Sitting at his desk, the goldsmith Juan Carlos Pallarols He takes out a worn notebook with a blue cover from a drawer.
—My grandfather left this notebook to my dad and my dad to me. In reality, it passed from hand to hand and my brothers and cousins told me: “You are the one who keeps everything, so we give it to you.”
As he caresses the pages, he summarizes the story of how, among his ancestors, goldsmithing was passed down from generation to generation.
In 1750, his great-great-grandfather began the trade in a workshop he had on Carretes Street, in Barcelona. At the beginning of the 19th century, his ancestor traveled to Argentina to raise money, but he had to fight in the English invasions and finally returned to Spain. It was Juan Carlos’s grandfather who, due to the bad European situation at the time, decided to settle in Buenos Aires. The knowledge and tools were passed from parents to their children.
—There is a part of the book that my great-grandfather wrote in 1854, when he fought in the Crimean War. And this part is from my grandfather, José Pallarols Torrás.
In the background you can hear the metallic tapping made by his employees in the workshop, adjacent to the room where we are.
—If you have time, I’ll read you a little…
Here, Juan Carlos works and lives. Here, too, operates the museum where he collects the works of the generations that preceded him. Behind the display cases there are silver crafts: Dupont pens, roses, mates, light bulbs and charms. Also, presidential canes: a few months ago he had an encounter with the Argentine presidential candidate Javier Milei, after the goldsmith said that the candidate called to ask for “one with the little hair.” Above the tables, the replica of a saber of General José de San Martín, shields, knives and a quartz sculpture.
His nails are neat and his fingers are wrinkled because, he says, a while ago he was working with a solution of sulfuric acid and water that left his hands rough. Next, she goes to put on a moisturizer.
—I take care of my hands. They have been insured by an English company for 10 years. Now I don’t know how much the policy will be worth, but at the time it was a lot of money.
He often returns to that blue notebook that recounts the memories of his great-grandfather and grandfather. She returns to see how the ancestors thought of her. She says: “To remember.”
—What always impressed me was how he encourages us to work.
Read slowly. With her index finger on the paper, she marks the words she pronounces.
—”Because work is the father of glory and happiness and, if not, keep this maxim in mind: he who does not start working when he is young will very soon begin to ask and he who has to live asking, due to lack of desire to work, it would be better for him not to have been born…”.
His grandfather bequeathed to him that passion that, today, he passes on to Carlos and Adrián, his two sons.
In 1945, when Juan Carlos was two and a half years old, José Pallarols Torrás became a widower and took him on as an apprentice. Through games, he taught him the trade. “What do you want to do today?” He asked her. “A cart, grandpa.” “Well, first let’s draw it. Then, to look for the material.” They used scraps of sheet metal, tin, wood: everything that was left over from the workshop. At six years old, Juan Carlos was already very advanced in the trade.
At nine, his grandfather took him to a publishing house where they made missals and Bibles. He showed her one, lined with red leather and metal toe caps. “Do you notice anything particular?” “Yes, grandfather, it seems to me that these little flowers are the ones I make in the workshop.” There were eight or ten of them, which adorned the book. “Exact. This is your job. Did your dad pay you for it? ”He asked her.
The teaching left its mark on little Juan Carlos. A few years later, at 12, he worked for a bookstore owned by Salesian priests. The owner wanted to haggle over the price of a small chalice. “1,800 pesos? No! That’s not worth more than 1,000…” At that moment, Juan Carlos remembered what his grandfather had told him and, angry at him, he confessed that, surely, he would be right. He left the bookstore and saw that the tram was coming a few blocks away. He took the chalice and placed it softly on the path. The metal wheels passed over the glass and destroyed it. The man left the business screaming. “How are you going to do that?” “What if you told me I was worthless!” replied the teenager.
“From then on, they never discussed a price with me,” says Pallarols. And I owe that to my grandfather.
He also owes his passion for work to his grandfather. The confidence that if he wanted to be someone in life he should never abandon his craft. And patience.
