Spiritual Choreographies

by Carlos Labbé

  I, on the other hand, wait for her to come and touch me late in the night, just before the engines start sounding in the streets. These eyelids try to push her away and, when I shut first one and then the other and blink them immediately back open, the screen assumes I am erasing every character in the autobiography until, exhausted, both lids fall shut and all corrections are unmade.

  7.

  CORRECTION

  The choreography needs accumulation. The baroque organist and composer, Johann Sebastian Bach, is considered the most influential musician in the history of Western music, not just because of the meticulous virtuosity of his pieces, but because of the scope of his compositions. Lawrence Hayward, front man and soul of the band Felt, who doesn’t appear in any musicological index of the twentieth century, moved from postpunk garage to lounge jazz and ambient, with stops along the way in new wave and folk, across a limited selection of songs. These two artists, of vastly dissimilar projects, converged unexpectedly in harmonies of The Band Project in the 80s and 90s. Inspired by the project of his friend and rival, Lawrence, the mentor planned a musical project that, straddling the line between Felt’s rhythmicity and Bach’s aspiration to infinity, spanning twelve years and twelve albums, would explore the twelve connections that, for him, constituted the chain of life, unfazed by successive accusations of forgetting where he came from, of anthroposophism, of art for art’s sake, of gnosis, and of sexual conservatism that would belatedly mark the reception of his albums. Illness forced him to prolong the completion of his work from twelve to thirteen years, a number charged with interpretations, though entirely lacking the symmetry he was seeking.

  In its first five years, The Band Project seemed like it was going to reach a wide audience; its first three albums shot up the sales charts and the imperial media took great pleasure in making irrelevant comparisons between Band Project shows and those of progressive rockers who in decades past raked in millions playing sold-out stadiums. As the years went by, the fundamental tension the mentor maintained between rawness and artifice became more relevant in popular music; the catchy synthesizer riffs and the guitar atmospheres clashed with the explosion, the bass drum, and the scream, in such a way that the mentor became a musician only invited to perform by anti-imperial conservation institutions. The Band Project’s later albums were released on record labels of the worker’s collective; there were no more shows or sales, the mentor shut himself away in his studio and not a single reporter had any interest in finding out why. His death would change all of that. The year before, out of nowhere, there had been a rash of famous dance bands claiming him explicitly as musical model, and that pretense of authenticity would establish the supreme value of a new imitative aesthetic. Continental clubs incessantly played new danceable electronica versions of some of The Band Project’s anthems and pop music radio stations even played some singles from The Band’s second album, itself an homage to and, at the same time, a break from The Band Project. The fact that those albums are now available again is due in large part to the interest of fans who demand more and more of The Band’s material and who unconsciously see in that experimental voice that leads the choral and percussive masses a prefiguration of their own vocalist, who nevertheless, unlike the guitarist, never knew the mentor. “We musicians envy the class struggle, for none of you will ever listen to us the way you listen to your political leaders,” the vocalist said ironically in front of the crowd of kids who gathered in that southern desert valley for the release of The Band’s last album. Only a few people recognized those words, the words with which the mentor brought to an end his final interview, when, the day before his death, he announced that his last album would be left unfinished: “We musicians envy the sacred, because of the way people who believe in the existence of some intangible thing listen.”

  The choreography needs displacement. I am he and he is the other, and the other insists that she come back to bed, instead of repeatedly stretching her groin, so the muscles send blood to the tendons in her foot.

  With blood he, the boy, and the old mother were weaving string, like pancora rippling the surface of the water on the river. Following the marks the rain left on the fields, the old mother went to the place where she kept her stones, everyone’s stones, and all the other stones we could throw at the security guards of the paper mill.

  He, recording, realized that it wasn’t his voice that hung in the air, but an echo. His problem, he’d tell the other in the middle of a heated discussion, when she and the two bassists had gone out to walk along the canals of that vacationing city, was that they were shut inside a glass box where their voices reverberated back at them, instead of finding a way to be exalted, exposed, released like insects gnawing their way deep into underground aquifers to protect themselves, to be knotted to the sticks that weiraos and coypus gathered to avoid the currents; the voice had to get lost so that someone else could discover the name of the person who lets it go when they hear it.

