I will never know how many times I visited Mexico.
On each return I completely do not know the places where I have already been.
I cannot move unless it is by means of the transport that the organizers send me.
I never traveled on my own.
On that occasion, I was accompanied by the great Mexican writer
Antonio Ortuño (his novel
Human Resources
, starring Juana Viale,
has recently been adapted to film ).
We initially met in Guadalajara, Ortuño notes: the Book Fair, circa 2016.
Every time I try to remember a remote event, I call that odyssey The Conquest of Amnesia.
Did everything 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.
Let's assume it was at the end of my official activities.
In a bar in Mexico City.
Suddenly, from a table occupied by half a dozen individuals, where they were singing and drinking, taunts began to come towards me.
I couldn't quite understand if they were jokes or invitations, or a mixture of both.
Among the Mexican corridos, I thought I heard some trace of a Buenos Aires accent.
The Aztec civilization is endless and babelic.
Ortuño was telling me that some Spanish investors had hired him as a consultant for a miniseries about the Conquest, but that the pro-Aztec excess of traditional producers had dissuaded him from continuing to participate.
In the screams and screams that came from the table in question, typical of the course or aftermath of 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.
Finally they said my last name and I approached them.
Someone hugged me, another kissed me.
They turned out to be Los Pachanga, a cumbia group and derivatives, whose melodies I knew from parties, from the radio, from playing in a supermarket.
There was still more than five years left for that genre to rank high until it reached 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 reflex act of my allergy to dance in general
.
One of the saxophonists and the vocalist turned out to be classmates of mine from seventh grade.
There were also Mexican, Puerto Rican and Salvadoran members.
They toured the Spanish-speaking world, with success and fun.
But the Argentines had persuaded the rest, during that party, that
I should write a bolero for them
.
His sad song, like the sad night of Hernán Cortés.
They had never performed a melancholic love story in a slow rhythm.
I was the one chosen for human sacrifice.
I asked them how much they paid and they responded with a shot of tequila
.
But I insisted, and someone mentioned 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 would actually be sung.
In my already old existence, I come to suspect that there exists a parallel universe in which the number of scripts and lyrics that I once wrote, cashed in, and vanished forever on the shelves of nothing are finally produced and interpreted.
They asked me for my telephone contact: within three days I would give them a 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 the time
.
I let myself be influenced by the lyrics of Juan Gabriel -by territorial osmosis-, but he burst in with something of Buenos Aires abstraction.
Because “let's give ourselves some time” would be more typical of Juan Gabriel as a conjugation and literality, but
Give me time
revealed a certain, not exaggerated, metaphorical ambition.
The boys 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 demanded the return of lost time.
While the vocalist considered that the couple should meet at the end of the bolero.
I replied that then it would not be Hernán Cortés's sad night, appealing to his own quote.
But he insisted that since we were both Argentinians, we could perfectly leave Cortés aside.
Not necessarily, I thought without arguing: 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 diametrically modify it, and the author. who watches perplexedly at the debacle of his inspiration.
I don't know what demon intoxicated me, I stood on my hopeless bolero and sent a new letter with the couple still separated.
Conintes, the vocalist, invited me to a barbecue with tacos at his house, in some limbic place in Mexico City, which I never knew nor would know if it was the periphery or the center.
Of course, he should have picked me up for a driver.
The couple lived in a mansion with a garden.
She was Aztec.
The girl and boy shared traits from various cultures and accents.
They were a nomadic family and in itself a successful Tenochtitlán.
Los Pachanga's bolero needed to end with joy.
At some point I seemed to understand that she was hinting at something of her own love.
Or her self-love.
I told him I'd think about it: another euphemism.
On the way back,
Candilejas
, by
Roberto Carlos
, was playing in the sad night of contemporary Mexico, and suddenly, out of nowhere, I remembered the two Argentines forming the duo Sensación, in the seventh grade of our public school, like part of the graduate trip fundraising.
At the end of our week in Tandil, one of the two mothers had fled with one of the two fathers of the quartet.
Perhaps that episode, which I was only now remembering, as if a sorcerer had erased it from my memory for decades (the conquest of Amnésica), traumatized Conintes in such a way that he wanted to change the ending with a thaumaturgical bolero?
I spent that sleepless night thinking about my bolero, equidistant between Moctezuma and Cortés, not wanting to betray or fight in vain.
But I failed and fell asleep with the first light of dawn, if you can call that the smog cloud 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 lyric on my computer.
On the flight I was alternately surrounded by a halo of dignity, for not having given up my superficial idea of the bolero, and my constant pathos.
I was content 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 suicide's memory.
Valladares and Conintes had been dating since the end of primary school
: they had not been particularly upset 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 Juan Gabriel bolero, Valladares had asked Conintes for some time, assuming they would meet again with new intensity.
Conintes was never able to recover from that sentimental interregnum.
He reproached 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 just resigned myself to closing the lyrics with the happy ending... but I had found myself in a strange land, 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 myself (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 does not know whether to laugh or cry.