The House of Silence by Blanca Busquets Read Free Book Online

which seemed further proof of the brilliant West that we had always seen, from the other side, as the best of worlds. Mother and I were mouths agape. Welcome, shouted some boys who came over with a bottle of wine and a few plastic cups. Mother and I drank with them, but soon they wentto greet others who had come across like us. In fact, we moved forward impelled by a crowd of people. Of people who wanted to take on the world.
    Let’s go, Son, my mother then said. I looked at her and I realized that the pain etched onto her brow had returned. And it never went away; she took it with her to her grave. Surely, the effort involved in walking so far that day had accelerated the process of her illness, since she had little strength and had pulled it out of somewhere. When we got back home, I was carrying her; she couldn’t do the last few meters on her own. Still, as I put her in bed, she found the energy to tell me, with a smile: I couldn’t die without seeing it.
    She died two days later. It was a month of death for some, a month of freedom for others. I buried her and then I thought about what I could do, if everyone was leaving home and looking to make a better life in the West. I thought of my father and I set off in search of him. I took my cello and my scores, I sold my piano and I landed in Barcelona on Christmas Eve.

Anna
    â€œLet’s get started!”
    Mark taps the music stand with the baton. I get my violin in position. I haven’t said hello to Teresa, haven’t even looked at her. But I have tried to locate Maria—and after just a glance her way, I felt her eyes fix on mine. Her eyes have a supernatural shine to them. Maybe she’s a witch. An evil witch in the audience and an evil bitch playing the violin beside me. But Mark is mine. And I want to take him to the river. I have to find my soul, and my soul is in the water, in water everywhere around the world, imprisoned there ever since the day it was carried off by the water in the lake near my house. Let’s go there, I said to Mark this morning. You go, I have to rehearse, he grumbled. And now I have to go find the river all by myself and I don’t know how. Maybe it, like Karl, has ceased to exist.
    Karl was the first real man I ever met. My violin teacher with the hawk nose was more a woman than a man, Mama’s friends were no more than bees buzzing around her, and I didn’t really meet Papa until Mama left.
    It was Teresa who opened the door to the larger world for me, when I started to study under her. Maybe you think that’s the end of the violin for you, Mama said after that series of smacks, looking dangerously into my eyes—but now you’ll go to the conservatory, and you won’t get personal attention there; that’s where everyone goes. Everyone means that’s where the poor go, those who can’t afford a good private teacher. I remained stock still as she spoke to me, impassive, holding her gaze to see if I would get a slap—but that day there were none. Oh, girl, you exasperate me; I don’t understand how you turned out like this, she said with a sudden wave of her hand, and vanished on a pair of spike heels that I was very impressed by because I didn’t know how she could walk on them. And then, that day, I don’t know what happened to me, but something came from deep inside me, I was able to make out a latent crack in the inaccessible wall that was that woman whom I so loved and hated at the same time. And I went up to her from behind and I hugged her. And for a moment, for a brief moment, she stopped, and her heels stopped tapping—and, to my surprise, she stroked my hand. But it was just an instant, as if a moment of weakness, and then she said, not now, my girl—but without forcing me to let her go, just waiting for me to do so on my own. And, when I let her go, she left without even turning around.
    I went back and found Clara watching the scene,