I’m a spiritual painkiller, my husband says:
-I’m here to do good to my friends. That’s my role in the universe, and I’m the center of the universe.

That’s how he talks, he’s used to saying things like that. But my husband is not my spouse or my lover, much less my love with a capital L, nor with italics or bold letters. My husband, in fact, gets nervous when he has to share a couch with gay people (I say: “homosexuals with penises,” since for my husband lesbians are first of all girls, always attractive women, before mere women or gay). My husband is a heavy metal punky and government worker and poet (Soulless, Ediciones Tácitas, 2011); yes, maybe he’s misogynistic in some manner, undoubtedly a misanthropist, but never homophobic. Despite what specialists in gender studies and daylight feminists might say at some point, the guy is adorable, I can attest to that. My husband and I were once colleagues: a long time ago, we both worked in a transnational e-commerce company where we wrote jokes in order to sell online discount coupons. We became friends and, years later, as if by accident or need, ended up living together in an apartment we rented for not too much money –sharing, in addition to a domestic life, maintenance fees for the building, light and gas bills, groceries and the basic expenses of the cat–.

My husband’s name is Corrales(!) and we call the cat Chito, although his real name is Gatotó. As soon as he wakes up at around 7:30, Chito/Gatotó only listens to Radio Beethoven. Religiously, at that time, I play music in the apartment before giving the cat his breakfast pellets –the animal eats Prescription DIET™ every morning, as well as in the middle of the day and after six–. While I spend the rest of the day at home next to Chito/Gatotó, the works of Rachmaninoff and Bach, Chopin, Ludwig Van y Debussy, and the poppiest bands from 96.5 FM all sound through the dining room speakers like white noise. This playlist, watered down and to an extent beige, turns out to be esthetically transparent when I write and read, such that it plays without interruption until I leave in the afternoon for the subway; from there, to the workshop.

This routine, always the same from Monday to Thursday, is broken on exceptional occasions when every once in a while, at around 7, Corrales (!) and I bump into each other just steps from the apartment door: he arriving; me leaving. I then get to see the cat getting excited and its hair bristling from the top of its ears to the end of its tail when my husband parks his custom bicycle, unfastens his helmet, greets me with a “How’s it going, faggot? And, without expecting an answer from me or the cat, unplugs the radio cable from the speakers and plugs in his cell phone. At that moment, when Corrales(!) finally arrives home, Beethoven goes silent and Chito/Gatotó almost seems to smile when the grindcore comes through the speakers.



The grindcore songs are short.
Two minutes, two and ten seconds, tops.
In Corrales(!)’s band, the drummer clowns the most: in between songs, they hand him the microphone and he acts as frontman.
The only time I’ve seen my husband play live, the frontman/drummer told the audience they could spank the bass player’s ass.
He only asked for one hundred pesos: a single coin was enough to spank that ass at will.
Three guys got on stage and started kicking the bass player.
It reads worse than it actually was.
No one was wounded that time.



It may be, it may not: I don’t know if Ray Loriga would listen to Ejaculator Command, the porno-satanic-komandant-grindcore trio where Corrales(!) plays the drums (when he’s not playing with his other band, Fragmento de Horror). In any case, I know I remember Loriga because, much to our chagrin, I discovered an edition of Héroes in our apartment’s library. It’s true that, before I turned eighteen and was still in school, I read that book but never got to buy it and Loriga disappeared from sight and memory until little while ago, when I ended up living with Corrales(!).

We never had any conflict, my husband and I, regarding our library’s composition: not about the distribution or order of our books: we decided they’d all be stacked vertically on the shelves of the north wall of the living room. It did us good to not have any method in the cataloguing of novels, story collections, anthologies, and poetry self-editions which took up a fifth of the space. More than an entropic chaos, it was the random order of the boxes arriving with the move that ruled how the books ended up in that piece of furniture. It therefore makes sense that, while looking for a little novel by Levrero –Dejen todo en mis manos, I think–, my fingers got to Héroes by Loriga and –once again, randomness– I now find it on top of a pile of books which rests on a table in the dining room.

On the cover of Héroes (Plaza & Janés, 1996) there is a guy with long hair, a jean jacket, a week-long beard and a couple of rings on his right hand, with which he also holds a bottle of beer: his ring finger shows a silver skull, his middle finger, trying to avoid clichés, shows a dark gem, probably fake. I can’t stop trying to understand that cover, I want to, I struggle, but I don’t have enough interpretative clarity: today, when I’m thirty something, I can’t remember Loriga’s face –I know I’ve seen pictures of him, I have to have seen them when I was younger– and I assume the guy on the cover is him: a writer that writes about rockers who behave like writers who want to be rockers. It’s very easy to think immediately of Corrales(!), I try to imagine him as a grave writer, seriously trying to be a rocker, and I can’t picture him like that. Then, I read the ending of Soulless (“Now that we are two of the soulless / we’re at the end / in the empty theater / we realize there never was an us / never was someone else / never was something else / us that are soulless / should be singular / sitting / me here / sitting / just me / and no one else”) and I read it one more time, as Fragmento de Horror or Ejaculator Command sounds in the background. Loriga was so wrong, that today I can’t stand him; we were so lost when we read him as kids, a whole generation with the silly aspiration of becoming stars. Before any rocker who plays at gravity, Corrales(!) has my respect, he who, while being a punky, metalhead and poet, does not fear being light nor clowning around.