Answer Across the Water

Celia: The Tuning Fork

A piano in Havana goes flat the way a person gets old: slowly, from the inside, and all at once when you finally notice.

The one in Vedado that Tuesday had been going flat since about 1990. It was a black upright with candle brackets on the front, the kind somebody's great-grandmother bought so that the girls of the house could play at parties, and it lived three meters from a window that faced the sea. Salt had been coming through that window every night for seventy years. The strings near the top had a fur of rust on them that came off on my fingers like orange pollen. The felt on the hammers was hard as a heel.

You told me we should each write our side of this down, turn and turn about, the way the song goes, so that the children have something besides a recording and a story that gets bigger every time your uncle tells it. You said I should start, because the song started in Havana, with my grandfather. I said the song started in St George's, with five strangers on a wooden stage, and you said, Celia, don't argue with the narrator before you have even begun. So here I am. Beginning.

I struck the tuning fork on my knee and held it to the cheek of the piano, and the A came out clean and cold, four hundred and forty times a second, the only thing in that room that was exactly what it claimed to be. The piano's A was somewhere near four hundred and thirty-one. The owner, Señora Graciela Soto, stood behind me in house slippers with her arms folded.

"Can you save it?" she said.

"I can bring it up a little today," I said. "If I bring it all the way up at once, the old strings will snap. I'll come back in a month and bring it up again."

"Like a patient."

"Like a patient."

She liked that. Everyone in Havana likes it when you say a thing is like a patient. We are a city of people waiting for something to get better slowly.

---

I am a piano tuner. I was supposed to be a pianist. At twenty-two, at my graduation recital in the small hall on Calle Línea, I sat down at a concert grand in a silence so complete I could hear the lights humming, put my hands on the keys for the first chord of a Cervantes dance, and could not move them. Not a tremble. Not a wrong note. Nothing. Forty seconds of nothing, which on a stage is a very long time. My teacher came out and touched my shoulder and I stood up and walked off, and that was the end of that.

My grandfather, Rolando Ferrán, who had played the tres in son bands since he was fourteen, did not say "try again." He took me the next week to see an old tuner named Pedro Osorio, who worked out of a room in Cerro full of piano actions hanging on the walls like the skeletons of fish. Pedro taught me for four years. When he died he left me his tools in a leather roll and his tuning fork, which is the one I still use, and a list of nineteen families who would call no one else.

"You hear better than anyone I have ever met," Abuelo told me the day I finished my first piano alone. "Someone has to make the instruments honest so that the brave ones can play them."

I did not like being one of the not-brave ones. But I liked the work. I still do. There is a moment, when two strings of the same note come into unison, when the slow wobble between them slows and slows and stops, and the note simply stands there, whole. Nothing else in my life does that on purpose.

---

I finished Señora Soto's piano at three in the afternoon and walked to the music house on Calle Neptuno, where my mother teaches solfège to children three days a week and where the secretary, Odalys, keeps a box of messages for people who do not have computers at home. Odalys is sixty-three and wears her reading glasses on a beaded chain and knows everyone's business in the kindest possible way.

She was waiting for me at the door.

"Your grandfather has a message from a foreign island," she said, "and I have read it, and I am not sorry."

She gave me a printed sheet. It had come by email to the music house address on Friday, because the music house was the only address in Havana a person could find for the name Rolando Ferrán, tres, on a search. The English was careful and a little old-fashioned, like a letter from a teacher.

*Dear Sir or Madam,*

*My name is Anselm Laville. I am writing from Roseau, in Dominica. My grandmother Philomène Fontaine died on the ninth of March at the age of seventy-nine. In her belongings I found six letters from a Señor Rolando Ferrán of Havana, written between 1977 and 1983, and a cassette tape of a song she sang with him in St George's, Grenada, in August 1977. She sang that song in her kitchen my whole life and never told me where it came from. If Señor Ferrán is living, I would very much like to tell him she is gone, and to ask him a few things about the song. If he is not, I would like to know that also.*

*Respectfully,*

*Anselm Laville*

Under it he had written a telephone number and, I noticed, a second line that he must have added later and not had the heart to take away: *She always said the song was not finished.*

I read it twice standing in the doorway. Then I folded it in four and put it in the leather roll with the tuning fork, which is where I keep things I do not want to lose.

"Well?" said Odalys.

"Well," I said, "I suppose I am going to have to tell him."

---

My grandfather lives with my mother and me on the second floor of a house on Calle Ánimas, in Centro Habana, that has been falling down very beautifully since before I was born. The balcony has iron railings shaped like question marks. Every afternoon at four he sits out there in a rocking chair made of mahogany and woven cane, with a small cup of coffee so sweet a spoon would stand up in it, and watches the street the way other men watch baseball.

He was eighty-five in February. He is small and straight, with white hair cut very short and long brown hands that still curl a little at rest, as if they were holding a neck that is not there. His tres hung on the wall behind him with a crack across its face that had been there since a hurricane in 2008. He would not let me fix it. He said he would let me fix it when he had something to play.

I sat on the floor of the balcony, the way I did when I was small, with my back against the railing, and I read him the letter.

When I said the name Philomène he stopped rocking.

When I said *died on the ninth of March* he closed his eyes.

When I got to the end, to *She always said the song was not finished*, he opened them again and looked across the street at the pink wall of the house opposite, where a woman was hanging out sheets, and he did not say anything at all. Down below, a man was selling peanut cones and calling out about them in a long falling voice. A boy ran past bouncing a ball. On the corner, the domino men slapped their tiles down on a board balanced on two knees, and somebody shouted that somebody else was a thief.

Then my grandfather began to sing. Very low. In Spanish. I will put it here in English, because that is how you and I agreed to write everything, and because you have heard it so many times now you could sing it in your sleep.

*I asked the water of my harbor*
*where the other shore begins.*

His voice used to fill the bandstand in Parque Central. Now it is mostly breath, with a little grain in it, like the sound of a brush on a snare. He sang the first verse through. Four lines more. He held the last note until it went thin and stopped, and he looked at me, and his eyes were wet but his mouth was almost smiling, as if he had been caught at something.

"Abuelo," I said. "Who was she?"

"She was the second verse," he said.

That was all I could get out of him for an hour. Then my mother came home from her lessons with a bag of bread under her arm, and he told her, very formally, that a lady he had known once had died, and my mother looked at me over his head with her eyebrows all the way up, and we had rice and black beans and fried plantain for dinner and nobody mentioned it again until the dishes were done.

At ten that night, when I was lying on my bed under the fan, I heard his slippers in the hall. He stood in my doorway in his undershirt, a shape against the light.

"Celia," he said. "Telephone that young man. Tell him I am alive. Tell him I am sorry. And then ask him if she ever finished it."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Anselm: The Biscuit Tin

She never finished it, Celia. Not on paper. That is what I told you on the telephone the first time, on the Thursday, when your voice came down the line so clear and so formal I thought for a moment I had reached a government office.

"This is Celia Vidal Ferrán," you said. "I am calling on behalf of my grandfather, Rolando Ferrán, who is alive."

Just like that. *Who is alive.* As if you were reading the result of a test. I was standing in the studio at the station with my headphones round my neck, and I sat down on the floor, because there was no chair close enough.

So. My side.

---

My name is Anselm Laville. I am thirty-six years old. I work at a small community radio station on a back street in Roseau, in a building that used to be a tailor's shop and still has the hooks in the ceiling where the suits hung. I present a program called *Saturday Heritage Hour*, which runs, on a good Saturday, for three and a half hours, because people call in. They call in to tell me I have the words of an old song wrong. They call in to tell me their auntie sang it better. They call in to tell me there is a goat in the road at Canefield, in case anybody is driving that way. It is that kind of station.

I also play the boom-boom in a jing ping band called Lakou Fontaine, which my grandmother started in 1964. The boom-boom is a long metal pipe, and you blow across the end of it like a bottle, and it makes one note. Low. A sort of friendly fog-horn. I play that one note very well. I have played it at weddings, at the Creole Day concert in the Botanic Gardens, on the Bayfront for the cruise ships, and once, at three in the morning, for a cow that had walked into the yard of the band's accordion player, who swears it liked it.

My grandmother sang. That was her instrument. Philomène Fontaine, small and wide, with a laugh you could hear across the Roseau River and a madras head-tie folded so sharp you could cut bread with it. She sang quadrille calls and old work songs and the songs the women sang at the river washing clothes, and in the seventies, when cadence was new and every band in the islands wanted a girl singer who could hold the room, she sang with the dance bands too. She traveled. She went to Guadeloupe and Martinique and Antigua and, once, in 1977, to Grenada, for a festival. I knew that much. I did not know about the song.

That is not quite true. I knew the song. I did not know it had come from anywhere.

---

She died on a Monday morning in March, in her own bed, in the house on Bath Road, with my mother Josette asleep in the chair beside her. She was seventy-nine. She had been tired for a year, and then, for three weeks, she was very tired, and then she was gone. The doctor said it was her heart. My mother said her heart had been fine; it was her lungs, from fifty years of singing in rooms full of cigarette smoke. My father, Gerard, who is a mechanic and does not argue with anyone, said it was her time, and made coffee.

We kept the old way for her. The house filled up. People came every night for nine nights and sat in the yard and on the gallery and in the road, and drank and ate and told stories about her, and somebody always started a song, and somebody always knew the next verse. Lakou Fontaine played on the third night. I blew my one note so hard I saw stars. On the ninth night, somebody's cousin from Portsmouth sang my grandmother's own song, the one from the kitchen, and got the second verse wrong, and twenty people corrected him at once.

It was after that, a week later, that my mother asked me to clear the wardrobe.

---

You have seen the wardrobe now. You know. It is mahogany, and it takes up one whole wall of her room, and it survived the hurricane in 2017, when the roof of the house next door went into the river and half our own roof went with it and the rain came straight down on the bed for two days. The wardrobe got wet on the outside and stayed dry on the inside, and my grandmother said that was the only piece of furniture on the whole island that knew how to behave.

Inside, on the top shelf, behind a stack of wob dwiyet dresses in plastic sleeves and a box of madras head-ties, was a biscuit tin. A big square one, blue, with a picture on the lid of a girl in a bonnet feeding geese. I knew that tin. When I was small, it lived on the kitchen shelf, and it had biscuits in it on Sundays and buttons the rest of the week. I had not seen it in twenty years.

It had no buttons in it now.

It had, wrapped in a pillowcase: one school exercise book, the kind with a multiplication table on the back cover, full of her handwriting in pencil. Six envelopes, airmail, with red and blue stripes around the edges and stamps from Cuba, addressed to *Sra. Philomène Fontaine, Bath Road, Roseau, Dominica, West Indies*. One photograph, black and white, curled, of five people on a wooden stage, four men and her, all holding instruments except her, who was holding the microphone stand as if it were somebody's arm. And one cassette tape, in a cracked case, with a label in her handwriting: *St George's, 13 August 1977. Last night.*

I sat on her bed with the tin on my knees for most of an afternoon.

---

The exercise book was mostly songs. Quadrille calls. Lyrics copied out, with little marks above the words for where she breathed. On page thirty-one, by itself, under a heading that just said *For two voices*, was the song I had heard her sing in the kitchen my whole life. Her verse was there in Kwéyòl. Above it, in someone else's handwriting, in pencil, were four lines in Spanish. And under her verse there was one more line, in her hand, and then nothing. A whole empty page. At the bottom of the empty page she had written, small, in English: *Third verse together. Next time.*

The letters were in Spanish. I do not read Spanish. I can order a meal in Spanish and apologize in Spanish, which in the Caribbean covers most situations. I could see they were written by a man with careful, upright handwriting, that each one started *Querida Philomène*, and that each one, near the end, had the word *verso* in it.

The back of the photograph said, in her hand: *Rolando (Cuba). Nico (Santo Domingo). Freddie (Puerto Rico). Lennox (Grenada). Me.*

My mother came in while I was looking at it. She took it out of my hand and looked at it for a long time, and then she put it back in the tin, and put the lid on the tin, and said, "So that is where she was."

"Who?"

"Her." She went out. I heard her in the kitchen, running the tap for no reason.

---

It took me a week to find an address. The envelopes all had the same return, *Calle Ánimas*, with a number, in Havana, but I did not know if a letter would reach it, or how long it would take, or if the man was alive. I searched his name and found an old list of musicians from a bandstand concert program and a music school on a street called Neptuno, which gave his name in a line about the history of the school's son ensemble. I wrote to the school. I wrote the letter three times. I wrote it the way my grandmother taught me to write to people I did not know: plainly, and with your name at the bottom where they can see it.

Then you telephoned. *Who is alive.*

We talked for forty minutes. You asked careful questions. You wanted to know the date on the cassette and the brand of the tape, which I did not know and you said did not matter, only you wanted to know how old the oxide was. I said, Celia, I have no idea what an oxide is. You said it was the part that remembers.

On the Thursday after that, I set my grandmother's old cassette player on the mixing desk in the studio, with the microphone in front of its little speaker, and I called the number you had given me, and you put the telephone on the table on your grandfather's balcony, and I pressed play.

There was hiss. There was a crowd, outside, somewhere, the sound of a lot of people talking under a roof. There was a tres, tuning. Then the guitar began, and then a man's voice, young, high, a little bit nervous, sang four lines in Spanish.

And on the other end of the telephone, in Havana, an old man began to sing them with him, over my grandmother's tape, line for line, like a man walking beside his own shadow.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Celia: The Cassette

Like a man walking beside his own shadow: that is what you said afterward, and I wrote it down, because it was exactly right, and I wished I had thought of it.

I was the one sitting beside him. Let me tell you what it looked like from there.

---

He had put on a shirt. That is the first thing. When I came out onto the balcony at four with the telephone, he was wearing his white guayabera, the good one with the four pockets and the tiny pleats down the front, which he wears to funerals and to the music house's end-of-year concert and to nothing else. He had shaved. He had combed what hair he has. My mother had told him it was a telephone call, not a visit, and he had said, "She will be there."

I put the telephone on the little table, beside his coffee, on speaker. Your voice came out of it, and the hum of your studio, and somebody behind you asking if you wanted a sandwich.

"Señor Ferrán," you said. "Good afternoon. I am going to play it now."

"Play it," he said, in English. He had about sixty words of English from the hotel bands in the fifties, and he had been saving all of them.

The tape was old. I could hear it before the music started: a wow in the speed, a slow wobble, the motor of the cassette player not quite steady. There was hiss like a far waterfall. Then a crowd, a big room, a wooden floor, someone laughing very close to the microphone, a glass being set down. Then a tres, three courses of doubled strings, tuning the middle course. I knew that sound. I had heard him tune like that ten thousand times: always the middle course first, always the octave string a hair sharp, so it sparkled.

He heard it too. His hand came up off the arm of the chair and touched the air.

Then the guitar started properly: a slow bolero figure, but with the son underneath it, that little push before the downbeat that makes your shoulders move whether you want them to or not. And then a voice. A young man's voice. It was strange to me, because I had never heard my grandfather young, and stranger because, the moment the old man next to me opened his mouth and joined it, I could hear that it was the same voice, only one was thirty-six and one was eighty-five.

*I asked the water of my harbor*
*where the other shore begins.*

He sang every line a little ahead of the tape, the way you do when you are leading. My mother had come out of the kitchen and was standing in the doorway with a dish towel in both hands.

---

The verse ended. Four bars of guitar. Then there was something I did not expect: a snap, sharp, like a twig, and a man's voice, the young one, saying a word I will not write down, and laughter all around the room.

"The second string," said my grandfather, out loud, to the balcony. "The B. It broke. Look at that."

"I can't see it, Abuelo."

"I can."

And then, under the laughter, a woman began to sing.

You have heard her sing all your life. I had never heard her at all. I am a tuner; I listen to voices the way other people look at faces. Her voice was low for a woman, warm all the way through, with no strain at the top, and she placed her notes the way a good carpenter places nails: once, exactly, and then on to the next. She sang in a language I did not understand at all and understood completely. Somewhere behind her, an accordion came in, very soft, holding a single chord like a hand under an elbow. Then a bass. Then a cuatro, high and bright, tickling the melody.

My grandfather did not sing with her. He sat with both hands flat on his knees and listened with his whole face.

She sang four lines. Then a fifth, slower, higher, a line that went up and stayed up, a question, you could hear it was a question even if you did not have a word of her language. And then the tape went into a long howl of noise, and a clatter, and silence, and the hiss of nothing, and then, after a long time, the cheerful voice of a man on the radio in Roseau selling furniture, because somebody in 1978 had recorded over the end of it.

"That is all there is," you said, from the telephone. "I'm sorry. That's the end."

"No," said my grandfather. "That is not the end. That is where the end goes."

---

He talked for two hours after that. He talked to you, on the telephone, until your station needed the studio back, and then he talked to me and my mother, at the dining table, while the light went orange and then purple over the roofs and the neighbors' televisions came on one by one up and down the street.

I am going to set it down plainly, the way he told it, so the children have it.

In August 1977, a woman named Iris Bain, who ran a hall on the Carenage in St George's and had more energy than the whole of the Grenada electricity company, organized a festival of island music. She wrote to cultural offices and dance halls and bandleaders on every island she could think of, and every island that could send a band sent one. There were bands from Trinidad and Barbados and St Lucia and Martinique and Guadeloupe and, from the Spanish-speaking islands, three: a son group from Havana, a merengue band from Santo Domingo, a plena and cuatro group from San Juan. Two weeks of concerts, every night, in the hall on the harbor. My grandfather was the tres player in the Havana group. He was thirty-six. He had never left Cuba before.

On the last night, Saturday the thirteenth, Miss Bain did something nobody expected. She took one musician from five different bands, put them together in the afternoon in a back room with a crate of soft drinks and a plate of fish cakes, and told them they were going to close the festival with a song nobody had ever heard, because they were going to write it.

"She chose us like a woman choosing fruit," my grandfather said. "She pressed a little. She sniffed. She put us in the bag."

The five were him, on tres. A young accordion man from Santo Domingo called Nico Peralta, who played merengue the old country way, with the güira and the tambora. An older man from San Juan called Freddie Santiago, who played the cuatro like it was the easiest thing in the world and smoked like a ship. A tall, quiet Grenadian called Lennox Alexander, who played upright bass for the host band and lived three streets from the hall. And Philomène.

"She came in last," he said. "She had a head-tie, yellow and red. She looked at the four of us and said, *Which of you is the one who can write?* And Nico pointed at me, because I had a pencil behind my ear. That was the whole reason. A pencil."

They had four hours. They had five languages, more or less, if you counted Freddie's English, which was half New York, and Lennox's, which was the island's, and Philomène's Kwéyòl and French and English, and Nico's and my grandfather's Spanish, which were not quite the same Spanish either. My grandfather wrote a verse. Philomène listened to it once, asked what it meant, made him say it three different ways, and then wrote an answer. Nico worked out the parts for the instruments and wrote them on the back of a printed menu from the hotel, because it was the only clean paper in the room. They decided that the third verse would be both voices together, his and hers, at the same time, in both languages, and that they would write it after the concert, when they had heard the first two out loud.

"And?" I said.

He looked at his coffee cup, which was empty.

"And there was no after," he said. "The boats. The planes. Nico's band left that night. Ours left at six in the morning. Freddie went home Sunday. She went home on the Monday, on a schooner, because the island boat she had come on had broken down. We wrote letters. Six from me, six from her. We said: next time. Every letter, we said, the third verse, next time. And then there was no next time. That is all. That is the most usual story in the world, Celia. It is not even sad. It is only life."

"It sounds sad."

"Sad is when you don't have the first two verses," he said.

