I will never know how many times I have visited Mexico. With each return I have absolutely no knowledge of the places I have already been. I cannot move except with the means that the organizers send me. I have never traveled alone. On that occasion the great Mexican writer accompanied me Antonio Ortuño (His novel was recently adapted into film Human resources, with Juana Viale). We initially met in Guadalajara, note Ortuño: the Book Fair, around 2016.
Whenever I try to remember a remote event, I call that odyssey The Conquest of Amnesia. Did it all happen in the city of Guadalajara itself or in Mexico City?
Ortuño remembers the circumstances and the characters, but apparently we drank like mariachis, Jalisco style, until we lost track of time and place.
Suppose it was at the end of my official activities. In a bar in Mexico City. Suddenly, from a table occupied by half a dozen people, where they were singing and drinking, insults began to come my way. I couldn’t quite tell if they were jokes or invitations, or a mixture of both. Among the Mexican corridos I thought I heard some traces of a Buenos Aires accent. The Aztec civilization is infinite and Babel-like.
Ortuño told me that some Spanish investors had hired him as a consultant for a miniseries about the Conquest, but that the pro-Aztec excess of the traditional producers had dissuaded him from continuing to participate.
In the shouts and screams that came from the table in question, typical of the course or period following the Florida wars, Nahuatl was not distinguished from Spanish, in its Raigal or Latin American variant; It was a multifaceted syncretism, hegemonized and homogenized by mezcal. They finally said my last name and I approached them. Someone hugged me, another kissed me.
They turned out to be Los Pachanga, a cumbia and derivatives group, whose melodies I knew from parties, from the radio, playing in a supermarket. There were still more than five years left for that genre to climb the charts to the top of pop.
Every time they announced the name, I silently thought, “I don’t like pachanga.” But not because I judged their music, but as a personal and incurable reflection of my allergy to dance in general..
One of the saxophonists and the singer were my classmates in seventh grade. There were also Mexican, Puerto Rican and Salvadoran members. They toured the Spanish-speaking world, with success and enjoyment. But the others, during that party, the Argentines had convinced him I had to write a bolero for them. His sad song, like Hernán Cortés’ sad night. They had never depicted a melancholic love story with a slow pace. I was the one chosen for the human sacrifice.
I asked them how much they paid and they replied with a shot of tequila. But I insisted, and someone mentioned to me about I don’t know what infinitesimal percentage of royalties, which could have made me rich. Of course I accepted. Although my real and only concern was that the lyrics were actually sung.
In my already old existence, I come to suspect that there is a parallel universe in which the number of screenplays and texts that I once wrote, cashed in and vanished forever on the shelves of nowhere are finally produced and performed. They asked me for telephone contact: within three days I would explain the reason.
After a deadly hangover – apparently, the worm I had swallowed contributed to my survival – I sent the first draft of the bolero. It was titled: Give me time. I let myself be influenced by Juan Gabriel’s lyrics – through territorial osmosis -, but he bursts in with something of the abstraction of Buenos Aires. Because “let’s give ourselves some time” would be more typical of Juan Gabriel in terms of conjugation and literalness, but Give me time It revealed a certain metaphorical ambition, not exaggerated.
The kids liked it.
However, as always, they expressed an objection: from my handwriting it was deduced that the couple who had “taken some time” could not reconcile. In fact, they mutually asked for the return of lost time. While the singer felt that the couple should meet at the end of the bolero.
I replied that then it would not be Hernán Cortés’ sad night, appealing to his own quote. But he insisted that, since we were both Argentinians, we could easily leave Cortés aside. Not necessarily, I thought without argument: few dialogic situations are more similar to that of Cortés and Montezuma than the exchange between the contractor who, after seeing the text, exclaims “I love it” and immediately applies a series of instructions that modify it diametrically, and the author, who looks perplexed at the fiasco of his inspiration.
I don’t know what demon intoxicated me, I stood up on my hopeless bolero and sent a new letter with the still separated couple.
Conintes, the singer, invited me to a barbecue with tacos at his house, in some limbic place in Mexico City, which I never knew nor would I know if it was the suburbs or the center. Of course he was supposed to pick me up as a driver.
The couple lived in a villa with a garden. She was Aztec. The girl and boy shared traits of different cultures and accents. They were a nomadic family and in themselves a successful Tenochtitlán. Los Pachanga’s bolero should have ended with joy. At a certain point I seemed to understand that he was alluding to something about his own love for him. Or her self-love. I told him I’d think about it: another euphemism.
On the way back, it seemed Lights of the sceneOf Roberto Carlosin the sad night of contemporary Mexico, and suddenly, out of nowhere, I remembered the two Argentines who formed the duo Sensación, in the seventh grade of our public school, as part of the fundraising trip for the graduates’ trip.
By the end of our week in Tandil, one of the two mothers had eloped with one of the quartet’s two fathers. Perhaps that episode, which I remembered only now, as if a sorcerer had erased it from my memory for decades (the conquest of Amnésica), traumatized Conintes to such an extent that he wanted to change the ending with a thaumaturgical bolero?
I spent that sleepless night thinking about my bolero, equidistant between Montezuma and Cortés, so as not to betray or fight in vain. But I didn’t succeed and I fell asleep at the first light of dawn, if you can call the cloud of smog that watches over the Mexican sky when the sun tries to emerge (perhaps defeated forever by the conquistadors).
I left for Buenos Aires with an unpublished text on my computer. During the flight I was alternately surrounded by an aura of dignity, for not having given up on my superficial idea of the bolero, and my constant pathos. I was happy to land.
A few months later, Valladares, the other Argentine member of Los Pachanga, sent me the bolero that Conintes had composed, with the express condition that it remain silent, in honor of the memory of the suicide. Valladares and Conintes had been dating since the end of elementary school: they had not been particularly disturbed by the melodrama of their respective fathers and mothers; nor the family that Conintes had established in Mexico.
But two years ago, as in a bolero by Juan Gabriel, Valladares had asked Conintes for time, taking it for granted that they would see each other again with new intensity.
Conintes never managed to recover from that sentimental interregnum. He berated Valladares and himself until his bitter and irreversible end. My bolero, Valladares tacitly accused me, had triggered the outcome. The Pachanga had disintegrated.
Give it some time, I thought. I didn’t say it. Maybe if I had resigned myself to closing the text with a happy ending… but I found myself in a foreign country, it was night, and Roberto Carlos was playing on the radio.
From time to time I listen, in a WhatsApp audio that I am saving in a group made up of me (not cumbia or derivatives), the wonderful song by Conintes y Valladares based on my lyrics. The God who listens to her in that parallel universe doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Source: Clarin
