Liveforever

by Andrés Caicedo

  I yawned, end of story, and he pushed me away from him. Stumbled a few steps and lay face down on the floor. I came behind, following his zigzag movements, and kissed the back of his neck. Hungry for his skin, I licked around his ears in the modern style. He purred something in protest, but I marshalled all my forces – this was not some kids’ party; I climbed on top of him and he rubbed himself against my hard, punishing protrusions, scraped himself off the floor with a dumb grin on his face and I goaded him, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck – get up, come on, get hard, bongo – and clutching each other we slammed into the back wall. We had to work quickly, to fight against the sleep that stalked us. I de-jeaned myself, popped my buttons and stood there facing him, pants flying, pum catapum viva Changó;55 he tried to lean back, to get away from me, to get comfortable maybe, but I was having none of that, I knew all about his past and now I intended to carve on to his heart one more detail for his martyrdom, hee hee; I shinned up him like a greasy pole, ripped open his fly as best I could, pursed my lips into a trumpet and stared at him, mouth gaping – I wonder if the sight of my tonsils was erotic? It must have been because he was hard as a nail and I wanted to slip down the whole length, all the way to the bottom, leaving only his two aching pendulous cojones; then, without closing my mouth, I hitched my ankles around his neck, and, leaning down, pumped him with my fist – oh, the look on his face when I slipped him inside me: he didn’t want any more memories, didn’t want anything to do with love until he’d revived his memories; and I said: ‘Shut up, rookie.’ All he wanted was my rhythm, my hands crushing his head and I was the one doing the pumping – he was in no position, he was my prisoner, my little pissant, offering up his strength to my cavernous cunt, my echoing interiors. He tried to slide down the wall but he couldn’t – I opened myself wider and swallowed him whole, he couldn’t hold out any longer, it was impossible, car horns, the poc-poc of a ping-pong ball, kids playing outside: as he came inside me, I rode him brutally and almost snapped his cock in two. I thought of the old joke ‘I wrung the duck’s neck, broke its eggs and burned its nest’. What would that have been like … To drive out this thought, I unscrewed myself from him. He whined but I said, ‘It’s cool, we’re done.’ I looked down, and it looked like a long drop, but I jumped, lithe as a length of bamboo, and landed on tiptoe.

  He slumped down and found himself on the floor, sat there with his thousand-yard stare like he was dead, like he’d been bled dry. After that he just whined and snivelled for his mamá.

  ‘Doesn’t a guy’s stuff ever run out?’ I asked once, back in primary school.

  ‘It runs out, but it lasts a long time,’ someone whispered to me in the playground. ‘They’ve got like a one-litre keg of the stuff just above the bladder.’

  Smiling, thinking back over my sins, I fell asleep but couldn’t seem to dream. It was like some dull doze, my muscles and my brain felt all weak. It wasn’t sleep at all, just a desire not to sit up. I never did like pills, though I have to say that when it comes to dancing and to sex, they make a perfect sieve for preconceptions, gazelles running amok across a field of giant reeds, the Christmas bomba.56

