by Joey Bui
Comma laughed from relief, and from the thrill of the catch. In this mood, she was ready again to say something to Slip, anything, but he was already clutching at her arm.
‘Look! More!’ he cried.
Close to where their first quail was trapped, three more approached, tumbling down the hill, wound up in their own traps.
‘The noise of one quail attracts the others,’ Slip explained.
He cupped his fingers around his mouth and let out a high-pitched clucking, imitating the quails. He looked at Comma, inviting her to join in. Comma laughed, disarmed. She cupped her fingers to her mouth and tried her own clucking, a more warbled version, which she thought sounded closer to the call of the awkward, inelegant quail. Slip was smiling at her. In the dark, far from their hometown, he looked genuinely happy for the first time. And then he looked shy. She had been waiting for this, to be let into his private world.
They kissed, slowly and shyly, as the quails arrived in swarms. The birds’ chorus of riotous clucking in front of the couple disturbed the cicadas, which were still singing out of rhythm.
Hours later, once the quail were inside the baskets, Comma taught Slip how to tie the baskets to their bikes her way, which they agreed was more secure. Later still, down the wide dirt road, Comma called out and asked if they could stop. She confessed that her legs were cramping and that the ride was much more difficult with a load of squirming quail. They had caught many more quail than they needed, so Slip carefully untangled them, bird by bird, and released half the quail from Comma’s basket. Comma and Slip watched ten or so birds waddle away at full speed.
Comma rode in front the rest of the way home, so that she could set the speed. She wasn’t sure of the direction, but guessed which fork in the road to take and found that she remembered the trees and houses they had passed earlier. Each time she turned to look back at Slip, a small, familiar face in the middle of the shadowy Mekong wilderness, he seemed a little more real to her. Sometimes he was looking out at the fields and streams beside them; sometimes he was already smiling back at her.
Comma did not know yet that each time she turned around to look at Slip in the days and years to come, it would be different. Even later that day, it would be different, when they arrived home, and, in the uncertain, hushed hour before dawn, they reached for each other. It would be different a year later, after they had put their firstborn son down to sleep, and whispered his secret, beautiful name to each other in their shared private world. She did not know yet that each of these moments of theirs, decades of them, would grow and cascade until, finally, Slip would pass away, Comma following only months later, tethered by her wild, mad, Mekong love.
The bathroom had pink tiles. That was one thing. Another thing I remember is the small, oblong window above the sink. Too small to let a body through, but enough of a gap to let the Buenos Aires songs float in, and keep floating in. It was a Tuesday night. I remember because, as I was pissing into the urinal, a guy walked past outside, singing, ‘Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, oh Saturday night is over.’ I heard him as if he was right next to me. The open window was just above my head, no flyscreen or glass. I remember because I was drunk and I thought, That at least is true: it is Tuesday, and so Saturday night is over. It was true like so very few things are.
That’s what I was thinking, so I would have noticed if Gabo had come in. Or if Gabo had been there, because I would have wanted to talk to someone about how it was Tuesday, and Saturday night was over. I’m just trying to explain what goes through my head when I’ve been drinking like that: that’s the way I think then, definitely, even if not properly. Definitely, Gabo did not come through the bathroom.
It was five months ago, the night Juan did a set on his own, or rather, with a different band. He was all right. He was doing acoustic, all soft and mellow, pop song choruses, and a guitar around his neck. Juan figured he was a handsome guy and, back then, all the romantic guys were singing bossa nova like the Brazilians.
Juan brought a new girl to the bar that night, this skinny brunette. I don’t remember her name. She was leaning forward on her chair listening to Juan, not talking to any of us guys, even though she was sitting at our table. She was like a bird, with a dainty chin and wet eyes, a real sad face, although she laughed a lot, kind of nervously. She looked miserable, but maybe that’s just the way her face was.
The other night, when everyone was talking about Gabo, she asked me straight up:
‘You were with him that night, weren’t you, Manu?’
