All Is Silence (3 page)

Chelín was taken up with his role. He concentrated all his senses, outside and in, just as his clairvoyant father had taught him. There was something special about the pendulum in his hand. The magnetic weight at the end of the chain was a bullet.

To start with, it didn’t move. But then slowly the pendulum began to sway from side to side.

Leda rebuked the disbelievers: ‘See?’

‘He’s doing it with his wrist,’ replied Brinco. ‘You’re a fraud, Chelín. Here, give it to me.’

Chelín ignored him. Because he knew Brinco was a stick-in-the-mud, and because he really was following another clue. Absorbed in the intricacy of flows, deposits and currents. He started walking towards the hollow of the door, the pendulum swaying ever more quickly.

‘Come on, have no fear!’ exclaimed Leda with conviction, because she knew Brinco was more than reluctant. Normally so forward, he always came up with excuses here, warned that the place was dangerous, on the verge of collapsing.

The inside of the School of Indians was largely in shadow, but there was a crater in the roof through which entered a substantial beam of light. A natural skylight opened by a circular cascade of tiles. And there were other, smaller holes, cracks through which entered spears or arrows with the nature of sun rays. The air was so thick that the light found it difficult to penetrate as far as the ground. But it was important it did so, both for the intruders and for the place itself. Because what this beam of light and the occasional slender lantern illuminated was the large relief map of the world which covered the floor. Carved in noble wood, it had been treated, varnished, skilfully painted and preserved, not with the idea of eternity, but so that it could accompany as optimistic ground, somewhere between time and the intemporal, the future of Noitía. In the American Union of Sons of Noitía’s school, built with the donations of emigrants, there was this peculiarity, which was later copied: each pupil sat in a corner of the
mappa mundi
and moved with the passing of the years, so that when he finished, he could be said to be a citizen of the world. There were other things that made the so-called School of Indians unusual. The typewriters and sewing machines sent from Argentina or Uruguay. The impressive library, imported or paid for. The zoological collection with the presence of desiccated animals and birds in glass cases, according to the custom of that period. There was still the odd specimen, the spectre of some bird which had been left for an unknown reason, like the long-necked crane hanging incredulous next to the detachable pedagogical skeleton missing an arm. On the main wall, faded like cave paintings, the trees of Natural Sciences and the History of Civilisations. Faded as was the map on the ground, over which the children walked, with Chelín and his pendulum leading the way, across countries and continents, islands and seas, the geographical names still discernible, despite the gnawing and abandonment of time.

Chelín came to a halt. The pendulum was swinging like crazy. He’d brought them to a shady corner where they could make out a bulky shape covered in a brand-new tarpaulin, which upped their expectations, since the visitors weren’t much interested in relics. A large part of the furniture and collections had burned in another time, an archaic period outside time, referred to by the grown-ups as ‘war’. There were still a few books on the dusty shelves, subsumed by cobwebs and rilled by lice. Not much was left. A few furtive visitors would come and rummage through the rotten, gnawed, fearful remains. Though each year the population of bats increased, hanging on their shadowy hooks.

Nobody dared. In the end, Chelín took hold of the bullet and decided to lift one end of the tarpaulin. They were silenced, astonished.

‘Well done, Chelín! Now that’s what I call a treasure.’

It was a large cargo of boxes full of bottles of whisky. The discoverers of the haul gazed in fascination at the image of the tireless Johnnie Walker.

Leda moved forward and managed to extract a bottle with the famous label of the rare and much sought-after imported whisky. She turned to Chelín and declared a historical redress in admiring tones: ‘You’re our hero, Chelín!’

Fins pointed at him triumphantly. ‘No more Chelín. From now on, Johnnie. Johnnie Walker! Our captain!’

The blast of a shotgun echoed around the old school’s interior as if propelled by the core of this last sentence. The echo. The fragments of tile. The crazed flight of the bats. The bulging eyes of the clairvoyant’s son. Everything seemed to have come from the weapon’s smoking barrel. Leda was so dazed she dropped the bottle of whisky, which fell to the ground and smashed in a bluey area named ‘The Atlantic Ocean’.

