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A father with a heavy heart chooses to leave his home in pursuit of a miracle. But will he find what he is looking for, or only trickery?
Fiction
Speculative
Every forty-five days, or forty-six if it rained, Beppo led his goat down the pebbly path into town, to sell a cart of onions in the square and to collect whatever news there was of the son who was dead to him.
But a commotion today on the outskirts of town diverted him from his usual course. Where the path passed through an old wooden gate, a group of people had gathered around a performance wagon. Such wagons passed intermittently through the towns of Tajul on the main road. The wagons came from Azoral in the east, and were painted in the bright colors of the desert lands. When performers were in town, Beppo always enjoyed stopping to watch the jugglers, the acrobats, the musicians, and plays both comical and serious.
But today’s performance ended just as Beppo arrived. As he approached, the doors of the wagon slid shut and he heard the jingle of the horses’ reins and the creak of the wide wheels as they began to turn. Of the performers, Beppo saw only a woman’s graceful brown arm waving from a side window and two tall, lean bodies hopping up onto the running board of the wagon as it began to roll away down the grassy track toward the main road through the town.
The townspeople who remained assembled were talking excitedly and pointing at the retreating wagon. “What happened?” Beppo asked a woman.
She pointed toward a man wearing a quilted green hat, who stood in the crowd cradling his left arm at the elbow. “They healed Nolo,” she said.
“He fell from there,” said a boy, pointing at the overhanging branches of a nearby tree. “Broke his arm. Snapped it like a chicken bone.”
The woman shook her head sympathetically. “He only wanted to see the performance.”
“Then this performance woman came out of the wagon,” said a man with a gray beard. “She walked over, pulled up Nolo’s sleeve—”
“Everybody here, we all saw it,” said the woman, growing more animated and motioning with both hands. “The bone was sticking out. How he didn’t pass out I’ll never know.”
“—and then,” continued the man with the beard, “this performance woman put her hands on Nolo’s arm, and just like that, his arm was healed, like it never happened.”
Beppo nudged his goat forward into the crowd, to where the man with the green hat stood repeatedly bending his arm at the elbow, while describing for onlookers how it had felt when the performance woman from Azoral had laid hands on his broken arm. “It twinkled like stars,” he was saying.
“Show us,” said a boy. Then the man in the green hat lifted a torn and bloody sleeve to show an arm that was whole and undamaged.
The crowd continued as before—some talking and some shouting, and all exclaiming their astonishment at this wonder. Quietly, Beppo led his goat away from the crowd of strangers and back toward the path. And all that morning and all that afternoon, as he sold his onions in the main square of the town, he felt that his heart was breaking open with hope.
It was late in the afternoon when Beppo tethered the goat to a small tree outside of Ivo’s house and let himself in. Heavy curtains blocked out the sun, and the rich smell of burning hoy leaves filled the room. When his eyes adjusted, Beppo saw the older man motioning to him through the smoke. “Come and sit at my table, cousin,” said the man, “and we will talk a while.”
Beppo sat on a cushion of aged and faded silk before a low table. “Business was good today,” he said.
“I’m glad to hear it.” Ivo puffed on a glass pipe for some time, until finally he said, “There’s news. Your son reports that he’s hungry. He’s had to take employment on the estate of a wealthy foreigner.”
“Oh?”
“It’s come to it now, Beppo. Hard times.” Ivo puffed with concentration on the pipe, then passed it to his cousin.
Beppo took the pipe but did not touch it to his lips. “Did he say what he does there?”
“He feeds pigs,” said Ivo, and he burst into laughter.
Beppo did not laugh. “That’s something worse than I imagined.”
Ivo dismissed Beppo’s concern with a wave of his hand. “It’s good news, cousin. In hardship young men learn hard lessons. Just wait. Before the year ends, you’ll find your son at your door again.”
Beppo looked down at the pipe in his hands. “A performance wagon is in town today, from Azoral. They healed a man with a broken arm, over by the mountain gate. Did you hear?”
“Actors,” said Ivo. “Entertainers.”
“No, this was different. People say there’s a new medicine in Azoral.”
“What people say this, cousin?”
Beppo did not answer. He took a small puff from the pipe and passed it back to Ivo. The older man dumped the ashes from the pipe into a black ceramic bowl, and with a pinch of hoy taken from a similar, white bowl, he refilled the pipe. “You have other children besides the wayward Anedu. How is Luid?”
