Matías closed his eyes. "Déjala. Some things must fly free."
Fin.
Matías had found it forty years ago but kept it secret. Now, the diocese wanted to digitize relics. He had promised to deliver the score by dawn.
Inside, the paper was the color of dried corn husks. The ink had faded to sepia, but the notes were still there—intricate, furious, tender. Lucero gasped. "This is... the complete coro? The missing modulation before 'Por guardar ese emblema divino'?" himno nacional de honduras partitura
But he had one last task.
High in the dusty attic of the cathedral, beneath a fallen rafter, lay a box marked with the seal of the National Autonomous University of Honduras, 1904. Inside was a rumor—a manuscript copy of the original partitura for the "Himno Nacional de Honduras," arranged by the composer Carlos Hartling himself. Not the simplified, modern transcriptions that schoolchildren memorized, but the true orchestral score: seven sweeping stanzas of defiance, the storm of the cornet, the tenderness of the cello weeping for the pine forests and the lost Lenca kingdoms.
With trembling fingers, he took the third page—the one where the horns rise like a mountain wind. He hummed the bar: "India virgen y hermosa dormías..." His voice cracked, but Lucero joined in, her young soprano lifting the notes into the cold air. Matías closed his eyes
Old Professor Matías Linares knew he was dying. Not from the cough that had rattled his chest for three months, but from the silence. For sixty years, he had directed the choir of San Miguel de Comayagua. Now, his hands trembled too much to hold a baton, and his lungs collapsed before the first verse of "Tu bandera es un lampo de cielo."
But Lucero climbed a rickety chair, rescued the sheet, and pressed it into his hands. "No, abuelo. We frame this. We play it, on Independence Day. For everyone."
The attic stairs groaned. His granddaughter, Lucero, a music student from Tegucigalpa, climbed up with a flashlight. "Abuelo, ¿estás bien?" Matías had found it forty years ago but kept it secret
He pointed to the box. "Abre con cuidado."
Matías nodded, smiling. "Hartling wrote it for a full philharmonic. But presidents wanted a shorter anthem. They cut the soul out."