My mother, who had not said a word in two hours, put her hand over his on the table.

---

When you called back the next day, I told you what he had told me. You were quiet for a while. I could hear your station behind you, a man reading the fish prices.

"Lennox Alexander," you said. "Grenada. Is he alive?"

"I don't know."

"Nico Peralta?"

"I don't know that either."

"Freddie?"

"Abuelo thinks he was older. He doesn't know."

"Well," you said, in your radio voice, the voice I would later learn you use when you are frightened and want to sound like you aren't, "I know how to find people. It is half my job. People call me to find their cousins."

That night my grandfather took the cracked tres down from the wall for the first time in eighteen years and laid it across my knees.

"Fix it," he said. "And find the others. Nico had the parts."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Anselm: The Long-Distance Call

Nico had the parts, you said, and I said, fine, and who had the hall? Because a song is a thing that happens in a room, and that room was in Grenada, and the only person on the back of that photograph who lived in the same town as the room was Lennox.

So I started with Lennox.

---

This is how you find a person in the islands. You do not look him up. You call somebody who knows somebody.

I called a man named Desmond Charles, who presents the early program on a community station in St George's, and who I met at a broadcasters' workshop in Barbados in 2019, where we were the only two people who stayed for the session on cleaning old tape. I said, Desmond, do you know a Lennox Alexander, about eighty, played bass in the seventies? And Desmond laughed so loud I had to hold the phone away.

"Know him? Everybody knows him. He sells me fish."

It turned out that Lennox Alexander had played bass for twenty years, taught mathematics at a secondary school in St George's for thirty, and then, at retirement, bought a small pirogue with a blue hull and an outboard motor and gone out every morning to fish, the way his own father had. He was eighty-three. He lived on a hill above the Carenage in a house with a red tin roof. He had a daughter, Dr. Avril Alexander, who taught history at the college and was, Desmond said, "the most organized human being in the Windward Islands, and that includes the airport."

Desmond gave me a number. I called it on a Sunday afternoon in April, the nineteenth, from my grandmother's gallery on Bath Road, with the river going by below and the neighbor's radio playing a cricket match.

A man answered. "Yes?"

Just that. A deep voice, slow, with sea in it.

"Mr. Alexander," I said. "My name is Anselm Laville. I'm calling from Roseau. I'm the grandson of Philomène Fontaine."

There was a long pause. Long enough that I thought the line had gone.

Then he said, "You have her voice in the middle. Not the top. The middle."

---

He talked for an hour and a half. I am a radio man; I know when to keep quiet. I put a pillow behind my back and let him go.

He remembered everything. He remembered that it rained on the afternoon of the thirteenth, a short hard rain that came down on Miss Iris's tin roof so loud they had to stop writing for ten minutes and just sit there. He remembered that Freddie Santiago taught everyone a card trick during the rain and nobody could work it out. He remembered that my grandmother had been annoyed with your grandfather for the first hour, because he kept explaining his verse, and she said, "Don't explain it, sing it, I'll understand." He remembered that Nico wrote the parts on the back of a menu from the Seaview Hotel, which had a picture of a lobster on the front, and that the lobster had a bow tie.

"And the end?" I said. "The third verse?"

"There was no third verse," he said. "That was the whole trouble. We played the two. Then we all stood there. Two thousand people in that hall and around it, in the road, on the boats in the harbor, everybody waiting for more, and there was no more. Rolando's string had broken, he was in the back fixing it. Philomène sang her line, the high one. And then Miss Iris came out on the stage and said, *Next year, the rest,* and everybody laughed and clapped, and the festival was over."

"Was there a next year?"

"No. Miss Iris got sick in the spring. The festival was only the once." He coughed. "She died in 1994. We named the hall for her when we fixed it after that, but then the hurricane came in 2004 and took the whole roof into the harbor and it has stood empty since. Twenty-two years, with the pigeons living in it."

I said I was sorry.

"Don't be sorry yet," he said. "Talk to my daughter."

---

Dr. Avril Alexander called me back the same evening. Desmond was right. She talked like a woman reading from a list she had already finished.

"Mr. Laville. I chair the trust that is restoring the Iris Bain Pavilion on the Carenage. We have the new roof. We have the floor. We have the electricity, God help us. We reopen on Saturday the fifteenth of August, two days after the anniversary of the last night of that festival, because the thirteenth is a Thursday and nobody comes to anything on a Thursday. I have a program for the opening night. It has a gap in it, at the end, about seven minutes long. My father has been talking about that song for forty-nine years. Do you understand what I am asking?"

"I think so."

"If you can find the people, or the people who belong to the people, the trust will pay the fares. We have a grant for exactly this kind of nonsense."

"It's not nonsense," I said.

"No," she said, more gently. "It is not. Find them. Call me every Friday."

---

That week was strange. I went to the station every morning and read the shipping notices and the funeral announcements and played the requests: a cadence tune for a couple in Mahaut on their fortieth anniversary, a calypso for a boy in Grand Bay who had passed his exams. In the evenings I went to Lakou Fontaine practice in the yard of Mr. Benoit Joseph, our accordion player, who is seventy-four and has a little diatonic accordion so old the bellows are patched with pieces of a raincoat. There are five of us: Mr. Benoit on accordion; his nephew Kelvin on the tambal, which is a big tambourine you hit with your hand; Miss Sylvie on the quage, which is a metal grater you scrape with a stick; Mr. Benoit's neighbor Augustine on the shak-shak; and me, on the boom-boom, my one note.

We played the old quadrille figures and the mazurka and the heel-and-toe, which is a polka with a stamp in it. Mr. Benoit's wife brought out bakes and saltfish on a tray and a jug of sorrel. The frogs started up in the bush behind the yard. And between tunes, I told them about the cassette, and the photograph, and Havana, and Grenada.

"Philo's song," said Mr. Benoit. "The kitchen one."

"You know it?"

"Everybody knows the second verse," said Miss Sylvie. "Nobody knows the first. She used to hum the first. Hum, hum, hum, then she'd start to sing."

That was true. I had never noticed. My grandmother hummed the Spanish and sang the Kwéyòl. My whole life, I had thought the humming was just how the song began.

---

I had not told my mother any of it.

That is not because I am a coward. It is because I am a coward who knows his mother. Josette Laville is fifty-eight. She has worked at the treasury office on Kennedy Avenue for thirty-four years and she has never once been late. She keeps her accounts in a ledger with a ruler. She did not sing at the nine nights. She did not sing at all, ever, that I can remember. When I was a boy and my grandmother sang in the kitchen, my mother would find a reason to be on the gallery.

I told her on the Friday, at supper, with my father there to keep the temperature down. Callaloo soup, thick and green with a piece of salted pig's tail in it, and a hunk of bread. I told her about Havana and Lennox and Avril and the Pavilion and the fares.

My father said, "Well, well," and put more pepper sauce in his soup.

My mother laid her spoon down.

"Do what you want," she said. "It's your grandmother's song."

"It's yours too."

"No," said my mother. "It isn't. It never was. Ask her where she was when I was nine." And she took her bowl to the kitchen, and that was that.

---

You called that night at ten. I told you everything except that, and you told me you had taken the top off your grandfather's tres and found the crack was worse than you thought but not as bad as you feared. I asked what the difference was. You said about four millimeters.

Then I told you that Desmond Charles had a friend at a radio station in Santo Domingo, and the friend knew every merengue típico accordion player on the south coast, living and dead, and that a Nicanor Peralta, aged eighty-one, was alive, and played on Sunday afternoons in the back of his grandson's colmado in Villa Consuelo, and had a telephone that nobody ever answered.

"So we go to Santo Domingo," I said.

"We?"

"I'll go. I'll fly through Antigua. And you," I said, and I stopped, because I did not know anything about what it took for you to travel, and I did not want to be a fool on the telephone. "Santo Domingo, then," I said. "If you can come."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Celia: The Hotel Pianos

If I could come. You said it the way people say *if it doesn't rain*, as if it were a question for the sky.

I am not complaining. I am explaining. A person in Havana who wants to go somewhere does not simply buy a ticket. She needs a reason that another country will accept, and a letter that says so, and money from somewhere, and a great deal of patience, and an aunt or a friend who knows which window to stand at and what time. I had a passport, which I had got three years before for a job in Mexico that never happened. I had nineteen families. I did not have a reason.

Then I had one, and it came, the way so many things do in my life, through a piano.

---

In the spring of 2024, a Dominican pianist named Teo Marichal had come to Havana to give a recital at a small hall in Old Havana and found, the afternoon before, that the hall's piano had a dead note in the middle of the keyboard and a pedal that groaned like a door. Somebody gave him my name. I worked on it for six hours. He played the recital that night, and afterward he came to find me in the corridor and shook my hand for a long time and said if I ever needed anything in Santo Domingo, anything at all, he was my servant. People say that. Teo meant it.

I wrote to him in April. I said I needed a reason to come to his city for one week, the second week of June, and did he know anyone with a piano.

He wrote back in two days. He said he knew a woman named Ramona Ureña who managed an old hotel in the Zona Colonial, the Casa del Ozama, in a house built of coral stone five hundred years ago, and that she had four pianos in four rooms and no one she trusted to touch them. One of them had not been tuned since 2003. The hotel would write the letter. The hotel would pay my fare and my room and a fee in dollars that made my mother sit down.

"You see," said my grandfather, when I told him. "Pianos are your passport. I told you someone has to make the instruments honest."

---

I had six weeks.

I spent them working, and I spent the evenings on the tres.

You have held it now, so you know, but I want it written down for the children. A Cuban tres is a small guitar with three pairs of strings instead of six single ones, and it is the heart of the son: it plays the montuno, the little repeating figure that turns and turns over the bass like a dog chasing its own tail and never getting tired. My grandfather's was made in 1958 by a luthier in Guanabacoa named Fermín Rey, of cedar and a dark wood for the back that nobody can identify anymore. In 2008, during the hurricane, the window on the balcony blew in and the tres came off the wall and landed face down on the tile, and the top split along the grain from the bridge almost to the soundhole.

I took the top off. I had never done that to a tres; I had done it to the soundboards of pianos, which are bigger and much more forgiving. I cleaned eighteen years of dust out of the inside, along with a dead gecko and a bus ticket from 1986. I closed the crack by hand, a little at a time, with hide glue I cooked myself in a tin can on the stove, which made the whole floor of the house smell like a stable. I cut three small diamond-shaped cleats of thin cedar and glued them inside across the crack, so it could never open again. I made a new bridge from a piece of a broken chair leg Pedro Osorio had left me, because he said it was the best mahogany in Havana and he was saving it for something important.

My grandfather sat beside me every evening and told me what I was doing wrong.

"Too much glue."

"It's the right amount, Abuelo."

"It's too much for a woman who has never done it."

"Then it's the right amount for a woman who has."

He laughed at that. My mother came and stood behind us with a plate of croquetas and said we were two old men and she was going to sell us both.

---

In the evenings, while the glue set, he told me about Nico.

"He was the youngest," he said. "Thirty-two, thirty-three. He looked twenty. He had a little mustache that was trying very hard. He played the accordion in the old country style, the style from the Cibao, the north, with only the güira and the tambora behind him, fast, fast, so fast the dancers had to be young. But he could play slow, too. That surprised everyone. He found a slow way into the song that I would never have thought of."

"What did he think of you?"

"He thought I was too serious. He called me *el profesor*. Because of the pencil."

My mother, who had never heard any of this, sat with us and listened with her chin in her hand. She was sixty that year. She had been eleven in 1977 and she remembered that her father had gone away for a month and come back with a green glass bottle full of nutmegs, and a necklace of red seeds for her, and a quietness she did not understand.

"The seeds," she said. "I still have them."

"I know," he said. "I've seen them in your drawer."

"You went through my drawer?"

"I was looking for the scissors."

---

He gave me a message for Nico, the night before I left. He made me write it down and then he made me read it back three times.

*Tell him the professor is still alive. Tell him I never forgot the slow way in. Tell him I am sorry I did not write more.* And then, after a while, *Tell him I still don't know the end.*

My mother packed a bag for me as if I were going to the moon. Two kilos of coffee, one for Nico and one for whoever else. A tin of guava paste. My good blue dress. A bottle of rum for Teo Marichal. The tres, she said, I could not take, because what if the airplane— she stopped, and changed it, *what if they lost it*, and I said, "Mamá, I am not taking the tres, it isn't finished," and she said, "Good," and hugged me so hard my ear hurt.

My grandfather did not come to the airport. He said he did not like goodbyes from people who were coming back. He stood on the balcony in his undershirt and lifted one hand, and the shared taxi, a 1950s car painted turquoise with seats that had been reupholstered in a plaid that did not belong to any decade, carried me down Ánimas and round the corner and onto the Malecón, past the seawall and the fishermen and the kids jumping off the rocks into the green water, and I watched the city go by and thought: I have never left it. I am thirty-one and I have never once been anywhere a piano was not.

---

Santo Domingo is louder than Havana. I did not think that was possible.

It is louder because there is more of everything: more cars, more motorbikes with whole families on them, more speakers on the sidewalks outside more shops, every shop playing its own song, so that walking down the street is like turning the dial on a radio with your feet. Bachata from one doorway, merengue from the next, a man selling avocados shouting over both. In the Zona Colonial the streets were narrower and the walls older and the sound bounced off the coral stone in a way that made me want to stop and clap my hands to hear the echo.

Ramona Ureña was a tall woman of about fifty in a linen dress, with reading glasses pushed up into gray hair. She walked me through the four rooms. A boudoir grand in the bar, painted white by someone who should be in prison. An upright in the library. A square piano from the 1840s in the corner of the dining room that nobody had played since anybody could remember. And in a little salon off the courtyard, an old upright with a carved music desk and keys the color of weak tea, the one that had not been tuned since 2003.

I opened the lid of that one and struck the A.

"Oh," said Ramona, at the sound.

"Yes," I said. "Exactly."

I worked Monday and Tuesday on the boudoir grand and the library upright. On Wednesday afternoon I started on the old one in the salon. The windows were open to the courtyard, where a fountain with a broken spout dribbled into a stone basin full of coins and someone's lost earring, and a mango tree leaned over the wall from the house next door. I had the action out on the table and was easing a sticky hammer on its flange when somebody stopped in the doorway behind me.

I had heard your voice for two months. Every week, sometimes twice, at ten at night, down a telephone line full of crackle. I had made a picture of you out of it the way you make a picture of a radio presenter: tall, broad, a big laugh, a big shirt.

You were wearing a big shirt. That part I got right.

"Celia?" you said.

I put the hammer down. I stood up. I looked at you for long enough that you began to touch your collar, as if something might be wrong with it.

"You're shorter than your voice," I said.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Anselm: The Colmado

Shorter than my voice. Everyone is, Celia. That is what radio does. It takes away your knees and your elbows and your bad haircut and leaves only the part that carries. I have been introduced at weddings in Roseau as "the voice from Saturday morning," and watched the face of the person shaking my hand fall about six inches.

You did not look disappointed, though. You looked like a woman checking whether a note was in tune.

I will say what I saw, since you said what you saw. A woman of medium height in a gray work apron with pockets full of little tools. Dark hair pulled back tight. A face that was very still and eyes that were not still at all. A tiny pencil behind one ear.

I said, "Your grandfather had a pencil too."

You said, "That is why he got the job," and turned back to the piano, and I understood that was all the welcome I was going to get until you had finished the hammer.

---

On Thursday morning we went to find Nico.

Ramona told us to take a car. Teo Marichal, who came to the hotel at nine with a bag of warm bread and the manners of a duke, told us to take a concho, which is a shared taxi that runs a fixed route and stops wherever anyone shouts, and which costs almost nothing and is, he said, the only honest way to arrive anywhere in Santo Domingo. We took the concho. There were six of us in a car built for four: you, me, Teo, a woman with a cake in a box on her knees, a schoolboy in a pressed shirt, and the driver, who sang along with every song on the radio and knew every word.

Villa Consuelo is a working neighborhood north of the old city. Low houses, painted every color there is, lime green next to tangerine next to sky blue. Laundry on the roofs. Cables strung across the street in black bundles so thick you could have hung a hammock from them. A man pushing a cart of sugarcane, cutting lengths with a machete for anyone who wanted to chew. At every corner, a colmado.

I had never been in a colmado. You know them now. For the children: a colmado is a corner shop and a bar and a post office and a newsroom and a living room all at once. It is open to the street on two sides. It sells rice by the pound and cooking oil by the cup and cigarettes one at a time and eggs one at a time and bouillon cubes one at a time, because people buy what they need for today. There are plastic chairs out front. There is a speaker the size of a refrigerator. There is a domino table. There is always a domino table.

Colmado Peralta was painted yellow, with the name in red across the front and a picture of an accordion, badly drawn, like a squashed caterpillar. The speaker was playing merengue típico, fast, the accordion running up and down like a girl on a staircase, the güira scraping, the tambora knocking on both ends. Four men at the domino table slammed their tiles down so hard the beer bottles jumped.

Behind the counter was a young man of about twenty-four in a sleeveless shirt, with his hair shaved at the sides and a gold chain and a güira hanging on a nail by his head, the metal cylinder punched all over with little holes, and the wire fork beside it.

"Yunior Peralta?" said Teo.

"Who's asking?" said the young man, in a voice that meant: if you are from the electricity company, I have never heard of him.

You stepped forward. You said, in Spanish, and Teo translated for me afterward, "My name is Celia Vidal Ferrán. My grandfather is Rolando Ferrán, from Havana. He played with your grandfather once. In Grenada. In 1977."

Yunior looked at you. Then he turned his head toward a bead curtain at the back of the shop and shouted, "Abuelo! The professor's people are here!"

---

I am going to try to describe Nico Peralta, for the children, but you will have to forgive me if I get it wrong, because I was so happy I could not see straight.

He came through the bead curtain slowly, with a stick. He was eighty-one. He wore a white cap and a short-sleeved shirt printed with palm trees and a pair of brown trousers pressed into a crease you could have sharpened a pencil on. His mustache was white now, and it had stopped trying; it had succeeded. He had a face like a walnut, all lines, and the lines were nearly all from laughing.

He looked at you. He looked at me. He looked at you again.

"You have his chin," he said to you. "Poor girl."

Then he sat down hard in a plastic chair and put his hand over his eyes, and Yunior brought him a glass of water and stood beside him with a hand on his shoulder, and the domino men stopped playing, and the speaker kept on going, the accordion still running up and down its staircase as if nothing had happened.

---

We were there all day.

He had a room in the back, behind the curtain, with a cot and a television and a fan, and on the wall a photograph of a young man with a little mustache holding an accordion on a stage in front of a banner that said, in English, FESTIVAL OF ISLAND MUSIC, ST GEORGE'S, AUGUST 1977. Under the photograph, on a shelf, in a case, was the accordion.

It was not the same one. He told us the first one went to his son, who went to New York and played it at weddings in the Bronx until it fell to pieces. This one was from 1990. A button accordion, with two rows of buttons on the right side for the melody and a little panel of bass buttons on the left, red, with mother-of-pearl around the edges.

You gave him the coffee and the guava paste and your grandfather's message. You read the message from the paper, and your voice shook on *I am sorry I did not write more*, and you stopped, and Nico held up his hand.

"Read me the last part," he said.

"*Tell him I still don't know the end.*"

Nico laughed. It was a big laugh for such a small man. It came up from his shoes.

"The professor," he said. "Forty-nine years. Still doesn't know the end."

---

Then he took the accordion out of its case and played us the song.

