The Swede in Quay Street

The Fionchaora pub. Its bright yellow exterior warms the corner of Quay Street, Galway. Inside amongst the oak, a gypsy-looking Swede tunes his violin in the corner. He wears an unbuttoned black cotton shirt underneath a fastened black waistcoat. His sleeves are rolled to the elbow with a leather cuff wrapped around his left wrist. Are you for playing the now? He is asked. He nods slowly, the intense blue eyes almost hidden underneath cascading blond locks. The chatter of the Sunday crowd builds as faces multiply and the bar does its late afternoon work. Irish maidens with corkscrew curls of ink flirt easily in their summer dresses and boots. Antipodean journeymen with rosy cheeks atop white beards recount folk stories, awash with pints of ale. A double base is wheeled in through the bodies and takes its position, squeezed next to the violin. A portly, genteel guitarist completes the trio.

At once, the humdrum is silenced by the cut of a single note, held and elongated by the Swede’s bow. At the very edge of its stretch it is met with the strike of the bass, which releases the note into full song. The rhythm is kept in order by the six-string and pegged by the double bass, freeing the fiddle to dance over it at will. And dance it surely does. The Swede plays with the crowd, sending crescendo after impossible crescendo up into the beams. The horsehair of the bow lashes at the strings in anger when the tempo is raised. It soothes them on the descent with sweeps of a mother’s tenderness on the cheek of a child.

It is not only his fingers that dance. The Swede leans over the tables during the peaks of the tunes, his face contorted and theatrical. The angles of the bow and elbow are in sharp contrast to the wild mass of flailing hair that performs of its own. But it is the eyes which tell the story of his songs. In the scream of the high notes which tremble and shake, tales of injustices past are written on the blue. When his back is arched into the drawn out sweeps, the audience is shown the beating heart of bygone loves.

Minutes and hours pass with the world on hiatus. In Fionchaora’s front room and snug for now there are no world affairs; there is no sport, and family gossip must await the Sunday table. There is only the Swede and his violin as he builds to a breathless finale. He bends forward over the neck, as the last notes drip from it onto the floor to dilute in the sweat of his brow. He holds that position and clings to a low F note long after the guitar and bass have abated. It whispers away and is replaced by the uproar of the stunned masses, who stand atop their stools and tables to throw thanks and blessings to this man. He raises, bends again in acknowledgment, and disappears like a phantom into the salt-shaken air of the Galway evening.