Alejandro's Lie

Fin A La Censura-2

The ten-year-old Alejandro asked himself if he would keep his value if he kept himself in good repair.

But his worth had not increased, that was clear. Alejandro knew why the junta recently released him from prison. The government threw inmates they considered washouts out of prison to lower the exploding prison population.

juntaAfter the strict regime of The Last Supper, Alejandro found himself in a society that confused him. Ten years behind bars had turned him into a stranger in a strange land. In that same period, the junta had succeeded in changing Terreno with the help of the mass media. Nothing was the same, not even the music. The National Government under President Galero Álvarez had seen music as part of the country’s cultural heritage; now, it had been replaced by an invasion of American disco.

juntaHe quickly realized that resistance against the junta had gone underground and was particularly alive in the poorer parts of the city. Their limited means required them to budget their activities, although their plans were still pretty grand in the scale of things. Many had forgotten the heroes of the past. Álvarez, who shot himself in the head when the army turned its weapons on the presidential residence, was often spoken of in scoffing terms as an ‘i***t Marxist’ who had steered the country into an economic abyss..

juntaNevertheless, news of Alejandro’s release had quickly done the rounds in the shanty town. People brought him gifts at the start, mostly middle-aged men with children who had no respect for them. Most people over thirty-five still looked up to Víctor Pérez—Alejandro’s dead friend and the former popular leader of the band Aconcagua—as something of a hero. For them, Pérez’s magnificence as guardian of the country’s cultural uniqueness still reflected a little light on Alejandro Juron. But the kids walked past him, indifferent, their jangling radios pressed to their ears: Whack-a Whock-a.

Whack-a Whock-a.Inside his shack, Alejandro watered the plants he was trying to grow in old cardboard boxes, with water from a rusty tin can. He clung to the little things that were meant to make his life bearable. I live by the grace of people who have little more in life than memories, he thought to himself, dispirited. You too, Violeta. More than fifteen years ago, you taught me to play the guitar, and two weeks ago, you found this shack for me. You rested your head on my chest and cried when you met me in front of The Last Supper after my release. I stood there, blinking in the sunlight, a whistling sound in my ear. You may have turned grey, Violeta, but you still believe in the old ideals. I saw you perform a couple of days ago for the people of the campamento. Bitter few had come to hear your husky voice and listen to your songs. You were just as jaunty as in the old days, and your eyes still sparkled under your thinning hair, but your hips were slower than before and your breath shorter. I turned away. I’m pretty sure you saw me leave, and I think you know why.

. I live by the grace of people who have little more in life than memoriesYou too, Violeta. More than fifteen years ago, you taught me to play the guitar, and two weeks ago, you found this shack for me. You rested your head on my chest and cried when you met me in front of The Last Supper after my release. I stood there, blinking in the sunlight, a whistling sound in my ear. You may have turned grey, Violeta, but you still believe in the old ideals. I saw you perform a couple of days ago for the people of the campamento. Bitter few had come to hear your husky voice and listen to your songs. You were just as jaunty as in the old days, and your eyes still sparkled under your thinning hair, but your hips were slower than before and your breath shorter. I turned away. I’m pretty sure you saw me leave, and I think you know why.Alejandro gritted his teeth, grabbed a tin of Nescafé, and lit a flame under a pan of water. The light in his rancho was filtered red by a sheet of plastic he used as a window. When it was warm, he stored it away, but the wind from the Andes could be cold and blustery in the spring.

ranchoHe watched the tiny waves of boiling water collide in the pan with the same rhythm as the thoughts in his head. A significant writer once wrote that the sea never stopped moving because if it did, every one of us would suffocate. He felt the steam begin to burn on his face. Some memories were unstoppable, especially memories of the Valtiago football stadium.

Ten years earlier, the army had herded the junta’s opponents together in the stadium. Alejandro’s memories were repugnant—the rusting bath of boiling water n***d prisoners were forced into. The electrically charged batons they used on prisoners’ genitals—how they gave off blue sparks in the darkness. The constant screaming that ricocheted off every wall.

juntaTeeth-grinding memories: the self-evidence with which their torturers went about their business, their impunity.

Why did the world look the other way? President Nixon had applauded Pelarón’s junta when it seized power in 1973 and used words like ‘order’ and ‘calm’ and ‘economic prosperity’ and ‘ally.’

juntaHad Nixon given Pelarón carte blanche because the general consistently referred to Nixon’s opponents as communists and terrorists? Or because the junta had borrowed massive amounts of money ‘in the people’s name’ and left the citizens to foot the bill?

carte blanchejuntaAlejandro tried clumsily to remove the pan from the heat, but it fell from his hand, and the water poured down the corrugated iron wall behind the gas cooker.

Morally, he faced an undeniable inner abyss. The woman who bought him the metro ticket was a shadow of flesh and blood, a phantom he had to suppress as quickly as possible.

“I’m an i***t, a complete f*****g i***t,” said Alejandro as he picked up the pan. He chuckled and groped under the plank of wood that served as a bed, the safest place to store his guitar. Violeta Tossa had kept it for him when he was in jail. She should never have done it: the guitar made him dwell on the past. Now the instrument seemed insistent that he write songs again in a land that lost its hearing.

