Fito Páez released On the Road, included in the album Abre, in 1999. With her he won the Latin Grammy Award for best rock song the following year. There is a part of the theme in which Páez sings: “I like to return from oblivion / to remember in my house dreams / from the boy who played ball / from 49585 / nobody promised us a rose garden / we talked about the danger of being alive". It was always one of my favorite songs. And that part excited me especially because I was the guy who was always playing ball at home, and I liked to imagine that number, 49585, was Fito Páez's house number just like 82 was my grandparents' in a street much smaller than a town much smaller than a city like that of Páez, Rosario.
My curiosity led me to look for the origin of that verse and I found, in a community of Fito Páez fans, the result of a test. The artist had told in Argentina that the number was that of his home landline. In one song, It was love, he sings: “Tangled up in the ENTEL cables of some dream we are going to leave”, because ENTEL was the national telephone company of Argentina until 1990. And in a 1982 ENTEL guide obtained by another fan, the Address of the Páez (Balcarce, 681) and their fixed number: 49585.
I remembered this listening to René, the song of Resident, former member of Calle 13. It is a long seven-minute autobiography that demonstrates the power of music, capable of calling something about seven minutes long and short of something of 200 pages. It is, in short, an impressive song in which the artist reviews his life and reviews himself without dodging the shadows, violence and depressions. And he says: "I want to be where nobody bothers me / Burn my notebook, drop my bags / I want to call 7550822 / Let's see who answers." When he repeats it, later on, he continues: “And if they answer me / I want to tell you that I want to come back / that I want to leave this hotel / and disappear” to enumerate everything that has been lost while winning prizes, since seeing Halley's comet with his mother on 11th Street until Christmas in summer.
We will die with several landline numbers memorized in the head, and those numbers and the voices that were on the other side will be proof that we are actually a few moments that already were. Until the time comes when we call something authentic that we are only reliving in the most reliable way possible, and we will ask the present not to have mercy on the future but magnanimity with the past, because at the moment one loses one foot, or both, the only thing that will belong to him, as Borges said, is what he lost. What you can not repeat, although there is a number to call without knowing if the voice that will be heard on the other side will be that of the father of his ex-girlfriend, that of his mother or that of a friend whom you lost track of when leaving of the school leaving his fixed number recorded forever. It is beautiful if you think: we still know the way but we don't know what there is at the end. The house of the Páez, for example, the one in which the 49585 sounded and was in Balcarce 681, today is a biochemical laboratory.
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