Where the Bird Sings Best

by Alejandro Jodorowsky

  Near Mapocho Station, they took a tram that went along San Pablo to Matucana Avenue. There they got off and continued walking until they turned left onto Andes. Beyond was Manzana de Altos. A square block of two-story houses (they could have been taller, but because of the earthquakes structures had to be smaller), all linked together. There was a legend that the police didn’t go in there because the few who dared enter never came out. Their bodies disappeared. Well, 98 percent of their bodies disappeared, to be precise. The remaining 2 percent, the testicles, were tossed from a window onto the street in a tin can.

  The block was a refuge for cardsharps; worn-out whores; pickpockets; drunks with rotten peaches instead of noses; crazy children; unemployed workers; and blurry, perpetually pregnant women. At the center of the block was a patio with an opening like a pit, where everyone threw their garbage and emptied their chamber pots. Right below ran the powerful San Carlos canal. More than one child had fallen in. The current never asked questions and just carried everything away.

  Lola, behind Doña Pair, made her way through the labyrinth of passageways, dodging from time to time a rat. The stench of wine came from every room, along with frying, rancid sweat, and excrement. If a ray of sunshine came in, it filled with dust, and its golden stain on the leaden ground was usurped by a mangy cat. No one bothered them. Carmelita lived in a room that opened onto the central patio. Her white door was framed with flowerpots filled with lilies and carnations. She’d glued a blazing heart of Jesus onto her windowpane. From within came an agreeable chirping of canaries mixed with the aroma of toasted flour.

  Doña Pair opened the door, which was not locked, and without announcing herself, had Lola enter too. There, in that clean cubicle, with only a bed, a table, and a gas burner where a pot was warming, was a tiny old lady, almost a dwarf, wearing a chocolate-colored bathrobe and some high men’s boots. She had one incisor in her mouth, her eyes had lost almost all color and were a faded gray, on her head a net of fine white hairs did not hide her freckled baldness, and her hands looked like two small seas of wrinkles.

  With the voice of a child, the mummy said, “Come on in, girls. I’ve got hot milk and corn porridge. Would you like some?”

  She got off the bed where she’d been sitting and, caressing her guitar as if it were a spoiled cat, walked slowly toward the table, whistling like three canaries, and prepared two little plates of the sugary corn porridge. Meanwhile, the blind woman pulled out a roll of banknotes tied up with a pink thread and put it into a plaster figurine of a little man squatting down, who seemed to be defecating a peach pit.

  “Thanks, Pair, for feeding my shitass there. God will give it back tripled. Oh, I see your little friend also brought her guitar! Let’s sing. After all, that’s why we came into this world.”

  Lola began to play along with the old ladies, but after a few chords, she felt alone. Doña Pair and Carmelita strummed with such delicacy that almost imperceptible musical phrases arose from their instruments. She made a huge effort and managed to distinguish the beauty of the melody, a lullaby so tender, so saturated with maternal love that her eyelids became heavy, and she was about to fall asleep like a baby full of milk. She was distracted by something like a cool breeze making its way through the sunbaked grass of summer.

  The old women, without moving their lips, their eyes fixed on the same infinity point, were singing. When Lola got used to that almost total absence of volume, she could listen to the words, verses as perfect as a pearl necklace, intense, revealing a sacred respect for life. Like clouds driven by the wind, the words sometimes changed rhythm and the song would acquire such force that its phrases seemed like rays of light. Then the immense calm would return, along with the oceanic sway of the rhymes. Lola began to suffer; those two ancients, luminous worms in the heart of a rotten apple, were creating an art that would not be transmitted for lack of witnesses. She did not deserve to be the only public for that marvel. That music was a national patrimony. All Chileans should know it. What a crime to allow such a heritage to be lost! Trying not to be noticed, she took a slip of paper out of her purse and tried to write down the music and the words that floated like a gold thread above the daily noise. Carmelita instantly stopped playing, as did the blind woman.

