Spiritual Choreographies

by Carlos Labbé

  3.

  A CUERO ON THE SAND CALLS TO A CUERO IN THE WATER

  We stuck a full leg into that place where the swamp began. Some of us weren’t even wearing shoes. Legs sinking into the thick mud, up to the knee in some cases, we arrived to the place where the backwater ended and the tide began, eddies, sandy banks now, you take a step and fall, you take another and get up, and yet no matter, because we ran until we could grab ahold of the rotten, wood edge of the dock or the boat, where the cold of the steel column touched our legs and our fingers spread as we pulled ourselves up, our fingernails digging into the boards, we didn’t let the performance artists get the oars and they moved away, taunting and heckling, some of us were even wearing pants, boots with long socks, because here, at the end of summer it is already starting to get cold, no matter, some of us had wrapped our legs in strips of gauze while smoking and staring at the bonfire, because of the chill in the air; the area hospital had donated the surplus supplies for our art projects, and we stitched the strips of gauze together with purple thread, and when we climbed into the boat that night, those who didn’t quite make it, because the bottles were slipping out of their hands and they were carrying pieces of grilled meat they were trying to keep from getting wet, grabbed ahold of the gauze to keep from being left behind. It was inevitable we’d make some error, water swallows any food you offer it, especially under a full moon, which became visible when the wind began to blow and the fog lifted, and in the reflection some of us were able to make out the gleam of the rusted nails in the boat from which the performance artist threw back at us what, you remember, pumice stone, pieces of wood, rubber balls, beans, sugar cubes, leftover stale bread from when we mixed and kneaded and shaped a human figure, and put it in the oven, and the man inflated, the limbs rose and the eyes popped open beneath their lids, the mouth’s lips swelled, and under the lips the teeth turned brown and under the teeth a tongue moved, a throat swallowed, and that night we took off running too, until we realized we’d gotten separated and were lost in the forest. We tried to find our way back, we were lost for hours, some of us had stayed behind, paralyzed there in the kitchen, until we took out the butter, spread it on the bread figure, and ate him before he could grow any bigger, before he cooled, we couldn’t wait for everyone, so on that last night some of us ran across the sand until its denseness released us and then, without knowing how, we had found the beach. We were carrying drinking glasses the sea snatched away from us immediately, nothing easier than filling a glass with salt water for such a strong midnight wave, and the moon looked red to us, red but not with light; the artist who didn’t know the language and the assistant and the owner and the second owner, even the photographer, who had already been there quite a while, recalled what the locals had told us, about what it might mean if a red moon were to break up that night’s dense fog, and we suddenly found ourselves on that one beach nobody had emerged from the forest to find for many seasons; ever since the strange human animals arrived, the birch trees had taken it upon themselves to hide the nine exits. Then, exeunt. One of us began weaving in the boat, not with the gauze that guided us through the swamp, and how was it possible all that thread she brought stayed dry, oh how her hands moved in the night. There were ten of us sitting together in a half-rotten wooden boat, at high sea. We had taken off our pants, shoes, blouses; a soaked pile of clothing drifted toward us, back in the direction of the beach and we couldn’t stop laughing, we wouldn’t be afraid to imagine what’d happened to the girls, pass the bottle, it’ll get better, and when one of us reached out her arm, another opened her mouth, and when another stopped laughing because something was wrong with the keel of the boat, because it was breaking down, because more water was getting in, because we were tipping over, one of us even had to untangle her legs, which had gotten wrapped in seaweed, another was trying to take off someone else’s boot she was wearing on her right foot, better pass the bottle, the matches, we exhaled in silence and hung our arms, shaved legs, and heads over the wobbling edge, intertwined we dried ourselves in the wind, warm at last, damp, but then, when it dawned on us what that wind and that red moon breaking up the dense fog at that hour at the end of summer meant, the assistant said since we had eaten the bread man, the spirit of the place would no longer appear to us, maybe that was why we had finally found a way out of the forest and onto the beach. One of the performance artists pointed at something dark in the distance and threw a seashell at it, something we couldn’t see and that convinced us the totality of the night had concentrated in a single point, so we started to kick as if rowing, but the wind grew cold, the swell broke, and the boat finally collapsed beneath us, what else were we going to do when the floating column exploded into salt, the thing was that out of all of us she, he, and the other were the only ones who knew how to swim, so it is likely the rest never made it to the boat and it is even more likely the three of us just stayed there drinking on the sand.

  2.

  BEACHING

  That was all, we swam back from the wreck of the boat against the currents that pulled away from the shore until our feet touched bottom. Drenched, panting, our clothes hindering our movement, we let ourselves drop to the sand, pale in the light of the moon of that last night.