“Full of high-minded notions and stubborn as an ox.”
“First-born sons can be like that. And your daughter, how is she?”
“Ah, well. Linza embroiders all day—beautiful, complicated designs. She’s become very skilled, with nothing to do all day but sit and stitch.”
Ivo nodded solemnly. An illness had struck Beppo’s daughter in infancy, and left her tiny feet twisted and mangled. She was ten years old now, and had never walked. “I am proud of my young cousin’s skill,” said Ivo.
“Next time,” said Beppo, “I’ll bring you a vest, or a hat and gloves, in payment for keeping correspondence with my rebellious son. You know I won’t receive letters from him myself. He’s dead to me.”
Ivo lit the pipe. “Is that so? Your son’s already lost his youthful pride, and I think you’ll forgive him when you see him. Then you’ll be able to drop this act. The part of the hard-hearted father doesn’t suit you.”
The two men sat silently for some time, passing the pipe back and forth, until at last Beppo stood. “I must be going. The path is steep, and the goat loses his footing when it’s dark.”
“The goat does?”
Beppo ignored the remark. He walked to the door and put his hand on the latch.
“Come back in forty-five days,” said Ivo. “Likely I will have more good news for you.”
Beppo bowed his head slightly, and then went out into the cool air of the fading day, where the goat was happily eating grass.
A hundred times Beppo had tried to make Luid understand, and a hundred times he’d failed. Luid was now pacing back and forth in the tiny kitchen. “Papa, you cannot believe this!”
Beppo leaned forward in his chair and put his elbows on the table. He would try for the hundred and first time. “Listen to what I’m telling you. Those healers possess great knowledge. I’ve seen what they can do.”
“They’re performers, Papa. They take coins for shows.”
“That man who fell out of the tree—there was nothing special about him, nothing to make you think he deserved to be healed.”
“He was an actor,” said Luid. “Like the rest of them. Part of the show.”
“I saw his arm.”
“So?”
“So why not Linza? Why should she not go to the healers’ wagon?”
Luid stopped pacing and turned to face his father. “Linza can’t go down the mountain!”
“She can! She’s been to town before.”
“As a baby. You carried her on your shoulders. How will you bring her to town?”
“I’ll bring her in the cart.”
“The onion cart? You’re joking! Linza’s a girl. You think she’s going to want to ride to town in a stinking onion cart?”
Beppo took one deep, stiff breath, as if to mend his injured pride.
“And how will you bring her back home?” asked Luid. “You can’t pull the cart back up the mountain with her inside, not even you and your goats pulling together.”
“Aren’t you listening? Linza will walk up.”
“You can’t seriously think...” Luid threw his hands up in exasperation.
“Luid, I am still your father, and I will make the decisions in this family.”
“They’re going to want money, you know that?”
“If they will heal Linza, I’ll give them every coin I own.”
“Every coin, you mean, except the ones you gave my brother.”
Beppo pointed a stern finger at Luid. “Do not talk to me about Anedu!”
Luid stomped across the kitchen and forcefully pulled open the old door of scratched and dented metal. Then he turned one last time toward his father, and said, “Crazy old man.” Then he went outside, letting the door slam shut behind him.
After he had gone, Beppo sat at the table for many long minutes, praying for a remedy for Linza’s feet, so that she could walk, for Anedu’s heart, so that he would come home, and for Luid’s mind, so that he would see his father’s reason.
On that bright morning a year earlier when Anedu left home, taking with him one hundred and ten silver coins—one third of Beppo’s fortune, which Anedu said belonged to him—Beppo stood facing Anedu on the pebbly walkway outside the house, and in the presence of his family, Beppo made the sign of disinheritance, covering his heart with both hands and saying as he did so, “You are dead to me.” But Anedu smirked, and turned his shoulder to his father, and went off in the direction the mountain path.
Beppo went into his house then, and without stopping to speak to his other children, he went directly to his private sleeping room, and began writing a letter. The letter began with the words My Son Anedu, and in this letter Beppo told the story of his own childhood in the same mountain village, where Oliana also lived, who would later become Beppo’s wife and mother to Luid, Anedu and Linza.
In the days and weeks that followed, Beppo would remember something else, some other event or connection between events, that he wanted Anedu to know, and he would take out the letter and add to his story. Now, a year later, the letter was long, and in places it was smudged and torn from use, but it was still not finished.