  “That scratching of pencil over paper is so ugly! You’re offending the angels, my girl. If you wanted to write all they sing, there wouldn’t be enough forests to produce enough paper. You want to give others the songs you yourself don’t know how to receive. That’s laxity. You interrupted a holy rhythm. It may be that without wanting to you’ve provoked something terrible. Let’s pray that the Holy Spirit forgives the wound your pencil made in Him.”

  The two old women made my aunt kneel and began to pray for her. Loud knocks shook the door.

  “Open up, granny, your throat cutters are here.”

  Six men, neither old nor young, in shirtsleeves, wearing muddy white sneakers and jeans whose right hand pocket was inflated by a knife, entered. They were smiling drunken smiles, and each one carried four bottles of pisco. Since there were no chairs, some sat on the edge of the bed and others on the table, their legs dangling.

  “We were lucky, Doña Carmelita. We mugged a rich guy, and we’re celebrating. You’ll have to forgive us. We still have some pisco left, and we want to down it with a musical accompaniment. So, play. You know that nobody denies a poor man a song. And your friends can accompany you. To your health!”

  The blind woman, used to dealing with drunken oafs, calmly adapted to the situation and, strumming her guitar, cackled out a jolly tune. The mummy accompanied her and invited Lola to throw off her stupor, whispering in her ear, “Don’t even think of putting up any resistance, girl. Sing without stopping until the wolves turn into groundhogs.”

  Following the galloping rhythm of the three women, each bandit emptied a bottle of pisco with one swallow. The effect was instantaneous. Their gestures became soft. They sweated, and with swollen lips babbled incoherent phrases at the same time they made the floor shake with their heels. The jiggling went on for more than an hour. They demanded song after song, their favorite Chilean cuecas. Then, worn out, they drank half of the second bottle to get back into form. Then they demanded sailor songs, which they accompanied in their harsh voices. They went on drinking.

  When they finished the other half, they began to get sad. The trio interpreted tonadas, songs from southern Chile, that talked about rain hanging from the sky like rags; about forests without owners, dying of sadness during the month of August; about swallows with clay masks. The third liter went down their throats like a funeral procession. Each swallow was a flaming coffin, and suddenly their sorrow burned off, and with their hearts turned into wounds, they began to laugh so hard it seemed they were vomiting. They rolled around on the floor, covering the tiles with spit and tears.

  The most powerful took out his knife and sliced the air. They stopped laughing. Suddenly they found themselves there, crouching down, not knowing who they were or in what world they were sitting. Everything lost meaning. It was strange to be “that,” a body with head, trunk, arms, and legs. An infinitely empty instant. Ugly women playing at being scarabs and singing, far away, incomprehensible. Horrified at themselves, to be a man or a spider is equally odd. Someone made a voice that didn’t belong to him resound in order to mumble words he half understood: “Stop playing, ladies.”

  The singers instantly obeyed. The satisfied killer farted. Then he smiled, compressing his lip and stretching his mouth in a grimace that seemed to split his face in two: “My fellow muggers, I think this ruin, Carmelita, has lived enough. God’s going to kill her soon, don’t you think?”

  “We do!”

  “Well then, why should we let that asshole have all the fun. Let’s kill her ourselves! Agreed?”

  “Agreed!”

  “And you, Grandma, do you agree too?”

  The old lady, with her usual calm, answered, “If God decides that you are the one to finish me off, I agree.”r />
  “Forget all that resignation, Grandma. Before I kill you, I’m going to rape you. What do you think of that?”

  “I’d say I was sorry for you. I’m so ugly you’re going to suffer.”

  “That’s just what I want: to add pain to the pain of being alive. Destroying the good is what counts. In this shitty world, goodness is the worst violence.”

  And giving a sudden roar, he leapt on top of the old woman, pulled off her underwear, spread her legs, pushed them back over her head, and penetrated her brutally, kissing that flaccid, wrinkled mouth with his entire soul. Barking euphorically, another two jumped onto Doña Pair, splitting her black glasses and sticking their tongues into her eye sockets to lick her cataract-covered pupils. Then with two sweeps of the knife that opened two red furrows in her flesh, they ripped off her skirt and penetrated her sex and her anus simultaneously. The three remaining raped Lola. The one who got her mouth shouted, “Do a good job sucking. If you bite me, I’ll slit your throat!”

