“Do not worry,” the Rebbe told me, or rather I told myself using the image of that aged Jew who was dressed as a rabbi. “Loneliness means not knowing how to be with oneself.” Of course, I do not mean to imply that a child of seven years can speak in such a fashion. But I understood these things, albeit not in a rational manner. The Rebbe, being an internal image, put things into my mind that were not intellectual. He made me feel something that I swallowed, in the way that a newly hatched eaglet, its eyes still closed, swallows the worm that is placed in its beak. Much later as an adult I began to find words to translate things that were, at that young age—how can I explain it?—openings into other planes of reality.
“You are not alone. Remember last week when you were surprised to see a sunflower growing in the courtyard? You concluded that the wind had blown a seed there. A seed, though it looks insignificant, contains the future flower. This seed somehow knew what plant it was going to be, and this plant was not just in the future: although immaterial, although only a design, the sunflower existed there, in that seed, blowing in the wind over hundreds of kilometers. And not only was the plant there, but also the love of light, the turning in search of the sun, the mysterious union with the pole star, and—why not?—a form of consciousness. You are not different. All that you are going to be, you are. What you will know, you already know. What you will search for, you are already seeking: it is in you. I may not be real, but the old man who you now see, although he has my inconsistent appearance, is real because he is you, which is to say, he is what you will be.”
All this I neither thought nor heard, but I felt it. And in front of me, next to the bed, my imagination brought forth the apparition of an elderly gentleman with silver beard and hair, his eyes full of tenderness. It was myself, changed into my older brother, my father, my grandfather, my master. “Do not worry so. I have accompanied you and I always will. Every time you suffered, believing yourself to be alone, I was with you. Would you like an example? All right, remember when you made the elephant of snot?”
I had never felt so abandoned, misunderstood, and unjustly punished as on this occasion. Moishe, with his toothless smile and saintly heart, proposed to my parents that he take me to the capital of Santiago for a month during the summer vacation so that my maternal grandmother might get to know me. The old lady had never met me, being separated from her daughter by two thousand kilometers. I hid my anxiety at being away from home to avoid disappointing Jaime. Exhibiting a false tranquillity I boarded the Horacio, a small steamboat that rocked so much that I arrived with an empty stomach at the port of Valparaiso. After rattling for four hours in the third-class section of a coal train I presented myself, timid and green around the gills, to Doña Jashe, who did not know how to smile much less how to deal with children as unhealthily sensitive as myself. Sara’s half-brother Isidoro, a fat, effeminate, and sadistic man dressed in a male nurse’s uniform, began to harass me, threatening me with an insecticide bomb. “I’m going to give you an injection in your ass!”
At night, in a dark room on a small hard bed fixed to the wall, with no lamp for reading, illuminated by whatever moonlight might filter through the narrow skylight, I stuck my finger up my nose, made balls of snot, and stuck them to the sky-blue wallpaper. During that month, little by little, I drew an elephant with my boogers. No one knew, for they never entered to clean or make my bed. At the end of the month, my pachyderm was just about finished. At the time of my departure, as Moishe was about to go back to Tocopilla with me, my grandmother came into the room to retrieve the sheets she had lent me. She did not see a beautiful elephant floating in the infinite sky; she saw a horrible collection of boogers stuck to her precious wallpaper. Her wrinkles turned a shade of violet, her hunched back straightened up, her amiable voice changed into the roar of a lion, her glassy eyes turned into balls of lightning. “Disgusting boy, pig, ingrate! We’ll have to paper the whole room again! You ought to die of shame! I do not want such a grandson as you!”
“But Grandmother, I didn’t mean to get anything dirty, I just wanted to make a nice elephant. It just needed a tusk, then it would have been finished.” This made her even more furious. She thought I was making fun of her. She grabbed a handful of my hair and began pulling, with the intention of yanking it out. Gandhi intervened, holding her back with gentle firmness. The odious joker Isidoro, behind Jashe, waved his insecticide bomb in my direction, agitating it back and forth like a violating phallus.
I was required to assist in removing the wallpaper, for which they used rubber gloves to protect their hands. Then they put the pieces in the middle of the courtyard shared by the group of small houses, sprayed them with alcohol, and made me throw matches on them until they were entirely burned. I saw my dear elephant consumed by flame. A lot of neighbors appeared at the windows. Jashe rubbed the ashes on my nose and fingers and brought me, thus dirtied, to the train. Once we were far away from Santiago, Moishe moistened his white handkerchief with spit and cleaned my face and hands. He was mystified. “You seem numb, my boy. You don’t cry or even complain.”