Tonight Beppo took out the letter again, and wrote about the performance wagon he had seen that day, and about his plan to bring Linza to town in the onion cart.
As it turned out, Linza loved the idea of going to town, even though she must have known that she and her father were a strange and comical sight. Beppo had outfitted the cart with a canopy to protect Linza from strong sun and light rain. The goat who pulled the cart wore a leather harness with jingling bells. To ease the jolting and bouncing of the ride down the mountain, Beppo had placed seven cushions in the cart, and on these cushions Linza sat with her embroidery, looking like a small empress.
And Beppo was her court magician. He had tied a small leather pouch containing the family’s entire fortune of two hundred and twenty silver coins around his waist, and to conceal this from the sharp, wandering eyes of thieves, he had tied over it a long sky-blue sash embroidered with tiny white stars. In his left hand Beppo carried a tall walking stick with a sprout of red and green hoy leaves attached to the top, so that it looked exactly like a wizard’s staff.
And Beppo carried one other thing besides. In the pouch, resting like an amulet beneath the coins, was his unfinished letter to Anedu.
The morning dawned bright and beautiful when Beppo and his young empress set off on the path. And all the way down to the foot of the mountain and toward the town, Beppo told his daughter stories of the land of Azoral, of the fanciful customs of the people, and the fantastical performance wagons that traveled the highways of the world. “Wait and see,” he told her. “The wagons are painted sky-blue and gold, and the wheels are crusted with the flakes of gemstones.”
At mid-morning Beppo and Linza entered the town through the mountain gate. “See there, Linza?” Beppo said, pointing. “That’s the place it happened. And that’s the tree.”
They stopped and asked a woman washing clothes in a basin outside a nearby house if she had seen a performance wagon the day before. The woman looked at Beppo and Linza, momentarily startled, and then said, “No wagons around here yesterday, sir.”
“Yes, there was one. They healed a man,” said Beppo.
The woman shrugged. “I didn’t hear about that,” she said, and went back to her washing. And so Beppo and his daughter continued on their way.
They entered the center of town like an empress with her wizard, so that everywhere people stopped to look at them, and children yelled after them. But of all the townspeople they asked, no one had any information about the performance wagon of the day before. Finally, in the busy market square, they met a man who looked them up and down and then told them—confidently—that yes, indeed, he had seen the very wagon.
“And they healed a broken bone,” said Beppo.
“Yes, yes, they healed a little boy’s leg, wasn’t that it?”
Beppo wanted to tell the man, No, that wasn’t it. It was an arm they healed, but suddenly the man said, “They left town last night. They’re gone.”
“Gone where?” asked Beppo.
“To Neugus, next town down the road.”
Beppo thanked the man and gave him a coin. And because day was bright and still new, and because the next town was barely seven miles to the west—or nine—along the main road through Tajul, Beppo thought that they could—and told Linza that they should—leave on the main road immediately, and go west to Neugus.
And Linza, who had never traveled from home before, did not know how far seven or nine miles was, and so she was content to sit in the bouncing cart and listen to her father’s incredible stories for a while longer.
The miller’s family stood watching the great wheel of the mill turn in the swiftly flowing water. Only the wife turned at Beppo’s shout, and went to meet Beppo and Linza as they approached from the road.
Beppo held out two silver coins. “Food, ma’am, if you can spare it. For me and my daughter. And a place to rest a while out of the sun.” The miller’s wife looked at Linza in her canopied cart, then at the small goat. Then she tucked Beppo’s coins into a pocket of her apron and went into the house.
Beppo and Linza went the rest of the way to the stream where the mill turned. “Did you folks see a performance wagon?” asked Beppo.
The miller turned, as if noticing Beppo for the first time. “We saw one.”
The miller’s daughter nodded. “A magical wagon. With jewels on the wheels.”
“The water was almost dried up,” said the miller’s son. “Then a wagon came through here, and the man held his hands over the stream.”
Beppo looked at the stream. Fish swam in the clean, swift water. “When?”
“This morning,” said the miller’s son.
The miller’s wife returned with a basket of cold chicken and boiled potatoes and invited Beppo and Linza to sit at a table under the trees. “My regrets, ma’am,” said Beppo. “My daughter can’t walk.”
