Where the Bird Sings Best

by Alejandro Jodorowsky

  The Jewish matrons left steerage without looking back, reciting magic verses to purify themselves from the sacrilegious air they’d breathed.

  Simón Radovitzky was happy to see his bare face and bald head in the hand mirror with floral frame Marla handed him. He exclaimed:

  “Being a Jew is much more than a disguise and a mop of hair! You can’t spend your life believing in fairy tales and vengeful gods! We’re living in the twentieth century! We’re arriving at a young continent. We have to stop separating ourselves, stop living in an imaginary universe. Race, nationality, religion, customs—they’re all unlucky limitations. We belong to the world, and the world is ours, in the same way that all human beings belong to us. Let’s open our eyes, because the awakening of Awareness depends on Justice.”

  Wearing white trousers and a yellow shirt with blue polka dots that Icho Melnik gave him, the new Simón Radovitzky, accompanied at a distance by my grandparents and the whores, ran to the deck to show himself to religious Jews, offering himself as an example. They all fled without looking at him as soon as he approached. He spread his arms, shouting at the top of his lungs, “Brothers, I’m not a wolf, and this is not a henhouse! Listen to me, I beg you! I too have tried to be a saint, but there is no saintliness to be gained by separating ourselves. With your noses buried in the Torah, you can only see yourselves, cut off from the world as you are by that ‘sacred’ text. For not wanting to give anything, for continuously washing your hands in a desire not to participate in sin, you have ceased to be useful to society. But since the universal law is that everything has a purpose, society uses you to make you into victims. You have constructed for yourselves a Destiny, to be clowns who receive blows from others. Enough! I will unite myself with the horrors of life. Whatever happens to others, happens to me. I shall denounce in all possible media—letters, newspapers, shouting in the street if it comes to that—the economic injustice that allows a few egoists to live in idleness, exploiting the labor of the workers. I shall ceaselessly demand the abolition of that authoritarian monster which is the State. I shall vomit on the lie of matrimony, a mercantile contract that legitimizes unions without love; I shall vomit on the patriotic lie that exaggerates natural affection for one’s native land to turn it into fanatical stupidity that keeps the proletariat from understanding that the social problem is cosmopolitan. And I’ll vomit on the religious lie that foments in the masses a servile attitude and enough resignation that they can bear the iniquities of earthly bandits with the hope of a celestial glory. I shall always denounce political necrophagy in favor of vital anarchy.”

  The bearded religious Jews whispered to one another, touching their temples with their index finger: Mashugana! Then they erased him from their memory. Simón spit toward them and went back to the whores’ corner to brandish a knife he’d stolen from the kitchen. He swore, “From now on my life ceases to be at the service of death. Instead, I put death at the service of life. Tyrants become vulnerable when a decided individual appears.”

  For my grandfather, those phrases shouted out by the young fanatic were a revelation. He, locked away from the age of five in the elegant prison of the Imperial Ballet, with no horizon other than dance, was unaware of the pain in the world. Life seemed to him a continuous party. All he had to do was move to experience the pleasure of the work of art. He saw everything as a dance where stars, landscapes, multitudes, animals, and machines mixed together in a harmonious coupling. But Simón’s inflammatory discourse brought him out of his naïve radiance and submerged him in the fog of madness.

  The Weser began to skim along the banks of the river, entering the outskirts of the immense city of Buenos Aires, a hive of proletarian dwellings and unhealthy factories, a human worm nest. From those dark places poured garbage, chemical liquids, rotten hides, greasy cans, excrement, making the water into a pitch-colored magma. On the banks of pestilential streams, garbage and myriad rats splashed around on the ground turned into mud by flooding. The mists from the leather factories, the smoke, and the soot from chimneys darkened the sky. Arrows of green flies opened ditches in that dense, gray air, buzzing with murderous hunger.