  The two old ladies, with that peace you see in gazelles hanging from the jaws of a lion, allowed themselves to be tortured without moving or screaming. The chief murderer buried his dagger in Carmelita’s neck. A spurt of blood left her, pushed by a long, intense wheeze that became fainter and fainter, but never finished, as if it were a serpent of air with an infinite tail. The men began shouting, because at the sight of the red blood, all six ejaculated at the same time. Following the example of the leader, they took out their knives and sank them into the body of the oldest woman. Amid insults, grunts, and coughing, they dismembered her, emptied out her guts, and decapitated her. Only when they shoved the plaster shitass in her vulva did the blind woman start screaming, as if she were seeing it. They threw themselves on top of her and cut her, too, to pieces.

  Pale, huffing and puffing, soaked with blood, they opened their last bottles and emptied them in the pot of corn porridge. To make it look like a bowl of punch, they threw in the four ears they’d cut off and a bunch of fingers. They forced themselves to swallow more than their throats could take. Then belching and belching, they stared, with wide smiles, like little boys asking someone to complement them for something clever, at Lola, who sobbed, hugging Carmelita’s guitar. The surfeit of alcohol began to drown them. They piled up the body parts in the only sheet on the bed, made a package, and stepped out onto the patio. The chief walked over to the pit that led to the San Carlos canal, staggered, and threw the remains into the current below.

  “Bye-bye, little friends. See you later.”

  He smiled, thought for a second, looked toward the square piece of sky that crowned the rectangular chimney full of windows, where neighbors looked out with the indifference of nocturnal animals, and said, “Let’s not leave for later what we can do today! Anyone with guts should follow me!”

  Jumping like a broken doll, he dove into the pit. One of his comrades shouted, laughing, “A perfect night for a swim!” And he too dove toward his death. Barking with desperate jubilation, the other four followed suit. The inhabitants of Manzana de Altos halfheartedly applauded each dive. Silence came, slipped under the white door, and filled up the bloody room like thick syrup. It seemed that all the calm of the Universe had concentrated there. Lola, without understanding why they’d left her alive, threaded a needle she found in a small sewing basket, mended her destroyed clothes, combed her hair, put the old lady’s guitar in its case covered with flowered cloth, and, holding it close, limping, made her way through the labyrinth of passages and short stairways, trying to find the exit. No one spoke to her. From time to time, a door would open and an index finger would point to where she should go. After an eternity, she found herself on the street, knowing that in a couple of months she’d have to have an abortion, that her ovaries would become infected, that after an almost mortal fever, they would have to be removed, and that never in her life would she have an orgasm. But nothing of that seemed terrible, because with the holy guitar she held in her hands, she would be able to capture thousands and thousands of angels in the form of songs.

  What happened to Fanny in that damned year was very different. She had no talent for being a victim. Above all things, she admired executioners, considering them champions. When she turned sixteen, she considered herself a professional. The dwarf whore, Ruby of the Street, had nothing left to teach her. For a teacher she had her body. Her red hair hung down to her waist like a gush of blood; her legs, fleshy but long, marched along with the elegance of a giraffe; her thick lips looked like two sleeping piranhas; her fertile pubis produced hairs so hard they passed through whatever she was wearing like tiny flames. Each breast was so full it seemed to contain a baby, and her prominent ass—fat, jolly, aromatic, with its deep crevice—made all temples envious. Sculpted like that, she felt able to drag along any well-off man by the moustache. The only weakness she had left was her virginity.

  Considering it dangerous to give it to a man—it might create sentimental ties—she decided to use a chair as a lover. She flipped it over, greased up one of its legs, and squatting over it, absorbed the wooden column as she finished eating an empanada. Now she was ready.

