According to my grandfather, Macaque’s romance with the martial arts fighter lasted about three years.
They settled down in an old boarding house downtown, and the fighter was able to procure a small location nearby to make his shoes.
Perhaps driven by the memory of her marital relationship, Macaque asked the fighter for them not to live entirely together.
My grandfather never explained to me (or at least I don’t remember him having done so) why an expert in martial arts would devote himself to the shoe-making industry.
Although it is also true that my grandfather never mentioned who that man was before becoming a martial arts fighter and getting involved in the filmmaking industry.
In reality, I think my grandfather spoke little.
I now have the sensation that he barely murmured just a few scant words.
That’s why it seems curious to me that I could have thought that he had told me these stories that I’m now relating during our frequent visits to the zoo.
I am also overlooking the reasons why I thought my family didn’t address him as a dead man, but rather as someone who had transformed into someone else.
Getting back to my grandfather and his potential ability, or lack thereof, to express himself, it seems to me that there always remained within me a question as to whether or not he spoke to me. For I felt at every moment that he existed in a different state of reality.
Now that I am thinking about it, my grandfather gave the impression of having become trapped in a kind of eternal present.
In a time when, for example, a string of different languages—both living and dead—were able to converge on a single point: him.
I have always known that my grandfather became bilingual with time.
I was never sure what language my grandfather spoke before reaching our land.
That is to say, his second language—for we know that his first language, Yiddish, was prohibited.
I now feel the need to repeat—as a sort of homage to my grandfather—that Yiddish was strictly prohibited in his childhood environs.
Yiddish could only be used at home.
I am not certain that this scene actually occurred, but one time I saw him performing a kind of dance at that zoo we would visit.
I remember we had gone to take our usual walk on a day with low attendance.
At least I didn’t see any other person act as a witness to the dance that my grandfather carried out that day.
As he danced, he repeated, almost like a mantra, that Yiddish couldn’t leave their houses.
That it was a language confined to the wooden table where the community’s family members ate.
The spectacle of my grandfather leaping and doing something like somersaults on one of the zoo’s paths produced a sensation in me that I would describe if I had the talent necessary to do so.
I don’t think now is the opportune moment.
I ought to concentrate on the ninety-nine divine names of God.
Curiously, watching my grandfather repeat between jerks that Yiddish could not be shared, even with neighbor families, didn’t become an absurd or terrible scene for me.
My grandfather’s complaint—manifested in a dance that was at a certain point laughable, performed on one of the paths of that empty zoo—seemed like more of a joke than a protest.
He didn’t show the tragic nature he truly carried within him.
It seems to me that this is the purpose of dance in general.
To conceal a series of unresolved ancestral questions that appear from generation to generation in situations that seem banal.
The prohibition against making his mother tongue public seemed to be the fundamental issue at the heart of the pantomime that my grandfather would always perform.
In that moment of apparent ecstasy, my grandfather even began to mispronounce his Spanish, which he usually could express himself with in a natural—what we would even call perfect—way.
I remember that he even mixed up the gender of his Spanish, uttering “la Yiddish,” “los casitas,” or “los welt completa,” trying to say “the whole world.”
Between songs, he said that on a certain occasion he disobeyed the order not to speak Yiddish beyond the confines of his family, making him the subject of ridicule by some of the children in his village.
I remember that he fled, and he walked, disconcerted, for some miles.
Finally he threw himself down in the middle of a wheat field and begged God to grant him death.
From then on (and it seems that he fulfilled this denial up until the moment when I saw him dancing at the zoo) he never uttered another word in his native tongue.
Until this moment, in which I find myself repeating the names of God almost without pause, it never occurred to me that something similar might have happened to Macaque.
That is, that she never used Yiddish except to recall the prohibition that weighed against that language.
I then saw Macaque living in an RV camper, which is where my grandfather said she had set herself up after the assassination of her martial arts fighter.
According to my grandfather, the camper was painted light blue, and time had eaten away at the tires.
It lay hidden in the foliage surrounding a park that, curiously, my grandfather told me was close to the zoo where we would visit the camels.
I’m not sure whether or not I asked him on any occasion if we could walk over there to meet that person that I had heard named so often face to face.
Macaque.
I would have liked to see not only Macaque, but also the blue camper she lived in.
I’m not sure if I ever asked my grandfather anything of that nature.
But I know that it would have been useful to do so, because my grandfather had knowledge that since the martial arts fighter’s death, Macaque had become submersed in a deep state of melancholy.
If I had gone to visit Macaque, I would have also met another of the people who lived with her in the camper: Master Porcupine.
At this point things really start to get confusing.
Not even in my prayer cell, repeating the names entrusted to me by my order’s sheikha, can I find any logical explanation for these occurrences.
