CORRECTION
The choreography needs its place. Nobody dies of heatstroke in that place. Though if it starts to rain, his friends might be left to float like teabags in boiling water, the tenor gloated with a fixed smile. Beside him, the waiter held out a tray with a dozen glistening glasses; as one of the last remaining aborigines in the region, the Empire paid him and his blood-relatives monthly installments to provide local color at the Protectorate’s different official celebrations. The waiter stepped behind the curtain and downed two drinks, looking out the window of the zeppelin to see if the storm was still coming. From overhead the tea plantations gleamed.
Two dark points stained the panorama of those green fields; two figures in motion, running from one side to the other, about to come together when a sound, a call, a slithering animal, or some obstacle—it was impossible to tell from the zeppelin—made the point on the right dart off toward the town. The other kept walking through the southeastern fields of the Protectorate, shaking and swearing, clothes soaked with sweat and his neck sunburnt. He sat down at the base of a tree, he wanted to take off the wool hat he had snatched from her during the argument, before she was lost from sight. That morning, when the security guards brought them down from the zeppelin, as soon as the ATV disappeared back in the direction of the hot air balloon, the other perceived what thereafter he would consider the silence. Then, finally, his head’s melody returned, this time a descent of minor notes dropping to the lowest octaves they could thrum; for ten months he’d been hearing nothing but an indistinct noise: tinnitus, they told him; concerts, live shows, recorded interviews, press conferences, board meetings, civil trials, shouted negotiations, sound checks, fireworks, he couldn’t distinguish one from the next. Pure feedback. He’d assumed he would never write another harmony when suddenly he saw the landscape of the tea fields. The sight brought him silence, and a song began to compose itself in his mind. That was when she’d leapt on top of him, clawing and biting and spitting, aiming for his throat before taking off running. Sitting at the base of the tree, the other breathed deeply and let the rain wash his face. And it dawned on him that her voice, despite her cries of rage or her sighs, was the one tone that, at the last second, was thrown into relief by the specter of itself. He regretted the moment he’d agreed to climb aboard the hot air balloon the company provided its artists. He did not regret, definitely not, punching the decrepit contemporary video artist who attempted to extinguish his cigarette on the waitress’s ass; against all odds, the percussionist had set down her drink and proposed they ditch the gala, run to the fuselage, and find a small hatch that would open onto a biplane, aboard which they would be able to return to the peripheries and join the resistance, like in the songs of yesteryear.
Hours later, the other walked into the nearby town. At a bar, he asked for water, but the woman who was working showed him an empty glass and shook her head with severity. They didn’t want his money. He found the percussionist, bathed and calm, on a bench in the square, eyes shut and mouth open, a local man standing in front of her wearing nothing but military pants. The man prodded her palate with a twig. The other walked up uncomprehendingly, reflexively humming the melody that, little by little, was coming back into his head, and sat down on the bench. He took her hand and she turned to him without surprise, without opening her eyes. The man standing in front of her awoke from his trance, lowered the stick, and spoke:
—Death does not want to take you yet, woman. What good fortune.
She covered her mouth with her forearm.
They shook hands, satisfied. As they parted, the man discovered she had managed to slip a bill into the palm of his hand; later he would bury it along with the seed of a new plant.
On their way back to the tea fields, she dodged a kiss the other tried to give her. They ran, savoring the sound of the dry leaves crunching beneath their feet, until they found themselves in a clearing. They looked up at the sky. The rain had stopped. For the next ten days, the afternoon sun would shine bright across the Southeastern Protectorate. The other raised his arms to the zeppelin and began to move.
The choreography needs synchronization. He had practiced every morning ever since, as a kid, he would rise with the first call of the chucao. He, the singer, decided he would devote the first hour of the day to gargling in the motel, where the habit still perplexed him, sun on his face.
He, running through the neighborhood with his brother, knelt down at midday on the church alters. He closed his eyes, opened his legs, relaxed his groin, lowered his zipper, stuck out his chest, leaned his head back to rest the nape of his neck against the wood, spread arms, letting a thread of drool slip from his slack jaw, until the rictus had taken hold of his entire body. Sometimes members of the clergy would take him by the hand, compassionate, until they saw the mess he’d made they’d have to clean. The janitor prodded him out the door with a broomstick and gently let him drop onto the stairs, tossing him a few one-peso coins. A priest, coming in earlier than usual, stood there, staring at him, and then took out his notebook and sketched the position of his body while, at his side, a nun wiped away the smudges his graphite pencil left on the holy cloth.
I, on the other hand, neither perspire nor drool, but force my eyes open until a line of veins forms, running from my temples to the corners of the whites of my eyes, and I proceed to eliminate, across that smooth surface that glows even in the summer, the paragraphs that speak of martyrdom, of sacrifice, of ecstasy, of glory.
He, in his prison, took off his clothes and sat down. He had been pronouncing the same words in all the languages he knew: “detach yourself from yourself with your own arms, remove yourself from yourself.” He was stringing together the names the old mother had taught him when, as a boy, she made him climb a hill so that, panting with exhaustion, he would open his mouth and exhale a “young man, macho, warrior,” whom later she would bury to the temples, while calling herself “elder, mother, worker, wise woman,” and with that throw herself over a precipice releasing an “old man, grandfather, impresario, consultant” along with the constant rain that pattered on the treetops where she landed. He recited them without activating a single facial muscle, without letting his skin move, even when his cellmates woke up fuming in the cool air, furious, drenched in nightmares, and went off on his discipline, on him and the windows, facing the hills where they thought day was breaking.
He, the star, didn’t hear the phone calls or the soft raps on the door, the recorded prayers, or silver clinking of the trays laden with honey, cheese, figs, yogurt with cochayuyo, and muday with manjar left for him on the mirrored table, outside all the doors to all his bedrooms and in all the dining rooms where he’d explicitly asked that not a soul enter so he could take off his clothes. As soon as he closed his eyes and tuned in, many languages and registers came to him and there was no need to choose any of them, just allow them to take complete control of his voice, the sound was noise until it coagulated into a rushing mass, expanding with each beat: without end or origin, next to nothing, in all places, and simultaneously crushing him, extruding his eyes from a skin that was fire.
I am he, his are not even chicken bones.
He, paralyzed, found his voice and sang. He achieved it when she kissed his eyelids, when he opened them to her touch and the place was reconstructed before his eyes.
The Band is I, he heard himself say. I, on the other hand, erase.