The House of Silence

by Blanca Busquets

  Anna

  The first look from Mark at the start of the concert leaves me indifferent. But Karl’s first look went straight to the depths of my eyes. It hurt, and it had been a long time since anyone had hurt me. Come in, he said in that strange language he spoke, a mix of equal parts Catalan, Spanish, and German. I followed him to a room where he had his piano. Along the way we passed Mark. He was nobody, just a boy who wasn’t even thirty, who was still studying conducting and living off of his father’s success. He said hello and disappeared. I didn’t see Maria that day; she must have had it off, because when she was there you found her around every corner—like now, because that woman is like the plague.

  Karl sat down at the piano and told me to play while he played the other violin’s part, the one Teresa played, even though I didn’t yet know that she was the one who would play it. That first day I pulled out my student violin, but another day, seeing that I could impress him, I brought the good one. A Stainer—how beautiful, he said, and a strange look passed over his face as if he had recognized something. Can I see it? he asked, and he took it from me and looked it over carefully. With one finger he touched the small stain that Teresa had explained was a crack that had been repaired, and he looked into the f-hole, and read the letters inside as if he wanted to be completely sure that it was really a Stainer.

  But that was later on. The first day I went there, he stopped me right away. That’s enough, he said suddenly, lifting his fingers off the keys. And he said to me, the other violinist had too much soul, and you don’t have enough; where is yours? I was taken aback; no one had ever said that about my music. He looked at me differently and said, you play incredibly well—so well that it’s scary. I felt myself growing inside. But then he continued: And yet you lack heart. Bach has no heart, I objected. Perhaps not, he replied, but he does have soul. And the violin does too. But you, on the other hand, you don’t. There was a silence. I was deflated and thought that I’d already lost my chance at touring with that conductor, which had become my dream. Then he looked at me again and asked who had taken my soul. I don’t know, I answered, shrugging my shoulders, unsure whether his question was serious.

  But I did know. My soul left the day that Mama departed, never to return. One morning she was no longer there and I thought she’d gone on a trip, but Clara wouldn’t stop crying rivers, and finally she said that Mama wouldn’t be coming back. At first I didn’t understand, but then Clara couldn’t take it anymore and she told me that Mama had left a note for Papa saying that she was leaving because nobody loved her or needed her.

  I left the house and went to the lake in the park. I was fourteen years old, and I no longer believed that there were little fairies in the water. But I did believe that the water, where pink water lilies floated on their wide leaves, carried off the little soul I had left—which, years later, Karl would ask after. Suddenly, I felt full of remorse, because I was sure that it was my fault Mama had left—because she must have thought that I didn’t need her. And the tears I thought I no longer had in me appeared once again, and I spent the afternoon and evening sitting on a bench, crying. I emptied myself out—and the lake, which had sucked my soul, remained impassive, the way I used to do when Mama looked at me after hitting me. Perhaps it was faking it as I had.

  At night, I slowly returned home. And then I met Papa.

  Teresa

  When Anna’s mother left, she didn’t tell me what had happened, but I saw that something was wrong, and after a few days, taking advantage of a moment when the girl had gone to the bathroom, her maid poked her head into the classroom and whispered to me. Now she’s with her father, she explained. She’s never talked about her father, I said. Because he was never around, but now he is; now he’s here to stay.

  My thoughts, current and past, always come wrapped in music, but now that I am here lit up and blinded by these spotlights, I feel as if, with Bach, all my life is suddenly well depicted. Bach is too exact, too clear. That moment with the maid was also very clear, and Anna immediately knew what we had been talking about. If you need anything, just ask, I said, realizing that the situation had become truly uncomfortable. Thank you, was all she said, and she brought her focus back onto her homework, onto the score that she had brought prepared for that day.

  Anna was left motherless, and my own mother had grown old. But before, long before, my mother had given me music; she had handed it to me on a silver tray. When that teacher told me, bring in the violin, let’s see how it sounds, let’s try to play something, I listened without saying a word—but the tears, my always sweet tears, dampened my face silently and without my consent. Oh, my girl, she said, wiping them away with her thumb, let’s see if we have a little musician here—and she pointed to my heart as she said it. Yes, there was a musician in there, and she was me: I brought the violin into school the very next day. But first I came home and ran to hug my mother; I hugged her very tightly and cried even more. And she kissed me all over as she said, I so sorry I can’t pay for a violin teacher for you. Maybe one day, sweetie, maybe one day.

