Spiritual Choreographies

by Carlos Labbé

  She remembered too that, for choir class, they had decided to practice that spring’s popular song all weekend, in order to perform it at the Emancipation Day civil ceremony. It was late one Saturday night, their throats burning, because it was their responsibility to carry the melody with their lips and not with their breath. The boy tried to show her for the zillionth time how to project her voice, but they ended up kissing and going at it in the showers. When they finished, she—who in some ways was still a he back then—felt a pain somewhere deep inside, deeper than her intestines, and she tried to explain to the boy it wasn’t due to his lack of experience or the hormone patches, and then they got a kick out of taking pictures of the colored stains in the urinal; during the previous two weeks one of them had eaten only asparagus and the other only beets, so during the last months of school, in addition to singing medieval hymns in unison, they ran together to the bathroom. The colors didn’t dissolve easily in the water that streamed down the white ceramic. They didn’t mix either. Amid the masses, looking up at the vocalist and the percussionist, whose hair she’d had the honor of cutting that very afternoon, the girl remembered how, when they were smoking together for the last time on the school rooftop, the boy had taken her by the hand and told her he would be moving away with his family, with The Band, to a remote and inaccessible location in the Anti-Empire.

  “Do you think the world is really ending?” she’d asked the boy.

  “Of course it is,” he’d answered with a sigh. “Your world, but not mine.”

  And as she wasn’t going to be able to free herself from the mob of fans who were using her strong shoulders to climb as far as the security guards who repelled them with cattle prods, the girl slipped one hand inside the T-shirt and wiggled out of it and started swinging it around in an ascending motion up her other arm, until the shirt flew toward the stage and hit the vocalist in the face. She didn’t care about this concert, the force of the knee against her back, the expression on the face of that figure photographed thousands of times and broadcast on all the screens of her city to the point of nausea. She cared about the light in her eyes; all she could really see was the back part of the stage.

  “Life here begins many times,” she’d said to the boy later, hanging out in the school’s back stairwell. And she let the boy put his hand on her aching groin.

  The boy’s face was no longer familiar to her, but he recognized her too, that evening, from his position backstage. He wasn’t so familiar anymore, and so she began to feel attracted to him as a potential client, smiling at her from a distance. That was her memory of him. She was more worried the light would reveal the sweat on her skin; that it would dilate her pupils too much and that wasn’t healthy, she thought, just before she fainted.

  The choreography needs a rhythm, a rhythm that isn’t moving.

  I am he. He is that.

  That is the beat. The beat is distant.

  I, on the other hand, your shadow and I.

  What was your shadow doing at night in the waves?

  1.

  WHAT WAS YOUR SHADOW DOING AT NIGHT IN THE WAVES?

  The choreography needs a rhythm. That night, from the third-floor balcony of the embassy, the straight line of the southern horizon yielded, lost its coordinates, and in the end was just the shadow of a cloud advancing toward the city and sweeping over the sea the vocalist and the other were staring out at, barefoot, toes turning purple, in silence, passing a bottle they’d stolen from the bar at the banquet. And smoking.

  “I read it somewhere, in an imperial library, I think,” said the other: “‘The oceanic feeling.’ I can’t forget that phrase. And likewise, I’ve never lost that feeling of the smell of the brine and the wailing of the gulls and the children carrying little buckets of saltwater, the footsteps of a couple pressing into the sand, and the sun falling on your face, but you’re in the sand dunes, you can’t see the water or hear anything, you don’t feel warm or cold, all you feel is the constant murmur of the ocean, though your head is submerged in your own moisture and maybe in sleep, a calm that comes and goes, the ceaseless crash of one wave over the next, the dangerous waves way out on the open sea, you know; a state in which you escape yourself and you smell the salt, but at the same time you’re alert because at any moment the tide might come in and sweep you away, the breaking wave drown you, you stay calm, your eyes are closed and you’re far away yet touching everything because the water extends as far as your eyes can see and, even though you keep them closed, you still hear it. Do you hear it? I read something similar in another book; the book of an old man who was celibate, yes, but why when all the priests are locked up and their horrible church is illegal. The celibate man talked about a southern visitor belonging to his same organization who went through all the towns seeking a new kind of experience, someone enlightened in the ways, or a colleague who might find in song, in drawing, in multicolored stained glass, a piece of that thing so many people talk about and claim to know, and that nevertheless doesn’t exist anywhere, except in what they were selling every Sunday. The visitor explored the rural byways until he reached the sea; he walked along the coastline and finally came to where the last tongue of earth jutted out into the water. He spent days and nights on those cliffs, staring out at the water. Until one day a saint appeared to him. For two days they discussed the oceanic feeling. By the third day, the saint was ready to throw himself off the cliff.”

