Antonio was never long without surprises for me. The third week when he boarded the bus, he carried with him many weavings both large and small. “What is this now?” I asked.
“I decided that while you are at the luncheon hacienda, I can make some business with the other people from other tours who go there. The girls will sell the pocket-books and the shawls. I will sell the rugs and tapestries.”
I said nothing, for it seemed to me that Antonio had a very good idea in that.
The singing of the children riding the bus between the two haciendas became a feature of my tours. Antonio placed himself in charge of the singing, and it was Antonio who decided which of the children could ride the bus. My bus tours became famous, and my boss in Quito would say to the visitors from the United States, “Our best guide is Ampara. You will enjoy her tour.”
There was one song that the children sang that I loved more than all the others. It was a song in Quechua, and I asked Antonio to teach it to me. Antonio told me no.
“Why no?” I asked him.
He answered me, “If I teach you that song, you will then sing it, and you will no longer ask me to ride the bus.”
“I never asked you even the first time,” I said.
“That is true,” he answered. “But now I am very popular, and I sell many weavings at the hacienda of the restaurant. I make good business, and it is not the business of pocketbooks and shawls; it is the business of the men.”
I said nothing to Antonio, but I am here to tell you this in English—it is something that I learned from the tourists who ride my bus—I was pissed off with Antonio. I would have told him that he could not ride the bus at all anymore, but I have already mentioned that my tours were now famous, partly because of Antonio. You might ask, why did I not dismiss Antonio and allow only the girls to ride the bus? You might say, weren’t they also singing? But I would have to answer you that I felt a certain attachment to Antonio, and I had the feeling that if I dismissed him from the bus, it would only make him more of the way he was. I wanted to show him that it is good to be smart, but it is also good to do unnecessary things like putting a design on the border of a rug just to make it more beautiful. It is sometimes necessary to use unnecessary words like thank you and please just to make life prettier.
After we had been making the tours for several months, I had heard the songs very often and I came to know all the words in Quechua, the words that I had asked Antonio to teach me. But about this I said nothing.
I was beginning to think that I had made a very bad mistake by not telling Antonio that I was pissed off with him, because as he and his singing group continued to ride the bus, he was becoming very swollen-headed and very bossy with the girls who rode with him. Part of the reason for this swollen-headedness was that many people asked to have their pictures taken with him to carry back to the United States for souvenirs. Antonio would arrange the girls in front of him, and he learned to say in English, “Cheese!” just before the picture was taken. Antonio loved best of all the Polaroid instant pictures that were in color.
Now I must tell you why I was glad that I held my tongue about the many things that made me mad at Antonio. It happened after I had been wearing the uniform of the finished guide for more than a year.
There came on my bus a man and his wife who were from Kansas in the United States. In Kansas in the United States there are no mountains and no ocean, and they loved everything about my country of Ecuador. And they had with them not only two cameras, one of which was the Polaroid kind, which I told you was loved by Antonio, but they had also with them a cassette recording machine. They occupied themselves with taking very many pictures of our Andes mountains and also with recording what I had to say into the microphone as I explained to them about our beautiful countryside.
As we were leaving the hacienda of the weavers, Antonio and his group began singing, and the man from Kansas gave to me the cassette and asked me to please make for him a recording of the children as they sang.
I went to the back of the bus and pointed the little microphone that was attached to the cassette machine toward the children. They had not before seen a cassette player, but they knew that it was special, and they sang very beautifully, and they smiled as they sang. They were in the middle of my favorite song when Antonio’s voice cracked. His eyes looked up at me, and they were frightened. He tried once again to sing, but he could not. He could not control the sounds that came from him. His voice shot high when it should not have. I picked up the song and sang along with the girls until the song was altogether finished. Then I shut off the machine and took it back to the man from Kansas, who thanked me very much.
Then Antonio did an unexpected thing. He walked forward before the bus stopped and sat down next to me on the seat of the guide; “You know the Quechua song,” he said.
“Yes,” I answered. “I have known it now for many months.”
“I do not know what happened to me today,” Antonio said. “My voice is like a forest animal; it makes strange sounds from hidden places.”
“It is the voice of your manhood that comes forth,” I said to him.
“Yes,” he said. “There will be a time now when I will not be able to sing.”
“That is so.”
“But I will continue to ride with you on the bus,” he said. “My grandparents have come to depend upon the money from my earnings at the hacienda of the restaurant.
“You can continue to ride on the bus with me even if you do not sing.”
“When the full voice of my manhood arrives, it will flow strong all the way to the front of the bus.”
“Yes,” I said. “I am sure the voice of your manhood will be loud.”
“I did not say loud. I said strong.”
“Strong?”
“Yes, strong,” he said. “Loud was the voice of my childhood.”
I laughed. “I do not believe that you will stop being loud.”
