He once told me that, fortunately for Beatles fans, McCartney’s polychrome palette was balanced by Lennon’s black. A typical comment from him. He was a superlative melodist, and “his” John Lennon in particular, were the poets whose lyrics he chose. He began by displaying the iridescent flashes of his instinct, and the black ran on the account of poetry, which in some sense also carried percussion. Bassist, when he composed he was concerned – in the construction of the canopy – about the highest points, and he laid cables from one to the other, where the melody would perform its acrobatics. I once read that Picasso said: “… sometimes I look for a blue and I can’t find it; then, I put red ”. I remembered Fernando’s comment: pure art.
Fernando made people laugh and laughed a lot. Although his eyes never laughed the way the rest of his face did. There was in them – here, there, towards the bottom – an imperturbable mineral and millenary cliff. Something strict, a severity to amputate the sense. In the early ’70s, I once told him that the best way to love the country was to be able to die for it. He laughed and looked at me with those eyes: the highest way to love her, he replied, is to be able to live for her. In other words: that I had no idea what he was saying. It was not a political rebuttal, nor was it something to do with bravery, or with sanity or insanity. I understood it much later, because you do not learn when you should, but when you are able. This passage of my affection for him is rhymed by a song of his, unforgettable (like so many others): “… also sweet children of mine were born / That in the meantime they sweeten you beautifully / We must learn to resist”. Juan Gelman. Somewhere in me, I need this to make sense. But I don’t want to know what it is.
This whole year of Flanders skies! Low, cranky skies, their bellies scalloped by charcoal gray iron-on tapes. Quino, Fontova, Pino, El Diez, Fernando. One night not so long ago I received another hymn. Fernando sent me Telegram to your old age, with lyrics by the poet Félix Grande: “… if out of fear or uncertainty / tonight you don’t push this door / behind the one that is already naked and awakens / the forbidden woman full of fire”. I lifted my nose to test the air quality: salt water, expired muscle tissue, ammonia salt, and vinegar. Year two thousand and twenty: snakes that scared the mirror away.
In February or March 1974 we traveled to Córdoba. Their group was called Ecstasy, and that was listening to them. Upon arrival, I went to a closed meeting at the University, in which Roberto Quieto told us that General Perón had, at most, six months to live. He gave him three, because he died on July 1. We rehearse in the Paraninfo. He was accompanied by Lucas Demare on lead guitar, Jorge Lützow-Holm on percussion and Rubén Bass on acoustics. At one point, it was Lucas’s turn for a guitar solo. I don’t know if it happens to everyone; to me, only three or four times in my life. Suddenly a voice, an instrument, a landscape, produce the suspension of the senses. It is as if the body were transported to another dimension, and while it is aware that something of a contrary order is at work, it is desired that that moment never ends. Maybe that’s why, you can’t get out of there until you stop. The only lasting slave is the one of love, Wilde said, because it is the one that consents to tyranny. Well, Lucas started off with a phrasing and we all squeezed into the real-life postponement. Fernando was not bewitched, because he quickly realized what was happening, and dedicated himself to sustaining the guitar voice with the bass until Lucas (or the music) decided that he was fine. When he finished, I sniffed the scent of rubble, early end. What I tell has a meaning, which is at hand. But I don’t want to know what it is.
The last I heard from him was a pastoral written by Quique Scheinfeld. On the instruments, Fernando composed another melodic line, put lyrics to it and sang it: “… seated face to face”. Earlier, at the end of September, he had sent me a batch of songs, Fernando de la Riestra y Grupo. Several decades after Dulces Sonidos (a national group that sang in English, which I was going to listen to from the outside when I was sixteen, when they rehearsed on Urquiza Street, which played a locomotive song, Five O’Clock Tea). Then came Fisoruga, Ecstasy, Bizarre World, The Threshold, their tribes. Maybe not in that order, and maybe not exactly with those names. One of the September themes is called The alarm: “… During the night, the siren sounds, from a factory near my house…”. A melody full of omen and towers, with the cymbals that ring between bells and the voice that rests on brittle glass.
Good. The alarm did not go off, my dear Fernando. And it was for you, just for now. Better not to have known it would be like this.
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