Jacob the Mutant

by Mario Bellatin

  After having carried out relatively calm lives, many of the villagers began to be monitored and some of them even came to have signs hung from their necks that testified to their pertinence to the Jewish faith.

  The children suddenly stopped going to the rabbi’s house where they had sat around the large wooden table that also served its purpose as a dining room table.

  If truth be told, the children suddenly stopped going to Jacob’s house not only because of the steady escalation of things but also because the rabbi would spend his days sleeping.

  The floods have lifted, O Lord, the floods have lifted up their voice; the floods have lifted up their roaring surge. Greater than the crash of many waters, greater than the mighty breakers of the sea, mighty is the Lord on high (Psalms 93:3–4).

  The voice of the Lord is over the waters. The God of glory sounds, the Lord is over many waters (Psalms 29:3).

  Jacob slept, and his cousin continued his labor.

  Once the cousin finished giving certain positions to the animals’ corpses (which, in some way, brought back memories of the times when the animals were still alive and were the attractions offered by the Tiny Nocturnal Zoo), that very cousin began to test out positions, with concrete actions, to give some grandeur to the scene of dead animals.

  The cousin positioned the embalmed panther so it would be attacking the wild wolf.

  The hyena, which a lost, wandering man had transported from Africa, bore a wide grin like that it was seen to have in its natural habitat.

  Jacob, meanwhile, continued sleeping…

  He couldn’t seem to handle the abandonment he had just suffered in a state of wakefulness.

  Jacob also couldn’t seem to handle the fate of the Tiny Nocturnal Zoo or the atrocities occurring around him.

  It is not known how, but during his sleep he was even able to learn that the dances particular to his community had begun to be prohibited.

  Especially those dances of the Hasidic tradition that were usually performed twice a year on the outskirts of town.

  The authorities resorted to taking measures based on a Roman text written in Latin, where more than two thousand years ago the same thing had been prohibited within the boundaries of Rome.

  Cum progenitores nostri Christianæ Religionis cultores quæsīverint separationem Judæorum a Christianis, statuendo illis habitationem in Venetiis 15 dierum, & signum tellæ zallæ in medium pectoris, & Judæi variis ingeniis & fraudibus suis impetraverint non portare signum, se cum mulieribus Christianis immisceant, & Juvenes doceant sonare & cantare, tenendo publicas Scholas; Vadit pars, quod omnis Judæus non portans signum telæ zallæ, sine ulla gratia vel remissione condemnetur in pœna statuta. Et similiter aliquis Judæus non possit tenere Scholas alicujus ludiartis, vel doctrinæ, vel ballandi, vel cantandi, vel sonandi, vel docere aliter in civitate nostra, sub pœna Ducat. 50, & standi sex menses in carceribus. Liceat tamem illis mederi.

  What was truly prohibited was the festive and rebellious nature of clapping and dancing.

  According to tradition, dancing and clapping helped because a kind of mystical wind would blow through the heart that would help the participating souls reach the highest point that could be reached while on Earth.

  A wind that was capable of penetrating the sixteen joints of the arm and the sixteen joints of the legs that all human beings have.

  Recalling this, there in the prayer cell where I found myself, the words proclaimed by the sheikha of my order took shape, the ones where she affirmed that living bodies were morphologically prepared to receive the mystical experience.

  That mysticism wasn’t a question of faith, but rather the revelation itself of our living organism.

  Something concrete and palpable.

  In some way similar to how, when clapping or performing the traditional dances, the presence of the divine wind that lifted the heart’s spirits became evident.

  It seems to me then that the presence of the hundreds of dance academies that appear in the chapter “Beatitudes” of the book Jacob the Mutant isn’t a casual occurrence.

  In Jacob the Mutant there is an entire city full of dance schools.

  A population that finds itself obliged—just as Rome was more than two thousand years ago—to impose a series of restrictions around that practice.

  There Jacob can be found, living in that place after having fled the horror into which his homeland plunged.

  Serving as a rabbi, carrying out his strange ablutions in a lake of pestilent waters found facing the lands given to him by his ship brother.

  Anyone who has read the book knows that “ship brother” is the term that the immigrants used with each other, thus guaranteeing a pact of aid in survival at their shared destination.

  These dances—neither in ancient Rome nor in the American settlement where Jacob and his family ended up living—could not be performed under the fate of free will.

  According to what is written, one should turn to the presence of the righteous man—Hasidic or ha-tzadik, the name given to the leader of a Hasidic group—so he may guide them.

  And there was Jacob Pliniak until, suddenly, as if being called upon by one of the Mystical Sephirot that only present themselves to certain beings once in a lifetime, as he carried out his usual ablutions in the waters of the region’s lake, he came back to the surface, transformed into an old woman named Rose Plinianson, a Catholic woman who until just before her death put all of her efforts behind fighting the dance academies that threatened to annihilate the city where they lived.