It was the first time she’d spoken to me directly.
‘We were all with him. He was with us.’
‘But you were.’ She stopped. ‘You were with him, weren’t you?’
Then I wanted to kill her, and it must have showed because she took off. I had been on a short fuse. Everyone wanted to ask me about Gabo, but for some reason she made me really angry. Maybe she was embarrassed that she couldn’t say outright that we were fucking, Gabo and I. But that’s all it was between us, and it wasn’t a big deal. Or maybe it was just her sad bird-eyes that set me off.
We all met Gabo at the University of Buenos Aires in July last year. The student union Juventud Guevarista held a midnight rally, the first of many. Mostly speeches and poems, young kids in jeans, manifestos sticking out of their back pockets. They asked us to do some songs. Rafael’s sister was in the Guevaristas and that’s how they knew our band.
I can’t remember the set list, because I had already got high while the kids were giving their speeches and reading from Che or something. So we got up and started playing, and in the middle of a song I forgot what came next. I was playing bass as well as singing, and I got stuck on two notes for about five minutes. I think it was D flat and E and I just played D flat-E, D flat-E, D flat-E over and over. The guys were freaking out.
But then I started singing, ‘Something, there’s something, something’s in the water,’ and I played that infernal bass line again. It sounded like it was all an accident, but I sang it because I’d been thinking about this stuff for a while. I sang, ‘There’s something in the water, you know, something in the water.’ The kids loved it.
We were doing what we’d heard was going on in the Tucumán music scene. Los Perros had a song about building a raft and escaping, and Almendra was doing a song about ice falling over the city, freezing the city when everybody is asleep. That was probably the best one I knew. The guys and I hadn’t talked about this new music, but we played it and it was what the kids wanted, even though they hadn’t asked for it. It was a time when nobody was saying anything much about anything, not really.
That was also before we really knew for sure that the military abductions were real. We’d heard rumours about some activists and students in Rosario disappearing. But nobody knew their names and it was all very uncertain. Maybe they were just hippies and left for the Andes one morning, or got broke and went back to their mothers in Tigre. You didn’t know who you could ask, either.
But at this point the vultures hadn’t come after musicians yet, or city kids. It was early enough that everyone was perversely excited about being involved in the protests. The whole thing was thrilling. Something was in the water.
After the Guevarista rally, we went drinking with some of the kids in La Boca. They were poets, carriers of the manifestos, and we had long conversations about things we didn’t know much about. Gabo was one of the poets. I remember the first thing he said that night, because it made me wonder if he was retarded. We were all talking about Che, good Che, father of the young Latin American poets, saint of the Latin American bar room, and the baptism into his patronage by spirits, by which I mean Fernet spirits. We were loud and drunk. Suddenly Gabo said:
‘I don’t care if I fall.’
He hadn’t spoken all night. His voice was high, stringy. It had to be—squeezed out of such a skinny body. But it was melodic, like he was reading poetry. Everybody stopped to wonder what the fuck.
‘As long as somebody pi
cks up my gun and starts shooting,’ he said.
Then another student, recognising the Che quote, shouted, and squeezed Gabo’s shoulders, rumpling his dark green sweater so that a section of his collarbone was revealed. I looked at him, and felt uncharacteristically shy when he stared back at me. He was a pale guy, ginger hair, slender with almond eyes like an Asian. He was the most delicate person I’ve ever seen, and the most serious.
In bed, he embarrassed me with his seriousness. We left the bar, and I took him with me: his serious looks were seductive, and I wanted to reward him for his Che quote and for the respect the other students clearly had for him. But I was unsure, because he gave me no signals. Even when he started taking his clothes off, slowly, studiously, it was as if I wasn’t there, as if his sole focus was on folding his sweater, his khaki pants, his thin T-shirt and his cotton underpants. I was embarrassed again by his skinny body. I stood watching him. I didn’t feel as if I could touch him. I felt strange. That was Gabo’s trick: he made me feel strange and melancholy. But mostly I was just wondering what the fuck, is he retarded or a poet? Then I got angry at myself for feeling strange and went after him.