Two figures emerged from the darkness with absolutely no intention of passing unnoticed, and came to a halt beneath the accidental skylight in the roof. The first to make himself visible was a giant hulk carrying the shotgun. But he was soon replaced in the foreground by a second man wearing a white suit and panama hat, who wiped away his sweat with a crimson handkerchief without removing his white cotton gloves.

They knew who it was. They knew it was useless trying to escape.

He took possession. The large bully dusted off a chair and offered it to his superior. When he started talking, he did so in a deep voice, which was both intimate and imperative. The man was Mariscal, ‘the Authentic’, as he himself liked to be known. The other man, the one with the weapon, was Carburo, his inseparable bodyguard. Nobody used that word. He was the Curate. The Stick under Orders. The Bully. This was his name. He’d worked for a time as a butcher, and used this snippet from his CV whenever he thought it appropriate, with convincing self-esteem.

‘I shit on the keys of life, Carburo! Don’t worry, boys, don’t worry . . . This oaf has a taste for artillery. I’m always telling him, “Carburo, ask first. Then do what you have to.”
A fortiori
. These things happen. You finger the trigger, it’s the trigger that’s in charge. As the philosopher once said, with gunpowder and a kick in the balls, that was the end of man.’

Mariscal became thoughtful, his gaze fixed on the ground. The wood-carved map in relief. The work that must have gone into it, the work involved in remembering.

He raised his eyes and noticed Leda. ‘Where did this girl come from?’

‘I came from the mother who had me!’ exclaimed Leda in a rage. She was furious about the loss.

‘
Kyrie eleison
,’ said Mariscal after a pause. ‘And who is that saint, if one may ask?’

‘Not “is”,’ said Leda. ‘She died when I was born.’

Mariscal clicked his tongue and leaned over. He seemed now to be inspecting the trail of lights in the ceiling. You grew up well, girl, he murmured to himself. Nature is wise. Very wise. History returns, he thought, and it’s good to step aside. He recalled Adela, an employee at the canning factory where Guadalupe used to work. He didn’t stop still until he’d bought the factory. He hated the owner, the foreman, those stingy, sticky exploiters. Let them go grope their own mothers. The owner didn’t want to sell, but had no choice in the matter. And when the factory was his, he said to Guadalupe, ‘Now they can sing and eat all they like.’ But that was only for a while. He ended up employing the same foreman. Adela? Yes, Adela. Her beauty, her shyness, her resistance, her sudden yielding, her unfathomable sadness in the mezzanine after what happened happened. She shut herself up at home. Never came back to work. Somebody convinced Antonio Hortas, a poor, single sailor, to marry her and give his surname to the baby. Antonio didn’t need much convincing. Or paying. Because Antonio Hortas loved that woman. And if it was a question of horns, he didn’t mind; he knew plenty of illustrious members of the Confraternity of St Cornelius.

God keeps an eye on the devil, who’s just a poor old demon. God gives as much as he has to give.

‘
Mutatis mutandis
,’ murmured Mariscal, avoiding the girl’s gaze. And then recovering his tone of voice, ‘Well, troops . . . there’s an end to it. You heard nothing. You saw nothing.
Os habent, et non loquentur.
They have mouths, and speak not. Learn that and you’ve gained half a life. The rest is also very simple.
Oculos habent, et non videbunt.
They have eyes, and see not.
Aures habent, et non audient.
They have ears, and hear not.’

In the ruinous School of Indians, his voice sounded charming, velvety and hoarse. They were all ears and eyes.

He fell silent. Sized up the weight of his charm. Then added, ‘
Manus habent, et non palpabunt.
They have hands, and touch not. Don’t pay much attention to that. The hands are for touching and the feet are for walking. But it fits the bill when things have an owner. As is the case here.’

They listened like schoolchildren being treated to an impromptu masterclass. Here was a man acting himself and revelling in the role. He cleared his throat. Stroked his lips.

‘It’s very important to know why the senses exist. What are the eyes for? For not seeing. There’s what cannot be seen, cannot be heard, cannot be said. And, in this last case, what cannot be said you have to suppress and keep your trap shut. What about the mouth? The mouth is for keeping quiet. That’s the funny thing about Latin, one thing leads to another.’