  When Rubén wanted to shoot off at three o’clock, I went with him. I learned a lot about his misery. He revealed to me the glorious mystery of playing 33rpm LPs at 45rpm, a Cali innovation which creates the distinctive frenzy of the dancers here. I wonder who first decided to find out what ‘¿Qué bella es la Navidad?’ would sound like at 45rpm, or ‘Micaela se botó’? When he heard the results, whoever came up with the idea must have thought he was a genius, a Walter Carlos, a composer. Playing a 33rpm at 45rpm is like being whipped as you dance; you feel the need to say everything, because you’ve got to say it sixteen times more, and let’s just see who can hold out, who can dance like us. It means unlocking the mind rather than the voice, or rather that darkness that rages deep inside us, the primal need to get off your ass and seek out the light, the song. It makes every trivial thing necessary and painful, because, mamá, we got salsa. It means squeezing notes together, snarling pianos riffs that started out as straight lines, shunting dancers into a parallel universe where the men singing have changed sex or turned into eunuchs; it means dancing the delusion, flogging wild horses, stoking the fever of the whirling trumpets, hacking off hunks of hot spicy music like meat, turning a singer’s languid sigh into an order, stockpiling energy, Tulia Fonseca, Tulia Fonseca, and the dancer’s thinking, ‘Jesus, this is hard and I’ve only been dancing for two minutes. How am I going to hold up after half an hour?’ Music that feeds on live flesh, music that leaves you with nothing but blisters, music hot off the wax, that’s what I want, that’s what I live for; bring it on, sap my energy if you can, turn my values on their head, let me founder, abandon me to criminality, because I don’t know anything any more, I can’t be sure of anything, I can’t hear the instruments now, only a torrent of regrets and flattery and wounded voices howling, matter transformed into slow notes, my aching tiredness, waking up late, night falling and stirring up delusional minds, a plea for forgiveness, a struggle for stillness. Perfect stillness, the magnificent confusion of souls vanquished by a three-minute song: that’s 45rpm. And they have to dance alone, because I want to watch them frantically whirling, I want the goal in life to be reduced to an elegant tap to end the piece and wait for them to put on a reasonable song. Rumba is when you can’t go on.

  I considered the various stages of the rumba: exhaustion, madness, senselessness, young guys destroying their futures over a single night of debauchery. And in the moment when they lost their last shred of dignity in the eyes of their beloved, they’d scream that hymn to pill-popping ‘Bollocks!’ only to collapse in a corner half an hour later, consumed by a remorse they can do nothing about, but one they were happy to find, to feel, not realizing it just makes the exhaustion worse. The party organizers politely try to wake one of them up and he opens one eye and spews insults at everyone. So they give him a kick up the ass, get the fuck out of here kid, and like his parents he’s probably thinking, ‘Life’s not worth shit,’ and he stumbles a few feet, he’s about to shout that he’s better than all that and then slumps down next to a lamp post, thinking, ‘I’m going to devote my life to the rush, chaos will be my master. But first I need to catch some Zs.’ The dark shadows of consciousness, the Boy from the South waking up to wind and weather, sniffed and snuffled by stray dogs, dressed in the new suit his mamá brought him from San Andrés at great personal cost. He’ll wake up, humming, having briefly nurtured the idea that he’s been left out in the sun to burn. How many times has he thought about and postponed that moment when he wakes up, the horror that he can’t forget, the shame of what he’s done? ‘They’re pouring boiling soup over my chest and my face.’ With this thought he opens his eyes: looming over his vicious headache is a pale, sickly sky; grease bubbles from his forehead and trickles down his cheeks, snaking its way into the collar of his shirt, and he can’t work out how since his shirt is still buttoned, since he slept like this, choked by his collar and his damned tie. He leapt to his feet thinking maybe the world might look different if he confronted it head on. It was worse, since a vertical position means facing the world, facing the abyss. And then he ran, because when a man is in pain (as I’d later learn) he races away from his mind. His girlfriend’s house is only two blocks from here. He pounds on the freshly painted door like a lunatic, waking everyone up (they’ve only just gone to sleep) and over and over begs his girlfriend to forgive him. ‘I was drunk, you know how it is, it could happen to anyone.’ His girlfriend, Blanquita, who’s been torn from pleasant slumber to be confronted by his fetid apologies, gets her brothers to kick him out. His Sunday has got off to a bad start. He needs to keep running.

  I indulged myself with these fantasies, already focused on the supreme challenge: I would forever be the centre and the reason for the rumba, n
ot its victim. I would be the spirit of harmony and endless pleasure. I was the soul that gives rise to the rumba, its lover, the one who’d always win out, always in control, always in demand, overwhelmed by healthy exhaustion, sleeping the few short hours of the just, lulling myself with plans for the next rumba, the one tonight, the one where I’ll perfect my system. I wasn’t going to fritter away the rumba: I planned to wreathe it with crowns, with kingdoms of recklessness, my skin flushed with the red glow of night, my hair a wild enchanted flower, a weed that dazzles, confuses, bewilders and brings sleep to the unwary. My hair would grow free and strong, and with every step take on a dazzling lustre that came from the very roots of my soul. My soul would grow like a field of daisies on the scorched lawn of the wild rumba, forbidden territory: anyone who picked one of my flowers to fill himself with energy for the bomba would certainly face the consequences.

