House of Scales

Chapter 3: The House on the Hill

Spending time with Charles was relatively easy: I just had to let myself go and the hours went like passers-by on unfamiliar streets. It was something I was used to; it didn't bother me. It wasn't like I had to be around other people all the time. Perhaps the problem was that I had never learned how. Maybe everything would have been different if I had had the same environment.

For me, it had always been different. It was true that, since I was a child, I had been interested in subjects that used to bore the other children who played with me at school. None of my classmates had shown an obsession with reading as I had. Perhaps no one had needed that escape like I did at the time. They had their games, their laughter, and a whole life ahead of them, long and uncertain that they would have time to worry about. They wanted to use the time they had to laugh and enjoy themselves without looking at the clock, to let themselves be loved by their parents; they wanted the warmth that friends give to the heart and the enjoyment of the good times that they leave behind. For me, it was something different. I needed those ink-filled pages that were but a key to visiting faraway places. They weren't beautiful because they were different and magical, as people thought: they were beautiful because they were far from everything that awaited me in the cold solitude of my home. I had had a time of happiness, love and ignorance of what the world was for a whole five years. Now, in their absence, it seemed like a lot, but in the pain of my chest, it was still too short a time for me, too short for a child.

Cato, as we used to call her, disappeared too soon for too many people. Catarina Bernhard died when I was five. One day the beautiful colours of my life changed: the greens and reds and blues went away; the tones that made me laugh were soon gone. The white of waiting remained in long tedium that ended up in an empty black that nested in our hearts, giving a glimmer of despair and a feeling of abandonment. We cried the martyrdom of love in which Catarina couldn't tuck us in. It was then that my voice, which laughed along with my mother's, went on a journey whose return was unknown. This is how the words in ink replaced many of the emotions that formed my being. I could no longer speak with a smile when there were only questions about where Catarina would sleep each night, far from us. The answers I was given weren't enough; even when I grew up, the false hope of heaven seemed to sweeten the cruel reality. I ended up with my favourite: a little story in which, together with the love she had for me and my sister, Catarina was now sleeping on the moon, from where she looked and cared for us.

While the rest of the people around me lived as if nothing had happened, in me, my smile was as lost as the desire to love, to talk, to be. Now all I had was Sasha since Jacob Bernhard had been busy coping with his work, one that consumed both memories of the past and his future. Perhaps that was the reason why one way out of all that hell were paper doors to distant worlds where all that misfortune wouldn't have come into my life.

It was a closed feeling, one that I couldn't easily share with others, even though I knew there was someone close to me who could understand us. That person was Richard Devlin. He wasn't only my mother's brother; he was also the one who understood the tragedy we had experienced from the heart. It had been a long time since the great Devlin household above the hill had seen the burning colour of the flames swallow up everything. The fire had threatened to take away that old building and also the hill down to the town. Many people, neighbours and acquaintances, had risked their lives so that the fire wouldn't spread and the houses closest to the hill could be saved. That had been the case of my father who, normally unaware of the rest of the people, had thrown himself into the sea of flames to rescue what, at that time, was most precious to him. It was in that fire that three lives were lost forever.

The first, whom I cried the most, Catarina Bernhard, Devlin by birth. The second had been his sister-in-law, Belinda Devlin. A candid and kind soul who, like her sister-in-law, had done everything possible to help in that tragedy, but in vain. The fire had devoured them both without the possibility of letting them out of that fiery hell. Belinda had been ill for the past few years, as my relatives had told me, so there was little she could do when the fire spread through the house from the basement. They say all she could do was run, despite her condition, to try to save the brightest star in that home. Ursula Devlin had been caught in the sting of the collapse, hugging her mother, knowing that this was the last time she would see the sky beyond the collapsed beams on the bedroom wall.