Where the Bird Sings Best (33 page)

One morning during the month of April, as usual, the women got up half an hour before the men to prepare breakfast. They felt an irritation in their eyes, but what caught their attention most was the darkness that persisted at that hour when the most beautiful light should be sweetening the hostile landscape. They tried to go outside to see if the sky was covered with black clouds, but they found the door locked. They had to wake up their husbands, and all four of them had to push to open it. A thick layer of ash covered everything.

The peons brought the news: the Descabezado Grande
volcano, located in Mendoza, had thrown into the sky an immense eruption of ashes that the trade winds and counter-trade winds had scattered over hundreds of miles. Swallowing curses, they plowed the land again and again, trying to mix in the ash. Impossible. The hungry animals cut open their gums chewing the grass covered with mineral dust. An anthrax epidemic broke out, and all the animals died. They would have to start all over again! They dug the rubber bag in which they’d hidden their earnings out of the excrements in the black pit, and Moisés and César went out to buy livestock. They came home with an enormous herd of pigs.

Shoske and Jashe, terrified, ran to hide themselves in a bed, pulling the sheet over their heads: “Forbidden food! God will punish us! How could you buy those disgusting animals that adore garbage? They are the Devil!”

César and Moisés, delicately folding back the sheet little by little, finally got the women to show their faces. Since they seemed unwilling to stop complaining, Moisés rattled his gums, producing a deafening clickity-clack. Impressed, the two women fell silent. César gave them each a glass of brandy, serving himself a large glass as well. Then, drying his mouth with his sleeve, he said, severely, “Ladies, times change. We have to adapt or we’ll die of hunger. The volcano ruined our land. Years will go by before the ash is washed away by rain or gets mixed in with the mud. We’ll never equal our production from before the disaster. If you want our children to have, some day, the economic means to study and get to be respectable citizens, we must progress. Forbidden or not, these pigs are right for us. They eat everything, and they are tough. They’re not even exported. Instead of fattening them and selling them off to the chilled beef industry, we will install a factory right here to produce hams, sausages, bacon, lard, and many other products. We’ll make lots of money.”

“But what will the other Jewish settlers say?”

“When there’s no more meat, it’s time to gnaw the bones. If what you want in this world doesn’t exist, you have to want what there is. Our compatriots can say whatever they like because we’ll stop seeing them. We don’t need them for anything. If they hold us in contempt, we’ll marry our children among ourselves, even if they are cousins. The Law does not forbid it. Do you want to get out of this hell someday? Then let God take care of tomorrow, and let the pigs take care of us today. Decide! Moisés and I are going to roast a piglet. Eat with us. All roads, even the smoothest, have stones in them. Harden your feet!”

One hour later, Jashe and Shoske came over to the fire and sat next to their husbands who cut big, juicy slices off the piglet and offered them. With sighs of resignation and their eyes raised to heaven, they chewed, slowly at first, overcoming their repugnance, only to devour pork later with an irrepressible appetite. When the banquet was over, the two women announced they were pregnant. Eight months later, they gave birth, as usual on the same day, one boy, Jacobo the Third, and one girl, Raquel the Third.

Time galloped on. The emblem of the Flying Hog ham factory, a pig with swan wings flying over a landscape painted in the colors of the Argentine flag, became famous all over the nation. When World War I broke out, they had to bring in workers from Buenos Aires, all goys apparently, to keep up with the numerous orders that came from abroad, especially from England. The exploitation of flesh forbidden by the Prophet allowed them to get through the crisis, amassing a huge fortune.

Since they did not want to live the rest of their lives isolated out on the pampa in the nauseating stink of their thousands of pigs, they decided to move to Chile. Iquique was a port visited by ships of all nationalities; with schools appropriate for the children, all kinds of businesses, enormous hotels, theaters, libraries; and boulevards where tourists, mine administrators, sailors, and workers who came down from the mines to spend the money they’d made over months could provide an inexhaustible source of income. They would open a huge store where there would be everything: food, clothing, furniture, kitchenware, toys for children, clocks, watches, jewels, and—why not?—a booth for buying and selling gold and silver.

While all that was being discussed, my mother turned thirteen without her family realizing it. Still faithful to the order to dye her hair, wear dark glasses, never bathe—her skin was covered with a dark, greasy coating that stank like the pigs—and walk bent over, she had created a situation in which no one wanted to be anywhere near her, not even the workers who butchered the animals. If by accident during the day she wandered near the house, her half-brothers and half-cousins would start howling with terror, and she would have to run off.