  The vocalist touched the other’s arm so he would be silent. He leaned into him and with difficulty got to his feet and walked over to the railing of the balcony, where he stood, looking out. Early in the morning, days before, in the center of that Anti-Empire city, outside Banco del Pueblo, the other had run into a bearded man strumming versions of themes by the mentor, by The Band, by Maria y Las Primas on his strings. He cashed the check he had stolen from the ambassador and invited him out to lunch. And though he and the vocalist had spent the last seventy-two hours together, improvising sounds and harmonies with guitar duets on the rooftop of that building (until the security guard showed up), the vocalist had barely said a word to him. And now he raised his hand, holding the bottle, pointing at a spot in the distance: the cloud had definitively enveloped the sea so earth, water, and sky were a single block in the night, a block that included the concrete of the city, the walls of the embassy, the invisible trajectory of the bottle the vocalist threw toward the tops of the park’s tallest trees. The other couldn’t remember what argument the celibate man had used to convince the saint not to jump off the cliff, to stay there with him instead, looking out at the open sea, for another day, and then the next one, and two more after that, until he got used to remaining alive. That was the most important thing, he thought, just as the vocalist pointed at a break in the clouds that revealed a white shape out in the water, maybe a boat, a rocky outcropping illuminated by a lighthouse, the glow of all the city streetlamps reflecting off the wall of fog. His fingers had been swollen, not anymore. He heard the sound of the vocalist vomiting in the bathroom, minutes before the hand of his old friend had been pointing not at a spot on the perfect line of the horizon, which was now reforming, but at the figure, growing larger, determined, striking, of a woman who tried and succeeded to scale the great wall of the embassy. He took a drink from another bottle he’d found in the pocket of a pair of pants on the floor and looked back toward the bathroom, the door slightly ajar, where the woman was cradling the vocalist’s head over the toilet. Sitting on the floor, she had offered them something to smoke that she’d brought in her pocket.

  “What did that celibate man have to offer apart from saving the life of a saint?” she said through the smoke, through hard consonants and soft vowels that betrayed her origin in some suburb of the disappeared Empire. “And those of us who aren’t saints, who aren’t celibate, who aren’t men staring out atop some sublime cliff, we just fucking deal with it. Whereas once upon a time, even farther to the south, there was an old mother who didn’t worry at all about the existence of
the ocean. She had knowledge of trees, of illnesses, of small animals, of one horse, of the climate, and of the two young boys she raised. They looked like twins. Throughout her life, the old mother had only known mothers, the mothers of her home and other mothers from far away, until one day the two boys arrived. The two boys are the two of you.

  The vocalist wiped away the bile with a sleeve, gave a little cough, and went unexpectedly to curl up, eyes open, beside the percussionist, who continued to speak. He moved his mouth as he listened to her words, but made no sound other than a few soft moans.

  “One night, the old mother had a nightmare unlike all the others, she grabbed the two boys and took them up to highest boughs of the their favorite tree. Sitting down below on a stump that had appeared in front of her house the day before, she waited for the logging company’s security guards, contract in hand: a kultrún, her drum. The guards came with first light, uniformed and armed by the central government. The old mother was waiting for them with a percussive song that went on for hours and terrified them because in it they glimpsed the decrepit, sick old men they’d become. They shot her twenty times, used the chainsaw on her, and after the rainstorm that blew in on a freezing wind, that same night, they shot each other. Those two surviving boys told this story in front of some functionaries of the central government, who didn’t listen, because that same day the first drone strikes of the imperial expansion were falling in the southernmost reaches.”

  The other, the guitarist, realized he was starting to hear music, a rhythm, a massive musical structure, as the percussionist seemed to stop talking, to concentrate on caressing the eyes of the vocalist. He went to sit beside them, but stopped a half-meter away and didn’t know how to get any closer but by offering his lighter, while in the distance they heard the rumbling of hundreds of vehicles hoping to reach the highway before there was nothing left.

  “The twins would blame one another for having sung in vain. Until they sang again,” she concluded.

  Then, as the sun rose, they began to applaud.

  The choreography needs pause and movement.

  Something is still missing before we can go up and play.

  That, over there, is that a seashell or a stone?

  2.

  THE OTHER STONE, BETTER KNOWN AS THE HOUSE OF BONES

  “The choreography needs pause and movement,” she said, turning down the volume on the film she was projecting.

  Beside her in the bed, propped up on pillows, the vocalist opened his mouth and blinked at the same time. She wondered how long it’d been since the expression on his face hadn’t been sad, while trying to hear who it was who had arrived to the house. It was just the boy and the other arguing, she intuited; after the laughter broke off, one of the two left with a slam of the door.

  That night there was a lot of wind. Is there anything physical like the wind, something tactile you cannot touch? What is a draft of air, if not a superstition? She remembered when he playfully formulated questions like that, in a low voice, beside her, in the enormous bed of a hotel in the Empire, that time they weren’t allowed to leave until they accepted a payment from the intelligence office. Among the inane requests the vocalist made to exacerbate the tension, was to demand they open the sealed windows only to, two hours later, beg them to close them again, holding his sweaty arm away from his body, because he dreamed the drafts of air could give him a backache. In the qullasuyu film she was watching, the bodies began to dance, not caring about the tanks rolling into the square in front of the government palace.

