'Love song': Carlos Zanón puts a soundtrack to love

one

Carpal tunnel

They went from his left hand.

All five fingers.

They took off in the middle of dinner.

They did not even have the grace to advise or leave a finger on the hand.

His escape, all five of them, did not take Eileen by surprise.

From the beginning of the concert, he knew that those fingers were going to end up doing precisely what they did, but he hoped they would hold up to the desserts.

It was not so.

She wished no one had noticed, but Jim was already looking at her when her eyes locked with his. Eileen's eyes were the kind that don't ask permission to look. The occasional bass player, Jim, approached her like a soldier in an old movie simulating the Great War: trenches, smoke, cables, pedals, and bits of electrical tape. Jim, after so many years, was immune to that look, but almost everything Jim knew about anything he had heard in some song and sometimes that was confusing in his head. Desdemona or Medusa, those eyes could no longer turn him to stone, but he had to admit that they continued to hinder him in the first moments of any approach. Eileen, aware of this, could not order anything to her eyes, but she could lower her head and withdraw her eyes,as if it were an animal drinking water. In the air, coupling and distortion. At bayonet's distance the face of Jim, her husband, was still trying, without much luck, not to show concern.

- I should cut it off.

Eileen was the rhythm of Prima Donnas, who was facing, one step ahead of the rest, in front of the mike.

He sang loudly and his contribution to the guitar was to set the melody with chords, so no one except for the two of them noticed the strange position of that left hand with the fingers fled.

The rest confused Eileen's violent frustration at this disobedience with the electric rage of other times.

The other guitar, Melanie - crazy and deaf or deaf and crazy, depending on the day and the boyfriend - filled the necessary gaps for it to continue sounding as it had sounded: huge, jumbled, fist to bone.

Who in the audience would miss his five fingers?

It was already the encores of that last performance before the end of the band's finals.

Those ungrateful fingers could have waited for the credits.

They should be amputated.

The fingers.

Hand.

Arm.

Uma, the bassist, had refused to go back with them.

They lost cache.

They brought Jim into the girl band.

Cache retrieved.

Uma wanted to go back.

His calls were not answered.

The cache was not even alluded to.

"I still think it's the carpal tunnel," Jim yelled in his ear.

A good theory, that of the carpal tunnel, a bad guitar player.

Excessive pressure on the nerves of the wrist that can weaken the fingers.

Yes, it was surely that.

It could be if it weren't for the muscle cramps attacking her, even asleep, in her hands and feet.

It could be if his latest falls - funny, recurring, some alone, silent, never revealed - had been caused by footwear, alcohol, wet floors or that treacherous sawdust from old sinks.

He could be if he didn't know what happened to Uncle Ronnie.

But I knew it.

Give the carpal tunnel a chance, he told himself that night.

You are too young.

You can't have such bad luck. "

The meeting with the girls was being fun and exciting.

The performances, explosive.

That music had never been a lie, and neither was it that night she was being fired.

Bad luck forbidden, she thought as Jim pulled her into a hug to drive his teeth into the back of her neck.

Oblivious to all this, Melanie, furious and accelerated, had started

"Come on, idiot, we're not leaving her alone," Eileen yelled at Jim with the volume off of her Gibson, hanging around her neck like Steve Rogers' shield.

She approached the mike supported by heels like champagne glass feet, the abandoned wedding dress tight, torn here and there, good cleavage, flat tits and a purple bra.

When he got there, in the middle of the stage, with his feet sinking into the dirty carpet, he began to scream because he could still scream, scream in the middle of that powerful, young, invincible music, that he could still do and is what he did: scream and scream.

two

The plan

A red sofa.

Lying on him, with a damp towel covering his face, Jim.

Listening and recognizing some voices.

The one about Cowboy talking to Julian, who touched the toe of his boot, and Jim, lifting the towel for a moment, winked at him like buccaneers are supposed to do.

After performing with Eileen and Prima Donnas at that festival in late May, he and Cowboy had done so on a couple of songs with Julian's band.

