The House of Silence Read online

  I reached home with my heart broken into a million pieces. My mother was frightened: My girl, where have you been? What did you do? she asked me. She hugged me and covered me in kisses. I went to the beach to play where I wouldn’t bother anyone, I simply said. She looked at me and saw the traces of my tears. Were you crying? she asked. Yes, I just can’t find the music, I said, and I began crying again. And she hugged me again. At least I had a mother who hugged and kissed me. Maybe the girl in the book only had a violin and no mother.

  Anna was like the girl in the book; she had a violin and no mother. The violin wasn’t much, it was a beginner’s violin, and one day I told Anna that she had to buy another one, a grownup’s violin. I know, she said, impassive, curt, sarcastic. And that was it. She only broke her cool demeanor when she played, because she pursed her face in concentration. But then she went back to being herself: Anna the impenetrable, hard to understand and hard to interpret, an excellent and gifted student with a talent for playing fast passages at a lightning speed that I envied. But she didn’t put her soul into it, only her intellect, and that was precisely how she had approached Bach—with her intellect.

  When Anna turned eighteen, the maid stopped bringing her to class and she came alone. I already walked myself to school at seven, and it wasn’t nearby. After the disappointment with the violin that day at the beach, I had been left empty. I didn’t know what to do or what to pin my hopes on. I had never been drawn to dolls or toys, I was much more interested in the things we found at the dump—but after discovering the violin, it seemed I would never get that excited about any other find. And now I no longer felt I had the right to smile or to get my hopes up about anything.

  But I should have remembered that the girl in the book didn’t have a mother and I did. A few days later, at school, the music teacher sought me out—the one who would try to teach us to sing some songs to fill the musical requirement, in a time and place where there were much more pressing problems. She was a teacher no one ever paid any attention to, that teacher who went unnoticed and ended up giving us all a good grade in a subject that was so low on the totem pole that it was practically nonexistent. She came to see me with a smile and with eyes that invited hope. She sat down beside me, on a bench in the schoolyard, and said, I heard you have a violin; why don’t you bring it in. Suddenly, the world opened up for me.

  Anna

  I keep running into that witch of a maid everywhere, and now I have to share a taxi with her. I made her sit between the violin and the door, but she never complains; she’s so perfect. The perfect maid, of course. Now she looks at the store windows as if she’d never seen anything like them before; obviously you can’t take her anywhere. But how could Mark even think to . . . And I bet she’s going to start crying when we begin the concert. For the moment, I’m holding Mark’s hand tightly, and I can tell that he is squeezing mine a little bit too, and smiling. Come on, Maria, I hope that now you can clearly see that there are some people who get what they want—and some, like you, who have nothing. And that Karl is already history.

  The time for tears is over. When we found out he was dead, we all cried, and I felt as if they had amputated something deep inside me. A part of me was ripped out violently by his death, despite what had happened just two days before when I knocked on the door of his hotel room. But now I’ve lived with the hole for so long, and with the passing years it’s finally gotten filled in.

  Dark years pass slowly. Light ones, on the other hand, fly by; there’s no way to catch them, you can’t dilly-dally. It seems as if someone is saying come on, hurry up, hurry up, you’re late.

  Mama was always late. Goodbye, my girl, I’m leaving; ay, don’t kiss me so much; you’ll get my dress dirty, she’d say to me when I clung to her skirt to keep her at home. Ever since I can remember, I’ve always done that, begged her to stay. But she never stayed, like light years, like the ones that fly by. My mother was a fleeting flash, an intangible being, some sort of angel you can’t touch or even be sure you’ve seen. You might have just imagined it. Take her to violin, she would order the maid. The violin was the excuse my parents had come up with to keep me out of their hair. Well, my father didn’t even need one because he was worse than an angel, he was never around, you couldn’t even catch a glimpse of him. Once I asked the maid if I had a father. Of course you have a father, Anna, she exclaimed in horror. And where is he? I asked, holding tightly to the hand of that woman I did see, who was the only one I saw at home, the only one who listened to me and also the only one who scolded me or called my attention to something I’d done wrong. Her name was Clara and she wasn’t very pretty. When she took off her apron to leave the house, she put on this ghastly cologne. I told her not to wear it, that it stunk. I didn’t hold back, making faces and batting at the air to get rid of a stench that made me sick.