  The giant dancer, hiding his ears on the bosom of the small woman, fell to his knees. Immobile and white, he looked like a cadaver emptied of blood. It was not the flock of men, women, and children working in the tremendous labyrinth of sordid factories that affected him but the mooing of the steers they were sacrificing in the chilled meat plants to freeze their meat and send it abroad. There were thousands and thousands of sheep in mile-long lines, being led to death. Their anguished moans, their squeals of terror, their dying cries, the rivers of dark blood, the mountains of guts and skulls, the filthy piles of hides, the fetid stench all came together in the mind of my grandfather with the ghosts of even more millions of quadrupeds that had already been butchered, day after day for years. Pyramids of knives worn right down to the handle, torrents of yellow teeth, smashed eyes floating in lakes of pus, planets of meat dissolving into worms.

  “Why this lack of awareness? They suffer, they are beings, part of myself. There they are before me, skinned animals, legs spread in a cross, an ocean of Christs with bleeding anuses, saints dismembered with mathematical slices. I know the pain of sheep; I’ve been raping them since I was in the sperm of Alejandro I, my demented grandfather writing a request for help with the guts of his victims. And then in the vital liquor of my degenerate father, murdering women and children like the owners of those factories. Forgiveness was already granted; my mother devoured the cadaver of my progenitor and purified it by immersing herself in white. White! White! I love you! My God, forgive the Argentines for they know not what they eat, because they do not realize that their country lives on the production of frozen cadavers!”

  Suddenly my grandfather saw, galloping toward him over the waters of the Río de la Plata, myriad sheep metamorphosed into furious dogs. And when they began biting him until they’d devoured his body and there was nothing left but a voice arising from the void, he began to howl:

  Because I walk in the valley of the shadow of death

  I fear all evils if you are not with me!

  Free my life from the power of the dog!

  My God, hasten to help me!

  Jashe, desperate seeing her husband immersed in madness, put one of her breasts in his mouth so he could suck as if he were her child. Then she put the red shoes on him. No sooner than he felt on his feet those ancient shoes did my grandfather smile in satisfaction and begin to snore. The swarm of flies scattered, shocked by the sirens in the port. The Weser was entering the capital of Argentina. The ships were all packed together like a nest of giant ants, dead ants drying out next to deserted sea walls. Not a soul walked among the mountains of merchandise piled up on the docks.

  Under a murderous sun, five thousand freight cars loaded with agricultural products were waiting to be unloaded at the warehouses. A huge banner made of cloth fluttered weakly, caressed by the tiniest breeze: WORKERS YES! SLAVES NO!

  When the Weser dropped anchor, it emitted a long blast of the foghorn, and without lowering the gangways, it seemed to pull back into itself like a sleeping turtle. The hours went by. Night fell. Dawn came. Marla, the captain’s favorite, carrying a Swiss cheese and some Italian nougat, brought the news: the Federation of Stevedores had begun a work stoppage supported by coachmen and other workers groups, that had degenerated into a general strike.

  The conflict erupted because the stevedores, whose workday lasted fourteen hours, were forced to carry sacks that weighed more than two hundred pounds. The rationale behind this was that the importers from South Africa required large sacks because they had black laborers stronger than camels. The federation demanded a limit of one hundred and fifty pounds and workdays of ten hours, energetically demanding for its members the right to be considered human beings and not beasts of burden. The bosses were outraged and assumed an inflexible attitude, calling the strikers pernicious foreigners. Accordingly, they proposed t
o the government a bill of expulsion. Now the Congress was locked away in a special session to approve the law, declare a state of siege, obtain the right to sack citizens’ homes, dissolve riots and aggressive meetings, use troops for an armed defense of “the dearest thing the nation has: its grand harvest,” and above all, censor the majority of the newspapers.

  Smiling, Icho Melnik shrugged his shoulders and quoted a thought of Maecenas: “Cripple me, make me lame, slap a hump on my back, loosen my teeth, crucify me... if you leave me alive, I’ll feel fine.”

