Where the Bird Sings Best

by Alejandro Jodorowsky

  No sooner had the first rays of sunlight shone like gold through his white beard than a chauffeur-driven car deposited Shorty Fremberg outside the tenement. Shorty checked the three gold watches on his wrist, hastily opened a box set in the wall, and pulled a whistle. The doors of the rooms shook like filthy tongues, and two hundred women wearing blue uniforms emerged to greet the boss. Then they went back into their cells and the dry rumble of machines resumed. Alejandro grabbed Fremberg by his lapels and shook him. To do so he had to bend over because he was tall and the Pole almost a dwarf.

  “Machines? Whistles? Uniforms? Where is the Anarchist? The Free Brothers and Sisters? What happened to the Happy Heart Bar?”

  “Let go of me, Alejandro. This is legal, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s very clearly stated in the contract you signed that I am the one who decides everything. You, without doing anything, if that’s what you’d like, earn the same salary as a regular employee. Wake up to reality, artist! We’re living in 1912, the Industrial Era! People no longer want handmade products. Machines are the present and the future. Open your eyes! You’re not in some village! You’re living in a great capital city! Around here no one wants to be a saint, and the only God is money! Anarchist dreams are over. The police came and kicked your friends out. I think the most fanatical were shipped to Easter Island. I’ve rented the entire tenement. In each room there are sewing machines or electric saws to cut leather, make heels. It’s a marvel. The orders just keep pouring in. We make hundreds of pairs of shoes every day. And the women we have working follow orders! For three pesos they work a ten and a half hour day with no right to any social benefits. If an agitator turns up, I have him arrested. What do you think? Lose that cemetery face and be happy. Your children are well, though I almost never see them. They only turn up to eat and sleep, but they look healthy and happy. What more do you want? You can work or not, but you get a salary either way. And that’s not all you should thank me for: I kept your room just as it was. I could have put a machine in it.”

  From then on, Alejandro said nothing. He sat at his bench, surrounded by the mechanical screeching, and made shoes by hand and to order for the few clients he still had. Few not because his work wasn’t of interest but because he was so stubbornly insistent on making perfect shoes that it could take him a year to make one pair. He would put them together, make corrections, take them apart, start all over again, incessantly, never satisfied. The buyers, fed up with coming back to try them on so many times, ended up never coming back. The perfect pairs of shoes, covered with dust, were stacked in a corner of the room.

  Shorty Fremberg was moved. He could not stand to see his partner sunken in such solitude. Now he had six gold watches, two cars, a chalet in the outskirts of the city, and four lovers, drawn from among the workers, who went along with his caprices for a pittance.

  “Come on, Alejandro. You’re wasting your time. Perfection is not of this world. Accept that reality has changed. Come along and take a look with me. You’ll see just how beautiful our machines are. And sometimes the girls who run them, too. You’re still young. Not even fifty yet. Make an effort.”

  And the Pole pulled my grandfather along by the hand toward the end of the corridor, to the room where the bar had been. He wanted to proudly show him the machine that cut patterns into the leather. It was run by Fresia, the youngest of Shorty’s lovers, thirteen years old, freckled, and with big eyes.

  “Why don’t you try to work it, Alejandro? You’ll see how easy and gratifying it is. You push a couple of buttons and the pattern engraves itself. Try it, please. Let’s see now, Fresia, let this gentleman take your place!”

  Fresia showed my grandfather how to produce the finished pattern and left him sitting at the machine while she followed Shorty behind a curtain to give him the oral caresses he’d requested by making an imperious gesture with his pudgy fingers. Just when he was ejaculating a flood of warm magma into the young lady’s throat, he heard a howl. The machine coughed as if clogged up. Fresia and Shorty quickly ran over. They found Alejandro in a faint, his right hand caught in the machinery. To get it out they had to take apart much of the machine. My grandfather woke up in the hospital in intense pain. The doctors requested authorization to amputate his hand, but Alejandro refused.

