Spiritual Choreographies Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  CARLOS LABBÉ

  “Begins to fuck with your head from its very first word.”

  —Toby Litt

  “What we encounter in Loquela is a skillful unmaking—complete with diary excerpts, missives from beyond the grave and an invented barn-burning manifesto on a literary movement, ‘Corporalism,’ which seeks to breathe life into the ‘corpse’ of literature—that manages to offer new ways of thinking about what the novel can do.”

  —Laird Hunt, L.A. Times

  “Labbé wreaks havoc on narrative rules from the start and keeps doing it.”

  —Bookforum

  “Loquela is drenched in the spirit of experimentality, dry and absurd humor, strangeness, and intrigue.”

  —Simone Wolff, Bookslut

  “Navidad & Matanza could be the hallucinogenic amalgamation of a César Aira plot with setting and characters conceived by Bolaño if written using Oulipo-style constraints…. With ample imagination and commanding style, Navidad & Matanza certainly marks Labbé as a young author from whom we ought to anticipate great, fascinating things to come.”

  —Jeremy Garber, Powell’s Books

  ALSO BY

  CARLOS LABBÉ

  Loquela

  Navidad & Matanza

  Translated from the Spanish by

  Will Vanderhyden

  SPIRITUAL

  CHOREOGRAPHIES

  CARLOS LABBÉ

  Copyright © 2017 by Carlos Labbé and Editorial Periférica

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Will Vanderhyden

  First edition, 2019

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-97-7 / ISBN-10: 1-940953-97-9

  This project is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  Printed on acid-free paper in the United States of America.

  Text set in Dante, a mid-20th-century book typeface designed by Giovanni

  Mardersteig. The original type was cut by Charles Malin.

  Design by N. J. Furl

  Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:

  Dewey Hall 1-219, Box 278968, Rochester, NY 14627

  www.openletterbooks.org

  For Inti, Mónica Ramón Ríos,

  and the Labbé Jorqueras.

  In memory of Caries, Ex Fiesta,

  Tornasólidos, Triple Turbante,

  and the Costa Rica Space Program

  CONTENTS

  13. CORRECTION

  12. CORRECTION

  11. CORRECTION

  10. CORRECTION

  9. CORRECTION

  8. CORRECTION

  8. CORRECTION

  7. CORRECTION

  7. CORRECTION

  7. CORRECTION

  7. CORRECTION

  7. CORRECTION

  PASTORTALE

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VI

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  VIII

  6. CORRECTION

  5. CORRECTION

  5. CORRECTION

  4. BONFIRE

  3. A CUERO ON THE SAND CALLS TO A CUERO IN THE WATER

  2. BEACHING

  I. THE SPECTER OF WHAT CAN ONLY BE TOUCHED

  0. THE GLEAM IS ONLY IN THE PUPIL OF THE EYES

  1. WHAT WAS YOUR SHADOW DOING AT NIGHT IN THE WAVES?

  2. THE OTHER STONE, BETTER KNOWN AS THE HOUSE OF BONES

  SPIRITUAL

  CHOREOGRAPHIES

  The choreography needs someone to witness its movements.

  I am he.

  I am he, the other, she, you, they.

  He played the harmonica with his nose, pulled out his handkerchief and blew until all the pollution of the capital was expelled from his lungs in one transparent color. He finger-tapped his flat chest like a kultrun, gargling to imitate a harp.

  He thought he’d be able to escape to his tree when he could not longer bear the smog of the city.

  I, on the other hand, now that I have no nostrils with which to inhale or exhale, want a melody of bows and strings and stones to still be raining down from all five fingers, onto this skin, stretched across this orthopedic wheelchair, when the sun rises.

  On the table, in the sunlight, there should’ve been some kind of animal, not this screen where each movement of my pupil writes a soundless name.

  13.

  CORRECTION

  The choreography needs audience, needs someone to witness its movements. The damp twilight wind slammed shut the kitchen window. She was cutting leeks at the sink when the sash colliding with the frame startled her; the shards of glass turned to fragments on the floor a few meters away. The shock made her jerk the knife across the back of her left hand. When the boy entered dressed in pajamas, hair mussed—mother, what was that? his question—she was standing there, staring at the shape of that small wound under the stream of water, as if it reminded her of some profound, lost thing. One sound, two, a counterpoint, the dark night looking out at waves, she thought. And then there was just her blood, staining the water in the sink. She brought her hand to her mouth so she wouldn’t ruin the vegetable with her foul taste.

  “Go shower, we’re eating soon. And bring him down,” she told the boy.

  Ten minutes later they were all sitting in silence around the kitchen table. She had to quicken her breathing and open her eyes: the little wound on her hand kept her from concentrating, pulsing in the dark, like the double of another wound on the palm of the hand of a man who in her memory recoiled from a seashell, from a broken bottle, tears and sweat; she was naked, on the wave-packed sand, wet. I was another person back then, she thought.

  “Life here begins many times,” the vocalist blurted out unexpectedly from his wheelchair.

  He did so without solemnity, but with a voice not his own.