  To move the world she would need a fulcrum point. A strange intuition—so strange that despite the fact that she obeyed it, she herself found it insane—ordered her to look for that point in the outskirts of the city, along the highway to Valparaíso. She walked for six miles, until she found a dingy gas station with blind hens squabbling about on the cement floor, covered with black grease. The attendant, a wide, undefined man with a tonsure-shaped bald spot and hands full of fingers as large as bananas, fell to his knees, splashed around in the oily gelatin, kissed her feet, and ran to light a candle at the statue of the Virgin Mary, who reigned in a niche protected by green, fly-specked satin curtains, when he saw Fanny and heard her say, “Unless you object, sir, I’ll be your lover for a short time. The only thing I ask for is a dish of food, a bed, that you bathe before sleeping with me, and that you let me dispense the gasoline. I don’t need a salary.”

  Did Fanny put her trust in the will of Destiny or did she force it to act as she wished? Impossible to explain. If it was absurd to sink into a cloaca in order to reach the heights of society, perhaps for that reason, because reality is not logical, it worked out for her: after three weeks of patient waiting, the luxurious car of a government minister stopped there. My aunt observed the man, the son of people from Cataluña: in his fifties, a chest like the prow of a ship, teeth like a horse, and the short legs of a thieving conqueror. She saw in his dry skin the melancholy absence of pleasure and in his irritated nostrils cocaine substituted for love. When the driver, a dark-skinned man proud of his uniform with cap and gloves, gave her a tip, she exhaled deeply into his face, a breeze hot enough to make him drunk: “Pick me up tonight, as soon as you’re free. I feel like dancing.”

  He obeyed her order. As soon as night began to fall, the automobile arrived, flashed its lights, and blew its horn three times. Fanny, wearing her impeccable white dress, her red high heels, her mane of hair exalted by brilliantine, gave a farewell pat to the garage attendant’s sex, sat down next to the chauffeur, plastered her lips to his mouth, and absorbed his entire tongue. The dark-skinned chauffeur, shocked, thought her vigorous sucking would pull it out by the roots, but in a fit of manliness, desire ate away at his brain like an acid; he relaxed and, almost choking, yielded his rough appendage. For this woman he would sacrifice even the ability to speak. She released him and told him to get going, and as they approached Santiago, she bent over between the shift lever and his legs and worked so hard that Ceferino went off the road, tardily slammed on the brakes, and found himself ejaculating with a dying cow under his wheels.

  That’s how Fanny began her ascent. She never lied to anyone. She warned each man that she was a short-term gift. From Ceferino she went on to the doorman at the Ministry, from the doorman to the messenger, from him to an assistant to the subsecretary, from there to the secretary, then to the chief bodyguard, the
n to the principal councilor, and finally she was received by Don Manuel Garrázabal, the minister. All that in under fourteen weeks.

  The frowning official looked at her above the photo of his wife, a vain devotee, and a pair of children, tyrants growing up to be cynics. He coughed, lit a cigarette, and offered it to Fanny. My aunt uncrossed her legs, pulled her skirt up (she wore no panties), and introduced the cigarette into her small sex with its pink lips. That way, with her thighs spread, she showed that she knew how to smoke through there, exhaling spirals of smoke. Meanwhile, as if that circus act were the most natural thing in the world, she proposed an amorous relationship to the functionary in exchange for a spacious house where she could carry on her business, that is, a luxury bordello.

  The man went crazy. With febrile enthusiasm, he fell on his knees between those alabaster legs and kissed her sex so hastily that he swallowed the cigarette. After half a dozen rapid, nervous assaults, he agreed to everything—but only if she swore absolute fidelity to him. Fanny, who said her name was Princess Rahula and showed, as proof of her blue blood, the black beauty mark she had on her forehead, accepted the killer imposed on her as a guard dog, so that at night, with his pistol in his belt, he would sleep under her bed.

  That sacrifice was worthwhile. She created a decent bordello, which had a sublime success. Her ideas were original. Instead of demanding a mansion in a well-to-do neighborhood, which would end up generating scandals among its sanctimonious neighbors, she asked for all the little houses along a passage off seedy Bulnes Street, always full of atrocious whores. The men who ventured into that territory came out with their lapels destroyed by the avid tugging of the women trying to seduce them, all ugly, drunk, and falling apart. Politicians, important businessmen, famous men, aristocrats. To each one she offered a complete apartment supplied with a salon, bar, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and a garage from which they could enter the house. That way, no busybody could see the client get out of his car, and discretion was absolute.