  He went back to the tenement with his hand hanging at his side, dead. He sat in his doorway and stayed there, mute, not even communicating with his children. Fremberg continued to send Bertita, one of his lovers, a woman of forty with whiskers and the backside of a mare, to cook for the children. They would arrive like famished shadows, eat, and then go back out on the street. Alejandro, in another world, gave nothing, asked for nothing. When it began to grow dark, he would light a candle and, with a nimble movement of his left hand, catch nocturnal moths in order to devour them. One morning, they found the doorway empty. No one in the tenement could imagine where he’d gone. He returned after midday and sat down again, but something had changed in his eyes. A vehement fire was burning in his pupils. On the back of his paralyzed hand, he’d had the machine tattoo a heart and inside it the name Teresa.

  The first people to realize that Alejandro could work miracles were the homeless children. One fell at his feet, twisted in pain after eating garbage. Alejandro put his dead hand on the child’s stomach, and the pain disappeared. A few days later, a boy with mange on his legs appeared. The dead hand cured him too. The rumor began to spread. A little girl brought her cat, crushed by an automobile. The cat revived. A boy showed him his face covered with pimples dripping pus. After five minutes of the cold contact, he walked off with clear skin.

  Adults began coming. They submitted to his paralyzed hand tumors, fevers, impotence, all kinds of physical disorders. With a sweet smile and with fire in his eyes, always mute, Alejandro would slowly raise his right hand, kiss the tattooed heart, and place it with a profound, humble delicacy on the sick parts, which always healed. A fetus, condemned to be born feet first, he made turn around and emerge headfirst.

  He accepted no payment, no money, objects, flowers, or food. Hearing the words “thank you” made him close his eyes and turn pale. His love for Teresa had overflowed the dikes and spread now toward all of humanity. Because he understood better than anyone what emotional pain was, he also managed to calm depression, jealousy, rage, and hatred. A mere touch of his hand to a martyred chest and that person left with new hope. There on that miserable threshold Alejandro stayed for two years, curing without interruption every sick person who asked for help.

  The Rabbi had nothing to do with those miracles. His journey had brought him to sainthood. Out of discretion, the Rabbi left him alone during that time, but now he had to deliver sad news: “Good Alejandro, the final moment has come. Your heart has deteriorated completely. You are going to die.”

  “I’m ready. I’ve lived all I had to live because God taught me to love. For great evils we need great remedies. I was a man of stone; He made me feel pain. I am infinitely grateful.”

  After breaking his silence, he asked that the design machine be removed, that his bed be brought into what had been the Happy Heart Bar, and that they place a big barrel of wine next to him. He went to bed and entered into a placid dying. The worker girls and their companions began to arrive and drink in a block, as in the old days. The Anarchist, who had been in hiding, suddenly appeared wearing dark glasses to hide his missing eye. He said nothing, but on his knees alongside Alejandro’s cot, he kissed the dead hand.

  The bar began to fill up with wildflowers. They forced their way through tiny cracks in the cement and covered the grayness with a multicolored blanket. Benjamín, Lola, Fanny, and Jaime, accompanied by Fremberg and his four girlfriends, entered, nicely combed, clean, and sad. Alejandro smiled. The Rabbi told him, “At the end everything returns.” Alejandro smiled again. The crowd parted slowly in order not to trample the flowers. A slim silhouette hesitated at the door. The children shouted “Mama!” and ran to clutch her in their avid arms. Teresa’s hea
d was shaved, she was skin and bones, dressed as a man, and wearing no makeup. She did not cry, but tears ran ceaselessly down her torpid face, a face you’d say was paralyzed.

  Alejandro extended his right hand, and his inert hand came to life. The white fingers recovered the color of living flesh and, losing their cold, moved slowly to call Teresa. The woman approached without separating herself from the children and, on her knees, placed her face in the revived hand. Alejandro touched her devotedly, trying to give the hollow of his hand the sweetness of a cradle. He whispered:

  “I’m not going to forgive you, because there is nothing evil to forgive. You obeyed life. Everything natural is good. Your soul is pure light. I thank you for existing. Don’t tell me why you’ve returned. There’s no more time. You’ve come, and that’s enough. I am going to die for you, not because of you. You became my teacher. The only thing I did well in this world was to learn to love you. I depart satisfied. Don’t put my name on my grave. I want a simple stone with a six-pointed star. In the center of the two interlaced triangles have inscribed: I Am Yours And You Are Mine.”

