baladas para un alien

The first few years I didn't yet know I was keeping vigil. I noticed that February kept handing me a song, a transmission whose origin I could not fully triangulate.

Here is the thing about receiving a signal in a frequency unknown. "Romperte esa boca empiezo a imaginar." I begin to imagine breaking your mouth. To an outside ear that does not devolve into cliched feels. It reads like a threat. And a confession. The sheísmo softens it and sharpens it at once, the 'll' gone to that wet zsh sound (that I adopted and excuse cuz Medeszhin), and beneath the Argentine Spanish, echoes of Italian cadence from a century of immigration and deeper still an Arabic sediment, ojalá, the word that means God-willing and arrived to Spain eight hundred years ago on Moorish voices, carrying a whole grammar of longing and distance the speaker no longer has to know about to feel.

From a distance you hear it all as texture. You can catch a glimpse of the abyss without understanding the etymology. This strangeness has history submerged in it, which is different from a thing being unfamiliar.

And then I made the mistake.

I looked one of the lines up. "Liquor no es helado." For a long time that phrase was pure mystery, a sentence that meant nothing and everything. When I learned it was, more or less, "your drink has gone warm": First contact lost, and the cost of arrival, the alien signal was more of a surf report. The ambiguity that embodied the entire experience collapses into survivable meaning. Translation does this. It is its only job and its quiet violence.

The tool I reached for to do the decoding was itself a particular kind of alien. Opus -- the model whose prose sounds like nothing else yet released, and sounds distinctly other in the same way Rioplatense sounds like Spanish with something drowned beneath it. I pointed an alien instrument at an alien frequency and got back something in a third language that is neither one thing nor the other. The strangeness did not disappear. It changed provenance.

She amplified the broadcast to reach one particular alien, loud enough to leave the club. The signal washes past the intended receiver and reaches others entirely. Porteños foremost, certain Mexicanos, emo trap kids everywhere who cried along with the delivery. Before they parsed the words. And tangentially me, further out in the constellation, with no native frequency at all, maybe picking up nothing but the carrier wave on specific dates.

The song titles itself as ballads for an alien. Valentín is the one in there, the figure being sung toward across the count. From where I am standing, the alien is probably me.

It named its alien. It did not mean me or Opus. We showed up cada Catorce anyway.