The miller’s family turned their heads toward Linza.
“Oh!” exclaimed the miller’s daughter. “It’s why you’re chasing after the wagon, is it? I have something you might like to see.” And with that she rushed into her house.
“Go to Neugus,” said the miller’s son. “They can’t have gone far.”
After a moment the miller’s daughter returned carrying a small bird in a cage. “They fixed him,” she told Beppo, opening the cage door. “His wing was broken. Now look.” The bird flew out and perched on Beppo’s finger. Its left wing was flecked with tiny gold spots, like glitter. “He’s better than he was before,” said the miller’s daughter. “He’s prettier.”
Beppo and Linza ate their meal in the shade, and rested, while the bird with gold-flecked wings flitted back and forth in the branches of the tree above them. Then the miller walked Beppo and Linza back to the road, where he bid them good-bye, and good luck. “The water in the mill stream,” he told Beppo as he turned to go. “There were never fish like that before.”
At the one-mile post outside of Neugus, Beppo and Linza found a beggar leaning on his crutches. “Pardon me,” said Beppo. “Did you see a performance wagon pass this way?”
The man waved a crutch in the air. “Vagabonds,” he said. “Tricksters and thieves.”
Beppo looked at the man’s twisted knees. “But didn’t they stop to help you, when they saw?”
“Oh, they stopped alright. But I told them, 'Get going, get going.'”
“Why?”
“Thieves,” said the man.
Beppo pressed a coin into the man’s hand, and he and Linza continued on their way.
Linza complained now that she was hungry and tired and sore, and in spite of Beppo’s stories about magical animals and rivers made of honey, she was soon crying. Beppo was at a loss for new stories, and was hurrying toward the town when he saw the trees, dozens of them, all bearing their different fruits although it was not the season for fruit. “Look, Linza,” he said. “Apricots and cherries and—do I see peaches?”
Linza wiped the tears from her cheeks, and pointed. “Look, Papa!” Flying among the trees were dozens of blue and red birds with wings that looked like they were made of gold.
Neugus was a disappointment. Most people eyed them suspiciously and hurried away when Beppo tried to speak to them. Of those people who did stop to hear Beppo’s question, no one knew anything about a wagon from Azoral whose performers healed men and birds and streams of water. It was late now, and Beppo paid eighteen silver coins for a room in an inn, six coins for supper for himself and Linza, and another coin to put the goat in the stable for the night.
The innkeeper knew nothing about any wagons, but his wife thought that she might have overheard in the market, or else at the bakery, that a woman who lived somewhere near the town was now drawing water from a well which had been dry only the day before. The innkeeper scoffed. “Water from a well,” he said, “What a wonder.”
And so night came, and Linza slept in a bed of straw, while Beppo took out his letter to Anedu, and with a bottle of ink that the innkeeper had sold him for three coins, he wrote about Oliana. The same illness that all those years ago had struck the infant Linza in her cradle had come upon the child’s mother, too. Oliana had needed a doctor from town, but Beppo thought that the doctor’s fee of thirty silver coins was too high, and besides, he thought, the fever would pass.
Beppo and Linza left Neugus in the morning for the next town. They traveled on the road all morning, while Beppo told his daughter stories of a palace that floated among the clouds, and of a princess who traveled on the back of a flying tiger.
At noon they came to the top of a hill and stopped at a small shrine. Inside, they found hundreds of candles burning and a monk in blue robes kneeling at prayer. The monk paused in his prayers to tell them that the previous night, foreigners traveling by wagon had visited the shrine and had lit the candles, and that the candles had burned all night without being consumed. Beppo left ten coins in a basket and he and Linza returned to the road.
As they descended the hill, they found on either side of them fields of yellow flowers, and blue butterflies that shone like silver in the sunlight. “We’re getting close now,” Beppo said. But they traveled slowly now, and Linza grew tired of her father’s stories, and tired of sitting in the cart, and she began to complain.
They arrived in Dagmar late, and found the town inhospitable. The people were hostile to the unusual appearance of Beppo and Linza, and would not speak to them except to call them thieves and foreigners and scheming magicians. Old women spit on the ground at Beppo’s feet, and bakers offered to sell them moldy bread. Innkeepers said that they had no rooms, only barns and stables, and for these they wanted to charge exorbitant prices.
