerts twice a year in whatever space they could get for free.

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Sal found the package sticking out of his box in the vestibule two days later and carried it upstairs assuming it was for him, although his name was nowhere on it and neither was anybody else’s for all his poor eyes could see. He opened it and was disappointed that he did not own a CD player. He had not owned one in a decade. But there was one, he remembered, in the hall closet, Rosa’s, a small gray Sony she used to play in the kitchen while she cooked.  He dug it out and found, after some trouble, an outlet that still worked and put the disc in mostly out of curiosity.

The first minutes of the Adagio did nothing for him. Strings, slow, the kind of music he associated with funerals and doctor’s waiting rooms. But it kept building, refusing to resolve, circling back on the same unbearable suspension over and over, and somewhere in the fourth minute Sal found he had sat down on the arm of the couch without deciding to, and that his face was wet. He could not have said, if asked, what exactly he was crying about — Rosa, or Lou, or Marty, or the two men in Boca and Westchester, or simply the overwhelming beauty of the sound. He played it again. Then a third time. Then he noticed a flyer had fallen out onto the rug, half under the coffee table. He picked it up and read, in print large enough for even his eyes, that the Amsterdam Chamber Players would be performing that Sunday at four o’clock, above a church on 90th Street, admission free.

He went. He told himself it was only to see if the music sounded different in a room instead of through his wife’s portable CD player. He sat in the fourth row of folding chairs among perhaps sixty other people, most of them older, some considerably more frail than he was. Afterward a woman named Constance Voss, who ran the coffee urn at these things because nobody else had thought to, asked him if he’d enjoyed it, and he said yes, more than he’d expected to. That was the whole of the conversation, but the entire experience was enough to make him come back in November.

By January he had a seat he thought of as his. By spring there were four of them who sat together and complained, cheerfully, about the folding chairs. A post-concert coffee stop was becoming a tradition. One of them, a retired dentist named Harold Ames, had taken to walking with Sal afterward as far as the corner of 90th and Broadway before their routes diverged, discussing, with real disagreement, whether the second violinist was flat or the rest of the ensemble was sharp. Sal did not tell any of them about the mysterious envelope, mostly because he had never questioned it was his to begin with. He thought of it, when he thought of it at all, as something that had just arrived exactly when it needed to.

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Rafael mastered the Aranjuez across two winters of small, humiliating failures, of the same sixteen bars run four hundred times, with Dom Corelli telling him from the doorway of the stockroom to slow down, “you’re rushing the sad part, people always rush the sad part.” In the spring of the second year, a member of a community orchestra that rehearsed in a school gymnasium on the Lower East Side heard him practicing through the open door of the shop and asked, on the strength of eleven minutes of listening, whether he’d consider auditioning for their fall concert. He said yes before he’d let himself think about saying no.

He was a nervous twenty-six-year-old when he stood in front of forty amateur and semi-professional musicians in a gymnasium that still smelled faintly of a hundred years of rubber-soled shoes, and played the Adagio movement of the Concierto de Aranjuez with them, and did not rush it.

Constance Voss had heard about the approaching concert from a flyer which was nearly identical to the one that had once fallen out of a bag onto Sal’s rug, and had mentioned it to the fourth-row patrons, and so it happened that Salvatore Bianchi, Harold Ames, and the rest of their row, were sitting on folding chairs in a gymnasium on the Lower East Side on a Saturday night in October, three years, almost to the week, after a stray dog and a curbside puddle had turned a D into a B.

Afterward Rafael’s masterful performance he was all smiles having realized his long-time dream. There was a folding table with wine in plastic cups and cheese cut into irregular triangles, and Sal, who was working up the nerve, the way he had once worked up the nerve to ask Rosa to dance in 1971, told the young guitarist that his interpretation of the slow movement had put him in mind of another piece of music, an Adagio, that a stranger’s kindness had brought into his life some years back, though he couldn’t say who the stranger was or how the CD had found him.

Rafael said only that he was glad the piece had moved him, and asked, because it seemed the natural question, what recording it had been. “Albinoni”, Sal said. “The Adagio for Strings. Delivered, if you could believe it, right to my door, at exactly the moment I’d needed it. From who … I still didn’t know.”

Rafael didn’t know where Sal lived but vaguely remembered bits of a day years ago involving the dog, the puddle, the blurred ink, the propped door, the slot instead of the doorman. But he thought it unlikely it had any relevance. He shook Sal’s hand and told him he hoped to see him at the spring concert, and Sal said he would be there, God willing, fourth row, same as always.

Neither of them ever learned the whole of it. Corelli’s shipped a replacement disc to Mrs. Whitfield in November with an apology for the delay, and she thought nothing of it. The mail slot at 3B was, some months later, painted over along with the rest of the vestibule trim, so that even the small brass evidence of where a misplaced parcel had once been, eventually disappeared. What remained was a friendship between an old man and a young one that neither could fully account for, and a committed chamber ensemble greatly enjoyed by four companions. And somewhere above a church on 90th Street, twice a year, the same beloved music … that a mistake in the rain had carried … unasked for … into a room where it was needed … continued to inspire a life… due to a caring God working in mysterious ways.

Recordings

If you are curious about the compositions mentioned in this story, turn up your volume and click the links below.

                Adagio for Strings & Organ by Albinoni performed by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karajan

                Concierto de Aranjuez by Rodrigo performed by Danish National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Rafael de Burgos & the great Pepe Romero as classical guitarist

Relevant Scripture

God sets the lonely in families, he leads out the prisoners with singing; but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land. (Psalm 68:6)

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)

Even though I walk
    through the darkest valley,
I will fear no evil,
    for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
    they comfort me. (Psalm 23:4)