All Is Silence Read Online Free

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