CORRECTION
The choreography needs three. The handful of individuals who paid a fortune to get seats at The Band’s reunion concert had to contain their impatience for close to ten minutes. From their positions, the reporters witnessed how, in the first row, the imperial minister’s face drained of color, how the neatly trimmed, contract-signing fingers of the proprietor of all the bread began nervously tapping on the seat in front of him, how the made-up mouth of the bald starlet from all the ad spots fell open with the passing minutes and wouldn’t close, because the frenetic bass drum that opened The Band’s latest anthem never came.
The three of them had appeared on stage with only a wooden harp and a tube organ, no retina-filling digital close-ups, no three-tiered orchestras or eco-political rants, no apocryphal verses or on-screen explosions. And then, with a nod of the vocalist’s head, a grinding hydraulic engine raised the neoclassical façade of what had been the municipal theater, so the concert was suddenly out in the open air and the one hundred seats were immediately surrounded by hundreds of students, workers, the unemployed, assistants, advisors, protestors, grocers, new arrivals, dogs, and girls who at that hour rummaged through the dumpsters of the old neighborhood’s high-end restaurants. The finance secretaries of the Anti-Empire took the moment to light up their water pipes, because it was all starting to make sense: the prohibitive cost of the exclusive tickets for The Band’s only reunion concert had been used to rebuild the façade of the old municipal theater in such a way that, minutes before the opening song, all the people in the streets had congregated there.
That had been the only condition the percussionist, the vocalist, and the other had stipulated when the mentor’s wife had proposed the reunion concert. And, in effect, it allowed thousands of unanticipated attendees to all at once connect The Band’s multiform discography with the enigma of their first toccatas, with the ideological saturation of their recent productions, and with the battle royale that exploded in the park at that summer concert when their breakup had been deemed consummated: the effect was rage. The Band made music out of rage; what rage, shouted a barefooted man. Just then, in the sky, the roof open now too, an enormous hologram appeared, showing documentary footage of clashes between fans and police at the festival in the desert, at the exit to a classical music festival in the old northern capital, during the predawn hours of the new year along a stretch of beach bordering the jungle, and in front of the parking garages at Estadio Popular, in counterpoint with the audio of the shouting matches he, she, and the other had at those final press conferences. From his seat, a supreme judge of the First Hemisphere coughed, then a group of haute couture designers raised their glasses; these were the previously agreed-on signals for a detachment of military bodyguards to encircle that faction of elites in a protective ring. The swelling chants of the masses, interrupted by the helicopters, could be heard over everything. The show hadn’t even started.
“What the organizers want,” someone said over the radio, from the trenches, “is for the rage to spread from one side to other.”
Then a great spotlight drew all the tension to the proscenium. For the first time at one of The Band’s shows, the vocalist appeared on the stage fully clothed; for the first time, he remained quiet, stony, distant; for the first time, his exhortations were not heard as soon as he set foot in front of the microphone: he started to dance, convulsive, until his arms tangled with his foot and the masses gasped in unison as he fell to the ground. At the same time, the other began to finger the harp and it became clear, from the low resonant notes echoing off the façades, the lights, and the concrete, that she was playing the tube organ with her feet. A cold fog was creeping over the elites and the masses, getting everyone wet; there were thousands now and you could barely distinguish one from the next. Maybe it wouldn’t be through pure rage that they would come to glimpse the totality the combination of all the songs of The Band Project, Cueros, The Band, and the different members’ various solo albums aspired to; the appearance of the two bassists, the percussion section, and a symphonic choir in the pit that used to separate the audience from the musicians, had the effect of elevating the hundred thousand privileged, greedy voices that intertwined, that identified with one of the many melodic vocal lines of that long and famous song, and that kept on singing. The seconds expanded, as the voice of each individual came to understand itself in the voice next to it and those voices in all the other voices there, intoning, uncanny, a harmony that wasn’t just a promise, that wasn’t embodied in a leader, in a faction, in a party, or in a government, but in an excessive, disciplined, complementary force, all one: the sound of all those bodies all at once. The minister’s muscles flexed at the same time her tendons relaxed, a kind of animal horde had taken over the old municipal theater and was moving docilely in the direction of something new, in a language not spoken by diplomacy: sound in itself. The minister didn’t recognize it, though she was a polyglot; neither did the owner of the subway system, nor the biotech wunderkind, nor the crown princess, nor the most-lauded writer, nor the oil baroness, nor the old pharmaceutical speculator, nor the game’s fair-haired heartthrob, nor the oligarchy’s public relations managers, nor the last great athletes, nor the two hundred most influential, accredited reporters. Nor was it the non-verbal language of artistic composition. It was a promise, nothing more, but there was nobody left to say what it meant as a collective experience: the chorus of voices would be swept away, with all the bodies of the audience, by a rhythm that would carry them not to that same place—there, where they lived—or to an entirely different place, but to the inside of an accumulation of palpitations, perspirations, afflictions, exertions, plenitudes. With that heartbeat, each individual would begin to dance asynchronously yet simultaneously, in different ways and at different paces, but aware of the person beside them and of the groups as a whole, such that even the possibility of dissolving into a harmony would transcend exclusive generalization.
The vocalist, on his feet again, just another voice in the chorus of thousands, snapped his fingers in front of the microphone to precisely mark the introduction of the next rhythmic layer just as two gentlemen of the oldest bloodline, whom nobody had even noticed in their seats, could no longer bear it and, with a clap of their hands, they gave the final signal. Then the military bodyguards about-faced and stormed the stage, while the police, armed with batons and machine guns, advanced on the masses. One individual, the whole multitude, saw the flash of the rifle butt strike the vocalist’s neck, a second before the blackout and the stampede and the massacre, his mouth open wide as he fell, his vertebra catching the corner of a stair, his voice still echoing through the feedback, down into the pit.
The choreography needs repetition. He, the singer, preferred the sound of his own voice to the look he got from her, from the other, from the masses at the last show, all asking him not to do what they expected him to do: not to jump into the pit, to limit himself to singing and dancing.
I am he, and yet.
Only my pupil lets me repeat a sound that could be my nose blowing, even if it is only in writing and I have no nasal cavity other than the respirator.
He, a word in itself insufficient at keeping a warning from sounding on the screen, because for the last nine minutes my eyelids have stayed open.
“The flame doesn’t burn deeply, the coals of burning branches are better. The embers,” said the old mother.
The light of this screen doesn’t burn.
He, running through the neighborhood with his brother, stopped to listen to the repetitions of the rain on the zinc roofs. He, in his prison, got charlie-horsed over and over until the spasms took him elsewhere.
He, the boy, slept in a dry wash in the summer.
He, hidden from the security guards, took refuge in any house where a fire burned in the winter.
“A sound, among the majority of anti-imperial peoples, moves not just the bodies of us animals at its whim, but all else that might receive the soft breath of wind.
“If you perceive music as a pleasing accord of sounds, if you listen to it just for fun and dance to it as social entertainment that provides a modicum of physical exercise, before long you will feel separate from the music, from the sound, from your body, and from everything that can perceive the softest breath of wind.”
He, after hearing the sound she made in the bathroom, thinking she was finally alone with the boy, heard nothing else for weeks.
I am he, and yet. A voice inaudible through the warning siren that sounds, because I haven’t moved a muscle in over half an hour.