“I mended them right away. I proved I love you by doing the useless work you asked me to do. Now you have to show me that you have a warrior spirit. Those children being mean shouldn’t affect you. Show off your heels proudly, and be thankful for the teasing because it makes your spirit stronger.”
Jaime, my father, and Sara Felicidad, my mother. He is seated to hide the fact that he is much shorter than her.
It is amazing what cultural richness was present in that small city isolated in the arid north of Chile. Before the crash of 1929 and the invention of artificial saltpeter by the Germans, this region, including Antofagasta and Iquique, was considered the land of “white gold.” Inexhaustible supplies of potassium nitrate, excellent for making fertilizer but above all, explosives, attracted a multitude of immigrants. In Tocopilla there were Italians, English, North Americans, Chinese, Yugoslavians, Japanese, Greeks, Spaniards, Germans. Each ethnicity lived behind high mental walls. And yet, in bits and pieces, I was able to gain things from these diverse cultures. The Spanish brought little books of Calleja’s fairy tales to the library; the English brought Masonic and Rosicrucian treatises; Pampino Brontis, the Greek baker, invited children to come and listen to his verse translation of the Odyssey every Sunday morning in order to promote his rose jam–filled pastries. The Japanese practiced archery on the beach, instilling in us a love of the martial arts. From time to time, the American women would show their generosity by offering sausages and refreshments in the city hall to the children of the men whom their husbands plunged into misery. Thanks to them, I became conscious of social injustice.
The day my father announced out of nowhere, “Tomorrow we’re leaving here. We’re going to live in Santiago,” I thought I was going to die. I woke up with a horrible rash. My skin was entirely covered with hives, I was delirious with fever, and the boat was leaving in three hours! Jaime stubbornly refused to postpone the voyage, even when Dr. Romero advised that I should stay in bed for at least a week. Cursing Western medicine, my father ran to the Chinese restaurant and, with his salesman’s skills, convinced the owner to give him the name and address of the doctor who treated them. There was not just one, but three aged brothers with a command of the science of the yin and yang. Serene as the mountains, with eyes like cats on the prowl and skin the color of my fever, they heated coarse grains of salt, put them on pieces of cotton cloth, folded these into packets, and rubbed them all over my body, almost burning me, whispering, “You go, but you stay here as well. If your branches grow to fill the whole sky, your roots will never leave the soil where they were born.” In half an hour the Chinese cured my skin, my fever, and my sadness, initiating me into Taoism.
Seeing me thus restored, my parents allowed me to say goodbye to my schoolmates. No one at school was surprised when I announced that I was leaving for good. After all, I was the child who could disappear in a second. This legend came from a spectacle at which I had assisted at the local theater. The theater usually showed films (it was there that I had the great pleasure of viewing Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, Buster Crabbe in Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, and many other marvels), but sometimes the white screen was rolled back from the stage and visiting troupes would put on shows. So it was that Fu-Manchu, a Mexican magician, came to town. He told the adults to make sure the children kept their eyes closed, and with a great saw, he proceeded to divide a woman in two. When he put her back together and the blood was cleaned up, he permitted the children to watch the rest of the performance. He turned toads into doves, drew an interminable cord out of his mouth on which blinking electric lights were suspended, changed the color of a silk handkerchief ten times, then got down from the stage and, from a large teapot that he had filled with water, filled small clear glasses with whatever liquor the spectators requested. He gave vodka to my grandfather, aguardiente to Jaime, and whiskey, wine, beer, and pisco to others. Finally, he showed us a red armoire with a black interior and asked for a child to help. Moved by an irresistible impulse, I volunteered. At the moment I set foot on the stage, I felt for the first time that I was in my proper place. I was a citizen of the world of miracles. The magician told me solemnly, “My boy, I am going to make you disappear. Swear that you will never tell the secret to anyone.”
