The House of Silence Read Online Free PDF Page B

breakfast, because later it was anyone’s guess as to when he’d go in and come out of there. I no longer remembered my life before that; Andalusia was far in the past, as were the two or three houses where I had worked before meeting Mr. Karl. Of course, in the other homes I only had to clean, but with Mr. KarlI had to do everything, everything that wasn’t music. Go get these scores at such and such store, he would order, giving me a piece of paper with some names and I would say, yes, and head off. And I would also be sent to pick up violin strings, or call on the tuner when Mr. Karl needed him. I could tell when he was about to send me for the tuner, because the piano sounded very sad, like it was crying a little bit. Mr. Karl would also send me to pick up plane tickets from a travel agency where I made friends with the girl who sold them to me because she was very nice and always greeted me cheerfully, even though I think she did that because Mr. Karl bought a lot of plane tickets. And one day I asked her if she had ever been on a plane, and what it felt like to fly. She told me she had, and that you didn’t feel anything, you just felt nauseous.
    I didn’t feel nauseous yesterday, but I did feel some very strange things. And I remembered that girl from the agency, who’s not there anymore, because she turned into a woman and the years passed and finally she retired. I saw that last week when I went to pick up my ticket to come here. Everything had changed, and the agency too, after so many years, they’d renovated it, and it’s much more light-filled and spacious. Then, when Mr. Karl started directing opera, he told me that it was very complicated and he would be gone more than usual, that he would be eating dinner at home less and that possibly a lot of people would come over to rehearse, so I had to be prepared.
    And that was how it was: He disappeared for a while, he went through the door without even saying goodbye, not because he was rude but because he forgot to, and then he would show up again—sometimes alone and sometimes accompanied. And he would say that line: Maria, I don’t want to be disturbed. And sometimes Iwould hear the voices of three or four people and other times, just one woman. But the times when there was only one woman’s voice started happening more and more often.
    The first time I heard that woman I thought she had a very pretty voice. When she spoke and laughed it sounded like the little bells we had in the dining room, the ones Mr. Karl used to ring for me. And then she would lock herself up with Mr. Karl inside the piano room and sing while he played. And then her voice wasn’t so pretty. Then she screamed like a possessed woman, so high that I worried she’d lose her voice. The first day I was shocked, I was there in the entryway dusting the bust of Beethoven, who was the only one of those musicians that rang a bell with me, because his name came up so much and because Mr. Karl, every day when he walked by the bust, would say something that sounded like gut’n Tag, Herr Beethoven, as if it were alive.
    Up close against Beethoven, trying to reach parts that were hard to get to with a normal dust rag like the one I had, I could hear what was going on inside the room quite well. Sometimes I would stand there on purpose and be swept up listening to the words or music or singing of those people who seemed like angels of the Lord, because they sounded as good as the organist at the church where I went to mass on Sunday mornings. And, well, there wasn’t anything wrong with listening in, I didn’t think it was bad or unbecoming or anything, nor did I think it was bad the day I heard the singer alone with Mr. Karl playing the piano. They were rehearsing a song with lyrics that sounded like Spanish but weren’t. Lyrics that I thought I could understand, but I couldn’t—and later, I found out that they were in Italian,