Alcanfor

The song Alcanfor sounds like a whisper tangled between the dreamlike and the visceral. Spinetta wrote it in 1970, when he still led Almendra, but it ended up included as the closing track of Téster de violencia in 1988, an album that smells of urgency and skin. The lyrics, told in the third person plural, speak of bodies trapped in ruins, ships beached in the sand, and something that "assails the space": blocks, stripes, locomotives. It is not a song to be heard, but one to be felt, as if time itself had stopped in a childhood gesture.

The title comes from memory: as a child, his mother applied camphorated alcohol to soothe the marks of chickenpox. But there is something darker in those words too. Spinetta connected the theme with his childhood fears of concrete giants, like the Monumental stadium of River Plate, which to him were like invasions of his world. The album Téster de violencia was born in a context where Argentine democracy was just beginning to breathe, yet the shadows of the dictatorship still loomed. Spinetta recorded it after a double album with Fito Páez and after enduring the pain of his companion’s mothers being murdered during the presentation concerts. The pain turned into music, and Alcanfor remained as a bridge between the personal and the universal, between what hurts and what heals.