All the misery in his life had its roots in the attraction between words and music. It wasn’t love at first sight: for much of his youth, the guitar was an unwilling favorite. Violeta Tossa, a cigarette permanently dangling from her lips, taught him with inexhaustible patience how to seduce the instrument. She changed Alejandro’s life completely the day she suggested he meet the legendary singer Víctor Pérez.

Alejandro remembered the heat in the air that day, the low horizon induced by the mountains, the mass of clouds reminiscent of Rembrandt’s gloomy skies. Violeta and Alejandro were sitting in his parents’ garden. Violeta had asked him to write something à la Pérez a couple of days earlier. Alejandro stayed up the entire night working on the verses. He had been drinking, and the words weren’t exactly cohesive, but he convinced himself that the world should hear them.

He was nineteen and thought that his brand-new protest song outclassed anything Pérez had ever written. He sang his song and played with passion. But Violeta’s eyes narrowed as she listened.

Violeta’s reaction to his performance cut into him like a blunt knife: “Spare me the whining, boy!” When she laughed, her motherly breasts would shudder on top of her plump belly. “That’s politics you’re trying to sing about.”

“Of course it is,” he answered, pouting at her stupidity. “You wanted something Pérez-style, didn’t you? Doesn’t he write protest songs? Old-fashioned stuff. My work is the kind of protest song Dylan would write.”

“You sound like a bullfrog!” Violeta roared with laughter. “If you shout like that, you’ll make people deaf. You have to fill their hearts with passion. You sound like a gringo yelling slogans on TV and driving everyone crazy.” She strummed her guitar. “And that guitar, boy, that’s not a mangy burro. It doesn’t deserve the donkey beating you’re giving it. It’s your very first girlfriend, the one with the hair softer than your cold heart can remember.” She plucked a spirited melody that slowly became wistful and sad.

burroWhen she looked up, she saw the hurt in Alejandro’s eyes. “Chin up, boy, you’ll get there one day. You can do it; you can make that guitar sing. It’s the voice of the people who lost their tongue.” She gestured in the direction of the street.

“Speechless, all of them, struck dumb: all they can do is wait until death comes to get them.” Violeta shook her head, and cunning filled her eyes. “Your guitar has to give voice to their silence, coaxing, wheezing, l*****g, threatening, screaming. And you can do it if you weren’t so easily satisfied, for Christ’s sake. You’re no Dylan or Bob Seger. You’re Alejandro Juron, and your soul belongs here, in this place. Those miserable bastards outside deserve your voice and not some phony imitation. Go on, play me a Víctor Pérez number!”

yourAlejandro sighed and strummed a chord. How could he tell Violeta that he was only really interested in fame and often had doubts about those Terrenean protest songs, no matter how popular they were? The only way to become a star in 1970 was with pop music. Víctor Pérez had a decent voice, but the stuff of his songs was folklore. The poor always won. Instead of singing about s*x and politics like the American pop stars, his songs were fairy tales. Alejandro felt sure that the love songs he wrote in secret were better than protest songs, certainly if he wanted to make a name for himself. The Terranean poor didn’t want to hear about their moral rights. They wanted to dance to the provocative tones of sizzling love. Didn’t Violeta understand that? But no matter how old-fashioned she was, he had to admit that she was and remained an inspiring guitar teacher. His mother—also pathetically corny— encouraged him to take lessons with her, adding that Violeta didn’t accept just anyone as her pupil.

sizzling lovejustAlejandro wondered how long he was going to be able to put up with Violeta. One thing was sure: he was determined to play in a pop band, come what may. He treated her to a Pérez song as she had asked, concentrating on the sound of his voice and guitar. He wanted adoration, even it was only from Violeta, and when he had finished, she said, “Plenty of technique and voice, but a reluctant heart. I’ll put you in touch with Víctor Pérez. He’s still looking for someone for his new group Aconcagua. Maybe that’ll wake you up.”

That was 1970, the year in which he found himself, entirely astonished, under the influence of Víctor Pérez and discovering the wealth of Aconcagua’s repertoire. Thirteen years later, the radio vomited American pop all day long, and songs by Aconcagua were banned. Alejandro had been right about the future of music, but not in the way he had hoped. Now he was an old man as far as the jittery youth were concerned, and he thought Irene Cara’s Flashdance…What A Feeling and Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Want To Have Fun were soulless crap.

Flashdance…What A FeelingGirls Just Want To Have FunAlejandro flipped the guitar, sniffed the sound box, and strummed a chord. His fingers glided self-assuredly across the strings. Amazing how they remembered their way through the scales. Alejandro didn’t have to search long for a melody: it emerged inside him, languishing with desire. He could fish it up from a timeless reservoir in which every note was as young as the day it was born. But the words resisted. After what he had been through, they seemed infantile. They convulsed like the catch in a fisherman’s net. Alejandro took the well-thumbed pages from under his pillow and read what he had written a couple of days earlier: