The House of Silence

by Blanca Busquets

  Teresa, Miss Teresa, came to the house after Mr. Mark had moved in. In fact, when Mr. Mark came, he would only stay there for stretches because he was also starting to tour all over the world. Before conducting, Mr. Mark played the cello—which captivated me the first time I heard it. I thought the sound was much deeper than the violin, and much thicker. It seemed that the violin was the son and the cello its father. While the violin reached every corner of the house, the cello’s sound filled them all.

  But who even remembers the cello now? Who remembers all those things in the past, those duets between father and son, those long evenings of music in which they discussed how each score should be played—and who remembers all the women.

  I wish I didn’t have to say it, but all that about getting down deep to the depths of the music seemed to be tied in with that. With getting to the depths of the sofa. When a woman came in to play with him, I knew full well where she would end up—if not on the first day, then on the second. They would rehearse whatever it was they were working on—play for a long while, sometime hours, then they would talk and laugh. Then came the sofa. And I couldn’t help looking through the keyhole, pretending I was dusting Beethoven, and saying gut’n Tag to him under my breath. All of the women who made music with him took their turn on the sofa—if they came alone, that is. A few resisted, but those were very few—and they did so with a giggle, and then never returned. But, in general, they were all like him; they must have wanted to get to the depths of the music.

  This is a comfy spot, here in this plush seat listening to music. I could doze right off. Miss Teresa’s violin thrilled. But not Miss Anna’s. Mr. Karl had said it; she lacked soul.

  One fine day, I stopped looking through the keyhole when the playing ended. Instead, I liked listening to the conversations about their craft that Mr. Karl had with the other musicians—both men and women. I was trying to soak up those words, so that I could one day play like them. After meeting Miss Teresa and hearing how she played, I was convinced that I could, over time, learn to play like all those people who discussed things that were starting to sound familiar to me—like the treble clef and the bass clef, and the demisemiquavers (a 32nd note), and the anacrusis, which was a term that Mr. Karl loved to use to refer to what part of the score we had to pick up from. I was already starting to play songs, and he gave me a book of songs from his country. They’re easy, he told me, and very pretty. You’ll see how much you enjoy playing them. I was so excited to see that book in my hands that I could barely hold it. It was filled with notes, and the best part was that I could read them. I could read them and felt I had the courage to give it a try. I can practice when you aren’t here, if I have some time, I said—pointing with my head toward the violin. Up until then I had never done that. I didn’t dare to pick up the violin when he wasn’t around. He smiled: I expect no less, Maria.

  And so it was. I practiced those songs in the silence of the empty house. They were sad songs that made you cry. They reminded me a little bit of Linda paloma mia and all those songs of mine that brought up tears. After learning a couple, I would close my eyes as I played them and imagine myself in front of an audience like the one that will be here tomorrow, with those spotlights that will illuminate Miss Teresa and Miss Anna, Mr. Mark, and the whole orchestra. And I imagined that they were clapping for me. But the best thing was that day when Mr. Karl heard me, when I played the song I had learned, and he gave me a few suggestions. But first he exclaimed, and I could see that it came from his heart: How delicate and in tune, Maria. He looked at me in such a way that I thought for a second, just a fleeting second, that Mr. Karl wanted to go to the depths of the music with me. Luckily, that look only lasted a few moments—then he started to correct me and tell me what I had to do to improve certain passages. I had my work cut out for me for the next week, in addition to the sweeping, mopping, dishwashing, and dusting, of course. I always had a lot of work to do.

  And then came the best part. One day he was rehearsing with a singer and a pianist, and he called me in. I went into the room and said, as you wish, sir. He pointed to the sofa, the sofa of the scenes that I had watched through the keyhole. He said, sit down, Maria, and listen. Then give me your honest opinion. The singer and the pianist looked at me in surprise. They never expected a maid in uniform would be telling them what she thought of their music. But I had to obey Mr. Karl, and I couldn’t help feeling proud that he’d ask me to do that—even though, of course, it was a very big commitment. So I sat on the edge of the sofa, because it didn’t seem right for me to sit there as if I were a lady. And I folded my hands neatly over my apron. My hands looked nice, I had bought rubber gloves some time back and was taking good care of them with those creams I’d seen the ladies buy in the perfume store, because I didn’t want Mr. Karl to give me another lecture about having my hands dirty with bleach and detergents. So the hands that now rested on my apron were the kind of hands that could be shown off. Otherwise, I looked the same as always—with my hair pulled back and some earrings I had bought when I’d saved up enough.