  Berlin is completely tranquil, but it hides its murky past in a river I need to visit again. My murky past was reflected, day in and day out, in the waters—not as clear and not as cold—of the small lake in the park we went through on the way to violin on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. We heard the shrieks of kids like me, who were playing hide and seek or trying the patience of their maids. But I was going to class; I couldn’t stay. One day, when I was dragging my feet more than usual, Clara explained to me that in the lake’s water there were little fairies who stole the souls of children who dallied watching them. And that made me want to stay there even more. Come on, let’s go, we’re late, she said, pulling me gently but firmly. And I always missed seeing the little water fairies because of the violin.

  I hated the violin.

  Your father travels often, Clara would tell me. Your father has a lot of work. A lot of work, yes, but when he came, he greeted me just like all the other men who came by the house, and I couldn’t tell which one was him. Until Mama said, sweetheart, give us some time alone. And she looked at me with big eyes, clear and pleading—eyes that said, if you don’t leave I’ll say something nasty to you in front of this man. Which one is my father? I asked the maid. And she described him to me. And it’s because no one had taught me to say Papa to anyone. And saying Mama did me no good at all.

  I had a small hole at the entrance to my stomach; it was always there, but when Mama left or kicked me out because she wanted to be alone with someone, the hole grew bigger. Then it was intolerable, like an ulcer that was eating me up from the inside. I had no way of stopping it; it just grew bigger and bigger. And, when Mama disappeared, when I saw her vanish, pretty and proud, through the front door, leaving me with the intoxicating scent of her delicate perfume, then I was torn apart completely. I stood clinging to Clara’s hand watching as the angel disappeared. At first I cried a lot, shouting Mama, Mama. Then I stopped because I realized it did me no good. I learned to pretend that nothing mattered to me, I taught myself to wear a gaze somewhere between languid and insolent while inside I was dying. I learned to keep up appearances. And gradually I became strong.

  Maria

  So it seems that in this concert they are going to sing some arias because Mr. Karl also directed opera. As I know full well. And I also know full well what happened the first time he directed one at the Liceu Opera House. Well, I don’t know what went on at the Liceu because I didn’t even consider going by there, but I do know what happened at home with that opera singer who almost cracked the plates with her shrieking. That was long before Mr. Mark showed up, when I had already gotten used to, over the years, opening up the large windows overlooking the park and watching nature spread its various seasonal colors depending on the time of year, hearing music in the background that Mr. Karl played locked up in his piano room—which I was only allowed to clean early in the morning while he had his breakfast, because later it was anyone’s guess as to when he’d go in and come out of there. I no longer remembered my life before that; Andalusia was far in the past, as were the two or three houses where I had worked before meeting Mr. Karl. Of course, in the other homes I only had to clean
, but with Mr. Karl I had to do everything, everything that wasn’t music. Go get these scores at such and such store, he would order, giving me a piece of paper with some names and I would say, yes, and head off. And I would also be sent to pick up violin strings, or call on the tuner when Mr. Karl needed him. I could tell when he was about to send me for the tuner, because the piano sounded very sad, like it was crying a little bit. Mr. Karl would also send me to pick up plane tickets from a travel agency where I made friends with the girl who sold them to me because she was very nice and always greeted me cheerfully, even though I think she did that because Mr. Karl bought a lot of plane tickets. And one day I asked her if she had ever been on a plane, and what it felt like to fly. She told me she had, and that you didn’t feel anything, you just felt nauseous.

