All Is Silence by Manuel Rivas Page A

Noitía.’
    Again that surprise in Amparo’s tone of voice. ‘Noitía, Noitía . . . I spent an afternoon in Noitía, buying thread. It was hot, very hot. The whole place was burning from the inside out, like a log. And I got caught in a storm.’
    They fell silent. Whenever the word ‘storm’ was mentioned, the other words waited a bit.
    ‘What are you going to work as?’
    ‘As a secret agent,’ he said in order to see her reaction.
    She did what Fins least expected. She burst out laughing. ‘A secret agent? There’ll be lots of those!’
    Fins now, for her, was the memory of an outing. Nothing more. Lucho Malpica, a child who was yet to be born. And Noitía, a nightmarish place, a place she’d gone to one day to buy thread and been attacked by a storm. She was behind him, calm, unconcerned, with her cushion, teaching her carer the secret art of making lace. He stood staring at the sea through a large window which let in the combined sound of the waves’ hiss and the seagulls’ scream. He’d have loved to draw the curtain. Cover that vision. He couldn’t understand people who found gazing at the sea restful. For him it was deeply disturbing. He couldn’t bear to be alone with the sea for more than five minutes. And it seemed the feeling was mutual. He was sure its mood changed and it grew angry whenever he stood looking at it.
    Diving was something else. When you were inside the sea, that was different. The only way to understand the sea was by getting wet. Surveying the underwater forests of kelp, sea lettuce, thongweed, bladderwrack, toothed wrack, knotted wrack, sea fans, sugar kelp, purple seaweed such as carrageen or Irish moss. Sailing, on the surface, he got seasick, felt as if he was dying. He sneezed, spat, drawled, coughed up his lungs, liver, prefixes, saliva, interjections, onomatopoeias, phlegm, tubercles, roots, bile, the inaccessible; the worst thing was throwing up what came after the void, after air, all of it yellow, the sky, sea, skin, the back of the eyes, the soul. Except when he was rowing. If he was rowing, and the more energy he put into it the better, with his back towards his destination, there was a temporary suspension of the disease. But he had to make sure he kept going.
    He closed the window of the room and all he could hear was the unmistakable knocking of the boxwood needles. They were in a home for old people and not such old people with Alzheimer’s. Amparo’s illness was something else. She was convinced she could remember everything.
    ‘Poor things! They sometimes forget their own names. I’m the one who has to remind them.’
    She tapped her forehead with her index and middle fingers. ‘It’s all in here!’
    Next to Amparo was her carer, a young and kind girl.
    ‘Her hands get more and more agile,’ she said. ‘Look at them. It’s as if the skin is smoother and her hands move more quickly. Good hands for making lace, aren’t they, Amparo? And who’s this little marvel for?’
    Amparo Malpica stared through the large window with melancholy.
    ‘It’s for my son. For when he’s born.’
    The neuropsychiatrist had said, ‘Her mind has suppressed a time that hurts her. Her illness is a property. The property of erasing a period of her life. Or at least erasing it as an explicit memory. Something we call retrograde amnesia.’ The period she’d kept alive was precisely her experience as a girl, before she left Uz and went to live with Lucho in the seaside house in A de Meus. Fins knew the dynamite had exploded not only on the boat. His mother, in her own way, had put an end to a life that included him. But seeing her there, physically well, with her agile fingers, that fertile gaze, dispossessed of the fears that used to hold sway over her, knowing her name, smiling at anyone passing by, he couldn’t help feeling annoyed.
    ‘So what you’re saying is she forgets what she wants to forget?’ he asked reproachfully.
    Talking to Dr Facal, he had the