Where the Bird Sings Best

by Alejandro Jodorowsky

  All the workers had to cover their mouths and noses with huge handkerchiefs to avoid the stench, but the ammoniac composition of the fumes made their neutralization impossible. A smoke with the taste of acid penetrated and bit the throat. Amid coughing and gagging, the workers, to fight the cold, tried never to stand still and would run from one place to another as if insane. Alejandro, forgetting his pains, gave himself to that crazy tumult with profound piety, but at the same time feeling an aesthetic pleasure, because he saw it as a beautiful dance. He understood that authentic art appears only in a secret place that resides between life and death. As his blue shoes began turning white, the voice of God repeated to him: “There is a precise instant when the world is marvelous: now.”

  Meanwhile, in the seven-by-nine-foot room, Jashe painted the walls white; constructed a folding bed; and invented, using boards and hinges, a table that could be hung on the wall after dinner and a box containing five more boxes, one inside the others, that could be used as chairs. Thus she began her struggle to dominate space: every single thing she allowed to enter that room was essential and had a preplanned shape so it would fit in with the others. Objects took on the existence of domestic animals. (My grandmother never forgot her tender blanket made from stray dog fur. She would call the dogs over, give them leftover food, and then shave them. Nor did she forget her humble wooden cup that each morning opened its mouth like an enchanted frog.) And that way, like someone who comes home and can’t find their cat and anxiously looks for it in all the neighborhood streets, if suddenly she did not have her electric stove, a solid and simple apparatus in which she cooked (using bones and vegetables picked out of the market garbage) the most complex stews, she would have suffered.

  Because the tenderness she had for her small helpers was corresponded, and they, she was sure, were worried about completing a labor impossible to obtain outside of an atmosphere like that one, Jashe wrote one afternoon to her sister Shoske:

  “A plant the doorman gave me because I begged him not to throw it in the garbage had apparently died. With its dead stems and all, I put it next to the window and stopped worrying about it for a long time. But every day I watered it, distractedly, thinking about other things. Suddenly, just yesterday, I don’t know through what miracle, it produced a leaf. It surprised me so much I began to cry. I understood that love is a grand thank you to the other for existing.”

  Two months before Sara Felicidad turned four, Alejandro arrived with a bouquet of daisies and his minimal weekly pay:

  “Jashe, this morning God said to me: My son, today you must stop working. You’ve grown thin, you’re losing your hair, your teeth are beginning to rot, your cartilage is inflamed, you have a tumor, your lungs have become weak, and you can no longer move with your former grace. But your soul has been forged in suffering and shines like a great firefly. Go back to dancing: those physical limitations are your honor and make you a man instead of a machine. Show the world what Art is. Yes, Jashe, I wasted my time teaching the children of the rich. Now I will dance by myself, but once. Sincere works should not be repeated; they have to be unique. The performance will be short, ten minutes, but it will have such intensity that anyone who sees it will never forget it. I don’t want to present myself in a theater but out in the open, at night in the kiosk of a poor plaza.

  “I won’t need spotlights, because I will be light. Even if there is no moon or stars, everyone will see me. And I don’t need an orchestra: the voice of my daughter is enough. Don’t worry about costumes; God tells me that only a naked body can reach the sacred. The press will take an interest. It will be an historic event. After my performance, dance will change. I want rich and poor to come, to mix around me. The wealthy, at the end of the act, will toss banknotes, which will be distributed to the poor. I was first dancer at the Imperial Russian Ballet; Argentina has to respect me. While I’m visiting newspaper offices, you, Jashe, will have to work.”

  My grandmother was hired as a worker in a felt hat factory. The site was watery and humid. The fumes from the mercury used in the preparation of the hair formed a thick mist that poisoned the place. With her hair and clothes always wet, breathing in that vapor, Jashe began to tremble, a tremor that spread to her lips, her tongue, her head, until it took over her whole body. She put up with those symptoms with a smile, and then rheumatic pains soon followed. Because visibility was so poor, several of her fellow workers lost fingers, and one child laborer, nine years of age, dropped dead, poisoned.

