CORRECTION
The choreography needs counterpoint. Sitting on a bench in the plaza, the other heard how the voices swelled inside the cathedral as sporadic drops gave way to rain. He opened his eyes and got ready to stand, to make his way through the crowd of shaved- and dreadlock-headed kids, covered in tattoos, who were beginning to shout insults at the riot police, obtained by the widow thanks to her friendship with the mayor.
Before entering the funeral, the other reflexively rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt. The bishop’s litanies made him drowsy and there, amid votive candles, eulogies, and kerchiefs dabbing eyes and noses of the venerable elderly, senators, and diplomats—relatives no doubt of the widow and not of her husband, the mentor—the other was able to fall deeply asleep for the first time in ten days, and thereby ignore the obvious swelling in his phalanges and tendons, resulting from the demanding schedule of rehearsals he’d been submitted to in recent days. On his deathbed, the mentor had provided him with instructions for how each of the twelve songs should be played, while struggling to hold up the weight of the tube organ and transistor sequencer, of the eight-track recorder and analog mixer, running the risk the equipment would tangle with the tube that had just fed him against his will, hanging on until the final chord of The Band Project’s thirtieth record was recorded.
The other heard the suite that would close that final album like a litany repeated by the thirty voices that crescendoed in the cathedral as the bishop bade farewell to the mentor, he said, to his time on this earth. Then the mentor was alive again, though dying, in his bed, while the other, sitting at his side, disguised the beeping of the monitors with an improvisation, starting out with an acoustic-guitar andante, because he knew that the mentor—who ate only vegetables and didn’t drink alcohol, who had never ingested pills or worked with other musicians until the other, when he was seventeen years old, was hired as his cook and managed to gain his trust as a guitarist; who practiced every morning, sequestered himself every afternoon, and renounced sex every night—didn’t listen to anything but Bach, Fela Kuti, and Felt. The blue skin of the mentor faded, fog filled the dream but not the image of those feverish eyes that the other saw cloud over when the mentor learned from the mouths of his doctors that he wouldn’t be able to complete his work on The Band Project, that he wouldn’t last long enough to finish recording the thirteen songs of the thirtieth and last album that was to close the cycle with the music of a possible biology behind the metaphysical practice; there was satisfaction in those eyes, because at last the pains of his illness would come to an end.
“In his Presence,” the bishop repeated.
Those words still hung in the other’s somnolent ears, in the cathedral, when he started awake, discovering a thread of drool seeping, almost imperceptibly, out of his mouth. God, he thought in his island language, at what point did it occur to me to roll up my shirtsleeves in this cold? Then—as an antique organ marked the footsteps of the widow’s relatives, walking down the aisle, bearing the casket of the man whose Band Project had topped the charts three times with its first album, as late-arriving fans watched the procession with perplexity from the seats in back of the cathedral, and as the reporters raised their cameras above the crowd—the other understood the origin of the reflex that had made him roll up his shirtsleeves before entering the funeral; he’d forgotten about how, when the ambassador told him over the phone that his mother had left to go live in the mountains with a guerrilla missionary, he was washing the dishes, holding the phone between shoulder and ear, so he had rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. The cold of the water shot up his arms along with the certainty that he’d never see her again.
The police had been deployed at the door to the cathedral and were pushing back the shaved- and dreadlock-headed kids, protesting the imminent burial of the mentor in a Catholic cemetery. For them, it was an affront to the Reichian Marxism he declaimed on the fifth installment of The Band Project, the double album with the sunflower cover, and they shouted slogans opposing the new contract, announced that morning by the widow in a TV interview, to rerelease his discography. From a corner on the stairs, behind the police cordon, over the sirens, through the entreaties of an ecclesiastical authority, above the cameras, and amid the growing mass of onlookers who weren’t approaching from the plaza, the other focused his attention on one heavyset kid, spouting off in yet another language. It was the vocalist. He remembered the impotent rage in the eyes of the mentor when he failed to play a syncopated rhythm on his guitar. He hurried toward the hearse, not caring anymore that the widow, the multinational record label, the military police, the shaved heads, the fan club, and the churches opposed it: he had decided to finish the last Band Project album on his own. That very night, he would record and mix the thirteen songs he’d glimpsed in his dream, the thirteen structures, the thirteen rhythms, the thirteen arrangements, the thirteen titles, the thirteen lyrics, and his own thirteen counterpoints that had come to him just then, amid all that mediocrity, as if they were those of the mentor, a second before a rock, flying through the air, struck him in the temple.
The choreography needs accumulation. I, on the other hand, am paralyzed in front of an immaculate, unblemished, un-cracked, unscratched screen.
He, the singer, kept closing his eyes and heightening the sensation in his skin whenever the voice rose from his stomach; prickling, he received the uploads from The Band, he stopped hearing the voice when, not even looking at each other, she and the other and the two bassists and the hired keyboardist stopped repeating their parts and began to elaborate separate variations that, in his prison, made him think of the movement of roots when the sun emerges.
“No, no one leaf is the same as the next,” the old mother would say if he got too close to the tree.
“Every time the sun shines, the stem ages, grows, or shrivels, whatever’s left evaporates and turns into rain.”
Just then, the way opened up and he, the singer, raised his voice so that she and the other and the two bassists and the hired keyboardist could, together, take what came from his hands somewhere far away. I, on the other hand, am sustained just by taking deep breaths and blinking. I have no way to stretch my clothes so my skin can breathe and to find, with The Band, a beat for which hundreds of people had put the little food they had on our plates, where our bare feet rested and, from there inside, would shoot off in every direction, little by little, sighing in some hidden corner, movement, amassing.
I am he, I saved up enough to get a wheelchair. And he, the singer, let himself fall into the masses that were waiting to break apart only to come back together when nobody asked for it, that had decided to grip the feet of The Band in their fists. The trunk whispered to him that neither the rain nor the snow nor the chainsaw would make him fall out of the tree he was climbing; the whisper was the deepest scream of that thing that has no name and never will, for it hasn’t been opened or shut, in the blink of an eye, masses accumulating, telling the story of The Band. Hearing his scream, they decided to dance, to let themselves be moved by a different beat, whisper, and vibration, coming from their own mouths. A single mass rushed to the center of the field, broke apart, crashed to the ground in the stadium, but nobody, except for the security guards, stepped on anyone.
The Band down in front of the stage is I.
She and the other and those others and the others am I: a tree that was pure root, a blue stain in a space resembling a wasteland, a lake seeping through stone opened by flameless fire, red water frozen for whoever might need to drink it, a hand in the night inside her mouth and the other’s mouth. He, the singer, lying there, vapor roiling across the floor, suddenly understood the word that had come to him from out the dancing masses; neither the name of his twin nor that of the other nor that of the old mother, not the stone he’d found in the jungle when aging made him shed his insect-bite-ridden skin: it was his own name in a language he couldn’t pronounce.
I, on the other hand, wait for her to come and touch me late in the night, just before the engines start sounding in the streets. These eyelids try to push her away and, when I shut first one and then the other and blink them immediately back open, the screen assumes I am erasing every character in the autobiography until, exhausted, both lids fall shut and all corrections are unmade.