Hora cero

Música de Astor Piazzolla

Strip to your underwear if you’re not wearing a black tie.
Get obscene if you want, but never casual.
You feel an urge?
Touch its pain, wrap yourself around it.
Don’t put on airs.
What you seem must be what you are, and what you are is mess, honey,
but that’s okay, as long as you wear it inside.
Look sharp!
Don’t slouch.
See anyone slouching here?
Stay poised, taut, hard.
Listen to your nerves.
It’s zero hour.
Anxiety encroaches, wave after wave, with every sqeeze of
the bandoneón.
Already twisted by the contraposto of you.
Time is flowing backward and forward into the vortex.
From the rooms come a warm air and a choked melody of syncopated gasps.
Something throbs. A vein under your skin.
It’s inside you now,
the bordello virus, this pleasure that tastes so much of anger and grief.
When you find pools of pure sweet light,
bathe in their waters, balm for your lacerations.
For the wishplash scars, the bandoneón is leaving on your soul.
If this were the milonga of the slums,
or those popular songs about painted faces and purloined love,
you could let the distance sketch up a smile on your lips.
Cheap irony.
You won’t get away that easy.
This music is for you.
It always had you in mind, your habits, your twitches,
the tiny blodvessels bursting inside you when you hide what you feel.
So walk in the parlor, bring your friend or come alone.
Come hear the master as he unravels the wind inside the box,
as he presses the growling tiger that threatens to embrace him and
shapes the beast into a purring kitten.
And tiger again.
And kitten.
It’s all a game.
You’re going to play it too, your going to dance with the tiger.
Don’t worry, your life is in danger.
Remember your instructions.
Listen up.
And suffer, motherfucker, this is the tango.