Suffering, consolation; consolation, suffering. The cycle has no end. When I brought the shoe shiner’s box to his parents they hastily placed it in the hands of Luciano, the youngest brother. That same afternoon, the boy began shining shoes in the town square.
The fact is that during this era, when I was a child of an unknown race (Jaime did not call himself a Jew, but a Chilean son of Russians), no one ever spoke to me outside of books. My father and mother, at work in the shop from eight in the morning until ten at night, put their faith in my literary abilities and left me to educate myself. And what they saw I could not do for myself, they asked the Rebbe to do.
Jaime knew very well that his father, my grandfather Alejandro, had been expelled from Russia by the Cossacks, arriving in Chile not by his own choice but only because a charitable society shipped him where there was room for him and his family. Completely uprooted, speaking only Yiddish and rudimentary Russian, he descended into madness. In his schizophrenia he invented the character of a Kabbalist sage whose body had been devoured by bears during one of his voyages to another dimension. Laboriously making shoes without the aid of machinery, he conversed constantly with his imaginary friend and master. When he died, Jaime inherited this master. Even though Jaime knew full well that the Rebbe was a hallucination, the effect was contagious. The specter began to visit him each night in his dreams. My father, a fanatical atheist, endured the invasion of this character as a form of torture and did his best to exorcise the phantom—by stuffing my head full of it as if it were real. I was not taken in by this ploy. I always knew that the Rebbe was imaginary but Jaime, perhaps thinking that by naming me Alejandro he had made me as crazy as my grandfather, would tell me, “I don’t have time to help you with that homework, go ask the Rebbe,” or more often still, “Go play with the Rebbe!” This was convenient for him because in his misinterpretation of Marxist ideas he had decided not to buy me any toys. “Those objects are the products of the evil consumer economy. They teach you to be a soldier, to turn life into a war, to believe that all manufactured things are a source of pleasure through having miniature versions of them. Toys turn a child into a future assassin, an exploiter, not to mention a compulsive buyer.” The other boys had toy swords, tanks, lead soldiers, train sets, stuffed animals, but I had nothing. I used the Rebbe as a toy, lending him my voice, imagining his advice, letting him guide my actions. Later, having developed my imagination, I expanded my animated conversations. I endowed the clouds with speech, as well as the rocks, the sea, some of the trees in the town square, the antique cannon outside the city hall, furniture, insects, hills, clocks, and the old people with nothing left to wait for who sat like wax sculptures on the benches in the town square. I could speak with all things, and everything had something to say to me. Assuming the point of view of things outside of myself I felt that all things were conscious, that everything was endowed with life, that things I considered inanimate were slower entities, that things I considered invisible were faster entities. Every consciousness had a different velocity. If I adapted my own consciousness to these speeds, I could initiate rewarding relationships.
The umbrella that lay in a corner, covered with dust, lamented bitterly, “Why did they bring me here, where it never rains? I was made to protect from rain, without it I have no purpose.” “You’re wrong,” I told it. “You still have a purpose; if not at present, at least in the future. Show me patience and faith. One day it will rain, I assure you.” After this conversation a storm broke for the first time in many years, and there was a real deluge that lasted for a whole day. As I walked to school with the umbrella finally open, the raindrops came down with such force that its fabric was shredded in no time. A hurricane-force wind tore it from my hands and carried it in tatters off into the sky. I imagined the pleasant murmurings of the umbrella as it became a boat and happily navigated toward the stars after traversing the storm clouds . . .
Yearning hopelessly for some affectionate words from my father, I dedicated myself to observing him, watching his actions as if I were a visitor from another world. Having lost his father at the age of ten and needing to support his mother, brother, and two sisters, who were all younger than him, he had abandoned his studies and begun hard work. He could barely write, could read with difficulty, and spoke Spanish in a manner that was almost guttural. Actions were his true language. His territory was the street. A fervent admirer of Stalin he wore the same style of mustache, fashioned with his own hands the same kind of stiff-collared coat, and cultivated the same affable mannerisms behind which an infinite aggressiveness was concealed.
