Radio Silence

Nuria had discovered the show by accident, the way you discover most things worth keeping. She had been looking for something, anything, in English that was not a podcast about productivity, and the algorithm had offered her a late-night phone-in from Auckland called Night Owls with Hemi Walker. It went out from ten at night until two in the morning, New Zealand time, which in Seville, in January, meant ten in the morning until two in the afternoon. She listened at her kitchen table, with coffee, while the rest of the city went to work.

For the first two weeks she understood perhaps half of it. Hemi had a voice like warm gravel and spoke quickly, and the callers were worse. The vowels seemed to have been shuffled: a man who said he had been out for fish and chips sounded to her as if he had said something else entirely, and "yes" came out somewhere close to "yis". People went to the bach for the weekend, wore jandals to the shop and finished their sentences with "sweet as", which never seemed to be followed by anything.

So Nuria did what her English teacher had once told her to do and stopped trying to catch every word. She listened for the stressed syllables, the ones that carried the meaning, and let the little words wash past her. She guessed from context. A bach, she worked out, had to be some kind of vacation cottage, because people were always driving to one and complaining about the plumbing. Jandals were obviously something you wore on your feet in summer. She was right about both, and the small thrill of being right kept her listening.

Then, one Thursday in late January, a woman called June called in. She sounded old, perhaps eighty, and a little shy. She said she had been trying for years to identify a song, a lullaby her mother used to sing to her when she was small. Her mother had come to New Zealand after the war, on a ship from somewhere in Europe, and had never spoken about where she was from. "I only remember a bit of it," June said. "It went something like this." And in a thin, careful voice she sang four or five words.

Before Hemi could reply, there was a click, and then nothing. Radio silence. "Looks like we've lost June," he said gently. "June, if you're listening, give us a ring back, eh?" She didn't. For the rest of the night, listeners phoned in with theories. One was sure it was Italian. Another said it was Greek, or possibly Croatian. A man from Hamilton insisted it was a nursery rhyme from Yorkshire, sung with a bad cold. Nobody agreed, and by two in the morning the show had moved on to a debate about the best pie in the country.

Nuria had not moved on. Something in those four or five words had snagged in her memory, like a thread caught on a nail. That afternoon, when the episode appeared online, she played June's call again. Then again, at three quarters of the speed. Then a dozen more times, with her eyes shut, ignoring the accent and listening only to the shape of the melody and where the stresses fell. On the fifteenth listen she put down her cup so suddenly that coffee spilled across the table.

It was not Italian, or Greek, or anything from Yorkshire. It was a la nanita nana, nanita ea, a lullaby her own grandmother had sung to her in an apartment above a bakery in Triana. June had sung it the way a child remembers a sound she was never taught to spell, and with an accent from the other side of the world, but the tune was unmistakable. The words, Nuria realized, had been carried across two oceans and seventy years without anyone knowing what they meant.

She wrote to the show that night, rewriting the email four times because she was terrified of making a mistake in front of a whole country. She explained what the song was, wrote out the words, and added, a little apologetically, that she was only a listener from Spain who was trying to improve her English. Then she waited. A week went by. She began to suspect that the email had gone straight into a folder that nobody ever opened.

The following Thursday, ten minutes into the show, Hemi cleared his throat. "Now, a couple of weeks ago we had a call from June, who was trying to find a song her mum used to sing. Well, we got a lot of guesses. But we got one email from a woman in Seville, in Spain, who reckons she's cracked it." He read Nuria's email aloud, every word, including the apology. Nuria sat at her kitchen table with her hands over her mouth.

And then June called back. She had been listening, she said; she always listened. Her voice was shaking. Her mother, she explained, had always said she was from Gibraltar, which was close enough to Spain that June had never wondered. But she had never once heard her mother speak Spanish. "Not one word," June said. "Except in that song." There was a long silence on the line, and this time nobody hung up.

Hemi asked whether June would like to say anything to the listener in Seville. June thought for a moment. Then, slowly, in an accent that made Nuria laugh and cry at the same time, she said, "Gracias." Nuria emailed the show again that evening, offering to help June look for her mother's name in old records. This time, she rewrote it only once.