The Radio Repairer – Part 1: Valves

"It is a very old lady," said Mateo.

"It's a radio," said Lucia.

"It is a 1954 valve set. She has been sleeping for twenty years. You cannot wake her quickly."

He turned the wooden cabinet over on his workbench, in the shaded stall on a Havana back street, and peered into the dusty depths with a torch. The air smelled of solder and hot dust and strong black coffee. Shelves around him were stacked with radios in every state of undress: cabinets, dials, loose valves in cardboard sleeves. A fan turned lazily overhead. Out in the street, a vendor sang about peanuts.

She was twenty-nine, an electrical engineer, brisk and slender, in a yellow cotton dress and sandals, with a notebook under her arm. He was thirty-three, a repairer, lean and quiet, with curly dark hair, a thin moustache and slow, careful hands. A magnifying glass hung round his neck.

"It was my grandmother's," said Lucia. "She used to dance to it."

"What song?"

"Her favourite. I don't know the name. I only know how it goes." She hummed a few bars, a slow, lilting bolero.

Mateo's hands paused. "I know that song."

"You do?"

"It is by an old trio. They are all dead. But I have a record."

He tilted his head, listening to something in his memory. Then, with his small screwdriver, he began, very gently, to open the radio. Lucia pulled up a stool and watched. For an hour, they said very little. He replaced a capacitor, cleaned a valve, tested a resistor. His face, in the glow of the work lamp, was serious and absorbed.

"I am an engineer," said Lucia.

"I know. You hold the screwdriver like a pen."

"I'm trained."

"You are impatient. Valves hate that."

She laughed, in spite of herself. He did not look up, but a smile ghosted across his face.

She came back the next day, and the next. The radio hummed and crackled and slowly began to wake. By the fifth afternoon, a thread of music, thin and far away, drifted from the speaker.

"Can I ask you something?" said Lucia.

"Yes."

"Why are you so patient?"

"Because some things are worth waiting for," said Mateo.

"Green?" she said, a valve, a dial.

"Green," said Mateo, going pink. "Very green. Come tomorrow. She is almost ready."

Continue the story: Part 2 – The Bolero.