Spiritual Choreographies

by Carlos Labbé

  “Fucking coward.”

  She tried to improve the soft consonants she used to pronounce that guttural—rabbit-like, it seemed to her—language, sitting on a gravestone, sipping from a glass one of the locals had given her. Or maybe that gravestone wasn’t just any gravestone, she thought, just as she heard someone say:

  “You’re sitting on His tombstone, love.”

  The other was approaching, coming down the path through the cemetery; he shook the water out of his short hair as he spoke. He knew that the vocalist wouldn’t be coming, that he had three years left to serve on his prison sentence; in any case, he’d promised him he would find a drummer for their band.

  The choreography needs a stage.

  He, the boy, walked behind the old mother.

  He wanted to hold her hand, which was like the earth where they went together to search for stones, on the slopes of the volcano, beyond the hill; that hand seemed within reach, but it was a fist, and he didn’t need the old mother to swat him away like a horsefly to keep him from taking it in his own.

  I, on the other hand, deliberately trace the story of a band, which appears to have been transformed into something soft, transparent, supple, polished, comfortable, into just the right amount of light so my pupils aren’t blinded and my eyelids can blink onto the screen dots and lines and marks that all of us know so none of us see.

  He, the boy, said something to the old mother to make her stop, to make her delay, to make her tell him which leaves to ask for and which not to take, how long to steep them, how long to wait, looking out at the sun, about where the night went, about the circular galloping, the sowing, the path, the first blows on a freshly strung drum, about whether they would come to him in his dreams too, and give him a new tree where he could plant his feet and run through the highest boughs.

  He, the boy, running through the neighborhood with his brother asked him where the old mother, the kawellu, the tree, the goats, the clay had gone. His twin looked at him with a smirk and kicked the black bags in the alley, grunting:

  “If you know, why ask.

  “If you have to ask it’s because you don’t understand where it is that we live now, that this is how you have to speak to enter the store and get a treat.

  “That you have to keep moving.

  “That they killed the old mother. That the old mother died alone. That your tree is now paper to wipe your ass with, that the goats were eaten by the security guards, and that the clay has been turned to sand to make the concrete of the shantytown’s new streets.”

  He, tired, couldn’t write the soundless words in the prison where they put him for killing his brother.

  I, on the other hand, have just the right amount of light so that my eyelids can blink open a page that’s no longer made of tree. Two hired nurses wake me if I start to drown in the hard clay.

  He, the boy, stopped on the road beside the old mother, who sang and danced in a single movement; he learned to do it too, without moving a muscle in his face, or mouth, or throat.

  He, the boy, realized just then that the hard clay of the volcano was suddenly a road, a flat tongue of earth, fine gravel for tires, clean and well lit by streetlights. At the hour when traffic came to a standstill, the old mother began to sing. Then came the rain, mud again, and out of the mud emerged shapes that hopped off toward the trees; frogs, hundreds of them, heading for his tree, before the wheels of the truck of the company arrived with the light of day.

  He, tired, could hear the old mother:

  “You can do what my mother and my mother’s mother, and her mother’s mother, and their mothers and fathers, and the eldest mothers and fathers, and the mothers of the eldest mothers and fathers did, but this place where they did it will no longer be here.

  “That doesn’t mean you cannot climb into the tree, pursue the blood of birds, or leap from the highest boughs onto the volcano, even if they try to make you believe that it’s just a mound of gravel, that the water belongs to a man, and that you’re nothing more than the wheelchair where you read, that supports and holds you upright, and the glass screen that turns your blinking eyes into words that can’t keep a secret.

  “The Band is where your Band has ended up.”

  I, on the other hand, sleep and make corrections without closing my eyes.

  9.

  CORRECTION

  The choreography needs a stage. Back then, the other had just turned fourteen. His mother was insistently calling to him from another room in the hotel suite, exclaiming with feigned enthusiasm that he should come, that the waves out in the cold sea had turned back into slugs, enormous and black, rushing in and washing over the coast, swallowing the locals. The other was muttering swear words he learned watching movies.

