My dear Eric: I didn’t see you in Wednesday´s concert. There were so many people that I don’t know if it was bad luck or you just couldn’t enter. I looked for you among the bundles. I looked for you at the exit. I tried, among thousands of people, to sharpen my ears and to distinguish a filament of your voice, a brief wrong sign that pointed at me your exact location in the bubbling the Karl Marx theater was. It was not possible, naturally, only in moments of desperation or of great anxiety people come with completely crazy things like that.
You should have seen me! I almost gave in and stayed outside. I was lacking the ticket, but a generous friend went out looking for me and convinced me to sneak in furtively, for me to arrive at the gate and with dissimulation it was to turn right and walk upstairs.
I did everything she told me to, as an obedient boy, and there were no major mishaps. I have lost skills. I remember that earlier we were doing these pranks even with audacity. Before we believed it was our right to break the rules. Before I would have believed as gospel that nobody on earth could prevent me from going to a Fito Paez concert in Havana, but on Wednesday, as a plain coward, I thought that if they caught me at the gate I would be truly embarrased. It is a sign of how age takes its toll on you and stabs your soul with absurd accounts.
Who could have told us, in those remote times lost in a strange school of province, that we were going to listen to Fito Páez like that, so closely, so really, so bluntly. Do not think about it from the present, because to think it from now makes no sense, think it from the distance, think it from a naive point of view and you will see it clearer.
I already assume that you were, but still I will tell you. I know, sure enough, that nothing stopped you. Nothing could stop us during those nights.
They turned off the lights of the boarding place and the cold entered in blasts through the windows in ruins. We brought the berths closer and the lights of Matanzas spread over the horizon below, like the golden skin of a tiger. But Matanzas was not slipping as a tiger, not even attacking. There are cities that attack, but there are cities that surrender placidly even to the ingrates. Matanzas stayed still, the sea in calmness, the calm streets, the bones of its dead persons in sacred rest … and since at dawn the voices travel without any limits, it would be interesting to know how far these songs of Fito flew that we were intoning like a choir, together, or one first then the other, only for the pleasure of attending to us and for the desires of bothering the others.
You taught me Giros. It was the first time that I listened, although quite briefly, a bandoneón. Sharp and incisive. Then I read that “the bandoneón is dramatic and deep (…) Only this instrument could serve to sing to the death and the solitude. It is an instrument of metaphysical resonance”. Was it that what we felt? Were those explosions signs of death and solitude? I couldn’t say, sometimes the things acquire the most dissimilar faces, and look like something and want to say the opposite. And they look like a moon and they are the sun.
In the Karl Marx, nevertheless, there was not bandoneón, but I felt it, surely you did too, as well as everything the one that has allowed be taken by the music on his head and has decided to play these internal, undecipherable springs. In the end, Fito sang a capella. But he did not sing with his voice, you had to see him. He sang with the sneer of his face, sang with the last contraction of his face, with the tearing for who knowns what past, or what promise done on what truth.
Fito was left alone, the theater was quiet. Except two or three lorgnette with stupid phrases, nobody disturbed his solitude and the people were moving away. We were looking at him, how he was leaving on a straight way, how it was we who were going away in the opposite sense, across personal routes, how, for example, we were separated by a curtain of smoke, a soft crystal, and how you and me who were meeting again and everyone was gaining access to its place, under the always opened moon of the poor.
How old were, when we discover Fito? Fifteen, sixteen? Were we ever that old? Did we ever do that that we did? And how did we stop doing it? How do we promote the words, if we once also sing this way? With the guts, with terminal gestures, moving the head this way or the other, tried to find the exact way to liberate a melody that it already doesn’t go out and that never, well we know it now, will leave our lips.
I left the theater on foot. It was inevitable, but not necessary. In December they exhibit movies. People seem happy. Transportation, even, is better.
Author
Carlos M. Álvarez