  I didn’t feel nauseous yesterday, but I did feel some very strange things. And I remembered that girl from the agency, who’s not there anymore, because she turned into a woman and the years passed and finally she retired. I saw that last week when I went to pick up my ticket to come here. Everything had changed, and the agency too, after so many years, they’d renovated it, and it’s much more light-filled and spacious. Then, when Mr. Karl started directing opera, he told me that it was very complicated and he would be gone more than usual, that he would be eating dinner at home less and that possibly a lot of people would come over to rehearse, so I had to be prepared.

  And that was how it was: He disappeared for a while, he went through the door without even saying goodbye, not because he was rude but because he forgot to, and then he would show up again—sometimes alone and sometimes accompanied. And he would say that line: Maria, I don’t want to be disturbed. And sometimes I would hear the voices of three or four people and other times, just one woman. But the times when there was only one woman’s voice started happening more and more often.

  The first time I heard that woman I thought she had a very pretty voice. When she spoke and laughed it sounded like the little bells we had in the dining room, the ones Mr. Karl used to ring for me. And then she would lock herself up with Mr. Karl inside the piano room and sing while he played. And then her voice wasn’t so pretty. Then she screamed like a possessed woman, so high that I worried she’d lose her voice. The first day I was shocked, I was there in the entryway dusting the bust of Beethoven, who was the only one of those musicians that rang a bell with me, because his name came up so much and because Mr. Karl, every day when he walked by the bust, would say something that sounded like gut’n Tag, Herr Beethoven, as if it were alive.

  Up close against Beethoven, trying to reach parts that were hard to get to with a normal dust rag like the one I had, I could hear what was going on inside the room quite well. Sometimes I would stand there on purpose and be swept up listening to the words or music or singing of those people who seemed like angels of the Lord, because they sounded as good as the organist at the church where I went to mass on Sunday mornings. And, well, there wasn’t anything wrong with listening in, I didn’t think it was bad or unbecoming or anything, nor did I think it was bad the day I heard the singer alone with Mr. Karl playing the piano. They were rehearsing a song with lyrics that sounded like Spanish but weren’t. Lyrics that I thought I could understand, but I couldn’t—and later, I found out that they were in Italian, which was really popular with the people who went to the Liceu. I was amazed by that voice because it was like one of those huge trucks that muffle all the other sounds on the street. What screams. And I didn’t understand how they could come out of a human. My voice, when I sang Linda paloma mia, would be completely drowned out next to that one. I was so surprised by that sound, I found it so unearthly, that I decided to see how she did it, and I went over to the door, which had a keyhole that we didn’t use. And I put my eye up to it and I saw them. Mr. Karl, his back to me, was playing as if his life depended on it, gesticulating with his entire body and moving his head up and down. The singer, fat and blonde, with a bosom trapped in a bra so big it looked like two frying pans, was also gesturing, but with her arms, as if she were acting on a stage. And she sang the whole song and ended with a shriek that I thought would break all the glassware.

  And then something unbelievable happened. As I was getting up to leave, Mr. Karl stood up at the piano, went over to the singer and, to my surprise, he kissed her. He did it like in the movies, the ones they forgot to censor on television, because by that point we already had a TV and would watch it sometimes. From the other side of the door, my mouth dropped open; I covered it with my hand to stifle a gasp and I tried to leave. But I couldn’t, no, what was happening in there was stronger than me—and when I saw that Mr. Karl pushed the singer onto the sofa, I thought that I had to leave, but that stronger force kept me stuck to the keyhole while in my head I asked God for forgiveness. He was always merciful with my weaknesses, and it would be a crime against decency to describe what I saw from that moment on, and a woman like me would never do such a thing.

  Anna

  Look at her, she’s already been here for a while. Teresa is playing there alone, amid the other musicians, as if she were in the orchestra too. I hold tightly onto Mark’s hand, until I’m quite sure that everyone has seen that there is something between us, something more than a professional conductor/violinist relationship. Pretty much everyone knows, but I want to make sure they all get the picture.

