By Gëzim Kabashi
Part Two
Memorie.al / Nikolla Velço will never forget the third weekend of December 1981. He was 26 years old, having graduated a few months prior from the Higher Institute of Arts as a cellist, and on Sunday, December 20, he was set to become a groom. He was marrying a fellow citizen from a much respected family, with who he had been in a relationship since she was a teenager. Tall and handsome, with a calm countenance, Niko – as his friends called him – must have been the subject of dreams for many girls in Durrës, and perhaps even Tirana. This was especially true after an event that put the Velço family in the spotlight in Durrës, the city where they lived: the youngest daughter of the family, Marjeta Velço, not yet 15 years old, had become the bride of Bashkim Shehu, the youngest offspring of the then-Prime Minister of Albania – the man considered the natural successor to dictator Enver Hoxha.
“YOU HAVE A LARGE UMBRELLA PROTECTING YOU”
“You have a large umbrella protecting you.” These were the first words Aishe said to us, looking up toward the sky. Then, in a low voice, she added: “Those who cooked up this whole story will meet their end. They will collapse!” This was Aishe’s prophecy, which restored faith to the two young people who had bound their lives and hardships in the same great love.
“We clung to those words, searching for light at the end of the tunnel,” says Nikolla, who testifies to being in his sister’s house again in 1996, a few months before Aishe passed away from a severe illness. “She didn’t remember our specific case – so many people, powerful or ordinary, had gone to her – but she more or less recalled the atmosphere of that time, nearly 15 years later.”
THE SMILE
The lives of Anula and Nikolla took on a new meaning in 1984 and 1985, when Alen and Arminda arrived one after the other. The son and daughter brought smiles back to the Velço home in Durrës. “I would return from work, and having the children on my chest gave me untold happiness,” Nikolla recounts. “Together with Anula, we were getting used to our daily routine.
From time to time, we went to visit Marjeta, who within a few years moved through several places of internment: Belsh, Shijak, Kryevidh, Cërrik, only returning to Durrës in 1989. When Ertgren, my sister’s son, turned 7, Niko tried to enroll him in the Music School in Durrës, but this led to Marjeta being sent to Cërrik, where even the child was treated as an enemy.”
THE RETURN
Years passed, and Niko had by now forgotten his professional training, and even more so the cello – the instrument he had come across by chance back in 1963. He was in the second grade at the “Maliq Muço” school in Durrës when a young teacher, Vitori Zaho, began his first cello lessons outside of regular classes.
When he finished the 8-year cycle, Nikolla Velço had decided to dedicate himself to high school, but another teacher, the very serious Lida Radoja, brought him back to the cello. Even more: she made him conscious of the artistic path. Along with a lifelong friend, Mon Kuriçi, they tied their future fantasies to music.
EUROVISION 1976
Nikolla Velço reached the Institute of Arts after competing, with a year’s delay, and lost another year for an absurd reason. The cause was the tape recording of several songs from Eurovision 1976. “We started listening to the tapes at the Institute in small groups, until we were called first to the Dean’s office and then to… the investigator’s office.”
For a month straight, Nikolla, who had recorded the songs from foreign radio stations, had to reveal who had given him the recording device, where he found the tapes, who the listeners of the “forbidden songs” were, and above all, what the professors said about all this…!
“Lefter Zhulla and Niko were expelled from the Institute,” remembers Moni, who was part of the group that had “sinned” by listening to “foreign poison”! Along with Moni, Niko recalls the cello pedagogues at the higher school: Gjergj Antoniu, always silent and sad; and the spouses Ymer and Ludmilla Skënderi, or “The Lady,” as the students called her.
THE ABSURDITY OF TRANSITION
All these memories were becoming buried for Nikolla, as the struggle for survival had long replaced music and art. A part of the fortune teller Aishe’s prediction would be realized 10 years after the event that caused the “earthquake” in the Velço family – two days before an unrealized wedding, the absence of which united its two protagonists even more: Nikolla Velço and Anula Afezolli. In 1992, with restored hope, they would face the absurdities of the transition.
“From the ‘Goma’ enterprise, they sent me to work in Shijak as a cultural organizer (masovik) at the Palace of Culture, but that wasn’t my profession,” Nikolla says regarding his first days outside the cage where he had been placed for years. “When the conductor Vullnet Sabahu, together with a German colleague, assembled the city orchestra, I took the cello in my hands once again. I cannot explain the feeling to you, just as when after a tour of Vivaldi’s works in southern Italy; I was told the cello had to return to Albania.”
IN THE PRINCIPALITY OF MONACO
Nikolla Velço, on the contrary, immediately after the tour – which once again separated him from his instrument – set off to seek a new fate: this time in Germany. The family arrived later, and the surprise was the cello: “Anula had bought my instrument, which had been owned by the Palace of Culture,” Niko recounts. In 1994, Nikolla Velço’s family moved to France. First to Le Mans, then to Nice and its surroundings.
Anula’s skills, foreign languages, dedicated work, and well-behaved children made the Velços feel at home on the French coast. Recently, they made an important decision: together with their son, Alen, they manage a souvenir shop in the Principality of Monaco. This is why Niko had come to Durrës alone those August days. Anula and the children did not expect him to return as he used to, but quite differently.
“I AM AFRAID TO TOUCH IT”
“Florian Vlashi, who often visits his apartment in Nice, asked me during one of our evenings together about the cello standing in the corner of the room,” Niko recounted. “I am afraid to touch it,” was his answer to Florian, whom he had known since Florian was a child attending the Music School in Durrës. “Why should you be afraid?”
“It’s enough to open the ‘drawers’ one by one and everything will come naturally,” Florian had insisted on that evening among friends, a few summers ago. That was all it took, and a few days later, Anula and their daughter, Arminda, brought home a special gift: CDs of Bach’s Six Suites, performed by cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras, one of the best in France.
“I remember that on November 28, 2011, at Anula’s insistence, I took the long-forgotten cello from the corner of the room once more,” Niko recalled. Nearly 31 years had passed since their marriage. Nikolla recounted that he had started over as if he were a first-grade pupil; “I had even forgotten the solfège that I had kept in my head for decades.”
NO TURNING BACK
But now, there was no turning back. Florian Vlashi had proposed that he play in the orchestra for the 2013 Biennale edition. The challenge was immense. The pain he felt while practicing “vibratos” on the cello fingerboard forced Niko to see a doctor. “Arthritis in the fingers,” was the specialist’s diagnosis, who encouraged the fledgling cellist: “continue the exercises, as they are the best possible therapy!”…
Three days ago, Nikolla Velço sat at the cello desk of the “Aleksandër Moisiu” orchestra, alongside his teacher Lida Radoja and his close friend, Moni Kuriçi. No one in the hall knew what was happening in the soul of the instrumentalist Nikolla Velço, who was returning before the public of Durrës after three decades.
In front of him on the music stand were Vivaldi’s scores, and within him were the great responsibility and the emotion of a beginner with a higher education. “I was losing my breath, and I didn’t know if I would make it.”
These were the words with which Nikolla Velço – my schoolmate and work colleague at the ‘Goma’ enterprise, a cellist graduated from the Higher Institute of Arts in Tirana in 1981 – explained his state of mind at the concert in St. Lucia’s Cathedral in Durrës.
In that sacred place, the fortune teller’s prophecies finally became reality. Nikolla Velço returned to the cello, the instrument with which he now converses for 2-3 hours every day in his home in the hills near Nice. Looking back, less and less! / Memorie.al