  We were only three: she, he, and the other; you fell asleep, we said; we threw sand in your open mouth and you snored, no, I was dead after all that swimming, I need first aid and laughter, more sand to my open lips, just as the spark leapt to the stack of firewood, we’d protected it with our body from the hands of the others and managed to get the flame lit, just as the wind had stopped blowing from our mouths, eyes, holes, orifices that are not the same but work anyway; we were showing each other the entrances as well as the exits, touch here, see how they don’t look alike but work just like in the bonfire, our clothes were spread out to one side and we lay down on top of them so we could bite and cling to each other and share space, shivering, crying out with and without laughter, engorged where the wind wouldn’t blow, try this, suck on that, viscosity like we’d never known, and yet; we found a way to swim with the full bottle, don’t ask how I held on; tension, reflexes; the first birdsong and as the red moon vanished, glimmering golden on a distant hilltop we’d never seen before, speaking without saliva at that hour, fluid without body, I don’t believe you. Yes I do.

  We believe you. We spoke only in whispers, at the volume of the crickets and frogs, softer than the wind which is all one but everywhere. Whereas, the three of us, more than conversing, were explaining to each other, in voices that didn’t sound anything like dialogue, the reason why it wasn’t the first time we had spoken. We saw her face, his face, the other’s face, confronting each other, the imaginary memory illuminated, the moon had been concealed by the fog, and we wondered who we were now.

  We heard all of that, along with the sound of the sticks burning down to embers, the embers taking flight as ash, the ashes scattering in the wind. We heard our lives but not our stories. Hers, his, the other’s, and without moving we dried ourselves. We placed the last of the ashes inside a seashell we’d found there, where we lit the bonfire, a single, translucent seashell that we sealed shut.

  I.

  THE SPECTER OF WHAT CAN ONLY BE TOUCHED

  By then, we were warm. By then, we could leave the clothes where they were, sit with our legs open in front of the bonfire and listen: it was daybreak, the new day, and we saw each other’s faces, who are you that you want to know so badly whether he was with her, whether she was with the other, whether the other was with him, whether all three together is possible, and if asking even matters, we said before listening to each other.

  The other started to make his lips vibrate, pressing them together so all the flesh of his mouth released a deep note just as the first sunbeams slanted through the trees, across the lake, toward the sea, alighting on her hairless arms, which she began to rub, because the moment had given her chills. And yet that rubbing gave way to light palm taps that, with each slap, after a
slight pause, punctuated the depth of the other’s sound, and before the fluty note of the first birdsong, getting ahead of it, he began to fill the spaces that she left open in the other’s vibration with a wail, a shrillness that ascended and descended when she, using her free hand, attempted to move a stick in the bonfire to make use of the side of the coal, and didn’t let it go, but instead attempted to counterpoint each beat with burning wood, with her palms and his fingers, with the sounds—who are you, why do you want to know so badly what language we did it in?—with the syllables the other began to string together into a repetitive sequence that broke down when the first shadow appeared as the sun rose in the sky. She joined in the exchange of cries that came together with all the birds singing at that early hour, with his exhaled responses, with the sound the other’s fingers made as they tapped in sync with everyone’s lips, and it was harmony, artistry, sand that began to throb on the taught skin of his chest time and again, a singing drum, theme of three, our song, music, they said. And they listened.

  “Listen,” she said to them. “It has been a revelation for me to get to know you during this artist residency. I didn’t expect to make music again, much less work with strangers and with men; but this song we just played, does it belong to anyone?”

  “Listen,” the other said to them. “I think it has been important for the three of us to have agreed to come to this artist residency, to leave behind the inertia of The Band, the problems of commerce, the sexual tension, the custom of property, the superimposition of couples, the fantasy of the band, the vanity of authorship, and, at last, to make music together again; but this song we just played, doesn’t it belong to the three of us and so, when we record it, won’t it be the central theme of our comeback?”

  “Listen,” he said to them. “I don’t know who the two of you are and I don’t care; don’t tell me where you came from or what brought you here, or how we came to make music together around this bonfire; I don’t want to know about your childhood, about your parents, about your neighborhoods, about your youth, about the people you’ve been with, about your jobs and your art projects, about your shortcomings and your accomplishments, about your original and present cultures; but this song we just played, doesn’t it belong to an expansive life that has just begun, to a mass of elements that only have a vibration in common when they touch, whose masses combine in a way that is not just one, but many yet to come, and that, up close, is composed of atoms, cells, tissue, organs, bodies and, at a distance, is composed of cities, towns, villages, hamlets, rivers, beaches, and mountains that won’t belong to this place, to this seashell, to this bonfire, or to this residency with its strange human animals, music that doesn’t belong to the listener or to the reader, but to the person who can imagine it never existed and understand it nonetheless?”

  By then, we were already dry. By then, we could have gotten dressed, but we didn’t.

  The choreography needs melody, day-to-day it was my fantasy there would be company.

  A beat plays that stops, that wakes me up.

  I am he.

  The sound envelops this body from inside. The organ repeats the theme. I, on the other hand. I, on the other hand.

  He, the boy, holding hands with the old mother, asked why they didn’t let him blow his nose into the hollow stick that was part of the instrument and why his shrill voice couldn’t carry on her repetitions.

  He, the singer, dismissed the second and third voices the other suggested for the most melodious part of the album that would bring them the fame and fortune and give them an excuse to break up. The other didn’t elaborate, just reincorporated them as percussion.