—One day he brought me a bunch of pebbles, covered them with water in a pot, put the heat on low and told me: “Cook these mongetes. “Don’t call me until they are tender.” I stirred for three hours. I knew they were never going to soften, but I also knew that if he called him he was going to slap me. At the end, he asked me what I had learned. “In life you have to be patient, grandfather. That without patience nothing is achieved.”
Pallarols gets up, opens a display case and, to exemplify what he said, takes out a fountain pen. He says that the platinum pen, the sucker and the plunger are from the French brand Dupont. On the cap and on the base, portraits of European romantic composers: Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, Liszt, Brahms.
—There are about twenty-odd portraits that are made by hitting with a tembleque: it is a little iron, with a bent tip. You grab it with the vise, hit it on one side and it vibrates on the other. You move it, soft, soft, and thus you raise the relief.
He says each portrait took four to five days. The complete pen, about three or four months. It is a very precise job and, therefore, if he were to sell it, the price would range between 30,000 and 40,000 dollars.
—And that rose?
Pallarols says that, in 1949, his grandfather gave it to one of his daughters for their silver wedding anniversary. Years later, another daughter of her grandfather asked him for one. And on August 31, 1997, the day Lady Di died, she was in Paris with some friends who were also acquaintances of the Princess of Wales.
—They asked me for a tribute. I made a silver rose and gave the cap a red gold plating and a patina with potassium sulfide that generated a black, reddish brown color, like those English flower buds that don’t open completely.
He says the photo appeared on the covers of the magazine Hello! and from the French newspaper The Figaro. And when he arrived in Buenos Aires, he had a lot of orders. In one year, he made 300 roses.
—The second famous one was the wedding of Máxima Zorreguieta.
Some of his works are commissions. Others are things that occur to him. And that, generally, then also sells. Sometimes he works 8 hours, other times 10 or 12 or 14.
—It happens to me that I’m having dinner and I think about something that was pending. So, I go back to the workshop (which is 10 meters away), I solve it and I go to sleep in peace, because there is no schedule in this.
—And the holidays?
—I had two cousins who worked in a neuropsychiatric hospital. He would visit them, sometimes he would have lunch there, and one day I saw a crazy person writing on a blackboard: “He who works in what he likes, he is on vacation all year round.” And I thought: “That’s what happens to me!” I’m on vacation all year round.
—Were you always self-taught?
-Absolutely. When I was in high school, my father’s house was auctioned off and he had to go to work in a friar’s convent in the province of Corrientes. At night, I went to the Academy of Fine Arts. But one day I told my mother: “If dad dies, I won’t learn anything.” “But if you leave Fine Arts you won’t have a degree,” she replied. “But what am I going to learn? To paint, to draw: I can learn that from dad,” I told him, and I went to work with him in Corrientes. My dad died at 69: so I took advantage of the last 20 years of his life.
—What do you know today, at 80, that you didn’t know 40 years ago?
-So many things. The more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t know. And, since I have the patience to turn over the stones, I continue learning, I continue studying. I have a good pulse, good eyesight and a lot of desire. So, for me, life is a never-ending adventure. I don’t know how long I’ll live: for now I’m healthy… But I knew healthy people who also died.
—To be self-taught you need strong discipline, right?
-I don’t know. Today I get paid well to give talks. And when I see that people listen to me, I say: “Well.” I felt quite self-conscious because I had not been able to finish high school or go to university…
From one of the display cases, he takes out a box.
-Look. This is the title of honorary doctor that they gave me at the University of Buenos Aires. “To the honorary doctor Juan Carlos Pallarols…”. When you get old, when you’re about to die, they give you all the prizes [ríe].
—Do you think about death?
Every day. Since I was little. But in a positive way.
-What do you think?
—In the convent of Corrientes where I lived as a teenager, on top of the nightstand, there was a skull with ink written on its forehead: “I was what you are. You will be what I am.” And that makes you think… But death is a natural fact. That forces you to revere, to respect, to enjoy every day of your life. Using it in a reasonable, glorious, joyful way. And leaving the best that one can leave.
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