The wedding of the broken string

On Saturday we played a wedding at a masía, an old farmhouse, near Llíria. Thirty-eight degrees in the shade, and we weren't in the shade. They put us under a gorgeous olive tree that shaded everyone except the viola.

For anyone who doesn't know: there are four of us in Cuarteto Turia. Sergio, second violin, who has kept a hand fan in his case since 2022. Laia, viola, the only one of us who can read a contract. Toni, cello, who drives the van and plays the radio very loud. And me, first violin, who gets nervous at every wedding as if it were my own.

Pachelbel, eleven times

The bride had asked to walk in to Pachelbel's Canon. Classic, lovely, no surprises. What we didn't know was that she'd arrive twenty-five minutes late, because the vintage car they'd hired overheated on the motorway and they had to wait on the hard shoulder for it to cool down.

The planner, a girl with an earpiece who never stopped checking her phone, signalled to us: "Keep playing." So we did. The Canon has an eight-note bass line that repeats over and over, which means you can loop it until the end of time. We played it eleven times. By the sixth, Toni had his eyes closed as if meditating. By the eighth, Sergio was slipping in ornaments that weren't in the score. By the tenth, the guests had no idea whether this was part of the ceremony or an experiment in contemporary art.

When the bride finally appeared, her dress stuck to her back and a heroic smile on her face, we started the Canon a twelfth time, for real now, and I swear it sounded better than ever. Our fingers were warm, which coming from a musician is a compliment.

The string

The worst came during the signing. We had to play Bach's "Air", which is slow and full of long notes on the E string, the highest and thinnest, the one that suffers most from heat and humidity. I'd felt it drifting out of tune all afternoon, and I'd been correcting it with the fine tuner between pieces, fingers sweaty.

Halfway through a long note in the second bar, just as the couple leant over the paper, the string snapped. It makes a sharp little crack, like a tiny whip, and then the loose end flicks up near your face. The whole farmhouse heard it. A little boy in the front row said "Whoa!" with sincere admiration.

At that point you have two options: stop or keep going. I stopped for a split second that felt like a week, then played everything that was left an octave lower, on the A string, changing fingerings as I went. It sounded strange, a bit darker, but it sounded. Laia glanced at me with that face she makes, half panic and half pride. Nobody noticed, except the boy, who stared at me for the rest of the ceremony as if I were a superhero.

My legs were shaking. I also wanted to laugh, which is what happens to me when fear runs out all at once.

Paquito

During the drinks, while I was changing the string behind the van, a man in a linen shirt and a very red face came over. The groom's uncle. He wanted us to play "Paquito el chocolatero", the brass-band anthem every Spanish party ends with. Laia explained very politely that it wasn't in our repertoire. The man looked at us as if we'd insulted his mother.

We played it by ear. Toni kept the beat by tapping on the body of the cello, Sergio did the trumpet part on the violin, I made up whatever I could. Within ten seconds thirty people in suits were doing the dance, crouching and springing up with their hands on their hips under a sun that was melting the tarmac. The groom's uncle was crying with happiness. He tipped us twenty euros, in a note folded in four and slightly damp.

We drove back at night in Toni's van, the cello strapped in the back and the windows down. Nobody said much. I got home at half past one, Marta was already asleep, and I stood in the kitchen for a while with the case open on the table, looking at the new string, which hadn't had to survive anything yet.