The House of Silence by Blanca Busquets Page B

in the violin, let’s see how it sounds, let’s try to play something, I listened without saying a word—but the tears, my always sweet tears, dampened my face silently and without my consent. Oh, my girl, she said, wiping them away with her thumb, let’s see if we have a little musician here—and she pointed to my heart as she said it. Yes, there was a musician in there, and she was me: I brought the violin into school the very next day. But first I came home and ran to hug my mother; I hugged her very tightly and cried even more. And she kissed me all over as she said, I so sorry I can’t pay for a violin teacher for you. Maybe one day, sweetie, maybe one day.
    It wasn’t long. The music teacher was a pianist but knew where to place her fingers on the violin and how to press the first strings to make a sound as she ran the bow along them. And you say you found it at the dump, she said, admiring the find. Yes, I said, and it’s a little bit cracked. I showed her the small line on the instrument. There are people who can fix that, she said, and made as if to grab the violin to take it away. I felt like I was dying; no, I shouted, no. Don’t worry, I was just looking at it, she reassured me. And then she closed one eye and looked with the other into the f-hole, and I couldn’t see her eyes but I saw that her lips moved as if she were speaking—but she wasn’t, they just moved, as if she were reading something inside there, which I didn’t yet understand, and that I now know simply means that the violin was a Stainer from 1672, a Stainer that I still can’t explain how I let go the way I did. But anyway, at that time I didn’t care that it was a Stainer any more than if it were a Sadurní. I could see the teacher’s eyes as she let out a whistleand looked at me again in some sort of altered state. The expression on her face had changed when she told me: Don’t lend it to anyone, all right? I nodded, but there was no real need for her to say that, because I wasn’t planning on lending my instrument to anyone, and not because it was a Stainer but because it was a violin and it made music. And then she showed me how to make the same sounds she made on the piano with the violin, the whole scale that at the time I didn’t even know was called the scale. And I went to the beach and practiced it. There, beside the waves, I made magic for the first time with that tool that was more than a violin, that was almost like the father I never had. I spent hours practicing the same thing. And the next day I stayed after class and showed the teacher how I was coming along. And she congratulated me. Then she found a score for me, of a very simple song, and above each note she wrote its name because I didn’t know them. And she told me, when we meet a week from now you should know how to play this song. And I went back to the beach when I could, when I didn’t have to go to the dump, and I practiced and practiced everything my teacher had told me. I ended up with cuts on my fingers from so much playing, but I couldn’t care less, I didn’t feel the pain, I only felt how, gradually, I was making a melody come out of that wooden box. I felt that I was managing to grasp the music, that I had it in my reach. After four or five weeks, the teacher took my mother aside and told her that she had nothing more to teach me, that I had to have violin classes. And she smiled and added another magical sentence: She will have a scholarship.
    I went to the conservatory until I finished my violin certification, at the age of twenty. And two years later, I began workingthere as a teacher. With my salary, mother was able to stop cleaning other people’s apartments and focus on her sewing. I also stopped cleaning apartments, and stopped ruining my hands. In my teens I spent my evenings worrying because I couldn’t study what I needed to for the class the following