“A stubborn voice is loud,” he said. “A trusting voice can speak softly and still be heard. My new voice will be deep, but it will be soft, and it will speak the language of Quechua, and that of Spanish,” he said. Then he looked at me very long and said, “And English.”
“But you do not speak English,” I said.
“Not yet, but you will teach it to me,” he said. “Please.”
“Since when have you wanted to learn English?” I asked.
“For a long time. But I did not ask. I thought that if I asked you to teach me English, you would say that you would teach me only if I taught you the Quechua songs, and if I taught you those, I thought you would never again ask me to ride the bus.”
“I would never think in that way, Antonio.”
“I know now that you would not,” he said. “I promise that I shall learn to speak English as Ampara speaks it.” Then he hummed his Quechua song until his voice once again cracked, and he walked to the back of the bus laughing at himself.
And that is the story of Antonio and me. I told you that I must tell the story, for English is not yet within Antonio. But soon it will be, and then he will speak for himself, and his speech will be soft and polite, but firm. And I, Ampara, will feel proud that I was the guide who got him there.
At the Home
by Phillip
I won’t bother you with details of how I broke my arm. Let me just say that some people are not as well coordinated on a skateboard as are some other people. I’ll let it go at that. I might also add that you can break an arm from a skateboard even if you’re not doing anything fancy on it. I wouldn’t even bother to mention my broken arm at all except that it figures into the story that I have to tell, and my story is rather complicated, so I have to lay it all out. Maybe I should add one more little thing, except that it wasn’t so little. Mine was not a simple break, what is called a simple fracture. Mine was a compound, a compound fracture, which means that the bone is broken in more than one place. Two, in my case. I’ll let it go at that except for one more small ma
tter. It was my left arm, not my right, and I am right-handed, so I had to go to school anyway.
At school I found out that a broken left arm, even if it is compound, is of interest to other kids only for as long as it takes them to autograph the cast. After that, they don’t think about it long enough to offer to carry your books home for you. Not that I ever carried that many books home, anyway. I’ll let it go at that, except for one more tiny thing I should mention about a compound fracture of the left arm. Skateboarding is out until the cast comes off. I suppose that a really well coordinated person could learn to balance himself with one arm in a sling, but I’ve already mentioned that I am not in your basic category of the really well coordinated.
I came directly home from the school bus stop that Tuesday in April, the first day after I had broken my arm, and found my mother ready to go to the old folks’ home. She goes there one afternoon a week and reads to some of the people. She also helps them make out checks or write letters. She usually stays until about five-thirty, when they are settled down for their evening meal. I had told my mother that I needed some batteries for my cassette player since I had decided to use this broken-arm time to improve my impersonations. Magic would have been my first choice, but I did mention that I am not terribly well coordinated. I’m not spastic or anything, but in order to do magic, the kind of coordination you need is beyond basic, beyond very, somewhere in the category of superb.
I asked my mother to take me to the discount store where I could buy some batteries for my cassette, and then I’d walk home. Unfortunately, I could not immediately find my cassette recorder, and I needed to find it because I couldn’t remember the exact size of the batteries it needed. Who can remember whether something takes C or D? It had been a long time since I had practiced my impersonations. It was also a long time before I found my cassette recorder. I suppose that I was making my mother nervous because she kept asking me if I had looked here or looked there; and finally, she said that she was going out to the car to wait, and I told her that it was not so easy looking for something with only one arm, and she told me that the better part of looking for something was thinking about it, like when did you use it last, and I told her that I couldn’t understand her hurry to get to the old folks’ home because those people weren’t going anywhere anyway, and she told me that she would wait for me in the car with the motor running and using up gasoline and for me to remember the energy shortage.
I found my cassette player in my bookcase behind the Hardy Boys. Its microphone cord was hanging down, and the first three times I looked at that cord I thought it was a magic marker stain. Once I found it, I didn’t hang around to take out the batteries. I rushed with it out to the car, where my mother was sitting not only with the motor running but also with the car door on the passenger’s side open.
“I’m going straight to the home,” she said. “You can go to the convenience store across the street from there and get your batteries. Then you can come over to the home and meet me, and I’ll drive you back after I’ve finished with what I have to do.”
“Batteries cost more at a convenience store,” I said.
“Get them there anyway.”
“At a convenience store they cost even more than they do at a regular store. Why don’t you drop me off at the discount store?”
“For some reason, I seem to be running late today. I can’t seem to find the time to make an extra stop.”
“At a discount store, they only cost—”
“I’ll pay the difference!”
“It will be a lot.”
“I’ll pay it.”
“A whole lot.”
“I’ll pay it.”
“It’ll be more than the difference between a discount store and a regular store. What I mean by a regular store is like a camera shop, where it isn’t self-service—”
“I’ll pay it. It will be cheaper than driving miles out of my way and using up all that gas,” Mother muttered.