He played the whole thing. The introduction, slow, the way Rolando had told you, the slow way in, a few notes on the accordion that sounded like a person walking down to the sea in the evening, looking for someone. Then the guitar figure, the bolero with the son underneath, which he played on the treble buttons with his right hand while his left hand pumped the bellows and tapped out the bass. Then he sang. His voice was cracked and sweet, like an old door that still swings well. He sang Rolando's verse in Spanish, every word. And then he played the second verse without singing it, because he said he could not do the words in my grandmother's language properly, and he would not insult her by trying.

You had a notebook out. Music paper, the kind with the five lines already printed. You wrote down everything he played, as he played it, faster than I can write words. I watched your pencil go. I had never seen anyone take dictation from an accordion.

Yunior had taken the güira off the nail and was scraping along with his grandfather, soft, very soft, not the way he would play it for dancers but the way you would play it for a baby. At the front of the colmado the domino men had turned their chairs around to listen. The woman from next door was standing in the doorway with a broom. A small boy came in for a single egg and stayed.

When Nico finished there was a moment where nobody moved.

Then one of the domino men said, "Again," and they all laughed, and Yunior went to get Nico a beer.

---

"The parts," you said, when he had his breath. "My grandfather says you wrote the parts. On a menu. With a lobster."

"With a lobster in a bow tie," said Nico. "Yes. Ugly lobster."

"Do you still have it?"

He shook his head.

"Freddie took it. The night of the concert, after, everyone was looking for a pen to write addresses, and I was looking for my bus, and Freddie said, *Give it to me, I'll keep it in the cuatro. The cuatro never loses anything.* He folded it up and put it inside the lining of the case. I saw him do it." He shrugged. "That is the last I saw of it. I never needed it again. It is in here." He tapped the side of his white cap.

"Freddie Santiago," I said. "Do you know if he's—"

"Dead," said Nico. "Seven years. His daughter sent me a card." He looked at the photograph on the wall for a while. "She is a nurse. In San Juan. She has his cuatro. I know that because she wrote it on the card. *I have his cuatro and nobody to play it.*"

Then he leaned back in the plastic chair and closed his eyes and was quiet so long that I thought he had gone to sleep. You put your pencil down. Yunior hung the güira back on its nail.

"You will come on Sunday," said Nico, with his eyes still closed. "My wife will make sancocho. You can't come to Santo Domingo and not eat the sancocho of Altagracia Peralta. It's against the law." He opened one eye. "And you will tell the professor something from me."

"What?" you said.

"I wrote the parts for the first verse and the second," said Nico. "Every note. But the end, the end I never wrote. They told me they would send it."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Celia: The Sancocho

They told me they would send it. I wrote that sentence on the inside cover of the music notebook on Thursday night, in the salon at the Casa del Ozama, with the action of the old piano still lying on the table beside me in its rows of hammers like a mouth with all its teeth out. Then I wrote under it, *Who is "they"?* Because Nico had said *they*. Not *he*.

---

I finished the old upright on Friday afternoon. It was the hardest piano of the four and the most grateful. When I put the action back in and brought the last string up and played a chord in the middle of the keyboard, warm, a little dark, the old felt singing the way only old felt does, Ramona Ureña came running from the front desk because she thought someone had brought in a new piano.

"It is the same piano," I said. "It only remembered."

She asked me to come back in a year. She paid me in an envelope. She stood beside me while I played the first page of a Lecuona dance, very badly, because my hands had not played anything for an audience in nine years and an audience of one woman in a linen dress was apparently enough to make them forget their own names. I stopped after the first page. She clapped as if I had played the whole of it.

You were sitting in the courtyard by the broken fountain the whole time, pretending to read a newspaper you could not read.

"That was lovely," you said, when I came out.

"It was terrible."

"It was lovely and you stopped."

"I always stop," I said. And then, because it was the end of a long week and the sun was going orange on the coral walls and the mango tree next door was letting go of its fruit one mango at a time into the courtyard with a soft wet thud, I told you about the recital on Calle Línea. The forty seconds. My teacher's hand on my shoulder. I had never told anyone outside my family. You listened the way you listen on the radio, with your whole head tipped.

When I finished, you were quiet. Then you said, "I don't sing."

"You're a musician."

"I play one note. On a pipe. I have never sung in front of a single person in my life. Not my mother. Not my band. I sing in the studio at five in the morning, before the news, with the microphone switched off. I sing the shipping forecast." You folded your newspaper very small. "My grandmother sang every hour of the day. My mother never sang once. And me, I am somewhere in the middle, pressing a switch."

We walked down to the sea after that, along Calle El Conde, which is a long street for walking only, all shops and cafés and men selling cigars from trays and a boy playing a saxophone for coins outside a church, and then down through the old gate to the seafront, where the wide road runs along the water and the waves come in brown and white against the rocks below the wall. Families were out. Couples. A man was selling boiled corn from a cart with a lantern on it. Somewhere a car was parked with all its doors open and its speakers playing bachata, and a couple in their sixties were dancing to it in the road, slow and neat, her hand on his shoulder, his on her back.

"If you could hear the end of that song," you said, "what do you think it would sound like?"

"I don't think it has one," I said. "I think it was always going to stop."

You said, "That is the saddest thing a tuner has ever said to me," and bought me an ear of corn.

---

On Sunday we went to Nico's house for the sancocho of Altagracia Peralta.

They live behind the colmado, through a door at the back, in a house of four rooms around a little concrete yard with a lime tree, a washing line and a cage with a parrot in it named Capitán who says only one word, which is *Yunior*, in Altagracia's exact voice, so that Yunior jumps every time.

Altagracia was seventy-eight. She was round and short, with gold earrings and a flowered housedress and hair dyed the color of a polished table. She had been cooking since six in the morning. She told me this the moment I came through the door, so that I would understand what I was about to eat.

A sancocho is a stew. That is like saying a cathedral is a building. Altagracia's had seven meats in it, because it was Sunday and there were guests: chicken and beef and pork, goat, smoked pork ribs, longaniza sausage and a piece of salted meat she would not name. It had yuca and ñame and yautía, which are three different roots that I could not tell apart and that she said were as different as her three sisters. It had green plantain and corn on the cob cut in rounds and a whole bunch of cilantro and a sharp little herb she called culantro that I had never smelled before and that I can still smell when I close my eyes. It had been cooked down until it was thick enough to hold up a spoon. It came in deep bowls, with white rice on the side and slices of avocado, buttery and cold, laid across the top.

"You put the rice in the soup," said Yunior, showing me. "Or the soup on the rice. It depends what kind of person you are."

"What kind of person are you?"

"Soup on the rice," he said. "My grandfather is rice in the soup. We don't talk about it."

You ate three bowls. Altagracia watched every spoonful with grim satisfaction. When you finished the third, she said something to Nico, very fast, and Nico laughed and said to you in English, "She says she likes you. She says you eat like a man who means it."

---

After the meal, while the women of the family, of whom there turned out to be eleven, cleared the table and argued about something to do with a wedding, Nico took us out to the yard and sat under the lime tree with his stick between his knees.

"I will tell you about the rain," he said.

He told it in Spanish and I put it into English for you as he went, which is a thing I had not done since school, and which made me feel, for the first time, as if I were in the middle of the song instead of tuning it from outside.

"It rained," he said. "In the afternoon. Very hard. On the tin roof of the back room, so hard we could not hear each other. Your grandfather," he said to me, "went to the window and stood there with his pencil, sulking, because he had just finished his verse and wanted to sing it again. Freddie did card tricks for Lennox. And Philomène sat down next to me on the bench, because I was the youngest, I think, and she said, in English, very slow, so I would understand, *You have children?*"

"Did you?"

"One. A boy, two years old. Yunior's uncle." He nodded toward the house, where a man in his fifties was carrying a stack of plates. "I said, one boy. She said, *I have a girl. Nine. In Roseau. My mother has her.* And then she said, *My boat goes Sunday. I told her Sunday. She will go to the jetty Sunday and wait.*" Nico shook his head. "She said it twice. *She will go to the jetty and wait.* Like a woman counting money that isn't there."

I looked at you. You had put down your glass.

"Then the rain stopped," said Nico, "and she stood up and went back to the professor and told him his verse was very nice but too long."

---

"And the end?" I said. "The third verse. Nico, who was supposed to send it to you?"

"Both of them," he said. "The professor and the singer. They argued about it. All afternoon. You have to understand, the idea was hers. She wanted the third verse to be the two of them together, at the same time. Not him then her, him then her. Together. Two languages on top of each other. Like two rivers coming into one."

"And my grandfather?"

"He said nobody would understand a word. Two thousand people in the hall, and half of them would hear Spanish and half Kwéyòl and nobody would hear both. And she said—" Nico stopped and looked up into the lime tree, and his lips moved as if he were reading something off the leaves. "She said, *They'll understand the music. People always understand the music. It's only the words they fight about.*"

You laughed, very quietly. "That's her," you said. "That's exactly her."

"So they did not write it," said Nico. "They agreed to the first two. They agreed: after the concert, when we have heard it, we will write the third and send it to everyone. And they never did, or if they did, nobody sent it to me." He rubbed his knee. "Only one thing. In the concert, at the end of her verse, she sang a line we did not rehearse. High. The professor was at the back with his broken string. We all looked at each other, Freddie and Lennox and me, like, *what is this?* We held the chord. And she held the note. And then she stopped, and the people went crazy, and Miss Iris came out and said, *Next year, the rest.*"

"Did you ask her what the line meant?" said Anselm. That is, you said. I keep forgetting I am writing to you.

"I asked her that night. On the steps. She said, *It is a question. When the professor writes his part, I will tell him the answer.*" Nico spread his hands. "That's all. That is everything I know."

---

We sat in the yard until the light went. Capitán the parrot said *Yunior* nine times and Yunior jumped nine times. Altagracia brought out a plate of sweet coconut and little cups of black coffee and sat down beside Nico and took his hand without looking at it, the way you take the handrail of a staircase you have climbed ten thousand times.

Yunior played the güira for us, properly this time, fast, the way it is meant to be played for dancing, the wire fork going up and down the metal so quick it blurred, a sound like rain on a hot road. Nico played along on the accordion with his eyes shut. Two of the eleven women got up and danced merengue in the little yard between the lime tree and the washing line, in their house slippers, laughing. One of them pulled you up. You danced like a man who had learned on a ship in a storm. Everyone cheered.

I did not dance. I sat and watched and wrote the güira pattern in my notebook, and I was happier than I had been in years.

At the gate, at the very end, when the taxi was waiting with its engine running, Nico held my hand in both of his.

"Tell the professor," he said, "the slow way in is still the best way in. And tell him he is too old now to be too serious."

---

You flew home on Monday morning, through Antigua. I flew home on Monday afternoon, to Havana. We said goodbye in the courtyard of the hotel by the broken fountain, and it was awkward, the way goodbyes are with people you have known for a long time on the telephone and four days in your own life.

You were going to San Juan in a week, you said. You had looked up Freddie's daughter. Nereida Santiago Rivera, a nurse at a hospital in Santurce. Desmond Charles knew somebody who knew her church choir, or her bowling team, or the cousin of her landlord; I lost track.

"I can't come to San Juan," I said. "Not this time. I'm sorry."

"I know," you said. "I'll be your ears."

"You'll be terrible ears. You'll miss everything. You don't know what a cuatro is supposed to sound like."

"Then I'll be your terrible ears," you said. "What should I look for?"

"A menu," I said. "With a lobster in a bow tie. And Anselm, bring me back the end."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Anselm: The Cuatro Case

Bring me back the end, you said, standing by that fountain with coins in it and somebody's earring, with your tool roll under your arm and your face very still, the way it goes when you are trying not to let it do anything. I want it written down that I said I would. I want it written down that I had no idea what I was promising.

---

San Juan in June is hot in a way that has opinions. It comes up off the street and in through your shoes. It sits on your shoulders like a cat that has decided you are furniture.

I landed on Monday the twenty-second and took a bus into Santurce, where Nereida Santiago Rivera lives, on the third floor of a pink walk-up three blocks from the market square everyone calls La Placita. In the daytime, La Placita is a market: fruit, vegetables, root vegetables, piles of green bananas and plantains and yams, a man with a machete opening coconuts, a woman selling bunches of herbs for tea and for baths and for things she would not tell me. At night, Nereida told me, it turns into the biggest party in the city: the stalls close and the bars around the square open their doors and the whole square fills with people and music until two in the morning.

"Thursday nights," she said. "Friday nights. Saturday nights. Not Monday. Monday, we rest. Monday you get coffee."

She was fifty-five and had just finished a twelve-hour shift in the emergency department of a hospital ten minutes away, and she still had her badge clipped to her scrubs. She was not tall. She had her hair cut short and natural, silver at the temples, and a laugh that started somewhere near her stomach and came out with a little snort at the end, which she was embarrassed about, which made her laugh more. She made me coffee in a stovetop pot and poured it into two cups with hot milk, and put out a plate of little golden fried pastries filled with ground beef, which she called pastelillos, and a jar of pickled peppers.

"You came all the way from Dominica," she said, "for a menu."

"For a menu."

"My father," she said, "would have loved you."

---

Her son came home at four. Gabriel. Seventeen, long as a pole, with headphones round his neck and a skateboard under his arm and the slow, sideways manners of a boy who has just grown eight inches and has not been told what to do with them.

"This is the man from the radio," said Nereida. "From Dominica. About Abuelo's cuatro."

Gabriel looked at me with something between suspicion and hope.

"You play?" he said.

"The boom-boom," I said. "One note."

He did not know what that meant, and I did not explain, and he nodded seriously, as if one note were a perfectly respectable thing to play, which I appreciated more than I can say.

The cuatro was in Nereida's bedroom, on top of the wardrobe. Of course it was on top of the wardrobe. It was in a black case, cardboard and leatherette, with a broken handle mended with electrical tape and old stickers all over the lid from hotels and festivals and shipping lines.

"I have not opened it," said Nereida, "since the funeral. Seven years. Gabriel opened it once. I yelled at him."

"You threw a slipper," said Gabriel.

"I threw a slipper," she agreed.

She took it down and set it on the bed and stood looking at it with her hands on her hips, the way you look at a child who has done something you will have to deal with.

"Go on," she said to Gabriel. "You're the one who wants to play it."

---

For the children, since you made me promise to explain everything: the Puerto Rican cuatro is not like the Cuban tres, though they are cousins, and it is not like a guitar, though it is shaped a little bit like one. It is carved from a single block of wood, the body and the neck together, and then a top is glued on, and it has ten strings in five pairs, tuned so that it rings high and bright, like water running over stones in the sun. The shape of Freddie's was like a keyhole, or a woman with her hands on her hips, round at the bottom and narrow in the waist. It was made of some reddish wood, very old, very worn, with a pale patch on the top below the strings where seventy years of thumbs had rubbed the varnish away.

Gabriel lifted it out the way you lift a sleeping baby. He looked at it for a long time. Then he turned it over and looked at the back, and turned it again and looked at the head, where there was a little carved scroll and, burned into the wood, a maker's mark from a town in the mountains.

"It's so light," he said.

He tried to tune it. It had been sitting for seven years and the strings were dead and two of them were broken, and he knew how to tune it, he said, from watching videos on his phone, and from watching his grandfather when he was ten, which was better. He plucked and twisted and plucked. It sounded, honestly, like a cat on a fence. Nereida sat on the bed with her hand over her mouth.

I was not watching the cuatro. I was looking at the case.

The lining was red velvet, very faded, nearly pink, glued to the cardboard. Down at the bottom, near where the body of the cuatro sits, the velvet had come away from the wall of the case along a seam, about ten centimeters, and somebody had pushed it back and held it with a dressmaker's pin. The pin was rusted solid into the cardboard.

"Nereida," I said. "May I?"

---

I did not pull the pin. I could not. It had been in there forty-nine years. I took a tiny screwdriver off my keyring, which I keep for the station's tape machines, and I worked the velvet away beside it, very gently, and slid two fingers into the gap.

Paper.

I could feel it before I could see it. A folded square, soft as cloth from heat and years. I eased it out. It came in two pieces, because it had worn through along one fold, and I laid them both on the bed and put them together, and there he was.

A lobster. Red. Wearing a little black bow tie. Under him, in curly letters: *Seaview Hotel, St George's. Dinner.* And a list of dishes and prices from 1977. Fish broth. Callaloo. Lambie in sauce. Flying fish. Oil down on Fridays.

I turned it over.

The back was covered from edge to edge in pencil. Music. Little hand-drawn staffs, five lines each, wobbling, with notes on them, and names down the side: *TRES. ACORD. CUATRO. BAJO.* Nico's handwriting, small and quick and perfectly clear. You could read it now in two minutes. I could not read it at all. But I could see that it went on for the whole back of the menu, two verses, and then stopped, and below where it stopped there was a big empty space, and then, in a different pencil, in different handwriting, big and loopy, the handwriting of a man who did not care who was reading, five words in English:

*Verse 3 — together — wait for Philo.*

Nereida leaned over my shoulder. She saw the handwriting and made a sound, very small.

"That's Papi," she said. "That's his writing. He wrote everything like he was signing a check."

---

There was one more thing in the case. When I took the paper out, my fingers found something hard behind it, lower down, wedged into the corner where the lining met the bottom. Gabriel helped me. It was flat and round and it would not come out through the gap, so in the end Nereida said, "Oh, for heaven's sake," and took a pair of scissors and cut the velvet open, and I am still sorry about that, but I am not very sorry.

It was a reel of tape. A small one, five inches across, in a little square box of brown cardboard. On the box, in the same loopy writing: *Island Fest. 13 Aug 77. Final night. Whole show.*

"He had a machine," said Nereida, slowly. "A little recorder. With reels. I remember it. He took it everywhere when I was small. Weddings. Parrandas at Christmas, when the musicians go house to house and wake everybody up. He recorded everything. My mother used to say he would record the end of the world so he could play it back and complain about the bass."

"Where's the machine?"

"Gone," she said. "Long gone. Sold, broken, I don't know."

Gabriel took out his phone. "My friend Andrés," he said. "His uncle has a studio in Río Piedras. He has everything. Old machines. He fixes them for people." He was already typing. "He can do it tomorrow if we take it in the morning. Before the San Juan night."

---

Tuesday the twenty-third was the night of San Juan, the eve of the saint the city is named for, and I have never seen a city so happy to walk into the sea.

But first we took the reel to Andrés's uncle, whose name was Don Wilfredo Colón, who was about seventy and had a studio in a garage behind his house that smelled of solder and coffee and had a reel-to-reel machine as big as a suitcase on a bench under a window, with its own little fan. He looked at the reel the way you look at a newborn grandchild. He said it would take the afternoon; old tape could be sticky, he would bake it first in a low oven, very slowly, so it would not shed. Then he would play it once, only once, straight through, and capture it.

"Once only," he said. "Old tape is like an old man. Ask it to remember once, it remembers beautifully. Ask it twice, it gets tired."

I did not stay to listen. I want that written down too, because you did not believe me afterward. While Don Wilfredo threaded the tape onto the machine, I went out into the street and walked up and down in front of his garage for two hours in the heat. I walked to the corner and bought a piragua from a man with a cart, shaved ice packed into a paper cone, with tamarind syrup poured over the top, and I stood in the shade and ate it while it melted down my wrist, and I did not listen. Because I wanted to hear it for the first time when you did. With him. With your grandfather. All of us at once. I did not want to be the only one who knew.

That night, Nereida and Gabriel took me down to the beach at Ocean Park with half of Santurce. People had come with coolers and grills and speakers and folding chairs. Somebody played plena on panderos, the round hand drums, three of them, each a different size, slapping out the beat while everybody sang a chorus back to the man with the lead voice, an old song about a neighborhood scandal that everyone knew all the words to. Nereida danced. Gabriel pretended not to know her. At midnight, the whole beach stood up, and turned around, and walked backward into the sea.

