WHAT WAS YOUR SHADOW DOING AT NIGHT IN THE WAVES?
The choreography needs a rhythm. That night, from the third-floor balcony of the embassy, the straight line of the southern horizon yielded, lost its coordinates, and in the end was just the shadow of a cloud advancing toward the city and sweeping over the sea the vocalist and the other were staring out at, barefoot, toes turning purple, in silence, passing a bottle they’d stolen from the bar at the banquet. And smoking.
“I read it somewhere, in an imperial library, I think,” said the other: “‘The oceanic feeling.’ I can’t forget that phrase. And likewise, I’ve never lost that feeling of the smell of the brine and the wailing of the gulls and the children carrying little buckets of saltwater, the footsteps of a couple pressing into the sand, and the sun falling on your face, but you’re in the sand dunes, you can’t see the water or hear anything, you don’t feel warm or cold, all you feel is the constant murmur of the ocean, though your head is submerged in your own moisture and maybe in sleep, a calm that comes and goes, the ceaseless crash of one wave over the next, the dangerous waves way out on the open sea, you know; a state in which you escape yourself and you smell the salt, but at the same time you’re alert because at any moment the tide might come in and sweep you away, the breaking wave drown you, you stay calm, your eyes are closed and you’re far away yet touching everything because the water extends as far as your eyes can see and, even though you keep them closed, you still hear it. Do you hear it? I read something similar in another book; the book of an old man who was celibate, yes, but why when all the priests are locked up and their horrible church is illegal. The celibate man talked about a southern visitor belonging to his same organization who went through all the towns seeking a new kind of experience, someone enlightened in the ways, or a colleague who might find in song, in drawing, in multicolored stained glass, a piece of that thing so many people talk about and claim to know, and that nevertheless doesn’t exist anywhere, except in what they were selling every Sunday. The visitor explored the rural byways until he reached the sea; he walked along the coastline and finally came to where the last tongue of earth jutted out into the water. He spent days and nights on those cliffs, staring out at the water. Until one day a saint appeared to him. For two days they discussed the oceanic feeling. By the third day, the saint was ready to throw himself off the cliff.”
The vocalist touched the other’s arm so he would be silent. He leaned into him and with difficulty got to his feet and walked over to the railing of the balcony, where he stood, looking out. Early in the morning, days before, in the center of that Anti-Empire city, outside Banco del Pueblo, the other had run into a bearded man strumming versions of themes by the mentor, by The Band, by Maria y Las Primas on his strings. He cashed the check he had stolen from the ambassador and invited him out to lunch. And though he and the vocalist had spent the last seventy-two hours together, improvising sounds and harmonies with guitar duets on the rooftop of that building (until the security guard showed up), the vocalist had barely said a word to him. And now he raised his hand, holding the bottle, pointing at a spot in the distance: the cloud had definitively enveloped the sea so earth, water, and sky were a single block in the night, a block that included the concrete of the city, the walls of the embassy, the invisible trajectory of the bottle the vocalist threw toward the tops of the park’s tallest trees. The other couldn’t remember what argument the celibate man had used to convince the saint not to jump off the cliff, to stay there with him instead, looking out at the open sea, for another day, and then the next one, and two more after that, until he got used to remaining alive. That was the most important thing, he thought, just as the vocalist pointed at a break in the clouds that revealed a white shape out in the water, maybe a boat, a rocky outcropping illuminated by a lighthouse, the glow of all the city streetlamps reflecting off the wall of fog. His fingers had been swollen, not anymore. He heard the sound of the vocalist vomiting in the bathroom, minutes before the hand of his old friend had been pointing not at a spot on the perfect line of the horizon, which was now reforming, but at the figure, growing larger, determined, striking, of a woman who tried and succeeded to scale the great wall of the embassy. He took a drink from another bottle he’d found in the pocket of a pair of pants on the floor and looked back toward the bathroom, the door slightly ajar, where the woman was cradling the vocalist’s head over the toilet. Sitting on the floor, she had offered them something to smoke that she’d brought in her pocket.
“What did that celibate man have to offer apart from saving the life of a saint?” she said through the smoke, through hard consonants and soft vowels that betrayed her origin in some suburb of the disappeared Empire. “And those of us who aren’t saints, who aren’t celibate, who aren’t men staring out atop some sublime cliff, we just fucking deal with it. Whereas once upon a time, even farther to the south, there was an old mother who didn’t worry at all about the existence of the ocean. She had knowledge of trees, of illnesses, of small animals, of one horse, of the climate, and of the two young boys she raised. They looked like twins. Throughout her life, the old mother had only known mothers, the mothers of her home and other mothers from far away, until one day the two boys arrived. The two boys are the two of you.
The vocalist wiped away the bile with a sleeve, gave a little cough, and went unexpectedly to curl up, eyes open, beside the percussionist, who continued to speak. He moved his mouth as he listened to her words, but made no sound other than a few soft moans.
“One night, the old mother had a nightmare unlike all the others, she grabbed the two boys and took them up to highest boughs of the their favorite tree. Sitting down below on a stump that had appeared in front of her house the day before, she waited for the logging company’s security guards, contract in hand: a kultrún, her drum. The guards came with first light, uniformed and armed by the central government. The old mother was waiting for them with a percussive song that went on for hours and terrified them because in it they glimpsed the decrepit, sick old men they’d become. They shot her twenty times, used the chainsaw on her, and after the rainstorm that blew in on a freezing wind, that same night, they shot each other. Those two surviving boys told this story in front of some functionaries of the central government, who didn’t listen, because that same day the first drone strikes of the imperial expansion were falling in the southernmost reaches.”
The other, the guitarist, realized he was starting to hear music, a rhythm, a massive musical structure, as the percussionist seemed to stop talking, to concentrate on caressing the eyes of the vocalist. He went to sit beside them, but stopped a half-meter away and didn’t know how to get any closer but by offering his lighter, while in the distance they heard the rumbling of hundreds of vehicles hoping to reach the highway before there was nothing left.
“The twins would blame one another for having sung in vain. Until they sang again,” she concluded.
Then, as the sun rose, they began to applaud.
The choreography needs pause and movement.
Something is still missing before we can go up and play.
That, over there, is that a seashell or a stone?