  Music that knows me, music that inspires me, fans me or shelters me, the pact is sealed. I am your distributor, the one who throws open the doors, carves out the path, spreading the news through the valleys of your harmony, your strange joy, the fleet-footed messenger who never rests, entrusted with a terrible mission; enfold me in your arms when I feel weak, hide me, shelter me till I recover, bring me new rhythms to restore me, send me out into the streets refreshed, into an afternoon like a necklace of coloured beads. Let my airs perplex and mislead: I flaunt your airs and blur them until they’re the tragic heart of those who know me, of those who see and can never forget me. For the dead.

  The rumba at the Parque de las Piedras was the last I went to with Rubén. I didn’t want him around me any more, this bird of ill omen: I abandoned him to his fate, and it didn’t turn out well. You see, I’d noticed this lanky beanpole of a guy with Indian hair and a jutting chin; he had lips like Jagger and a showy way of dressing and of walking. I danced with him twice, taught him complicated steps and weird salsas, and he wound up embarrassed and confused by my stance and my swagger, so he stumbled over to a wall to catch his breath, greedily gulping some aguardiente and getting away from his friends. I was laughing at him and turned my back. During the third dance he suggested, ‘Pelada, how d’you fancy a day of sun, salsa and stimulation tomorrow, since Sunday in this city is unbearable?’

  ‘I never say no to nothing,’ I said without looking at him, already thinking I wasn’t even going to help Rubén pack away his equipment tonight.

  The guy lost control of his fancy footwork. I stepped aside and waited. He came back, twirled me around. We didn’t talk any more. I knew he was going over and over my words in his head: how could this long string of negatives add up to a tremendous ‘Yes’?

  When the song was over, he headed back to his spot by the wall, but someone else had taken it. He deliberately shoved the other guy and started a fight. Since the other guy was alone and had no friends to back him up, they had no trouble kicking his ass. Then all his friends came over and patted Bárbaro – that was his name – on the shoulder and told him to chill out. His response to their advice was to neck more aguardiente. He could have asked anyone, checked my references, everyone would have told him, ‘You wanna be careful with that pelada, she’s a live wire,’ but he didn’t ask anything. He carried on drinking and – when I let him – stared into my eyes. I laughed to think that if the music wasn’t so loud, so wild, he might have come over, kissed my hand and quietly told me the plans he had for me, brushed a speck from my eye with a corner of his handkerchief, blown tenderly into my face, crossed his legs, told me his life story and sensitively asked me about mine, and we might have reached an amicable understanding. But we had to rely on the music and we had to shout above the pounding racket. I parked myself right in front of him and danced a couple of dances with some other mancito till I’d tired him out, and managed to drive Bárbaro half crazy. He started trembling and kicking the wall. His friend came over and calmed him down again. He shrugged that he was okay, everything was cool, and went on drinking and staring at me. Then he called two of his best friends over. He obviously said something to them about me, because the two of them, a gangly boy and this other guy who was old before his time, came over to where I was shimmying and whispered very politely in my ear, ‘Señorita, would you be so good as to go out into the park to exchange a few words with our good friend Bárbaro?’

  I agreed and bongoed across the floor. Bongo gets my people moving.

  I slipped out discreetly, but a couple of kids noticed and made comments about the girlfriend of the guy spinning the tunes. I had no regrets about Rubén: he’d already done his vomiting, so I’d done my duty. I stepped out into the glorious moonlight, the moon that follows me whenever for an instant I forsake my music.

