The House of Silence (3 page)

I learned to recognize strength in people's eyes. When I met Karl, I saw strength in his. That wasn't my thought when I saw Anna's eyes, despite her showing up for the first time all sassy and ready to take on the world. She came with a maid, who took her around everywhere. Normally, at least for the first class, the parents would come to introduce me to the child and tell me what their expectations were or simply to meet me. That never happened with Anna; she came with the maid on the first day, and every other day
as well, and Anna was already old enough to get around on her own. The maid would wait for her outside, and I sometimes would stick my head out the window and watch as they walked toward the Diagonal to catch the bus—because, as the girl had explained to me, they lived on the other side of the city, near the park with the lake.

I had spent a lot of time at the park myself. I brought children there to play after cleaning their kitchen, after ironing and scrubbing their floors and bathrooms. I say bathrooms because those folks had two and, sometimes, three—for me, that was quite the luxury. I had never seen a house with more than one bathroom. And what bathrooms they were: They looked to me like the ones in the films I watched on television. I was fifteen then, and that was when mother told me, wiping the beads of sweat from her forehead: We've both got to roll up our sleeves now, girl. My childhood was over.

Traveling in this taxi along the streets of this sunless city, I saw a display window filled with all sorts of bonbons, and it suddenly brought back the memory of when Mr. Karl caught me red-handed with my chocolate. That made me smile.

“And what are you laughing at?” Mrs. Anna snapped, her tone mocking.

“Oh, nothing,” I said evasively, thinking how that woman was always watching my every move. “Just that—I like chocolate.”

Mr. Mark looked at me for a moment and smiled. Mrs. Anna, when she saw her husband smiling, grew silent and stared out the window with a sour expression.

Mr. Karl usually spent the mornings at home and the evenings out. That was if no one came to visit him, obviously, or to practice, and then they would all play or sing in the piano room, and they'd close the door. Normally he would call out, Maria, we're not to be disturbed. Two months after arriving in Barcelona, he could already make himself understood. I don't know which language he
spoke to me, but I understood him. And when he couldn't find a word, he would use body language.

After the violin incident, we had a silent period, a time when neither of us said more than was necessary. I did my work, and when I finished it, I retired to the kitchen or my room or I went for a walk. Until one day, when I had just gotten paid, I went to buy powdered chocolate, a bit of whipped cream, and some ladyfingers from the bakery. I sat in the kitchen to eat it all up. There was a café nearby where I often saw mothers taking their children for a snack. Sometimes there was also a maid there, but normally that was something mothers did, something they did with their kids. It was like a reward once a week or once a month. The children entered with their eyes gleaming, and they left with their faces all messy, and I was so envious.

I didn't dare go into the cafe and that was why I made a version for myself at home. And so, there I was with my mouth full of thick hot chocolate topped with whipped cream and scooped up on a ladyfinger that fell apart on my tongue, and I could hear the heavenly angels singing. I couldn't understand how that wasn't everyone's favorite food. Just then, with my eyes closed, I heard Mr. Karl's voice saying, I see you take good care of yourself. It still makes me laugh when I think about it, but I try to hold it in so Mrs. Anna doesn't get mad at me. That day I opened my eyes and found him standing there. I hadn't heard him come in; he'd been so quiet. I smelled something from the living room, and I thought you were up to something, so I tiptoed in, he told me later. Mr. Karl was like that occasionally: playful. And I couldn't think of anything else to say besides I bought it with my money. Then he started laughing.

I had never heard Mr. Karl laugh before, and it made me laugh to see him laugh, because he was so large and he laughed so hard that you couldn't help but join in. And I was choking with laughter, and he didn't stop, and I didn't know what to do. I finally managed to swallow the bite of ladyfinger and was able to laugh comfortably. And then he stopped abruptly and said, won't you offer me some. So I did, because I had just been thinking that I'd overdone it with the whipped cream, and there was plenty of chocolate to go around. Of course, I said, I'll bring it into the dining room. No, no, he said—and, to my surprise, he sat at the kitchen table with me, his legs spread wide on a stool, and waited for me to heat up the chocolate. He told me that he had only had thick hot chocolate like this once before, and that he'd liked it. Because in my country it's eaten in bonbons or bars and, anyway, not that often, he said in a somewhat sad tone.