My paternal great-grandparents.
Fortunately, my maternal grandmother’s husband Moishe, who had lost his fortune in the stock market crash but still kept a little shop as a gold dealer, bore a resemblance to Gandhi due to his bald head, missing teeth, and large ears; this balanced things out. Fleeing the severity of the dictator, I took refuge at the knees of the saint. “Alejandrito, your mouth was not made for saying aggressive things; every hard word dries up your soul a little bit. I shall teach you to sweeten your words,” he said. And after painting my tongue with blue vegetable dye, he took a soft-haired brush a centimeter wide, dipped it in honey, and made as if to paint the inside of my mouth. “Now your words will have the color of the blue sky and the sweetness of honey.”
In contrast, for Jaime/Stalin life was an implacable struggle. Unable to slaughter his competitors, he ruined them instead. Casa Ukrania was an armored tank. Since the main street (Calle 21 de Mayo, named for a historic naval battle in which the hero Arturo Prat had turned his defeat at the hands of the Peruvians into a moral triumph) was lined with shops selling the same articles he was selling, he employed an aggressive sales tactic. He declared, “Abundance attracts the buyer; if the seller is prosperous that suggests that he is offering the best goods.” He filled the shelves of the shop with boxes, a sample of the contents sticking out of each box: the tip of a sock, the fold of a stocking, the cuff of a shirtsleeve, the strap of a brassiere, and so on. The store appeared to be full of merchandise, which was not the case, for each box was empty save for the item that was poking out.
In order to awaken customers’ desires he organized items into various lots rather than selling them separately and exhibited collections of things in cardboard boxes. For example, a pair of underwear, six drinking glasses, a clock, a pair of scissors, and a statuette of Our Lady of Mount Carmel; or a wool vest, a piggy bank, some lace garters, a sleeveless shirt, a communist flag, and so forth. All the lots had the same price. Like me, my father had discovered that all things are interrelated.
He hired exotic propagandists to stand in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the door. There was a different one every week. Each one, in his or her own way, would loudly extol the quality and low price of the articles for sale, inviting curious passersby to step inside Casa Ukrania, under no obligation to buy anything. They included, among others, a dwarf in a Tyrolean costume, a skinny man dressed as a nymphomaniacal black woman, a Carmen Miranda on stilts, a wax automaton who beat at the shop windows from the inside with a cane, a ghastly mummy, and a stentorian whose voice was so loud that his shouts could be heard a kilometer away. Hunger created artists; the out-of-work miners invented all sorts of disguises. They would make Dracula or Zorro costumes out of flour sacks from the mill that they had dyed black; masks and warrior’s capes from debris found in garbage cans. One of them brought along a mangy dog dressed in Chilean peasant clothes that danced on its hind paws; another brought a baby that cried like a seagull.
In those days, with no television and the cinema open only on Saturdays and Sundays, people were drawn to any kind of novelty. Add to this the beauty of my mother, who was tall, pale-skinned, with enormous breasts, who always spoke in a lilting voice and dressed in Russian peasant clothes, and one can understand how Jaime robbed his snoozing competitors of their customers.
The shop next door, the Cedar of Lebanon, had rough wooden tables instead
of glass display cases, there were no windows facing the street, and it was lit entirely by a single 60-watt bulb covered with dead insects. From the back room came a distinct odor of fried food. The owner, Mr. Omar, known to us as the Turk, was a short man; his wife was small like him but had elephantiasis in her legs, which were so swollen that although they were wrapped in black bandages they appeared ready to explode and cover the wood floor, gray from years of dust, with a layer of flesh. An invasion of spiders in their shop made up for the lack of customers.
One day, while sitting in a corner of our little courtyard reading Jules Verne’s In Search of the Castaways, I heard a heartrending wailing from the Turk’s yard, which was separated from ours by a brick wall. These cries, punctuated by long feminine “shhh” sounds, were so devastating that curiosity got the better of me and I climbed the wall. I saw the woman with the huge legs using a straw fan to shoo flies away from the scabs that almost entirely covered the body of a boy.