  Not many articles announcing the show appeared in the newspapers. The journalists saw a filthy giant limping toward them wearing a tattered suit, his eyes opened far too wide, speaking an incomprehensible Spanish, and took him for a drug addict. The few lines that did appear were written with contempt and mockery. My grandfather did not lose courage:

  “Only a few spectators will come, but if they are high-quality spectators, they will be enough. Only twelve witnesses saw Christ, and all humanity learned of Him. My dance will be engraved in the collective memory.”

  The great day came. That morning they celebrated Sara Felicidad’s birthday. They gave her a can of peaches in syrup and a dancer made of rags whose hair was made of wool dyed yellow. That afternoon, Alejandro gave her the final instructions:

  “You will sing without stopping, no matter what happens, until I stop dancing. You will forget all the songs you know to allow your voice to take the paths it wishes. Make yourself into a channel open to the passage of two rivers: the dark and the celestial. What your will tries to do is of no interest to you, only what you receive will be good.”

  When night came, Alejandro stood in the center of the kiosk of a rundown plaza, and his daughter began to sing. The only spectator was Jashe. No one, poor or rich, came. No reporters either. Some dogs tried to howl, but the girl’s voice enchanted them, and soon they listened to her in silence, wagging their tails. Rising from the half-light like long crystal knives, my mother’s voice reached every window. Strange sounds that were not interrupted by silences, thanks to the fact that her vocal chords vibrated both when she breathed in and when she breathed out. Those superhuman notes woke exhausted families of workers and little by little the plaza filled with men, women, and children who came up to the kiosk with the same respect with which they entered church every Sunday.

  Alejandro Prullansky, very slowly, as if he had a thousand years to do it, took off his clothes. It took him half an hour to remove his trousers and his shirt, the only clothes he was wearing. He kept his white shoes on. With the same slowness, he crouched to open the cardboard suitcase and remove from it an apple. With a serious, rhythmic voice, impregnated with an immense goodness he said, “The artist defines the world and transforms it into his work. If a poet eats this apple, that act is a poem. If a musician does it, it’s a symphony. And a sculptor, on eating it, will be making a sculpture. I dance.”

  And, slowing the velocity of his movements even more, he bit the fruit. Sara Felicidad and he, in the darkness of that cloudy night, looked like two black statues. Despite the intensity of the singing, which was so fine it cut the leaves of the few trees there like a scalpel, dropping a dark green rain on the heads of the workers, the noise of the chewing arose intact and gave the steely tones of the girl a watery bed. No one blinked. Aside from the sound, nothing was happening, but the shadows of the kiosk promised that something important was going to take place.

  Alejandro opened his spirit in two wings of great length and absorbed the taste of the apple. From the center of his brain came an iridescent ray that pierced the sky. The clouds were swept away by his breath, and stars appeared, which began to spin around the seeds he kept in a triangle on his extended tongue. There he placed his awareness and showed it to the public as if it were a consecrated host. Following the silvery roads the voice of his daughter showed him when she was bathed in the light of the stars, he launched the crown of his thoughts into space. The sacrificial animal appeared, a man of pure flesh, headless, pouring out his redeeming
blood to quench the thirst of so many people in misery. That was the mission of Art. Now he had to overcome his swollen joints, give power to his wasted lungs, recover the elegance of his footwork, and gesture toward the point where limits disappear.

  He removed six bottles from his suitcase; removed the corks; emptied the gasoline they contained over his entire body; lit a match; set fire to himself; and, transformed into a bonfire, showed human beings what true dance was: a body making sublime movements in full ecstasy as it was being consumed.

  Jashe made a shout of horror, then she covered her mouth with her hands, ashamed of herself, of her egoism. The beloved was giving himself to the world, dying for it, and for that very reason, causing an immortal Art to be born. By including Death in the creation of beauty, he ended death.

  Sara Felicidad, obeying her father’s order—“You will sing without stopping no matter what happens”—saw him run, leap, laugh, and combine marvelous steps, all with his flesh spurting flames like a sun. That image remained engraved in her mind, and she transmitted it to me, her son, every night during my childhood. So that as I would fall asleep, she would sing me a lullaby where her father, transformed into a star, crossed the firmament, granting men a Destiny:

  “Making tracks in the sky is like opening their soul. That torch Alejandro lit, you, who bear the same name, must in turn transmit it so his sacrifice won’t be in vain. Someday, thanks to you, humanity will become aware of this ephemeral spectacle, eternal monument of the art of dancing, and millions of hand will applaud your grandfather with thanks.”

