How deeply she saw, Malena. Suddenly it seemed to Flaca that Malena hid an ocean inside her, depths never spoken, full of slippery wakeful things.

It seemed, at times, that this was the only way the world would be remade as the heroes had dreamed: one woman lifts another woman, and she in turn lifts the world.

I could have swallowed all the buildings in this city, could have swallowed anything, the sky, a corpse, a lie, a truth, the sea. I was starved for something that had no name.

She’d seen her mother, her sisters, watched the way they wrapped their days around their men, the way it worked, a code she’d always known she’d avoid for her own life, who wanted it? what was the point? It wasn’t worth having a man no matter how much people mocked you for lacking one.

Maybe everyone bore the wounds, no matter what had or hadn’t happened to them; maybe they were all part of the same vast, bruised body in the shape of a nation. A body groping for the slightest illusions of safety.

A music born among children of slaves is like an orphan: it will never know its real parents, will never hear the full visceral story of its birth.

As if music could be crushed like a condemned building or a stubborn anarchist. But it could not. It always rose and returned, vital, immense, fortified by new instruments, new shapes, new musicians crazy enough to give their lives to it like underground, unsanctioned priests.

I want to believe in prophecies more than policies. I want to listen to poets rather than pollsters.

She didn’t mind the sacrifice. It seemed enough for a life, to give yourself to music the way nuns give themselves to God. To vow. To surrender. Only music, after all, made life bearable. Only with music did she feel – what was it? Free? Happy? No, it was something else. Awake.

Husbands. People crazy enough to think that washing their boxers and cooking their food and listening to their boring rants for the rest of your life would make you happy.