The Millennium marked a new dawn, a brave new world and coincidentally my sister’s PR firm chucking out all the old enormous computers to buy new ones. It was her dogged insistence that one Saturday morning led to her driving up and kindly dropping off the hefty plastic oblong hard drive in the hallway together with its weighty monitor and not forgetting half a mile of tangled cables.
“What am I supposed to do with that?” I rather ungratefully complained.
“You can get online now” she exclaimed, possibly exasperated at my lack of vision. Despite having bought a ZX Spectrum (the original one with the rubber keys) early on in the 80’s, computers had never been my thing. However I was recently unemployed (by my own hand at least) and at a very loose end, with honestly nothing better to do. With no money and no up and coming prospects of anything else I thought what would be the harm in connecting to the World Wide Web?
It was the time (you may remember) when AOL disks littered supermarket checkouts, the first big push to get the UK population online. I picked one up, unplugged the telephone and tried to get connected. Of course it didn’t work, I’d fudged the whole thing up and didn’t have a clue so I called in somebody else, someone who actually knew what they were doing, my Uncle’s mechanic who built his own computers in his spare time (clever chap). Within the space of a day or two I had an AOL account and access to the World Wide Web, albeit only when, much to everybody else’s frustration, I disconnected the landline.
There wasn’t much to look at online in those early days, most antiques dealers didn’t even know what a website was, there was really only EBay. Inevitably I was one of the first to fall into the routine of scouring EBay’s listings for a gem, though back then the model and feel of it was different to today.
Firstly there were very few “professional dealers” on EBay, it was more like a global car boot fair or attic sale. Secondly most sellers didn’t use the now familiar “Buy It Now” format but listed items for auction, but importantly, unlike today, most of them had reserves, set by the seller which you simply couldn’t see. If you wanted it you’d just have to keep putting in higher and higher bids until the figure turned from red to green.
Lots of little things, odd gems turned up that first year but nothing really “big” nothing of real importance until one day I decided to wander through EBay’s global listings, country by country, familiar enough by now with the standard layout, that it didn’t really matter that I had no idea what language it was all in.
It was whilst looking through some South American listings, in Portuguese or Spanish that I first saw it. A casket, by a very famous maker, covered in silver and gold.
Years earlier I had been working in Sussex at Sotheby’s and, as it wasn’t much of a drive, I frequently spent weekends at my sister’s house in London.
Whilst I’d use the break to visit friends, go out to antiques fairs and markets I would almost always call in to the V&A. I adored the V&A since travelling up on a family day out, one summer, as a boy (when going to London was a major trip). It was a huge treasure chest which you could stroll around, at leisure and happily all for free so who wouldn’t love it?
It was an unremarkable rainy Saturday afternoon which found me with a few hours to kill so I thought to pop into the silver galleries for a stroll, to press my face against the glass cases and spectacle at some of the nations assembled treasures. I slowly walked through, visiting favourite pieces, wishing I had a glass cutter in my pocket and could abseil down the side of buildings like the man in the Milk Tray adverts, even knowing that the rope probably wouldn’t take the weight.
As I reached the end of the Gallery, which usually lead into domestic metalwork I noticed a special exhibition. It was the assembled work of Eibar Damascener’s Eusebio and Placidio Zuloaga, to my eternal shame I had never heard of them before.
Damascening is the art of inlaying gold and silver onto a base metal by using only a fine network of cross hatching of the surface and simple hammering. Eibar had been one centre for the craft for hundreds of years (a welcome vestige of Moorish occupation) but in the nineteenth century Eusebio Zuloaga followed by his son Placido had turned it into a masterful art. The surfaces of every object in the exhibition, large and small, were plastered in the most ornate yet refined gold and silver arabesques, swirling and interlacing with one another in the most complicated patterns. It’s a cliché I know, but these pieces took my breath away. I left the small room elated (the best Antiques will do that), stopping only at the gift shop to buy the paperback catalogue of the exhibition. Which at the time seemed the closest I would ever get to owning one of these masterpieces.
Pieces by Zuloaga were only for the very wealthiest of international collectors, one piece, signed or “in the manner of” might turn up in a big international sale at Sotheby’s or Christie’s every couple of years and when it did the hammer price would be astronomical. It was knowing this that made it all the more remarkable that amongst the listings of a private seller in Buenos Aires was a casket fully signed by “Placido Zuloaga”. The price though, upon inquiring, was very high indeed, as it should have been. So, whilst I made a note of the item number, I gave no more thought to that extremely rare beautiful work of art, which I was sure, in those early days of EBay, laid unseen and unrecognised by anybody else.
Months passed, I became familiar with buying on EBay, with picking up odds and ends, usually from the States, nipping to the Bank to do an “international transfer” and existing on the slender gains made at Antiques Fairs up and down the country selling the spoils. Then two coincidences were to present a possibly valuable, possibly foolhardy opportunity.
