As a little boy, I found the storms disorienting. My brother was thrilled by the coins they uncovered and the feathers they brought on the swirling sand. Once he even found a soldier’s boot, which became the prize of his collection stuffed in the cracks of the wall. For me, though, the sandstorms obstructed my beauties. Each clear night, I stole from my bed and onto the roof to admire them. My parents must have known, but they closed their eyes to my habits. As long as I learned my lessons in the morning, my mother did not object. One night I had stayed up nearly till dawn watching shooting stars pierce the summer sky. The second time I complained or poked my brother, my mother fixed me with a stern eye and warned me that my nocturnal choices were not permitted to interfere with my daily work. While Salvi begged to know what nocturnal meant, my mother asked me if that was clear. Desperate to continue my rapture, I agreed, stifling both a yawn and the impatience that comes with fatigue. Where my brother moaned over our mother’s insistence on our afternoon rest when the sun bleached the world diamond-white, I learned to fall into deepest sleep the instant my head touched my bed. This way I found I gained an extra hour with my beauties.
“That one there, Melchi, is a lion. Can you see it?”
Uncle Taz indicated the stars with his pipe. It took imagination to see the shapes he described, especially because for me it had been about the dance, the play of stars across the sky. The red one that came and went in the spring. The brightest one over the horizon. The unmoving one like a navel on the canopy. I could not quite see what he meant. So, Uncle Taz went down to his room and lumbered back up with a stylus and a board. He was a merchant who sold the rugs my father made, throughout the world. Several times a year, he would return with his caravan empty, full of stories of the places he had seen, the exotic foods he had eaten and the women he had known. At this point, my mother quickly silenced him before Salvi and me. He also came with great bags of money. The first evening he came, my father and he would sit long into the night, sorting coins into their own kinds and calculating the profits and sales with the help of Uncle Taz’s stylus and board. Uncle Taz was a good merchant. I could tell that. His brown eyes were warm, honest, and full of fun. Salvi worshipped Uncle Taz and was spellbound by the coins. Every time one fell off the table, Salvi would leap to collect it, claiming he could not find it, all the time concealing it in his robes. Uncle Taz allowed him to have one, and then would wrestle the others from the nephew whose delight knew no bounds at this play. Then our father would clear his throat and Taz would grunt as we pulled him to his feet again. I always held back from the tussle, but I liked it nonetheless.