Where the Bird Sings Best

by Alejandro Jodorowsky

  “Seraphim said, ‘After this, it doesn’t matter to me if I die. These people love and respect me; what more can I ask of life? I never dreamed I would attain so much. I owe it all to you.’

  “I answered by giving him a long kiss, and we returned to the school, where we realized that it wasn’t called Santa María by accident. Rosauro and the comrades thanked us for our sacrifice, and since we were worn out by the long march, they gave us the director’s office so we could sleep in his comfortable armchairs.

  The enormous orgy lasted all night. Just at dawn, silence once again reigned. All Iquique slept until two o’clock on Monday. The people’s deep sleep was interrupted by a long, hoarse blast from a foghorn. It was the warship carrying the chief administrator. We ran in a mob to the dock and lined the seawall. The army followed us like a gray shadow. Three hundred sailors armed with polished rifles disembarked from the ship to form a double column through which Tomás Eastman soon made his way.

  “He was a thin, dried-out old man dressed in black. Taking small steps, he walked toward the administration without raising his eyes from the sepia puttees adorning his honor guard. We crowded together under the principal balcony with a knot in our throats, nervous about the cannon pointed at us from the ship. Eastman came out onto the balcony and spoke only one sentence before going back in: ‘I carry official instructions from the government to resolve the conflict. Go back to the pampa.’ A jubilant din drowned out the noise of the waves. The workers considered their participation in the strike over, and now it was up to the leaders to negotiate the best conditions. Accordingly, they headed for an esplanade where the train track passed.

  “We then heard train whistles, and two locomotives pulling a long line of flat cars arrived. The miners and their families crowded onto them. They looked like herds of animals. After this train pulled out, many more pulled in. The mining company had organized an efficient but undignified transportation system. The group of two thousand workers possessed of social awareness ran to the hill called La Cruz, which overlooked the esplanade, and from there, waving flags, they shouted, ‘We aren’t sheep to travel this way! Don’t leave, comrades! Nothing has been decided yet!’ But no one paid them any attention.

  “No sooner had the last train pulled out, than the army, announcing a state of siege, herded the rest of the revolutionaries toward the Santa María school. Rosauro told everyone to obey, that nothing had been lost, and we shouldn’t give the authorities any reason for justifying the use of force. As soon as we entered the school, the military surrounded the building. The combined force of soldiers, sailors, and police was about eight hundred men. Not content with simply pointing their rifles and machine guns at us, they brought in a cannon and placed it opposite the main door.

  “‘Victory, brothers!’ shouted the Indian. ‘If they’re waving around so many weapons, it’s because they’re afraid of us. And what do they fear, since they know we are unarmed? They fear our spirit! Perhaps some spy told them about the Yeco. That makes me happy because now the great moment has arrived. The prediction, which until now has been accurate at every stage, says that at the feet of the Sent One all armies will fall to their knees. If we send Don Seraphim and Doña Teresa so they show the child to the troops, the Yeco will shine like a sun, appearing in all his majesty. Seeing him, a colonel mounted on his white horse will fall as if struck by lightning. And the regular soldiers, realizing we are brothers, will turn their weapons against the exploiters.’

  “At that very moment, a trumpet sounded. We went to the windows and saw a colonel mounted on a white horse arrive. With a castrato’s voice he shouted to us: ‘This is Colonel Roberto Silva Bernard speaking. I order you here and now to evacuate this school in order for you to be transferred to the hippodrome. There you will be sentenced for insurrection. You have five minutes to leave. If you disobey, I will order my men to fire.’

  “Seeing that the arrival of this Napoleon coincided with the legend, the miners smiled in relief. Everything was happening as in a marvelous dream. The Indian suggested we open a few bottles to make a toast in honor of us, the Holy Family. We drank a glass of wine. Then the workers hugged us with great emotion and accompanied us to the main door. When they began to open it, I felt my legs weaken. I lost strength and had to ask Seraphim to carry Almo. I felt unbearable shame. I had never been a coward and didn’t understand why now, when I needed the most courage so I could be an example, I was feeling dizzy. I took the arm Rosauro offered me and mumbled to him: ‘Friend, for what you venerate most, keep me from falling. I don’t want the comrades to realize my weakness and to think I’m having doubts. I, more than anyone else, have faith in the power of my son.’