  Bárbaro was out in the park surrounded by barrio kids, not one of them of them older than twelve, all toking on a fuck-off Barquisimeto. So the guy came up to me and all the kids traipsed after him and stood together, staring at us wide-eyed. Surprisingly, Bárbaro managed to walk in a straight line (first time I see him zigzag, I’ll turn my back, fuck him), and when he spoke, out of his mouth came the scent of magnolias. I thanked him for his impeccable manners, fluttering my eyelashes and laying my cheek on his chest. He sighed (as did the kids), laid his right hand on my head, and I could hear the hammering heart from which he took his orders. ‘Just looking at you is so cool, pelada. I want to show you my kingdom, but it’s not of this world. My citadel is far away on the nearest plain to the high mountains where the guava trees and poisonous black nightshade grow. There we will never lack for salsa, or for ’shroom-munching gringos – a tribe, I can say in all modesty, I specialize in hunting.’

  It was about six in the morning by the time Rubén came out, with a face that looked like it had never seen the sun. I stared at him from the park, my face flushed, drinking in the colours of my new paramour, who had slipped his hand around my waist while the kids standing behind us, wide-eyed and wild in this hour of abandonment, passed around another Barbuco, what they called a Wake ’n’ Bake, the spliff that lifts the veil and prepares you for the slings and arrows of the day, and I thought, ‘Do these kids have the same energy I’ve got?’

  Rubén moved with slug-like slowness, single-handedly dragging out his massive speakers and the complicated array of amplifiers with a tangle of cables trailing behind. He obviously didn’t feel too hot knowing I was weighing up and memorizing his every move only to forget them a few hours later in the name of my new companion. Bárbaro looked at him with a twisted smile. Just as well Rubén had his hands full, because otherwise he wouldn’t have known where to look. His legs weren’t working at a normal rhythm, he was bound to take a spill and I wouldn’t be able to stop myself laughing at him: the kids might have managed to – after all they still had some respect for the guy who’d brought the music.

  In the end, Rubén compared his black mood with the luminous daylight all around and, more wretched than ever, gave a limp wave and said goodbye. He could barely manage to look me in the eye. I smiled at him the way that, in ancient times, noble, hard-working sailors’ wives would smile as their husbands sailed off to their deaths.

  He climbed into a taxi, forlorn and forsaken, knowing I was in classy company. I didn’t want to watch him leave, didn’t want his sad face engraved on my memory, a jagged line puncturing my mornings. And I never saw him again. Later I heard he killed himself, having got into the bad habit of banging his head against the wall.

  Let no one exist unless I give my permission, my consent; let them crumble to dust as the reader turns the page. A character cannot exist unless I bestow my favours; if I spurn him, he has no reason to exist, nada. What’s so special about my melody? Knowing that others go astray while I run on through the Parque de las Piedras, freer than any girl can be, my hair streaming behind me, stealing all the best colours from the anthuriums and the morning chrysanthemums, with Bárbaro beh
ind me, cooling himself in the wake left by my body, and the kids revelling in the clearness of the air, knowing that they never had a childhood (by the time they turned ten, they’d discovered music, drugs, doubt, misery, mistrust and lovelessness) while our youth would last forever. Oh, the radiant flushed pink of my complexion: here they could stagnate, grow stunted, never to be productive, immortal in their indolence, longing only to talk like grown-ups and watch resignedly as colour drained from their faces, leaving behind the yellowish, wooden features of those who’ve swerved from their true path. I was transmitting to them the song that had struck me that night, a song that had pierced my perfect oneness, ‘Change your trip or your dress will rip,’ and we formed a line in diminishing order according to inner intensity and height, and I was thinking about their little skulls, probably damaged and punctured with air holes, their fontanelles reopened from too many hallucinogens, with bronchial tubes in their brains and atrophied holes in their suspect hearts.

  But what was I doing thinking about this at such a time! Bárbaro had just invited me to take a trip into the deep south, far beyond the Río Pance, in the foothills of the cordillera. Xamundí, now there was a place where they appreciated salsa, a harmonious region; how can I envision you, place where I am not, how could you let yourself be so suddenly discovered? I shut myself within you in this discovery and you rejected me, region choked by the thousand shades of green. Goddess of the desert, you would not listen to my song.