  He, recording, didn’t expect anyone to understand his poorly translated words. So they shook hands when the other unexpectedly took out his keys, a bottle, hoisted a recording device onto his shoulder, and asked that he go with him. He rented a boat, pushed it out from the shore where the water made their legs glow, and said: now sing.

  I, on the other hand, can only come face to face with the narrowing of these eyes in the homogenous, hard, and unbreakable surface where the blinking of my eyes writes and erases. The autobiography of The Band, underlined with the lowering of a brow, is neither the story of the other nor of her enlightenment, nor a character study starring the vocalist, no, it is the barbed wire, the streams, the tracks, the signs, and the pathways that divide these lands as they connect them. The mass of flesh, weaving together muscle, skin, tendon, vein, lymph, nameless matter, nerve, and bone doesn’t constitute a specific organ: it is our body.

  He, the boy, squinted his eyes but couldn’t shut them when, coming down from the high boughs, he saw some unfamiliar birds pecking at the fingernails of the old mother, who had been tossed out of a truck belonging to the company that owned all the paper mills onto a pile of burnt leaves, between his and his twin brother’s trees.

  He, singing, remembered that the old mother’s footsteps had to encompass not just the hill where they were walking but the river they were skirting and the volcano where they were heading, not just the kawellu that showed him the way, but also the witranalwe clutching the eggs in its talons, making him want to turn back, the pillanes and the imps, the insomniacs and the snorers. He, in his prison, was unable to privilege in his memory the old mother’s remains over the way she moved when she danced and sang, for to do so would be to forget that his own unknown name included her name, the name of the chicken and the goats, of the old mother’s mother’s mother, and of that place that is in all places.

  “To each their own tree,” the percussionist would say in her island language when it dawned on her that he, tired, had brought her to live on lands he’d bought for her.

  “For a tree isn’t a tree, it’s a vertical forest, a conjuring of boughs, insects, birds, fungi, larvae, vapors, and other creatures that don’t want to be seen and we don’t want to see.”

  He, tired, sat down in his chair and never got up again.

  I am he. He grew old because she, though she wouldn’t know how to say the name to him, had heard it. I, in hers and in all places, keep on blinking: what I previously set out before me to pulsate in the sun only appears now if I shut my eyes.

  7.

  CORRECTION

  The choreography needs displacement. She kissed him. For a long time. Then she was alone, inside a small room full of her cousin’s doll collection. Through the door, she’d heard somebody say her father’s funeral would take place that very night, but as a three or four year old, she could never resist the drowsiness that came over her, without fail, as soon as the sun went down, her eyelids grew heavy and she fell asleep. So she got into the bed; it was a white-lacquered wooden
bunk bed whose mattresses came together to form a T. She coughed. She shivered with chills under the covers. She stretched a little and found a pile of cushions atop her legs. They’re so hard, she said to herself, getting up to remove them. And it was then she discovered her father’s corpse, wrapped in the sheets at her feet.

  She woke up from the fright. It was ten in the morning; the cool breeze of springtime in the old empire’s capital came in through the window accompanied by the song of a bird and occasional honks from out in the street. Beside her, the bed was empty; the pillows on the floor. The vocalist had meticulously wrapped the percussionist’s legs in blankets and down comforters, so she had to struggle to stand up. He’d also built a sort of tower with the hotel cushions on top of her feet. Where had he gone, she wondered, and scanned with her eyes for the underwear, the wrinkled pants, and the metal belt he’d thrown in a corner last night, after skillfully removing them, the glasses and the pills he’d deposited on the nightstand while she showered. In vain. She didn’t remember what time he’d left the room, all she could summon was the terror of having touched a dead body, her father’s body, in her dream, and a vague melody that at times was a faint hum. Was her family alive? She was still rehearsing in her mind the long-distance international and national codes for her home city when the ringing of the telephone on the nightstand made her jump out of bed.