But Sara Felicidad did not suffer. For her, this shabby aspect of things belonged to the world of forms. Beneath that was the world of essences, which only she could perceive. There she could sing as loud as she wished and show herself with her white skin, golden hair, blue eyes, her six-foot-three height. There, the Earth was an amorous being granting long caresses lasting millions of years, where atmospheric changes were the jolly games of a God at play, and where human beings were angels riding on pigs that really did have wings.

Late on nights when there was a full moon, Sara Felicidad would climb the ombu tree and from there see emerge from the sleeping men and animals a second, transparent body that allowed them to travel, without their being able to remember it when awake, throughout the Universe, until they sank into the final abyss, where they would find the consciousness that was the origin of life, and then emerge covered with luminous scales, larger than the planet Jupiter, and spin and dance, emitting the music of a whirling top, with the spirits of the dead, who are always happy.

For Jashe, Shoske, Moisés Latt, and César Higuera, bringing Sara Felicidad along was a problem. Secretly, they all wanted to leave the pigs and her. No one would dare propose it, so when the time came to leave, they gave her a third-class ticket while they and the six children traveled in first class. They hoped the wind of the train would carry off her fetid stench. When they got to Iquique, they would replace the barrel with an annual allowance and a room in a boarding house, as far away as possible, so they could once again forget about her existence.

It
was extremely difficult for me to bring Jaime and Sara Felicidad together. When incarnating myself again in this world became a necessity, the man I chose to be my father was in a circus, way down in southern Chile, being hung by the hair. And the woman who was supposed to be my mother was locked away in a desert sanctuary way up north. Separated by more than two thousand miles, they never would have found each other if, in 1919, I didn’t decide to take those two people of such differing character—which is as much as saying they were opposites—to be the founding elements of my future body.

I don’t know if my memories of the time before my birth correspond to reality or if they are mere dreams. That doesn’t matter. In any case, reality is the progressive transformation of dreams; there is no world but the world of dreams. I am convinced that I chose and united the sperm and the ovaries that allowed me to be born again for the—who knows how many times I was born? Thanks to my iron will, when the chosen moment came and in the proper spot, an oasis in the middle of the pampa, I exacerbated the magnetic suffering that forced the paternal penis to penetrate the maternal vagina so that, in a cataclysmic joy that overwhelmed all its cells, it would let fly the radiant arrow that went to bury itself in the avid depth of her magic blackness.

I slid through that crack opened in space and time, intent on conserving my memory intact because I would need it to carry out the plan I’d been elaborating from life to life. But as almost always happens, the disturbance suffered by the subtle body when it penetrated the dense levels of this existence caused me to lose a large number of memories. Little remains of that incessant development of a spirit knowing itself. It’s a fragmented magma, shadowy sensations, colossal spaces, eternal times, births and collapses of universes, savage rivers of swept-away souls crossing infinite splendors in vertiginous orbits.

During some periods, there was total silence, as if God had never created ears, and after, the racket of galactic cars, carnival trucks showing off the spangles of their suns, advancing with no goal, pushed along by the goodness of an inexhaustible emanation, a unique principle that feeds myriad beings who only receive. With no fear of the ridiculous, I accept the fact that I was a metallic crag wandering through dark immensities with an impassioned thirst for light. Within my extreme density lived an exclusive desire: to create language, song, the Word itself, which had drawn me out of the nothingness. That ideal must have inflamed me. Perhaps I exploded into stars and planets and became crystal, amoeba, plant, animal, and then lost myself in an incessant line of men and women being born and dying in murderous religions, labyrinths of legends and symbols until I learned to open the eyes of my senses and learn to see that pure light that arises from the original fountain with my soul, without intermediaries.

Then the language of thought resounds, the silent voice that speaks to Being, perpetuating itself through time in order to create the true Tradition, “That which is received.” It seems that I was an initiate born in Germany in 1378. It’s clear that the year, composed of 13 and of 78, which is 13 x 6, transports a message. Those who have received a Masonic education will understand what that mans. In that life, because of misery, my parents abandoned me at the doors of a convent. The monks—who, lacking a sexual life, develop their intellect until it becomes a tumor—taught me to speak and read Greek and Latin before I was six.