  Teresa kissed his forehead. My grandfather smiled again and began to give up his soul. The Rabbi, nervous, shouted to him, “Wait! Hold out a little longer! You want to go, but I want to stay here. The eternal nothingness is not for me. Pass me on!”

  “Pass you on?”

  “That’s right! I am your best inheritance: tradition. Give me to one of your children.”

  “To which one?”

  “The way things are going, your twin girls will never be mothers, and Benjamín will die chaste. The only one who will be able to pass me on to one of his children is Jaime.”

  Alejandro signed to Jaime that he should come close. Jaime was not moved. A dull resentment kept him from suffering. He’d often tried to approach his father, always crashing against a barrier of incomprehension. They were different, and that was that. Jaime had the right to not want to be a just man. In a society of thieves and exploiters, egoism was not only allowed but it was also the only intelligent thing a person could do. Nevertheless, once, to please his father, Jaime took on the task of making a pair of boots. For three months, in secret, he dedicated himself to that painful work. The result was not unworthy of Alejandro himself. Proud of himself, he showed his father his work and expected that after the congratulations he would keep the boots in a dresser as a souvenir. That did not happen. The next day, his father sold them to a poor client for an absurdly low price.

  “Good shoes should be on feet and not in a dresser. We don’t make them to exalt ourselves but to serve. Remember, son, serving is the greatest human value.”

  Jaime never forgave him. He felt that Alejandro held his work in contempt, that he refused to give him the recognition he deserved. He swore he’d never again make a shoe, never again serve anyone.

  “Come here, my son.”

  He’s going to give me a farewell kiss, but what good is it to me now when he never did it before. I would have preferred kisses that began something, not kisses that end things. “I’m coming, father.”

  He pressed his lips together and brought his face close to that of the dying man. Alejandro, with his resuscitated hand, took hold of Jaime’s nape and immobilized his head. Following the Rabbi’s instructions, he fastened his mouth around Jaime’s nose and breathed, a final, long, interminable breath. The Rabbi entered through Jaime’s nostrils into his spirit. Alejandro died. Jaime fell to the floor, writhing in rage and screaming: “I don’t want your madness! No! I don’t want it! Get out of me, you shitty ghost!”

  A pale old woman, waving a newspaper, came to announce that war had broken out in Europe.

  Teresa no longer wanted to think about her children. Never again did she bathe or leave the small apartment Shorty Fremberg had given her in exchange for the percentage of Warsaw that belonged to her husband. She spent her time staring out the window at the nothingness. If she spoke, it was only to curse, keeping secret the name of the person she was cursing. Fanny, Lola, and Jaime, tired of her incessant bad humor, looked, each on his or her own, for some way to earn a living. Soon they stopped visiting. Benjamín could put up with being mistreated and worked as a salesman in a bookstore so he could feed his mother. They began to sleep together in the same bed.

  Lola began to study guitar with the blind woman in Room 28. The old woman knew myriad songs and went from bar to bar offering her broken-down voice. The drunken patrons, overwhelmed with sorrows of the heart, requested melodies that would remind them of the woman who betrayed them, and she always knew them. An astonishing memory. Lola, late at night, transformed into a guide-dog, accompanied the old woman from bar to bar, singing duets with her.

  Jaime became violent, rejecting the appearances of the Rabbi with epileptic fits. González the Horse, mentally retarded, with a long face, thick lips, and enormous teeth, formerly a champion boxer, accepted him as a student. The boy’s aggressive energy enabled him to win good money in that sport. He took part in clandestine bouts: before dog fights, the organizers would present two or three fights between boys because they were popular with homosexual bettors.

  Horse had very personal training methods. He would go with Jaime to the potter’s field at the General Cemetery to steal skulls. Then, in Room 35, completely painted white with posters and trophies covering the walls, now transformed into a gym, he would have his student demolish skulls with his fists. “Remember: your punches must pass through flesh, which is illusion, to break the real bones.” Every feint or duck provoked reflections that, despite being said in an alcohol-soaked voice with a cross-eyed diction, taught Jaime how to fight against that fierce enemy, life.