  She and the other, on the other hand, harmonized in low voices in the hospital, on a chair and in the bed.

  “What a melody it might be, more than a kind of company, a way for me to be?” he bandied and didn’t look pleased, nor could he, when he heard what they were singing.

  The old mother, on the other hand, boy, she swatted him away so he’d keep the necessary distance.

  That word, melody, didn’t exist in the language of the old mother, or in that of the old mother’s mother, or in that of the old mother’s mother’s mother. He would keep his distance.

  He would blow out of his mouth until his nose, eyes, and ears blew too. I am he and if I were singing I wouldn’t try to speak.

  0.

  THE GLEAM IS ONLY IN THE PUPIL OF THE EYES

  The choreography needs melody. A girl was running an electric razor along the nape of a woman’s neck in one of the salons on the university square, observing through the mute windowpanes how four patrol cars pulled up on all sides of an obese man wearing a gardening dress and a hat, pointing a rifle at some foreign executives coming out of a bar. The obese man had smiled a second before the police took him down in a hail of gunfire; the girl saw this on the television in the salon. She was interrupted by the sound the boy made, sitting in one of the armchairs by the door, kicking the rug to the rhythm of her clipping scissors, opening and closing. She had seen him before, the girl thought; the boy seemed to be singing to himself without opening his mouth. When he looked back at her, she realized that because of his headphones, he probably hadn’t heard the noise out in the street.

  “Gotta go,” the boy said, looking away from her, getting up and trying to walk with feigned agility, catching his headphones as they fell from his ears as soon as he opened his mouth, almost tripping and falling.

  The girl shrugged. Before the door to the salon closed, it seemed to her the boy had said something else, words that hadn’t fully registered, in a language she didn’t know. She stood, looking out at the street again, the sirens, the masses confronting the helicopters and the cameras, the obese man’s limbs poking out from under a silver tarp, the ambulances. Then she remembered some particular words: she remembered the boy’s full name and that in high-school choir class he was usually two spots to the right of her in the top row, that the first time she had caught him by surprise, staring at his mouth, as the two of them sang the lowest notes of the a capella version of the éxito primaveral in the neighborhood; she remembered she had understood what the boy said in that other language, minutes before, to the woman accompanying him, the woman whose hair she was preparing to dye in that exact instant:

  “Don’t cut your hair,” he’d said. “It’ll grow out again anyway and they’ll recognize you.”

  The woman, whose hair the girl now trimmed with the electric razor, had, until then, sat completely still, eyes gazing past the mirror. But she turned around when she heard the boy’s voice and, disregarding the blade of the electric razor, got up from the salon chair. She tried to say something, but saw the boy had already run out the door into the square; her voice caught in her throat and she swallowed. She turned back to the mirror, smiled, and sat back down. Her phone vibrated incessantly in her hand. The girl couldn’t help but notice the caller on the small screen: “Hospital.”

  The memory entered her mind of how, on the street at a stoplight, in the backseat of the big car of an executive who paid her for two weeks of full service, she had sat up briefly and had seen a very attractive man walk by. She was struck, staring at him. She blushed when she realized not only did she know who he was, but she knew just how he smiled, the particular way he stretched out his arms when he woke up in the morning, the proud inflexion in his resonant, imperious voice when he asked a question, and that little wrinkles formed along the edges of his mouth when he was tired. The executive who was paying her pushed her head back down; her situation—that she needed to get a different job—became painfully clear to her when the executive looked out the window and sighed:

  “Look, there goes that actor from that show.”

  From that moment on, the girl knew without question who the boy was, as she smiled at the woman in the chair in the mirror, applied the final ointment, finished cleaning the base of her neck, dabbed behind her ears with a cotton swab, damp with a little mineral water, offered her a product sh
e turned down, charged her, gave her her card, wished her a pleasant afternoon, and watched her push open the door that opened onto the university square, where she got into a taxi. Of course she remembered who that client was now, the salon’s cosmetologist had been showing her pictures of a drummer who painted her body to match the other members of The Band for their shows.

  As soon as the clock struck five, the girl left the salon at a run; three new male clients had requested her by phone. But as her pace slowed with each step, it became clear to her she had joined a mass of people that was taking shape on the west side of the square and there was no room to run. She had to cancel the dates on her screen, regretting having to waste what she’d made that day at the salon on data fees. She was dragged along by the mob for hours, all the way to the big park where the victory of the immigrant woman in the presidential elections was being celebrated. The girl watched dozens of feet trying to push forward, she had been looking down at the pavement ever since, on one street corner, some skinheads had reacted to her surgically-enhanced body and grabbed her around the waist and, to her surprise, pulled a blue T-shirt printed with a crucifix down over her torso, and she couldn’t take it off, because her hands were too busy keeping her upright amid the arms of all those strangers, a throng of skins pressing against her and propelling her forward, and finally a metal gate, a stage, spotlights in her eyes. A roar of amplified instruments and a multitude of voices singing and dancing convinced her to look up at the stage, and she realized that The Band’s vocalist was approaching her, he sang to her from a few centimeters away, but she could barely see him, because of the spotlights shining in her eyes.