  Prullansky, the giant, without realizing he was dying, almost burned to a crisp, made an enormous leap and, like a bird with long red and yellow feathers, fell in the center of the plaza. The people who had witnessed the act, respectful, immobile, fascinated, were suddenly possessed by panic. The beauty seemed to them terrible, and they ran screaming to their houses to close doors and windows, afraid the monster would enter in order to burn up the little they owned. The noise of shutters and wooden frames slamming on sills was interpreted by Jashe as the announcement of future applause. Her husband gave up his soul dancing and, in full flight, fell to the cement pavement to become a pile of smoking bones.

  The child stopped singing. Her mother removed the Tarot from her bosom and, card by card, burned it in the glowing coals, where the shoes’ remains were glowing like two red rubies. During the fire, they had recovered their original red.

  “There will never be another like him, Sara Felicidad. His memory will accompany us forever. I’ll live alone only so that you can grow up well, but in reality what you see is a body moved by the tiniest part of my soul. The rest went with him. The woman who will marry again, have more children, get old, and die will be a different woman.”

  Sara Felicidad witnessed the change to her mother’s face. Her skin, with its mother-of-pearl sheen, darkened; her nostrils became smaller, allowing only two needle-fine breaths of air to pass; from the edge of her lips toward her chin, fine wrinkles snaked along; and her eyes became covered by an invisible curtain that separated her from life. The Jashe of today was possessed by the Jashe of the future, a long-suffering, indifferent lady, her sensibility asleep, passing through the days like a ship with no navigator. Before submerging her daughter in that gray existence, she said, “I’m going to ask that as long as you are with me that you never sing again.”

  In that moment, my mother was four years old. Tall, like her father, she looked ten. The same golden hair reached down to her waist, and her eyes were dark blue, translucent at the edges, each one as big as her mouth, they shined with millennial depth. Alejandro’s burning did not perturb her. On the contrary, it was an example of strength, enrichment of soul, treasure of beauty, fountain of joy. But Jashe’s request fell on her like a fatal lightning bolt, a threat that was not only moral but also organic. Her body fell in agony. To take away her singing was also to rip out her tongue, fill her heart with sand, burn her wealth of life in one blow. She had to defend herself. She had to mature in just a few minutes, establish around her innocence the armor of an adult. Down her legs ran a hot, thick, sticky liquid. Blood. At the age of four, she had her first menstruation. She ceased to be a child and became the protector of that semi-empty shell that her mother now was. Since she was forbidden to sing, she also stopped talking. But, absolute mistress of her interior world, she filled it with music. She ceaselessly repeated songs she knew and immediately invented others. She created for herself a symphony orchestra and composed her accompaniments. And that way, developing her mute voice more and more, she became an opera singer who dominated all registers. For years she was a performer as well as her own audience. That permanent interior singing bestowed on her a happiness that allowed her to survive in the sad world that was going to swallow a large part of her youth.

  Jashe put the calcified bones of her husband into a cracker box, which she tossed into the Río de la Plata. She tied the box to a rubber ball so it would float until it became lost in the ocean. Then she worked one final week in the hat factory, and one Monday in the morning she went to ask help from the Jewish Colonization Association.

  Aboard the Weser, Marla had told her that the Jewish immigrants, who had separate kitchen equipment and livestock so they could eat kosher food, were going to Argentina at the invitation of the Jewish Colonization Association, which had at its disposal more than almost five hundred thousand acres of land and maintained close ties with the highest spheres of both the provincial and the federal government. The purpose of this society was not to extract earnings from its enormous investments but to establish in the new country an ample and solid stratum of Jewish peasants who would, each of them, work their own land and derive from it a convenient living. Therefore, the JCA could easily give her a farm on the pampa. After all, she was still as Jewish as the others, and, despite the tremor that shook her body, she was able to farm a piece of land and get crops that would feed herself and her daughter.

