And one evening, I waited for Mark in my pajamas and with the Stainer in my hand. My whole being was aboil, but I couldn’t bear to think that he was rehearsing with another violinist. I sat waiting until he opened the door, and then I put the violin on my shoulder and I began to play. I played Tartini’s Il trillo del diavolo. I played it with a feeling that I’d never had before, and even more so when I saw Mark approach and stand watching me in surprise. I put a passion into it that wasn’t soul but pure passion. I played for two long minutes, carried along by the fever or the devil himself, I’m not sure which. At the last moment, before falling to the floor, I thought that knowing that Mama was trailing me had me all shook up.
They took me to the hospital, and, later, Mark took me to a spa for ten days. Ten days without the violin. I didn’t miss my instrument because I had my man, who only lived to make me happy.
Now he’s here at the front of the stage about to mark our entrances. First comes Teresa and then me, on the fifth bar. In fact when this concert is over, I’ll never have to see Teresa again. That will be the end of it. I place the violin on my shoulder and, when it’s my turn, I begin my melody. And then, for some mysterious reason, a strange, deformed sound emerges from inside the Stainer; and all of a sudden, everything comes unmoored.
Maria
I didn’t stay at the concert to see what happened when it came time for her to play. When the applause began for the piece before the violin duet, before the two women came on stage to play Bach, I just got up and left. Well, I got up best I could and walked across the entire row, saying, excuse me, excuse me, and everyone looked at me strangely because they couldn’t understand what I was saying and because I was stumbling over everyone in this long dress that almost reaches my feet. Now I’ve made it out, down the stairs and to the theater’s side entrance. Outside, everything is dark. And there, pure silence, the audience is in the great hall, there where Mrs. Anna must be wanting to tear her hair out because her violin isn’t sounding like it should. I look at the coat check woman, like before, who doesn’t understand me but lets out a little oh! when she sees me and points to the case by her side, half hidden among the coats.
“Yes, exactly . . . I’ll take my coat and the instrument . . . thank you.”
She understands me perfectly and hands me both things. She must be tired, she must be thinking, I’ve had enough of this lady, with her I’ll collect the case and now I’ll check it again—I smile at her and nod as if to say thank you and goodbye.
I can barely stand, my stomach feels like a pressure cooker but not because I need to use the bathroom, actually I haven’t eaten a thing all day. It’s just hurting horribly. But I don’t care, I smile. At my age, even pain brings a smile. I cover up and go outside. I look back and see a brightly lit sign that reads Staatsoper im Schiller Theatre. I hold my breath and think how I don’t really know what it means, but the letters make an impact because they are so large and bright. I didn’t notice them yesterday, and I didn’t notice them today when we arrived. Oh, because it was still light out and we came in a cab, I say to myself. I can’t see much, but I can tell the ground is wet. Yet it’s stopped raining.
It rained the day that I ran into Miss Teresa on my street. It was the street where my new house is, the apartment I bought in a more humble neighborhood than the one where Mr. Karl lived. Mr. Mark, on the other hand, stayed close, and I would go over to his apartment to tidy up, in exchange for a small salary and the chance to chat for a little while with someone who appreciated me. But sometimes Mr. Mark wasn’t there because he was increasingly popular and had more and more concerts; he was starting to seem like Mr. Karl in that way, but only in that way, because he will never be like his father, and he will never make the music his father did.
When I found out that he had left me so much money, I didn’t even care. I didn’t care about anything, not a single thing, except for the fact that Mr. Karl had suddenly disappeared from my life completely. First, it seemed that it was all just so unfair, and then I felt lonely. After forty years of his company, I no longer had anyone. All I had was money, but I didn’t really care about the inheritance. I realized that I was doing everything, going everywhere, with my eyes constantly wet with tears. There was nothing I could do to get rid of them, the tears had stuck to my eyes, they didn’t want to go inside, they only wanted to flow out. I felt sad, sad, sad. Every once in a while I would kiss the letter he had left me, and in those first days, when no one else was around, I would play the German songs on the Stainer, especially the one about the peasant girl and the shepherd. And I would think, Oh, if only Mr. Karl had told me earlier what he’d told me in the letter.
