She had not seen the philosopher since the day she left with only the clothes on her back, but she had received a postcard from her every summer inviting her to the yearly silent retreat. Callie snapped the pillowcase, folded it, and lined it up over the other one. If she ever fled across the border to Buddhism, she would not leave everything for someone else to take care of.
She shook out a sheet, folded it, and placed it on the pillowcases. Still, the philosopher’s washer had come in handy, as had her furniture and dishes. She’d enjoyed leafing through the philosopher’s books and had found herself lingering over love in Plato’s Symposium. And though she would have been happy with no decorations other than the periodic table she had brought with her, she had kept the philosopher’s collection of masks, and even her life-sized straw animals. She shuddered, remembering the look the jaguar had given her when she placed him and his coyote and baboon friends on the terrace for Juanito to sell. She had acquiesced and, for better or worse, they had kept her company since.
She took out another sheet. She had kept Juanito’s grandmother Doña Petra on, too, though she had balked at having someone else clean her house. Cleaning was personal. And, besides, it provided physical activity to balance hours at the computer. But Doña Petra had been part of the deal. “She needs the work,” the philosopher said. “You have the income to do your part.” The next year, when she got the idea to encourage Doña Petra, then sixty-six, to retire with full salary, Doña Petra had accused her of trying to run her off. So Doña Petra had stayed, and now, Callie knew if Doña Petra was to retire, she would miss her touch, too.
When she stretched out her arm to fold the sheet, she knocked something off the shelf. She gathered the sheet back and leaned over to look. There it was again. The package still wrapped in brown paper, tied with twine, and decorated with a sprig of lavender. What had Jacob been thinking, stopping by to give her the gift the morning she left Chicago for Mexico? Their relationship had been over for some months. Unequivocally over, in fact. She placed the package back on the shelf and sighed. She would never in her lifetime figure out what to do with it.
But she could finish the linens. After folding the sheet and arranging the stack as it should be, the sheets on the bottom and the pillowcases on top, she smoothed the top of the stack and leaned down to breathe in its fragrance of sunlight. Then she stood back and frowned. Doña Petra would be disappointed to find the laundry done. But with the rain so unpredictable, she really had to get it washed and dried while she could. Still, she had no excuse for folding it. One by one, she flipped the sheets open and crumpled them into the basket.
THE entry bell sounded a moment after her aunt Ida called. “I won’t keep you,” her aunt said. “I was just looking through some photos and found one of you in a smock. I thought you might like to have it.”
She held her breath. A smock. She had worn one for months when staying with her aunt. Was that the one?
“You’re about nine years old and straddling a branch in that old oak tree behind your folks’ house,” her aunt said. “You’re wearing Mary Janes and reading a book. Your father’s standing below laughing up at you.”
She recalled the bark against her bare legs, her father’s arms when she slid into them. She let out her breath. Just one of her aunt’s reminders of good times with her father. Well, she hadn’t been a threat to his ego at nine years old. She could give him that.
The bell rang again. She looked through the windows over her desk. Raindrops bounced off the patio tiles.
“The bell …”
“I’ll let you go,” her aunt said.
She pulled her sweater closer. “Is Mother okay? I haven’t heard from her.”
“I’ve never seen her so gay. Did I tell you she’s been coming to our Wednesday morning coffee klatch? That makes five of us bald-faced Democrats in Farmtown.”
“‘Bald-faced,’ you say. I suppose you’ll have Armando using that expression next.”
“You taught him French grammar, and I teach him Midwest talk.”
She laughed. “And what do you mean five of you? Has mother come out as a Democrat?” She remembered her mother’s nervous phone call after Aunt Ida had taken her to meet Farmtown’s three other liberals in a popular café on the town square. “She would not keep her voice down,” her mother had said. “A sixty-five-year-old. You would think she would know better.” Still, Callie had thought she detected a hint of secret pleasure in her mother’s description of local businessmen choking on their coffee at Aunt Ida’s praise for the Canadian health care system.