  Fanny accepted that Ruby of the Street, the tenement prostitute, should educate her. The sensual dwarf informed her: “With that red hair, that body, and that face, your future is secure. You’ve got long legs, full lips, a tangled pubis, firm breasts, and a round ass, which is to say, you’ve got everything! All you need is to learn to know men. By knowing them you’ll be able to dominate them. Understanding what they’re made of, you become their mother. You’ll appear docile, and they’ll think that they’re the boss, but in fact they’ll obey orders. And the best way to drag them around by the nose is to give them sexual pleasure. I’m going to teach you all the techniques. You’re just a girl, but you’ll memorize everything I tell you, and later it will be precious to you, pure gold. Each penis is different and has a special way of getting satisfaction. You will become ductile, malleable, changing. You won’t be just one woman but thousands, and your muscles and orifices will be proficient in giving the maximum pleasure. And you won’t disdain using certain objects. From this moment on, I’ll hide you in my armoire, and looking through a little hole you’ll see what I do with my clients. If you clean off the soot, every man is a diamond.”

  Fanny was so interested in this apprenticeship that she decided to become the best whore in Chile.

  Teresa never told why she came back until, many years later, Benjamín punched her in the face, desperate because of her ill treatment and her attacks of absurd rage. Then he tied her to the bed, and using a pail he forced her to swallow half a liter of vodka. The alcohol finally loosened her tongue.

  “After sending your father that letter in which I announced our break, I forgot, I must confess, the whole family. I felt as if a dry skin had fallen off my body, allowing me to be born again. For forty days, I stopped having sexual relations with my lover, and I stretched out in the darkness of the wagon to wait for a new hymen to grow within me. I got up free, perfectly sealed. At that moment, we were passing through a tiny village called Las Ventanas. From the street came the smells of bread and wine. Everything in me, now, was virgin, even my sense of smell. Those perfumes of wheat and grape, transformed by baking and fermentation into sacred food and elixir, moved me profoundly. I wanted with the totality of my being to receive Seraphim’s sperm in order to engender a perfect son, the fruit of love, not like you and Benjamín, the fruit of obl
igation.

  “Seraphim did not behave the way I saw him—an angel sent by God, who to reach the stable where I awaited him naked, offering him my thirsty chalice, had to cross the entire Universe, slip through the whine of galaxies being born, gallop over careening comets, and fall into the dense matter of the Earth, attracted by a center more brilliant than the sun, my interior light. Instead, he insisted on being a monkey, hanging by his feet from a tree, his head hanging down, and he squealed with rage: ‘You’re mocking me, Teresa. No woman can desire to have a child with me, ever. Another monster would be born.’

  “‘I do want to have your child! To shine, I have eliminated pain. Now, in this place, I am what I am, nameless, without problems, a flower open in the present, saturated with love down to the last particle of flesh, and for that very reason nonexistent when it’s alone. Have faith in my open sex: enter entirely into it to give content to my empty form.’

  “‘That love of yours, immense as it is, is not enough to convince me that deformity is beauty.’

  “‘Who will you believe, those who despise you, or me? If you let yourself be guided by what they think, you are your own worst enemy. Stop hating yourself and accept the miracle! We are two candles on the shrine. Our son will be a god. I want him to look like you.’

  “I took a branch and broke it from the tree like a ripe fruit. He fell on me, biting, scratching, expelling his insides, sucked by the black ocean heaving in my ovaries to emit his ardent liquor with a squeal of pain-pleasure, collapsing exhausted next to my bosom to sleep for nine months. I desired to conceive with such intensity that I clearly felt the moment when his sperm fertilized me. In the depth of my womb, a point of immense energy vibrated. It opened like a door toward another dimension, receiving a river formed of millions of universes. All my flesh, in the presence of that potent flash, felt the drowning of death, the anguish of having lived in the shadows, separated. That new energy flooded my bones, my guts, my blood, purifying and fortifying each cell, eliminated the impurities and pain. My movements became delicate, prudent: I was the coffer that held within itself a diamond. I believed I saw a sheaf of fine rays emerge from my womb to illuminate the sordid wagon. I was overwhelmed by a millennial peace. Like a bird that begins its migration, my spirit emerged from the rot.