  Late that night, he woke up with a melody in his head, two bass lines in eighth and whole notes, that made him grab his keyboard, write down the notes, and repeatedly subject them to that automatic arpeggio. The ambassador, apoplectic, opened the door, walked over to the bed, and ripped the keyboard from his hands, asking in his always-monotone voice if he wasn’t ashamed for having woken his mother, who probably wouldn’t fall back asleep for the rest of the night. The other stayed in the dark, looking out the window, rabid, spitting at the faint silhouette of a face that took shape against the darkness and the rain, imagining it was the figure of the ambassador. But it was just his own reflection, and that made him so angry that he decided he was going to use the new underwear his mother had left him in the dresser drawer to wipe the mess of spit off the window. But he didn’t do it. He just opened the window and stood there for a while, looking out at the sea, and then it occurred to him that the waves did, in effect, look like slugs, absorbing the rain and rising, with impunity, to swallow anyone who might venture out along the seashore. It upset him that the same thing had occurred to his mother hours earlier—how unoriginal. Around eight in the morning, the ambassador interrupted his reverie, placing his hands on his shoulders as he spoke to him. The other couldn’t hear him and just watched his mouth moving, because the volume was turned all the way up on his headphones. He started laughing. His father tore off his headphones with a quick swipe. Listen up: he had thirty minutes to shower, shave, and get dressed. His suit was on the table. In thirty minutes, he repeated, the driver would come by to collect him and take him to the ceremony at the church. He and his mother had to leave earlier. The ambassador was a close friend of the general.

  The other shut himself in the bathroom until he heard his parents leave with a slam of the door, after having stood in the doorway for more than five minutes, giving him instructions. He found an umbrella, took the key to the suite, walked down the hallway, got in the elevator, and went down to the hotel’s first floor. He ordered an espresso at the bar and sat down in a leather armchair in the corner, settling in to watch the rain fall out on the water, while smoking a fat cigar he’d found in a suitcase. Behind the bar, a woman and two waiters were looking at each other, smiling, whatever words they spoke were inaudible. In the middle of the restaurant, a foreigner told his local companion that no, that nothing and nobody could get him to discuss his black hair in an interview, those grays had cost him too much grief decades back. Then, for long minutes, they ate clams in silence, a silence broken only to praise the quality of whatever wine they were drinking.

  As he looked out the window and noticed with unease that the waves had already taken the sidewalk across the street, as a distant echo asked what color was the sea, the other distinctly heard in his head the four bass lines that he’d transformed into a base rhythm on his keyboard, and to which he now added a pipe organ, a xylophone, and strumming, plus four gospel singers for the chorus, and the deep melody of a doom-metal guitar. And he began to hear certain words, lyrics that fifteen years later would be the opening lines on The Band’s first album; he began to hear the lyrics, yes, but not the voice that sang them. How was that possible? he was asking himself when, at the other table, the tourists interrupted his thoughts wit
h cries for more wine, more clams, another ashtray.

  It was becoming hard to tell if outside it was pouring rain or if the fog was just very dense, and then, arbitrarily, the light of a streetlamp blinked into existence. The other was able to make out a taxi pulling up along the curb and a girl getting out of it. Her arms barely managing to hold onto a rain-soaked stuffed animal of absurd dimensions. The other got to his feet, grabbed an umbrella, and ran out between the tables, down the hallway, through the hotel lobby, across the sidewalk and street, between the cars, behind the taxi. In the downpour and honking horns he was unable to find her. She had probably gone into one of the buildings along the avenue; he gave up. Just as he was bringing his eyes back down from the buildings, a man in athletic attire ran right into him. They brushed themselves off. Both swallowed a quick apology, exchanged nods. Then the man snatched the umbrella out of his hand and took off running, just as a wave rolled in and broke over the other.