“Say out loud she’s a Democrat? Not your mother. But that doesn’t stop her from attending our meetings. As a matter of fact …”
The bell sounded again. “Someone’s at the door.”
“Well, you go on now.”
“But you were about to say?”
“It’ll keep.”
Callie opened the door from her bedroom to the patio and frowned at the water streaming down the stone stairway that connected the patio to the entry terrace above. The rain had begun in earnest and she had, as all too often, left her umbrella upstairs.
The ringing had stopped when she, curls pasted to her scalp, opened the peep window and saw the top of Juanito’s head.
She tried to turn the key in the lock, but it stuck. “Momentito,” she called through the window. She jiggled the key and tried again. It turned with ease. Maybe she wouldn’t have to call Armando about changing the lock after all.
“Come in.” She pulled the door open. “Come in.”
“I have something to show you,” he said, taking off his backpack on the way into the dining area. He unzipped it, his eyes sparkling with excitement.
She crossed her fingers and made a wish. Not another item for the storage shelves.
“Look, a trumpet.” Juanito pulled the instrument from his pack.
She smiled. So it was.
“Do you like it?” Juanito said. “It’s pretty. Isn’t it?” He held it up in front of her, turning it from side to side. “Not a dent on it.”
She laughed and reached out, then held back. If she touched it, she might buy it. “Beautiful.”
“It works, too.” He held the trumpet to his mouth, puffed out his cheeks, and produced a blast that rivaled the thunder.
“So it does.” Could she learn to call Tavelé with it? She took the instrument.
“Do this,” Juanito said. He closed his lips and stuck the tip of his tongue out and then quickly back in with a puff of breath, as if he were flicking something off it.
Someone pounded at the door. That had to be Armando. He never rang the bell. She put the trumpet under her arm and went to let him in.
Armando frowned at the trumpet. “What are you doing with that piece of junk?”
“You never know when a trumpet will come in handy,” she said, and bought it.
Five
CALLIE WOKE IN THE DARK, HER MOUTH DRY, CHEST stiff, heart pounding, and she was panting as if she had been running a long time. The dream again. The starched white cap and heavy cross on a silver chain. The nurse looming over her. Whispering, “You little slut.”
Her aunt’s advice came to her again. No point in dwelling on the past. She focused on the driving rain. Thick arcs of water spilling from the rooftop gargoyles, splashing through the avocado tree to the patio. Streams of water rippling down the stairs to the garden. Flowing down the callejones. Finding its way to the vault-covered river that wound underneath the city center.
Everything would change by the morning. No dust coating the trees. No litter in the callejones. No pools of stagnant water in the stream beds. All would be fresh. She got out of bed, went to stand under the avocado tree, and lifted her face to the rain.
THE next morning, she woke to see the sky shining blue through glistening leaves. She stretched her arms over her head and yawned. Armando had been happy the night before. He even cut short his usual lecture about spoiling Juanito to tell her the good news: he
had his ticket for Veracruz and had already called Claude to let him know. Claude had also complimented his French. So what if he now sounded like a character out of a nineteenth-century novel. Oh, not to worry. Claude said his grammar was perfecto, perfect, parfait. He whisked a CD of Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter from his shoulder bag and gave it to her. “Pour toi, mon chou.” Before he left, he pulled out a thick stack of flyers. “You wouldn’t mind handing these out, would you?”
She showered, lathered her face in sunscreen, and dressed in her usual brown skirt, white top, wheat shirt, and Birkenstock sandals. In the kitchen making tea, she hummed along to Fitzgerald singing “It’s All Right with Me.” On the way out the door, she caught a glimpse of the trumpet reflecting the morning light. She lingered a moment. She could take it along. Blow it like the Pied Piper. Attract a following of stray dogs, barking and sniffing in her wake.
Partway down the callejón, a string of men carrying bags of cement across their shoulders overtook her.
“Chamba?” mumbled Nacho, the neighborhood carrier who organized delivery of construction materials and helped neighbors with other heavy items.