Above his head the hum of a huge bar fridge stopped every time someone opened its upper doors: beer bottles, cans of Coke, plastic waters and two cans of an unknown concoction rolling back and forth. without anyone taking the sensible action of straightening them, drinking them, or shooting them in the back of the neck.

People who didn't care going in and out.

Jim was guided by the harsh and slow tone of Julian's voice so as not to hear anything else.

In an apocalyptic scenario in which all the cities disappeared, Madrid could re-establish itself based on Julián's way of speaking.

He's old, fat and scared, Jim told himself at the same time that he felt bad about doing it: this guy was the author of great songs, a generous colleague, but Julian's panic summoned his in this tricky game of guessing the future with the present of the others.

"So what is your plan?"

- Julian asked, and in his voice Jim thought he heard fear, trembling, kneecaps chattering, because no one thought of Julian when a plan was hatched.

"It's all his business," Cowboy replied, his hand curled with silver rings around an Alhambra bottle.

Resigned, Jim lowered the towel under his chin and straightened up a bit, ready to do battle with Cowboy.

Jim was in his early thirties and he was handsome in that unbridled way that one ends up forgetting that he is.

At that time she had her brown hair cut to the teeth by Eileen's scissors.

Large, melancholic eyes, under bushy eyebrows, sparse cheekbones and a nose deviated from a knee in a boy fight.

Not too tall and not too thin.

Jim was practical and determined, like someone who lives convinced that, if necessary, he could score at the last minute.

That kind of person.

Quite the opposite of Cowboy, for whom reality inside and outside was all the same at the same time. Nothing seemed to begin and end for him, there were no better or worse times or more or less love at that time than at any other. He was tall and lanky, skinny. He was dressed in black, like he had just come out of a blues. His graying black hair was long, gathered in a ponytail like that of a soldier commanded by Genghis Khan, father of all Europeans. Aquiline nose, vulgar eyes, facial features looked muddy if they came after too many wasted days, too much alcohol and too much cocaine. He was fifteen years older than Jim but looked thirty older. Old boots, always the same and earrings of polish, about which he was presumably lying tenaciously when he said that Tom Petty had given them to him.Cowboys and a denim jacket hot or cold, Cowboy was deep if a labyrinth is.

Julia, Julian's wife, opened the door to request something from him.

Before, he greeted the rest.

Eileen followed her in, her thirst drawing her toward the refrigerator.

From this he took two bottles of water as if he had previously agreed that loot with Julia.

Jim was thirsty, but he still didn't know what for.

Eileen had sat on top of him and was trying to open her bottle.

Jim wanted to help and grabbed her ass from the bottle, but she refused almost violently.

He opened his hand and released the bottle.

Eileen got it with her left and as a reward she drank her fill.

Then he offered what was left to Jim, who emptied it.

Almost furtively, he took her hand and covered her fingers as if he could make them new by giving them heat.

She did not remove them.

"Well, you cowboy ... are you coming with us or what?" Eileen asked.

"I think it happened."

-And so?

"I still record something with Raúl."

"Our Raulito?"

- Julian asked.

The silence proved him right.

Jim was about to congratulate him on the news, which he did not know and envied, as he always envied everything - he liked everything to happen to him without necessarily having to take it from anyone - but he was interrupted by the gesture of Eileen sticking her tongue out at Cowboy, half I'm joking, I half hate you, in that code of the two of them, non-transferable and exclusive.

Cowboy and Eileen.

Eileen and Cowboy.

Both seemed to always know lines and movements of any scene in which they appeared. Bright replicas and counter replicas that were black holes for anyone who entered without warning. The most hurt character, obviously, was Jim, always with less text and clarity than the actor who played Jim would have liked. At first that dramaturgy, that complicity, made him feel bad. It exhausted him so much fencing, so much to be always on guard against what was said, what was meant, what was not said anyway. But over the years he had learned to let it be, to accept that these two were linked by a membrane that neither he nor anyone else could pierce. He had the body and the heart of the girl - that small and warm body that at that moment he had on top of him, with that smell that he would recognize among all the smells.while Cowboy had a part of her brain and love that was not housed in desire. It wasn't the best deal in the world, but it was the best possible, and he had finally accepted it.