  Five hours later, she was waiting, in the backseat of a taxi, for a guard to return her documents and open the forbidding gate of the widow’s residence. On the way, she had amused herself looking at the shapes of the clouds that appeared in the northern sky. Every time she called the vocalist, she got a message saying his phone was no longer in service. Twice she was tempted to call the other to ask him if he had seen the vocalist, both times she settled for finding the back of a horse in the nimbuses, the legs of a spider, the silhouette of a cat resembling the Siamese her little cousin adored. The butler let her into the residence. She waited in a hall adorned with two hanging chandeliers, sitting on the edge of a divan, facing two huge oil paintings. It was just how she imagined the inside of an old-empire castle. She smiled not out of happiness, but because she was imagining the bitter pantomime the other would do as soon he entered that place; he would look around and allege that these people all think everything from the past should be a museum, just so she could retort that in that case he should propose a remodel and put an illuminated glass pyramid in the center of it. What do you know, the other would fire back, that you didn’t read in some tourist guidebook. During the half hour she spent waiting for the widow, as the staff refilled her cup, she forced herself to maintain these internal dialogues to keep from thinking about the keys: there was a grand piano glowing in the middle of the hall. The top was open. After ten minutes, she couldn’t help but stare from the divan at the whiteness of the keys, while fingering from memory and from afar, eighth note by eighth note, a polonaise that her father frequently played on their piano, at home, in the summer.

  The widow interrupted her reverie when she entered the hall, trailed by a assistant. They went over the dates of The Band’s tour through the ruins of the cities; they discussed the weather and the advantages of traversing the old empire in taxi. They were silent. She tasted the chamomile tea they had brought her to ameliorate the effect of successive coffees, she felt like there was a viscous paste on her tongue.

  “Do you like my hall?” asked the widow.

  She nodded.

  “And the piano?”

  She shrugged.

  “Drums are my thing.”

  She was lying. Then the widow stood up and ceremoniously closed the wide doors.

  “You know,” she said, after sitting back down, “I feel like I can trust you. It’s been a long time since I felt that way.”

  Then she looked cheekily at her assistant, who exhaled audibly.

  “A long time, to tell the truth. Every time I’ve met with musicians in my various homes, for thirty years, none of them has ever been able to resist sitting down at the piano and playing some of their dreck while I make them wait. You’re the first one who has shown any respect.”

  The widow took off her glasses and began to adjust her hair. Is it possible this woman reminds me of my cousin? the percussionist thought to herself. The widow looked at her as if she were expecting a specific response from her. She got to her feet again, walked to a cabinet with double doors. She opened it, removing a bottle and two glasses.

  “That’s why I want to propose that we do a different sort of business,” she said.

  The choreography needs its place, there, where he could walk without fear, without laughter, without fantasy, without pride, without property, without subterfuge, and without expectation, across the ground from where the old mother always leapt into the tree, from where the men walking in the street weren’t reflected as their twins in the glass of the buildings, from where each person moved in a way distinct from him, singing, and, at the same time, they were all part of the same mass; in the end, a space where he couldn’t identify himself, because it was neither country nor city, neither prison nor sea, neither stasis nor dance.

  He, the singer, liked that moment when the instruments still resounded, though all the musicians had stopped playing.

  He, the singer, let himself be moved by the inertia and the echo of a final syllable that would close his throat in front of the masses. He made no movement, nor did he pause. Pause. She comes with a glass of water and a cotton swab, devotes herself to cleaning the gunk collected in the folds of my eyelids. She insists on the cotton swab and the water, she ignores the cosmetic products that the company I own sends me. Then she gathers the dirty cotton swabs, rewets them and wipes clean the screen here in front of me, while I shut my eyes and pretend to be sleeping, between her legs as her thighs forcefully squeeze me. Finally, she lets me go. I go back to the glow of the glass, she puts the cotton swabs into a bag and drinks down the dirty water in a single swallow.

  He, the boy, threw a stone into the water to scare away the cuero. “That was your stone,” the old mother said sarcastically behind him.

