Had this been her last concert? Alfonzo imagined it that way because it made the recording more potent. She was an animal before or beyond her time. Other animals recognized what she’d meant only after she was gone and, in truth, not even then. She was a light seen through a hole in a black sheet. She was a compact mirror held up to the starry night. With her singing, she focused the audience. Or was it that their attention focused her? Are we one or many? she asked without asking, for her songs were always folksy and full of metaphors. But even as she asked this question, her existence was foregrounded. One mouse stood onstage and demanded singular attention. If they were many, they would all be singing. “Perhaps they admire in her what they do not admire in themselves,” a critic said, and perhaps if she could teach them to hear themselves better Josephine would no longer be needed. The mouse folk required Josephine—whether or not they admitted it—to cherish and hate. That is the role of all singers in an endangered community.

But then again, could Alfonzo really know, separated as he was from that era? They say that to take in her art, one had to not only hear but also see Josephine in the flesh, or rather the fur. The recording was an imperfect substitute. On the back of the album was a black-and-white photo from the concert at which it was recorded. The mouse was small yet powerful on the high-contrast stage. In the background were little faces of the crowd caught in countless frozen expressions that ranged from ecstasy to distraction to incomprehension. Josephine had been called the voice of the voiceless, but from the picture you could see that the voiceless were not that. Were they even one group, or were they a multiplicity of voices who also listened? But yes, Alfonzo thought, they were for an instant a together something, because they allowed themselves to be an audience for her. To listen together. To differentiate the normal songs of work and life from a performance. To gather together around Josephine’s sound made them a group, and in that collection maybe they could imagine their collective need, or pain.