  The choreography needs a libretto. He is not the other. She comes now with a cup of tea and strokes my hair in the same way that she takes a glass of wine and wraps her arms around the other in bed.

  I, on the other hand, can write a line of jacket copy for this autobiographical fiction that keeps no secrets, if morning comes in through the window, alights on my face, and dazzles me like the blind chicken that flaps around far away from the bonfire and turns to stone when caught in the headlights of a truck traveling down a dirt road in the night:

  “This book isn’t a story of excesses, betrayals, business negotiations, abandonments, alliances, accidents, and reunions.

  “The Band doesn’t begin when its members meet, but when each of them recognizes for the first time that they are the instrument of whoever is playing.”

  I am he. Not the other. My brother didn’t die when I stabbed him, the prison didn’t begin when I turned myself in, covered in blood, at the port’s third precinct. The volcano won’t turn into a hill even if a millennium of commerce consumes its slopes. The old mother lets them go to the city with the boys but not the girls; one night, when they got back, the chickens were hanging bloodless, and in the morning they found the kawellu gutted atop the gravel heap. In the end, the paper company comes and cuts down his tree along with millions of others; his tree, but not his brother’s tree, which adorns our office garden to this day.

  He, the star, bought that company and so many others: accordingly, I no longer have a hand resting on the bark of a tree, just my eyelashes pressing against the surface of a glass screen. In that city where he and his brother grew up, nothing grew. They ran, raging through the streets until one of them glimpsed the sea for the first time, until one of them touched snow for the first time, until one of them breathed in the jungle air for the first time. So his brother had to die too.

  I, on the other hand, let myself be sliced up repeatedly by the saw of electricity on stages in many different places that, nevertheless, were identical: lights on my face, on the other’s hands, on her torso, on the groins of the two bassists, on the feet of the masses come to dance with our vapor, our projections.

  I am he, no longer with any ability to turn my back on the smoke or the screen.

  He, the boy, stopped in front of the tongue of earth, where trucks were still passing by loaded with security guards, helmets, and machine guns, searching for the old mother. He stood at the edge of the stage. Hands pressed against the nape of his neck, he sustained a scream that didn’t require him to move a single facial muscle and that, at the same time, contorted those of the people who heard it. Because his tree was about to fall. I, paralyzed, correct this autobiography:

  “She is as important as the other, as the two bassists, as the masses called audience, because she’s blinded, like the old mother who disappears beyond the hills, in the direction of the volcano.”

  The Band is also I. It is my land even if I can no longer be there; a land, mine, made not of land, or metal, or glass.

  8.

  CORRECTION

  The choreography needs a libretto: Cueros was officially started in the summer of 1986, on a patio in the Santiago neighborhood of La Florida by a set of twins, children of a linotype operator and a nurse who worked at José Joaquín Aguirre hospital. Those were the days of Latin rock playing on the radio, but instead of hits by Upa!, Soda Stereo, GIT, the twins listened to tapes that a friend of their father, living in exile in Stockholm, sent to them, with songs by bands like the Chameleons, Television, and the Cocteau Twins.

  It was around that time, in high school, that his brother met his future wife, Sara, the sister of a popular performance artist, who a decade later became a set designer for nationally syndicated TV shows. Before long, the twins were regulars at Garage Matucana, where they heard the Electrodomésticos, Viena, and La banda del pequeño vicio play over and over. The twins made their first record on their home stereo: he played guitar and sang lead vocals; his brother played bass, sang vocal harmonies, and used the drum-machine feature on a toy keyboard that belonged to Sara’s little sister to create the beat. Cueros played Garage Matucana three times, with guest performances featuring Sara on recorder and Igor Rodríguez—of Aparato Raro—on synthesizer. Two songs they composed during that period were recorded professionally and included on the compilation, released by the Alerce label, Nuevo rock nacional, volumen 4.

