Anthony's violin

Anthony's violin is the material centre of Anthony Brown's life as a street musician: at once an intricate, carefully handled instrument, a source of music that gathers strangers around him, and the only possession he says he owns besides his clothes. Its maker's label gives it a voice that Anthony understands himself to borrow, while its value makes it a constant responsibility as well as his livelihood.

Form and identity

The violin first appears in Kalamata in a battered case carried from a train arriving from Corinth. The case does not prepare the people who hear Anthony Brown play for the instrument's remarkable detail. Its back is cut from a single piece of striped maple, which Anthony admires for its tiger-like markings. The pegs end in tiny pearls; the bridge is fine; and purfling traces the instrument's curved outline. On the tailpiece, an elaborate carving forms a face that a child recognizes as resembling the violinist.

The violin's interior carries another kind of identity. When light enters through one of its curved, f-shaped holes, writing becomes visible inside the wooden body. A boy makes out the beginning of the name Antonius Stradivarius, then later gives up before he can read the full inscription. The label is not Anthony's name: Anthony explains that it names the maker. He says every violin made by Antonius bears his name, and that each instrument is unique while carrying its maker's voice. When listeners mistake the label for the player's name, Anthony does not correct them; in his account, the violin and player are joined closely enough that the mistake has a kind of truth.

A public instrument

Anthony plays in the streets on a feast day, where groups of itinerant bouzouki and klarino players are familiar sights. His dress and music distinguish him from them. His playing stops children in the middle of their games, and they approach the violin without the reserve shown by many adults. One boy reaches not to handle it carelessly but to discover its surfaces: he plucks a string, touches the carved face, and turns the instrument to inspect it. Anthony bends down and lets him look, keeping a light hold while allowing the child to examine it.

The music makes the violin a gathering point as much as an object of scrutiny. Anthony's playing is described as sweet and mellow, without a misplaced or discordant note. When children are near, he chooses bright, easy melodies; boys abandon their ball and circle him until they are giddy, while girls skip hand in hand. The instrument's effect is not confined to attentive listening: its rhythms draw the children into movement, turning a street performance into a shared, spontaneous play.

The encounter with Magda

At the port, the violin's sound reaches Magda while she sits alone outside her cousin Andreas's café. The water is still, the port's concrete expanse is nearly deserted, and the warehouses hold dried fruit and drums of olive oil. Against the sky turning pink, Anthony plays a single sustained note, then another. Magda feels the music is being played for her, although the narration leaves open whether Anthony is looking at her for inspiration or is unaware of her. The violin's sound makes an intimate address possible without settling what the musician intends.

As sailors and dock-workers drift closer, Magda keeps her attention on Anthony. His eyes are closed; he senses the audience's mood and selects from a repertoire that includes Bach, Mozart, Telemann, Corelli, and Vivaldi. The music continues even as a boat arrives and its anchor drops. Anthony seems unable to stop playing, and the violin makes his solitary performance the focus of a small, changing crowd. Magda asks how he learned. He replies that the violin taught him, as though the music already waits inside the instrument for someone to release it.

Anthony then takes the violin from its red velvet case and shows Magda how to play. He adjusts the pegs to tune it, moves her hair aside, sets the instrument beneath her chin, positions her left hand, and guides the fingers of her right hand along the bow. As he helps her draw it across the strings, the violin becomes something she can feel and handle rather than only hear. Its low open G sounds first; then Anthony places her forefinger on the E string, producing F sharp—the note with which he had begun that evening with Bach's Air on a G String.

When the note fades, Magda lays the violin in her lap and looks down at it as if it were a baby, precious but unfamiliar. She traces the small wooden body and glimpses the writing through the f-shaped opening, prompting her question about the inscription. The scene returns the instrument's physical details to the foreground: its sound has drawn her close, but the label and carved body invite her to inspect what makes this particular violin distinct.

Livelihood and attachment

Anthony tells Magda that the violin is the most precious thing he owns and that, apart from his clothes, it is all he has. Without it, he says, he does not eat. Its value therefore carries practical consequences: the instrument is both the means by which he earns a living and something he must guard. He describes feeling possessed by it, as if it sometimes plays him, and says that even when he is not performing he has to protect it. The responsibility occupies his thoughts throughout the day.

The violin is thus neither simply a prized possession nor merely a tool. Its fine construction invites the close attention of a child; its sound interrupts the quiet of the port and draws Magda out of her customary solitude; and its label gives Anthony a way to describe performance as the release of another person's voice. At the same time, the dependence is concrete: his survival as a busker rests on the one object he cannot afford to lose. The instrument's beauty and musical presence are inseparable from its vulnerability and from the precarious life organized around it.