The House of Silence (7 page)

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.

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 before 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.

I look around. “Are we ready?” I ask, lifting the baton.

“One second, please . . .” says Teresa, adjusting her instrument on her shoulder.

I look at Anna out of the corner of my eye. She is ready; she's always ready, and she gets impatient with the others, especially with
Teresa. And then, when she is playing, she gets that wrinkle on her forehead, and her lips become more desirable than ever, more than when she smiled at me for the first time, more than when I saw her playing with my father and yearned to feel her close to me.

My father came to the door with a few strides. He cut an imposing figure, so tall and stocky. The woman in the uniform and apron had disappeared. I spoke to him in German, I told him right away that I came from East Berlin. He seemed interested and smiled widely as he invited me in. I followed him into a large room, with picture windows that overlooked a park filled with trees. He had me sit down and rang a little bell to call Maria. He asked me if I wanted a tea, and I said okay with a nod of my head because I was struck dumb by the luxury he lived in, which I was so unused to. And then, with the tea in front of me, he just said, go ahead, tell me, thinking that I had come with a message for him. What he wasn't expecting was that I would say I was his son. After a moment of shock, he asked me to repeat myself: What did you say? he asked. That you are my father. According to my mother, I was born shortly after you separated.

My father, the great orchestra conductor Karl T., was speechless. He must have been unsure whether I was telling the truth or was some sort of scam artist. I pulled my brand-new passport out of my pocket, and handed it to him. He took a look at it, and it said that I was his son. And that my last name was the same as his.

The great Karl T. was flabbergasted. Finally, he reacted, I'm going to call my—your mother. She's dead, I said, as he was already getting to his feet. He sat back down and didn't move, and I understood that he was in shock. That wasn't surprising, considering
that in a matter of seconds, he had learned that his ex-wife was dead and that he had a twenty-eight-year-old son. I pulled a letter out of my pocket, the one my mother had written before she died. It explained everything. They occasionally spoke on the phone; he worried over her, but she had never spoken to him about me. In the letter she said that it was because she didn't want to lose her son. Given the political circumstances, if I went to the West, she would have never seen me again. My mother had put the letter into my hands shortly before she died: Go and bring it to him, she had said. And that was what I did.

Teresa seems be ready. I tap the music stand with the baton:

“Let's go.”

After the first moments of confusion, my father looked at me with those blue eyes my mother said I had inherited, and he said: It says here that you're a musician. Stay. And I stayed.

I close my eyes and let myself be carried off by the music, as if I were dusting off Beethoven. The music pierces my heart. The violin sounds so lovely, even though it is Mrs. Anna's. I can't help smiling a little; the Stainer sounds so good.

Look at the piano, Mr. Karl would tell me, because I was embarrassed to look at my hands there on the keys, with his guiding my fingers into the right placement. And now keep practicing, he would say; you have to work on it a little bit each day, do you understand? I nodded. Mister Karl would tell me that I had half an hour in the afternoons to play the piano and make music. Yes, sir, I said again, and continued doing scales, while he started to teach the notes: Do, re, mi, fa, sol, and he would ask me to do them out of order. Then he would ask me to give them with the corresponding sound, and I had to know exactly where the sound of the note was, because each had its own and you couldn't just make it up; there was one and just one. I tried it with varying success; there were days when Mr. Karl seemed to lose his patience with me—
but other days he would say: Very good, Maria, very good, and he would congratulate me. I felt so happy, as happy as when my boyfriend kissed me and put his arm around my shoulders as we walked down the street.

My boyfriend and I saw each other on Sunday mornings, always after mass, because he couldn't on Thursday evenings. And we were seeing each other for a year. At first he only kissed me. But later, one day, when we were sitting on a park bench, where no one could see us, he kissed me in a way he never had before—with a kiss that lasted a long time, and lit a fire inside me. It made him hold me tighter and tighter, and then he started to put his hand on my inner thigh, as if he wanted to touch me under my skirt. In spite of the fire I felt inside, I gave him a good slap and quickly said: What do you think you're doing? But Maria, he replied, that's what boyfriends and girlfriends do; you have to let me touch you. No, I said, not until we are married.

Thinking about that now brings a smile to my face. But at the time, what I was thinking of was Mr. Karl and the opera singer and the smack he'd received. I was unpleasantly surprised; I didn't expect that from my boyfriend, I don't know why. I already knew that some people did those things that Mr. Karl did, but I thought he was a decent boy. He was the only boyfriend I'd ever had, and up until then I'd enjoyed it—but that day I suddenly stood up and repeated: not until we're married. And I waited. I thought that he would say: Well then, let's get married, and that he would kneel down in front of me and ask me for my hand. I really thought that: I was such a fool; for heaven's sake! When you get older you realize all the stupid things you've done. Because that boy, that boyfriend
of mine who sat in the back rows of the church, like I did, so it wouldn't look like we were trying to blend in with the gentlemen and ladies of the neighborhood—well, that boy, despite how much he devoutly prayed, found some other girl who would let him put his hand up her skirt, and maybe more. I found that out because, when he didn't show up at mass the next Sunday or the one after that, I got worried. When I went to his house, they told me he had gone out with his girlfriend. Of course, I thought that I was his girlfriend, and clearly I wasn't.