Where the Bird Sings Best (45 page)

“Well, as my name says, I’m a victim nailed to the cross of my hunched back. A load like this is very hard to carry. When I pass through the taverns to sell my hardboiled eggs, the drunks always end up beating me. I understand them. They, workers, peasants, miners, are constant victims of the injustice of their bosses. They discharge their accumulated rage on me. I have a German hurdy-gurdy that contains pretty melodies. I can sing as I crank the handle and then sell bananas and eggs. You, strong as you are, disguised as a gorilla—I have a costume I found thrown in the garbage after carnival—could protect me. Many organ grinders are accompanied by little monkeys who collect money in a little can. Mine would be bigger. Admit it: the idea is good, my friend. Wearing the mask, no one will recognize you, and after a short time, we can split the profit between us. You’ll save up enough to buy a ticket to Santiago.”

Jaime was not surprised that fate would transform him into an ape-man. His mother had fallen in love with one, and perhaps for him it was good to identify himself with a simian form, which, indirectly, would give him the sensation of receiving the maternal love he lacked.

Meanwhile, the two presidential candidates, after each claimed the win, accused each other of fraud. Amid turbulence among the people, along with the threat of military intervention, the election was decided by an honor tribunal that gave the presidency to Alessandri.

My father lived a year submerged in the gorilla suit, visiting bars and restaurants every night of the week. At first he had to bloody a few drunks so that they’d learn to respect the hunchback, but later the job was easy. Everybody wanted to shake his hand or hug him, smiling like children. One night, out of pure boredom, he took a hanky out of the pocket of a customer and began to dance a cueca. A general clapping of hands ensued, and many wanted to accompany the gorilla, pounding their heels intensely. Jesús sold all his merchandise.

During the day, my father did not take off the disguise and, seated in the town’s main square, he amused the children. It did him good to live anonymously, within a hairy shell. He needed to lose himself, to discover the zero point. Deep down in the depth of his soul, he believed in nothing. He felt intensely separated. He’d been dropped in a world full of locked doors but given no keys. He looked for meaning to existence, always finding that nothing was worthwhile.

Hidden within the gorilla suit, as if in an alchemical crucible, he was dissolving, transforming into a formless spirit without personality or definition, with no values to affirm, free of models, of ties. He stopped being a gringo. A false monkey was accepted but a Russian immigrant was not. He challenged himself, dressed that way and without taking off his mask, to conquer a woman. Why just one? Many! His weapons of seduction were his eyes, his bare hands, his voice, and an interior force that pierced the animal skin and surrounded him with an erotic aura that married women, his preferred victims, perceived as blue-green waves.

Between three and five in the afternoon, when those ladies were preparing dinner and their husbands were far away at work, he easily managed to possess them in any old corner of the kitchen. It was best for them not to know his name or his face. They yielded to pure pleasure with no ties, free of all guilt. When the act was over, they slipped him a banknote or a packet of flowers and food. These impersonal relationships allowed my father to know the root of pleasure, a brutal enjoyment that was mysterious, devoid of modesty, where each female showed her basic heat. He didn’t exist, and the mask, granting him the quality of being a mask, transformed him into the ideal male all women bear within. Each one of them molded him to make him into an excrescence of their own flesh and that way they could possess themselves. Jaime knew he was walking through a space where there was no becoming.

One morning, Jesús de la Cruz, highly excited, woke him: “Jaime, today you can take off your monkey suit and put your parrot costume back on. I mean, you can dress like a normal citizen even though the color is loud. We’re going to a workers’ demonstration. The city is full of thugs. Recabarren is coming!”

“What? Recabarren?”

“That’s right, Recabarren, your idol! It’s the First Congress of the Communist Party of Chile. They are going to officially declare their allegiance to the Communist International whose seat is in Moscow. Being inside that gorilla suit and bouncing all over the place, you haven’t been aware of anything. The leader has come out of jail, been elected a deputy, and the doors of Congress are open to him. Now it’s going to be difficult to cut him off. Tonight, for certain, there will be no beatings, even though they’ve put up posters everywhere that say,
With Body and Soul We’ll be Red!
”

“But why are they meeting here, in Rancagua?”