Until Miss Anna showed up and took the violin away. I couldn’t keep her from going into the piano room, just like I had never been able to when she would come by the house. It was my bad luck that the Stainer was in the room just then because I’d been playing it, and the piano room had the best soundproofing in the whole house, Mr. Karl had had special walls put in so the neighbors wouldn’t complain. Miss Anna headed straight there, grabbed the Stainer, and asked me, where is the case? in the haughtiest voice I’d ever heard. But, Miss, the violin is not yours. Of course it’s mine, anyone who knows me will say that I play this violin, I’ll prove it to you anytime you’d like. But you gave it to Mr. Karl, he told me, I exclaimed. Miss Anna looked at me for a moment with doubt in her eyes, but then she started to laugh and said, what nonsense, why would I give the Stainer to Karl, don’t make me laugh.
I was desperate and I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to go find the letter and show her the proof that violin was no longer Mr. Karl’s but mine now, but I was held back by the rest of the contents of the letter, because if I showed Miss Anna the part of the letter where it said that he was giving me the violin and that he had gotten it in exchange for promising to marry her, I would have had to show her the entire page, and I wasn’t willing to do that, at least not then. So, after a few seconds of thinking it over, I told myself that it was best not to do anything, to just let it go. She saw that I was giving up the fight over the instrument, and then she seized the moment to say, so, are you going to give me the case or do I have to walk through the streets with it like this?
All of a sudden, I hated her. I had never felt anything like that before and I didn’t enjoy the feeling, but at that moment there was nothing I could do about it. I went to my room, grabbed the case and brought it to her, holding back my tears, which were tears of rage right then, not of sadness. She placed the instrument inside, and, without even a word of thanks, she said farewell and left. Then I really did burst into tears.
They didn’t last long, though. At least not the tears over the violin. The others, the ones over Mr. Karl, didn’t last long either, on the outside, but they were flowing inside me for a very long time, and there was no way I could stop the flow. Crying inside had never happened to me before either; it was like hating Miss Anna, which gradually faded, because I understood that such a negative feeling could only hurt me and so it would be stupid to hold on to it. But the tears for Mr. Karl, ay, those were harder for me to get past, and they soaked my insides as if they were vinegar because they burned holes in my stomach and everywhere, and not like now, when it also feels like I’ve got vinegar in my stomach, but in a different way that no doctor could heal.
When Mr. Mark and I left the house by the lake, he asked me if I wanted to take anything with me. I asked him if I could take the violin, the other one, the student violin. He always played it, I lied. Oh, really, and I thought he had given up the violin. You didn’t spend much time at home, Mr. Mark, I mean Mark, I said. That’s true, he conceded with a sad smile. And isn’t there anything else you want? he asked. I hesitated for a moment, well, yes, there is something I’d like to have, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to because it’s very heavy. Mr. Mark arched his eyebrows as he waited. Beethoven, I said quickly. Then Mr. Mark started laughing, that’s a good one, Maria, you are such a card, I don’t kno
w if they’ll let us, but we’ll do everything we can, I doubt they’ll raise a fuss over a plaster bust.
