THE GLEAM IS ONLY IN THE PUPIL OF THE EYES
The choreography needs melody. A girl was running an electric razor along the nape of a woman’s neck in one of the salons on the university square, observing through the mute windowpanes how four patrol cars pulled up on all sides of an obese man wearing a gardening dress and a hat, pointing a rifle at some foreign executives coming out of a bar. The obese man had smiled a second before the police took him down in a hail of gunfire; the girl saw this on the television in the salon. She was interrupted by the sound the boy made, sitting in one of the armchairs by the door, kicking the rug to the rhythm of her clipping scissors, opening and closing. She had seen him before, the girl thought; the boy seemed to be singing to himself without opening his mouth. When he looked back at her, she realized that because of his headphones, he probably hadn’t heard the noise out in the street.
“Gotta go,” the boy said, looking away from her, getting up and trying to walk with feigned agility, catching his headphones as they fell from his ears as soon as he opened his mouth, almost tripping and falling.
The girl shrugged. Before the door to the salon closed, it seemed to her the boy had said something else, words that hadn’t fully registered, in a language she didn’t know. She stood, looking out at the street again, the sirens, the masses confronting the helicopters and the cameras, the obese man’s limbs poking out from under a silver tarp, the ambulances. Then she remembered some particular words: she remembered the boy’s full name and that in high-school choir class he was usually two spots to the right of her in the top row, that the first time she had caught him by surprise, staring at his mouth, as the two of them sang the lowest notes of the a capella version of the éxito primaveral in the neighborhood; she remembered she had understood what the boy said in that other language, minutes before, to the woman accompanying him, the woman whose hair she was preparing to dye in that exact instant:
“Don’t cut your hair,” he’d said. “It’ll grow out again anyway and they’ll recognize you.”
The woman, whose hair the girl now trimmed with the electric razor, had, until then, sat completely still, eyes gazing past the mirror. But she turned around when she heard the boy’s voice and, disregarding the blade of the electric razor, got up from the salon chair. She tried to say something, but saw the boy had already run out the door into the square; her voice caught in her throat and she swallowed. She turned back to the mirror, smiled, and sat back down. Her phone vibrated incessantly in her hand. The girl couldn’t help but notice the caller on the small screen: “Hospital.”
The memory entered her mind of how, on the street at a stoplight, in the backseat of the big car of an executive who paid her for two weeks of full service, she had sat up briefly and had seen a very attractive man walk by. She was struck, staring at him. She blushed when she realized not only did she know who he was, but she knew just how he smiled, the particular way he stretched out his arms when he woke up in the morning, the proud inflexion in his resonant, imperious voice when he asked a question, and that little wrinkles formed along the edges of his mouth when he was tired. The executive who was paying her pushed her head back down; her situation—that she needed to get a different job—became painfully clear to her when the executive looked out the window and sighed:
“Look, there goes that actor from that show.”
From that moment on, the girl knew without question who the boy was, as she smiled at the woman in the chair in the mirror, applied the final ointment, finished cleaning the base of her neck, dabbed behind her ears with a cotton swab, damp with a little mineral water, offered her a product she turned down, charged her, gave her her card, wished her a pleasant afternoon, and watched her push open the door that opened onto the university square, where she got into a taxi. Of course she remembered who that client was now, the salon’s cosmetologist had been showing her pictures of a drummer who painted her body to match the other members of The Band for their shows.
As soon as the clock struck five, the girl left the salon at a run; three new male clients had requested her by phone. But as her pace slowed with each step, it became clear to her she had joined a mass of people that was taking shape on the west side of the square and there was no room to run. She had to cancel the dates on her screen, regretting having to waste what she’d made that day at the salon on data fees. She was dragged along by the mob for hours, all the way to the big park where the victory of the immigrant woman in the presidential elections was being celebrated. The girl watched dozens of feet trying to push forward, she had been looking down at the pavement ever since, on one street corner, some skinheads had reacted to her surgically-enhanced body and grabbed her around the waist and, to her surprise, pulled a blue T-shirt printed with a crucifix down over her torso, and she couldn’t take it off, because her hands were too busy keeping her upright amid the arms of all those strangers, a throng of skins pressing against her and propelling her forward, and finally a metal gate, a stage, spotlights in her eyes. A roar of amplified instruments and a multitude of voices singing and dancing convinced her to look up at the stage, and she realized that The Band’s vocalist was approaching her, he sang to her from a few centimeters away, but she could barely see him, because of the spotlights shining in her eyes.
She remembered too that, for choir class, they had decided to practice that spring’s popular song all weekend, in order to perform it at the Emancipation Day civil ceremony. It was late one Saturday night, their throats burning, because it was their responsibility to carry the melody with their lips and not with their breath. The boy tried to show her for the zillionth time how to project her voice, but they ended up kissing and going at it in the showers. When they finished, she—who in some ways was still a he back then—felt a pain somewhere deep inside, deeper than her intestines, and she tried to explain to the boy it wasn’t due to his lack of experience or the hormone patches, and then they got a kick out of taking pictures of the colored stains in the urinal; during the previous two weeks one of them had eaten only asparagus and the other only beets, so during the last months of school, in addition to singing medieval hymns in unison, they ran together to the bathroom. The colors didn’t dissolve easily in the water that streamed down the white ceramic. They didn’t mix either. Amid the masses, looking up at the vocalist and the percussionist, whose hair she’d had the honor of cutting that very afternoon, the girl remembered how, when they were smoking together for the last time on the school rooftop, the boy had taken her by the hand and told her he would be moving away with his family, with The Band, to a remote and inaccessible location in the Anti-Empire.
“Do you think the world is really ending?” she’d asked the boy.
“Of course it is,” he’d answered with a sigh. “Your world, but not mine.”
And as she wasn’t going to be able to free herself from the mob of fans who were using her strong shoulders to climb as far as the security guards who repelled them with cattle prods, the girl slipped one hand inside the T-shirt and wiggled out of it and started swinging it around in an ascending motion up her other arm, until the shirt flew toward the stage and hit the vocalist in the face. She didn’t care about this concert, the force of the knee against her back, the expression on the face of that figure photographed thousands of times and broadcast on all the screens of her city to the point of nausea. She cared about the light in her eyes; all she could really see was the back part of the stage.
“Life here begins many times,” she’d said to the boy later, hanging out in the school’s back stairwell. And she let the boy put his hand on her aching groin.
The boy’s face was no longer familiar to her, but he recognized her too, that evening, from his position backstage. He wasn’t so familiar anymore, and so she began to feel attracted to him as a potential client, smiling at her from a distance. That was her memory of him. She was more worried the light would reveal the sweat on her skin; that it would dilate her pupils too much and that wasn’t healthy, she thought, just before she fainted.
The choreography needs a rhythm, a rhythm that isn’t moving.
I am he. He is that.
That is the beat. The beat is distant.
I, on the other hand, your shadow and I.
What was your shadow doing at night in the waves?