The Apprentice's Masterpiece by Melanie Little Page B

do.”
    Señor didn’t know
that his slave could read.
Slaves don’t correct masters.
    He never found out
how wrong he was.

Mountains
    After more than a fortnight of walking
the real labor starts.
    The mountains are no longer distant.
Once we desired just to reach them.
Now we are in them, and
all tangled up in their tricks.
    It’s a contest between the wagons and men—
which moan the most going up the steep slopes?
    Sol laughs at us.
“Imagine,” he says, “how you’d have fared
six months ago! I was here, so I know.
    â€œThese roads we walk on? Not there.
Since that time, six thousand men
have been paving the way for your
precious feet!”
    Well, even with bridges and roads,
it’s hard work. The curves are sharp elbows.
It’s easy to slip. The spring rains were heavy,
and there have been floods.
My clothes have become so caked with mud,
they weigh at least twice what they did
when I took them (I shudder)
from the Christian’s corpse.
    And yet, for the first time in weeks,
I feel awake.
Perhaps work revives me.
Or maybe it’s just that these mountains
are filled with my abba —my father.
My first.

Mountains (2)
    He’d leave us to climb them, stay away long,
and then, happy day, he’d return.
His cart when he came would be brimming with snow,
packed in as tight as skin stretched on a drum.
    He always came down to a crowd.
The best men in Granada waiting for him.
The courtiers—even the emir himself—
bought up each flake of snow every time.
Some had fancy wives who bathed in it,
swearing it made them as young as their daughters.
Some topped it with raisins, ate it like candy.
Most used it to give longer life to their food.
    But no matter which grandees clamored around,
my abba would wait. He refused to remove
one bit of snow till he saw that I’d come.
    As people queued up for his wares,
he’d conjure the finest snow cone—all for me.
    Pure and plain was how I preferred it.
Nothing to muddy the clean, bracing flavor,
exactly the same as the mountain air’s taste
when sometimes it breezed by my bed.
    Only once in Cordoba did I taste that air.
I was out on the patio, watching the stars.
The air changed, just for a minute, and there
was the smell of the mountains.
    It was as if my first father, and I, had not left.

Why Not?
    Those long days of waiting
for abba’ s descent,
my mother and I learned to read
side by side.
    So many times had I stared at those scribbles,
wondering how men saw stories in them.
In Granada, writing is part of the world.
It’s not just in books. It graces the walls
of our homes and our mosques.
It is the way we talk to our God.
    Mother did washing for a poor scholar.
In exchange, he gave us one lesson each week.
These were just threads.
But we used them to make
a whole carpet. Learning one word
always leads to another.
    So when Raquel—my Cordoban mama—
said, “Women don’t read,” I asked her,
“Why not?” And she had no answer.
    Papa and Ramon echoed her, though.
“Women don’t read.” (Or had she echoed them?)
Females have poor heads for books,
so they said. I knew better.
    So during siestas when Papa was tired,
too tired for work on our project together,
Mama and I worked instead.
    We’d sit in the courtyard with what books
we could find. Even Plants of Castile .
I knew some Spanish, but not enough.
She helped with meanings.
Though sometimes we simply listened
to the music of words.
    We were, in that courtyard, shut off from the world.
But also, somehow, more in it than ever.
Gathering threads.

Ghosts
    One day my abba went up the mountain
and did not come back down.
Three snowfalls came and three snowfalls went.
His cart, even then, was not to be seen.
After four snows, a new man appeared.
He had a new cart.
And no word of my father.
So he said.
    The city forgot all about my abba .
He’d never been.
The townsfolk began to ignore us—
my mother