Firstly my Mum had a twenty year insurance policy come due. This was not a “holiday cruise fund” this was the back breaking, penny scratching type of policy only the poorest of working class households will ever be familiar with. A small elderly suited insurance man calling once a week at the door to take 50p or a £1 premium against life insurance to possibly cover the cost of funeral, which would also pay out a lump sum if you didn’t pop your clogs. Mum had somehow managed to find the money every week to pay it, no matter how hard things had gotten and now it came due, a little more than two thousand pounds, an absolute fortune.
The second thing to occur was a crash, a dramatic financial crash, not here but in Argentina. There were reports of riots, hyper inflation, chaos and people trying to leave the country. As I saw the reports in the evening news and I confess my thoughts returned to that Buenos Aires EBay seller. I wondered if his need of funds now exceeded his love of that precious little box? Now I thought, now could be the perfect time to make him an offer and buy a treasure I could only have previously dreamt of, IF it was still for sale? I can say this with the benefit of hindsight now, but I must have been out of my fucking mind.
A few emails back and forth and yes the Zuloaga casket was still for sale, and yes the price had dropped dramatically, though not so low as Mum’s precious policy payout could afford, so I put the squeeze on my Sister too and between them I had borrowed enough, just enough to meet the substantially lower asking price.
PayPal didn’t exist back then, it came later and for International purchases you simple wired people the money. Or let’s put it another way, you sent thousands of pounds to a complete stranger on the other side of the world with no means whatsoever of getting it back should anything go awry. Still I threw myself headlong into it, but with one final dreadful word of caution from the Argentine seller.
He had said that (at the time) it was “crazy” in Argentina and that whilst he would send the casket by FedEx upon receiving the money and forward me the tracking number, he could not insure it for more than $50. He explained that all the parcels went up through Brazil and then onto the States. His experience was that Brazilian customs misappropriated ANYTHING marked as high value and the parcel would simply be declared lost. So he stressed it would be entirely sent at my own risk should I wish to proceed, and wether it arrived or not there would be absolutely no insurance cover and no possibility of any refund.
Today I would run screaming from any such deal. Today I would charter a space flight to leave the Planet before considering entering into any such arrangement, with a man on the other side of the world I didn’t know, but back then I was Young, Dumb and full of...Gullibility.
I popped down to the Bank the very next day with the larger portion of my entire family’s borrowed wealth and wired it to a man I’d never met, never physically spoken to, thousands of miles away in Buenos Aires, such youthful abandon, Olé!
A nervous day passed before I got an email back, a thank you (well, yes) and a FedEx tracking number, there was I thought, a glimmer of hope. Logging on to the FedEx website every 20 minutes for an update on the parcel’s whereabouts now became my only purpose in life. It was at the despatch centre in Buenos Aires, then it was at Customs, then it cleared Customs and was on the plane to Rio, this all looked good. Then a day later it had arrived in Rio but been put back on a plane to Buenos Aires? Hang on, what was afoot? A day later it was despatched again for Brazilian customs in Rio, but again, like the Wimbledon Finals, the ball, or parcel had been tapped back over the net into Argentina. Over the next three days I became a nervous wreck, consumed with the enormity, the fully fledged horror and stupidity of what I’d done as my parcel, the sum collected savings of an entire family, was ping-ponged back and forth between two South American countries in worsening states of civil unrest and economic turmoil. I imagined how delighted the wife of the Head Customs in Rio would be when he eventually came home one evening and placed the casket, my casket, on their family mantelpiece. A week passed without any update and hope had dwindled to a slender thread, then one morning there was a knock on the door. I opened it to see, without any prior warning, a FedEx delivery man, albeit with what appeared to be a very small parcel. I hurriedly signed and brought it into the kitchen and placed it on the table.
“Is this it?” Mum asked, unaware of all the trouble I’d been having with the tracking number.
“It must be, but...” I hesitated “...it’s so small.”
The casket itself had been described as a good eight inches long, and I began to wonder if the gentleman selling had exaggerated the size of it. If so it wouldn’t be the first time in history a man had exaggerated the dimensions of something, albeit in probably entirely different circumstances. The parcel barely seemed that large, with boxing and packing the contents couldn’t be anything like that, but I had reckoned without my Argentine sellers thrift and abandon.
The “packaging” to see this fragile treasure, this museum quality masterpiece, half way around the world (and more than that given how many times it had gone back and forth) was a single wrapped around piece of thin card, cut to size, probably from a cereal packet, with some sellotape to secure it, nothing else, not bubble wrap, tissue or a folded piece of paper. I removed the card and found it both pristine and perfect. If the Vatican ever needs another miracle then this whole affair, from beginning to end is it.
I managed to pay my sister back quickly after a fair in London selling odds and ends (you never want to owe my sister money) but told my Mum I’d pay her back when I sold it. She instinctively saw me looking at it, loving it and said “it didn’t matter” and I should “keep it”, it was “really very nice”. As I recall and write this now I see that the casket, the very beautiful gold and silver inlaid casket I was so taken with at the time was not the real treasure of this whole affair. The real treasure was my Mum, who would happily give me everything she ever worked and saved for without a seconds hesitation or a moments thought for herself, never for herself.
(Detail of a Casket by Placido Zuloaga, Eibar, c.1870)
I LOVE this story!! and what a Mum x