Piwin -> RE: Most aggressive flamenco guitar? (Apr. 8 2017 19:52:01)
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... In 1994, I travelled to Brussels for business. After a long and rather dissapointing day (the Czechs had refused to sign the exit clause of the contract we were negotiating, which meant that we were back to square one), I dragged my weary feet down to a small pub just outside of the international quarters of the city. I got to talking with a man at the bar. After a few glasses of scotch, he opened up. He worked for Interpol, or at least he used to. He said that they had been tracking Fernandez guitars for decades, that they would appear right before almost every major conflict since WWII only to vanish into thin air right after. In 1991, he heard that a Fernando Santez guitar had appeared on the black market in Martuni, a small town between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The name sounded eerily similar to Santos Fernandez so he decided to investigate on the ground. When he arrived, the guitar was gone, apparently confiscated by obscure FSB operatives, and the entire Nagorno-Karabakh region had just collapsed into another wave of violence. He decided to widen the scope of his investigation and look into the enigmatic Fernando Santez. At first, it was just rumours: a kora had been found in 1990 in North Mali right before the outbreak of the Tuareg rebellion. The locals said it bore the name Fernando Santez. Later that year, a tin ramkie was said to have been sold near Kagitumba, in Northern Rwanda. The name Fernando Santez had been scratched into the tin can with a screwdriver. The instrument was lost during the RPF invasion. This wasn't much to go on, but the man kept on investigating. The signs started to point to Central and Eastern Europe: a Santez guitar appeared in Kijevo, Croatia, in late 1991. Another appeared in Koretin, Kosovo, in 1992. And yet another in a small mountain village in Abkhazia, still in 1992. A few months before I met him, he had gone back to Nagorno-Karabakh, on a hunch. While in the Maldakert district, he heard of an incident that had occured at the Gandzasar monastery. The relics of St. John the Baptist had burst into flames upon the arrival of a wandering Spanish monk. The man went straight to the monastery. The abbot who led the cinobeum told him about the incident, and about the arrival and abrupt departure of the wandering Spanish monk: he had introduced himself as Sancho and carried a guitar on his back. The trail had since gone cold, but our man wasn't giving up. Interpol had dropped the case for lack of evidence. And he was now digging his way down a rabbit-hole of debt to pursue his obsession for Fernando Santez/Santos Fernandez on his own money. He had lost his job at Interpol, and his relationship with his wife was on the brink. The price of obsession. I paid for his drinks and got up to leave. Before I was out the door, he said: you know, they never found the body. -What body? I asked. -Back in the trailer park, in Long Beach, after the fire where they said Santos Fernandez died. They never found the body.
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