“It must be because there are so many peasants and also because lots of workers can come down from the El Teniente copper mine. They’re already arriving, peaceful, wearing their Sunday best. They say it’s one of the most transcendent events in the history of Chile.”

“They say, they say. Who the fuck does all that saying? Pure publicity!”

Jaime, not knowing why, had awakened in a bad mood. There was something that deeply bothered him, a negative foreshadowing that arose from the foundations of that city, with its typically Spanish configuration formed of eight by eight blocks with a plaza at its center. The surrounding streets did not start at the corner of the tree-lined rectangle but from the center of each of its sides. It was there that 1,500 patriots, defeated and perhaps betrayed, had died. All that put Jaime in a bad mood. He walked to the church, sat in a pew, and, pretending to pray, summoned the Rabbi, who was not slow in coming. Jaime, treating him coldly but courteously, laid out the situation. He got the answer he feared:

“You’re right to be worried. Never disdain symbols. The Plaza of the Heroes is between four streets that form a cross. For a Catholic civilization that signifies martyrdom. In 1814, Bernardo O’Higgins (Christ) occupies the plaza to stop the Spanish army from advancing from the south toward the capital. Juan José Carrera (Judas), two leagues away, remains with a detachment of cavalry in order to support the bulk of the army when his help is requested. This, for reasons no one has been able to explain, he does not do.

“Attacked in four places, the infantry is decimated, without giving up. The hero does not allow himself to be crucified, and in a ferocious attack opens a path to escape the disaster. The motive for the cruel sacrifice: naïve confidence in a bad ally. You, who, like all Chileans, know this battle by heart, are upset seeing Recabarren reproduce the same disastrous configuration without realizing it. By founding the Communist Party in Rancagua, he is expressing that, deep down, he is preparing for betrayal and defeat. He, a just spirit, a redeemer, a human canal of the Supreme Father, Lenin, will be badly judged, understood by few for none, and will see the people massacred around him. His triumphs will be tactical retreats; he’ll have greater sufferings. He will be abandoned and alone in adversity, deserted even by his guide.
Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?
”

“Fine. Now you’ve told me what I needed to hear: Recabarren should never have founded his party in this city of defeated heroes. Now go away. I’ve had enough hallucinations for one day!”

And with his bad mood transformed into fury, he returned to the tiny room he shared with the hunchback. He shaved, cut his hair, and put on his green suit. Jesús de la Cruz looked like a boy going to the circus. With an air of complicity, he showed Jaime a package of chocolates and mints. He showed off a T-shirt with a mountain peak embroidered on the back. He had dyed his eggs red.

A great multitude tried to enter the lecture hall of the municipality. Miners and peasants crowded around outside, orderly, knowing that the hall was filled to capacity. When they heard a round of applause, they too clapped and shouted support, not knowing for what and why. It took Jaime and the hunchback an hour to cross that tranquil and dense sea. They managed to get in using the pretext that they were carrying food for the members of the Congress. When they did get into the hall, Recabarren was speaking. There was nothing extraordinary in his looks. He was a serene man, clean-shaven, gray around the temples. His gestures were modest and friendly. His voice—devoid of oratorical tremolos—was plain, direct, and common, but it also possessed a conviction so deep that it electrified. His words went straight to the heart of his fellow believers with no need for shouting or gesturing.

“Comrades, without the blood of the thousands of worker martyrs cruelly spilled by the exploiter classes in the ferocious repressions that have taken place since 1900 right until today, 1922, without the anti-imperialist struggle kept up for years by patriotic elements, it would have been next to impossible for the conditions to be created in Chile for our dream to become reality. The Communist Party is born by assimilating the ideology that corresponds to the proletariat: Marxism-Leninism. The Party is born carrying high in the air the red banner, the emblem that synthesizes the most noble ideals, the purest aspirations, the most sublime visions of those who desire to construct a better humanity, a more perfect, more human society that will definitively liberate man from exploitation, that will eliminate need, that will extinguish the anxieties of insecurity, that will tear open all the veils of ignorance and inaugurate the kingdom of happiness.”