  It was a little unsettling, according to the doctors, his neurological damage rendered speech impossible, but that was the third time in a year he’d spoken during meditation. For an instant, the boy opened his eyes too; he and his mother exchanged a glance just as a draft swept in through the broken window and caused a distant door—the bathroom door, she guessed—to slam. Then they heard the beep, beep, beep of the alarm being deactivated at the front entrance. It was the other, returning from the recording studio. He came in carrying a paper bag, set it down in the middle of the table, and went into the kitchen. Reaching out her fingers, she removed a still-warm roll from the bag and tore it open, scanning with her eyes, in vain, for the jam. The other shut the refrigerator with his foot, sat down; he grabbed the jar of jam and set it beside her plate—she gave him a grateful smile—and turned to the vocalist, offering him a sip of the beer he held in his hand.

  Then the other raised the can and made a toast:

  “Bless Him. I finished writing the bloody score today.”

  The boy pinched an unlit cigarette between his lips as he applauded. The movement of his hands knocked over the milk carton, which, striking the floor, bounced back up and collided with the jar of jam. Suddenly irritated, she couldn’t take her eyes off the can of beer as she attempted to clean the floor with a spoon. The other brought his hands together and bent down beside her.

  “The Man wanted to tell me something last night, I’m sure of it,” the boy blurted out.

  The vocalist tried to grimace through his paralysis.

  “Was the show any good?” she asked.

  “It’s been proven: The Man is the greates
t baritone in the history of humanity, Mother. His shows are always perfect.”

  “That’s why he’s in the bubblegum music.”

  The other burst out laughing at his own comment. She, all the while, watched her son speak, but couldn’t understand what he was saying. Were they speaking in Chezungun again to mess with her, to exclude her? All she heard was laughter and—it’s absurd, she said to herself, we’re miles from the ocean—the sound of waves breaking on the beach, swelling with wind and rain. Another spark in her memory: the beach’s thick sand clinging to her thighs as she spread her legs, the other’s alcoholic stench on the nape of her neck, his moan in the dark: leave us alone.

  “I pushed through the crowd right up to the front, seriously. And there I am, transfixed, face to face with The Man, modulating the final guitar solo with the vocoder implanted in one of his molars. Then he sees me, I’m sure of it. He sees me and wants to tell me something, something only he knows, something for my ears alone.”

  “My dearest, dearest lad,” the other sighed under his breath. “Do not forget the stage’s bright lights are there to blind the performers just enough.”

  She carried the plates and cups to the dishwasher as the volume of the conversation rose. According to the boy, the fact that The Man was the first clone to ever produce positive sales numbers for the record company proved nothing in terms of his musical refinement, nor did it provide any credible proof as to whether or not he was capable of feeling emotions when he sang.

  “Haven’t you ever seen a stranger’s face pass quickly by a window, the face of a stranger to whom you must impart some important thing, a face that never comes entirely into focus, but that you just have to speak to? I swear that’s what happened to The Man when he saw me.”

  She decided to leave them to their discussion and take the vocalist in his wheelchair to their bedroom. She thought she might purchase a Quyasullu film for the four of them to watch while they ate dessert. She helped prop him up in the bed, brought a few pillows in from the living room to support his back. When she gave him the remote control, he gripped her hand, his eyes fixing on that little wound, already beginning to heal. She wanted to say, to ask him one, two, three times the same question about the words he’d babbled during meditation: if, after all these weeks correcting the book about The Band on his screen, he could use his voice again, if something had made him say what he’d said, and to what end. Then the wind blew, causing another draft to slam another door. A door somewhere in the apartment. The front door? she wondered.

  The choreography needs melody, the melody I can now only hear in one ear.

  He, the boy, wanted to play the part of the young macho warrior and not humanity’s savior.

  He wanted to be the liberator and not the vocalist in a band.

  I am he, and yet. No more. This useless body that once leapt across stages.

  All those lives come together on this page and now it’s only possible for me to quietly write with my eyelids about what isn’t a lie, in the margin of this little volume of autobiographical fiction, on the table before me, in place of some unknown animal, bleeding out in the sun at the old mother’s feet, the kawellu and the goats, the chicken and the tree, my brother and me.

  I am he. The Band. Nothing more.

  12.

  CORRECTION

  The choreography needs melody. And the theremin section wove together more than twenty voices. The drum machine accelerated to the rhythm of the piano chords and the double bass announced a silence that was followed by the recorded sound of a busy signal in the background. The lights flashed with the first words of the silhouette, the figure, the sweaty face that emerged from the fog. He opened his arms and dropped to his knees to sing the song of a woman who traveled the world with her terrorist cell, freeing animals from zoos, until she was caught and sentenced to life in a prison. That song had topped commercial sales charts for eighty weeks straight, before even one photo of The Band appeared on screens or in magazines. A roar erupted from the crowd of five thousand imperial kids, falling down drunk after three days of celebrating an immigrant woman being elected president. The girl who played the drum machine saw all of this from her corner of the stage; the tiny hairs on her arms stood on end. She saw how the vocalist’s hard eyes fixed on a girl in the audience as she climbed onto the stage, how something changed in him when that same girl tore off her T-shirt and, like an offering, threw it at her idol, before letting herself fall back into the arms of the bouncers, swallowed by the crowd, fainting away. Likewise, she saw the shirt in his hands, how he let the microphone drop, and without turning back, walked to the dressing room, though the other tried to push him back onstage. The girl’s T-shirt was blue and printed with a cross and his name, in place of the baroque Inri.