  Simón Radovitzky turned red with rage: “This period in Argentina will be tossed into the garbage can of history. In the future, no citizen will want to recall such infamy. Only a few scholars, while reading in some library dusty documents containing these miserable petitions to Congress, will shut their eyes in shame, afraid of catching an infection. How can one human being force another human being to carry two hundred pound sacks fourteen hours a day for a salary he can’t live on? These millionaire parasites have gone insane: they think they are the soul of the nation, when in reality they are devouring the nation!”

  At midday, the asphalt began to tremble and a metallic, heavy noise made thousands of stevedores come out of the shadows. In a few minutes, a sea of human bodies filled the docks roasted by the implacable summer. Fatigue and anguish had transformed the workers into a tame flock. Five cars appeared, filled with soldiers and police, who quickly got out to point their rifles at the brutalized mass.

  “What insolence!” Simón exclaimed.

  From a motorcycle protected by an armored car and a group of thugs came the chief of police, Colonel Roberto Falcón. Some twenty or so men ran toward him to hand him papers. “Disgusting informers!” muttered Simón. “Look at them passing on their abominable blacklists!”

  Roberto Falcón jumped on top of a barrel and, with ferocious contempt, stared at the strikers. His impeccable suit without a wrinkle; his black hair plastered down with hair tonic, shining like a helmet; his patent leather boots; his striped tie with pearl clasp; his white silk scarf, all contrasted scornfully with the filth and poverty of the silent workers. Suddenly the colonel began to shout like an animal trainer, as if he were talking to dogs:

  “The jig is up, faggots! You lost the battle! The Congress unanimously voted to give us legal powers to launch the largest repressive campaign our country, Argentina, has seen to date! The general strike is liquidated! We’re going to cleanse the nation of anarchists, active militants in trades unions, leaders of workers, the editorial staff of critical press, seats of labor, and the rest! Hear what I said, you jackass gringos? Get back to work immediately and let us, if you want to save your scummy hides, get on with the arrest of the malevolent agitators whose names we have on the lists our wise informers have given us!”

  The soldiers penetrated the crowd guided by the squealers, who shouted out the names of the guilty at the top of their lungs. The accused, with their eyes averted and without trying to run away, turned themselves in to the men in uniform, who first beat them with night sticks and then locked them away in black riot trucks. The other stevedores headed for the mountains of sacks and began to carry them. The rays of sunlight made those packages shine and gave them the air of shells transforming the saddened workers into slow-moving reptiles. The ships, shaking off their lethargy, filled up with sailors. The cranes screeched, the gangways stretched out their avid arms, and the port, with the tremors of a woman giving birth, gave out a dismal whine. A compact sphere of flies, flashing green in the sunlight, paused over the colonel’s head. He extracted a thin stiletto from his walking stick and plunged it into the buzzing planetoid. The flies separated and fled to land on the carloads of rotten vegetables.

  “Fucking bugs. Only force can pull them apart. The only reason they listen to is the whistle of weapons. Remember my name, you living rag dolls. In the name Falcón, there is a falcon. Anyone who doesn’t obey will fall into my clutches and get the pecking he deserves. If you don’t understand, I’ll reward you with a beating salad. You are the scum of your nations. If you want to live in this country, don’t behave like uppity parasites. Gringos have no rights here. No say, no vote. Be thankful we’ve let you live. Anyone who stops working today, even if it’s to pee, will be shot to pieces. Hard laws only apply to some people, which is the way it should be. Get the hell out of my sight!”

  Haughty, the colonel grabbed hold of the shoulders of a young man with the profile of a Greek statue and rode off on his motorcycle, heading for the center of the capital. The strong blast from the exhaust pipe gave Radovitzky chills. He waved a kitchen knife around, muttering, “You get the hell out of my sight and may you rot in hell, Roberto Falcón! I know we shouldn’t hate the dog but the owner of the dog, but you carry out your disgusting task with too much pleasure. You add torture to the legal punishment, only to blow up the stinking balloon of your image of power. One day a knife will burst that balloon and make you go back to being what you’ve always been: a dead man.”