  A case of transmutation similar to the one that my grandfather tried to show me each time he brought me to visit the camels?

  An occurrence of transformation like that which my grandfather carried out when from one day to the next he was no longer at my side?

  Let not the foot of pride overtake me (Psalms 36:12).

  While the feet are raised through dance, the ego lessens in intensity, seems to be what Jacob Pliniak repeated as he submersed himself in the waters before coming back out transformed into the young Miss Plinianson.

  The more that we wash our feet, the ga’ava—ego—is nullified in a very effective way.

  That American community couldn’t have known—here from my prayer cell I am certain of this—that the dances performed according to certain premises also help nullify idol worship.

  Idolatry, and not monotheism, in that city of the Far West, so far from the centers of theological debate?

  Jacob understood through his readings of the Books that in those moments when the permanence of the idea of monotheism stood on shaky ground, Hasidic leaders brought their villagers, in any way possible, to spaces favorable to dance.

  The leaders should not offer great explanations to make their people dance.

  It was enough for them to congregate in the main city squares and voice the phrase:

  Wash your feet (Genesis 18:4).

  But under the conditions the village found itself in—here we are referring to that place where Jacob was asleep, where his tavern was located—it was impossible, due to the new order’s incursion, to carry out any activity capable of bringing that spiritual wind to their hearts.

  The only secret task was that which the cousin was carrying out in the solitude of what had once been the shed of Jacob’s house.

  Upon hearing of the proclamations outlawing dancing, which were being hung up on the main walls of the village, the cousin couldn’t think of any idea better than making a tiger dance with a seal (which some poor man had brought Jacob from the Russian seas).

  The cousin’s stuffed animals began to dance in a sort of ecstatic parody of movement.

  As the prohibitions for the community members increased, the animals of the Tiny Nocturnal Zoo performed the most bizarre dance steps one could imagine.

  Rounds of penguins, dhikrs—ancestral dances—made up of glass-eyed orangutans.

  This far along into the new reality that the village was living, the inhabitants—one by one, e
ven the most timid—understood that they were being called upon so that a luminous wind would reach their hearts, one which can only be brought about by lifted feet.

  But the lifting of feet that the inhabitants of the village were being called to was not that which was usually obtained through dance—that is to say, that which tradition had prescribed—but rather the new members of the order arrived with the gospel that that state would only be reached through labor—the only action capable of liberating men.

  Only labor will set you free, seemed to be the contemporary declaration.

  For that purpose, the authorities invited the villagers to prepare their bags with the most basic items in advance.

  They were then driven to the train that would take them to the promised paradises.

  Many believed that they were being called upon not only to carry out a task of physical purification, but also that they were being summoned to carry out a true prayer.

  They furthermore believed—let’s not forget that we are discussing a community composed of simple beings, many of whom spent their nights drunk in that tavern managed by the rabbi’s wife—that they were called upon to practice a prayer that reached such lofty heights that, at that point, it was not possible to demand any further explanation.

  In other words—standing sorted into the lines that were congregating at the train station—they thought that they were invited to carry out an action that, in those moments, it was impossible to comprehend.

  They had the understanding as well that, in order to do what was being requested of them, they ought to carry out an activity similar to some form of corporeal liquidation—lehitpashtut hagashmiut—which in other terms means “to shed one’s body.”

  Finally the members of that small community were taken into account by somebody other than themselves.

  Throughout the centuries they had been a forgotten part of the Empire and now, finally, the inhabitants held an importance for someone other than God.

  They no longer merely formed part of a Divine—and consequently, intangible, as Jacob had informed them on more than one occasion—Plan, but they now belonged also to a project invented by men, ones who had taken up the work of noticing their existence.

  It was precisely in this moment that what we could identify as a sort of social ecstasy appeared, and under the sunlight of that spring morning the colorful parade of neighbors could be seen, each person carrying his or her own suitcase.

  While this all was occurring, Jacob continued to sleep, and his cousin continued on with his task of making the dead animals dance.

  What happened next is history.

  When Jacob awoke, the village was almost empty.

  Not a soul could be spotted in the streets.

  The businesses and the synagogue—shut down.

  Where are our Catholic brothers? Jacob dared ask.

  It seems as though they, too, had left.

  That they were not in the village despite remaining present.

  According to what Jacob later found out (this passage doesn’t appear in the work Jacob the Mutant) many of the villagers continued on there in the village, carrying out their normal daily labors and yet Jacob was incapable of seeing them.

  Could this phenomenon of the transparency of outside bodies be related to a variation of the many Sephirot that we men tend to fall into when our souls are thus attuned?

  In reality, the only ones who had left the village were those individuals who, up until a few weeks prior, had been required to wear a sign around their necks.

  But for Jacob that place was nothing more than a ghost town.

  Jacob observed this from his bedroom window.

  Next to his window stood the empty bed, left behind just a month earlier by his wife.

  When Jacob left home and approached the shed, he could see his cousin in the midst of the dance that, at that point, he had spent days arranging.