Besides Macaque, my grandfather mentioned a few other characters.
The first that I remember is Master Porcupine.
My grandfather told me that Macaque had offered—in spite of the state of grief she found herself inundated in—to help Master Porcupine develop a theory that he called “Mariotic.”
It had first occurred to him while giving math classes to students at a public school.
What is the Mariotic Theory?
It’s precisely what I’ve come to ask myself now that I am in a state of prayer.
I remember that my grandfather partially explained it to me.
He explained that this theory was named after a writer.
Mario Bellatin.
Master Porcupine didn’t try so much to understand the texts that this author had produced, but rather the mechanisms that he used to create them.
It was a situation for which the words written by that author would give rise to facts that indeed lay beyond the logic of things, but not beyond their nature.
Macaque had hung, on the inner wall of her camper, an old movie poster advertisement for a Bruce Lee film.
I find it incredibly curious that my grandfather would have referred—the version of the story that I offer here is completely faithful to that which my grandfather told me—to Bruce Lee during his never-ending descriptions of Macaque.
I find it impossible, because the image of my grandfather, standing before the camels at the zoo, is chronologically situated in the early years of the sixties, and everybody knows that the martial arts film genre didn’t become popular until years later.
Nevertheless, the voice of my grandfather insisting that there was a Bruce Lee poster hanging on the wall of Macaque’s camper only gets clearer with time.
The mention of a film of that nature makes me recall the success this movie had, primarily in those regions of the world where Yiddish was spoken fluently.
This fact is one that I am certain my grandfather told me.
There’s no other way I could have obtained a fact of that nature: that the martial arts film genre had great success in those regions of the world where Yiddish was spoken fluently.
What places could that entail?
Where in the world could Yiddish still have been spoken as a native tongue?
I now know that the existence of such places is false.
In this cell where I find myself repeating the ninety-nine sacred names of God in a seemingly endless way, I know there are no regions in the world where that language is spoken fluently.
Therefore I also know that it is impossible that those alleged speakers of Yiddish could have been incommensurately enthused by martial arts films.
The affinity felt in the projection halls between those who used the prohibited language of my ancestors and the films that were in Chinese was impressive.
Some attendees even adopted certain Asian inflections that sounded like they came from their native language.
I think that having attended one of these functions would have given my grandfather great enjoyment.
Although I am sure that, given his manner of being, he wouldn’t have given in to the catharsis into which many of his linguistic brothers fell.
As I’ve said, the sea was nearby.
It was even possible at certain times to clearly hear the breaking of the waves from the zoo.
On one of the occasions when we were together, my grandfather told me about the night that one of the seals had escaped from its pool and tried to make it back to the sea.
Bruce Lee’s face presiding over the main wall of the camper stood out to Master Porcupine.
He asked a few questions.
Macaque clarified that the poster was an homage to her deceased lover.
That actor had been the fighter-turned-shoemaker’s favorite.
Macaque thought that her lover had even had something to do with the film advertised on that poster hanging from the wall.
That fighter that she found in a roadside restaurant never confirmed whether or not he had been a personal friend of Bruce Lee.
Only sometimes he let signs of it slip.
On more than one occasion he shared details of the actor’s life.
Of the relationships that Bruce Lee had with the mafia and how he had been sentenced to death, not just him but also his descendants for three generations.
The fighter-turned-shoemaker had lived for some years in the United States.
He had a habit of telling Macaque that he had come to control, of his own free will, a few million dollars.
It all ended when, from one moment to the next, he had to flee the country carrying only what he was wearing.
At the end of his stories the fighter always said the same thing: that Bruce Lee’s perdition had come about because he was too committed to the material objects surrounding him.
Macaque purchased the poster—the one she had hanging from the main wall of her camper house—the very morning that they told her that the police had assassinated her lover.
She found it on her way back from the morgue she was required to visit.
As she walked down the street she suddenly saw, there on the sidewalk, Bruce Lee’s face.
A street vendor had laid out a series of movie posters from every era of film on the floor.
What Master Porcupine was doing in the camper is a question I never dared to ask my grandfather.
I also know that he never would have answered me.
Mainly because my grandfather was a man of few words.
Jacob the Mutant (the book that precedes this text) was written by Joseph Roth in moments of inebriation.
It begins by confirming that it is a work that was never published during its author’s lifetime.
For a variety of reasons, it was kept hidden until the time when certain retired employees of two German publishing houses admitted to having saved fragments of the text in their archives.
The Border.
Mario Bellatin gives these fragments the name Jacob the Mutant, and he selects those fragments in which Joseph Roth narrates the years of the tavern known as The Border, as well those spent in an American village.