  The choreography needs a rhythm, a rhythm that isn’t moving.

  I am he.

  Before tossing out ten possible false names, before proposing titles, I dilate my pupil to transplant someone else’s words into the beginning of this volume of autobiographical fiction:

  “It’s the libretto of a musical piece and some unspoken dialogues, a beyond-the-text that’s nonetheless of utmost importance when it comes to reading it and that’s not why it doesn’t occupy the fundamental place on the page.

  “Don’t substitute voices.

  “Don’t anticipate them; don’t try to express them or metamorphose them into writing.

  “It’s not the story of a journey, not a spiritual treatise.

  “The choreography simply supplies a set of procedures and practices related to experiences that aren’t described or explained, that don’t entirely enter the text, and whose representation doesn’t aspire to in any way, for it posits them as its own exteriors, assuming the form of an oral dialogue between the one who writes and the one who reads, or a silent history of the relationship between what goes unuttered and its two guardians.”

  Meanwhile, these eyelids grow heavy.

  11.

  CORRECTION

  The choreography needs a rhythm. And the girl who later played the drum machine in The Band had asked her parents for a drum set three times, in vain; she stopped studying, the arguments got insufferable. One afternoon, she left school, walked to a bus stop, and took a bus into the city, then another to the capital, and from there, another to the port. For decades, she refused to visit her parents—who wept for her every night—but she never forgot her bedroom in that house, the soft bed with hand-woven blankets where for hours she lay, staring up at the Roneo-paper poster where the vocalist appeared, facing the camera and, simultaneously, in profile, face made up like a violet, teeth and eyes purple.

  Two years later, she met him. In the embassy bathroom, at a gala hosted by the other’s father. She strolled in through the garden of the well-guarded diplomatic headquarters, as if it were one of the suburban lawns of her youth; the security didn’t question her and the dogs roaming the grounds failed to pick up her scent. The other never took his eyes off her. He, on the other hand, was passed out on the bathroom floor. She kissed him awake, splashed water on his face, told him she was his one and only fan.

  Years before, she’d traveled as an exchange student to his home country. She’d had the good fortune of being hosted by a self-proclaimed devoutly religious family, who lived in a mountaintop mansion only accessible by car and, since she didn’t have her driver’s license, she passed the time reading books she took from the enormous library that the head of the house maintained in his private study, along with a collection of seashells, capped bottles, and locked drawers. She liked to stay up to watch, on the TV in her room, a music-video show on a local channel. And on one of those late nights she was mesmerized by the only recorded show of one of his previous bands. Though there were seventeen musicians on the stage, she only had eyes for the vocalist, for his moustache, his yellow bikini, and his rubber boots.

  The choreography needs pause and movement.

  I’m only paralyzed to the person who sees m
e in this chair, not to the person who looks for my eyes and fails to find them.

  When I open them the previous sentence is corrected.

  I am he, learning to follow the old mother across the hill where once were various species of trees that no longer exist.

  She’s dictating a series of words to him in the language that cannot have a name, so he’ll forget them on his way somewhere and remember them as soon as he gets there. And so, only when he lies down on his back and looks up will he know if he’s come to the place where the boughs lace together to form arches, doorways, gates, gyres, tunnels, keyholes, and arms.

  He, who is I, realizes—when the explosions drive him up the tree and he finds the old mother riddled with the bullets of the company’s security, the company that owns all this paper—that there’s no such thing as tree, vocalist, keyboardist, or dancer, just a mass.

  There’s neither chaos nor system in this autobiographical fiction: just this mass of flesh that has be contained to remain alive, a tangle of roots that can never be exposed to the sun.

  He recalls that series of proper names.

  Know that I do not utter them, for to do so would erase them.

  10.

  CORRECTION

  The choreography needs pause and movement. It was eleven in the morning. A mist fell from the gray sky; and yet, she wasn’t cold, as she ran to the town cemetery.

  Two hours earlier, in front of the singer-songwriter’s family home, an old man in a wheelchair, whose white beard hung to his belly, had rung a bell and the mass of people wrapped in parkas, blankets, anoraks, jackets, and ponchos had bowed their heads; one couple even knelt. The air was humid and the little town had always been quiet. In the distance, a dog began to bark. A boy cried out, a young woman wept. A drunk smashed a beer bottle. A second dog joined in with a howl. Within twenty minutes, the police had already dispersed the thirty-second commemoration of the singer-songwriter’s death. Over the loudspeakers, they announced that the nuclear power plant had exploded. That everyone had to evacuate. But she wouldn’t break her promise. Four months ago, he’d sent her a message from the port, asking her to come meet him in that little northern town. There, he would attempt to face his fear of the audience; he would bring his guitar and pay homage to the singer-songwriter with a new song he’d written, after eight months without uttering a word.