All Is Silence Read Online Free PDF Page A

carpenters, bricklayers, day labourers . . . and sailors. Once they’d got themselves a bit of silver, the first thing they’d do is go and buy themselves a suit for dancing. The next thing, get together in order to set up a school. That’s what they did. All over Galicia. It was for them the Modern School. But after the war, when it was abandoned, it got this other name, School of Indians.’
    He glanced over at Amparo, who was slowly inserting pins into the cushion.
    ‘It wasn’t just any old school. It was the best school! Everything they had hoped for. Rationalist, they called it. And they sent typewriters, sewing machines, globes, microscopes, barometers . . . They even packed in a skeleton so we could learn the names of all the bones. They set up loads of schools, but this one had something special. An extraordinary idea that the floor of the school was the world. They made it out of noble wood. That floor was built by the very best carpenters and carvers. Every now and then, you’d sit in a different country.’
    He fell silent. Made an inventory. In this composition of the thinker, he held his head with such pressure, so horizontally, that he seemed to be stopping a leak in his temple.
    ‘That’s all that’s left, more or less. The floor and the skeleton.’
    He stood up and with his right forefinger started pointing at his left hand, ‘Trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate . . .’ One word jumped on top of another. Lucho Malpica was content. He noticed the fizz of memory on his lips, the fact that he could remember. That salty taste.
    ‘Do you know which is the most important bone of all? No, you don’t.’ He smacked his son on the nape. ‘The sphenoid!’
    Lucho then made a bowl with his scarred hands and declared, as if holding a human skull, ‘I can hear the teacher now. Here’s the key, the sphenoid! The bone with a chair like a Turkish bed and a bat’s wings, which opened in silence all through history to make room for the enigmatic organisation of the soul.’
    He stared at his hands in surprise, the bowl of eloquence they’d made. Then exclaimed in amazement at himself, ‘Blessed hosts!’
    The other two, mother and son, also stared at him in wonder. He was a taciturn type. On the quiet side. At home there was a connection between his ruminations and the knocking together of the boxwood needles. To Fins, when he became aware of it, this was a wounding sound. A chattering of the house’s teeth. But there were these moments, increasingly rare, when the sound became transfigured. And the cud showed itself.
    ‘Which parts of the world did you sit in, father?’ asked Fins with shared enthusiasm.
    Lucho Malpica suddenly changed tone. ‘I don’t want you going there.’
    ‘Any day now the sky will fall on top of you!’ added his mother.
    Lucho went over to the window to take a look at the sea. From there, he spoke to his son in an imperative tone. ‘Listen, Fins, you need to go and clean the vats again.’
    ‘He’s too big to be getting into those vats,’ remarked Amparo angrily. ‘Besides, he gets dizzy.’
    ‘Not half as much as at sea,’ mumbled Lucho.
    He got down on his knees by the hearth in order to stoke the fire. At his back, the smoke imitated the seascape, taking the form of mists and storm clouds. ‘What do you want me to do, woman? Rumbo asked me. I can’t tell him no.’
    ‘Well, it’s about time you learned to say no once in a while!’
    Lucho ignored his wife. If only she knew the times he’d had to say no. He decided to speak to his son, and did so vehemently. ‘Listen, Fins! Don’t go telling anyone about your absences. If you talk about it, you’ll never get a job. Understand? Don’t ever talk about it. Ever! Not even to the walls.’
    Amparo took up her work and the boxwood needles resounded again like the house’s anguished inner music. There was now a thread connecting the lacemaker’s imagination and the way the needles knocked together. In