The voice in the middle

Nobody walks out of Mass humming the alto line. People take home the melody, which belongs to the sopranos, and perhaps the bass of don Isauro, which rumbles through the pews like a delivery truck. Our part, the altos' part, sits in the middle: filling in, holding up, making the chord sound whole without anyone quite knowing why. I have been singing there for eighteen years and it still seems to me a very comfortable place to be in the world.

The choir rehearses on Thursdays at half past seven in a room behind the sacristy, with plastic chairs in assorted colors and a harmonium someone donated in the seventies, two of whose keys no longer sound. Maestro Efrén, who was directing the choir before I arrived, knows the dead keys by heart and plays around them, the way you swerve around a pothole that has been on the same street for years. There are fourteen of us when everyone shows up, which is almost never.

Learning not to hear yourself

When I joined, it was very hard. I came from singing alone in the kitchen, where all of us sing the melody, and suddenly I had to hold a line that sounded like no song at all. They seated me next to doña Chela, a soprano since she was fifteen, and the moment she opened her mouth I would chase her voice like a dog after a bicycle. Maestro Efrén would stop, look at me over his glasses and say: "Valentina, you are not an echo." I felt like never coming back.

I came back because my mother told me that the first time she made tortillas she burned every one of them, which is not a musical argument, but it worked. Over the years I learned a trick nobody taught me: covering one ear with my hand, discreetly, as if adjusting an earring. That way I hear myself from the inside and don't get lost. Now I see the new members doing the same and I say nothing; everyone finds her own earring.

Saturday's wedding

Last Saturday we sang at a wedding. Weddings bring a little money into the choir fund, which this year will go toward fixing those two keys. The couple had asked for Schubert's Ave Maria and, for the recessional, a Juan Gabriel song, which Maestro Efrén arranged for four voices with a look of such resignation that we laughed through three rehearsals in a row.

Halfway through the Ave Maria, the soprano who was to sing the solo lost her voice. A June cold, the kind that arrives with the first rains. There was one terrible second when the harmonium carried on alone. And then doña Chela, without anyone asking, took up the melody, and we altos settled in underneath her the way you settle into a familiar bed. Nobody in the pews noticed. The bride cried, but I think she had been crying since before.

On the way out, while people threw rice, Lupita, who sings beside me, said: "Nobody could tell, right?" And that is exactly what those of us in the middle do: make sure nobody can tell. I walked home along Macedonio Alcalá with my heels in my hand and the Juan Gabriel song stuck in my head, in my part, the one nobody is ever going to hum.