  Mr. Karl conducted and the two musicians, after giving me an incredulous look, started to play. He closed his eyes and put his all into it as if he were before a large orchestra. The pianist played with enviable agility, moving around a lot. Her long hair kept covering her face when she swung her head. The high-pitched singer followed her as best he could, and pulled it off. His voice was lovely, but there was something about it that wasn’t right—something that made it actually unpleasant to listen to. I recognized it right away, but I controlled myself well, remaining stock-still until Mr. Karl stopped them. Then he turned and said, Maria, inviting me to speak. Very good, I said hesitantly, because I didn’t dare to say more. Mr. Karl looked at me impatiently: Come on, Maria, not compliments, what do you think? I felt lost, but I had to speak: Well, the gentleman sings, yes, very well—but it seems like he’s not quite hitting the notes. I knew what I meant and Mr. Karl did too, but the singer got furious: What are you saying, what are you talking about, and why are you asking this? he said. Mr. Karl cut him off, turned and winked at me as he said: Thank you, Maria, you’re dismissed. I left quickly. Then, of course, I stood behind the door and looked through the keyhole at what was happening. Obviously, the singer was telling Mr. Karl that he couldn’t be expected to listen to a maid’s opinion, and that he couldn’t even understand what I had said. And then Mr. Karl answered with his typical calm: She was saying that you are singing below tone, just a touch. It’s a question of coloring; it’s very subtle, and I wanted to make sure, because I wasn’t certain I was even hearing it myself, after so much rehearsal. All right, let’s do it again. The singer didn’t reply, and began singing again with the pianist with the swinging hair, who didn’t seem to mind repeating the same fragment over and over—because boy, did they. It was no use; it kept coming out the same. But don’t you hear that you are below the note? asked Mr. Karl, and he said no, that he was in perfect tune. In the end, they both got mad and decided to call it a day.

  That evening, Mr. Karl thanked me and apologized for having put me in that position. It was very helpful, thank you, he said. Do you think that singer will get in tune? I asked. No, he won’t, it’s impossible, he said. He was recommended to me, but it’s not working, I’ll have to find someone else. Thank you, Maria. That second “thank you, Maria” meant I could go. I could already see that he was in a bad mood and flustered, and that I should leave him in peace. But from then on, he would sometimes call me in to hear his rehearsals, and the musicians were shocked to see the uniformed maid sitting on the edge of the sofa listening to them play. Although, most times, when they finished I would say: You played wonderfully. Because it was true.

  Teresa

  Anna, the same Anna who is now playing with me, the same one who directs hatred at me every time she looks my way—a hatred you can smell, feel, and perceive; a hatred that shines in her eyes and she can’t control; a hatred that she puts in her music now that she’s p
laying with me—well, that very same Anna was the best student I’ve ever had. I realized that she had a special talent, even though she was missing something. She needed to put her heart, or her soul, as Karl would say, into it. Karl couldn’t find that in her, because he had begun to doubt that she had a soul. First, it seemed she did, and I thought she really could become a first-rate violinist; her agility was exceptional, and in a violinist that’s very important. There are very fast passages that most professionals struggle to play, and it turns out that she was able to play them in just her fourth year of studying the instrument.

  The day that Anna came to class with her father, Maties, she was still very young. And I remember that she didn’t know where to look, because the maid used to always bring her—then her mother had left, and now her father, who apparently had never had any interest in the child, had shown up out of the blue. On that day, her father came over to ask me which instrument would be best for his daughter, because he wanted to buy her one. And Anna was looking first at the floor, then the window. I said to her, Anna, you’ll play better with one for adults; you’ve outgrown this one. I said it to get her to look at us, but she wouldn’t, she was eaten up by insecurity. She really had outgrown it and her mother had refused to buy her another one. Oh, she had no interest in music, Maties explained—and, in a low voice he’d added, but one of the conditions for her keeping the girl was that she study violin because, you know, I always wanted to play but we couldn’t afford the lessons; my parents had enough problems paying for my obligatory studies—I mean, regular school, you understand.

  Yes, I understood, he didn’t need to tell me; I had a mother without a cent to her name who had scrubbed apartments. I wondered if he would also have scrubbed apartments to be able to study the violin, if he’d had to steal hours of sleep in order to do it all, and then practice for hours and hours. Would he have managed the snowballing hours the instrument and its professional study demanded, unable to take the violin to be repaired for several years, without the money to pay for even that trifle? I was always just breaking even, and my mother was having an increasingly hard time of it; she was very tired and very slow in her cleaning, so much that they finally fired her. Luckily, she still had her sewing, which she’d never given up, and she would sew and I would play, and we got by like that. I no longer played on the beach, though. I would play all morning long at home, but I played in tune, so I didn’t drive the neighbors nuts—even though I did repeat the same passages over and over to get them perfect. Mother, with her sewing machine by my side, seemed not to mind, even though I really did go on past the point of tiresome and was at it every single day. I only went to the beach when I was short on time and had to practice all night for something the next day.

