Free The House of Silence by Blanca Busquets

the tea in front of me, he just said, go ahead, tell me, thinking that I had come with a message for him. What he wasn’t expecting was that I would say I was his son. After a moment of shock, he asked me to repeat myself: What did you say? he asked. That you are my father. According to my mother, I was born shortly after you separated.
    My father, the great orchestra conductor Karl T., was speechless. He must have been unsure whether I was telling the truth or was some sort of scam artist. I pulled my brand-new passport out of my pocket, and handed it to him. He took a look at it, and it said that I was his son. And that my last name was the same as his.
    The great Karl T. was flabbergasted. Finally, he reacted, I’m going to call my—your mother. She’s dead, I said, as he was already getting to his feet. He sat back down and didn’t move, and I understood that he was in shock. That wasn’t surprising, consideringthat in a matter of seconds, he had learned that his ex-wife was dead and that he had a twenty-eight-year-old son. I pulled a letter out of my pocket, the one my mother had written before she died. It explained everything. They occasionally spoke on the phone; he worried over her, but she had never spoken to him about me. In the letter she said that it was because she didn’t want to lose her son. Given the political circumstances, if I went to the West, she would have never seen me again. My mother had put the letter into my hands shortly before she died: Go and bring it to him, she had said. And that was what I did.
    Teresa seems be ready. I tap the music stand with the baton:
    â€œLet’s go.”
    After the first moments of confusion, my father looked at me with those blue eyes my mother said I had inherited, and he said: It says here that you’re a musician. Stay. And I stayed.

Maria
    I close my eyes and let myself be carried off by the music, as if I were dusting off Beethoven. The music pierces my heart. The violin sounds so lovely, even though it is Mrs. Anna’s. I can’t help smiling a little; the Stainer sounds so good.
    Look at the piano, Mr. Karl would tell me, because I was embarrassed to look at my hands there on the keys, with his guiding my fingers into the right placement. And now keep practicing, he would say; you have to work on it a little bit each day, do you understand? I nodded. Mister Karl would tell me that I had half an hour in the afternoons to play the piano and make music. Yes, sir, I said again, and continued doing scales, while he started to teach the notes: Do, re, mi, fa, sol, and he would ask me to do them out of order. Then he would ask me to give them with the corresponding sound, and I had to know exactly where the sound of the note was, because each had its own and you couldn’t just make it up; there was one and just one. I tried it with varying success; there were days when Mr. Karl seemed to lose his patience with me—but other days he would say: Very good, Maria, very good, and he would congratulate me. I felt so happy, as happy as when my boyfriend kissed me and put his arm around my shoulders as we walked down the street.
    My boyfriend and I saw each other on Sunday mornings, always after mass, because he couldn’t on Thursday evenings. And we were seeing each other for a year. At first he only kissed me. But later, one day, when we were sitting on a park bench, where no one could see us, he kissed me in a way he never had before—with a kiss that lasted a long time, and lit a fire inside me. It made him hold me tighter and tighter, and then he started to put his hand on my inner thigh, as if he wanted to touch me under my skirt. In spite of the fire I felt inside, I gave him a good slap and quickly said: What do you think you’re doing? But Maria, he replied, that’s what boyfriends and girlfriends do; you have to let me touch you. No, I said, not until we are married.
    Thinking about that now brings a