CORRECTION
The choreography needs displacement. She kissed him. For a long time. Then she was alone, inside a small room full of her cousin’s doll collection. Through the door, she’d heard somebody say her father’s funeral would take place that very night, but as a three or four year old, she could never resist the drowsiness that came over her, without fail, as soon as the sun went down, her eyelids grew heavy and she fell asleep. So she got into the bed; it was a white-lacquered wooden bunk bed whose mattresses came together to form a T. She coughed. She shivered with chills under the covers. She stretched a little and found a pile of cushions atop her legs. They’re so hard, she said to herself, getting up to remove them. And it was then she discovered her father’s corpse, wrapped in the sheets at her feet.
She woke up from the fright. It was ten in the morning; the cool breeze of springtime in the old empire’s capital came in through the window accompanied by the song of a bird and occasional honks from out in the street. Beside her, the bed was empty; the pillows on the floor. The vocalist had meticulously wrapped the percussionist’s legs in blankets and down comforters, so she had to struggle to stand up. He’d also built a sort of tower with the hotel cushions on top of her feet. Where had he gone, she wondered, and scanned with her eyes for the underwear, the wrinkled pants, and the metal belt he’d thrown in a corner last night, after skillfully removing them, the glasses and the pills he’d deposited on the nightstand while she showered. In vain. She didn’t remember what time he’d left the room, all she could summon was the terror of having touched a dead body, her father’s body, in her dream, and a vague melody that at times was a faint hum. Was her family alive? She was still rehearsing in her mind the long-distance international and national codes for her home city when the ringing of the telephone on the nightstand made her jump out of bed.
Five hours later, she was waiting, in the backseat of a taxi, for a guard to return her documents and open the forbidding gate of the widow’s residence. On the way, she had amused herself looking at the shapes of the clouds that appeared in the northern sky. Every time she called the vocalist, she got a message saying his phone was no longer in service. Twice she was tempted to call the other to ask him if he had seen the vocalist, both times she settled for finding the back of a horse in the nimbuses, the legs of a spider, the silhouette of a cat resembling the Siamese her little cousin adored. The butler let her into the residence. She waited in a hall adorned with two hanging chandeliers, sitting on the edge of a divan, facing two huge oil paintings. It was just how she imagined the inside of an old-empire castle. She smiled not out of happiness, but because she was imagining the bitter pantomime the other would do as soon he entered that place; he would look around and allege that these people all think everything from the past should be a museum, just so she could retort that in that case he should propose a remodel and put an illuminated glass pyramid in the center of it. What do you know, the other would fire back, that you didn’t read in some tourist guidebook. During the half hour she spent waiting for the widow, as the staff refilled her cup, she forced herself to maintain these internal dialogues to keep from thinking about the keys: there was a grand piano glowing in the middle of the hall. The top was open. After ten minutes, she couldn’t help but stare from the divan at the whiteness of the keys, while fingering from memory and from afar, eighth note by eighth note, a polonaise that her father frequently played on their piano, at home, in the summer.
The widow interrupted her reverie when she entered the hall, trailed by a assistant. They went over the dates of The Band’s tour through the ruins of the cities; they discussed the weather and the advantages of traversing the old empire in taxi. They were silent. She tasted the chamomile tea they had brought her to ameliorate the effect of successive coffees, she felt like there was a viscous paste on her tongue.
“Do you like my hall?” asked the widow.
She nodded.
“And the piano?”
She shrugged.
“Drums are my thing.”
She was lying. Then the widow stood up and ceremoniously closed the wide doors.
“You know,” she said, after sitting back down, “I feel like I can trust you. It’s been a long time since I felt that way.”
Then she looked cheekily at her assistant, who exhaled audibly.
“A long time, to tell the truth. Every time I’ve met with musicians in my various homes, for thirty years, none of them has ever been able to resist sitting down at the piano and playing some of their dreck while I make them wait. You’re the first one who has shown any respect.”
The widow took off her glasses and began to adjust her hair. Is it possible this woman reminds me of my cousin? the percussionist thought to herself. The widow looked at her as if she were expecting a specific response from her. She got to her feet again, walked to a cabinet with double doors. She opened it, removing a bottle and two glasses.
“That’s why I want to propose that we do a different sort of business,” she said.
The choreography needs its place, there, where he could walk without fear, without laughter, without fantasy, without pride, without property, without subterfuge, and without expectation, across the ground from where the old mother always leapt into the tree, from where the men walking in the street weren’t reflected as their twins in the glass of the buildings, from where each person moved in a way distinct from him, singing, and, at the same time, they were all part of the same mass; in the end, a space where he couldn’t identify himself, because it was neither country nor city, neither prison nor sea, neither stasis nor dance.
He, the singer, liked that moment when the instruments still resounded, though all the musicians had stopped playing.
He, the singer, let himself be moved by the inertia and the echo of a final syllable that would close his throat in front of the masses. He made no movement, nor did he pause. Pause. She comes with a glass of water and a cotton swab, devotes herself to cleaning the gunk collected in the folds of my eyelids. She insists on the cotton swab and the water, she ignores the cosmetic products that the company I own sends me. Then she gathers the dirty cotton swabs, rewets them and wipes clean the screen here in front of me, while I shut my eyes and pretend to be sleeping, between her legs as her thighs forcefully squeeze me. Finally, she lets me go. I go back to the glow of the glass, she puts the cotton swabs into a bag and drinks down the dirty water in a single swallow.
He, the boy, threw a stone into the water to scare away the cuero. “That was your stone,” the old mother said sarcastically behind him.
He, the boy, dove into the river before dawn, shivering with cold, because the pancora wanted to pull him into the holes and because the cuero would tug him down into the depths if his little fingers were unable to find anything solid to hold onto. And yet, as the old mother sang on the shore, the current became crystal clear so he could hear her and in that way find the stone. Then they built a fire that the sun, when it rose, put out with its wind and, when the stone was dry, the old mother added: “That stone doesn’t belong to you, none of them do. You need to know this. Neither the cuero, nor the pancora, nor this water are here for your fear, even if justice grows too great and, as I know you will, you end up the owner of all of that which cannot be owned.”
He, in his prison, knew the song’s place wasn’t the silence, wasn’t the music, wasn’t the noise. The place was a moment.
He, the singer, chose that moment to dive into the masses.
He, tired, built her a greenhouse in the old place where all that was left was his twin’s tree. She climbed on top of him and perspired until drops fell from overhead. “An equatorial palm tree and a tundra shrub only intertwine on the narrow earth of the city, never in the country,” she murmured in her imperial language, after so many tears and trying to explain herself.
He, tired, went out walking across those lands he would sign and seal over to the company that owns all this paper. He found neither river nor hill, nor the volcano that appeared with the fog.
He, paralyzed, knew his legs belonged to someone else. Someone who took away his groin and his fingers. He would fall and the floor would rise to meet him, with open arms. Before the names came in her scream, in the other’s scream, and in the nurses’ screams, he brought his hand to his neck: the pancora was ascending toward his mouth.
He, the boy, never understood whether the pancora went inside and died, if it emerged from another hole, or if it underwent a state change. I, on the other hand, know precisely how to raise just one eyebrow in front of the glowing screen, when there appears a name, a toponymic, a demonym, a year in the autobiography. I am he. The Band cannot be named.