by Carlos Labbé
Hours later, the other walked into the nearby town. At a bar, he asked for water, but the woman who was working showed him an empty glass and shook her head with severity. They didn’t want his money. He found the percussionist, bathed and calm, on a bench in the square, eyes shut and mouth open, a local man standing in front of her wearing nothing but military pants. The man prodded her palate with a twig. The other walked up uncomprehendingly, reflexively humming the melody that, little by little, was coming back into his head, and sat down on the bench. He took her hand and she turned to him without surprise, without opening her eyes. The man standing in front of her awoke from his trance, lowered the stick, and spoke:
—Death does not want to take you yet, woman. What good fortune.
She covered her mouth with her forearm.
They shook hands, satisfied. As they parted, the man discovered she had managed to slip a bill into the palm of his hand; later he would bury it along with the seed of a new plant.
On their way back to the tea fields, she dodged a kiss the other tried to give her. They ran, savoring the sound of the dry leaves crunching beneath their feet, until they found themselves in a clearing. They looked up at the sky. The rain had stopped. For the next ten days, the afternoon sun would shine bright across the Southeastern Protectorate. The other raised his arms to the zeppelin and began to move.
The choreography needs synchronization. He had practiced every morning ever since, as a kid, he would rise with the first call of the chucao. He, the singer, decided he would devote the first hour of the day to gargling in the motel, where the habit still perplexed him, sun on his face.
He, running through the neighborhood with his brother, knelt down at midday on the church alters. He closed his eyes, opened his legs, relaxed his groin, lowered his zipper, stuck out his chest, leaned his head back to rest the nape of his neck against the wood, spread arms, letting a thread of drool slip from his slack jaw, until the rictus had taken hold of his entire body. Sometimes members of the clergy would take him by the hand, compassionate, until they saw the mess he’d made they’d have to clean. The janitor prodded him out the door with a broomstick and gently let him drop onto the stairs, tossing him a few one-peso coins. A priest, coming in earlier than usual, stood there, staring at him, and then took out his notebook and sketched the position of his body while, at his side, a nun wiped away the smudges his graphite pencil left on the holy cloth.
I, on the other hand, neither perspire nor drool, but force my eyes open until a line of veins forms, running from my temples to the corners of the whites of my eyes, and I proceed to eliminate, across that smooth surface that glows even in the summer, the paragraphs that speak of martyrdom, of sacrifice, of ecstasy, of glory.
He, in his prison, took off his clothes and sat down. He had been pronouncing the same words in all the languages he knew: “detach yourself from yourself with your own arms, remove yourself from yourself.” He was stringing together the names the old mother had taught him when, as a boy, she made him climb a hill so that, panting with exhaustion, he would open his mouth and exhale a “young man, macho, warrior,” whom later she would bury to the temples, while calling herself “elder, mother, worker, wise woman,” and with that throw herself over a precipice releasing an “old man, grandfather, impresario, consultant” along with the constant rain that pattered on the treetops where she landed. He recited them without activating a single facial muscle, without letting his skin move, even when his cellmates woke up fuming in the cool air, furious, drenched in nightmares, and went off on his discipline, on him and the windows, facing the hills where they thought day was breaking.
He, the star, didn’t hear the phone calls or the soft raps on the door, the recorded prayers, or silver clinking of the trays laden with honey, cheese, figs, yogurt with cochayuyo, and muday with manjar left for him on the mirrored table, outside all the doors to all his bedrooms and in all the dining rooms where he’d explicitly asked that not a soul enter so he could take off his clothes. As soon as he closed his eyes and tuned in, many languages and registers came to him and there was no need to choose any of them, just allow them to take complete control of his voice, the sound was noise until it coagulated into a rushing mass, expanding with each beat: without end or origin, next to nothing, in all places, and simultaneously crushing him, extruding his eyes from a skin that was fire.
I am he, his are not even chicken bones.
He, paralyzed, found his voice and sang. He achieved it when she kissed his eyelids, when he opened them to her touch and the place was reconstructed before his eyes.
The Band is I, he heard himself say. I, on the other hand, erase.
7.
CORRECTION
The choreography needs synchronization, that of those two bodies, motionless for a moment, bathed in sweat, shuddering and panting. They heard the engine of an airplane beginning to descend toward the airport. He rolled off her, put on his pants, and sat on the convertible’s fender, smoking, while she leaned back in the seat and saw how the stars in Central Empire’s summer sky were blinking out of sight. Before she drifted off to sleep, the percussionist heard him still intoning his archaic song. For a long second, she maintained focus on the melody the vocalist hummed like a trompe. Their argument was far from over.