When I was almost an adolescent, I accompanied the abbot on a journey to Jerusalem. He died there, granting me a freedom that by then had become essential for me. I sought the Truth among old Kabbalists, but when my organs of knowing developed, I understood that, unable to be universal, it presented itself as a violent belief. Then I sought a technique that would allow me to disconnect from that archaic desire. Truth would only be the world without my desire for it, and the technique would be to learn to disappear as a separated individual. To accomplish that, I had to confront inspired thought in other masters.

Egypt showed me its secrets in a numerical system: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, etcetera. Ascetic Turks showed me how to fall into a trance: I could open my abdomen with a knife, empty my guts out onto a plate, and dance, spinning dizzily, and at the end put them back in their place and seal the wound without leaving a scar. In Fez, I studied alchemy, how to spiritualize matter, and magic, how to materialize spirit. Finally, I was visited during a dream by the Knights of Heliopolis, those who consider physical death a sickness and who have the incredible patience to live more than fifteen thousand years.

Those ancients treated me like someone they’d been awaiting for a long time, and each one (there were seventy-eight) gave me his knowledge summarized on a rectangular sheet. When I was able to order those drawings into a hexagonal mandala that resembled a snowflake, I thought I understood the constitution of the Cosmos and the mystery of life. Considering, as did my masters, it useless to go on remaining in one single body, I decided to live 151 years and to continue, in another life, my work, which was to lead all beings to Awareness, progressively eliminating God by absorbing Him in existence so that we would all become an exclusively human Universe. All of that was achieved with the consent of the Father, who, out of absolute love, creates us so we will be his tomb. Out of the putrefaction of the divine our eternity will be born.

I returned to Germany, where I adopted an orphan girl. I instructed her for some years until she became my wife. With the immense fortune I accrued transforming base metals into gold, I had a temple constructed in the Alps, carved from the rock of the mountains themselves. I led the workers there blindfolded and returned them home without their knowing where the site was located. There, with my young lover and four friends chosen from among the most highly developed spirits of the period, protected by our disguised and impregnable nest, we locked ourselves away to decipher the miraculous language of geometry. Almost a century went by. I saw my disciples die placidly. I had met them too late, after society had already encrusted in their minds the programing of death and the triumph of old age. Since they believed in those two concepts, they achieved them.

Federica, my companion, educated by me, grew up without those prejudices and accompanied me until I was 151 years old. Young, only 110, she wanted to die with me, but I forbade it; she had to go on living for several centuries, if necessary—until, in another incarnation, I would remember her and seek her out to achieve our final union, the sacred androgyne.

The two of us constructed a seven-sided crypt. In the center of the roof, we hung three lamps filled with oil we’d managed to extract from gold, which, thanks to a wick made from chameleon spittle, could burn for a millennium. At the center of the heptagonal floor, we erected a round covered altar with a copper plaque on which I engraved
Hoc universi compendium unius mihi sepulchrum feci
and other important things that, unfortunately, I’ve forgotten. Finally, in a glass coffin, I lay down with my seventy-eight cards floating from one hand to the other like a rainbow.

Under the serene gaze of my faithful Federica, I began to give up my body. I separated first from my feet, in which I felt the enthusiastic faith of the always-growing toenails, the fierceness of the instep, the solidity of the soles giving roots to intelligence, and the clarity of the heels, round fertilizers of the planet. I loved them the way you love during farewells: more than ever. Then I withdrew from my skin, flesh, bones, viscera, until, separated from my matter and my needs, I began to do the same thing with my desires, which was relatively easy. Only one difficulty arose: the profound attraction I felt for my companion.

A sperm as brilliant as a jewel had been waiting for many years to inseminate her. I’d had to sacrifice that natural desire for reasons related to my initiation, which I do not understand. Then came the farewells from all the humans who gave me wisdom, from all the plants, animals, minerals, an army of beings with which I had established tender links and which I also thanked and quickly abandoned. Finally, I eliminated from my spirit my unfinished works, anxieties of being, doing, and living. With an immense felicity, I gave myself to the change and emerged in the limbos of the Interworld. I wandered in the Interworld, there where space and time are absorbed by the unthinkable creator, Eye.