“No work today. Sorry.” Maybe he could move the stone angel. But not right now. She needed to get to work on her translation, and first she must hand out the flyers about Tavelé.
As she continued down the callejón, she regretted not having told that lovely trumpet teacher about Tavelé the evening before. If he had shown up, she would have known to call. And if not, she could have been on the lookout. Best to go right in this morning. The teacher and the girls would be so busy with each other they wouldn’t have time for conversation with her. Why hadn’t she thought of that the day before? Oh, well. Now that she had the flyers, it would be easier to find something to say. All she had to do was show the flyer and translate it, if necessary. What had Armando written this time? She translated as she read.
Lost dog. Brown with black stripes. Short hair. His complete name is Tavelé Martin Torres Ruelle, but he answers to Tavelé (pronounced “Tav lay”). He’s very social and doesn’t bite. He likes orange cake, roast chicken, and the songs of Cole Porter. If you find him, please take care of him and call Maestro Armando Miguel Torres García. Cell: 044 473 100 3478. A reward of one hundred pesos.
A reward of one hundred pesos. She paused and looked down the hill for Nacho. Gone. Too bad she hadn’t thought of him earlier. She started walking and then paused again. What if the girls weren’t there and she had to make conversation with the trumpet teacher? What would she say? She could tell her she just bought a trumpet. That her father had played, but she was thinking of using hers to round up stray dogs. She imagined the young woman laughing and then felt her face redden. Talking about herself would be silly. She was going there for Armando, not for herself. And why would that striking young teacher care about her anyway? She started walking again. She had to watch herself. Stick to her plan. Her breath started coming more quickly as she approached the iron gate. She stopped a few steps away. What had she decided to say? She took a flyer out of her backpack, her hands shaking. Oh, yes, just translate the words. That would be easy enough. She took another step toward the gate. Her knees felt a little weak. Think of how happy Armando will be when he sees Tavelé, she told herself and reached the gate without stopping again. But when she got there, it was locked with a padlock on the outside. No one would be at home. Her hands still shaking, she rolled up the flyer and lodged it in an ornamental curl of iron. By the time she got down to Plaza Mexiamora she had stopped shaking, and only then, as she zigzagged between the clusters of children gathering for primary school, did it come to her that, instead of relief, she felt disappointment at missing the lovely teacher.
ON Truco, she veered left and dashed up the stairway to the Basilica, narrowly escaping the Jehovah’s Witnesses. She planned to pass through and out the door to the next street. But when she entered, she noticed an elderly woman with a black lace shawl draped over her head coming from the confessional. She paused then, in the passage between the doors, and watched. The woman had swollen ankles and shuffled slowly, but her face looked soft and relaxed. Had confession brought her that tranquility? The nurse’s voice came to her again. Could confession stop nightmares?
She glanced at the confessional and then back to the woman. She watched her kneel in a pew, take out her rosary, and hold it to her lips. Then the woman rose, aiding herself with a hand on the back of the bench in front of her. She paused and crossed herself again before sitting.
Callie cupped her hands over the back of the bench she stood behind and closed her eyes. She had once peed on a bench like this.
She should have used the restroom after Sunday school, like her mother had said. Instead, she had gone outside to look for grass to make her dolly a basket like the one Baby Moses had. Just before the service began, her mother found her sitting on the recently mowed lawn, crying. “We’ll go to the lake later,” she said. “We’ll find some reeds for a basket.”
She must have been around five years old. Old enough to know better. Old enough, too, not to talk in church. She had tried to hold the pee. She thought she could. She had before. And she did, until well beyond the end of the sermon. But when the pastor raised his hand for the final benediction, she felt something warm trickle through her clenched legs.
She wriggled back and forth on the bench, trying to soak the pee into her cotton A-line. If only she wore the many-layered petticoats and full skirts the girls across the street from her home wore. But she was not permitted such clothing. Modesty in all things. That had stayed with her. Modesty in all things.