In the end. Beppo was forced to pay fifty coins for a night’s shelter in a stinking barn. Linza cried, but Beppo told her not to worry, because tomorrow they would cross the river into the magnificent city of Chaldor, capital of Tajul, and they would surely find the performance wagon there. But Linza stayed scrunched in her cart, weeping, until finally she fell asleep curled like a baby on her seven cushions.
And as he had done the night before, Beppo continued writing his letter to Anedu. He wrote that things might have worked out differently for them if Anedu had not lost his mother so young. He told Anedu that he had made the decision that had seemed best at the time, and that he was sorry for his smallness and stinginess.
“Well?” said the young guard at the bridge. “You going to pay the toll today or tomorrow?”
The coins were gone—all of them, lost or stolen.
Just the night before, when Beppo put the letter to Anedu and the small jar of ink back in the pouch and lay down to sleep, all the remaining coins were accounted for. And now they were gone. In the pouch under the star-embroidered sash, Beppo found only the letter and the ink. He had come all this way, and now he did not even have the ten coins he needed to pay the toll to cross the bridge into Chaldor.
“I had…” Beppo began. “They must have taken them…while I slept…”
“No toll, no pass, old man.” The young guard raised the handle of his spear to Beppo’s chest, and pushed him back.
“Wait,” said an older guard. “The goat’s worth ten coins, easy.”
“What do you say?” said the young guard. “You feel inclined to sell your goat today?”
Beppo looked sadly at the goat. The animal had worked hard and walked far, and Beppo had thought to reward him once they got home. But now, with his savings gone and forward passage barred, the future looked uncertain. Beppo nodded at the older guard, who unfastened the goat from the cart and tethered him to a post on the bridge.
“Papa,” said Linza, “don’t leave him here.”
Without making eye contact with Linza, Beppo handed her his walking stick. “Hold this,” he told her. “You’ll need it for balance when you start walking.” Then he took the goat’s place at the front of the cart, lifted it on its poles, and pulled it behind him across the bridge.
For a man without a coin left in all the world, the river was a frontier of no-return, and crossing it was a wild act of faith. The city of Chaldor was bigger and more boisterous than any place Beppo had ever seen. The road which had become so familiar now dissolved into a grid of similar roads, all paved with stone and brick. People were everywhere, though none of them paid any special attention to Beppo and his daughter, despite their strange appearance. And of all the people he asked, most knew nothing of the performance wagon that had traveled from Azoral, bringing healing where it passed.
Some few knew of healers, though, and told of wonders they witnessed themselves, or heard of.
A few others dismissed the notion altogether, insisting that so-called healers were really just tricksters, and that other, simple causes restored the sickly and the dying to health. One of these—a woman who laughed at Beppo’s belief in healers—nevertheless looked with compassion on Beppo, with his blistering hands, and Linza, with her maimed feet, and she told Beppo that poor travelers in Chaldor could find shelter and food at the almshouse.
While Linza rested on her assigned cot in the women’s dormitory, Beppo followed an old nun through the sprawling complex of buildings that made up the almshouse. Sister Mila walked briskly, her hands tucked in the loose sleeves of her robe. Beppo had to trot to keep pace with her. “This is the dining room,” she told him as they hurried through. “Be here on time or you won’t eat.”
“Can you tell me…” began Beppo.
Sister Mila pushed open the door and led Beppo outside. “Don’t worry about your child. She is perfectly safe in the dormitory. Now here are the gardens. We all assist with the chores at this house.”
“My daughter is…”
“She will work, too, in whatever capacity she can. She can help the cook, perhaps…”
“Of course she will work. What I mean to say is, I came here for her sake, because she can’t walk.”
Sister Mila stopped walking and looked blankly at Beppo.
“Do you know if there are performance wagons in the city?” he asked.
“There are. They stay at the almshouse by the dozens. New ones arrive almost every day. If your child wishes to see the wagons, take her to the courtyard in the hour before dusk,” she said, and then she resumed her tour.
In was nearing sunset when Beppo and Linza finished their meal and their chores, and were able at last to leave the heat and noise of the almshouse and go out into the courtyard. Linza sat in her cart, which Beppo pulled with bandaged hands, and they wandered up and down the rows of performance wagons.
And they saw tricksters and entertainers. Men with painted faces juggled bottles and balls. Women turned back flips and walked on their hands. Dancers twirled and spun, and actors practiced their lines.
