“The Silvertone B-Twelve,” Federico said, his voice, always melodious, suddenly more so. “I sell them. I sell the B-Eleven as well, but I prefer the look of the Twelve. Louis the Sixteenth is far superior in design to Louis the Fifteenth. You agree?”

“Of course,” Danny said, though if he’d been told it was Louis the Third or Ivan the Eighth, he’d have had to take it on faith.

“No other phonograph on the market can equal it,” Federico said with the gleaming eyes of the evangelical. “No other phonograph can play every type of disc record—Edison, Pathé, Victor, Columbia, and Silvertone? No, my friend, this is the only one so capable. You pay your eight dollars for the table model because it is less expensive”—he crinkled his nose downward—“and light—bah!—convenient—bah!—space saving. But will it sound like this? Will you hear angels? Hardly. And then your cheap needle will wear out and the discs will skip and soon you will hear crackles and whispers. And where will you be then, except eight dollars the poorer?” He spread his arm toward the phonograph cabinet again, as proud as a first-time father. “Sometimes quality costs. It is only reasonable.”

Danny suppressed a chuckle at the little old man and his fervent capitalism.

“Papa,” Tessa said from the stove, “do not get yourself so…” She waved her hands, searching for the word. “…eccitato.”

“Excited,” Danny said.

She frowned at him. “Eggs-y-sigh…?”

“Ex,” he said. “Ex-ci-ted.”

“Eck-cited.”

“Close enough.”

She raised her wooden spoon. “English!” she barked at the ceiling.

Danny thought of what her neck, so honey-brown, would taste like. Women—his weakness since he’d been old enough to notice them and see that they, in turn, noticed him. Looking at Tessa’s neck, her throat, he felt beset by it. The awful, delicious need to possess. To own—for a night—another’s eyes, sweat, heartbeat. And here, right in front of her father. Jesus!

He turned back to the old man, whose eyes were half closed to the music. Oblivious. Sweet and oblivious to the New World ways.

“I love music,” Federico said and opened his eyes. “When I was a boy, minstrels and troubadours would visit our village from the spring through the summer. I would sit until my mother shooed me from the square—sometimes with a switch, yes?—and watch them play. The sounds. Ah, the sounds! Language is such a poor substitute. You see?”

Danny shook his head. “I’m not sure.”

Federico pulled his chair closer to the table and leaned in. “Men’s tongues fork at birth. It has always been so. The bird cannot lie. The lion is a hunter, to be feared, yes, but he is true to his nature. The tree and rock are true—they are a tree and rock. Nothing more, but nothing less. But man, the only creature who can make words—uses this great gift to betray truth, to betray himself, to betray nature and God. He will point to a tree and tell you it is not a tree, stand over your dead body and say he did not kill you. Words, you see, speak for the brain, and the brain is a machine. Music”—he smiled his glorious smile and raised his index finger—“music speaks for the soul because words are too small.”