  We couldn’t move to a new apartment, neighborhood, or situation until I managed to graduate—until I became a real violinist after passing the classes of instrument and harmony and composition and all those things you had to do back then, which are now a thousand times more. Then, the day I graduated, we went out to celebrate and we spent a little beyond our means on lunch. We had never been to a restaurant before that day, and we wanted to be served, which was what we always did at the houses where we worked, after all. That meant the end of looking for scholarships for my classes; from then on it was about finding someone to pay me.

  In the first movement, Anna tries to best me any way she can. But now that we’d started the second, I’m beating her. The second, that largo ma non tanto, slow and drawn out, is where you need soul. That is where my gaze dares to meet hers, but she closes her eyes and brings her brows together to make that wrinkle between her eyes that I’ve seen all my life. It is a wrinkle I helped to create. And I really loved her; it makes me sad: She was an unlucky child no one had loved, even though it seemed that her father wanted to turn that around. Anna was my opposite: plenty of money and no love. But if I had to choose, I’d stick with my childhood, full of love but no money.

  I found work right away; they were looking for new teachers at the conservatory and it was a time of change. The dictator’s regime fell and everything was different. Everyone was protesting over everything, and I just wanted a job. I got one and I didn’t leave there until I had to ask for a leave of absence to go on tour with Karl. And then other conductors started to ask me to play for them. My life took a turn with the change of the century. Everything is change, like Karl’s East Berlin, which despite everything is still run through with some scars, traces of a wall that separated people without any criteria. Just because some lived here and others there, they weren’t allowed to cross to the other side. I know Mark quite well, and he also carries that scar, in his eyes. And Karl had it too.

  And when I saw my mother for the last time, she had generosity in her eyes. Now that we live well, she said with resignation. Those were her last words, and she was right. We were living in the new apartment, I had been a teacher for a few years, and Anna had already been my student for about one. I missed two days of class and, when I returned, I told all the students what had happened, and they all gave me their condolences. But not Anna, Anna didn’t say a thing. And I looked at her and realized that her gaze was hostile, that she was recriminating me for not having gone to class, for having missed my student-teacher date with her; she didn’t find it right at all that I hadn’t been there. The truth is that in that moment I found it strange, but then I forgot all about it when life went back to normal, and our student-teacher relationship did as well.

  But I saw that same look in her eyes when Maties and I started to date. I had bumped into Anna with her father at the Palau de la Música and that was where it all started; we began chatting. Years had passed and Anna was very far along in her studies, she was a girl who, bit by bit, had learned happiness and sensitivity at her father’s side, and musically she had come a long way as well. She had relaxed and managed to do what it takes to make music, real music.

  But it didn’t last long, because that was the end of it all. We all went out to dinner and she seemed happy, but then Maties and I exchanged phone numbers and she didn’t like that as much. When she realized that something special was growing between us, she changed again and, suddenly, I saw in her the girl who met me with hostility when I returned to class after burying my mother. That day she was afraid of being left by the only person who was there for her. And then, with Maties, she thought I was snatching her father away from her.

  Maybe we should forget about this, I sadly said one day to Maties, when I thought the situation was untenable. No, she will understand; she has to understand, he said. After all, he was right, a girl who was already an adult couldn’t dictate what her father did with his life. But it hurt me, and suddenly, Anna stopped putting what she had been putting into her music. It was as if it were all tied together: her personality, her moods, and, above all, her soul. Suddenly, she had lost it again, and no matter what instructions I gave, there was no way to get her back to the Anna she had been before, the Anna of the past four years. I tried to talk to her; I asked her if she was upset by the fact that her father and I were dating. She answered that our lives weren’t her business, although she wouldn’t meet my gaze, and she asked me to go back to the music: that we didn’t have much time, all of a sudden she was always in a hurry, she always had to leave.

  My relationship with Maties grew, while my relationship with Anna deteriorated. When I went to their house, she was never there, or she disappeared as soon as she heard me come in. She had become invisible. Then, at the conservatory, they told me she had requested a different teacher. I was shocked.

  Then I did what I never should have done, but it was a last ditch attempt to get her on my side, to get her to at least have a bit of affection for me. For all three of our sakes, I gave her my Stainer. She had seen it on more than one occasion, and I knew she envied it. I had never told her where I’d gotten it; normally, I taught with another violin and only brought it in every once in a while. And then I gave it to her. I thought that
that would solve everything, that letting go of a gem like that was worth it if it meant winning over a person I needed on my side. I also thought that things with Maties would move forward and that we’d eventually end up living together, and the violin would stay in the family. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I gave it to her.