I swore. I was ecstatic. If I disappeared, I would finally find out what existed beyond this gloomy reality. He had me go inside the armoire, lifted his red satin cape to hide me for a second, then let it drop. I had disappeared! Again, he lifted and dropped his cape. I reappeared! There was great applause. I returned to my seat. When my parents, my grandfather, and several other spectators asked me what the trick was, I answered with great dignity, “I have sworn to keep the secret forever, and so I shall keep it.” And I guarded the secret zealously until today, more than sixty years later, when I have decided to reveal it. I did not step into another dimension; while I was hidden in the cape a pair of gloved hands spun me around and shoved me into a corner. There was a person dressed all in black inside that black compartment who could not be seen. All he needed to do was cover me with his body in order for me to disappear. What profound deception! The great beyond did not exist. The miracles were mere illusions. And yet, I learned something more important: a secret, even one of little substance, when kept, gives one power. At school I declared that I had gone to another world, that I knew how to go there, that I had the ability to disappear whenever I wanted to. I also hinted that I had the power to make anyone I wanted disappear without returning. This did not gain me any new friends, but it diminished the teasing. I was given the silent treatment; no one spoke to me anymore. I had transitioned from receiving insults to receiving silence. The former had been less painful.
The boat let forth a hoarse sigh and pulled out of the port. The heart of my childhood remained in Tocopilla. The Rebbe, old Alejandro, and my happiness all left me straight away. I headed straight for a dark corner. I disappeared.
TWO
The Dark Years
Do names seal destinies? Do certain places attract people whose emotional state corresponds to the hidden meaning of their names? Did the plaza of Diego de Almagro, where we came to live in Santiago de Chile, become a terrible place because of its namesake, who was a Spanish conquistador? Or was the place neutral and I felt dark, sad, and abandoned there because I made it the mirror of my sorrow? In Tocopilla I was grateful to my nose, despite my dislike of its curved shape, for bringing me the smell of the Pacific Ocean—an ample fragrance that arose from the icy waters mixed with the subtle perfume of the air of a perpetually blue sky. There, the sight of a cloud was an extraordinary event. The white clouds made me think of caravels transporting colonizing angels to enchanted forests where giant sugar trees grew. Beneath a sallow sky the air of Santiago smelled of electric cables, gasoline, fried food, and cancerous breath. The heady sound of the waves was replaced by the grinding of aging trains, piercing car horns, roaring engines, harsh voices. Diego de Almagro was a frustrated conquistador; following the deceitful advice of his comrade Pizarro he left Cuzco for unexplored lands to the south expecting to find temples with fabulous treasure. Greedy for gold he pushed on for four thousand kilometers, burning the huts of natives who were interested in fighting, not in building pyramids. Finally, he arrived at the desolate Strait of Magellan. The extreme cold and the ferocity of the Mapuche people decimated his troops. He returned in disgrace to Cuzco, where his treacherous comrade Pizarro, not wishing to share the riches stolen from the Incas, had him executed.
Jaime rented two rooms in a bedsit facing the unhappy plaza. It was a gloomy apartment divided up into bedrooms that were like cages. In a somberly furnished dining room we were served the same thing for lunch and dinner: anemic leaves of lettuce, a soup suggestive of chicken, a puree of sandy potatoes, a thin sheet of rubber referred to as steak, and for dessert a crippled biscuit covered with paste. In the morning there was coffee without milk and one piece of bread for each of us. Sheets and towels
were changed once every fifteen days. And yet, neither my mother nor my father complained. Not my father because, detaching himself from family concerns, he was devoting himself to finding the right location where he could return to his own form of combat—the name of his new shop was El Combate, and he decorated it with a sign depicting two bulldogs pulling at the leg of a pair of women’s drawers, one on each side, indicating that the article in question was indestructible—and not my mother because Jashe, her beloved mother, lived just a few meters off the Almagro plaza. Hoping to enroll me in the public school, they left me a prisoner in these inhospitable surroundings in the charge of the landlady, a widow as dry as the daily potato purée, who would walk into my room without knocking with the sole aim of sharing her rants about the government of the People’s Front with me. While Jaime ate empanadas in the street and Sara sat around drinking maté in her mother’s house, I was laboriously swallowing the menu of the Eden of Croesus rooming house. Timid as I was, I hid my face behind the pages of the adventures of John Carter of Mars. Across from me sat an old woman, her back bent double, who had lost all her teeth except one canine on her lower jaw. Every time soup was served she would dig in her shabby handbag, furtively bring out an egg, break it against her single tooth with a trembling hand, and drop it into the insipid liquid, splattering the tablecloth and my book. I pictured her squatting in her room like an enormous plucked chicken, laying an egg each day in lieu of defecating. At the same time that I learned to conquer sadness, I had to learn to master disgust. At the end of each lunch and dinner she would bid me goodbye, kissing me on both cheeks. I forced a smile to my lips.