  Alerce signed them on to record a full-length album. In October of 1987, La pieza de Sara was distributed in two popular record stores and sold an unexpected 330 copies, with zero promotional support beyond word of mouth. A manager, whose name is unknown, offers to represent them. Already distancing themselves from Garage Matucana, in the summer of 1988, the twins bring in Arturo Soto on drums and the Argentine Clemente Ferlosio on keyboards, who play multiple shows with them in discotecas up and down the central coast, culminating at the second annual Festival Free in Bellavista, where they share the stage with Aterrizaje Forzoso, Lambda, and—the headliner—Los Prisioneros.

  An Argentine tour at the end of the year coincides with the release of the Cueros second single, En el techo, onto the Buenos Aires airwaves. The magazine Cerdos y peces put it on their Song of the Month list. They toured the provinces on the other side of the Andes for four months and even crossed another border to do a show at a bar in Foz de Iguaçu. In the subsequent months, Arturo Soto leaves the band and the vocalist meets Dudú Branca, a fusion percussionist, playing with John McLaughin at the time, in Brasilia, and his brother marries Sara and takes a job as a producer for Sony Music Argentina.

  In April 1991, Cueros release the EP, La escalera de J, on Alerce, whose blank green cover—a nod to the vocalist’s recent conversion to Rastafarianism—was replaced at the last minute by a photograph of Copacabana in the summer. None of the Cueros albums, or those of the subsequent Sismos and Jim Nace, included any information beyond the production credits; of the twins, there only exists one tiny monochrome portrait that experts picked out in the collage depicting the recent electronic compilation of Gymnastics’s greatest hits. A second EP, from July of 1991, Las fotos reveladas, would be Cueros’ final record. On August 16th, they sign on with EMI for two albums and record a live performance of the single “Labiales y velas” for the TV show Undercriollo, on UCV-TV. Because of the variety of rhythmic and melodic references in their songs—60s British psychedelia, gringo Gospel, and New Wave, but also Jamaican rhythms, Peruvian Chicha, Old School East Coast Hip Hop, Brazilian tropicalia, the sunshine pop of the Beach Boys, Pehuenche ceremonial music, industrial postpunk, ambient, the anti-cuecas of Violeta Parra, and the jazz of Sun Ra—which, according to Argentine music critics, baffled the public, Cueros would have no doubt achieved a musical synthesis that would’ve gone on to animate the listless pop produced in the Southern Cone in the following decades, if it hadn’t been for that fatal August night in 1991, when the vocalist stabbed his twin brother.

  The choreography needs simultaneity. I close my eyes and repeat this continuously, for I have neither larynx, nor lips, nor pa
late with which to sing a word that remains hidden.

  He, in his prison, realized that the best way to shave, to look himself in the eyes, to pluck hairs, and to check for food in his teeth wasn’t with a mirror, which were prohibited; a guard had been stabbed and a tunnel dug with their sharp, broken points. He, in his prison, figured out that he could see his reflection in the window.

  I, on the other hand, blink and am not tired. I move my pupil, there’s no longer a ngürütrewa to follow with my eyes up the mountainside, while awaiting the right moment to steal the kawellu and bring it to the old mother on a rope, furious, kicking, just like her, to remove the hair from its belly, to hear it whinny with pride, to let it rest its muzzle against my leg instead of my neck.

  He, in his prison, was looking out the window at the hills. He guessed that the sun danced blue on those slopes because, in front of them, was a great body of water, because the ocean was right there. So the punishment was that he understood when people spoke to him of the sea, that he was even allowed to go to the window and stare out at its reflection, but that none of the windows had a view of the coast. He’d never seen the sea; he told the four men who came to rape him the place at the window was his and he wasn’t going to give it up.

  I, on the other hand, sit in front of a window that’s not transparent. A piece of glass that corrects me if I don’t dilate my pupil, opening new windows where neither hills nor what’s beyond the hills appears when I blink three times in a row; that alerts me when I need eye drops by reflecting a vein in my eyeball. She comes in and I see in the blankness of the screen how she kisses me, how she puts her hand on the nape of my neck, how in her language she sings to me.