  She turned up the volume with the remote control, starting as she began to nod off; she didn’t want to fall asleep yet, so she turned toward him, stiff amid his cushions, to wipe away the drool with the sleeve of her old sweater. Throughout the night, she’d wake up and run a finger around the outside of his mouth. She’d clean the snot from his nose and the goop from the corners of his eyes too, but now, this time, he reached out his stiff hand—that pale and thin hand that so often had clung to her own or to the microphone—and grabbed her. She didn’t understand how he was suddenly able to move, why he squeezed her palm until the blood from the wound formed a streak. In the film, on the screen, nothing of which to speak. Across the window, a crack, a break. Hush now, not a peep. A farewell blowout. The vocalist rehearses: it’s time for me to go now. Out on the beach, she and he and the other burst apart. The dream makes her faint—black out.

  “Now it’s time to dance. Everything in its place.”

  A bit of the dialogue between the characters in the film woke her up. She tried to grasp what was happening, who was saying what, but the masses had turned into a diablada that had overrun and swallowed the tanks.

  “Now play,” stammered the vocalist, sitting up in bed.

  She sat there looking at him. No longer fixating on the lines of his wrinkles or his motionless cheeks. The cushions and pillows were on the floor. She wasn’t trying to understand the disordered movements of his pupils anymore, but seeing him speak, in complete contradiction to all scientific diagnosis, it dawned on her now he wasn’t supporting his back against any surface either. That stiff hand, which was clinging to hers, tried to caress her.

  “Now play.”

  He hadn’t said those two words in the imperial language or in the language of commerce, not in Chezungun or the language of the rabbits or that of the peninsula or that of the island or that from across the sea either: the sounds were completely foreign to her and yet she’d understood them anyway. The vocalist didn’t want to write his autobiography with his eyes. He wanted to sleep. She wept.

  A door slammed.

  “We’ve got some wind,” the other said when she wasn’t expecting it.

  He had been watching the two of them snore from the bedroom doorway. He was holding three glasses of lukewarm water in his hands, he didn’t move until he heard her stir. He took off his shoes, his tie, his suit, and got into bed with them.

  “That boy of yours can’t be convinced that a thing will never again become what it once was if it is determined to be transformed. He’s still looking for the girl, the stylist, in The Man. I told him memory can be operated on, too, now. He took off.”

  She was waking up. Sleepless, The Band’s percussionist amused herself by pressing a series of buttons on the remote control; the projection changed format on the wall, bulging, the soundtrack dropped and out of the crowd of choreographed bodies the voice of one actress emerged. The wound on her hand had stopped bleeding. The Band’s guitarist saw another scar on the opposite side of her hand she’d never shown him before. She let him look at it in the half-light. The vocalist appeared to have fallen asleep among the cushions, at last; maybe the three of them would finally rest in front of the mass that had dismantled the attack with their dance, they wouldn’t pick up their instruments to help.

  “What language is this choreography in?” they asked.

  The door would open and close one last time, pause and movement.

  The choreography needs correction.

  NOTE

  This novel includes paraphrases from texts by Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, Michel de Certeau, Lydia Cabrera, Lawrence Hayward, Thomas Mann, Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Lacan, and Manuel Manquilef.

  Carlos Labbé, one of Granta’s “Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists,” was born in Chile and is the author of eight novels, including Navidad & Matanza and Loquela, and two collections of short stories. In addition to his writings, he is a musician and has released five albums. He is a co-editor at Sangria, a publishing house based in Santiago and Brooklyn, where he translates and runs workshops. He also writes literary essays, most notably on Juan Carlos Onetti, Diamela Eltit and Roberto Bolaño.

  Will Vanderhyden received an MA in Literary Translation Studies from the University of Rochester. He has translated fiction by Carlos Labbé, Edgardo Cozarinsky, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Juan Marsé, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Rodrigo Fresán, and Elvio Gandolfo. He received NEA and Lannan fellowships to translate Rodrigo Fr
esán’s novel, The Invented Part, which won the 2018 Best Translated Book Award.

  Inga Ābele (Latvia)

  High Tide

  Naja Marie Aidt (Denmark)

  Rock, Paper, Scissors

  Esther Allen et al. (ed.) (World)

  The Man Between: Michael Henry Heim & a Life in Translation

  Bae Suah (South Korea)

  A Greater Music

  North Station

  Zsófia Bán (Hungarian)

  Night School

  Svetislav Basara (Serbia)

  The Cyclist Conspiracy

  Guðbergur Bergsson (Iceland)

  Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller

  Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès (World)

  Island of Point Nemo

  Per Aage Brandt (Denmark)

  If I Were a Suicide Bomber

  Can Xue (China)

  Frontier

  Vertical Motion

  Lúcio Cardoso (Brazil)

  Chronicle of the Murdered House

  Sergio Chejfec (Argentina)

  The Dark

  My Two Worlds

  The Planets

  Eduardo Chirinos (Peru)

  The Smoke of Distant Fires

  Marguerite Duras (France)