Finally, school started. I got up at six in the morning and carefully put my notebooks, pencils, and textbooks in order. Trembling from both the cold and my nerves, I walked out into the square with an empty stomach and sat down on a bench to wait until the time came to go to a place with children my age who did not know that I had been called Pinocchio, did not know that I had a mushroom, and did not know that my overalls covered milky-white legs.
Suddenly, sirens rang out and lights flashed. A police car appeared, followed by an ambulance. The empty plaza filled with curious people. The policemen dragged a dead beggar toward my bench as if I were an invisible child. Wild dogs had torn out his throat and devoured part of one leg, his arms, and his anus. Judging by the empty bottle of pisco that they found next to him he had passed out drunk, not reckoning with canine hunger. When I vomited the nurses, policemen, and gawkers appeared to see me for the first time. They began to laugh. One brute wiggled a stump on the cadaver, and looking at me asked, “Want a bite to eat, kid?” The taunts echoed in the air, and the air burned my lungs. I arrived at school with no hope left: the world was cruel. I had two alternatives: become a killer of dreams like everyone else or shut myself up in the fortress of my own mind. I chose the latter.
Mildewy rays of sun brought an intolerable heat. Without giving us time to put down our heavy book bags, the teacher loaded us all onto a bus that departed from the school. “Tomorrow classes start, today we’re going on a field trip to get some fresh air!”
There was applause and shouts of joy. All the children knew each other already. I sat in a corner on the back seat and kept my nose glued to the window. The roads of the capital city looked hostile to me. We drove along dark streets. I lost my sense of time. Suddenly, I realized that the bus was driving along a dirt road, leaving a cloud of red dust in its wake. My heart beat faster. There were patches of green everywhere! I was used to the opaque sienna of the barren mountains in the north. This was the first time I had seen plantations, trees lining the roads for miles at a stretch, and best of all, an intense chorus of insects and birds. When we arrived at our destination and left the bus, my schoolmates threw off their clothes with a clamor of joy and jumped nude into a crystal clear stream.
I did not know what to do. The teacher and the driver left me sitting on the back seat. It took me half an hour to decide to get out. There were hard-boiled eggs on a flat rock. Feeling myself submerged in the same solitude that surrounded the old woman with the single tooth, I took one and scaled a tree. Although the teacher urged me to get down off the branch and jump in the stream, I remained sitting there, immobile, and did not respond. How could she know? How to tell her that this was the first time I had ever seen a stream of fresh water, the first time I had climbed a myrtle tree, the first time that I had smelled the fragrance of vegetable life, the first time I had seen mosquitoes drawing macramé patterns with their ethereal feet on the surface of the water, the first time I had heard the sacred croaking of toads blessing the world? How could she know that my sex organ, with no foreskin, resembled a white mushroom? The best thing I could think of to do was to remain quiet in this alien, humid, aromatic world in which, not knowing me, no one could yet establish that I was different. It was better to isolate myself before they could reject me, thus denying them the chance to do so!