"Three times!" Nereida shouted at me, holding my arm. "Backwards! For luck! For the year!"

So I walked backward into the sea at midnight in San Juan, three times, with a nurse holding one arm and a seventeen-year-old holding the other, and the waves came up warm behind my knees, and the moon was on the water, and I thought about you in Havana and my grandmother in Roseau and a girl of nine on a jetty, and I thought, whatever is on that tape, it is going to change something.

Don Wilfredo sent the file to Nereida's phone on Wednesday morning. Nereida sent it to me. I sent it to Odalys at the music house, because you had no way of getting it otherwise. Forty-one minutes. The whole show. And at the end, after the song, the last four minutes nobody had heard.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Celia: The Reel

The last four minutes nobody had heard. You wrote that in your message, and Odalys printed the message and read it before she gave it to me, and when I came into the music house she was sitting at her desk with her glasses off, crying, and said, "I don't even know these people."

---

We listened on Thursday, the second of July, at four in the afternoon, on the balcony.

Odalys had copied the file onto a little memory stick shaped like a key. My mother borrowed a speaker from the music house, a black box the size of a loaf of bread that the solfège children used for their dancing class. You were in your studio in Roseau, on the telephone, with your own copy ready, so that we could press play at the same time. "On three," you said. "One. Two."

"Wait," said my grandfather.

He was wearing the guayabera again. He had been out on the balcony since two, in the rocking chair, not rocking. He had asked me to bring the tres out and lay it across his lap, finished now, with its new bridge and three new pairs of strings, though he had not yet played it. He kept one hand on it, flat, the way you rest a hand on a dog.

"Wait," he said again. And then, "All right. Now."

"Three," you said.

---

You know what it sounds like. The children will have it too. But I will tell what I heard, because I heard it for the first time beside him.

Freddie's little machine had been sitting near the front of the stage, I think on a chair, because the sound was close and wide at once: the hall and the crowd and the sea outside all mixed together, the way a room really sounds when you stand in it. The tape was so much better than the cassette. There was no wobble, no hiss like a waterfall. Don Wilfredo had done beautiful work. You could hear a man in the crowd near the microphone saying to someone, in Grenadian English, *Hush now, hush, they starting.* You could hear somebody fanning themselves with a paper. You could hear, very far off, the horn of a boat in the harbor.

Then Nico's accordion, alone. The slow way in. I watched my grandfather's face when he heard it, and it did something I had never seen it do: it got younger.

The tres came in. His hand moved on the body of the tres across his knees, the fingers of his left hand making the shapes on the neck, not pressing, just making them, as if they could not help it. His young voice sang the first verse, all of it, clear and nervous and sweet.

*I asked the water of my harbor*
*where the other shore begins.*
*The water said, go ask the singer*
*who lives beyond the wind.*
*I sent my song across the water*
*to find out where it ends.*

And the snap of the B string, and the young man's word, and the laughter. And her.

*I heard you from my green island,*
*I heard you through the rain.*
*The shore begins where someone's waiting,*
*and I am on the sea again.*

That is how you put it into English for me, afterward. On the tape it was in Kwéyòl, and I did not know a single word and I knew every one. And then the fifth line. The high one. On this tape I could hear what the cassette had lost: how she took a breath before it, a long one, the kind you take before you go under water. How the accordion and the cuatro and the bass all stopped and held one chord under her, and you could hear them holding it, nervous, three men not knowing what she was going to do. And she went up, and up, and held the top note so long that the crowd stopped breathing.

*Who will keep the song for me*
*while I am out on the water?*

---

Then applause. Enormous. It went on for nearly a minute, Freddie's little machine distorting under the noise of it, a roar like surf. Whistling. Feet on the wooden floor. Somebody shouting *Again!* in English and somebody else shouting it in Spanish.

Then it quieted a little, and someone tapped a microphone, and a woman's voice, older, very crisp, very Grenadian, said, "Ladies and gentlemen. The Five Islands."

"Miss Iris," said my grandfather, out loud. "That's Miss Iris."

More applause. And then, close to the microphone, the voice of Philomène again, speaking, not singing. A little out of breath. Laughing a little. She said something in Kwéyòl, three or four sentences, warm and quick, and the crowd laughed and clapped at the end of it, the Dominicans in the crowd, I suppose, and some of the others who understood a little.

And then Miss Iris again: "Next year, the rest!" And the laughter and the clapping, and then the band from Trinidad starting up, steel pans, a big bright wall of sound, and the tape went on with that for a while and then stopped.

My grandfather turned to the telephone. "What did she say?" he said. "At the end. Anselm. What did she say? I was at the back. I never heard it. I was fixing my string."

You did not answer right away. I could hear you breathing on the line. I could hear, in your studio, the little click of you pressing pause and rewinding and playing it again, once, twice, very quietly. Then you said:

"She said, *Thank you, thank you, Grenada. That last little piece I sang is for my daughter Josette, who is nine years old, and who is waiting for me on the jetty in Roseau. Sweetheart, I'm coming home Sunday. Keep the song for me.*"

---

My grandfather did not say anything.

He sat there with his hand on the tres. The woman across the street was taking in her sheets. The domino men on the corner were arguing about the tiles. Down below, a boy on a bicycle went by ringing his bell over and over for no reason, the way boys do.

I had always thought that my grandfather was a man who would cry about anything, a song on the radio, a baby on a bus, a sunset on the Malecón. He did not cry. He looked out at the pink wall across the street, and his face was quiet and confused, like a man who has walked into a room in his own house and found the furniture in a different place.

"Forty-nine years," he said, finally, very softly, in Spanish. "Forty-nine years I thought she was asking me."

"Asking you what, Abuelo?"

"To keep it." He turned the tres a little on his knees. "In her letters she wrote, every time, *Keep the song.* I thought it was for me. I thought the line was for me. I thought, she is going home to her island and she is asking the man from Havana to keep it. And I kept it." He touched the strings, very lightly, and they made a soft little chord, out of tune, because I had only just put them on. "I kept it, Celia. I kept it every day."

"I know you did."

"It wasn't for me," he said. "It was for the little girl."

You said, very gently, from the telephone, "Maybe it was for both, Señor Ferrán."

He shook his head. He did not say anything else that afternoon.

---

On Saturday he fell on the stairs.

Not far. Three steps. He was coming down at seven in the morning to buy bread, which he has done every morning for fifty years, and my mother says he would do from his coffin, and on the third step from the bottom his legs simply went soft, he says, like a candle, and he sat down hard and hit his shoulder on the wall. Our downstairs neighbor, Tomasa, who is seventy-two and has the ears of a bat, heard him and screamed for my mother, and my mother screamed for me, and I came down the stairs in my nightgown with my tool roll in my hand for no reason I can explain.

We took him to the hospital in a neighbor's car. The doctor in the emergency room, a young man named Lázaro Méndez with very tired eyes and very clean shoes, listened to his heart for a long time and said it was doing something irregular, a little skip and stumble, like a dancer who has lost the count. It was not new, he said. It had probably been doing it for a year. He wanted to keep my grandfather overnight. He wanted to change his medicines. He asked a great many questions. Had he been tired? Short of breath? Under any strain?

"He just learned something," I said. "About a song."

Dr. Méndez looked at me with his tired eyes and wrote that down too.

---

I slept in the chair beside his bed. At five in the morning, when the light was just coming gray through the window and somebody down the corridor was singing to themselves while they mopped, I woke up and he was lying there with his eyes open, looking at the ceiling.

"Celia," he said.

"I'm here."

"I have been thinking," he said. "All night. About the third verse."

"You should be sleeping."

"I am eighty-five. I will sleep soon enough." He moved his hand on the blanket until it found mine. His fingers were cold. "Philomène and I argued for four hours about who would write the third verse. Who would say what. Who would answer. I wanted it to be mine. I thought I was the one who asked the question, at the beginning, about the other shore. So I would answer it at the end. That was how a song worked. A man asks. A woman answers. A man answers back."

"And now?"

"Now I know she asked a question too," he said. "Her own. Not mine. And I was at the back of the stage with my broken string and I didn't even hear it." He was quiet for a while. "Then the answer was never mine to write."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Anselm: The Market

The answer was never his to write. You told me he said that, from a telephone in a hospital corridor in Havana on Sunday afternoon, with someone's radio playing a baseball game behind you and your voice gone thin from no sleep. And I said, Celia, then whose is it? And you said, Anselm, you know whose.

I knew. I had known since Wednesday in San Juan, standing in front of Don Wilfredo's garage with tamarind syrup running down my arm, not listening. I had heard the dedication for the first time with you, on the Thursday, and I had translated it for your grandfather in my best radio voice, steady as a weather report, and then I had switched off the microphone in the studio and sat on the floor again. I do a lot of sitting on that studio floor. It is a good floor. It has heard a great deal.

I had to tell my mother.

---

Before I tell you how, I have to tell you about the letters, because they matter to what came after.

In June, before Santo Domingo, I had photographed your grandfather's six letters page by page and sent the pictures to Odalys at the music house, and you had read them to me over the telephone, one each night, translating as you went. You remember. You read slowly. You stopped when a word was hard. And I wrote them out in English in a notebook, in my best handwriting, because I thought my mother might want them someday, even if she would not say so.

They were not love letters. I had been afraid they would be, if I am telling the truth here, and I am. They were letters between two musicians who had liked each other very much for one afternoon and one night and decided to stay friends. He wrote about his band. He wrote about his wife, Esther, who sewed costumes for the cabaret dancers and laughed at his jokes only when they were bad. He wrote about his daughter Mirta, eleven, who wanted a bicycle. He wrote about the weather in Havana, and the price of strings, and a bolero he heard on the radio that was almost as good as theirs. And at the end of every letter, he wrote about the third verse. *I have an idea for the first line. No, I have thrown it away. Next time. Write me your idea.* And then, under his name, every time: *Keep the song.*

I had put the notebook on my mother's dresser in June. It had stayed there, untouched, under her hairbrush, for a month.

---

On Saturday the eleventh of July, I went to market with her.

I do this most Saturdays when I am not on air early. I carry the bags. That is my whole job. My mother has been shopping at the Roseau market on Saturday mornings since she was a girl walking behind her own grandmother, and she has a route through it the way a postman has a route through a town, and you do not change it.

For the children: the market in Roseau is by the river, under a big roof open on every side, and on Saturday it starts before six. The country people come in from all over the island on the buses and in the backs of pickup trucks with their produce in sacks and baskets. The ground provisions are along one side: dasheen and tannia and yam, sweet potato, green bananas in big bunches, breadfruit like heavy green balls. Then the vegetables: christophene and pumpkin and cabbage and bundles of chive and thyme and the little hot peppers in red and yellow heaps. Then the fruit: mangoes, which in July are everywhere and nearly free, passion fruit, soursop with its spiky green skin, golden apples, limes. Women sell cocoa sticks for making cocoa tea, rolled with spice and wrapped in leaves. Somebody sells bay oil in little bottles. An old man from the Kalinago Territory sells baskets woven so tight they would hold water. And through it all, the noise: everyone greeting everyone, prices called out, arguments that are not arguments, someone's radio playing the cadence-lypso program, the bus drivers outside shouting where they are going.

My mother does not haggle. My mother states. "That breadfruit is not ready," she says. "Give me the other one." And the vendor gives her the other one.

She bought dasheen and a breadfruit and chive and thyme and a bundle of green bananas and two pounds of fish down at the fish market by the Bayfront, where the men cut it for you on a wooden block with a cutlass and a terrible speed. I carried everything. Then, when the bags were full and we were walking back up toward Old Street, I said, "Ma. Come down to the jetty with me a minute."

She stopped. She looked at me.

"What for?"

"I want you to hear something."

---

The Bayfront in Roseau runs along the sea in front of the old town. There is a promenade with benches and a few palm trees. There is the cruise ship berth, which that day was empty. And there is the old jetty, a short concrete pier going out into the water, where the island boats used to come in from Guadeloupe and Martinique and the other islands before there was a ferry terminal, where the schooners tied up with their cargo of onions and cement and people.

I did not plan to take her to the jetty. That is a lie. I had planned it for three days.

She sat down on an iron bollard at the end, with her shopping bags at her feet. The sea was flat and blue-green and very clear; you could see the bottom, the rocks and the sand and a little school of silver fish moving like a hand turning over. Across the water, the mountains came down green to the shore at the south of the island. It was very hot. She had on her Saturday dress, blue, and a straw hat.

I gave her one of my earbuds and kept the other, so I could hear it with her, and I played her the last four minutes of Freddie Santiago's tape.

---

I watched her face during the song. I had never seen my mother listen to her mother sing. Not once in thirty-six years. She held very still. When the high line came, the question, her lips went tight and white. She looked out at the water.

Then the applause. Miss Iris. And then her mother's voice, close, speaking, out of breath, laughing a little.

*That last little piece I sang is for my daughter Josette, who is nine years old, and who is waiting for me on the jetty in Roseau.*

My mother took the earbud out of her ear.

She held it in her palm and looked at it as if it had bitten her. Then she put it back in, and said, "Again." And I played it again. And then a third time.

The fish was going to spoil. I did not care.

---

When she finally spoke it was not to me. It was to the water.

"Sunday," she said. "She said Sunday. Granny brought me down here Sunday morning in my good dress. We waited until dark. No boat. Granny said, *Tomorrow.* Monday we came again. I sat right here. Right on this. They had a man selling sugar cakes, coconut ones, pink and white. Granny bought me one every day so I would stop crying. Monday, nothing. Tuesday, nothing. Some men on the jetty said the island boat had broken down in Grenada and she would come on a schooner, and a schooner could take a week, depending on the wind. I said, *What is the wind doing?* And they all laughed."

"When did she come?"

"Wednesday. At dusk. I saw the sail from the beach. I thought it was a different boat. Then I saw her yellow head-tie." My mother wiped her face with the back of her wrist, quickly, like a woman wiping sweat. "She came down the plank with a bag of nutmegs and a box of fish cakes and she picked me up, and I was too big to be picked up, and she cried and cried. And I hit her. I hit her on the shoulder with my fist. Because I had waited three days."

"Ma."

"I never forgave her for those three days," said my mother. "Then she went away again the next summer, and the one after. Guadeloupe. Martinique. Antigua. Singing, singing. I stayed with Granny. And I thought, she loves singing more than me. She loves those bands. She loves that man from Havana she writes to." She looked at the earbud in her hand. "Fifty years I thought that."

"She was singing to you," I said. "On the stage. In front of two thousand people. It was for you."

"I know what it was," said my mother, sharp, the treasury voice. "I heard it. I'm not deaf."

---

We sat there a long time. A man came out to fish off the end of the jetty with a hand line and a bucket and nodded to us and said "Bonjou," and my mother said "Bonjou" back without turning. The silver fish went by again under the water.

Then she said, "The letters. The ones in the tin. From him."

"I had them put into English," I said. "In June. The notebook on your dresser."

"I saw it." She was quiet. "I didn't read it."

"They're not what you think. They're about guitar strings. And his daughter's bicycle."

She laughed. It surprised both of us. It was very short and it came out through her nose.

"Read me one," she said. "Tonight."

---

I read her all six that night, on the gallery on Bath Road, with my father in the hammock pretending to sleep and the river going by below in the dark and the frogs going in the bush. She sat in her mother's chair. When I got to the end of the sixth one, the last, from 1983, where he wrote *I still don't have the first line. Maybe you should write it. You always knew where the shore was. Keep the song*, she held out her hand for the notebook and sat with it in her lap.

"The third verse," she said. "Your Cuban girl's grandfather. He's not going to write it."

"He says it was never his to write."

"He's right," said my mother. "It isn't."

"Then whose is it?"

She looked at me over the top of her glasses, the way she looks at a column of figures that does not add up.

"Don't be stupid, Anselm," she said. "Her question was to me. If anyone answers her, it is me."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Celia: The Papers

If anyone answers her, it is me. When you told me she said that, I was standing in the kitchen on Calle Ánimas with the telephone in one hand and a pot of rice in the other, and I put the rice down on the wrong burner and burned it, and my mother said a word I have never heard her say, and my grandfather, from the balcony, said, "What? What did she say?"

I told him.

He was out of the hospital by then. Dr. Méndez had given him two new kinds of pills, one white and one pink, and a list of things he was not allowed to do that included climbing stairs to buy bread, which he ignored, and getting excited, which he also ignored. He sat in the rocking chair with the tres on his knees, which he now did every afternoon, playing a little, very softly, a montuno figure that went round and round.

"Good," he said, when I told him. "Good. Then you must go."

"Go where?"

"To Roseau," he said, as if I were slow. "She cannot write it alone. Nobody writes a song alone. Not even Philomène. You heard Nico's parts. You know how the instruments go. Anselm knows the words of her verse. The daughter knows the answer. Three of you." He held up three fingers. "Go."

---

It took two weeks. I will not tell the children the whole thing about the papers, because it is boring, and because every person in Havana has their own story about papers, and they are all boring in exactly the same way. I will tell them that Avril Alexander's trust in Grenada wrote a letter, and Anselm's radio station in Roseau wrote a letter, and Teo Marichal in Santo Domingo, who apparently knew someone everywhere, wrote a letter, and that my mother put all the letters in a folder and went with me to stand at the right window at the right time, and that she wore her best dress to do it and spoke to every person behind every window as if they were one of her solfège pupils who had not practiced, kindly but without any doubt about who was in charge.

"Your grandfather," she said to me on the bus home, "is going to be fine without you for one week. I will put him in the chair and sit on him."

---

I landed in Dominica on Saturday the eighteenth of July, in the afternoon, at a small airport on the east coast of the island with mountains standing up all around it, close and green, so green it was nearly black, and clouds caught on their tops like wool on a fence.

You were at the gate with a sign that said CELIA in letters drawn with a marker and decorated with a little drawing of a piano that looked like a fish tank. I told you this. You said it was a piano and I was a tuner, not an art critic.

Then you drove me across your island.

I had no idea. I am from a flat city by the sea. Havana has hills the way a bed has hills: you can see them, but they are not really trying. Your island is all hills. The road went up and around and up and around and down and around through forest so thick the trees met over the top of us, with ferns as tall as houses and vines hanging off everything and every few minutes a river: brown, or clear, or white where it came down over rocks, crossing under the road or beside it, so loud I could hear it over the engine. Rain came out of a clear sky and stopped again. Little villages clung to the sides of the mountains, wooden houses on stilts painted green and blue and pink, with people sitting on the galleries and children waving. A woman by the road was selling grapefruit from a wheelbarrow. You stopped and bought six. You said I had to eat one immediately and I did and the juice went everywhere and you laughed so hard you had to pull over.

"How many rivers are there?" I said.

"People say three hundred and sixty-five. One for every day of the year."

"Is it true?"

"Nobody has counted," you said. "Everyone is too busy swimming."

---

Roseau was smaller than I had imagined and louder. It sat at the bottom of the mountains where the river came out into the sea, a town of old wooden houses and stone ones with wooden upper floors, and balconies everywhere with white fretwork along the edges like lace on a collar. The streets were narrow and steep. Minibuses with names painted across their windshields, *Blessed*, *Patience*, *Mama's Boy*, came round the corners with music thumping out of them. Everybody you passed said good afternoon to you, and you said good afternoon back to every single person, and after about twenty of these I started saying it too.

The house on Bath Road was blue, with a gallery all along the front and a tin roof, bright and new on one half and old and rust-red on the other.

"The hurricane," you said, before I could ask. "We replaced what it took."

