All Is Silence Read Online Free Page B

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!’

6
    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.
    ‘That book came from the School of Indians,’ he said. He poured himself a glass of claret and emptied it in one go.
    ‘Why was it called that? School of Indians?’
    Lucho’s hurt gesture. His smile. He always made the most of this opportunity. Fins knew what he was going to say, the same old joke about playing cowboys and Indians, being an Apache and so on. But this time a flicker of pain interrupted his smile. A spasm introduced by memory.
    ‘Many from here – many! – left for America. Most were stonemasons,