  “‘Don’t worry, Teresa,’ he whispered into my ear. ‘I’ll accompany you, holding you up until the spell passes. Be brave.’

  “And, giving the strikers an explanation I didn’t hear because I was holding back my vomit, he walked out onto the street with us. We were four human beings against an army armed to the teeth. Under my sweating feet, the ground moved like the deck of a ship on the high seas. My dry tongue had turned into a piece of wood. Seraphim held up the child and spread his legs to show his two sexes. I took a deep breath and concentrated my will, trying not to faint. Almo smiled. I waited for him to shine like a sun so the colonel would fall as if struck by lightning. Suddenly Rosauro took me by the back of my neck and brutally forced me to run toward the soldiers. I was so weak I couldn’t resist. When the soldiers, smiling, opened a path for us, Silva Bernard howled: ‘Open fire, God damn it!’ And a cannon shell blew my lover and my son to pieces. It had to be a nightmare. The Indian was laughing. There on the street, the flesh of my two beloved beings was falling in shreds like a slow rain.

  “The machine guns began to bark. The soldiers tossed hand grenades and tear gas. They put on masks. They fixed bayonets. The cannon thundered again. The school door became a sun of splinters. I forgot my name, forgot where I was. An overpowering need to sleep made my eyelids swell. I knew my heart was tearing apart, but I felt that pain as if it were distant, above; my body transformed into the surface of a black well where my awareness was submerged. Soldiers and sailors dashed into the school. Everything became mixed up. Shouts of rage and agony. Packs of dogs coming to lick up the blood. Men, women, and children shot to pieces on the upper terraces. Miners running through the street with their guts in their hands. Brutish soldiers finishing off the wounded with knives. Masked men in gray dragging corpses by the hair. I begin to faint.

  “The Indian carries me like a package, enters the administration building, goes upstairs to an office, locks the door, throws me onto an armchair, lifts my skirts, tears my panties off, mauls my breasts, and possesses me three times in a row. I vomit in his face. He laughs and drags me by the foot to the bathroom. He takes off his clothes, finishes undressing me, turns on the shower, and under the cold water rapes me again. Whistling a popular song, ‘We Who Love Each Other So,’ he brings me back to the armchair.

  “I fall into a deep sleep. When Rosauro wakes me up, it’s already nightfall. I barely recognize him. He’s no longer an Indian or one-eyed, his skin is much lighter, his hair is short, he’s wearing a suit of English cut, a striped shirt, and a green tie with a clip in the form of the Chilean seal. Seeing my surprise, he whirls like a fashion model, guffaws aggressively, takes me by the waist, and forces me to look out the window. While the soldiers, with innocent faces, pile corpses onto garbage trucks, he, standing behind me, sexually assaults me like a wild animal.

  “Hatred mixes with suffering, but pleasure, a pleasure only located in my sex, increases, and I can do nothing to stop it. It is like a soft crab that grows in my guts, stretching its sickening legs out further and further. My body betrays me. I explode, want to die, punish myself. I try to jump out the window. He punches my breasts and tosses me, splayed out, onto the armchair. He penetrates me again and, with no modesty whatsoever, roars and drools until he ejaculates.

  “I scream, insultin
g him. Then he ties my feet together and puts handcuffs on my wrists. He pulls over a chair, sits opposite me, and lights a cigarette: ‘You won’t get anywhere screaming, Teresa. No one will come. I suppose they expect me to kill you. There’s still room in the last garbage truck. You must be wanting to die as well. But I’m going to disillusion you. I’ve decided to keep you for a while. The moment I saw you breastfeeding the baby in that miserable scene, I decided to get control over you. A Russian like you, with huge tits, a big ass, and skin whiter than your own milk—that’s not something you find every day in this country.