They didn’t. In fact, they had placed Beethoven there as a nod to Mr. Karl, but surely if they wanted to sell or rent that house, they’d have to move it, because it occupied a space that any normal family would rather use for a small table or one of those lamps that people keep in their entryways. And so Beethoven came to my new house, to my small apartment. He didn’t fit in my entryway, not even in my kitchen, so I had to give him a room, the other one that wasn’t my bedroom, because there were only two. And there he was in the middle and I would dust him every day, and at first I would just say gut’n Tag, but then I started to tell him more things and to talk to him about Mr. Karl, and I read him the letter that I now carry in my pocket, and not just once but I read it to him a thousand times, and every time I read it to him, there were tears. Mine, not Beethoven’s, because he was made of plaster, and I had thought he was made of stone but no; he wasn’t that hard. But anyway, he was cold and he gave me quite a look, and he must have been deaf, too—because they say even the real one couldn’t hear a thing. And then I would pick up the violin and tune it best I could without a piano, but I discovered that, if I listened to any radio station that played classical music, I could tune it; it came naturally, I quickly found the A, and then I could play the German songs, especially the one about the peasant girl and the shepherd, but I cried so much that I decided to stop for a while and not play it anymore, at least until some time had passed.
At first everything was sad and dark. The apartment was so small, and I felt as if my breathing was constricted. Once a week I went over to Mr. Mark’s place and kept things in order, even though I didn’t need the money, thanks to Mr. Karl’s inheritance. Mr. Karl had never spent anything, he hadn’t even paid for the Stainer, because it was a gift from his father, and I didn’t have many expenses because I lived alone—so, with what he had left me, I could live forever, if I wanted to.
When I left Mr. Mark’s house, I always went by the park and the lake with its still waters where lilies or their beds of leaves floated. And I would close my eyes for a moment to smell the green scent, and I listened to the lullaby of the tinkling poplar leaves and the shouts of the children playing in the afternoon, like those other kids that Miss Teresa used to watch so long ago, the ones that always got away from her.
Miss Teresa came to my apartment one day because I ran into her right out front, and it was raining. She smiled at me and asked me how I was doing. We got to talking about Mr. Karl. Fortunately, it was years since his death, and I could talk about him normally, without crying. I invited her up to my apartment; it just came out suddenly like that, because it would have been rude not to and then have her see me enter the building. She was carrying a bottle of cava that someone had just given her. We’ll drink it together, she said happily. And we went upstairs, and I took her past the room with Beethoven and the violin to avoid having to explain, and I had her come into the little dining room, and she exclaimed, it’s very nice, and she asked me if I still saw Mr. Mark. And I said no, not anymore, because it was true, two days earlier I had been let go.
Miss Teresa and I had a couple of glasses of cava. I had learned many things at Mr. Karl’s house and the other homes where I had worked before that, and one of those things was that it was important to be prepared for guests and have a few glasses always at the ready, because you never knew what could happen and who might come over. Then I thought that I should have had some cava on hand, but fortunately that time Miss Teresa had brought it with her. Why is that? she asked me when I told her I no longer saw Mr. Mark. I sighed, well, now Miss Anna spends a lot of time there, and Miss Anna doesn’t like me very much, you know. I didn’t tell Miss Teresa that Mr. Mark had given me a phone number where I could reach him if I needed to and that he had told me to keep the keys to the house, and that he had apologized a thousand times.
Miss Teresa took a sip of cava and coughed a little. Anna is a complicated person, she said in a vague tone. She finished her drink and poured some more. I didn’t stop her, I just drank two glasses and she drank all the rest. And, when it had all gone to her head, she solved the mystery of the Stainer for me.
Oh, all of a sudden I can’t breathe. I can’t move. Everything is dark and no one can see me, here in this square filled with slippery, wet tiles in front of the theater. Finally, with much effort, I manage to put one foot in front of the other, but it’s obvious I won’t be able to walk much farther. Holy Beloved Virgin of the Macarena, now I clearly see that I won’t make it back to Barcelona.