Your father was in the yard with his head under the hood of a car. Gerard Laville. He took his head out and wiped his hands on a rag and shook my hand very gently, as if he was afraid he might leave oil on it, and said, "Welcome. Josette is inside. She's nervous. Don't tell her I told you."

---

Your mother was in the kitchen. She was standing at the counter cutting dasheen with a small knife, very fast, very neat, and she did not stop when I came in.

She is a handsome woman. You did not tell me that. Tall, with your grandmother's wide face from the photograph and her own very straight back and very short gray hair, and reading glasses on her head and a blue blouse buttoned to the neck. She looked at me over her shoulder.

"You're the tuner," she said.

"Yes."

"Anselm says you hear everything."

"Most things."

"Then I'll try not to say anything stupid," she said, and turned back to the dasheen.

I had brought her two things. My mother had made me promise to give them to her in the first hour. I put them on the kitchen table. The first was a kilo of coffee, which every person in Havana gives to every person everywhere, and which she looked at and nodded at. The second was a packet tied with a piece of green ribbon.

"From my grandfather," I said. "He said they belong to you."

She wiped her hands. She untied the ribbon.

It was the six letters your grandmother wrote to him. Airmail envelopes, the same red and blue stripes, the stamps from Dominica with birds on them, a parrot and a hummingbird. They were in English. Your grandmother wrote to him in English, because English was the language they had most of in common, and he had read them with a dictionary on the balcony, a word at a time, every one, over and over, for forty-nine years.

---

She read them at the table. All six. I sat across from her and pretended to look at the kitchen, which was not hard, because it was a beautiful kitchen: a big old gas stove with a pot of soup on it, shelves with tins and jars and a row of enamel cups hanging on hooks, a calendar from a hardware store, a window over the sink with a view down the hill to the river and the roofs and the sea.

I watched her face, a little. I am sorry. It is my job.

Her face did nothing for the first letter, or the second. On the third her mouth moved. On the fourth she put her hand up to her chest, flat, the way you would hold a door shut in the wind.

When she finished she put them back in a pile, squared the edges, and laid her hand on top.

"She talks about me," she said. "In every one."

"Yes."

"*Josette learned to swim in the river at Pottersville. Josette is first in her class in arithmetic. Josette sings when she thinks nobody is listening, she sings in the bath, she sings walking to school, she has a better voice than me.*" Josette took her glasses off. "I never sang. I never once sang. I stopped when I was ten."

"Why?"

"Because she sang," said your mother. "Because I wanted to be something she wasn't." She looked at me. "That is stupid. You can say it."

"It's not stupid," I said. "I stopped playing piano in front of people when I was twenty-two because I couldn't bear for my grandfather to see me fail at the thing he loved most. That is stupid. Yours is just ordinary."

She looked at me for a long time. Then she laughed, the same short laugh through the nose that you have, exactly the same.

"Anselm said you were rude," she said.

"Anselm says many things."

"Yes," said your mother. "He's on the radio."

---

That night, after a supper of fish broth with green fig and dumplings, which you call fish water, and a dish of callaloo cooked down with coconut milk, which I ate two bowls of and could have eaten four, she and I sat on the gallery and you went inside to wash up, and I told her the thing I had not told you.

"My grandfather thought her question was for him," I said. "All his life. That she was asking him to keep the song. He kept it. Every day. He played it on the balcony every afternoon of my childhood. I thought it was just one of his songs. I thought it was his."

"So he kept it too," said Josette.

"Yes."

"And I kept it," she said slowly, "by not singing it. Isn't that funny? I kept it by never once singing it. I know every note. I know her verse backward."

The frogs were very loud. The river below was louder. Somewhere up the hill, a radio was playing a cadence tune and a woman was singing along with it, off key and happy.

"Then you have the answer," I said.

She shook her head.

"I have the last line," she said. "Maybe. I don't have the rest. I'm not a songwriter. I'm a treasury officer. You and Anselm, you know how songs go." She stood up and went to the door. Then she stopped and turned and stood there with the light of the kitchen behind her, very straight.

"We have the question," she said. "We need the answer in three voices."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Anselm: The Writing Table

We need the answer in three voices, said my mother, standing in the kitchen door like a woman giving instructions to a bank, and then she went to bed at nine o'clock, because she had work on Monday, and you and I sat on the gallery until one in the morning looking at each other and saying, "Well."

---

We worked at the kitchen table. Four days. Tuesday the twenty-first to Friday the twenty-fourth.

I had taken the week off from the station. Desmond Charles's cousin in Roseau, who does a gardening program on Wednesday nights, took over *Saturday Heritage Hour* and announced, to the whole island, that I was "on a songwriting retreat with a lady from Cuba," which meant that every time we went out into the street that week someone stopped us to ask how the song was coming, and three separate aunties brought food to the house.

We had: your music notebook, with Nico's parts copied out from the menu, every bar. The menu itself, in a plastic sleeve, the lobster in his bow tie grinning up at us. My grandmother's exercise book, open to page thirty-one. Rolando's verse and hers, written out in Spanish and Kwéyòl and English on three sheets of paper side by side. Her old guitar, which nobody had played since 2009, which you restrung on Tuesday morning and tuned and which turned out to be very good, much better than any of us had known. My boom-boom, which was no use at all but which I put on the table anyway for luck. And a pot of cocoa tea, which my mother made before she went to work every morning and left on the back of the stove, thick, with nutmeg and cinnamon and a bay leaf, sweet enough to make your teeth hum.

And my mother, in the evenings, after work, in her chair at the end of the table, with her reading glasses on, saying nothing for an hour, and then saying one thing that changed everything.

---

The trouble was the shape.

You had worked it out on the Tuesday, with the parts. Rolando's verse was six lines, my grandmother's five. Under them, Nico had written the accordion and cuatro and bass and tres in a slow bolero time, with the son pushing underneath, and he had made one beautiful decision: on her verse, he moved the accordion up to answer her voice, so that at the end of each of her lines the accordion said a little thing back. Call and answer. Like a jing ping band, you said, which surprised me; you had heard Lakou Fontaine on Sunday night in Mr. Benoit's yard and come away saying *the accordion talks to the dancers*.

"And then the third verse," you said. "Both voices together. And everything else answers both."

"How do two voices sing together in two languages without sounding like a quarrel at a bus stop?"

"Counterpoint," you said.

"I don't know what that is."

"It's a quarrel at a bus stop," you said, "where both people are right."

---

We tried it your way on Tuesday and Wednesday. I will say this for the children: your way was very clever. You wrote two melodies that fit together like the two halves of a zipper, one going up while the other came down, one holding a long note while the other moved. You wrote it in Nico's time, exactly, bar for bar. You played it on my grandmother's guitar and hummed both parts in turn and it was lovely, it was really lovely, it sounded like something you would hear in a cathedral.

It did not sound like her.

I did not know how to say that. I said it badly. Thursday afternoon, at about three, after you had played your melodies for the eleventh time and changed one note and played them again, I said, "It's very good. It's too tidy."

You put the guitar down.

"Tidy," you said.

"She didn't sing tidy. She sang like the market. Like a woman calling across the street. You've made it into something for a concert hall."

"It is for a concert hall."

"It's for a hall on a harbor with the doors open and people in the road and boats outside honking. It's for Lennox's boat. It's for Yunior's colmado."

"So what do you want?" you said. "Two people making it up as they go along?"

"That's exactly what they did!" I said, too loud. "Four hours, Celia, in a back room with fish cakes and a thunderstorm. That's what they did. And it was better than anything either of them ever wrote alone."

You stood up. You looked at me for a long moment. Your face did the very still thing.

"I have spent nine years," you said, quietly, "making instruments honest so that other people can be brave on them. Don't tell me about making things up." And you walked out of the kitchen and down the gallery steps and out of the gate and down the hill.

---

I sat there for ten minutes. My father came in from the yard, looked at me, looked at the open gate, said, "Well, well," got a soft drink out of the fridge and went back out again.

Then I went after you.

I knew where you would be. You had been there every morning that week, early, before I was up. The jetty. You were sitting on the same bollard my mother had sat on twelve days before, with your arms around your knees, looking at the water. It had started to rain, the soft, warm afternoon rain that comes over the mountains and out to sea and goes on for twenty minutes and stops as if somebody had turned off a tap. You were wet through. You did not seem to have noticed.

I sat on the next bollard. I got wet too.

"I'm frightened," you said, after a while. To the water. "That's all. If it's tidy, I can play it. If it's tidy, I can stand up in front of two thousand people in Grenada and play the guitar part and sing the harmony and get every note right and nobody will know I'm frightened. If it's like the market, I'll freeze. Like Calle Línea. Forty seconds."

"I'm frightened too," I said. "I've never sung in front of anyone. Not even my mother. I sing the shipping forecast. You know that."

"Then why do you want it loose?"

"Because I'm going to be frightened either way," I said. "And if I'm going to be frightened, I want to be frightened singing something that sounds like her."

You laughed, a little, wet. A man went by on the promenade with an umbrella and said "Good afternoon" and we both said "Good afternoon" back.

"Both," you said, finally. "Tidy underneath. Loose on top. Nico's parts exactly as he wrote them, every bar, the way the old players will remember. And over them, you and I, we answer each other, line and line, like her accordion answering her. Not together. Not at first. Turn and turn about. And then at the end, together."

"Like this," I said.

"Like what?"

"Like this. You and me. Writing it down. Turn and turn about."

You looked at me for a long time, and the rain ran down your face, and you said, "Don't be clever, Anselm, it doesn't suit you," and we went home and wrote it.

---

My mother came home at five-thirty. We had the first six lines. You played them on the guitar, and I sang mine, very quietly, the first time I had ever sung in front of another human being on purpose, and you sang yours, and we did it three times, and the third time my mother came in from the gallery and stood in the kitchen door and listened with her handbag still on her arm.

When we finished, she put the handbag down on the table.

"The fourth line," she said. "*The mountain kept the rain.* That's wrong."

"What's wrong with it?"

"It's not the mountain," said my mother. "It's the river. The mountain doesn't keep anything. The mountain lets it all go. It's the river that keeps it. Every child on this island knows that." She took off her glasses. "And the last line before mine. You have *five shores and home again*. Home is not a shore. Five shores and back again."

You wrote both changes down without a word.

---

On Friday night we took it to Mr. Benoit's yard and played it with Lakou Fontaine.

You played the guitar, Nico's tres part, as close as you could make it. Mr. Benoit played the accordion line from your notebook, which you had copied out large for him, and he looked at it suspiciously and then threw it away and played it from his ear after you hummed it twice. Kelvin on the tambal, very soft. Miss Sylvie on the quage. I played my one note on the boom-boom under everything, the low, friendly fog, holding the bottom up. And then we sang, you and I, turn and turn about, over the band.

It was wrong in about forty places. It was too slow and then too fast. Mr. Benoit put in a little run at the end of every one of my lines that was not in Nico's part and that was much better than Nico's part. Miss Sylvie laughed all the way through the second half. The frogs joined in.

But at the end of it, Mr. Benoit put down his accordion and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief and said, "That's Philo. That's her, all right."

My mother was sitting on a bench at the edge of the yard with Mr. Benoit's wife. She had not sung. She had not moved.

On the way home, walking up Bath Road in the dark with the guitar case between us and the river going by below, you said, "We have everything but the last line."

"That one," said my mother, behind us, "is not yours."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Celia: The Doctor's Word

That one is not yours. Your mother said it to our backs in the dark on Bath Road, and neither of us turned around, and I have thought since that it was the kindest thing anyone said to me that whole summer. It meant she was going to do it. It meant she had already started.

She would not tell us what it was. Not on Saturday. Not on Sunday morning, when you drove me back across the island to the airport through the rain and the ferns and the three hundred and sixty-five rivers. At the house, before we left, she stood on the gallery in her Sunday dress with her arms folded and said, "I'll have it by August. Don't ask me again." And then she came down the steps and hugged me, very hard and very quickly, like someone closing a suitcase that is too full.

"Tell your grandfather," she said into my hair, "that my mother wrote about him too. Not only about me. She said he was the most serious man she ever met and she liked him very much. Tell him that."

I told him that. He laughed until he coughed and my mother made him take a pink pill.

---

On Monday the third of August, at nine in the morning, we went back to see Dr. Méndez.

He had told us, in July, that he would decide about the flight after a month of the new medicines. I had been awake most of the night before, lying under the fan, listening to the street, a man walking home late whistling a danzón, a dog barking at something, the first buses at five, the bread man calling at six. I had worked out exactly what I would say if he said no. I had a speech. It had three parts and a conclusion.

He listened to my grandfather's heart for a long time. He looked at a strip of paper from a machine that had drawn a line with little spikes on it, like a fence somebody had built while drunk. He looked at my grandfather.

"Señor Ferrán," he said. "Why do you want to go to Grenada?"

My grandfather sat up straight on the edge of the examining table in his guayabera with his trouser legs rolled up.

"Doctor," he said, "forty-nine years ago I stood on a stage in St George's and I broke a string in the middle of the best song I ever wrote, and while I was at the back of the stage fixing it, a woman I admired sang a question to her little daughter, and I didn't hear it. I have been answering the wrong question for forty-nine years. I would like to stand on the same stage and hear the right answer. That is all. Then I will come home and take your pills and buy bread every morning and never climb another stair."

Dr. Méndez looked at him for a long time. Then he looked at me. Then he wrote something on a pad.

"He can fly," he said. "A wheelchair in every airport. No carrying bags. Someone with him at all times. He takes the white one in the morning and the pink one at night and he does not forget, and if he gets short of breath he sits down, wherever he is, even if it's in the middle of the song." He tore the page off. "And he doesn't climb the stairs to buy bread. I mean it."

"In Grenada," said my grandfather, "I will send my granddaughter for bread."

"In Havana too," said Dr. Méndez. He gave me the paper. Then, at the door, he said, in a different voice, quieter, the voice of a young man and not a doctor, "My grandmother sang boleros. In the kitchen. Will there be a recording?"

"Yes," I said.

"Send it to me," he said, and went back to his tired eyes and his clean shoes.

---

My mother came with us. That was never a question. She had arranged to leave her solfège classes with a younger teacher, she had ironed every shirt my grandfather owned and three that he didn't, and she had packed the red seed necklace he brought her from Grenada in 1977 in a little cloth bag in her handbag, where she could touch it.

"I have never been anywhere either," she said to me. "I'm sixty. You are not the only one."

So it was three of us, and the tres.

The tres was a problem. I would not check it into the hold of an airplane. I had seen what airports do to luggage. I had no case for it; the old case had rotted in a cupboard years ago. So I made one. Pedro Osorio had left me, along with the chair leg of good mahogany, a sheet of thin plywood that he said was for emergencies. I cut it and bent it and glued it and lined it with foam from an old cushion and covered it in a piece of blue canvas from the market, and I sewed a handle onto it out of a belt. It took four evenings. My grandfather supervised.

"Too heavy," he said.

"It's the right weight."

"For a woman who has never made a case."

"For a woman who has," I said, and he laughed, and said that I was becoming impossible, and my mother said I had always been impossible, I just had not had the opportunity to show it.

---

The most important thing I did those two weeks was learn to sing.

I don't mean I learned how. I knew how. I had six years of conservatory and a teacher who made us sing every interval in every key before we were allowed to touch a piano. I mean I had to learn to do it out loud, in the air, where somebody could hear.

My grandfather taught me on the balcony. Every afternoon at four, with his coffee, and the tres across his knees.

"Sing me your line," he said.

I sang it. Very quietly. Barely past my teeth.

"Again. Louder."

I sang it louder. My voice shook. Down in the street, the domino men looked up.

"You're singing to them," said my grandfather.

"I'm singing to you."

"No. You're singing to the whole street. You're singing to every man down there who might think you sound like a cat. That's why you freeze. You're singing to everyone." He set down his cup. "In her fourth letter, Philomène wrote me something. I had told her I was frightened of a big concert, a concert in the theater in Havana in 1979, the biggest of my life. And she wrote back, *When I am frightened I sing to one face. Only one. The rest is weather.*"

"Only one."

"Pick one face," he said. "Sing to that. Let the rest of them be weather."

"Whose face?"

He looked at me with great patience, the way he used to look at me when I was eight and could not find my shoes and they were on my feet.

"Celia," he said. "Pick one."

---

So I sang to the pink wall across the street, at first, because it seemed safest. Then to the woman who hung out her sheets there, who had started coming out at four every day to listen, and who after a week began to applaud from her own balcony, briskly, with the clothespins in her teeth. Then to Tomasa downstairs, who came up with a chair and sat in our doorway and corrected my vowels.

And then, one afternoon, the last week, without deciding to, I sang my line of the third verse to a face that was not there. A man in a big shirt, sitting on a bollard in the rain at the end of a concrete jetty, telling me he was frightened too.

I didn't freeze.

I sang it through. Then I sang your line too, because you weren't there to sing it, and then the line after. My grandfather played the montuno under me on the mended tres, slowly, the slow way in, and his fingers were stiff and he missed two notes and didn't care. When I finished, the domino men in the street below put down their tiles and clapped, and one of them shouted up, "Again! But the old man plays faster!" and my grandfather shouted down that the old man would play as fast as he liked, he was eighty-five and he had a doctor's note.

My mother was standing in the door. She had been standing there the whole time.

"Who were you singing to?" she said.

"Weather," I said.

"Hmm," said my mother, who has been my mother for thirty-one years and is very hard to fool.

---

You called that night from the station, at ten, with the shipping forecast going on behind you, a man's voice reading out wind speeds, in your studio, with the microphone off.

"Avril says everyone is coming," you said. "Nico and Yunior on Wednesday from Santo Domingo. Nereida and Gabriel on Wednesday from San Juan, Gabriel has been practicing eight hours a day and Nereida says if she hears that cuatro one more time she will throw it in the sea. My mother on the Wednesday evening plane. And me on Sunday. To help Avril. She has decided I am an assistant."

"Are you?"

"I'm whatever Avril decides," you said. "Everyone is."

I told you about Dr. Méndez. I told you about the case. I did not tell you about the face. I told you I could sing now.

"Out loud?" you said.

"Out loud."

"In front of people?"

"In front of the domino men," I said. "They are the hardest audience in Havana."

You were quiet on the line, and the shipping forecast went on behind you, *southeast fifteen to twenty knots, seas four to six feet*, and you said, very softly, in a voice that was not your radio voice at all, "I'm glad, Celia."

Then my grandfather came out of his room in his undershirt with his pink pill in his hand, and stood behind me, and said loudly enough for you to hear, "Is that the radio man? Tell him we're coming. Tell him the professor is coming. Grenada, then. All of us."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Anselm: The Carenage

Grenada, then, all of us: I heard him say it behind you, from the other side of the sea, a little cracked, very pleased with himself. And I put the telephone down and switched the microphone back on and read the next part of the shipping forecast so badly that three people called in to ask if I was all right.

---

I flew to Grenada on Sunday the ninth of August, through Barbados, on two small planes, the second one so small that the pilot turned round in his seat and asked us all to please sit on the left side for balance. We came in low over the sea at the south of the island, over water so many blues it looked painted, and white sand, and green hills with houses scattered up them, and I thought: my grandmother saw this from the deck of a boat. She was thirty-one. She had her yellow head-tie on and she was thinking about her girl.

Avril Alexander met me at the airport. You know her now. For the children: Dr. Avril Alexander was fifty-two, tall, with her father's long bones and her hair in a crown of small braids. She carried a clipboard. Not a figure of speech. A brown clipboard, with a pen on a string, and on the clipboard a list, and on the list, I saw, upside down, my name, with a little box beside it, which she ticked as I came through the door.