Gabo wrote a song for us in September, or was it November? He’d been at a lot of our gigs. He’d come from the university and sit with the other kids, not drinking or talking, but they always saved a seat for him and fell silent when he spoke, like he was their secret god. I still don’t really get it. We were hanging out with the university kids a lot by then, and some other odd people who talked about rock and poetry—and who drank a lot, of course—just hanging out, like we were all waiting for something to happen.
After ‘Something in the Water’, the guys and I only played songs like that. New songs, nothing sentimental anymore. Only about the things that nobody was talking about. Pablo knew another student poet, Maria; he was sleeping with her. She wrote an insane song for us called ‘Mister Scissors’, about a guy who cut out scenes from a film that starred his lover, editing and rearranging the clips. Then one night he comes home and cuts her up in bed. It was good, really freaky. The first night we rehearsed it, Maria was standing next to the stage, right in front of me, and she kept shrieking, ‘Louder! Louder! Louder!’ I paid attention to her, because honestly I was scared of her, and because the song has a climax in which everything is shrieking, like the lover in the song when she’s being cut up. I didn’t know how Pablo could get into bed with someone like Maria, but it was good, because we started getting more attention with that song.
Maybe Gabo wrote a song for us because he was jealous of Maria’s success.
‘I wrote you a song,’ he said suddenly, in the middle of the night, as if an alarm had gone off. He got up and walked over to the window ledge, where he picked up a piece of folded paper, then came back to bed and handed it to me.
He didn’t have handwriting like a poet; his letters were big and childlike. The song was about dinosaurs.
‘Read it slowly,’ he said, his naked body beside me. That wasn’t hard because my hangover was on the way.
‘Imagine the dinosaurs in your streets, imagine the dinosaurs in your bed, imagine the dinosaurs disappear.’
‘Slowly, slowly.’
‘The dinosaurs will disappear, the dinosaurs will disappear,’ I read.
I didn’t sing it; I was too tired. But Gabo nodded, his expression serious. In my stupor, the song made sense, although in the morning it sounded a bit odd. But by then I trusted him enough, this strange, skinny god of the young poets, and the song became our greatest hit.
We performed ‘Dinosaurs’ in Tucumán in November. It was a huge gig. They called it a happening, and all the kids came down for it from Buenos Aires and Rosario, even Santa Fe and Montevideo. The best bands were there; it was a big deal. Almendra were there. They knew about our dinosaur song, just like we knew about their snow song. They even looked like us, four haggard guys in their twenties like they didn’t have a mattress between them, or a mother. We had Juan, though. Nobody had a guy as handsome as Juan.
Gabo travelled with us, nothing special. I mean, not with me. A group of Buenos Aires students had started coming everywhere with us, including Gabo and Maria, who was sleeping with Juan by then. A couple days before we left for Tucumán, I passed a kiosko in Buenos Aires that sold kids’ books alongside the chips and candy. Books like The Little Prince and Mafalda, and a book about dinosaurs. When I saw it, I had to buy it. But it felt like a stupid idea once I’d brought it home, so I gave it to Gabo.
He took the book gently, as if it would fall apart. Impatient, I grabbed it back and flipped over to the page I’d flagged.
‘This one is you,’ I said, pointing. ‘Apatosaurus.’
It was one of the vegetarian dinosaurs, with scaly skin and a long skinny neck that made me think of Gabo’s body.
He stared at the page, then said, ‘You are not one at all.’
I was angry for a second, and then I realised it didn’t matter. It was just a stupid kids’ book. But if I was one, I think I would be a big flying Quetzalcoatlus.
Things got really crazy after the Tucumán performance. There were thousands of people in the hall, and even more outside on the grass. Everyone was camping because the hostels were full. Nobody slept that weekend anyway, except with each other. I didn’t see Gabo again because the band was constantly swarmed by fans, and also I was blind drunk the whole time. We had made it then, really made it. We played ‘Dinosaurs’ over and over, every day, and it was great every time, everybody wanted to hear it, over and over. The kids worshipped us and chanted our names. New kids came back to Buenos Aires with us, along with some of the same faces, but it was hard to keep track because, like I said, I was drunk the whole time and there were a lot of people around.
The last time anyone saw Gabo was on the Tuesday. We were out drinking at some bar in Palermo, the guys, Maria and the kids who came along with us. Gabo didn’t come home that night or the next, or the next, and soon we realised that we had seen him for the last time. No one could talk about anything else; we were really scared. The guys in the band asked me about it. Did I know where he lived? Did he seem scared around that time? Did it seem as if he knew what was going to happen?
Once, the guys and I all sat down and talked about what we remembered of that night.
‘He left early.’
‘He was strange that night.’
‘He’s always strange.’
‘The bathroom had pink tiles,’ I told them.
I was passed out in the bathroom when Gabo left, on his own. I must have been there a long time, because everyone thought I had left too. But I was sitting in the bathroom, staring at the pink tiles, dizzy.
In the end, we didn’t figure out anything and didn’t feel any better. We didn’t meet to play anymore. There always seemed to be something more important to do, although I didn’t really have anything to do, except drink.
By the end of the month, Juan and Maria left to go to Juan’s country home. They didn’t tell us where it was exactly, and we didn’t talk about the band again. Nobody talked much. There was a lot of moving around, and I saw Pablo and Rafael a couple more times. But two or three months after that Tuesday night, I knocked on Pablo’s door and got no answer. The neighbours told me that no one lived there anymore. So then I was alone most of the time.
One night, I found myself in the same bar again. I didn’t mean to go there; I didn’t want to see that place ever again. At first, I didn’t recognise the place. It was like any dingy dive in Palermo, a neon burger sign out front—the same neon burger sign that hung outside a couple of spots I know in the city.
I sat at a low table, unreasonably low for an average adult. I felt overgrown and sad. The seats were so close to the floor that my knees hung out to the sides. I forgot to order a burger and drank a lot of beer instead.
After a while, I began to feel bloated and my knees were cramping, as if the table was sinking. Yes, I must have been drunk. The vertigo gave me the sensation that
I was heading for the floor, not like an upright person falling over, but as if I was swelling and swallowing up the furniture.
I made myself get up and go to the bathroom. When I washed my hands, I looked up and saw the small, oblong window and started screaming. The vertigo, or whatever it was, meant that I filled up the room. I had a bird’s eye view of the tiny bathroom: it had white tiles, although I knew it was the same bathroom as that night. I checked and, even though I was swollen and huge, it was obvious that a person could have fitted through the window. Then I heard bird songs and a woman’s voice.
‘You were with him that night, weren’t you, Manu?’
It was Maria’s voice, Maria with the sad bird-eyes, but why didn’t I know it? And I understood then why the tiles were pink that night and why I spent such a long time staring at them and never forgot that they were pink. The room swelled with bird songs, with Maria’s voice, and I thought I might die, but then it passed. I pissed. I was sitting back on the toilet seat. I kept pissing and the room deflated, so did I, and the bird songs faded. I smelled fried meat and remembered that I had ordered a burger after all, and that I was ravenous, so I washed my hands again and went back to the bar, which looked the same, and it was like nothing had happened. Nothing could have happened at all, not really.
It is no joy to write about what has already happened. But the story of this girl must persist because it already has. At some point, when we are in the thick of it, you may be tempted to believe that I have a choice, but you should not; I do not. Her name is damned and I cannot forget her. The dumb girl muttering songs by the highway has to live, though she did not ask for it. She only lives because she wakes up in the morning. That is understood, there is no other way.