I boarded the Horacio for a three-day voyage and disembarked in Tocopilla without ever having said a word. When I saw my mother, I ran to her and began to cry convulsively, buried between her enormous breasts. “You jerk! Why did you make me go?” When I saw my father fifteen minutes later I held back my sobs, dried my eyes, and faked a smile.
“I was there, seeing the mental limitations of these people,” the old Alejandro said to me. “They saw the material world, the pieces of snot, but the art, the beauty, the magical elephant, those things were lost to them. And yet, rejoice in this suffering: thanks to it, you have met me. Ecclesiastes says, ‘The greater one’s wisdom, the greater one’s pain.’ But I tell you, only he who knows pain can approach wisdom. I cannot tell you that I have achieved wisdom; I am no more than a step along the path of this spirit who is traveling toward the end of time. Who will I be three centuries from now? Or what will I be? What forms will serve as my vessel? In ten million years, will my consciousness still need a body? Will I still have to use sensory organs? After hundreds of millions of years, will I continue dividing the unity of the world into sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile images? Will I be an individual? A collective being? Once I have known all of the universe, or universes, when I have arrived at the end of all time, when the expansion of matter stops and with it I begin the journey back toward the point of origin, will I dissolve in it? Will I become the mystery that surrounds time and space? Will I discover that the Creator is a memory with no present or future? You, a child, I, an old man, will we not have been merely memories, insubstantial images, without having had the least reality? For you, I do not exist yet, for me you do not exist anymore, and when our story is told, he who tells it will be nothing but a string of words escaping out of a pile of ashes.”
At night, when I awoke alone in the dark house, it became essential for me to imagine this double of myself from the future. Listening to him I calmed myself little by little, and a deep sleep came, gloriously allowing me to forget myself.
During the day I did not despair, despite the anguish of living unappreciated, a Robinson Crusoe on my inner island. In the library my friends the books, with their heroes and adventures, blocked out the silence for me.
There was someone else who used books to escape from silence: Morgan, the gringo. Like all the English, he worked for the electric company that provided energy to the nitrate company offices and the copper and silver mines. He liked to drink gin. When they forbade him to drink any alcohol, dying of boredom he buried himself in the “esotericism” section in the library. The Freemasons had provided shelves crammed with books in English that dealt with mysterious topics. Jaime claimed that The Secret Doctrine by Helena Blavatsky had disturbed Morgan’s brain. “He’s got bats in the belfry!” he would often say. The gringo believed in a group of invisible Cosmic Masters and began fervently believing in the reincarnation of the soul. In accordance with the auth
or he idolized, he declared to anyone who would listen to him that the veneration and burial of cadavers was a barbaric custom because they infected the planet. They should be burned, as was done in India. He sold all his possessions and with the money thus obtained, plus his savings, opened a funeral parlor called River of Ganges Sacred Crematorium. The place of business was decorated with wreaths of artificial flowers, sweets made of almond paste in the shape of fruits, and plaster models of exotic gods, some of which had elephant heads. It opened onto a long courtyard covered with orange tiles, and at the center was an oven similar to those used for making bread with room enough for a Christian inside. The priest, launching diatribes against this sacrilegious monstrosity, was preaching to the choir. Who among the citizens of Tocopilla would permit their deceased loved ones to be burned in some big stove? No one, for sure, wished to see the carnal remains of their dear departed converted into a pile of gray ashes. Morgan, whom people called the Theosophist, shrugged his shoulders: “It’s nothing new, the same thing happened to Madam Blavatsky and her partner Olcott in New York; ancestral customs have deep roots.” He changed his strategy: if the priest contended that according to Christian theology animals did not have souls, then it was highly advisable to burn their remains. The oven began its function: first dogs, then, thanks to a discount, cats, followed by the odd white mouse or plucked parrot. The ashes were placed in milk bottles painted black with gilded stoppers. Drawn to the nauseating odor, a multitude of vultures came to land on the orange tiles, covering them with their white excrement. The Theosophist would shoo them away with a broom, but the stubborn birds would fly in circles, which eventually turned into spirals, finally returning to the tiles, squawking and defecating. The fetid odor became insufferable. The Theosophist closed the funeral parlor and began to spend most of his time reclining on a bench in the town square, promising reincarnation to anyone who would accept him as their master. It was there that I struck up a friendship with him, for I was saddened to see him become the laughingstock of the whole town.
To me, he did not seem to be a lunatic, as my father claimed. I liked his ideas. “My boy, all evidence suggests that we were something before being born and we will be something after dying. Can you tell me what?”
I rubbed my hands together, stammered, and then said nothing. He began to laugh. “Come to the beach with me!” I followed him, and when we got to the beach he showed me the towers joined by cables on which steel cars glided, full from the mines. They came from the mountains, ran along the beach, and disappeared between other mountains. I saw a pebble fall from one of them, half gray and half coppery.