"Mr. Laville," she said. "You're on time. Good. Tomorrow is carnival Monday. You'll need old clothes."

"Old clothes?"

"Clothes you never want to see again," said Avril. "My father is taking you to J'ouvert. I'm not coming. I'm fifty-two and I have a doctorate. I'll see you at noon if you've survived. Bring the old clothes to the Pavilion after and we'll burn them."

---

St George's, Celia. I know you've seen it now. But I want to put down what it was like to come round the hill in Avril's little car that first evening and see it, because I had heard about it all my life and it was more than I'd heard.

The Carenage is a harbor shaped like a horseshoe, deep and calm, cupped in the hills. The town climbs up from the water on every side: old buildings of stone and brick with red roofs, the roofs made of fish-scale tiles brought over as ballast in sailing ships three hundred years ago, so they say, and newer roofs of red and green tin, and houses on the slopes painted yellow and white and pink, and over the top of it all, on the point, an old fort with its walls the color of sand. The water was full of boats. Fishing boats, painted pirogues with names along their sides, a few big white yachts that looked embarrassed to be there. On the waterfront, a street ran all round the horseshoe with shops and offices and rum shops and a fish market, and, at the far end, near where the harbor opens out to the sea, a long low wooden building with a new red roof and a gallery on stilts out over the water.

"The Pavilion," said Avril.

She did not stop the car. She drove right past it.

"You'll see it Tuesday. Monday you're with my father. Tonight you sleep."

---

At four in the morning on carnival Monday, Lennox Alexander knocked on the door of his own spare room, where I was sleeping, and said, through the door, "You awake? Put on the clothes you hate the most."

I had a pair of khaki shorts with a hole in them and a shirt from a radio conference in 2016 with the conference's name across the front. Lennox looked at me in the hall in the dark and nodded.

"Good," he said. "You'll never wear that shirt again."

He was eighty-three. He was the tallest old man I had ever seen, still nearly straight, with white stubble on his long jaw and hands as big as dinner plates and a way of standing very still that made you want to stand still too. He was wearing a pair of cut-off trousers and a sleeveless vest and, round his neck, a set of plastic devil's horns on a headband.

"Every year?" I said.

"Every year since 1958," he said. "Except '04. That year I fixed my roof."

---

J'ouvert. Daybreak. You have to understand, my island has carnival too, Mas Domnik, and I thought I knew carnival. I didn't know this.

The streets of St George's in the dark before dawn were full of people, hundreds, thousands, all moving toward the town in one slow, loud, swaying crowd behind trucks with speakers stacked on them taller than houses, playing soca so loud I felt it in my teeth. And the people were black. Not their skin, I mean, everybody, every color of skin, was painted shining black from head to foot, in oil, or something that smelled like burnt sugar and old engines, molasses mixed with something else, Lennox said, and better not to ask. They wore horns. Some had chains around their waists. They had their faces painted, their hair, their clothes. And they were dancing, and laughing, and coming up behind people who were not yet painted and rubbing them.

"Jab jab," said Lennox, happily. "The devil mas. Old, old. From the time after slavery, the people taking the thing they used to be called and wearing it, and laughing at it. Dancing in it." He looked at me. "You're very clean."

A very large woman with green horns and a big smile came up behind me and hugged me from the back with both arms.

I was not clean anymore.

---

We danced until it was light. I say *we*. Lennox did not exactly dance; he walked, with the crowd, slow and upright, with his horns on and his big hands swinging, and people kept coming up to him and saying "Mr. Alexander! Teacher!" and shaking his hand and getting him oilier. Half the town had been in his mathematics class, I think. The sun came up over the hills and the black faces all around us started to shine like wet stones, and the crowd went round the Carenage and back through the town and down to the water, and when it was full daylight, Lennox walked me to a little beach below the fort and we walked straight into the sea with our clothes on.

The water went brown all round us.

"So," said Lennox, standing up to his chest in the brown sea with his horns on. "Your grandmother. You want to know what she was like? That afternoon?"

"Yes."

He looked at the fort for a while.

"Bossy," he said. "Very bossy. She told me my bass was too loud. Nobody tells a bass player that. She told Freddie his card tricks were cheating. She told the Cuban his verse had too many words. She told Nico he was very good and he should sit up straight. And then she sang, and we all stood there like boys." He wiped his face. "That's all. That's what she was like. I never saw her again. I thought about her every year on carnival Monday, because she said, that night, after, on the steps, *Next year I'll come for your carnival and you'll show me the jab jab.* She never came."

"I came," I said.

"You did," said Lennox. "And you're the dirtiest man on the beach."

---

On Tuesday, after the Pretty Mas parade, the costumes, the feathers, the bands in their sections in every color under the sun going round and round the town, Avril finally took me to the Pavilion.

You will remember it the way I did, I hope. A long, high room of new pitch pine, with the smell of fresh varnish so strong it made my eyes water. Windows all along one side over the water, with shutters that folded back, so that when they were open the whole room was full of moving light off the harbor, dancing on the ceiling. A stage at one end, a little raised, with the old proscenium arch that had survived the hurricane, painted wood, carved with nutmegs and pineapples and a ship. The new roof was red tin, high, with big fans turning slowly under it. Out the back, a gallery on stilts over the water, where you could stand and look across the harbor to the fort.

"Twenty-two years," said Avril, standing in the middle of the floor with her clipboard against her chest. "Twenty-two years the pigeons had this room."

And in the corner, under a sheet, a piano.

I lifted the sheet. An old upright, a big one, dark wood, with a cracked music desk and candle brackets and keys that had gone the color of a smoker's teeth. The lid was warped. When I opened it, a smell came out like a wet dog that had been sleeping in a church.

"Miss Iris's," said Avril. "It was in the hall in 1977. The hurricane took the roof and left the piano. We found it under a pile of timber, upright, not a scratch on it, full of water. My father dried it out in his house for a year, with a fan on it day and night. Nobody has played it since." She looked at me over the clipboard. "Your tuner. Is she good?"

"She's the best I've ever met."

"She'll need to be," said Avril.

---

That afternoon, while the last of the Pretty Mas bands went by on the waterfront outside, Lennox cooked oil down in the yard of his house on the hill.

He did it the old way, in a big iron pot over a wood fire in the yard, the way his mother did, with his grandsons running in and out with firewood and Avril in the kitchen pretending she was not watching every step. He lined the bottom of the pot with callaloo leaves. Then salted pig's tail and salt beef, which had been soaking all night to take out the salt, and chicken. Then breadfruit, peeled and cut in big pieces like the wedges of a moon. Then dumplings, flour and water rolled long between his big palms. Carrots, onion, chive, thyme, hot pepper, the whole pepper laid on top so it would not burst. Then the yellow spice, which he called saffron and which I would have called turmeric, and Avril, from the kitchen, said was turmeric and had always been turmeric and why did he insist. And then the coconut milk, which he had made himself that morning, grating the coconuts and squeezing the white flesh through a cloth, poured over everything until it nearly covered it.

He put on the lid. He put a wet cloth over the lid. And then he left it, for an hour and a half, on a slow fire, until all the coconut milk had cooked down into the food and there was nothing left in the bottom of the pot but a little golden oil.

"That's why they call it oil down," he said. "The milk goes into everything. Then it's gone, and only the oil is left, and you know it's ready."

We ate it in the yard in the evening off enamel plates, with the lights of the Carenage coming on below us one by one and the fort going pink and then gray in the last of the sun. It was the best thing I have ever eaten, Celia. Don't tell my mother. Don't tell Altagracia.

Lennox sat on an upturned crate and ate slowly and looked at the harbor.

"Tomorrow," he said, "the professor."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Celia: The Airport Wheelchair

"Tomorrow the professor," Lennox said, on his crate, and on Wednesday the twelfth of August, at half past two in the afternoon, the professor came through the doors of the small airport at the south end of the island in a wheelchair pushed by his daughter, with a blue canvas tres case across his knees and his white guayabera ironed so sharp it could have stood up without him.

He made my mother stop the wheelchair three meters from the door.

"Help me," he said to me.

"Abuelo, Dr. Méndez said—"

"Dr. Méndez said a wheelchair in every airport," said my grandfather. "He did not say I had to be sitting in it when I saw Lennox Alexander."

---

I helped him up. He stood. He gave the tres to my mother. He walked, very slowly, the last three meters, with his hand on my arm, through the sliding doors and into the arrivals hall, which was full of families holding signs and children running and a man selling coconut water from a cooler, cutting the tops off the green nuts with a cutlass, and a tall old man in a white shirt and a straw hat standing very still by a pillar.

They looked at each other.

I don't know what I expected. A hug, I suppose. Tears. Something from a film. What happened is that Lennox Alexander took off his straw hat and held it against his chest, and my grandfather stopped and stood up as straight as he could make himself, and they looked at each other like two men measuring each other for a suit.

"Professor," said Lennox.

"Bass," said my grandfather, in English.

"You got old."

"You got tall."

"I was always tall."

"Not like this," said my grandfather. "This is ridiculous."

And then Lennox laughed, a deep slow rumble that made the coconut man look up, and came forward and put both his enormous hands on my grandfather's shoulders, very lightly, as if my grandfather were a glass of water filled to the top, and my grandfather put his hands up on Lennox's forearms, and they stood like that in the middle of the arrivals hall, two old men holding each other up, while families with signs walked around them.

You were standing behind Lennox, with Avril and her clipboard. You were crying. You told me later it was the airport air.

---

Nico came at four, on a plane from Santo Domingo by way of somewhere. He came through the doors in his white cap and his palm tree shirt, on his stick, with Yunior beside him carrying the accordion case and the güira in a plastic bag. When he saw my grandfather he stopped dead and pointed at him with the stick.

"Professor!" he shouted, across the whole hall. "Still too serious!"

"Still a mustache!" my grandfather shouted back. "Still trying!"

The two of them embraced, and Nico kissed my grandfather on both cheeks, loudly, and then kissed Lennox, who bent down for it, and then kissed my mother, whom he had never met, and me, and Avril, who was surprised, and would have kissed the coconut man if Yunior hadn't caught his arm.

Nereida and Gabriel came at six. Nereida walked out of the doors in sunglasses and a big straw hat with the cuatro case held in front of her in both arms, like a cake she was bringing to a party and did not trust anyone else to carry, and Gabriel loping behind her with two suitcases and the headphones round his neck. Nereida had never met any of them. She stopped in front of my grandfather and Nico and Lennox, all three in a row, and took off her sunglasses, and looked at them.

"My father," she said, "said you were all very good-looking."

"He was a liar," said Nico. "But a good one."

Nereida burst into tears, and laughed, and snorted, and was embarrassed, and laughed more, and Nico gave her his handkerchief, which was ironed, and she cried into it for a long time while he patted her back.

Your mother came on the last plane, at half past eight, alone. You had wanted to go and meet her. She had told you on the telephone not to fuss. You went anyway, and I went with you, and we stood together at the arrivals door and watched her come through it with one small suitcase on wheels and her handbag on her arm and her very straight back.

She saw you, and nodded. She saw me, and nodded. Then she looked past us, at the doors of the hall, where Lennox's car was waiting outside with the engine running and my grandfather sitting in the front seat with the window down.

She walked straight out to the car. She leaned down to the window.

"Señor Ferrán," she said. "I'm Josette."

My grandfather looked up at her. I don't know what he saw. I saw a woman of fifty-eight with gray hair, in a blue blouse buttoned to the neck. I think he saw a girl of nine on a jetty in a good dress.

"I know," he said. "I have read about you. Six letters."

"I've read about you," said your mother. "Six letters."

"She said I was too serious."

"She said you were the most serious man she ever met," said your mother. "And that she liked you very much."

My grandfather took her hand through the car window and held it, and did not say anything, and your mother let him.

---

That night we all ate at Lennox's house on the hill, eleven of us at a long table in the yard under a string of colored bulbs. Lennox's grandsons served the leftover oil down, which Avril said was better on the second day, and which I believe. Fried bakes. A big bowl of callaloo soup. Nutmeg ice cream that Avril had made, pale gold, with the nutmeg grated over the top fresh, so strong and sweet it was almost like a smell rather than a taste. Rum punch with nutmeg on it too. Everything in Grenada has nutmeg on it. Lennox said the children came out of the hospital with nutmeg on them.

The lights of the Carenage were below us, a horseshoe of gold around the black water. You could hear music from the town, the last of carnival, a steel band rehearsing somewhere, the bright ring of the pans rolling across the harbor.

Nico and my grandfather argued about the tempo of the slow way in. Lennox told Gabriel about Freddie's card trick and Gabriel said he knew it, his grandfather had shown him, and did it, at the table, with a pack of cards from Avril's kitchen drawer, and nobody could work it out, and Nereida said "Papi" to the sky. Yunior and Lennox's eldest grandson, who were the same age and had nothing in common, discovered they had everything in common, and went off down the hill at eleven to find somewhere with louder music. My mother sat beside your mother and the two of them, who between them had no language in common except a few words of English, talked for two hours with their hands and a pencil and the back of a paper napkin.

"What were they talking about?" you asked me, later.

"Their fathers," I said. "I think. And their mothers. And a bicycle."

---

I woke at five on Thursday. I went down to the Pavilion alone, before anyone.

Avril had given me a key. The sun was not yet up over the hills and the harbor was gray and smooth and silent, and the boats lay still on it, and the fishermen were just going out, the outboard motors coughing and catching one by one in the half dark. I let myself into the long room. I opened the shutters, all of them, one by one, and the gray light came in off the water and lay across the new pine floor.

Then I took the sheet off Miss Iris's piano.

It was very bad, Anselm. You had told me it was bad and I had imagined bad and it was worse. A tropical piano that had been under the sea, more or less, and then dried out for a year with a fan, and then sat for twenty years under a sheet. The soundboard had a crack a thumb wide. The bridge had come loose at the bass end. Half the hammers had moth in them. Eleven keys did not come back up when you pressed them, because the wood had swollen. The A was somewhere near four hundred and twenty-two.

I had two days.

I took off my shoes, so I could feel the floor. I took out Pedro Osorio's tools, and his tuning fork, and I struck the fork on my knee, and held it to the cheek of the piano, and the A came out, clean and cold.

"All right," I said to Miss Iris's piano. "Like a patient."

---

I worked until eleven. At half past, Avril came in and closed every shutter against the glare that comes off the harbor at midday and makes a stage impossible to see, so that the long room was lit only by the new bulbs. Then the others came, at noon, for the first rehearsal.

I want to write this down honestly, because the children should know that it did not just happen. It was terrible.

We had my grandfather in a chair at the front of the stage with the tres. We had Nico in a chair beside him with the accordion and Yunior behind with the güira. We had Lennox on a stool with his old upright bass, which he had not played in public in eleven years and which he had restrung for the occasion with strings so new they squeaked. We had Gabriel, standing, with his grandfather's cuatro, rehearsed to a frenzy, very fast and very nervous. We had me at Miss Iris's piano, which I had brought about halfway back to the world, playing Nico's chords to hold everybody together. We had you, with your boom-boom, which you had brought from Roseau in a tube, and which you said was there for emotional support. We had Nereida at the side of the stage, singing the cuatro line to Gabriel under her breath and trying not to. And we had your mother, in the back row of the empty hall, sitting very straight, with her handbag on her knees.

Nico began the slow way in. My grandfather came in on the tres, too fast, because he was nervous. Gabriel came in on the cuatro, much too fast, because he was terrified. Lennox came in on the bass at exactly the right speed and looked at the rest of us as if we were a class that had not done its homework. Nico stopped. Started again. My grandfather began to sing the first verse and his voice cracked on the second line and he stopped and coughed and my mother ran from the side of the stage with a glass of water and a pink pill, though it was not time for the pink pill. Nico and Lennox started to argue about the tempo, in two kinds of English and one kind of Spanish. Gabriel played his part all the way to the end alone, very fast, without noticing that everyone else had stopped. Nereida said, "Gabriel. Gabriel. GABRIEL," and he stopped and looked up and turned red to the ears.

And your mother, in the back row, stood up, and said, "I'm going for a walk," and walked out of the hall.

You looked at me across the stage. I looked at you. I opened my mouth to say something.

Then all the lights went out.

The fans slowed and stopped. The little bulbs over the stage went dark. Somewhere in the building something clicked and hummed and gave up.

Avril Alexander, from the dark, at the back of the hall, said, "I did warn you about the electricity."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Anselm: The Rehearsal

"I did warn you about the electricity," said Avril, from the dark at the back of the hall, and for a moment nobody moved at all.

It was not completely dark. You remember. The shutters were closed against the noon glare, and light came in through the slats in thin gold lines that lay across the floor and up the walls, and through the gaps under the doors, and through one knothole in the new pine high up near the roof, which made a little round spot of sun on the stage, right beside Lennox's foot, like a coin someone had thrown. The fans had stopped. Without them the room was suddenly hot and very quiet. We could hear the harbor outside slapping at the stilts under the gallery. A boat engine. A man calling to another man about a rope.

Then Lennox Alexander laughed.

"Professor," he said, into the dim. "You remember?"

"The rain," said your grandfather.

"The rain," said Lennox. "On Miss Iris's roof. Four o'clock. The power went then too. Same hall. Same harbor. We sat in the dark for an hour, waiting for the man to come and fix it."

"And Philomène said—" said Nico.

"She said, *Good. Now you'll have to listen to each other instead of looking,*" said Lennox. "And she made us play it through without the lights. And it was the best we did all day."

Nobody said anything. In the gold stripes of light I could see your grandfather's face, and Nico's, and Lennox's, all three of them turned toward each other.

"Again," said Nico. "In the dark. From the slow way in."

---

So we played it in the dark.

I want to tell you what it was like from where I was standing, Celia, because you were behind the piano and could not see what I saw.

Nico started. Alone. The accordion, very soft, the slow way in, the person walking down to the water in the evening. Without the lights he played it even slower than before, and nobody could see him to hurry him, so nobody did.

Your grandfather came in on the tres. Not fast this time. He couldn't see Nico's hands, so he had to listen to them, and because he was listening, he waited. Just a little. The push before the downbeat came exactly when it should, and I felt my own shoulders move.

Then Lennox, on the bass. Low and steady. He did not need the lights. I don't think he had needed lights to play the bass since before I was born.

Then Gabriel. I watched him. He was standing in one of the gold stripes, with half his face lit, and he had his eyes closed, and he was not playing the part the way he had rehearsed it eight hours a day in his bedroom in Santurce. He was playing it the way the others were playing, waiting, listening, coming in a little late on purpose, like a boy getting into cold water one inch at a time. His mother, at the side of the stage, had both hands pressed over her mouth.

And then you. Miss Iris's piano, half mended, with its old dark voice, holding Nico's chords under everybody like a floor.

And your grandfather sang.

He sang the first verse sitting in his chair in a stripe of light with his eyes closed and the tres on his knee, and his voice was not the voice on the tape, it was mostly breath, it was a brush on a snare, but it did not crack this time. It was not loud. It did not have to be. In that hot, still room with the fans stopped, you could have heard a man whispering in the last row.

*I sent my song across the water*
*to find out where it ends.*

He stopped. He opened his eyes. Nico held the chord.

And then everyone turned and looked at me, because the second verse was mine.

---

I had not told anyone how frightened I was. You knew. That was all.

I stood in the middle of the stage with my boom-boom in its tube at my feet for emotional support, in a gold stripe of light from the shutters, and I opened my mouth, and nothing came out but a small dry click.

The band held the chord. Nico did not even look up. Lennox's bass went on, slow, patient, one note and then the next, like a man walking beside a child.