“What’s wrong with your son, señora?”
“Oh, it looks like an infection, little neighbor, but no. What’s happened is that he has lost his mind.”
“Lost his mind?”
“My husband is very sad because of bad business. My son confused this sadness with the wind. Covering himself with scabs to stop the bad air from touching his skin, he went mad. For him, time does not pass. He lives in seconds as long as the devil’s tail.”
It made me want to cry. I felt guilty on account of my father. With his Stalinist cruelty, he had ruined and devastated the Turk. And now his son was paying the painful price.
I returned to my room, opened the second floor window over the street, and jumped out. My bones held up under the impact, and I only scraped the skin off my knees. A commotion ensued. Blood ran down my legs. Jaime appeared, angrily pushed his way through the curious crowd, congratulated me for not crying, and carried me into Casa Ukrania to disinfect my wounds. Even though the alcohol burned me, I did not scream. In his role of Marxist warrior Jaime saw a sensitivity in me that he considered feminine, and he decided to teach me to be tough. “Men do not cry, and by their will they conquer pain . . .”
The first exercises were not difficult. He began by tickling my feet with a vulture’s feather. “You have to be able to not laugh!” I managed to withstand tickling not only on the soles of my feet, but also on my armpits and, in a total triumph, to remain serious when he stuck a feather in my nostrils. Laughter thus subjugated, my father said to me, “Very good . . . I’m beginning to be proud of you. Mind you, I said ‘beginning to be,’ not that I am proud yet! To win my admiration, you must show that you are not a coward and that you know how to resist pain and humiliation. Now, I’m going to hit you. Turn your cheek toward me. I’ll start by hitting you very gently. You tell me to hit harder. I’ll do that, more and more, as much as you ask me. I want to see how far you get.”
I was thirsty for love. In order to gain Jaime’s approval, I asked him to hit me harder and harder each time. As his eyes shone with what I took for admiration, my spirit became more and more inebriated. My father’s affection was more important to me than pain. I held out. Finally, I spat out blood and a piece of a tooth. Jaime uttered an exclamation of admiring surprise, took me in his muscular arms, and led me, running, to the dentist.
The nerve of my premolar, coming in contact with saliva and air, was causing me atrocious suffering. Don Julio, the local dentist, prepared a calming injection. Jaime whispered in my ear (I had never heard him speak in such a delicate manner), “You have carried yourself like I do; you are brave, you are a man. You don’t have to do what I’m going to ask, but if you do it, I will consider you worthy of being my son. Refuse the injection. Let your tooth be fixed without anesthesia. Conquer pain with your will. You can do it, you are like me!”
Never again in my life have I felt such terrible pain. (On second thought, I have—when the shaman Pachita removed a tumor from my liver with a hunting knife.) Don Julio, persuaded by my father’s promise of a gift of half a dozen bottles of pisco, did not speak a word. He scraped around, used his little torture device, applied a mercury-based amalgam, and finally put a cap on the gap in my mouth. Grinning like a chimpanzee, he exclaimed, “Brilliant, young fellow, you are a hero!” Oh, what a catastrophe: I, who had endured this torture without a murmur, without budging, without shedding a tear, now interrupted the triumphant gesture of my father, who was spreading his arms out like the wings of a condor—and fainted! Yes, I fainted, just like a little girl!
Jaime, without so much as offering me a hand, led me back home. Humiliated, with swollen cheeks, I shut myself in my room and slept for twenty hours straight.
I do not know whether my father realized I had wanted to commit suicide when I threw myself out of the window. Nor do I know whether he realized that by “accidentally” falling on my knees in front of the Cedar of Lebanon (we lived on the second floor, just above) I had been begging the Turk’s forgiveness. All he said was, “You fell, you idiot. This is what comes of always having your nose in a book.” It is true. I was always absorbed by books, and with such concentration that when I was reading and someone spoke to me, I did not hear a word. Jaime, for his part, would bury himself in his stamp collection as soon as he got home, as deaf as I was with my books. He would soak the envelopes his clients gave him in lukewarm water, carefully remove the stamps with a pair of tweezers—if so much as a tooth was lost from the edge, the value would be reduced—dry them between sheets of blotting paper, then classify them and keep them in albums that nobody was allowed to open.