Tears rolled down her cheeks, and her mother, who was by then gathering her gloves and Bible, gave her a concerned look and leaned down to whisper in her ear. She glanced over at her father, and then holding her finger to her lips, she looked down at Callie with tender eyes. When they stood to leave, her mother pulled her close to shield her damp dress from view and laid a bulletin over the puddle.
THE man on the bench before her stood to move to the confessional. Callie watched him lower to his knees and wondered what it would be like to feel the leather pad against her own knees, to bow her head, and to whisper not about a childhood mishap, but about the source of the nightmare. To seek solace.
She closed her eyes and recalled sitting before her father, her face burning with shame and frustration, and yet knowing that talking back would only provoke him further. And so, she had sat there silently, her hands on her lap, one on top of the other, trying to calm her racing heart. He could never forgive. No wonder it still came back to her in the night, that racing heart. That shame.
Her eyes moved again to the kneeling woman, and then she startled at a tap on her shoulder.
“Callie,” Armando said, laying his hand on her shoulder. “What are you doing here?”
Six
CALLIE STOPPED AND CLOSED HER EYES A MOMENT against the sunlight that blinded her when she emerged from the church. What had Armando said, “You were right about the trumpet.” Right? How so? She had not stayed to find out. Instead, confused and embarrassed, she had mumbled something about her deadline and left without even greeting Maestro Chávez who had been with Armando. But before going out the door, she had turned back to catch Armando’s eye and wave goodbye. His quizzical look stayed with her.
She shivered. The church had been cool. The library would be cool, too, but she had a sweater in her backpack, and she longed to be sitting at a simple wooden table, working on her translation.
Walking along, warmed by the sun, she mused about her good luck in having work that suited her. It hadn’t been the elegance of grammar, as she once thought, that led her from science to language and then to translation. She had had to admit, there was nothing more elegant than the periodic table. It was, instead, the near impossibility of the task that drew her. An English noun as straightforward as “potato” had no exact counterpart in French. Pomme de terre, literally apple from the earth, called a differen
t image to mind. Even the same words spoken by natives with different histories had incommensurate meanings. Someone raised on McDonald’s french fries understood “potato” differently from someone who had wiggled her fingers through the loose soil below a flowering plant and found oval tubers nestled like eggs under a sitting hen. Though she accepted that the fullness of another’s meaning remained beyond her grasp, she found that, with effort and imagination, she could reach something close enough to understanding to feel connected.
This feeling came to her even when translating engineering documents. That’s what kept her going, spending hours on those “dry documents,” as Armando called them. Those flashes of understanding between languages worlds apart. The way she could bridge those worlds, despite the odds.
She had begun studying language in high school, first with two years of Latin. Then, to her parents’ dismay, she had selected French over German. Odd for her, since she usually went along with their wishes. Life was easier that way.
But she took her parents on when it came to French. She had reasoned with them. It made more sense to continue with a Romance language after her two years of Latin than to switch to a Germanic one. But her actual motivation stemmed from a fascination that had been brewing since she first heard Edith Piaf sing “Milord” on The Ed Sullivan Show. She had been charmed by Piaf’s accented English introduction to the song of a love that could not be, and then mesmerized by Piaf’s delicious rolled r’s when she got underway in French. She had no idea if she could sound any more like France’s Little Sparrow than she looked like her, but she would give anything to try. And, besides, it was her last chance to take a class with Steve, her best friend and confidant, who would be graduating at the end of the year. So, she said she wouldn’t take another language at all if it wasn’t to be French. She wouldn’t leave her room either, and feigned illness to avoid going to school. Her mother, who couldn’t stay home from the store indefinitely, convinced her father to let her have her way this once. She even bought her records for listening comprehension and pronunciation. The speakers, who were children, had nothing of Piaf’s pizzazz, and Callie, to her chagrin and Steve’s amusement, wound up, more often than not, speaking with a child’s high squeak rather than with Piaf’s throaty croon.
The Trumpet Lesson Page 3