  Maria is already sitting in the audience. She drags her feet, her head bowed, as if she is looking for a coin on the ground. That’s typical of her class of people. It’s so embarrassing to have to share a taxi and a hotel with her. Luckily, she isn’t traveling with us. Look, I can’t help it. It’s mortifying, it makes me feel horrible; people should know their place and stay in it. Why did you invite the maid on this trip? I asked Mark, really surprised. Because she lived with him for many years, many more than I did, he answered. And that was that. Mark is stubborn and, when he’s got an idea into his head, there’s no getting it out. But taking a maid on tour with us, frankly, it’s more than I can take.

  But I didn’t say anything more about it. Sometimes you can tell it’s no use, and that’s always been the case for me. The same thing happened when I tried to keep Teresa from coming. It did no good at all.

  It had been a really long time since I’d seen Teresa. It was when I met her that everything changed. That was the end of the private violin lessons in that house filled with dark shelves lined with tidy scores in folders that smelled of dampness and poverty. That was the end of that odious walk through the park filled with children playing, to meet that hawk-nosed teacher who forced my fingers down onto the strings, en souffrant, as he called it, and he would press them down hard with his own fingers. It hurt, and I, who already hurt inside, hurt on the outside then, too. His eyes bore into mine, and one day he told me that I had a black cloud in them. Where? I asked him, flustered. Inside the pupil, he replied. And he pointed at it with a finger as crooked as his nose, and I blushed without knowing why, and I looked away. He pressed his fingers on mine again, hard against the strings, en souffrant, and I held back a cry of pain, and I tried to play mechanically. I tried to do everything mechanically, until one day he exploded and said to Clara: Tell this girl’s parents that she’s not cut out for the violin. Better yet, I’ll call them myself.

  And that day, when we got home, he had already called, and Mama slapped me. Again and again. Mama would occasionally slap me and leave my cheeks red, but that day they were bright as summer strawberries. Papa, when I finally figured out which one of those men he was, never did that. In fact, since he didn’t even look at me, I had no interest in anything he might have had to say. On the other hand, I was interested in Mama’s slaps, because they felt good, those smacks felt like caresses, the caresses I had never been given, and now they were coming a bit hard, but they were finally contact between me and my mother—a touch that wasn’t like the touch of a dress that would get sullied by tears if you got too close. I realized that Mama had become more irritable ever since th
e man who visited her most often had disappeared with a slam of the door. That very day, when I came near her, she screamed at me. Later, I provoked her and got a good slap, and the next day I thought to start singing in a very loud voice, so she would lose her patience and tell me to shut up and I would refuse to. That earned me another slap. And then it occurred to me to spill my milk onto my white Sunday dress at breakfast and I got two more. And on and on like that each day. I would seek out those smacks; I wanted them. But what are you doing, Anna? Why do you provoke her? Clara would ask me, horrified. And I didn’t answer her; I just giggled, I found it funny. I’d found pleasure in those smacks, a pleasure that excited me more and more each day and encouraged me to be naughty. Mama’s hand was warm, and a second after she hit me that warmth would spread, and for just a moment she would touch me, which was what I most wanted in the world.

  The day of the violin, the last day of playing en souffrant, the smacks went on and on. I smiled as she hit me, and she did it more and more frantically because she couldn’t stand that I was smiling—and, since I had realized that, I smiled more and held her gaze, impassive, aware of my strength in the face of her weakness, even though I was the one getting beat up. It hurt, but there came a moment in which I no longer felt the pain. I just looked at her and experienced the infinite pleasure of her touch and that she was focused only on me, that I was the one exasperating her; I was the one who had her in that state. And I started to hear Clara shouting that’s enough, ma’am, stop—and at first she ignored her, but finally Clara got between us and then, to my surprise, Mama began to cry.

  Clara gestured for me to leave while she comforted Mama, and I obeyed and went to the bathroom. My cheeks were burning, my head was spinning, but I was still smiling. I swayed as I walked, like a roly-poly toy. When I reached the bathroom and looked in the mirror, I touched my cheeks. My mother had a ring that had turned and the precious stone had made me bleed. En souffrant, I thought. And, barely crying at all, I washed my face and then I dried it with a towel, taking pains to leave it really dirty.