Mario Bellatin himself has affirmed on more than one occasion that the material left by Joseph Roth is quite extensive and chaotic.
For example, in the book Jacob the Mutant, the Tiny Nocturnal Zoo is never mentioned.
The Tiny Nocturnal Zoo is a place similar to the one that my grandfather and I traversed on certain days of the week.
In my grandfather’s zoo, in addition to the camels, there was a pool where some seals were being raised.
In the birdhouse for birds of prey something terrible would happen.
Because it was an establishment of meager means, some of the employees would be given orders to place cages in nearby trees, so as to trap small wild birds that would then be placed live in the same enclosures as the birds of prey, as food for them.
The Tiny Nocturnal Zoo was located next door to Rabbi Jacob’s house.
On more than one occasion, Mario Bellatin affirmed that he found it fascinating to imagine a scene, in the early hours of the day, of a humble rabbi welcoming a set of children from a Central European village as his wife returned home after having run the tavern that they had set up in what had previously been, for several generations, the barn on the property where they lived.
The children were received in the main area of the small house. Around a large wooden table that Jacob and his wife used to eat.
It wasn’t common in those days (nor do I think it is today) for rabbis to behave in such a way.
Not only was it unusual to receive children in their house instead of a classroom built outside of the home, but it was also strange that his wife would dedicate her time to managing an establishment of that nature.
That she would do it at improper hours, as well.
That the wife of a rabbi had to face a series of drunken men wasn’t common within the tradition.
This is why the woman in reality managed a collection of trained wild animals—a nocturnal zoo, of sorts—which was the way the couple had found to carry out such an activity within the norms of their religion.
In that corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire lay the rabbi’s small house and the tavern—a nocturnal zoo—out back.
Even though it didn’t have an established name, the establishment was known as The Border to the people who frequented it.
They were not easy times and, a few kilometers away—perhaps two or three—lay the Empire’s outer limits.
It was a confusing region. In addition to the economic difficulties that had become a part of day-to-day life (which were the reason the barn had to stop being used for its original purpose and become a small zoo whose visitors could drink huge amounts of alcohol surrounded by caged wild animals), in neighboring Russia the pogroms that had devastated the region for several centuries had intensified, or—better put—come back.
The changes in the political situation in Russia appeared to have revived the systematic practice of the elimination of entire Jewish communities.
The news of villages laid waste by revolutionary forces had even reached the place where the Tiny Nocturnal Zoo was located.
The community members would get together in the rabbi’s house to hear the stories brought by some of the survivors of that holocaust.
Around Jacob’s table the sad tales were told, almost inevitably ending in a synagogue ablaze and the faithful trapped within.
Jacob always advised his visitors to continue their flight.
To take refuge as quickly as possible far from those lands.
Jacob knew that at a given moment not so far into the future the same occurrences would also come to
the village they lived in, reason for which he took advantage of these reunions to remind his community members that they ought to perpetually be prepared for a diaspora.
Not only did the dispersion that his community members would suffer and the future of the children he was educating worry Jacob, but also the future of the Tiny Nocturnal Zoo that had cost him many years and much effort to build.
The Tiny Nocturnal Zoo was built little by little.
As is known, Jacob and his family lived in a region of continuous transit.
It was not uncommon that hunters from the north would cross the town, carrying with them the young of the wild animals they had killed for their furs.
Small wolf cubs, bears of various sizes, and small lion or tiger cubs were among the animals brought by those foreigners on their way through the region.
Gradually the barn became the place where Jacob himself built a series of cages to raise the animals he went about acquiring or trading for food items.
He liked to brag about a panther that as a cub had cost him the equivalent of twenty kilograms of recently harvested oats.
It was curious how, despite the fact that Jacob’s words seemed as if they were filled with the logic of the obvious, many of his community members couldn’t believe that at any point in time they would no longer belong to the land that had been theirs for several generations.
Jacob tried to be subtle while expressing his statements.
He understood that many of them, himself included, didn’t have a thorough understanding of the world.
That is why he was extremely cautious when, upon finishing a cage, he would tell his followers: go forth and walk and try not to think.
Nonetheless, he urged those who came fleeing to continue their routes and not to stop until they reached some point on the other side of the ocean.
In the meantime, he managed to arrange—under the pretext of his visits to the Tiny Nocturnal Zoo—for his wife to carry forward the administration of the tavern while Jacob took on the responsibility of teaching the community children by day and caring for the animals, keeping them in the best conditions possible.
It was difficult for some to know what motive Jacob really had for keeping a tavern in operation.
Some could have thought that it had to do with a means of making money, but few understood that the real reason behind such an establishment was helping the numerous people fleeing the Russian pogroms so that they might escape to other lands.
Jacob the Mutant Page 4