“Papa,” said Linza, “where are the healers?”
Beppo selected a wagon—a sky-blue one with brass handles and shiny flecks of metal and colored glass on the wheels that glittered like gemstones. He plucked up his courage, and leaving Linza in her cart at the edge of the pebbly track between the rows of wagons, he approached a performer who sat alone, plucking at the strings of a small guitar, with his back to Beppo. “Sorry to intrude, sir,” said Beppo. “My daughter and I, we’re looking for someone who might help us.”
The man turned around, and for a moment Beppo’s heart forgot to beat, and his lungs to breathe.
“Papa?” said Anedu.
Beppo’s mind was as overcome as his heart, and he could think of only one thing to say to his son. “I thought you were feeding pigs.”
“How did you know…?” Anedu put the guitar down and stood before his father. “I fed pigs. Now I do this,” he said.
“Tricks? Performances? Acts?”
“Yes, Papa. I perform acts.”
“I heard that hardship came to you. I heard that you worked for a master, and that you disliked it.”
“Ivo told you, did he? It’s true, Papa. I hated the work. But what came of it was…”
Beppo stepped forward and embraced his son. “Anedu, I never meant for her to die. I loved your mother. You must believe that.”
“Papa, I know.”
“With a few coins, I could have paid a doctor to save her.”
“I don’t blame you for that, Papa. And it is I who must ask for your forgiveness.”
“Papa?” said Linza, but Beppo did not hear his daughter.
“I learned from it, Anedu. I spent all my savings to come here. I lost every coin. It’s for Linza’s sake that I came, looking for the healers’ wagon.”
“That took a lot of faith,” said Anedu. “And look there, Linza is…”
“Papa?” said Linza.
“But now,” Beppo said to his son, “I don’t believe anymore. I came so far, but here there are only jugglers and dancers and acrobats.”
“Papa,” said Anedu, “there’s more here than you see…”
“Papa?” said Linza.
Beppo turned. Behind him, at the edge of the pebbly track where he left Linza in her cart, the child now stood on two healthy, perfectly formed feet. She was leaning for balance on Beppo’s walking stick, and she wore a smile such as Beppo had never seen before.
“Linza! But how…?” Beppo’s eyes moved from Linza, to the performers from Anedu’s wagon, who stood all around her, and then finally to Anedu.
“It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” said Anedu. “All of us you see here—in Azoral, we worked for the same master. He was the greatest physician in the land, and he practiced a great medicine.”
“He trained you?”
“No, Papa. He healed us.”
Tears came quickly to Beppo, but understanding came more slowly. He looked at the performers.
A slender boy said, “I was deaf from birth, and mute. Now I act and sing.”
A juggler with a painted face said, “I was blind.”
A woman dancer with long graceful arms said, “And I could not walk any more than your daughter could.”
“Our master is wealthy,” said the singer. “He sends his wagons into foreign lands. The price of our healing is that we go with the wagons, and heal others as we have been healed.”
“But you’re tricksters.”
The juggler said, “We are that, too. And to many people that’s all we will ever be.”
“But Anedu,” said Beppo, “you were born perfect, and beautiful like your mother. What healing did you require?”
“You already know the answer to that, Papa. You pronounced it yourself, before the whole family. But even before that day, I was already dead.”
“And now you are alive again.” Understanding dawned on Beppo then, and he blinked. “Anedu,” he said, “I have a letter for you.”
Beppo and Linza rode back in the performance wagon. At the toll bridge, they located the guards they had met when they crossed the first time, and they bought back the goat for twenty silver coins.
As much as possible, the wagon stayed outside of the towns and kept to the road. And along the way, Beppo and Linza witnessed tricks both entertaining and miraculous, until they arrived finally at the wooden gate at the bottom of the mountain path, where Beppo had seen the first healing, and there they parted ways.
Anedu remained with the wagon and did not in fact return to his father’s door, as Ivo had predicted. But he was restored to life, and to his father’s heart, and this was a great miracle.
Luid was standing at the top of the path when he saw Linza walking up—and hopping and skipping a bit, too—followed by the goat, and then Beppo with his walking stick. And though it was hard for him, Luid did admit, afterwards, that he was wrong.
Linza still embroidered from time to time—beautiful, complicated designs—but now she said that what she really wanted was to be a dancer.
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