"And after Raúl ...?"

Eileen asked.

"Then I have things."

-Oh yeah.

Of course.

Things.

"You can sign up whenever you want," Jim intervened, now definitely operational.

We will sail under the false flag.

We have even changed agencies.

No Prima Donnas, no Avignon, no Cowboy ... Maybe we caught a drummer.

We had thought of Telmo, the Rock-Star.

Do you know him?

And if you don't sign up, we'll still look for another guitar, I don't know ... I've told Íbon about it.

- Julian's liver was squeezed.

Jim noticed her clumsiness: "Why didn't I think of him?"

I was also thinking of proposing it to you, Julian.

We close in Tarifa.

There I sign up with the Egon Soda to two performances at the Tres Culturas o Tres País, I don't know what that is called ... And in the middle of our Cutre Lux Tour: campsites, bars, celebrations of saints ...

"But why all that nonsense, Jim?"

- he released

Cowboy.

"The king comes home disguised as a beggar to find out how much his subjects love him," Eileen pointed out, and Jim, who had his fingers tangled in his hair, gave it a tug.

"Don't you want to play again just to play, to be told that they don't like what you play or how you play ...?"

"I already play to play."

They already tell me.

You are the famous one, the one who no longer knows what to play, the one on TV and the contest ...

"That was three years ago, asshole," Jim trailed off.

His participation in that contest was a subject that among musicians like Cowboy or Julián made him feel uncomfortable.

-Fuck off.

A summer playing, drinking, laughing, eating and going back to the beginning, when we were handsome, young and Scottish.

We'll be playing the real hits of the summer and not your prehistoric songs and dark shitty b-sides ...

Cowboy put down the empty beer carton and, leaning against a table that served as a table, crossed his arms and looked at his friends with almost sincere curiosity.

Should I believe him?

Could that be the reason?

He knew Jim was leaving in the autumn for London to indulge himself in recording with a brilliant old producer a few songs that would end up shredded and settled online.

And Cowboy could understand why he wanted that rich kid bullshit about being a fairground musician, but did Eileen have nothing to say?

She was walking with her head down until she noticed Cowboy's gaze.

-And you...?

Why do you do it?

She asked as if Jim wasn't there.

- I love good endings

Eileen was a good reason to sign up for that long goodbye of a couple of months now that she no longer had an address in Barcelona.

From the top floor, his father, Centauro, had kicked him out with the excuse, Son of the Great Bitch, that he needed to rent it, he, who had two or three more.

All his things were or should be in a storage room.

Somewhere he must have the receipt with the deadline of the rent that Centauro had paid him.

But before Cowboy could verbalize his indecision or leave a door open, Jim spoke:

"Yes, if you come, I love you well."

"Fuck off, pretty face."

Eileen's gaze nailed like a wooden stake where Jim should have had a heart.

"There is no such thing, damn it. You tell each other worse things," he wanted to tell her.

"But you're not us," she would have answered. "You don't know where and how to hit."

-Ignore him.

Come on.

Nobody is going to take care of anybody.

Cowboy took another Alhambra from the fridge, opened it and, without answering, went out to the cool.

He immediately took as long a first drink as he could.

He was upset but couldn't say why either.

It was a mixture of trampled feelings, of sensations above and below that he knows that if mishandled they will end up on the infected edge.

As the cigarette was lit, his hands shook.

He knew what he needed in those moments.

He made out a crowd of well-known people, musicians,

, guest ladies and gentlemen, and headed towards them, dragging his screwed leg a bit, the leg that hadn't taken a four-story fall, his leg sore as always after a performance. .

It wasn't jealousy, it was never jealousy.

It was something more complex than he had ever been able to express with words, only with songs.

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