So I bought the batteries at the Minute Market across the street from the home. I kept the cash register receipt to help Mother keep her promise about paying the difference. I wandered into the lobby of the old folks’ home. I sat there, trying to put the batteries in one-handedly, when this old man came up to me and said, “Need some help there, young man?”
He had an accent that sounded Communist. He took the cassette player from me and set the batteries in it just right, all the pluses where they ought to be and all the minuses where they belonged, too.
I had left an old cassette in it, and I wondered what was on it, so I turned the machine on and heard Walter Cronkite giving the evening news. I had worked on my Cronkite impersonation a long time before I decided that you can’t make anything sound like a world crisis until your voice has changed.
The old man picked up the microphone, and I pushed down on the record button, and he began to sing. He sang a whole song all the way through in some foreign language, and I asked him what the language was.
“Ukrainian,” he answered. I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know where Ukrainia was. He must have read my mind because he asked, “You know the Ukraine?”
I shrugged.
“It’s part of Russia,” he said. “What I sang was an old folk tune, something that is very appropriate, coming as it does from an old folk.” Then he laughed at his little joke.
I laughed, too. I was glad that I had guessed right about his accent; Russia was Communist. I played back what he had sung, and he was so pleased with hearing it that he asked me to show him which buttons to push so that he could record another song. He learned about the buttons very quickly, and he sang not one but two more songs before my mother appeared.
“Ah!” the Ukrainian said, “so you are Leona’s son.” With his accent, the word son came out sounding like I was a whole generation, which I am because I am an only child.
That night after supper I picked up the cassette player. They had announced on TV that Rich Little would be on Hollywood Squares, and I thought that it would be very clever to impersonate an impersonator doing an impersonation, if you get what I mean.
I rewound my tape, and I happened to push the play button instead of record, and some of the Ukrainian folk songs came pouring out. I shut it off, getting ready to rewind again, when my father yelled, “Wait a minute!”
Needless to say, I waited.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Nothing’s the matter. I would like to hear the rest of that.”
So I played it to the end. My father asked me where I had recorded those tunes, and I told him. “Don’t erase it,” he said. “I’d like to have it.”
“But I need the cassette. I don’t have another one.”
“Buy one,” he said, and reached in his pocket and pulled out a five dollar bill and didn’t say anything about giving him change.
I took the money and didn’t make any suggestions. “Why do you want that tape?” I asked.
“I like those songs. My mother used to sing them to me. She came from the Ukraine. What did you say the old man’s name is?” he asked.
“I didn’t say. I don’t know his name.”
“Why don’t you find out? Maybe Mother will know.”
So I went to my mother and asked, “Do you know who is the person at the old folks’ home who has gray hair and who isn’t very tall and is a little bit stooped and speaks with an accent and wears a beige suit and walks with a cane?”
“Give me a real hint. Man or woman?”
“Man. I said beige suit.”
“The women wear suits, mostly beige. Give me another hint.”
“He was very old.”
“Old, you say?” Mother raised an eyebrow and put her finger under her chain and did what people call knitted her brow and said, “Old? Now that should narrow it down.”
Considering my broken arm, I thought that she could skip the sarcasm.
“This one has brown spots all over hi
s hands.”
“Right hand or left?”
“Both.”
“They all have brown spots all over both hands. Now, if this one was left-hand spotted . . .”
She was really getting me mad.
“This one’s from the Ukraine,” I said. I turned on the cassette and played a little of his songs. “He sang three of these before you came to pick me up. Don’t you remember, he called me Leona’s son.” I must say I did an excellent job impersonating his son.
“Why didn’t you say that you meant Mr. Malin?”
“How could I say I meant him when I didn’t know it was him?”
“That’s a gotcha, all right,” Mom said. “Anyway, why do you want to know his name?”
“Dad liked his singing. Either his singing or his songs.”
Mother smiled. “Ah! yes, the Ukraine. Why don’t you come back with me tomorrow and ask your Mr. Malin to record some more?”
“He is not my Mr. Malin, and tomorrow is not your regular day.”
“I know. But I got a call just a few minutes ago that Miss Ilona has broken her arm, and since her other arm is paralyzed, she has to be fed. They asked me to take care of her for supper tomorrow, and I agreed to do it.”
I told her all right, that I would go, because I needed to buy a new cassette anyway since Dad wanted to save this one.
So I went.
I found the singing Ukrainian, and he told me that his name was Jacob P. Malin now, but that in the Ukraine it had been something else. When he came to this country, the man at immigration who was filling out his application wrote J-A-C-O-B just as Mr. Malin had told him to, and then he wrote P-E-T-R-O-N-O-V-I-C-H, because that is what the P stands for, and when Mr. Malin started telling him his last name, he didn’t have room in the space for anything more than M-A-L-I-N, so they shortened his name to that, and that is what he has been ever since. He said that he has one brother named Malinkowski and another one named Malinkovsky; even though they all had the same mother and the same father, they all had different immigration officers and so they ended up with three different last names.