  “‘I requested you as a prize if I carried out my task. The government has wanted to cut off that damned Recabarren for a long time. With his poisonous newspapers, taking advantage of the eternal discontent of the poor slobs, he was churning up political agitation that was very dangerous for the mining companies. Even though it would have been easy, it wasn’t convenient to assassinate him. Transformed into a martyr, he would end up unifying the workers around his myth. Better to defame him. The secret police sent me disguised as an Indian so I could catch him in something bad. I followed him for months, shadowed his every footstep, but it was useless. The bastard is straighter than my dick. He even looks like a saint. He doesn’t smoke and doesn’t drink, so he won’t assist bourgeois business. If you offer him cocaine, he rejects it in a rage. He’s faithful to his girlfriend and has no children we would have liked to lead into degradation. He never goes to parties and only likes to read. This shitty traitor is an enlightened nut. I was about to throw in the towel when I saw you clean your kid’s ass. At first his double sex disgusted me. Then I was happy, because a genial plan came to me, a plan that would win me a promotion, money, vacation, and your ass. I made up a legend in the asshole style of the Mapuche Indians, and you and your husband, like all parents who just drool over their kids, swallowed the hook.

  “‘I sent you to Iquique for four months to have time to spread the story among the superstitious miners and convince them, showing them the photo of the monster, that he was God incarnate. I communicated with my chiefs, we coordinated the action with the mine administrator, the city, and the army, and the plan was set. We managed to eliminate all the strike leaders. The dragon lost its two thousand heads. The mass of workers, who only think about fornicating and getting drunk, will be happy with a pay increase of a few pesos. Recabarren will need many years to recruit new disciples. And what you thought was cowardice was the effect of a sleeping drug I put in your wine during the last toast. I’m talking to you, but I don’t want you to answer. What you think or feel doesn’t matter a bit to me. So I can make good use of your body, I want you to keep your mouth shut. And if you do say something, I’ll knock your teeth down your throat. We’re going to spend two months by the sea, far away from the world, in a chalet they’ve lent me, located between Iquique and Tocopilla. I’m going to have you at least six times a day. When I get tired of you, I’ll sell you so you can work as a whore in Peru or Argentina. If you do everything I want, you can grow old in those slimy bars, but if you make trouble, I’ll blow your brains out.’

  “I gave in. Something in my brain had broken. I stopped thinking or having emotions. I assumed the role of his faithful bitch—to the point that when my executioner went to buy provisions, leaving me locked up, I whined by the door until he came back. I had to follow him wherever he went. When he cleaned his pistol, I stretched out at his feet, naked, waiting to be raped. I actually licked his boots clean and smiled when he peed on my face.

  “One day, after he drank a dozen beers, he fell asleep in my arms. Suddenly I recovered my identity along with my anger and fury, and with one snap of my teeth, I severed his jugular vein. He got up and ran along the beach with a red line trailing behind him. He fell in the sand, transformed into a white rock. Even though I knew he was dead, I fired his pistol into his head. His skull split open, and a gray mass flowed out, which the crabs immediately devoured. I let them eat until they had enough. Then I dragged his remains to the hills, dug a deep grave, and buried him. When I’d tossed on the last shovel of dirt, I realized I had no idea what his real name was.

  “I cleaned up the blood, and among his clothes, I found a suit, a shirt, shoes, and a hat. I put the rest of his things in two suitcases and buried them too. This way his bosses would think he’d left with me for some other country. I cut off my hair and, disguised as a man, with the little money I found, I bought a train ticket for Santiago. No one bothered me on the trip, because I pretended to sleep with an empty bottle in my hand—just another drunk. If I’d had anywhere else to go, I wouldn’t have come back to the tenement, to a past that was no longer mine. I got here when Alejandro was dying, the last person I might have been able to confide in. It didn’t matter to me that the world war broke out. Maybe it even made me happy, since I could take it as some kind of revenge. I knew I would be forever isolated, desolate, useless. Life? To be born for no reason, to suffer constantly, to die ignorant. God? Extant but unreachable. Blind, deaf, and mute for His creatures. Human society? A prison filled with lunatics, thieves, and drunks. Everything and everyone deserve only my curses.

  “So now you see, Benjamín. You wanted to know the Truth; here you have it with the smell of rot. Stop sighing, untie me, bring more vodka, and let’s drink together. The best thing in this world is not to have been born.”

  My uncle untied Teresa, brought another bottle, and they began to empty it. He’d felt himself depicted in my grandmother’s final words. He understood that much more than hating other people, he hated himself. He was a transparent angel fallen into a filthy sewer, his body. Before starting to snore with his nose stuck into his mother’s navel, he muttered:

  The night comes with its she-wolf fury

  Promising the birth of a sun in love

  But shade can only give birth to shades

  Nothing is born, nothing dies

  And creation is oblivion.