  It wasn’t long. The music teacher was a pianist but knew where to place her fingers on the violin and how to press the first strings to make a sound as she ran the bow along them. And you say you found it at the dump, she said, admiring the find. Yes, I said, and it’s a little bit cracked. I showed her the small line on the instrument. There are people who can fix that, she said, and made as if to grab the violin to take it away. I felt like I was dying; no, I shouted, no. Don’t worry, I was just looking at it, she reassured me. And then she closed one eye and looked with the other into the f-hole, and I couldn’t see her eyes but I saw that her lips moved as if she were speaking—but she wasn’t, they just moved, as if she were reading something inside there, which I didn’t yet understand, and that I now know simply means that the violin was a Stainer from 1672, a Stainer that I still can’t explain how I let go the way I did. But anyway, at that time I didn’t care that it was a Stainer any more than if it were a Sadurní. I could see the teacher’s eyes as she let out a whistle and looked at me again in some sort of altered state. The expression on her face had changed when she told me: Don’t lend it to anyone, all right? I nodded, but there was no real need for her to say that, because I wasn’t planning on lending my instrument to anyone, and not because it was a Stainer but because it was a violin and it made music. And then she showed me how to make the same sounds she made on the piano with the violin, the whole scale that at the time I didn’t even know was called the scale. And I went to the beach and practiced it. There, beside the waves, I made magic for the first time with that tool that was more than a violin, that was almost like the father I never had. I spent hours practicing the same thing. And the next day I stayed after class and showed the teacher how I was coming along. And she congratulated me. Then she found a score for me, of a very simple song, and above each note she wrote its name because I didn’t know them. And she told me, when we meet a week from now you should know how to play this song. And I went back to the beach when I could, when I didn’t have to go to the dump, and I practiced and practiced everything my teacher had told me. I ended up with cuts on my fingers from so much playing, but I couldn’t care less, I didn’t feel the pain, I only felt how, gradually, I was making a melody come out of that wooden box. I felt that I was managing to grasp the music, that I had it in my reach. After four or five weeks, the teacher took my mother aside and told her that she had nothing more to teach me, that I had to have violin classes. And she smiled and added another magical sentence: She will have a scholarship.

  I went to the conservatory until I finished my violin certification, at the age of twenty. And two years later, I began working there as a teacher. With my salary, mother was able to stop cleaning other people’s apartments and focus on her sewing. I also stopped cleaning apartments, and stopped ruining my hands. In my teens I spent my evenings worrying because I couldn’t study what I needed to for the class the following morning or for an exa
m—and, when night fell, so as not to be a nuisance, I went back to the beach, as always, winter or summer. In winter I would cut off the fingertips of my gloves so I could play. And while I washed dishes in that home we had rented, I went over in my head the studies I had to play the next day. And when I was at the park with the kids or walking down the street or on the bus, I would do the fingering in my pockets to keep up my agility. I had to if I wanted to be a violinist. And that was surely what I wanted most in this world.

  Anna

  The orchestra’s first violin is named Maties, like my father, like the father it turned out I did have. Mark stopped the concert for a moment to ask him to pick up his pace a bit. Maties nodded and the orchestra understood that they have to go faster.

  At fourteen, I understood that everything had changed, everything. The day after Mama left, Papa showed up. He was one of the men who had come and gone, but never stayed for very long and never smiled at me or said anything. Wow, you sure have grown, he said, and that day he said it with a smile. And he looked at me with excitement in his eyes; where it came from I didn’t know. Frankly, it seemed as if I had just conjured him up out of my imagination. Then, to my surprise, he asked me how it was going with the violin. Once I had recovered from my shock, I answered, fine, it’s fine now. What do you mean? he asked, intrigued. We were in the dining room at home, so many years eating alone or in the kitchen with Clara, and now it turned out I had a dining companion, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I wasn’t sure I liked that perfect stranger sitting down with me at the table like it was the most natural thing in the world, after a fourteen-year absence. But at that moment I felt obliged to answer, well, I didn’t like the teacher I had before, but I like the one at the conservatory and now I like the violin too.

  I said it like that because I didn’t know how else to explain it. I didn’t know how to say that at thirteen, when my gaze no longer wandered as I walked through the park, when I no longer had irrepressible desires to go play with those kids, I had discovered that an instrument, a violin, was the only thing I had, the only thing in my life that I truly possessed. For a while I thought I had Clara, but then she found a boyfriend and explained how she was getting married and leaving. She had explained it to Mama, and later, she explained it to Papa: If you’d like I can come by the hour, but I can’t live here, she said. And Papa told her that there was no need, because it seems we had to have someone who was live-in.

  So I only had the violin. Like now, when I play as if my life depended on it, playing at rebutting everything Teresa says to me with her violin and, sometimes, we look each other in the eye and it seems we’re at war, in a war that began because of my father.

  I remember that he leaned back with a piece of bread in his hand and rang the bell for Clara to bring out the dessert. And then he said, you know, it was my decision that you study violin, because it’s my frustrated ambition. I wanted to play the violin, but, of course, it wasn’t good enough for me. They made me study business management, you see, and we didn’t have the money for more studies. You were studying with a teacher who was recommended to me and you didn’t practice much, according to what your mother told me. But now you do practice, right? Oh, yes. What else could I tell him. So he was the one responsible for sending me to that hawk-nose violinist, en souffrant for who knows how many years. So he was the one guilty of my martyrdom. I hated him in silence. I drank a sip of water and retaliated: Why weren’t you ever around? He didn’t feel bad at all about the question, quite the opposite, it was as if I’d asked him the most normal question in the world. He looked toward the window and said, after thinking it over for a moment: Frankly, your mother was impossible to live with. We agree on that, I thought, but I stayed quiet because I saw that he wanted to go on. Clara brought dessert, and Papa kept talking anyway: I had to make my life, you know, just like she made hers, but we agreed that I would only come once a month for paperwork. I rented a place quite far from here, years ago. I told her and she didn’t seem to care.

