—
I Am Sitting in a Room by Alvin Lucier: I am sitting in a room, Alvin Lucier said, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice, and I am going to play it back into the room, again and again, until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves. Was this Antonio’s idea of a prank? Or was his insistence to have her listen to this piece just a pretext to seclude himself with her by his bed? Antonio wasn’t laughing, and the door to his bedroom wasn’t locked, but neither was sufficient evidence to refute her hypotheses. So that any semblance of my speech, Lucier said, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, if you ignore the reverb and the space sounds of the electronic dance music coming from his living room, where his farewell party wasn’t ebbing yet — can you believe it? Antonio’s going back to do the Peace Corps in his own country! — are the natural resonant frequencies of the room, articulated by speech. What you won’t hear is Antonio relaying his unspoken expectation of her to her: concentrate, Masha, music isn’t just counterpoint and variations. But I regard this activity, Lucier said, not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have. I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. After the seventh or eighth iteration she stopped listening in for surprises. Lucier was simply shearing his voice and what remained was metallic noise. His fingers surprised her by grazing her lips. She didn’t smile so he did it again, this time acting as if he was clearing bread crumbs, stepping back, drunk like the rest of them — all of my friends here are party friends, Mashinka — turning his left hand into a bird, fingers like antlers, as he had done the night they stormed out of the premiere of Messiaen’s San Francis de Assisi. Whatever he saw in her face saddened him but he was a quick one, raising his index finger in mockery, as if he had just remembered something important: aha, yes, he had to stop his double decker and tap the other portable player to check that it was still running. Are you recording this, Antonio? He nodded, motioning with his hand to please recite something for him. Sure, why not? She could recite something he wasn’t likely to know: here is my gift, she could recite, not roses on your grave, not sticks of burning incense: alone you let the terrible stranger in, she could recite, and stayed with her alone: only my voice, like a flute, she could recite, will mourn at your dumb funeral feast: but she didn’t feel like giving him that satisfaction. Later that night, at her apartment, she was to recite those lines out loud to herself. They’re opening a new crêpe place on Gough, she said. I’m sorry I didn’t call you about the party, Masha. I figured you would hate it anyway. Or that you would expect to find painters like you, pianists and poets, a salon. All last minute anyway. I’m leaving. I was going to call you and tell you. To Ecuador? Where else, Masha? Berlin, Barcelona, New York? Guayaquil has one performance arts center named after one of our presidents who was praised by Reagan for his strong armed tactics. The shows mostly comedies there? Antonio laughed. Then he sat down on the bench by his bed and cried. Was this another ploy of his to embarrass her? To expose her callousness? To repulse her with his self pity? No. He probably would have cried even if she wasn’t there. Or wouldn’t have cried if she was there but hadn’t dismissed his manuscripts. Or if she would have asked him to tell her more about Alvin Lucier. How easy it is to discourage aspiring writers. Because of his flower pants and his ruffled shirt she still expected him to turn his crying into a joke. He didn’t. She didn’t know then that this would be the last time she would see him. That her last gestures toward him would be nongestures: no sitting next to him on his bench, arms around his shoulders, trying to convince him to stay. Imagine a different life in Berlin or New York, where you could walk out of operas like Messiaen’s every week. Goodbye, Antonio.
III / LEOPOLDO AND THE OLIGARCHS
Along the empty municipal hallway León Martín Cordero dashes to a press room that will have no chairs, no lamps, no bouquets of microphones like those favored by El Loco, no podium but instead a rolltop from where he will enact Leopoldo’s idea of summoning the two thousand four hundred and ninety pipones that El Loco indiscriminately added to the previous payroll. Prostitutes and junkies who would only materialize on payday and whom he wiped from the books on his first day as mayor of Guayaquil, carajo, summoning them now under the pretext that they’ll be reinstated to the payroll, please bring your official letter with you, not knowing that he has also summoned the press so that their cameras will remind the nation of El Loco’s repulsive brand of graft, and yet as Leopoldo waits for León Martín Cordero to finish dashing along the hallway, Leopoldo’s sure León’s not thinking about Leopoldo’s idea or about the lawsuit against him for his alleged human rights violations during his tenure as president, no, not thinking that now they have the nerve to complain, conclave of ingrates, now because they think that I’ve been enfeebled by a minor eye surgery (his right eye was replaced by a glass one) or by a routine coronary bypass (his third in ten years) or because of rumors that I have lung cancer and even
(Doctor Arosemena cannot yet confirm to Leopoldo if León has Alzheimer’s)
all of which I’ve survived just as in my youth I survived three bullets unscathed, carajo, now they have the nerve to complain instead of thanking me for ridding this country of terrorists like Alfaro Vive Carajo, now they like to pretend they weren’t panicking about what could’ve happened to their husbands, ay mi Luchito, ay mi Alvarito, all of whom were at risk of being kidnapped like Nahim Isaías had been kidnapped by that tracalada of thieves who called themselves guerrilleros, ay Mister President, ay Leoncito, do whatever it takes to weed them out, now they like to prattle about so called truth panels instead of thanking me like Reagan thanked me by gifting me a miniature.38 caliber automatic that I still carry under my
(an articulate champion of free enterprise)
and yet as Leopoldo waits for León Martín Cordero to finish dashing along the hallway, Leopoldo’s sure León’s not thinking about Leopoldo’s plan or about El Loco’s graft or about the lawsuit against León for his alleged human rights violations but about Jacinto Manuel Cazares, who an hour earlier had asked for permission to write León’s biography, arriving precisely when Leopoldo opened León’s door, as if this Cazares individual, a former classmate of Leopoldo who nevertheless looks like the son of a horsekeeper raised by law clerks, had synchronized himself to León, courtesy of some municipal snoop who’d relayed the data from León’s wristwatch, some sneak who shook León’s hand and managed to extract León’s data to the millisecond, some groveler or someone posing as a groveler just like this Jacinto Cazares individual who showed up with Volume III of León’s Thoughts and Works, which had been published by the National Secretariat of Public Information when León was president and that León probably overlooked as a prop of ingratiation because that impossible to find volume describes the most ambitious highway system the country had ever seen, plus it was tagged with so many sticky notes that it looked like a flattened sandwich or a