CORRECTION
The choreography needs a libretto: Cueros was officially started in the summer of 1986, on a patio in the Santiago neighborhood of La Florida by a set of twins, children of a linotype operator and a nurse who worked at José Joaquín Aguirre hospital. Those were the days of Latin rock playing on the radio, but instead of hits by Upa!, Soda Stereo, GIT, the twins listened to tapes that a friend of their father, living in exile in Stockholm, sent to them, with songs by bands like the Chameleons, Television, and the Cocteau Twins.
It was around that time, in high school, that his brother met his future wife, Sara, the sister of a popular performance artist, who a decade later became a set designer for nationally syndicated TV shows. Before long, the twins were regulars at Garage Matucana, where they heard the Electrodomésticos, Viena, and La banda del pequeño vicio play over and over. The twins made their first record on their home stereo: he played guitar and sang lead vocals; his brother played bass, sang vocal harmonies, and used the drum-machine feature on a toy keyboard that belonged to Sara’s little sister to create the beat. Cueros played Garage Matucana three times, with guest performances featuring Sara on recorder and Igor Rodríguez—of Aparato Raro—on synthesizer. Two songs they composed during that period were recorded professionally and included on the compilation, released by the Alerce label, Nuevo rock nacional, volumen 4.
Alerce signed them on to record a full-length album. In October of 1987, La pieza de Sara was distributed in two popular record stores and sold an unexpected 330 copies, with zero promotional support beyond word of mouth. A manager, whose name is unknown, offers to represent them. Already distancing themselves from Garage Matucana, in the summer of 1988, the twins bring in Arturo Soto on drums and the Argentine Clemente Ferlosio on keyboards, who play multiple shows with them in discotecas up and down the central coast, culminating at the second annual Festival Free in Bellavista, where they share the stage with Aterrizaje Forzoso, Lambda, and—the headliner—Los Prisioneros.
An Argentine tour at the end of the year coincides with the release of the Cueros second single, En el techo, onto the Buenos Aires airwaves. The magazine Cerdos y peces put it on their Song of the Month list. They toured the provinces on the other side of the Andes for four months and even crossed another border to do a show at a bar in Foz de Iguaçu. In the subsequent months, Arturo Soto leaves the band and the vocalist meets Dudú Branca, a fusion percussionist, playing with John McLaughin at the time, in Brasilia, and his brother marries Sara and takes a job as a producer for Sony Music Argentina.
In April 1991, Cueros release the EP, La escalera de J, on Alerce, whose blank green cover—a nod to the vocalist’s recent conversion to Rastafarianism—was replaced at the last minute by a photograph of Copacabana in the summer. None of the Cueros albums, or those of the subsequent Sismos and Jim Nace, included any information beyond the production credits; of the twins, there only exists one tiny monochrome portrait that experts picked out in the collage depicting the recent electronic compilation of Gymnastics’s greatest hits. A second EP, from July of 1991, Las fotos reveladas, would be Cueros’ final record. On August 16th, they sign on with EMI for two albums and record a live performance of the single “Labiales y velas” for the TV show Undercriollo, on UCV-TV. Because of the variety of rhythmic and melodic references in their songs—60s British psychedelia, gringo Gospel, and New Wave, but also Jamaican rhythms, Peruvian Chicha, Old School East Coast Hip Hop, Brazilian tropicalia, the sunshine pop of the Beach Boys, Pehuenche ceremonial music, industrial postpunk, ambient, the anti-cuecas of Violeta Parra, and the jazz of Sun Ra—which, according to Argentine music critics, baffled the public, Cueros would have no doubt achieved a musical synthesis that would’ve gone on to animate the listless pop produced in the Southern Cone in the following decades, if it hadn’t been for that fatal August night in 1991, when the vocalist stabbed his twin brother.
The choreography needs simultaneity. I close my eyes and repeat this continuously, for I have neither larynx, nor lips, nor palate with which to sing a word that remains hidden.
He, in his prison, realized that the best way to shave, to look himself in the eyes, to pluck hairs, and to check for food in his teeth wasn’t with a mirror, which were prohibited; a guard had been stabbed and a tunnel dug with their sharp, broken points. He, in his prison, figured out that he could see his reflection in the window.
I, on the other hand, blink and am not tired. I move my pupil, there’s no longer a ngürütrewa to follow with my eyes up the mountainside, while awaiting the right moment to steal the kawellu and bring it to the old mother on a rope, furious, kicking, just like her, to remove the hair from its belly, to hear it whinny with pride, to let it rest its muzzle against my leg instead of my neck.
He, in his prison, was looking out the window at the hills. He guessed that the sun danced blue on those slopes because, in front of them, was a great body of water, because the ocean was right there. So the punishment was that he understood when people spoke to him of the sea, that he was even allowed to go to the window and stare out at its reflection, but that none of the windows had a view of the coast. He’d never seen the sea; he told the four men who came to rape him the place at the window was his and he wasn’t going to give it up.
I, on the other hand, sit in front of a window that’s not transparent. A piece of glass that corrects me if I don’t dilate my pupil, opening new windows where neither hills nor what’s beyond the hills appears when I blink three times in a row; that alerts me when I need eye drops by reflecting a vein in my eyeball. She comes in and I see in the blankness of the screen how she kisses me, how she puts her hand on the nape of my neck, how in her language she sings to me.
I, on the other hand, erase what remains in the window.
He, in his prison, was defending his place by the windows, because he had seen her out walking, as an adolescent girl, across one of the hills. For a month, she entered through the same door. She appeared on the same upper-story balcony, leaned against the railing, and stayed there, looking back at him; behind her, on the back wall in the room she rented, he could also make out a poster with the other’s face and the name of another band.
He, in his prison, was defending his place by the windows where she once appeared and kicked out the glass panes in which his brother saw him again.
I, on the other hand, sit in front of this blank screen. I let what my eyelids write be corrected on a soft, pleasing, polished surface—neither tree bark nor quicksilver nor glass:
“I am he. The Band begins where the couple formed by me and the old mother, me and my brother, she and the other ends. The Band ends where the couple begins.”
I correct and let myself be corrected.
He, in his prison, writes on the fogged glass with his finger before the guards come, before four of them grab him for having broken the window. I am he and I blink incessantly until my eyes swell shut.