And she dreamed, in great detail: rising from the tables in that nameless bar, where they had been introduced as The Band for the fourth time, they heard chatter, groans, and heckles that every so often drowned out the volume of their lengthy ballads and the poorly-amplified voice of the vocalist was lost in the thrumming of the two bass guitars, but nobody in the audience seemed to care, probably because the owners had the foresight to bill them as “anti-establishment ambient music” on photocopied posters hung on the door. The vocalist inserted conchesumares, sordosculiaos, and sacoweas into his cries, but nobody was offended, because not a word of his invective-punctuated repertoire was audible over the din. Forty-five minutes later, when she was already snoring in the minivan’s backseat, four men in two pickups ambushed them under a yellow streetlight. She poked her head up into the front seat, half asleep, and saw the windshield was covered in spit. There was nobody in the front seats, the doors were open, and she heard the strangers shouting from the street, calling her a whore over and over; she, who had been sleeping the whole time and hadn’t even seen the faces of the men insulting her. Amid shouts that brought to mind the free beers offered to everyone in the bar when a spark blew the soundboard and brought the music to a definitive end, the vocalist and the other had taken off after the spitters in the minivan, determined to fight them. Meanwhile, she and the bassist and the other bassist waited for them, sitting in a café along the highway, laughing, reenacting with bread figures the heroic battle the other would start with the aggressors. After a few hours and the fading of the pills’ euphoric effect, she got up the nerve to admit she was worried. One bassist extracted from his leather jacket a small bottle he’d secretly stolen from the bar. He offered it to her, she uncapped it carefully as the bassist and the other bassist told the story of how they’d met, in a café identical to that one, but on the opposite coast of the Empire. The bassist worked in the kitchen and the other bassist delivered meat and cheese. Every Monday and Thursday, as they unloaded the blue bags from the truck, they talked at length about the new albums they’d bought and before long started making each other tapes with surprising mixes of songs. When the café owners bought a warehouse in an industrial district, the bassists began meeting there when they got off work, and walking together to the basements where the bands played. They teased each other gently whenever women approached them offering to buy one or the other a beer; in general, amid the monotony of all those guitars, amid the same verses as fifty years ago and the same choruses as always, they inevitably found a reason to abscond.
The bassists interrupted each other as they told her what happened next: someone had caught them in the warehouse, the one hadn’t been able to stop the other fro
m breaking a bottle over the head of a skater in a club, they shouted at each other and fought and stopped talking. The contents of the warehouse were moved from the industrial district to a new location on a now-abandoned touristic street. Long weeks passed without them calling each other. When the other bassist stopped working double-shifts, he started playing in Afro-Latino clubs; around the same time, walking home, the bassist found an amp and nearly-new bass in a dumpster and decided to take them, and proceeded to start writing songs. Until, a year and a half after they’d last seen each other, he strolled causally into the café and ordered something. He ate, paid the check, headed for the bathroom, but instead of turning down the hall to the right, he walked through the doors that led to the kitchen where the other bassist was working. They fist-bumped. The bassist wanted to know if the other bassist still had keys to the old warehouse in the industrial district. They met there that night. Holding a flashlight, the bassist asked the other bassist to follow him. In a corner, atop one of the collapsed shelves, all covered in dust, there should have been a tape the bassist had left for the other bassist the last time, a gift he never found. They began making their way through the detritus until the sound of a growl brought them to a halt. In a corner, a dark animal, a meter and a half tall, reared up on its hind legs, lashing its claws and gnashing its teeth. The bassist and the other bassist held hands the entire time. The cassette had vanished along with all the shelves, refrigerators, sinks, and containers in the old warehouse.
Back in the café, where they were now, so many years later, their story was interrupted when the vocalist and the other came in, arms around the four men who had insulted her and spit on the minivan. Beers in hand, they chorused tunelessly a southern church song and stumbled and fell; they crashed loudly into the one of the café’s glass cake displays. The manager, seeing the glass on the floor, disappeared into a back room and reemerged with a shotgun. The waitresses egged him on to shoot, but three police officers appeared who had known one of the men since childhood and he took all of them back to his house. In the meantime, the other had come over to her and whispered, drooling in her ear, that it’d all been a misunderstanding, that the four men from the pickup had thought they saw a bumper sticker on the minivan for the band they hated most on this coast. The percussionist shoved him so hard he fell back onto the pieces of glass on the floor.
Now she was dozing again in the backseat of the minivan. On the floor, the bassist and the other bassist were playing chess. The truth was that cassette the one had left for the other in the old warehouse wasn’t a mixtape of his favorite songs, they said. They were original compositions, six to be exact, that the bassist had specially recorded and dedicated to the other bassist; he hadn’t had the nerve to tell him, he’d just left the tape on a shelf so that some random day the other bassist would find it. But now, it was lost forever. The other bassist sighed and kissed him.