  “Calm down, boy, and hide that knife,” said Icho. “What you say about the colonel is valid for all living beings. What is life if not a slow death?”

  My grandfather woke up very rested, but it took him ten minutes to recover his senses. Meanwhile Jashe combed her blonde hair and made a braid down to her nape. Then she examined that piece of work with intensity. Seeing the dancer’s transparent beauty, his blue eyes like a constant dawn pouring an immemorial love onto the world, that smile of a newborn, that powerful chest breathing with such delicacy that the foul air left his mouth transformed into a balm, my grandmother wept with rapture and thanked heaven Alejandro hadn’t seen the atrocious beating. She would have wanted to be a magician to cleanse the world of ugliness and offer this divine man a life equal to his purity.

  The first-class passengers began to disembark. The Imperial Ballet was received by an elegant committee that filled the arms of the ballerinas with roses of all different colors. Marina Leopoldovna, making her way down the gangplank, cast a rapid look toward the emigrants crowded together on the deck. When she saw the blond giant shining like a lotus flower in the pool of pitch formed by the Israelites’ black overcoats, she murmured malignantly, “Your career is over. You will never dance again. My father will have your legs cut off.” They all got into a dozen taxis and left the port for the colonnaded Colón Theatre.

  As the procession passed, the workers took off their caps and saluted the ballerinas as if they were magical abstractions, butterflies made of human flesh, ambassadors from a paradise yet to come. Seeing the tremendous impression they made, Vladimir Monomaque thought to satisfy the multitude by tossing out handfuls of coins, which for dignity’s sake no one picked up. Marina Leopoldovna, refusing to flash her famous smile, preferred to sink into the seat of the car and, under the pretext of an attack of sneezing, hid her face in her shawl.

  When the Ballet and the committee disappeared, eight immigration inspectors entered the ship to receive the Jewish farmers. Seeing those bizarre costumes, those long beards, those interminable sideburns, they were astounded. Then they burst into curses: “We asked for farmers, not a bunch of lunatics! These skinny worms couldn’t even lift a shovel!”

  The immigrants shook their pale hands to show the calluses they’d acquired on the voyage by rubbing their hands with ropes.

  The chief inspector howled, “Captain, send barbers! No one gets off this ship wearing a beard, sideburns, and long hair! And to salute our flag, they all have to take off those ridiculous little hats!”

  When some of the stewards appeared waving razors and scissors, the women went down on their knees howling doggish lamentations, and the men gathered behind them intent on dying before they let anyone cut off a single hair. Not knowing what to do, the immigration authorities went up to the bridge to communicate with their superiors by telegraph.

  Icho Melnik said, “Our compatriots worry a lot about something that matters little. After all, how important can it be to avoid for more
or less time what is inevitable? They’ll end up shaven!” He spread his arms to receive his brother Yumo, who came to Buenos Aires three years earlier. It was he who sent the tickets. He ran a bordello for the wealthy in the center of town. All the girls were foreigners, preferably Jews, because they were the most sought after.

  The fat pimp spoke with his brother in hushed tones, and then said to his new friends, “Alejandro, Jashe, Simón, following what my master teaches, the site where we stop matters little, as long as we can arrange a good exit. For the moment, you have no place to stay. It would be better if you came to our bordello. There, no one will bother you and, in exchange for some small services, you can stay as long as you need. There are lots of empty rooms. While Jashe helps in the kitchen and Simón makes the beds and brings fresh towels to the rooms, Alejandro can give dance classes to our protégées so their backsides fatten. Agreed? Well? Then come along with us. The authorities, with regard to whores and money discretely allotted, will provide all the facilities we need to disembark.

  In the car that carried them to the center of the city, distancing them from miserable neighborhoods and bringing them closer to baroque constructions where myriad styles and luxurious materials all mixed together, Alejandro was discovering within his spirit an infinite field of new possibilities. Unable to contain himself, he poured into the ears of my terrified grandmother words so optimistic that in this world, sinister for being so unknown, they glittered like demented jewels.