  Despite being a static dance by nature, the cousin took charge of frequently varying it.

  When he felt that the ostrich had been dancing with the rabbit for too long, he would—quite suddenly—switch their partners.

  At a certain point, Jacob touched the cousin on his back and told him that it was time to set out for the diaspora.

  To help him place the stuffed animals into the wagon where he had once transported the Russian fugitives.

  He urged him to then follow, without wasting any time, the paths he knew so well by memory from having trafficked so many people while the tavern was running.

  After a few unexpected events they arrived, all the while pulling the wagon, to one of the ports ships departed from.

  There the cousins were faced with a dilemma: the two of them could not travel with the wagon on the same boat.

  There wasn’t enough space.

  Either the two of them could travel together and leave the wagon at the port, or just one could go while the other waited for the next departure, which would set sail with more space.

  Jacob boarded the first ship alone.

  There, on that trip, he became ship brothers with the man who would later give him the lands where he was to take roots with his recovered wife—as is known, once in New York Jacob convinces his former wife to return to him—in front of a lake situated in a city overcrowded with dance academies.

  His cousin boarded the second ship, which left ten days later, with the wagon with those animals that once made up the Tiny Nocturnal Zoo.

  But something happened at sea.

  Mid-voyage the notice came that Jacob’s ship would be the last to be granted entry into the United States without visas for its passengers.

  As a result, the cousin’s ship docked in Veracruz.

  This is the reason why the stuffed animals remain until this day in the basement of a house on Calle Ideal in Mexico City, a place where the taxidermist cousin eventually ended up settling down.

  Affairs with Respect to Jacob the Mutant that It Would Be Good Not to Forget or Leave to Chance

  It seems important to me that any interested party, having arrived at this point of the book Jacob the Mutant as of the text that attempts to respond to the relevance of having written it, keep in mind a set of elements that I, as author, hold under consideration.

  When my grandfather would refer to Master Porcupine at the zoo, he would always give me some new explanation or other about the Mariotic Theory being developed by that teacher.

  Master Porcupine always wore a black felt hat.

  In my memories my grandfather would refer to that hat with precision.

  He would describe its particularities with such detail.

  I found it curious that he would do this—with such precision, no less—given that my grandfather always walked around bareheaded.

  This is why the blond fuzz that grew from his ears was so visible.

  On more than one occasion he said that from the time he arrived in the city where we were living, he had come to lose every hat that he had tried to start wearing.

  It seemed as though his inability to wear a hat was some sort of a vengeance.

  I think he even expressed as much to me on one occasion.

  That thought—my grandfather’s embarrassment for not wearing a hat, as was the custom—came to me fleetingly in one instant of the prayer I was immersed in.

  At that moment I thought of something that seemed absurd: that my grandfather had slowly gone about losing his hats as a sort of vengeance for not having been able to ever pronounce a word in his mother tongue.

  In that curious instant that took over me in my prayer cell I would have liked to have learned not just the reasons why my grandfather would constantly lose his hats, but also with what exact words my grandfather made his plea to God—lying in an open field sown with wheat—for Him to assist him in dying.

  Perhaps these words do not exist, but if they possessed some kind of materialization, it would certainly be found represented in the hats that my grandfather endlessly lost.

&n
bsp; My grandfather told me that Master Porcupine was unexpectedly fired from the elementary school where he worked.

  He was accused of not following the program of studies, as well as using his students as guinea pigs to test what the school administrators felt was a strange theory, with the goal of systematizing it.

  At the end of each month, Master Porcupine answered the questions on his students’ exams himself.

  He would also do their homework.

  He would then turn in the papers to the administration as a progress report for his class.

  The Mariotic Theory, according to Master Porcupine:

  Something that occurs each time a minimal, isolated incident breaks with an established order, followed by the emergence of a chain of uncontrollable chaos and increasingly absurd acts.

  As my grandfather told me many times in front of the camels, it seems that Enter the Dragon was Bruce Lee’s most successful film.

  Macaque had never seen it.

  No matter how many times her lover, the martial arts fighter, insisted she do so.

  The movie was so successful that it continued showing for months at one movie theater downtown.

  Macaque always answered the fighter, saying that she didn’t enjoy movies with violence.

  She had already had enough of that in the marriage that she had had to flee from behind her husband’s back.

  In those days Macaque and the martial arts fighter lived in the room they rented in that boarding house.

  It was there that the news came of the death of her lover.

  Macaque immediately walked out to the street.

  The shoemaker’s workshop was a few blocks away.

  The corpse had already been taken to the city morgue.

  Some police officers were still around.

  Some were carrying handkerchiefs tied over their noses.

  It was the first time that Macaque visited the workshop.

  The shoemaker had forbidden it.

  Macaque saw that it had two roofed sections and a small patio.

  The first part was for displaying the shoes.

  They were outdated models, simple, that nevertheless sought to respect a certain classic style.