Just then she woke up in the reclined seat of the convertible. She discovered the immensity of the sky of the Central Empire was a single cloud, it was going to rain. She looked at the clock on the dashboard of the convertible: it had only been four minutes since she closed her eyes. She tried to get up, but her arms were tangled in the heavy black jacket the vocalist had wrapped around her naked body. She shivered. He was sitting on the fender, burning some papers.
“Contracts,” he said when he saw she was awake.
Then she pulled the lever and raised the seat, sitting up, and said that she’d thought it over, that she’d changed her mind. That she was going to stay in The Band. That, together, they were going to have a son and every night, to help him fall asleep, they would take turns telling the boy—she used that word—variations of the same fable.
PASTORTALE
I
Skinnybunny, Stinkat, and Bonehound jump. They jump, they run, they are hungry, and they are thirsty, but they hide because Accountant Carola enters with Scabrous Spouse, yelling at each other that the money, that the business, that the bonus, that the interests. They howl. One of the two dies; the other flees. Skinnybunny, Stinkat, and Bonehound jump when they see the body, they are hungry and they are thirsty; and yet, they are also hungry and thirsty for justice. What will they do?
II
They roll around in the humors mixed on the floor, they sleep one on top of the other on top of the other, they curl up, they stretch out, and they yawn: they have found a way to choose between justice and hunger and thirst. When one of them starts to drool too much, they bite, scratch, and kick each other.
Before proceeding, Stinkat, Skinnybunny, and Bonehound wrap the body in aluminum foil. Then they sit down in the light of the rising sun to demonstrate the different noises they can make with their bodies. Whoever can turn their noise into a sound, and that sound into music, and that music into awe such that it dispels the mood of despair, will have the solution they chose to defend prevail; nobody is convinced, but they proceed melodically.
Stinkat holds, with the oscillating murmur of the phlegm in her chest and the vibrato of her throat, that justice should be specific, and that—though it be a figurehead, an archetype, an example of an entire lineage they oppose—that specific body has done nothing to them, thus it is not just that they eat it and drink its blood. The others hold hands, they weep.
Skinnybunny argues, with the steady rhythm of his joints, to which he hypnotically adds the tapping of paws and jaw, that justice is a concept, and that, in order to conceptualize, the organism must first have attended to its biological necessities; thus the notion of justice is invalid when there is a body of which they can eat and drink, as they so need to do. The others dance, they applaud.
Bonehound points out, after a profound silence, in which the chorus of each of his hairs brushing against all the others becomes more and more perceptible, that justice is nothing but an arbitrary accord, a game they play among themselves, thus if one simply convinces a second that hunger and thirst are more important than declaiming convincingly before some unknown entity all the harm that body and its ilk have caused them for as long as they can remember, the third should submit to those rules. The others begin to sing.
The sun rises. Then Stinkat, Skinnybunny, and Bonehound leap all at once to snatch a coin they want to slip under their skin. They don’t know it is just the aluminum foil attracts them, and so, all of a sudden, they find themselves on the ground scratching each other, hurting each other, because the place is infested with coins of every size and denomination. All riled up, it occurs to them to open the aluminum foil and let the plague of money depart with the body. And yet, would that be just?
III
And that smell?
It’s the smell of money.
And before Bonehound, Skinnybunny, and Stinkat can plug their noses, a squadron of Shoulderheads appears with whips, saddles, and wagons and jumps on them. They have them in custody when suddenly they notice the body.
And that smell?
It’s the body of the Stupendous Spouse, shout the Shoulderheads; after days of tension, the kidnapping that has kept the public on tenterhooks has come to a tragic end. Bonehound, Skinnybunny, and Stinkat argue with them that no, that it wasn’t them, that it was Accountant Carola and Scabrous Spouse, that with every death a mystery is born, and that the squadron is also participating in the search for justice and its lack.
But the Shoulderheads decide, instead of exploiting them, to take them to the dungeon. And throughout the interrogation they keep asking: and that smell?
IV
First letter from prison
(Intercepted by a Shoulderhead and signed with a paw print that signifies “All of us”)
Now I shall do something we cannot tell the others about: don’t distinguish the dungeons from the home, we are one and the same, and I swear to you on my veins the mystery of your empty signifiers is the key that allows us to survive the moments when we argued about justice, about representation, about community, about semblances, and we must know not only how to say no,
no, and no, but yes, because if you leave behind our night and I am not one of the people with whom you would undertake an endeavor, please, let us remember the world and the sea and the other side. And the future?
V
Names? they interrogate.
All of us, all of us, and all of us, they answer. Then the Elbowheads beat them; as many blows as the number of their presumed clandestine followers.
Then the Shoulderheads take note.
Names?
And for every beating, electrocution, burn, and submersion they suffer, in effect, a new collective rises in their defense without ever having met them.