Two large, almost circular scabs formed on my knees; my father applied cotton wool soaked in hot water, and when they softened he peeled them away in one piece with his tweezers, exactly as he did with his stamps. Of course, I held back from crying. Satisfied, he applied alcohol to the red, flayed living flesh. New scabs formed by the next morning. My allowing him to peel them away without complaint became a ritual that brought me closer to a distant God. When my knees began to feel better and the pink hue of new skin heralded the end of the treatment, I took Jaime’s hand, led him out to the courtyard, asked him to climb the wall with me, showed him the mad child, and pointed to my knees. He understood without any other gesture being necessary. In those days there was no hospital in Tocopilla. The only doctor was an affable, plump man called Ángel Romero. My father dismissed his current salesman—a boxer who was pummeling a mannequin decorated with a large dollar sign—and accompanied by Dr. Romero asked Mr. Omar’s permission to enter to visit the sick boy. Jaime paid for the consultation and made the 100-kilometer journey to Iquique to buy medicine with a prescription from the doctor. He returned to the Omars’ armed with disinfectants, tweezers, and the basin in which he soaked off his stamps. With infinite gentleness, he soaked and softened the scabs that covered the poor boy, and peeled them off one by one. After two months of such assiduous visits, the younger Turk regained his normal appearance.
It should be understood that all these things took place over a period of ten years. My relating them all together may make it seem as if my childhood was full of bizarre events, but this was not the case. These were small oases in an infinite desert. The climate was hot and dry. During the day an implacable silence descended from the sky, gliding in from the wall of barren mountains that held us against the sea, rising from a terrain made up of small rocks without a speck of fertile soil. When the sun went down there were no birds to sing, no trees for the wind to blow through, no crickets to chirp. There was only the odd vulture, the braying of a distant burro, the howls of a dog sensing death approaching, the seagulls skirmishing, and the constant crashing of the ocean waves whose hypnotic repetition one would eventually cease to hear. And the cold nights were even more silent: a thick mist, the camanchaca, gathered on the tops of the mountains to form an impenetrable milky wall. Tocopilla seemed like a prison full of corpses.
One night, when Jaime and Sara were out at the cinema, I awoke in a terrified sweat. The silenc
e, an invisible reptile, had come in through the door and was licking the feet of my bed frame. I knew that I was in danger; the silence wanted to enter me through my nostrils, settle in my lungs, and drain the blood from my veins. To frighten it away, I began to scream. My cries were so intense the windowpanes began to vibrate, buzzing like wasps, which increased my terror. And then the Rebbe arrived. I knew that he was nothing but a simple image, and his apparition was not enough to prevent universal muteness. I needed the presence of friends, but what friends? Pinocchio—large-nosed, pale, circumcised—did not have friends. (In this torrid climate, sexuality came early. The firemen’s barracks was near our shop; on an old wall in their big courtyard, hanging like the strings of a gigantic harp, were ropes that served to hold up the hoses when they were cleaned and set out to dry after being used to put out fires. The watchman’s sons and their friends, a band of eight young rascals, invited me to climb twenty meters up to the top of the wall. Once there, out of sight of adult eyes, they formed a circle and began to masturbate at an age when the emission of sperm was still something legendary. Wishing to fit in, I did the same. Their immature phalli, covered by foreskins, rose up like brown missiles. Mine, which was pale, showed itself without hiding its wide head. They all noticed the difference and burst out laughing. “He’s got a mushroom!” Humiliated, red with embarrassment, I slid down the rope, scorching the palms of my hands. The news spread through the whole school. I was an abnormal boy with a different “wee-wee.” “He’s missing a piece, they cut it off!” Knowing that I was mutilated, I felt even more separated from other human beings. I was not of this world. I had no place. All I deserved was to be devoured by silence.)
The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography Page 2