Then, as he savored the chocolate, whipped cream, and ladyfingers, we shared a table and both took pleasure in one of the world's best combinations. He told me where he came from and what his city was like. He explained that they were putting up a wall that would divide the country in two, because people fled from one region to the other and they belonged to different sides. He had grown serious as he explained it, and I didn't dare ask who the two sides were. Recently, I had heard the news on the small kitchen radio where I listened to those afternoon radio serials I found so thrilling. And on the news they talked about that wall, but I didn't really get it; it had seemed so remote. And now it turned out that Mr. Karl was from there, because he was German and that I already knew. But I didn't know that he was from that place that was always
on the news. I did ask him why they couldn't go from one side to the other; I didn't understand, since I could go anywhere in Barcelona and out of it as well, and to other countries if I had a passport. He sighed and said that he didn't understand it either, but that was just how it was. He also explained that in his neighborhood there was a square where he would meet with other musicians to play, a very pretty square. Even when it was cold, we would play, and that made us forget about everything, he said—and he smiled slightly as he spooned a bit of chocolate into his mouth. I didn't dare to say anything; I didn't want to interrupt those thoughts that seemed as sacred as a Sunday mass, and I could feel my heart beating faster because Mr. Karl was explaining them to me, and because it seemed that his thoughts had taken him out of my modest kitchen for a few seconds.

Yesterday, here in Berlin, I saw pieces of that wall they had been building as we shared hot chocolate for the first time. Over the course of my forty years with Mr. Karl, they'd had time to put it up and tear it down again. Yesterday I saw that Mr. Karl had been telling me the truth, that someone had built a wall cutting through the city—You see, Maria, Mr. Mark explained, I lived on one side and they wouldn't let me go over to the other side, only when part of the wall came down was I able to leave. And I looked at the piece of wall and I thought,
Well, it looks like it was solid enough to last for many more years.
And again I thought that I didn't understand why they didn't let people cross from one side to the other and vice versa. They had us all counted, said Mr. Mark softly. And then I thought I understood what the problem was:
If they switched sides, it would mess up their count.

Now comes that moment when the orchestra seems like a buzzing beehive because everyone is warming up at the same time. It made me think of my first attempts to play my violin from the dump. The neighbors were frantic, and Mother too. I had picked up the violin with sure hands. It must have hit hard when it fell into the pile of rubbish; the wood was peeled in one spot, but that didn't affect the sound. In fact, it sounded wonderful. Well, it sounded wonderful to me. My mother was sick of hearing it on the very first day, and the neighbors only held out a couple days more. They weren't the ones who had saved Mother years earlier; they were others with whom we only had a hello and goodbye relationship, and they knocked on the door to ask if I could, please, go out to the beach to play the violin. There the sound of the waves would drown it out. Forgive me, I muttered, mortified. And I grabbed the instrument and took their advice, I left the house and I went to the beach. We lived beside the sea, even though we couldn't even see it; the streets faced away from it and we never saw the sand or the water. The road
leading there was filthy; that was where everyone threw their junk, the things they didn't use anymore but that were too big for the trash cans. Where are you going, girl? my mother asked. I didn't answer her; my throat was choked with tears as usual. I took my instrument and entered the beach along a narrow street, and leapt over all the obstacles between me and the sand. It must have been March; the day was cloudy, damp, and cold, but I didn't notice that. I breathed in the scent of salt water, of fish being brought in by the fishermen, who I heard coming in every morning, shouting. Soon I felt the wind mussing my hair and, gradually, as I drew closer to the water, I heard the sound of the waves coming and going—a sound that filled my ears and my thoughts. I set myself up right in that spot, because surely no one would hear me there. I put the violin on my shoulder, closed my eyes, and ran the bow along the strings, putting my fingers carefully on them. The sound that came out was bloodcurdling. I couldn't take it anymore. I broke out in sobs, put the violin down, and sat beside it with my head sunk into my arms. I felt like I was close to the music, but that it was just out of reach—that the door to that vast treasure was closed to me.

After a little while, I walked back home slowly. I dried my tears, and I told myself that it must be that some children were destined for one thing and other children destined for another. The girl in the book played the violin and I went through trash at the dump. And there was nothing that would change that.

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.

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.