  He, the boy, dove into the river before dawn, shivering with cold, because the pancora wanted to pull him into the holes and because the cuero would tug him down into the depths if his little fingers were unable to find anything solid to hold onto. And yet, as the old mother sang on the shore, the current became crystal clear so he could hear her and in that way find the stone. Then they built a fire that the sun, when it rose, put out with its wind and, when the stone was dry, the old mother added: “That stone doesn’t belong to you, none of them do. You need to know this. Neither the cuero, nor the pancora, nor this water are here for your fear, even if justice grows too great and, as I know you will, you end up the owner of all of that which cannot be owned.”

  He, in his prison, knew the song’s place wasn’t the silence, wasn’t the music, wasn’t the noise. The place was a moment.

  He, the singer, chose that moment to dive into the masses.

  He, tired, built her a greenhouse in the old place where all that was left was his twin’s tree. She climbed on top of him and perspired until drops fell from overhead. “An equatorial palm tree and a tundra shrub only intertwine on the narrow earth of the city, never in the country,” she murmured in her imperial language, after so many tears and trying to explain herself.

  He, tired, went out walking across those lands he would sign and seal over to the company that owns all this paper. He found neither river nor hill, nor the volcano that appeared with the fog.

  He, paralyzed, knew his legs belonged to someone else. Someone who took away his groin and his fingers. He would fall and the floor would rise to meet him, with open arms. Before the names came in her scream, in the other’s scream, and in the nurses’ screams, he brought his hand to his neck: the pancora was ascending toward his mouth.

  He, the boy, never understood whether the pancora went inside and died, if it emerged from another hole, or if it underwe
nt a state change. I, on the other hand, know precisely how to raise just one eyebrow in front of the glowing screen, when there appears a name, a toponymic, a demonym, a year in the autobiography. I am he. The Band cannot be named.

  7.

  CORRECTION

  The choreography needs its place. Nobody dies of heatstroke in that place. Though if it starts to rain, his friends might be left to float like teabags in boiling water, the tenor gloated with a fixed smile. Beside him, the waiter held out a tray with a dozen glistening glasses; as one of the last remaining aborigines in the region, the Empire paid him and his blood-relatives monthly installments to provide local color at the Protectorate’s different official celebrations. The waiter stepped behind the curtain and downed two drinks, looking out the window of the zeppelin to see if the storm was still coming. From overhead the tea plantations gleamed.

  Two dark points stained the panorama of those green fields; two figures in motion, running from one side to the other, about to come together when a sound, a call, a slithering animal, or some obstacle—it was impossible to tell from the zeppelin—made the point on the right dart off toward the town. The other kept walking through the southeastern fields of the Protectorate, shaking and swearing, clothes soaked with sweat and his neck sunburnt. He sat down at the base of a tree, he wanted to take off the wool hat he had snatched from her during the argument, before she was lost from sight. That morning, when the security guards brought them down from the zeppelin, as soon as the ATV disappeared back in the direction of the hot air balloon, the other perceived what thereafter he would consider the silence. Then, finally, his head’s melody returned, this time a descent of minor notes dropping to the lowest octaves they could thrum; for ten months he’d been hearing nothing but an indistinct noise: tinnitus, they told him; concerts, live shows, recorded interviews, press conferences, board meetings, civil trials, shouted negotiations, sound checks, fireworks, he couldn’t distinguish one from the next. Pure feedback. He’d assumed he would never write another harmony when suddenly he saw the landscape of the tea fields. The sight brought him silence, and a song began to compose itself in his mind. That was when she’d leapt on top of him, clawing and biting and spitting, aiming for his throat before taking off running. Sitting at the base of the tree, the other breathed deeply and let the rain wash his face. And it dawned on him that her voice, despite her cries of rage or her sighs, was the one tone that, at the last second, was thrown into relief by the specter of itself. He regretted the moment he’d agreed to climb aboard the hot air balloon the company provided its artists. He did not regret, definitely not, punching the decrepit contemporary video artist who attempted to extinguish his cigarette on the waitress’s ass; against all odds, the percussionist had set down her drink and proposed they ditch the gala, run to the fuselage, and find a small hatch that would open onto a biplane, aboard which they would be able to return to the peripheries and join the resistance, like in the songs of yesteryear.