What Nil asked me

Nil is nine, has a fringe his mother cut with more determination than steadiness and a habit I adore: before he plays he blows on his fingers, like card players in films. He's been with me at the school for two years. He's one of those kids who practise very little but listen enormously, and even though no method book mentions it, that shows.

On Friday we had the start-of-term recital. It's a small thing, in the first-floor room at the school, with sixty plastic chairs, a piano that's out of tune on the high D and parents filming with their phones held upright. Nothing important, in theory. Each student plays a short piece and then there's juice and biscuits.

Nil was playing a Bach minuet, one of the easy ones, the kind every violinist on earth has played at some point with their shoulders hunched up to their ears.

Behind the door

We were waiting in the corridor, next to the coffee machine that's been broken since last year. He was on after a girl playing the flute. Nil was very quiet, which isn't like him, and he wasn't blowing on his fingers. He was looking at his shoes.

Suddenly he said: "Elena, do your legs shake too?"

I had the teacher answer ready. The one that says it's normal, it's just excitement, it goes away once you start playing. That answer isn't exactly a lie, but it isn't exactly true either. And Nil was looking at me with the eyes of a child who knows perfectly well when a grown-up is telling him a story.

So I told him the truth. That yes, my legs shake, and worse, my bow shakes, especially on long notes, because your arm stays still and fear takes the chance to sneak in there. That in my final exam at the conservatory, playing a Bach sarabande, my bow bounced on the string like a ping-pong ball in front of a panel of three people, one of whom wrote something down, and I thought I was going to die. That this summer, at a wedding, a string snapped and I nearly passed out.

Nil listened very seriously. Then he asked the real question:

"So why do you do it?"

And I didn't know what to say. I opened my mouth and nothing useful came out. I said something like "because I like it", which is true but explains nothing, because I also like nougat ice cream and my legs don't shake when I eat it.

My tricks, such as they are

What I did do was teach him my tricks, which aren't much but sometimes work. Run cold water over your wrists in the toilets. Press your toes into the floor inside your shoes, as if you were trying to grip the ground. Breathe out more slowly than you breathe in. And look at a spot on the back wall, not at faces, because faces tell you stories that aren't true.

We went to the toilets together. He wet his wrists so enthusiastically that he soaked his shirt sleeves up to the elbow. I told him it didn't matter.

But only a bit

He walked out, did a clumsy bow, blew on his fingers (good, I thought) and began. The first bars were fast, almost tripping over each other. Then came the long note at the end of the first section, a D that has to last two beats, and I saw it. The bow was shaking. Not much, a small wobble nobody in the third row would notice, but I was standing by the piano and saw it clearly.

He didn't stop. He pressed his lips together, carried on and finished the piece with a slightly abrupt last stroke, and the room clapped as if he'd played at the Palau de la Música. His grandmother shouted "Bravo!" with her mouth full of biscuit.

When he came back to the corridor, sleeves still wet, he came up to me and said quietly, very pleased with himself:

"It shook. But only a bit."

Next Saturday I have a wedding in Sagunto. I've written his sentence in pencil inside the lid of my violin case, next to the rosin.