Brinco understood perfectly the meaning of Mariscal’s words. But what he liked best was the way he said them. That assuredness. That manner of asserting control with a hint of scorn, which captivated and drew you in with an obscure sense of sympathy. He felt linked to him by an invisible intelligence. A force stronger than that of rebellion, but which couldn’t override it completely. Shit. His guts. The way they rumble so it seems everyone can hear. That whiny bastard, how Mariscal likes to talk. To listen to himself. The mouth is for keeping quiet.

Víctor Rumbo made as if to leave. Started to do so.

‘Brinco, stay where you are. I haven’t finished yet.’

Mariscal approached the teacher’s desk, mounted the platform and, possibly because of his position, raised his voice, giving free rein to his discourse. ‘You have to differentiate between reality and dreams. That’s the firstest thing.’ He laughed at his grammatical error. ‘The first is always the firstest.’ Then he recovered his grand gesture, his sobriety. ‘The day you get that confused, you’re lost. So walk very carefully, children. There are bad people about, people who on account of a Johnnie Walker, one miserable smuggled bottle, will hang you from a butcher’s hook.’

Mariscal turned his gaze towards the wall with the faded Tree of History.

‘History started with a crime,’ he said abruptly. ‘Haven’t they taught you that yet?’

He interrupted himself. Seemed to gauge the weight of his own words. Stared at the map on the floor and murmured tiredly, ‘Enough lessons for today!’

The glare of lightning illuminated the ocean inside the School of Indians. They waited, but the clap of thunder held back, as if summoning all its strength to burst through the crater in the roof intact.

‘Home, all of you! The beams of heaven are about to cave in!’

LUCHO MALPICA WAS
shaving in front of a small mirror with a diagonal crack, which hung next to the window opposite the sea. Half his face was covered in shaving foam, which he removed with the razor, leaving half Christ’s beard. From time to time he would stop and stare sombrely through the window, in search of signs in the sea and sky.

‘Seems like the old so-and-so has finally calmed down.’

Into a cushion used for knitting lace, on top of the stencilled pattern, a woman’s hands, Amparo’s, stuck pins with different-coloured heads which appeared to be inventing a map of their own. The hands paused for a moment. They also were on the lookout for Malpica’s embittered voice.

‘How long is it since I last went fishing, Amparo?’

‘Some time.’

‘How long?’

‘A month and three days.’

‘Four. A month and four days.’

Then he added a piece of information he immediately regretted. But he’d said it already. ‘Do you know where there’s a tally? In the Ultramar’s book of IOUs. That’s where they keep track of the stormy weather. Some sailors never leave that place.’

‘They shouldn’t have gone there to start with,’ said Amparo angrily. ‘Let them drown their sorrows at home.’

‘You have to do something. God knows, I wish I were in prison!’

Amparo raised her eyes and responded with irony, ‘And me in hospital!’

Seated at the table, Fins watched these two words, ‘prison’ and ‘hospital’, cross the tablecloth and build a strange abode in the red and white squares of the oilskin. A space that was quickly occupied by the creatures from the book he was reading, which twisted and turned and which until now had been unknown to him.

Amparo’s hands took up their work. They moved with the urgency of arriving somewhere as soon as possible. As they managed the boxwood needles, the sound of the wood formed a musical percussion which seemed both to mark and to follow the rhythm of the man’s restless pacing, of the storm in his head.

‘So me in prison and you in hospital. What fun! This life is for letting off fireworks!’

Her hands dropped to her lap. ‘You’re getting worse, Lucho. You used to have more patience. And more humour.’

The sailor pretended to zip up his mouth. Felt guilty for the sense of unease. Attempted a smile. ‘I used to cry with one eye and laugh with the other.’

Fins had been dividing his imagination and gaze between the print of his parents and the illustration in his book. He took advantage of his father’s sudden silence. ‘Dad, have you ever seen an Argonaut?’

The sailor sat down at the table, next to his son. Thought about it. ‘Well, there was a Russian boat that went down once. The sailors wore heavy leather jackets. Black leather jackets. Good they were too . . .’

‘No, Dad. I’m not talking about people. Have a read of this: “Such cephalopods are very ugly animals. If one looks inside an Argonaut’s eyes, one sees that they are empty.”’

Fins looked up from the book and stared at his father. Lucho’s expression was one of enormous surprise. He was running through all the sea creatures he knew. He thought about the rainbow wrasse, which some years was male and others female. He thought . . . But no, he’d never gazed into an Argonaut’s empty eyes.