Teresa
My God, that was terrible. The audience didn’t realize that the Stainer wasn’t the Stainer, but they could tell that something was wrong because all three of us—Anna, Mark, and I—were in a state of shock when we heard the instrument. And we played two bars and then Anna stopped. You could see she wanted to go on but couldn’t, she hadn’t entered on time, it seemed something was holding her back, that her fingers wouldn’t move, that she couldn’t press down on the strings, that she couldn’t make the bow move. It seemed she couldn’t do anything until she snapped out of her shock. Then Mark had had to stop everything. There was a deathly silence in the concert hall. The orchestra, if they had noticed anything, they hadn’t shown it, but the three of us were petrified. Mark looked at Anna. And Anna, red as a beet, looked at the violin, which looked exactly like the Stainer, but wasn’t the Stainer. And I looked at the instrument too, but not openly because I realized that we had to do something to save the situation. And, luckily, my partenaire hadn’t peered through the f-hole to see if Stainer’s signature was there, because that would have made us look really, really bad. She had simply stopped, perplexed. It had all been a matter of seconds, and then Mark had saved the day, turning toward the audience and, with a smile on his lips, said, for those of you who don’t know, he always did it this way, with a false entrance like the one in the Blue Danube at the New Year’s concert. The crowd laughed and applauded. Then Mark turned and gave us both a look that said, Stainer or no, we are going to give our best concert. And we did, forgetting about the fact that Anna wasn’t playing the Stainer. To be fair, I have to say that she bounced back exceptionally well. The fact that she controls her emotions so well had helped her to maintain her composure and play with a new, strange violin the way she would have with the Stainer or any violin she’d known all her life. I was impressed. When we finished, we were showered with applause, and I thought that she was the one who deserved it. That day, she had more than earned her recognition from the audience. We took a bow, they brought us some flowers, and now we’ve just gone offstage while the orchestra takes their seats.
“What happened?!” I ask once we’re backstage, looking at Anna’s violin.
“I don’t know—” she says, looking at it as well.
She seems sincere, completely sincere. She doesn’t know what happened, just like Mark and me. But he is still holding the baton and says, “Come on, let’s go back out before the applause dies down.”
We paint a smile on our lips and go out onto the stage. Sometimes you have to do that in life, paint on a smile and go out. Here, there are warming spotlights, but outside it’s cold. And then you find yourself very alone, like I did after Karl’s death, despite returning to the Conservatory and the quartet. Because Karl had symbolized something more to me than the sexual release of the early days. He wasn’t like Maties, there wasn’t that unbridled passion and that mutual vision of life together, that feeling that I’d found my soul mate. No, it was just that Karl, the great orchestra conductor, had captured my soul, that soul he said I put so much of into my playing. And he hadn’t even heard me play the magic violin, that magic violin that God knows where it’s gone to now, perhaps into the hands of someone who knows how to work its spell. My violin that glowed in the garbage heap; who knows if right now it’s at some other dump?
I won’t ever say where I found that violin, I said.
What violin? asked Maria. Oh, the one that Anna has now, the Stainer. I looked at her for a moment, and even though I had drunk almost an entire bottle of cava on my own, I suddenly realized that I was talking to Maria about something she could never understand. That no matter how fond I was of her and what a charming person she was, that she must not be able to tell the difference between a Stainer and an Olivera. Sorry, I said drinking the last sip in my glass, it’s a kind of strange story, you know, Anna’s violin used to be mine. She looked at me as if she’d never seen me before. Go on, tell me, she said eagerly, as if she were very interested. We were in her house, we had run into each other on the street and I was carrying a bottle of cava, and I thought it would be better to drink it with her than by myself, because lately I’d been reduced to that. And Maria and I had always gotten along, she was very kind, so we had a nice time remembering Karl and talking about how Barcelona had changed. Then she told me that she wouldn’t be going to Mark’s house anymore because Anna had pretty much moved in, and so I ended up telling her my story about the dump. I had never told it to anyone before, but considering Maria’s background, she was the perfect candidate to understand that at the dump you can find fascinating things. Even if she didn’t know what a Stainer was. So I started by explaining to her about the Stainer and why that violin was so valuable. I told her a bit about the luthier, who was Tyrolean and had lived in the 17th century, and I also explained, in the simplest words I could, that the instruments he had made were special, that they had a special sound and that through the f-hole you could read his signature, Jacobus Stainer, and the date of the violin’s construction.
The House of Silence Page 15