I closed my eyes.

I thought of my grandmother in the kitchen on Bath Road with her back to me, frying bakes, humming the Spanish and singing the Kwéyòl. I thought of her biscuit tin. I thought of a jetty and a sugar cake, pink and white. I thought of you on a bollard in the rain, saying *I'm frightened too*. I thought: one face.

And I sang my grandmother's verse in her language, in the dark, in the hall where she first sang it, with the band she first sang it with.

I don't remember singing it. I remember the end. The fifth line, the high one, the question. I remember reaching for it and thinking I would never get there, and getting there, and holding it, and the accordion and the bass and the cuatro holding the chord under me, the way they held it for her, and the old men looking at each other the way they looked at each other in 1977.

*Who will keep the song for me*
*while I am out on the water?*

Then I stopped. And it was very quiet.

And then the lights came back on, all at once, the bulbs and the fans together, with a great clank and whirr from somewhere in the building, and we all blinked at each other in the sudden bright room like people coming out of a cinema in the afternoon.

Avril was standing at the back with a ladder and a screwdriver and her clipboard under her arm. Behind her stood a young man from the electricity company in a yellow vest, looking pleased with himself.

"Again," said Avril. "With the lights. Exactly like that."

---

We played it four more times that afternoon. It was never as good as it had been in the dark. It was good enough. Nico said that was always the way: the first time you play a song right is never the time anybody hears it.

But my mother was not there for any of it.

She had walked out before the lights went. When the rehearsal finished at five and everyone was packing up, and your grandfather had been taken back up the hill by Mirta for his pink pill and his rest, and Nico and Lennox had gone off to a rum shop on the waterfront to continue the argument about tempo, which they were enjoying very much, I went to find her.

You offered to come. I said no. You understood.

I found her at the far end of the Carenage, past the fish market, past the place where the water taxis wait, at an old stone wharf where the cargo schooners tie up. There was one there that day: a wooden sloop, painted green and white, low in the water, being loaded with crates of soft drinks and sacks of something and, as I watched, a refrigerator, carried down the gangplank by four men singing to keep their feet together.

My mother was sitting on a low wall with her handbag on her knees, watching them.

"This is where she left from," she said, when I sat down. "Lennox told me. Monday morning. On a schooner like that one. With a bag of nutmegs and a box of fish cakes."

"How did Lennox know?"

"He carried her bag," said my mother. "He was there. He said she cried all the way down the wharf. He said she was afraid I'd stop waiting."

The men with the refrigerator reached the deck and set it down and cheered.

"I heard you sing," said my mother.

I didn't answer.

"I was on the gallery. Out the back. Over the water. I didn't go for a walk. I went out the back door and stood on the gallery and listened through the wall." She looked at me sideways. "I never heard you sing before."

"I never sang before."

"You sing like her," said my mother. "In the middle. Not the top. The middle."

---

We sat there until the sloop was loaded. The sun went down behind the hill and the harbor went gold and then lilac and the lights came on along the Carenage, one by one, the same as every night.

I asked her about the last line. Of course I did. I'm a radio man; I can't help it.

She shook her head.

"I have it," she said. "I think I have it. I've had it since Roseau, since the market. But I can't sing it. Not yet. Not in that hall. I don't know where it is yet. You understand? I know the words. I don't know where it lives."

"Where would it live?"

"I don't know," said my mother. "Somewhere she was. Somewhere I've never been." She stood up and put her handbag on her arm. "She brought me nutmegs. A bag of nutmegs, that Wednesday, on the jetty, and I hit her. I never once asked her where they came from." She looked out at the harbor. "Tomorrow, take me to the nutmeg place."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Celia: The Nutmeg Station

"Take me to the nutmeg place," your mother said, and you told me that night on the gallery of Lennox's house, and I said I was coming too, and you said I had a piano to finish, and I said the piano had waited twenty-two years and it could wait until two in the afternoon.

I was up at four. I worked on Miss Iris's piano until ten, by the light of the shutters and two lamps. I glued the bass end of the bridge back down. I shimmed the crack in the soundboard with a strip of spruce I had brought from Havana in my suitcase, wrapped in a shirt. I eased the eleven swollen keys, one by one, with a little tool Pedro made for exactly that, sanding the sides of each key where it rubbed against its neighbor, a hair at a time, until it came back up on its own. I brought the A up from four hundred and twenty-two to four hundred and thirty-four. It would not go higher in two days without breaking something. Nico's accordion is tuned to four hundred and forty. I would have to tell him to push his bellows a little gently and make friends with the difference.

At ten Lennox came to the door of the hall in his straw hat and said the car was outside.

---

My grandfather stayed in bed. Dr. Méndez's orders, and my mother's, and his own, he admitted, because the rehearsal had tired him more than he wanted anyone to know. My mother stayed with him. So it was Lennox driving, in his old car with the window that would not roll up, and you in the front because your legs are too long for the back, and your mother and I in the back seat with our knees touching.

The road to Gouyave goes up the west coast of the island, north from St George's, along the sea. It goes through little towns, one after the next, with wooden houses and rum shops and churches painted white and blue and schools with children in uniforms, and in between the towns it goes up into the hills and down again to beaches with fishing boats pulled up on the sand and nets spread out to dry. Everything was green. Everything smelled of something: wet earth, cooking smoke, the sea, and over and under all of it, everywhere, faint and warm, nutmeg.

"Can you smell it?" said Lennox. "The whole island. The trees. When the wind's from the hills."

Your mother had her window down, the one that worked, and her face turned into the wind.

---

The nutmeg station at Gouyave is an old building of stone and wood on the main road, three stories high, with big doors and long windows and the paint going soft with age. You smell it from the street. Inside, it is dim and cool and the smell is so strong it is almost a sound.

A woman named Cynthia Mitchell showed us round. She was in her sixties, small and quick, with her hair tied up in a cloth and a pencil behind her ear, and you and I both looked at the pencil at the same time and then at each other, and then had to look away.

She had worked there forty-one years. Her mother worked there before her.

"The farmers bring them in," she said. "In sacks. From all over the hills. The nutmeg grows inside a fruit, like a little yellow apricot. When it's ripe the fruit splits open and the nut falls out, and around the nut," she held one up, "is the mace."

It was the most beautiful thing I saw in all those islands, and I saw many beautiful things. A dark brown shiny nut, the size of a walnut, and wrapped around it, like a hand with its fingers spread, a lace of bright red, scarlet, waxy and soft.

"The mace we take off by hand," said Miss Cynthia. "We dry it. It goes orange, then gold. That's a different spice. Same tree, two spices. Then the nuts go up there," she pointed at the ceiling, "on the racks, on the second floor and the third, for six or seven weeks, to dry. We turn them every day."

Upstairs, the racks went back into the dark, wooden trays one above the next, and on every tray, nutmegs, in their shells, thousands upon thousands of them, a sea of brown.

"Then we crack them," she said. "And we sort them. And then we put them in water."

---

The sorting room was on the ground floor at the back. Long wooden tables. Women sitting on benches at the tables, a dozen of them, in aprons and headcloths, talking, laughing, sorting the cracked nutmegs with their fingers into piles by size, so fast their hands blurred. Somebody had a little radio on the windowsill playing old calypso. Two of the women were singing along with it, not well, very happily.

At the end of the room was a big tank of water. A man in rubber boots was pouring a basket of nutmegs into it.

"The good ones sink," said Miss Cynthia. "The bad ones float. That's how we know."

We all stood and watched. The nutmegs went into the water with a little splashing rattle, and most of them went straight down and lay on the bottom of the tank, dark and heavy, and a few, a handful, bobbed up and floated on the top, turning slowly.

"The ones that float," said your mother. "What's wrong with them?"

"Nothing wrong," said Miss Cynthia. "They're just not full. Something went wrong inside them while they were growing. A worm. Too little rain. Some years the tree is tired." She scooped one of the floaters out and put it in your mother's hand. "We sell them for oil. They still smell. They're still nutmeg. They just aren't heavy enough to go to the bottom."

Your mother stood with the floating nutmeg in her palm. She looked at it for a long time.

"My mother brought me a bag of these," she said, to nobody. "In 1977. She brought them home from here."

Miss Cynthia, who could not have known anything about it, looked at your mother's face, and then said, quietly, "Well, then she came to Gouyave. Everybody who brought nutmegs home came to Gouyave."

---

She sold your mother a bag. A cloth bag with a drawstring, a kilo of whole nutmegs in their shells. Your mother would not let anyone else carry it. Then Miss Cynthia gave her, free, a small square of folded paper, and in the paper a little dried mace, gone from red to orange to gold, like a piece of a sunset somebody had saved.

"For luck," she said. "For your concert. Everybody in Gouyave knows about the concert. Lennox told all of us."

Lennox, at the door, looked at the ceiling.

---

We had lunch at a stall on the beach of fish broth and bread, and drove back to St George's, and I finished the piano. I will not tell the children about the piano that afternoon. It was work, and it was hot, and I broke one string, a high one, and replaced it, and swore in Spanish so loudly that a man passing on the waterfront stopped and called through the shutter, "You all right in there, miss?"

At six, Lennox drove us all back up the coast to Gouyave again. Everyone, this time. My grandfather in the front seat, rested, with his guayabera on. My mother, and your mother, and you, in Lennox's car. Nico and Yunior and Nereida and Gabriel in a taxi behind, with Avril following in her own car, keeping an eye on all of us.

Because on Friday nights in Gouyave, Lennox said, the whole town turns into a kitchen.

---

Fish Friday. You were there. But I want the children to see it.

The narrow streets of the town by the sea, closed to cars, strung with lights. Stalls on every side, dozens of them, with smoke going up from the grills into the warm dark: whole snapper, split and blackened over coals; tuna steaks; kingfish; lobster, with no bow ties; lambie, which is conch, cut up and stewed in a spicy brown sauce or made into a broth called lambie water, served in a paper cup. Fish cakes, golden and hot. Fish roll, a kind of pastry. Grilled corn. Bakes. Long lines of people waiting at every stall and nobody minding. A steel pan side set up on a corner, ten players under a streetlight, playing calypso, the pans ringing out over everything, high and bright and round. People eating standing up, dancing standing up, talking with their mouths full.

My grandfather sat on a folding chair that somebody's aunt brought out of her house for him and ate a fish cake very slowly with his eyes closed.

"These," he said. "These were on the plate. In the back room. In the rain."

"How do you know?" I said.

"You don't forget a fish cake," said my grandfather, with great dignity.

---

My mother and your mother found a low wall at the edge of the sea behind the stalls and sat on it with paper cups of lambie water, and I sat at the end of it, near enough to hear, far enough not to be in the way.

They didn't talk for a while. The steel pan side was playing a slow calypso. Out on the water, a fishing boat was coming in with its lantern lit, bobbing.

Then my mother took the little cloth bag out of her handbag and opened it and took out the red seed necklace from 1977 and put it on.

Your mother looked at it.

"He brought me that," said my mother, in English, slowly, finding the words. "From here. When I was eleven. He came home. Very quiet. For a long time quiet. I did not understand."

"Mine brought nutmegs," said your mother. She put her hand on the cloth bag in her lap. "I hit her."

My mother laughed, very softly. "I hid the necklace. In a drawer. For a year. Because I was angry he went away."

"A year?"

"Then I wore it every day."

They looked at each other. The two small ones, I thought. Eleven and nine. One on a balcony in Havana. One on a jetty in Roseau. Both waiting for a musician to come home from the same week in the same hall.

---

I saw your mother's face change at about half past nine.

A girl at the next stall, maybe ten years old, in a yellow T-shirt with her hair in two puffs, was helping her mother sell fish cakes. Her mother was frying. The girl was taking the money and handing out the cakes in paper, and between customers she was singing. To herself. Not a song I knew. Not a song anyone knew, I think. A song she was making up, about fish cakes, and her mother, and it being late, and wanting to go to bed, the words coming out any old way to the tune of the steel pan on the corner. Nobody was listening to her but your mother.

Your mother watched her for a long time. She did not move.

Then she stood up. She went over to the stall. She bought a fish cake from the girl, and paid, and said something to her I could not hear, and the girl laughed and nodded. And your mother came back and sat down on the wall and took the dried mace out of her pocket in its little paper and opened it and looked at it, gold in the light from the stalls.

You had come back from the steel pan by then. You were standing behind her with a plate of grilled snapper.

"Ma?" you said.

"I know where it lives," said your mother. She folded the paper back up. "I have it. Don't ask me. You'll hear it with everyone else."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Anselm: The Afternoon

You'll hear it with everyone else, said my mother, and folded the paper around the mace, and put it in her pocket, and ate her fish cake. She did not say another word about it for the rest of the night. She danced, though. At eleven o'clock, to the steel pan, with Nico, who had put down his stick and was holding her hand very formally at shoulder height, the way old men dance, and she was laughing. My mother. I have it on video. It is the most important thing I own.

---

On Saturday the fifteenth of August Lennox took your grandfather out in his boat.

He did not ask anyone. He came down the hill at half past five in the morning in his cut-off trousers with two cups of coffee and knocked on the door of the room where your grandfather was sleeping, and your grandfather was already awake, sitting on the edge of the bed in his undershirt, and said, "Where are we going?" and Lennox said, "Fishing." And your mother, Celia, who heard them from the next room, came out in her nightgown with her arms folded to say absolutely not, and your grandfather said, "Mirta, I am eighty-five years old and it is the day of my concert and I am going fishing," and your mother looked at Lennox, and Lennox looked back at her, and she said, "Then he comes too," and pointed at me.

So I came too.

---

Lennox's pirogue is called *Miss Iris*. It is about eighteen feet long, wooden, painted blue on the outside and white inside, with her name in red letters along the bow and an outboard motor on the stern that is older than me and makes a sound like a man clearing his throat in church. We helped your grandfather into it at the bottom of the steps by the fish market. It took the two of us. He sat in the middle on a cushion Lennox had brought for him, holding the sides, with a life jacket on over his undershirt that Avril had sent down with a note on it in her handwriting that said *ON. NOT UNDER THE SEAT. ON.*

We did not go far. Out to the middle of the Carenage, then out past the point, past the fort, to where the harbor opens to the sea. The sun was just coming up behind the hills, and it came across the water low and gold and lit up every red roof in the town at once, one after another, as if somebody were going along the hill switching them on. The water under us was clear and green. Lennox cut the motor and we drifted.

He put a hand line over the side. He gave your grandfather another one.

"I haven't fished since 1962," said your grandfather.

"The fish won't know," said Lennox.

---

They didn't catch anything. That was not the point. They sat in the boat with the lines in the water and their coffee, two old men, and looked back at the town. From out there you could see the Pavilion, at the end of the Carenage, its new red roof and its gallery on stilts over the water. It looked small. It looked like a place where five people could sit in a back room in the rain.

"She was right," said your grandfather after a long time. "About the third verse. Two voices at once. I was wrong. I thought nobody would understand."

"You were both wrong," said Lennox. "It wasn't two voices. It was three."

"Three?"

"Her. You. And the little girl." Lennox pulled in his line and looked at the empty hook and threw it out again. "That's what the line was. She was asking it out loud so the girl would hear it someday. She knew the girl wasn't in the hall. She asked anyway. That's what you do. You ask anyway."

Your grandfather was quiet.

"I thought she was asking me," he said. "Forty-nine years."

"She was asking everybody," said Lennox. "That's why it's a good song."

I sat in the bow and did not say anything at all. I just wanted it written down, Celia. Two old men in a blue boat at sunrise outside the harbor at St George's, holding fishing lines with nothing on them.

---

You were in the Pavilion by eight. You did not come out until three.

I brought you lunch at one, a roti from a woman on the Carenage, curried chicken and potato wrapped in soft flatbread. You ate it standing up, with one hand, and played a scale with the other, and listened to the scale with your head on one side, and made a face, and put down the roti, and went back inside the piano. I sat on the edge of the stage and watched you work. I had never watched you work for that long. You talked to it. Very quietly. In Spanish. Little things. *There. Come on. No. Like that.* You talked to the piano the way Lennox talks to his outboard motor and the way Nico talks to his accordion and the way my grandmother used to talk to bread dough. As if it were a stubborn child you were very fond of.

At three you closed the lid. You played a chord. Then a long run up the keyboard and back down. Then the opening of Nico's slow way in, the piano part, very soft.

It was not a perfect piano. It never would be. It was a piano that had been under the sea and came back. You could hear that in it. It was a little dark, a little low, a little rough at the top, like a voice that has been shouting at a carnival. But every note was there and every note came back up when you pressed it and every note was honest.

"There," you said. "That's all I can do."

"It's beautiful."

"It's four hundred and thirty-four," you said. "Nico will complain."

---

We ran it through once at four. Everyone. With the lights. With the fans. Without my mother's line, because she would not sing it in rehearsal; she sat in the back row with her handbag again, and when we got to the end of the third verse and held the chord and waited for her, she just nodded, once, as if to say, *yes, that's where it goes*, and Nico let the chord die.

Then Avril sent everyone away to rest and dress.

I didn't rest. I walked up and down the gallery out the back, over the water, for an hour. I felt sick. I thought I was going to be sick. I thought about the shipping forecast. I thought about the forty seconds on Calle Línea, which were yours, not mine, but which I had started to think about as if they were mine too, as if I had been in the hall.

You came out and found me there at six.

You had changed. You were wearing a blue dress, a dark blue, plain, and you had taken your hair down for the first time since I had known you, and it was long, much longer than I had thought, and you did not have a pencil behind your ear. You looked like somebody I did not know and had known all my life.

"You're going to be sick," you said.

"Yes."

"Pick one face," you said. "That's what she told my grandfather. In a letter. *When I am frightened I sing to one face. The rest is weather.* Pick one, Anselm, and sing to it, and everybody else is rain on the roof."

"Whose face do you pick?" I said.

You looked at me for a long time. The way you look at a note.

"You'll see," you said.

---

People started to come at half past six.

At first a few, then many, then everyone. They came along the Carenage on foot, in their good clothes, families, old couples, children, Lennox's old students, the women from the nutmeg station in a group with Miss Cynthia at the front, Desmond Charles from the radio with his microphone and a cable round his neck, the fishermen from the market still in their boots. The hall filled up. Then the gallery out the back filled up. Then the street in front filled up, people standing on the waterfront outside the open shutters, looking in. Boats came in from the harbor and tied up alongside the Pavilion stilts, pirogues and water taxis and a big yacht with its crew all standing on the deck, and people sat in them and on them and leaned on the rails.

"Just like 1977," said Lennox, standing in the wings beside me with his bass. "The road. The boats. Everybody."

There was an opening program first. Avril's program. A choir of schoolchildren. A speech by the chair of the trust, which was Avril, and was short, because it was Avril. A steel pan side, the same one from Fish Friday, playing a calypso so fast and so bright the whole floor bounced. Then a quadrille from a group of dancers in madras and white, and a row of hand drummers with dancers in long skirts turning in front of them. Then a calypsonian from St George's, very old, who sang a song about Miss Iris Bain from 1981 that I had never heard and that made half the hall cry.

Then the lights went down a little, and the fans turned slowly under the red roof, and Avril came out alone onto the stage, into one white spot of light, with no clipboard.

"Forty-nine years ago," she said, "on the thirteenth of August, in this hall, my godmother, Miss Iris Bain, put five strangers from five islands into a back room with a plate of fish cakes and told them to write a song. They wrote two verses. She promised you the rest next year." She looked out at all of them, the hall and the gallery and the road and the boats. "We're a little late."