“Where do they come from? Where are they going?”
“I don’t know, Theosophist.”
“There, you don’t know where they come from or where they are going, but you can pick up one of their stones and keep it like a treasure. You see, boy, I know what mine they come from and what mill they are going to, but what good would it do to tell you? The numbers of those sites will mean nothing to you because you have never seen them. It’s the same for the soul that is transported by the body: we do not know where it comes from or where it is going, but now, here, we want to keep it and do not want to lose it; it is a treasure. A mysterious consciousness, infinitely more vast than our own, knows the origin and the end but cannot reveal it to us because we do not have a sufficiently developed brain to comprehend it.”
The gringo put his freckled hand into a pocket and extracted four gold-plated medals. On one was Christ, on the second were two interlaced triangles, on the third a half-moon containing a star, and on the fourth were two drops, one black and one white, nested together forming a circle. “Take these, they are for you. They represent Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, and Taoism. They believe that they symbolize different truths, but if you put them in a little oven and melt them, they will form a single grain of the same metal. The soul is a drop in the divine ocean for which we are, for a very brief time, the humble vessel. It comes from God and travels to return and dissolve into God, which is eternal joy. Take this cord, my young friend, and make yourself a necklace with the four medals. Wear it always to remind yourself that a single thread, immortal consciousness, unites everything.”
I returned proudly to Casa Ukrania, showing off my necklace. Jaime, more Stalin than ever, trembled with rage. “That idiot Theosophist, appeasing the fear of death with illusions! Come with me to the bathroom!” He seized the medals from me. One by one he threw them into the toilet. “God does not exist, God does not exist, God does not exist, God does not exist! You die and you rot! After that there is nothing!” And he pulled the chain. The rush of water bore the medals away, and with them my illusions. “Papa never lies! Who do you believe, me or that loony?” Which one was I to choose, I who longed so for my father’s admiration? Jaime smiled for a second, then looked at me with his customary severity. “I’m tired of your long hair; you’re not a girl!”
Sara’s father had died before she was born. Her mother, Jashe, had fallen in love with a Russian dancer—not Jewish, a goy—with a handsome build and golden locks. When she was eight months pregnant, he climbed on top of a barrel full of alcohol to light a lamp. The lid broke, he fell into the flammable liquid, and it began to burn. The family legend was that he ran down the street, enveloped in flames, leaping up in the air as much as two meters high, and died dancing. When I was born I emerged with a full head of curly hair, as abundant and blond as the late idolized dancer. Sara never cuddled me, but she spent hours combing my hair, giving me ringlets, refusing to cut it. I was her father reincarnated. In those days no boys ever had long hair; thus, I was incessantly called “queer boy.”
My father, seizing the moment while Sara was napping, brought me to the barber. His name was Osamu, and he was Japanese. In a few minutes, reciting several times over, “Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha,”*2 he cut my hair short and impassively swept away the golden curls. Immediately, I was no longer the burned dead man; I was myself. I could not help shedding a few tears, which brought my father’s contempt down on me with renewed force. “You wimp, learn to be a macho revolutionary and stop clinging to your mop of hair like a bourgeois whore!” How wrong Jaime was: losing that mane of hair, the subject of so much mockery, was an enormous relief. But I cried because losing my curls also meant losing the love of my mother.
Back at the shop I threw my coppery pebble into the toilet, pulled the chain, and ran proudly to the town square to make fun of the Theosophist, pressing my index finger to my temple as my sole response to his fervent words.
One might think that during my childhood I was more influenced by Jaime than by Sara. However, this was not the case. She, dazzled by my father’s charisma, applauded and repeated everything he said. Severity was the basis of the education I was to receive in order to grow up a man and not a woman; after the Japanese barber cut my hair, my mother applied herself diligently to this process. Tied down to the store all day, she had little or no time to devote to me. My socks had holes, and a circle of flesh was visible on each heel. Because of their round shape and color, the children likened them to peeled potatoes. While playing, if I wanted to run in the yard, my cruel peers would point to my heels and call out snidely, “I can see his potatoes!” This humiliated me and obliged me to stay still, keeping my feet in the shadows. When I asked Sara to buy me new socks, she grumbled, “It’s a useless expense, you’ll tear them the first day you wear them.”
“But mama, everyone in school is making fun of me. If you love me, mend them for me, please.”
“All right, if you need me to prove I love you, I’ll do it.”
She took her sewing box, threaded a needle, repaired the holes with great dedication, and showed me the socks, perfectly mended.
“But mama, you used flesh colored thread! Look, I put them on and it looks like you can still see my potatoes! They’ll keep making fun of me!”
The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography Page 3
