Suddenly, seeing this boy playing “The Greedy Cat” on the piano, Blanca has before her again an immaculate, unburdened, carefree Nicholas, and she reproaches herself for allowing the flutter of a pleasant but unfounded feeling that life is granting her a second chance. As for Farax, as soon as he sees the fine-featured woman with dreamy eyelashes and dark circles under her eyes coming into the parlor hand in hand with the Maestro, he has the feeling that his hands will be paralyzed by fear and he won’t be able to play his best, but this proves untrue; his hands respond with joy and confidence because Farax feels at home before this woman with the somber gaze, as if he is with his mother or his sister, as if he is with someone he could love, or maybe someone he already loves from the first instant.
To listen to the visitor, Nicholas and Blanca sit together holding hands, he all aquiver with expectation, barely perched on the edge of the sofa and smacking his lips as if he’s hungry and about to be served a great delicacy, she trying to do two things at once, watching the boy with one eye and following her husband’s gaze with the other. Farax, meanwhile, gives himself over to the rhythm of the dance, forgetting his distinguished audience, rocking on the stool to keep time and accompanying the melody with an unconscious crooning, sweet and innocent. When “The Greedy Cat” comes to an end, one of those famous sentences is spoken, of the sort that is seemingly simple but loaded with hidden meaning and that seals the destiny of the speaker as well as the recipient. You and I understand each other, Nicholas says to Farax, using the casual tú instead of the formal usted although they hardly know each other, although there is an age difference of almost twenty years, although one is the master and the other the apprentice. Farax doesn’t know how to react to this unexpected form of address, to the Maestro’s smoldering gaze, to the brush of the Maestro’s hand on his shoulder, but he understands that his life will change in the wake of this We understand each other that wafts past his ears like a damp breath. Could we hear something else? asks Blanca, moved, in a voice that isn’t quite hers, and Farax, as if understanding the transcendent nature of the moment, starts to play the Blue Danube waltz with all the requisite solemnity.
Beyond the euphoria revealed in Nicholas’s and Blanca’s respective diary entries, one might ask whether this was really the “sweetest of sweet” instants that Blanca describes, and if it was, was it so for all three of them? for two of them? did anyone have a foreboding of pain and future shadows? During that first meeting, which of them was jealous, and of whom? What did Nicholas see in this Abelito to whom he gave the name Farax: a promising disciple? a rival in the trade? a rival in love? an object of desire? did he see his heir, the continuer of his art and in a certain way also of his life? or rather did he see in him the one who would trigger his ruin, the bringer of the silent news of his approaching end? In her diary, Blanca asks herself the question in broader terms when she speculates whether decisive moments are decisive from the instant they occur, or whether they only become decisive in light of what comes after them and what they bring about. Meanwhile, there’s no diary or letter to explain what Eugenia was doing in the big parlor that exuded dampness, what corner she’d been relegated to when her father, her mother, and Farax all forgot her, leaving her alone with the lead soldiers lined up in marching order.
Farax came from far away and to judge by the modesty of his clothes and the battered state of his knapsack, it seemed unlikely, even impossible, that he would have money to pay for room and board in town, so the Portulinuses invited him to dine with them that night and to sleep there if he so desired, and in fact he did so desire, not just that night but all the following nights for the next eleven months. If only silence were white! Nicholas shouted at dawn the first time Farax spent the night with them, If only silence weren’t so damnably filthy and tainted, he said with a sigh, bursting into his wife, Blanca’s, bedroom and waking her up. What are you talking about? she asked, sitting up in bed and struggling to see where such a thorny topic would take them at this hour of the night. I’m saying, Blanca, that I wish silence wasn’t polluted. Polluted how, she asked just to gain time, at least enough to put on her robe. With noise, with noise, what else? can’t you hear it? the silence is riddled with sounds that hide in it like creaks in the joists, and that eat away at it from within; you’d have to be deaf not to hear the humming and buzzing, or are you still asleep and that’s why you can’t understand me? Nicholas shook her, grasping her by the trim of her nightdress, while she begged him to lower his voice so he wouldn’t frighten the children and the visitor, and at the same time tried surreptitiously to find the drops for the tinnitus, or chronic ringing, that her husband suffered from in both ears. To compose I need pure silence, Blanca, the way poets need blank pages, or do you think Lord Byron could have written anything worthwhile on a sheet that was already full of words; and seeing that his wife was deathly pale from being shaken he let go of her and smoothed her crumpled nightdress and disheveled hair. It’s all right, Blanquita my dear, it’s all right, he said, sitting down beside her, it’s all right, nothing’s the matter, don’t look so frightened, I just want you to understand that despite what people think, silence isn’t beneficial or restful.
Now melancholy instead of frenzied, he explained to her that there were basically two kinds of noises that plagued him and drove him to distraction, or that actually there were many but these two were the worst and most persistent, one sibilant and sly, like the sound an old woman with no teeth might make whispering an interminable secret in your ear, and the other rasping, sometimes like the purr of a cat and sometimes mechanical, like the clatter of a waterwheel or a millstone. When the whispering noise takes possession of my ears I can compose but I can’t think, and with the other noise the opposite occurs. It’s all in your head, Nicholas, go to bed, darling, I don’t hear any old ladies or cats, and then he left the room cursing her and slamming the door.
The next day at breakfast, as the young guest busied himself serving oatmeal to Sofi and Eugenia, the couple’s two daughters, or rather the two surviving after the early deaths of five other children, Nicholas repeated at the table the same description he’d given Blanca the night before of his auditory woes. The difference, he says, is that now the rasping noise doesn’t sound like a waterwheel or a millstone but like a chair being dragged along a very long passageway. You’re right, Professor, Farax replies in that disturbing voice of a child who minute by minute is leaving childhood behind, and who at the instant he speaks is already a bit more of a man than he was when he was serving the oatmeal, You’re right, Maestro, that’s why I go high up into the mountains, where I seek the inner and outer peace I’ve lost. These words seem wise and profound to Nicholas, who has the look on his face of someone who has heard the ultimate truth revealed, and he smiles placidly. You do understand me, he whispers to Farax, you and I understand each other, a statement that Blanca interprets as an indirect reproach for the clumsy words she spoke a few hours earlier on the same subject, and for the first time she experiences what from then on will become a constant, that anything she says will sound coarse to her husband when contrasted with the angelic and extraordinary pronouncements that issue from Farax’s lips.