Despite the pain the purity of that man gave to him by fighting for ideals that manifested his immense love for humanity and which would lead him, when he collided with innate human perversity, to martyrdom, Jaime found himself applauding, galvanized like the rest. Recabarren, fearless, read a declaration of principles, attacking the juridical, political, and economic structure of society, appealing to the class struggle to inaugurate, by means of the proletarian revolution, a Communist government.

As an essential measure of that program, he announced the foundation of a newspaper that would be the organ of the National Executive Committee. Then a brass band, not quite in tune but energetic, played “The International,” which was sung by all present under waving red flags. Recabarren, not wanting to be the center of this fervor of the people, disappeared among the Congress members, but many workers began to shout “Recabarren!” so he came back with his arms outstretched (like Jesus, thought Jaime), in order to receive the vibrant ovations.

My father, dissolved in that enthusiastic mass, tried to approach the politician he admired and felt so sorry for, not with the hope of speaking to him—many rings of comrades surrounded him, making incessant commentaries, trying to hear from his lips a phrase that would be a personal memory—but to get the energetic contact of his invisible aura. He managed to get five yards from his goal and felt happy. He could see the chest of the historic man rising and falling. Perhaps he’d have the luck that his eyes, which already belonged to legend, would meet his own for an instant.

Surprised almost to paralysis, he heard the leader say to him, “You there, the young man in the green suit, come over here.”

The bodies immediately separated, opening a narrow path. As if submerged in a dream, with the intense palpitation of a heart witnessing a miracle, he walked toward Recabarren, who gave him a hearty handshake and invited him to follow along to a private office where he was going to rest.

Now Jaime began to think: “Could he see that I’m inhabited by a Jewish monster? Did he recognize Teresa’s face in mine? It isn’t possible that I, among thousands of enthusiasts, could interest him! Or maybe I do. He’s an extraordinary man; he must perceive things differently, see into our interior, know the quality of our souls. I’ve always known that I’m great, that my secret spirit is as pure as a diamond, and that I have the strength to move mountains. If he organizes a workers army and gives me command of it, I won’t lose a single battle. No Rancagua for this boy. I’ll even demolish the ruins of this sick capitalism and pitilessly cut all the heads off the dragon!”

Recabarren observed him calmly, offered him some tea in the cup from a thermos bottle, and asked him: “Tell me, young man, where did you buy that suit?”

Jaime fell from his delusions of grandeur to the size of a flyspeck. “To tell the truth, I didn’t buy it. A gravedigger gave it to me. It belonged to a dead man who had neither friends nor family.”

“Family he did have, at least one, me. Vicente was my uncle, a traveling salesman in the clothes business. He made that suit from the fabric on the mattress of his mom’s bed. He was always an old bachelor, very discreet. When my grandmother died, he poisoned the thirty cats that lived with them. He was the only son of that recalcitrant widow, and he buried her on a bed of cats. As you see, thanks to your glaring clothes, we’re almost members of the same family. Besides, you get an inheritance. Cut open the shoulder pads: Vicente always hides a few pesos there folded up in case of emergency.”

“Thanks a lot. I’ll do just that, Don Luis Emilio.”

“What’s your name?”

“Jaime Jodorowsky, at your service.”

“An odd name. Is it Polish?”

“It is, but my family is Russian. I’m lying. They’re Jews.”

“But do you know how to speak Russian?”

“I’m lucky enough not to have forgotten it.”

“Want to work with me?”

“Of course!”

“My obligations as a member of Congress oblige me to live in Santiago. Here on this card is my address. I have a pile of Russian books, all disorganized. You will be very useful to me. Not only to me but also to the entire working class. Your translations can be published in our newspapers. Come to see me as soon as you can. But remember: the trains leave on time and if you’re a second late, you’ll miss a long trip.”