In that splendor, impeding the disintegration of my awareness, I waited for the manifested Universe to perish and be reborn in order to reincarnate in an advanced era where man would have overcome his animal inertia. But I made a mistake and let myself be trapped by a certain orange-tinged light that cast me into an avid ovary during a primary era that corresponded in no way with the dates of my death. Trapped in the past, I was born in Lisbon in 1415, in the body of the Jew Isaac Abravanel.

I had the good luck to be part of a family of notable and eminent Talmud scholars, among whom I learned numerous languages. I stood out in the study of Law and developed the powers of my spirit, managing to be named Minister of Finances by Ferdinand of Spain. In that country, I met Salvador Levi, a lion tamer. Thanks to contact with the stares of his beasts, hunters of souls, I managed to turn one corner of the veil and remember the seventy-eight arcana that had been revealed to me in my former incarnation by the Knights of Heliopolis. The rest of that life you already know. Do you remember? Thanks to the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, I ended up in Italy, where, after many adventures, I decided to die like the clowns, by balancing on my head with my red shoes toward heaven.

By introducing the Tarot into the Levi genealogical tree, even if my material form hadn’t dissolved in their genetic codes, made it mine, and from the Interworld, with an astral vibration that might be compared, allowing myself all licenses, to human satisfaction, I watched the development, from generation to generation, of Cosmic Consciousness, which, without trying to make frivolous wordplay, is enormously comic. He who understands philosophy understands laughter. That mysterious Word at the beginning, mentioned in the Bible, is a divine guffaw.

All the ancestors of the woman who would be my mother were receiving, little by little, the infinite joy that emanates from the Creator. They shone like golden fruit among the branches that spread higher and higher. But none got as far in its glitter as Sara Felicidad. Her intense glow went beyond our solar system until, liberating itself from the attraction of the galaxy, reached the limits of the Universe and penetrated into the Supraworld, perhaps even farther than that. So much purity in love attracted me irresistibly.

I chose that woman as a crucible and, entering into her ovaries, I populated them with an imperious call. The task I took was a hard one, commensurate with my enormous life will: to make Jaime, whom I chose for the colossal energy that inhabited him, transport his sperm from the distant forests of the south to the desert, where my mother awaited him. That journey would take ten years. For mortals, an infinite waiting period, but for me, used to the time of the Eternal One, less than a tenth of a second.

Sara Felicidad’s illumination began after a long passage through abandonment. Ever since she reached Iquique, relegated to a room in an obscure boarding house on the outskirts of town, the gaze of the family and of others decomposed her instead of helping her to integrate herself. No one was able to be a positive mirror to reflect her values. No. All they showed her was disgust, indifference, or irritation. Who would want to be amiable with a strangely curved girl who smelled bad, was greasy, hidden behind thick black glasses, her hair gathered into a filthy beret, and who, although not mute, never spoke except for some catlike whispers? No one bothered to teach her to read, but she didn’t need reading. Ignorant, she was capable of conversing with the earth, the sky, the sea, and with all kinds of fire. She understood the language of the birds and of many other animals. Even rocks spoke to her. No element refused to sing with her, whether they were spiny plants or the clouds of red sand that rolled down the mountainsides like gigantic caterpillars. Human beings behaved in another way toward her. In the boarding house,
The Schoolboy
, a building of boards and cement with small windows that faced a bald mountain, Sara Felicidad ate lunch and dinner in the family dining room, where no one bothered to say hello to her.

One hot day in July, a cart overflowing with people in costume, men and women of all ages, stopped outside the boarding house. The dust, the burning sun, and the blinding glare forced them to stop. After swallowing a few bottles of water, gathering strength from a mysterious faith, they played drums, trombones, triangles, and horns and started dancing on the patio, where there was only cat and dog excrement instead of plants. One group, separated from the others, played flutes that, as it seemed to Sara Felicidad, imitated the cries of birds announcing rain. She tried to understand the costume of the dancers. What were they dressed as? Birds? Each wore a coffee-colored costume composed of a light helmet, a shiny shirt, trousers with lace hems, a belt covered with little mirrors, and a leather skirt, open in front, that reached to the heels. Also, a small white cape covered their shoulders. Multicolored flowers were embroidered on the chest and leg area of their costumes. One of them, in the ecstasy of his ritual dance, shouted, “Long live the Chinamen of the Virgin of the Carmen!”