{Photograph} by Carina del Valle Schorske.
This week, the Overview is publishing a sequence of brief reflections on love songs, broadly outlined.
The primary time I felt tropical rain was an erotic revelation: I used to be 9, visiting household in Puerto Rico on a Carnival cruise. At house in California, rain was chilly toes and flooded freeways. However on the island, rain got here quick and scorching, soaked via my cotton gown, then—sliced by solar—revealed a rainbow. Aguacero. The revelation was erotic not just for my physique (the sound, the texture) but in addition for my thoughts: now I knew that one thing dangerous is also good—relying on temperature, timing, timbre. My good friend Luis Alba calls tropical rain “the key rhythm beneath all our music”—the windy scraping of the guiro, the shifting pebbles of the shekere—however Dangerous Bunny’s “Aguacero” begins with ten seconds of literal downpour. Then, the fuckboy’s serenade: me tienes el bicho ansioso.
“Aguacero” just isn’t a correct love music. It’s reggaeton lite (easy manufacturing, raunchy lyrics), one of many extra predictable tracks on Dangerous Bunny’s newest blockbuster. However I can’t lie about what’s on repeat—within the kitchen, on the seashore, on the experience house from his place. As with love songs, so with love: we don’t at all times need what we deserve. For a protracted whereas—longer than we stated we’d—I had a lover who was in the course of a messy divorce. He wouldn’t have me for actual, and I wasn’t even positive that’s what I wished. However I used to be sick, I used to be drained, I hadn’t fucked with feeling for a number of years. So I went forward within the rain. Si el calor es de noventa, el aguacero es de cien. The refrain was each invitation and warning: if the warmth’s at ninety, the downpour’s 100. This wetness received’t make you much less thirsty.
“Aguacero” needs to maintain issues gentle—child dale simple, simple, sabes que soy piscis—with a languid dembow barely quick sufficient for dancing. However this restraint solely intensifies the music’s sensuality, soliciting a gradual grind your physique may bear in mind from “Cool Down the Tempo” by Gregory Isaacs or “Rock the Boat” by Aaliyah. Dangerous Bunny comes so near the mic you possibly can really feel the spray of s’s in your ear—now he’s Benito. The lyrics, in the meantime, vacillate between ostentatious detachment (don’t fear, I received’t say I like you) and ardent romantic roleplay (once you need it, I’m your husband). The anxiousness confessed within the first line returns to bother the lovers: she wants a doctorate in psychology to grasp his intentions, she’s obtained him desquiciado, scrolling via archived messages. Nonetheless, he insists on a basic equality of goal between them that I acknowledge from conversations with my lover—yo soy un cuero, y tú también—as if the extreme mutuality of sexual need might function a solvent for no matter inequalities emerge down the road. The phrases of their association stay unclear, and he appears to love it like that: in the event that they ask, say we’re distant cousins. My lover was additionally reluctant to call in public what we couldn’t even identify in personal; we by no means discovered the proper line.
It’s doable to eroticize virtually something, and the quip about distant cousins makes me wince then smile, admitting how I did really feel a queer sort of kinship with my lover: we had been each youngsters of short-lived cross-cultural relationships between bohemians, attempting to invent sustainable types of intimacy from the ruins of the nuclear household. Like Puerto Rico, New York is an island: there’s nowhere to cover from the connections that deliver us collectively even as soon as we’ve turned away. There’s tenderness there, should you’re prepared to style it. Yo soy un cuero, y tú también, the boys sing, and we dance—however will we all perceive the will that sustains the trade the identical approach? The phrases really feel impoverished to me; they don’t appear to honor the wealthy thriller of the mornings he would wake early to the touch me within the solar, like I wished. They’re drowned out by the regular pulse of precipitation that saturates the music. In “Aguacero,” there’s a sure stress between phrases and music, communication and sensation, as if what transpires between our bodies encodes a actuality that runs counter to our said expectations—that exceeds them.
Or was the music making issues worse, naturalizing preparations that I struggled to maintain in my on a regular basis life? Was it solely, as my mom typically warns, perpetuating a patriarchal program that objectifies ladies, evades emotional duty, and finally blames us for our confused complicity? Quédate en cuatro, que se ve precioso. I used to be studying Annie Ernaux, Gillian Rose, Luisa Capetillo, and Simone White, wanting to interrogate my heterosexual pleasures however reluctant to relinquish them fully. I texted my lover a passage from Simone White: “dancing just isn’t an endorsement of violence however in fact it’s /// … when dancing i do really feel unfold out / i really feel helpless and resent the sense that separating myself from emotions of affection and pleasure for the sake of so-called liberation is fucking us all up.” At night time I’d dance alone in my bed room and submit the movies to my Instagram tales, and if I swiped up—the app had a brand new function designed to revenue from female torment—you might see who’d watched them. I attempted to not use it, however I couldn’t overlook it was there.
After we stated goodbye, lastly—it was too chilly to face on the road for the time it ought to have taken—he instructed me he’d wished an escape and he thought that was okay. Now he was going house to another person. Within the second, nonetheless bewildered by need, I misplaced my will to litigate. However later, again in Puerto Rico, I questioned over the resonance between that phrase—escape—and the touristic wishes that develop our shorelines, uproot our mangroves, and slowly flip predictable seasonal storms into unnatural disasters. I do know I’m being dramatic, letting my metaphorical creativeness run wild. However no particular person or place can be an escape: escape is simply the rhythm of the one who’s working.
Final night time, strolling all the way down to the seashore in Luquillo, I noticed two males with shovels on the mouth of the river that feeds into the ocean—or ought to, as a result of simply then it was choked by sand, so the river was rising and flooding their properties. They had been attempting to dig out the channel, to revive the circulate. Their mission appeared unimaginable to me, particularly at such a late hour—and wouldn’t the drive of the tides at all times be stronger than the drive of the present? However the subsequent morning, I noticed they’d opened the channel into a large delta, and I noticed what number of instances they will need to have come down to do that work by hand. They’d already dedicated to discovering a kind that may accommodate the downpour, that may mitigate—if not eradicate—the injury of the deluge.
Carina del Valle Schorske is a literary translator and a contributing author at The New York Instances Journal. Her debut essay assortment, The Different Island, is forthcoming from Riverhead.