  The Promised Pampa

  The thirty-five days of the voyage passed quickly. The powerful Weser cut the waves with the same ease the waiters in first class cut slices from their collection of French cheeses. Whenever meals were served, those mixed odors of milk and dung descended like oily waves along the metal ladders and reached steerage to make the 1,200 dried-out mouths of the Jewish emigrants water. But Alejandro Prullansky, without envying the luxury surrounding his ex-colleagues from the Imperial Ballet, enthusiastically went on with his daily exercises.

  Poised on a rope strung between two enormous packing cases, he repeated hour after hour his entrechats, leaps, and cross-steps, following the rhythm Icho Melnik generously supplied with his harmonica. In his memory, the pimp retained innumerable melodies by Chopin, Liszt, Mozart, and others. When his lips began to hurt from blowing so much through his small instrument, he would begin to recite thoughts from Seneca rhythmically, revealing a level of culture that in a man of his profession seemed absurd, all so his friend could continue training: “Work is not a good in itself. Then what is a good in itself? Contempt for work.” Icho would laugh but immediately continue: “On the other hand, those who make an effort to obtain virtue without allowing themselves to become dejected deserve applause.” And when he pronounced the word “virtue,” he used his fingers to mimic the act of counting money.

  Jashe joyfully observed her husband’s perfect body. The splendid functioning of those wise muscles, producing gestures of superhuman delicacy, aroused in her a pleasure that made her forget the corruption of the flesh, evil, and hunger. She did not fear the future and, knowing she was pregnant, gave herself over sweetly to the new life. Her Alejandro was a living temple, and his dancing would change the world. The six prostitutes lavished tender care on her, making the voyage as comfortable as possible because she read the Tarot for them, giving profound answers to their silly questions: “Will my business improve if I dye my pubic hair red? Will I find an old man who will give me jewels and furs? Will I know love?” She predicted that two of them would
marry military men; Marla, the tallest and most powerfully built, she saw paired up with an important politician; she lied to the other three, covering up her sorrow with nervous laughter, promising them long lives, health, and riches. They believed her because the gigolo began to make them work during the crossing. At night, he sent them to the cabins of the ship officers or to the service staff. They would come back at dawn carrying fruit, cigarettes, caviar, champagne, and chocolates. They shared everything. Icho, his belly swollen and with a smile from ear to ear, would quote before falling deeply asleep: “Life is a play. What matters is not that it lasts a long time but that it be well-acted.”

  The coast of Argentina came into sight, and the ship made for the Río de la Plata. It was then that Simón Radovitzky, a tall, long-nosed boy with protruding ears, as skinny as a string bean, appeared before the prostitutes. He was pursued by a party of matrons frantically supporting his mother, who was tearing her hair out. Because of Simón’s black, bulging, and fanatical eyes, the rest of his body became invisible after a few minutes. When he spoke, the words seemed to come from his pupils: “Gentlemen, your good wives shave you every morning. Please allow them to cut off my beard. I want to get this superstitious tradition off my back. The past is a cage.”

  While his mother twisted her fingers and howled “oy” piteously, her huge tears soaking the wool shawl covering the heads of her fellow gossips, the young prostitutes, happily chirping, lathered up Simón’s head and face. His mother tried to stop him for the last time by reciting a few proverbs in Yiddish: “A man’s stupidity complicates his path. With a lie, you go far, but you can’t come back. If you give the devil a hair, he’ll soon want your whole beard.” But the girls, after taking off his black overcoat, his fringed vest, and his leather cap, began to shave him.

  When his payot, his side curls, fell, his mother muttered: “You are lost!” and bent over clutching her abdomen as if she were having a miscarriage. Her women still held her up so she wouldn’t fall to the floor. Making a supreme effort, she recovered; “It’s annoying to carry a hunched back, but painful to separate yourself from it. This man is no longer my son. He’s a drunk, a shikker. May your mother be one of these six kurvehs! May your brain dry up, may the worms start eating you while you’re still alive, may you walk on your hands as many years as you’ve walked on your feet, and for the rest may you drag yourself along on your backside!”