  To save the trolley fare, she walked with her daughter from the industrial outskirts to the center of Buenos Aires, twelve miles. They were exhausted when they reached a five-story building with a façade of white marble and no windows but with two enormous, light-blue columns on both sides of its entry gate, where a six-pointed star was shining. The haughty luxury of this palace curved Jashe’s shoulders and made her aware of the hunger biting her stomach. If something could get them out of misery, it was this institution. She nervously looked over at Sara Felicidad. She looked more Russian than anything else. She sighed in resignation. In any case, her husband’s name was written in the passports, and she could do nothing to hide the fact that she was the widow of a goy. She shook her stitched-up overcoat and did the same with her daughter’s, naively trying with a few pats to turn their rags into proper clothing.

  She timidly pushed the metal doors, whose hinges were so well greased that they opened wide. Not finding a living soul, mother and daughter wandered the gleaming stone corridor in this labyrinth decorated with pictures representing the life of Moses. Finally they entered a gigantic hall filled with silent men modestly dressed in peasant clothes, pale women with sad backs, and astonishingly thin children. Their fetid breath told Jashe that they, like her, had empty stomachs. They were all staring toward a barred little window, at which an elegant functionary with slicked-down hair, rings, and a gold bracelet arrived to observe them. He was as severe and immobile as a wax manikin.

  One of the immigrants, a being who seemed to be thirty years old in his body and seventy in his face (because he was toothless), approached him to say in the hushed tones of despair: “Please allow me, Mr. Representative of our worthy association, to introduce myself: Moisés Latt, elected by chance to speak for the colony of Clara. Our penury is so great that we have come to ask you to communicate to Baroness Clara de Hirsch, widow of our benefactor, who has left us orphans with his premature decease, this letter, which I will now read to you:

  Madam: With all our hearts we long to bec
ome a nation of farmers, as your husband dreamed. But help us to persist, so our children do not die of hunger and need before reaching that goal.”

  The functionary opened the barred window; stuck out his pudgy hand; accepted the letter; and without saying a word, closed the window again and disappeared into the palace’s interior. After half an hour, a natty gentleman, looking rather like a banker, appeared at a high balcony and whispered, perhaps because raising his voice was unsuitable for his position, “The JCA has learned of your problems and will communicate this missive to the Baroness. For now, we can do nothing more. Return to your hearths, and if the Council decides to give you help once again, we will inform you. Now, please leave the hall quickly, because we have to wax it for Shabbat. Thank you.”

  And making a slight bow of farewell, he stepped back until he disappeared. The settlers remained immobile, thinking over with difficulty, a situation hard for them to digest.

  The toothless man smiled bitterly: “We’ve done all we can. We propose, and now may God dispose. It may be that this time He decides to stop punishing us for some old sin of which we have no memory.”

  Dragging their feet, they began to make for the exit to the street. Seeing that the place was emptying out, Jashe ran to Moisés Latt and tugged at his sleeve. (Why did she choose him and not another of the hundred or so men who filled the hall? It was certainly not because he was handsome. That mouth, with its black, hard gums, like a crack in dry dirt; that head, shaved as if by knife slashes, which tossed left and right two huge ears with fleshy lobes covered with hair; that skin of a brownness tending toward watery chocolate did not constitute a very attractive combination. Nevertheless, she wanted to join with him for the rest of her life. He was the insignificant companion that answered the need of her worn-out heart.)

  Moisés Latt was thankful, in the deep pit of his solitude, for that tug at his sleeve. He was the human version of an abandoned dog: an orphan, ugly, poor, toothless, a pariah. When he was ten, during a pogrom, a Cossack forced him to drink a bottle of poison. He was dying from spring until fall. Along with the autumn leaves fell his thirty-two teeth. He had to learn to speak all over again because his tongue, deprived of the barrier of incisors and canines, tended to fly out of his mouth along with a rain of saliva. His gums hardened until he was able to chew the small ration of hard meat allotted him by the community of Grodno, the place where he was born by means of a long cut that opened his dying mother’s belly. By clacking one gum against the other, he could imitate the sound of Spanish castanets. Thanks to that noise, highly celebrated by the cooks, he managed to double his meager ration of meat (and shrink his dignity a bit more). He was delighted that this lady had a daughter. He never aspired to have a wife but a mother—distant, absent, as dead in life as that small woman, young but aged, scum of an implacable society. He and she, remains of different shipwrecks, stuck on the same shore.