Laughter, all through the hall.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said Avril Alexander. "The Five Islands."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Celia: The First Verse

"The Five Islands," Avril said, into her one white light, and stepped back out of it, and for a moment the stage was empty and lit and waiting, and the whole hall, and the gallery, and the road, and the boats, were as quiet as the inside of a piano with the lid shut.

Then we walked out.

I want to put it down in order. I have played it back in my head so many times that I am afraid of wearing it out, like Don Wilfredo's old tape. Ask it once. It remembers beautifully.

---

Nico first, on his stick, with Yunior at his elbow carrying the accordion. The applause started the moment he appeared, because Desmond Charles had told the whole island the story on the radio all week, every morning, a little more each day, like a serial, and by Saturday there was not a person in St George's who did not know that the man with the white mustache had written the parts on the back of a menu with a lobster on it.

Then Lennox, carrying his bass by the neck like a tall friend who had had too much to drink. The applause got louder. His old students whistled.

Then Nereida, walking with Gabriel, holding his arm, though it was not clear who was holding up whom. She went to the side of the stage and sat on a stool. Gabriel stood in his place with Freddie's cuatro, and he was shaking so hard that I could see the strings shiver from where I was.

Then you, with your boom-boom in its tube, for emotional support, in a white shirt, with your face the color of the shirt.

Then me. To Miss Iris's piano. I sat down. I put my hands in my lap.

And then my grandfather.

He would not use the wheelchair. He would not use the stick. He came out from the wings on my mother's arm in his white guayabera with the tres in his other hand, very slowly, and the closer he got to the middle of the stage the straighter he stood, and when he got to his chair he let go of my mother's arm and stood there by himself in the light.

The hall went up. All of it, all at once. Up on their feet. The noise of it came in waves off the walls, off the new red roof, out through the open shutters to the road and the boats, and came back in again, and I could feel it in the floor through the soles of my shoes.

My grandfather stood in it. He did not wave. He did not bow. He looked out over all of them with his chin up and his mouth almost smiling, as if he had been caught at something.

Then he sat down, and laid the tres across his knee, and the hall sat down with him, and it was quiet again.

---

I told you I would tell you whose face I picked.

I didn't tell you then. I told you *you'll see*, on the gallery, at six, with my hair down, and you were too frightened to see anything. So I am telling you now, in writing, where I can't take it back, and where the children will read it, and where your mother will read it, which is worse.

I looked down the keyboard of Miss Iris's piano, and past the end of it, and past Lennox's bass, and found you, standing in your white shirt in the middle of the stage, holding a metal pipe in a cardboard tube, looking at the floor.

That one, I thought. And the rest is weather.

---

Nico began the slow way in.

The accordion alone, in the quiet. The person walking down to the water in the evening. He played it softer than I had ever heard him, and slower, and I could hear him pushing the bellows very gently, the way I had asked, so that his four hundred and forty would lean down toward Miss Iris's four hundred and thirty-four and meet it halfway. They met. Two voices a hair apart, coming together, the slow wobble between them slowing and slowing and stopping.

And that was when it came, the thing I had been afraid of for nine years. My hands were in my lap, and I had to lift them and put them on the keys, and they did not want to go.

I counted. I am a tuner; I count everything. One. Two. Three. I knew the number. I knew it the way you know the number of steps in your own staircase in the dark. I sat at that piano and Nico played the slow way in and I counted to forty in my head, every second of it, and at forty I was still sitting there with my hands in my lap.

And at forty-one, I lifted them, and put them on the keys, and played Nico's first chord under him, exactly where it belonged.

I don't think anybody noticed. That is the strange thing. The worst forty seconds of my life, the second time, and nobody noticed, because they were Nico's forty seconds, and he filled them up, and all I had to do was come in at the end.

Afterward, at the party, he told me he had seen my hands. He said he had stretched the slow way in by eight bars, just in case. "The professor's girl," he said. "I know that face. He made it in 1977. He made it in the back room for an hour before the rain."

---

My grandfather came in on the tres.

He was listening. You could see it. He was not looking at Nico's hands. He had his head turned a little to one side, the way I turn mine at a piano, and his eyes half closed, and he waited, just the tiniest bit, the way he had in the dark, and then the montuno began, turning and turning over the bass. Lennox's bass came in under it like the floor of the sea. Yunior's güira, very soft, the wire fork on the metal like rain beginning on a road. Gabriel's cuatro, high and bright, coming in late on purpose, one inch at a time, and I saw Nereida at the side of the stage put her hand to her mouth.

And then my grandfather sang.

He sang to one face, too. I know whose. He told me afterward, and I am not going to tell anyone, because it is his. But I will say that he did not look at the hall. He looked at the back row, at the door that went out to the gallery over the water.

His voice was eighty-five years old. It had been mostly breath for a long time. That night it was breath and something else, something under the breath, a little grain of the voice from the cassette, a little of the young man who had never been out of Cuba before standing in this room with a pencil behind his ear.

*I asked the water of my harbor*
*where the other shore begins.*

Every person in that hall heard him. It was not loud. It did not have to be. The fans turned slowly under the roof and the shutters stood open to the night and the boats rocked gently on the harbor against the stilts, and you could hear him to the back of the hall and out through the shutters to the road.

*The water said, go ask the singer*
*who lives beyond the wind.*

And then the moment came. The fourth bar after the fourth line. Where the B string broke in 1977.

My grandfather stopped playing.

The band held. Nico held the chord. Lennox held his note. The hall did not know what was happening; some of them did, the ones who had heard Desmond on the radio all week, and a little ripple went through the front rows, a breath.

My grandfather lifted his right hand off the strings and looked down at the tres, at the B, the second course, the pair of strings I had put on in Havana in July. He tapped it. Once. With one finger. The way you tap a man on the shoulder to say, *I know you*.

It held.

And the hall laughed. All of it. A big warm laugh that came up from the floor, from the people who knew and the people who didn't, from the boats outside. My grandfather laughed too, without making a sound, with his shoulders, and put his hand back on the strings and came back in on the turn as if nothing had happened, and sang the last two lines.

*I sent my song across the water*
*to find out where it ends.*

He held the last note until it went thin and stopped. Nico let the accordion breathe under it, a long soft sigh of the bellows. And my grandfather turned in his chair, slowly, not to the hall, but to you, standing in the middle of the stage in your white shirt with your pipe in its tube.

"Your verse," he said, in English, quietly, into the hush. "Radio man."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Anselm: The Second Verse

"Your verse, radio man," said your grandfather, and every head in the Iris Bain Pavilion turned to look at me, and every head in every boat outside the shutters, and every head in the road, and I stood there in the middle of the stage in the white shirt Avril had made me buy that afternoon and I thought: Celia's face. Look at Celia.

And then I didn't.

I want this written down, too, so you know that I knew. I knew you were looking at me. I had seen you find me, at the start, from the piano, when Nico began. I had felt it the way you feel sun come out on the back of your neck. I knew which face you had picked.

But it was not your verse. It was my grandmother's. And she wrote it for someone.

So I looked past you, and past the front rows, and past all the people standing at the sides of the hall and sitting in the aisles, to the very back row, to the last seat at the end by the door to the gallery, where my mother was sitting very straight with her handbag on her knees and her straw hat in her lap.

That one, I thought. The rest is rain on the roof.

---

I opened my mouth. And this time something came out.

I sang my grandmother's verse in her language, to her daughter, in the hall where she had first sung it to her daughter, who was not there. Who was there now. In the back row.

*I heard you from my green island,*
*I heard you through the rain.*

I could hear my voice in the room. That was the strangest thing, Celia. I had spent my whole life with my voice coming back to me through headphones, a quarter of a second late, made smooth and close by a microphone and a mixing desk. In the hall it came back to me off the walls and the roof, all round me, big and rough and real, and it was not a radio voice at all. It was hers. In the middle. Not the top. The middle.

Behind me I could hear the accordion answering me at the end of every line, the way Nico wrote it for her, and Mr. Benoit's little run that was not in Nico's part, which Nico had heard me hum on Thursday and stolen without a word. Under me Lennox's bass, walking beside me like a man beside a child. Over me Gabriel's cuatro, bright, far up, like sun off the water.

*The shore begins where someone's waiting,*
*and I am on the sea again.*

My mother had not moved. She had not looked away. She was looking straight at me down the length of that hall, with her hands on her handbag, and her face was doing nothing at all, nothing, the way yours does, the way her mother's never did once in her life.

---

Then the fifth line.

I knew what I was going to do. I had rehearsed it, in the dark and in the light. You reach for it. You take a breath before it, a long one, the kind you take before you go under. The band stops moving and holds one chord. And you go up.

I took the breath.

The band stopped. Nico held the chord. Lennox held his note. Gabriel held his. You held yours on Miss Iris's piano, the four hundred and thirty-four chord, warm and dark, a little rough at the top, honest. And your grandfather held his, the tres, the montuno stopped, his hand flat on the strings, damping them, listening.

And I went up. And up. Into the top of my voice where I had never been, not even at five in the morning before the news with the microphone off, the top where my grandmother lived. And I held it.

*Who will keep the song for me*
*while I am out on the water?*

I held it as long as I could. I held it until there was no air left in me. I held it for her, in 1977, standing on this stage, singing to a girl on a jetty nearly four hundred kilometers away who could not hear. I held it for my mother in the back row, who could.

Then I stopped.

And nobody clapped.

That is what I remember most. The hall did not clap. In 1977 they clapped, they went crazy, the tape is full of it. In 2026 the hall knew there was more. So they didn't. Two thousand people and the boats outside and the road, and they held their breath with the band, and the chord went on, and the fans turned under the roof, and the harbor slapped at the stilts, and the whole room waited.

---

That was where the third verse began.

You know it. You wrote half of it. But the children should have it here, the way it went, in the order it went.

You lifted your head from the piano and sang the first line, alone, to me.

You did not freeze. I heard you not freeze. I heard you come in a hair late, the way Gabriel did, the way your grandfather did in the dark, one inch at a time into cold water, and then all at once, clear and low, in Spanish, a voice I had never heard you use, not on the telephone, not in the courtyard in Santo Domingo, not on the jetty in the rain. A voice like the A on Pedro Osorio's tuning fork. Exactly what it claimed to be.

*Every island kept a little:*

And I answered you, in Kwéyòl, my grandmother's language, the way her accordion answered her:

*a string, a drum, a name.*

And you:

*The harbor kept the asking,*

And me, in my mother's correction, which she made at the kitchen table on Bath Road with her handbag still on her arm:

*the river kept the rain.*

And then together. For the first time. Both voices at once, two languages on top of each other, like two rivers coming into one, the way my grandmother wanted it and your grandfather was afraid of, the way she said people would always understand, because it's only the words they fight about.

*The song went round the water,*
*five shores and back again.*

---

And then we stopped. And Nico held the chord. And the hall held its breath.

And we waited, the way Freddie Santiago wrote it, in big loopy pencil, on the back of a menu with a lobster in a bow tie, forty-nine years ago.

*Wait for Philo.*

Nico's bellows were nearly empty. I could hear it, the little wheeze at the end of the push, an old accordion running out of breath, an old man's arm getting tired. Lennox's bass was holding on a note so low it was almost not a note. Your hands were flat on the keys. Your grandfather had his eyes closed.

Nobody moved.

And in the very back row, at the end, by the door to the gallery over the water, my mother stood up.

She put her handbag down on her chair. She put her straw hat on top of it. She took something out of her pocket, a little square of folded paper, and held it in her hand.

And she began to walk up the aisle.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Celia and Anselm: The Third Verse

**Celia**

She began to walk up the aisle, and Nico, who had no air left in his bellows, who was eighty-one and whose arm was shaking, did a thing I have never seen any accordion player do. He opened the air valve with his thumb and pulled the bellows wide in silence, all the way out, a huge breath, without a sound, and then closed it and came back in on the chord as if he had never left. Nobody in the hall heard it but the band. I heard it. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever heard an instrument not do.

Your mother walked the whole length of the hall. She did not hurry. People in the aisles moved their feet to let her pass. Some of them knew who she was; Desmond had not told the island that part, but people in St George's know things. A woman reached out and touched her arm as she went by. She did not stop.

She came to the edge of the stage. There were three wooden steps up. Lennox put down his bow and held out his enormous hand without looking at her, and she took it, and came up.

She did not go to the middle. She stood beside you.

---

**Anselm**

She stood beside me, my mother, Josette Laville, fifty-eight, treasury officer, who had never sung once in front of anyone since she was ten years old, in her blue blouse buttoned to the neck. She did not look at me. She did not look at the hall. She looked out past all of them, past the back row and the open door, through the shutters, at the harbor, where the boats were, and the black water, and the lights of the Carenage going round in a horseshoe of gold.

She unfolded the little paper in her hand. Inside it was the mace from Gouyave, gone gold. She held it in her palm.

She took a breath. A long one. The kind you take before you go under.

And she sang.

Not in the middle. Not at the top. At the bottom of her voice, low, where nobody in our family had ever sung, where my grandmother never went, a voice that was not her mother's at all, that was all her own. In Kwéyòl. Two lines. The answer.

I will put them in English, the way Celia and I agreed. But you have to know that in the language she sang them, they rhyme, and they are very simple, and a child could sing them, because a child did.

*I kept it, Mama. I was on the jetty.*
*I kept it, and I sang.*

---

**Celia**

That was all. Two lines. Nico let the chord go.

There was silence for longer than forty seconds. I counted. I am a tuner; I count everything. Fifty-one. Fifty-one seconds of two thousand people and a road and a harbor full of boats making no sound at all. The fans turning. The water at the stilts.

Then the hall came down.

I don't know another way to say it. It came down. It came down on us like the rain on Miss Iris's roof in 1977. People were standing on their chairs. People in the boats were standing on the gunwales and some of them fell in and were hauled out laughing. The women from the nutmeg station were screaming. Desmond Charles had let go of his microphone, and it was swinging on its cable, and he did not care.

And my grandfather.

He had stood up. Nobody helped him. He stood up out of his chair with the tres in one hand, and he walked across the stage to your mother, three steps, four, five, and stopped in front of her. He was not as tall as her. He looked up.

"Josette," he said. In English. "Thank you. I was answering the wrong question."

"You kept it," said your mother. "She said in the letters. You kept it too."

"Badly," said my grandfather. "Without the last line."

"Everyone keeps it badly," said your mother. "That's how you know it's kept."

And she put the little piece of gold mace in the breast pocket of his guayabera, the left one, over his heart, and pressed it flat with her hand.

---

**Anselm**

They made us play it again. Of course they did. In 1977, Miss Iris said *next year*. In 2026 Avril came out into the light and said, "Again? Well. All right. But only because you asked." And we played it through from the slow way in to my mother's two lines, and the second time Nico did not stretch the introduction, and Celia did not count, and your grandfather tapped the B string again for the laugh, and got it, and my mother walked up from the back row again as if it were her own idea and nobody had ever thought of it before.

The second time the whole hall sang the last two lines with her. In Kwéyòl, most of them, though they did not know a word of Kwéyòl, because they had heard it once and that was enough. The ones in the boats sang it. The ones in the road. It came in through the shutters from outside, from the waterfront, a few seconds behind us, like an echo off a mountain, like a song coming back across water.

Desmond Charles recorded the whole thing. It went out the next morning on his station in St George's and on mine in Roseau, and a man in Santo Domingo who knew Desmond's friend played it on a merengue program on the Sunday, and Nereida's friend's uncle, Don Wilfredo, played it on a community station in Río Piedras where he does a program on Thursday nights about old tape. In Havana, Odalys at the music house printed out the email with the recording on it and read it before she gave it to anybody and cried at her desk for the second time in a summer over people she had never met.

You sent it to Dr. Méndez. He wrote back two lines. *My grandmother would have liked this. Tell your grandfather to sit down.*

---

**Celia**

This is the end of our side, I think. But the children should know what happened after, because that is part of a song too, the part after the last note, when everybody goes home.

My grandfather came back to Havana with the mace in his pocket. He keeps it on the balcony, in a little dish beside his coffee cup. He does not climb the stairs for bread anymore. He sends me. At four o'clock every afternoon he plays the whole song on the mended tres, all three verses, slowly, and the domino men on the corner stop playing for the length of it, and the woman across the street comes out with her clothespins in her teeth.

Nico plays it on Sunday afternoons in the back of the colmado in Villa Consuelo. Yunior on the güira. Altagracia makes the sancocho. The parrot has learned to say *Philo*. Nobody knows who taught it.

Gabriel came home to Santurce and stopped practicing eight hours a day. He practices four. Nereida says it is a great improvement. On Thursday nights he plays his grandfather's cuatro in the square at La Placita with two old men who knew Freddie, and they call him by Freddie's name half the time, and he lets them.

Lennox goes fishing every morning in *Miss Iris*. Avril framed the menu, the lobster in his bow tie and Nico's parts and Freddie's five words on the back, in glass on both sides so you can turn it round, and it hangs in the Pavilion by the door to the gallery over the water, next to the photograph from your grandmother's biscuit tin. Every year on the thirteenth of August, which is sometimes a Thursday, she says, and she doesn't care, the Pavilion plays the whole song, all three verses, with whoever is there.

Miss Iris's piano is at four hundred and thirty-eight. I went back in November and brought it up again. Like a patient.

And I played the piano at the music house in Havana in October, at the end-of-term concert, in front of my mother's solfège children and their parents and Odalys and Tomasa and the domino men, who came in a group and sat in the front row in clean shirts. A Cervantes dance. The one from Calle Línea. All the way through.

I picked a face. It was not in the room. It did not need to be.

---

**Anselm**

My mother sings now.

Not much. Not in front of people. In the kitchen on Bath Road, with her back to the door, frying bakes, she sings. I came home from the station in September and heard her through the window, and stopped in the yard, and stood under the window by the breadfruit tree like a boy, not breathing, so she would not hear me and stop. She was singing my grandmother's verse. And then her own two lines. And then, very quietly, she hummed the Spanish.

My father was on the gallery in the hammock. He opened one eye and looked at me standing under the window, and said, "Well, well," and closed it again.

Lakou Fontaine plays the song now, at every wedding, and at the Creole Day concert in the Botanic Gardens in October, where my mother wore her mother's wob dwiyet and her yellow and red head-tie and sat in the front row and did not sing, and did not need to, because the whole crowd sang her lines for her. Mr. Benoit plays his little run at the end of every line, and he has told everyone on the island that Nico stole it from him, which is true.

I still play the boom-boom. One note. Very well. But I sing on *Saturday Heritage Hour* now, with the microphone on. People call in to tell me I am flat. People call in to tell me their auntie sang it better. People call in to say there is a goat on the road at Canefield, in case anybody is driving that way.

And I am writing this at the kitchen table in Havana, on Calle Ánimas, in December, with the fan going and your grandfather on the balcony playing the slow way in on the tres and your mother at the stove making something with black beans that she will not let me help with, and you across the table from me, with a pencil behind your ear, writing your side.

Turn and turn about. The way the song goes.

---

**Celia**

You are reading over my shoulder. Stop it.

**Anselm**

You said we should end it together.

**Celia**

I said the song ends together. The story can end however it likes.

**Anselm**

Then let it end like the song.

---

**Celia and Anselm**

We asked the water of the harbor where the other shore begins.

The water said, go ask the singer.

So we did. We asked a man in Havana and a woman on a jetty in Roseau and an old accordion in Santo Domingo and a cuatro in a black case on top of a wardrobe in San Juan and a tall man in a blue boat outside the harbor at St George's. We asked a biscuit tin and a menu and a reel of tape that could only remember once. We asked each other, turn and turn about, for nine months, across the water.

And this is the answer, for the children, and for theirs.

The other shore begins where somebody sings back.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.