Still, you took the brush-lined road to your music teacher’s house, your feet as accustomed to the dampening pedal as to the long walk. You did as she told you, repeating the Stravinsky until she said yes, you were feeling the music, not just playing it. Running through the original score of Les Noces until you thought your veins were molten. Wincing as you held your wrists under cold water in her downstairs bathroom, because you did not want the pain showing on your face as you sounded each note of Bartók’s Rhapsody No. 1.

But the pain did show on your face, and your music teacher said that such cringing, such hardening in your jaw, would never let you on the grandest stages. She said you could not take each wrist in the opposite hand between sections or movements, no more than a ballerina can stretch her calves onstage.

Your hands, and your wrists, and your forearms—they spoke, even when you told them, asked them, begged them to be quiet. And the more that pain took hold of you, the more your music teacher cast you aside like a frayed bow.

This is the part that took you the longest to tell me. This is the part that, when you did, made my heart feel like it was cracking open. Because I could feel it. The cold water as you tried to put out the flames in your muscles. The feeling of your teacher losing both patience and the sparkling faith she once had in you. I know the look. I got it from my own dance teachers, when they saw me falter on ankles that were giving out under me, when they caught the wince under my stage smile.

I wish you hadn’t known it too.

That look, I guess, is how you came to be in my great-grandmother’s village, even though you are unrelated to anyone there. Even though you are a different kind of brown-skinned boy than I am a brown-skinned girl.

You came to be in my bisabuela’s village because there is an old man who lives there.

El viejo moves so slowly that he seems to cross the street in rhythm with honey dripping from a spoon.

All of him, that is, except his hands.

He plays, knows, the cimbalom better than you, better than your music teacher. But he also knows what music takes from the body. So when a friend of a friend of my mother mentioned him to your mother, your mother and father thought this man might teach you to save both your hands and the part of your heart that has turned to wood and metal strings.