Family Notes

On the label inside the guitar, an old piece of paper bears the inscription: “Musical Emporium, J. Llobet y Cía., S.C. Rambla de Canaletas, 129 – Telf. 222 42 86 Barcelona – 2.”

A simple internet search led me to discover the shop where my father's guitar had come from. “José Llobet Gardella, a Catalan who one day emigrated to Argentina in search of fortune and returned with an Italian wife and two daughters, conceived the idea of founding a publishing house dedicated to sheet music, particularly religious compositions and traditional Catalan music. And so, in 1900, Musical Emporium opened its doors in a small shop just steps away from Plaça de Catalunya, which had yet to undergo urban development. Barely a decade had passed since the installation of the present-day Font de Canaletes, and the city was only beginning to expand toward the emerging Eixample district.” — [El Mundo]

Somewhere in that shop, at some point between 1900 and 1970, the guitar I want to tell you about today must have been assembled.

My parents, both born in Pereira, Colombia, met in Manizales in January 1970, during the city's annual festivities. My mother told me that my father bought the guitar in 1973 from Father José María Ruíz Piedrahíta, the parish priest of Our Lady of Fátima Church in Pereira. Father Ruíz had brought the guitar from Spain years earlier and mentioned to my mother that he was willing to sell it. When she told her then-boyfriend about the opportunity, he didn't hesitate for a second. He bought it for approximately three thousand Colombian pesos.

When violence and drug trafficking forced us to leave Pereira in 1989, I was fourteen years old, and the guitar was probably around twenty. We moved to Cartagena, a city that welcomed us as its own. Once settled there, among the few things I remember from our previous life was the guitar. In fact, I believe it was the only thing we brought with us.

From 1973 onward, that guitar accompanied my father for more than four decades—forty-two years—until his death in 2015.

When my father passed away from cancer on April 21, 2015, it seemed as though the guitar had echoed his rapid decline. It was in terrible condition. Not knowing what to do, I put it away for several years, with the same tenderness with which one might keep an old pair of shoes.

The only sounds it made were echoes of memories: our sessions playing together, performing the same songs our grandparents had once played. The bambucos of Luis Carlos González, the tangos of Carlos Gardel, and the rancheras of José Alfredo Jiménez.

One day, I gathered the courage to ask a dear friend, Eduardo Bosa, to help me restore the guitar. If there was anyone I could trust with Tato's guitar, it was Eduardo. He had left behind a promising engineering career to devote himself to lutherie—the craft of making and restoring stringed instruments—a passion he had already been pursuing for several years. Since 2014, Eduardo has been building guitars in his workshop in Cartagena, Colombia, combining traditional and modern techniques to create beautiful, high-quality instruments. (Visit his website here)

Eduardo knew my father well. Perhaps that is why he embraced this project as his own, with the same affection, care, and dedication he would have given it had the guitar belonged to him. And he did so at considerable personal cost. For Eduardo, every hour spent restoring the guitar was an hour taken away from his commercial projects. As a luthier working alone, every minute matters. I will be eternally grateful to him.

When Eduardo returned the guitar to me, I couldn't hold back my tears. All those years of hearing its echoes throughout our home, all the songs, all the family gatherings, all the moments we had shared came rushing back, carrying the full weight of his absence. At once, I felt my father's presence and the profound emptiness of being without him. And yet, the joy of holding the guitar in my hands again overshadowed every trace of melancholy.

Another deeply happy moment, though filled with nostalgia, came when we presented the restored guitar to my mother on her eightieth birthday. Gathered as a family, we once again sang the songs that had always been part of our lives: Mi Casta, La Ruana, Muchachita Pereirana, Volver, La Media Vuelta, and so many others. We celebrated Tato's life and his legacy. We cried, and we laughed. 

Musical Emporium closed its doors in 2014. After 114 years of history, José Llobet Gardella's dream had come to an end, just one year before my father's passing. But music transcends farewells. What remains with us is the guitar, now more than half a century old, and I hope its strings will continue to resonate for many decades to come.

Not merely as a witness to the passage of time, but as a bridge between generations, reminding us that as long as someone is there to play its strings, the memory of those we love will live on.