  Inside me, there was a gut-wrenching voice that came from a bottomless hole, a voice that screamed: And what about me, why didn’t you even say hi when you came, and why didn’t you ever give me a single kiss, and why didn’t you let me know that you were my father? The voice kept screaming, but only on the inside, I didn’t say any of that out loud. Instead, I said something that I knew would hurt him, and I did it with a spoonful of cake in my mouth: I didn’t know which of those men were my father, you see; I didn’t even remember you.

  I managed to hurt him, I could see it in his eyes and in how he stopped eating. I savored my victory over the enemy, him, as much as the cake I was swallowing. He didn’t say anything more.

  Later, I went out to look at the lake. The water was still and silent; it was the weekend, there were no kids, there was no one, except a couple of people walking their dogs. I looked at my soul laid out there, on the surface of the liquid medium that sustained the water lilies with all the calmness in the world. I saw it, my soul, and I saw it every day until it disappeared. It must have evaporated under the sun. And I thought that maybe, like the water, it would fall in the form of rain into a river, another lake, or the sea. From then on I look for it in every body of water I come across, and as I get close, I think I can hear it grumbling and complaining. But it only allows me to hear it, never to capture it.

  That day, before my soul had evaporated, I went back home and said to my father: By the way, I need to buy a violin urgently; the one I have is for a little girl and it’s very small. Papa smiled grudgingly but I didn’t care, I thoroughly enjoyed the feeling of dragging him through the mud. You’ll have your violin, he finally said, but we should talk to your teacher to find out exactly what type you need.

  Mark

  My father was truly obsessed by Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins; my mother always told me that. It seems she would groan every Sunday when she woke up hearing it, early in the morning, and my father would be pretending to conduct with one hand, his eyes closed and in a state of ecstasy, as I would see him do in Barcelona, also on Sundays, always on the sofa, always with one hand in the air, always with his eyes closed. Sometimes, later in the day, my mother would tell me, he went out with his musician friends and they would improvise an evening of Bach in the square. He always, always played second violin, and another friend was the first violin, and whatever other musicians were there acted as a whole orchestra. It seems that, when they were young, after the war, in a time of great hardship, they played to distract themselves from their hunger. People came from all over Berlin to hear them, and my mother was one of those people there watching and listening to them, defying the cold, the hunger, and the state of emergency Berlin was in. It was an oasis of art and warmth, she would tell me. And that’s how they met. He was starving, she explained with a smile, but he refused to be separated from his violin; he didn’t want to sell it, he adored it. It was a Stainer like the one that Anna has. Hers was a gift, according to what she told me. My father had inherited his from an Austrian grandfather I’d never met.

  Then my mother would tell me about the period when my father began to conduct his orchestra in East Berlin, which was when he started to make a name for himself. His dream was to conduct the double concerto with two female violinists he admired. Both of those women were already quite a bit older than him, but he was passionate about how they played; he said he just had to work with them before they retired. And he did; he toured all over East Germany with them and the orchestra, and that was what spread his fame over borders and walls. Of course, after studying that concerto for so long, I said to my mother, half joking, when she told me. And her lips tightened before murmuring, off-handedly, yes, and after studying them for so long. At the time I didn’t know what she meant, but I didn’t dare to ask. When he came back from that tour, she was waiting for him with packed bags. His bags. That was shortly before I was born. When I started to ask if I had a father, my mother explained that they’d gone their separate ways b
efore I was born and that while my father may be a great musician, he was also a skirt chaser.

  Today, about to begin my father’s favorite piece, the Bach concerto, I wonder how my mother could really think that my father was interested in those women. I think my mother was just jealous that she couldn’t give him what they gave him; she couldn’t reach the musical ecstasy that he shared with his violinists. I say that because I know, because I find myself in the same boat—because I do have something more with Anna, but not with Teresa; that’s just music. And that was something my mother never understood.

  My father didn’t just leave home. The regime wanted to promote him; he was one of their favorite musicians, and after taking him to the main capitals of the East, such as Saint Petersburg, Budapest, Prague, and Dresden, they sent him beyond, to the West. He toured the top European capitals and ended up in Barcelona with an offer to stay there. And that’s what he did, convinced that he no longer had anyone on the other side of the Iron Curtain. He didn’t know anything about me until I rang his doorbell that Christmas Eve, a month after the Berlin Wall fell.

  Maria, the same Maria we met today in the hotel, who seemed not to understand why we’d brought her all this way, opened the door and found me standing there. She spoke what I took for a very odd Spanish dialect. I later found out that it was Andalusian sprinkled with Catalan. I understood very little of it at the time; I had only studied a little Spanish in high school. She was dressed like the chambermaids at the hotel near my house in Berlin, with a brown dress and a white apron. I had never seen anyone dressed like that in a private home, so I thought I had the wrong address. But I still said my father’s name, and she gestured for me to wait a moment. After a little while he appeared at the door.