Murmuring “he’s stupid,” they left me alone and soon forgot me, absorbed as they were in their aquatic games. I slowly ate the hardboiled egg and compared myself to it. Removing my exterior shell was in my best interest; it made me strong, but also made me sterile. I had the sensation of being too much in this world. Suddenly, a butterfly with iridescent wings landed on my brow. I do not know what happened to me next, but my vision seemed to extend, penetrating time. I felt as if in the present I was the figurehead on a ship that was all things past. I was not only in this material tree, but also in a genealogical tree. I did not know the term genealogical at the time, nor did I know the metaphor of the family tree; and yet, seated in this vegetable being, I imagined humanity as an immense ocean liner, filled with a phantasmal forest, sailing into an inevitable future. Unsettled, I asked the Rebbe to come.
“One day you will understand that couples do not come together by pure chance,” he told me. “A superhuman consciousness brings them together according to a set plan. Think of the strange coincidences that led to your arriving in this world. Sara lost her father before she was born. Jaime’s father had also died. Your maternal grandmother, Jashe, lost her fourteen-year-old son José after he ate lettuce irrigated with infected water, which left her mentally disturbed for life. Your paternal grandmother, Teresa, lost her favorite son, who drowned in a flood on the Dnieper River when he was also fourteen years old, which drove her mad. Your mother’s half-sister Fanny married her cousin José, a gasoline seller. Your father’s sister, also called Fanny, married an auto mechanic. Sara’s half-brother Isidoro is effeminate, cruel, solitary, and ended up a bachelor living with his mother in a house that he, an architect, designed. Jaime’s brother Benjamín, homosexual, cruel, and solitary, lived alone with his mother sharing the same bed until she died, and a year after burying her he died. It would appear that one family is the mirror image of the other. Both Jaime and Sara are abandoned children, forever pursuing the nonexistent love of their parents. What they had to go through, they are now putting you through. Unless you rebel, you will do the same thing to the children you have. Family suffering repeats itself generation after generation, like the links of a chain, until one descendant, in this case perhaps you, becomes conscious and changes his curse into a blessing.”
At ten years old, I understood that my family was a trap from which I must free myself or die.
It took me a long time to gather the energy to rebel. When my teacher told Jaime that his son was deeply depressed, might have a brain tumor, or might be showing the effects of intense trauma due to relocation or familial abandonment, my father took offense rather than worrying about my mental state. How could this dumb, skinny, hysterical bourgeois woman accuse him—him!—of being a negligent father and his offspring of being a sissy queer? He immediately forbade me to go to school, and taking advantage of having found a location for his shop moved us out of the Eden of Croesus without paying for the last week.
Sara had wanted the shop to be in the city center in order to be well regarded by her family, bu
t Jaime, driven by his communist ideals, decided to rent a storefront in a working class area. Thus we were immersed in Matucana Street.
The business district was only three blocks long. A swarm of indigents, domestic workers, laborers, and hawkers circulated there every Saturday, which was payday. Next to the railroad gate, people squatted, selling rabbits. The carcasses, skin still on with open abdomens revealing shiny black livers the size of an olive, were hung on the rims of baskets, necklaces of flesh assaulted by flies. Street salesmen announced the availability of soap that would remove all stains; syrups to cure coughs, diarrhea, and impotence; scissors strong enough to cut nails. Thin children with the jaundiced tint of tuberculosis offered to shine shoes. I am not exaggerating. On Saturdays it was difficult for me to breathe so thick was the stench of filthy clothes that arose from the multitudes. All along those four hundred meters, like enormous somnolent spiders, three used clothing shops, a shoe shop, a pharmacy, a large warehouse, an ice cream shop, a garage, and a church all opened their webs to the public. In addition, there were seven bustling pubs that were jammed full of patrons and reeked of vinegar. All activities revolved around alcohol. Chile was a nation of drunkards, from the president, Pedro Aguirre Cerda, who was known as Don Tinto (Sir Burgundy) due to his heavy drinking and red swollen nose, to the miserable laborer who would drink what remained of his pay each weekend after buying new underwear for his wife and shirts and socks for his children, then plant himself in the middle of the railroad tracks—in Matucana long freight trains ran between the road and the sidewalk—and defy the locomotives, fists raised. The virile pride of drunkards knew no limits. Once, I happened to be walking along the street just after a train had smashed a foolhardy man to pieces. The onlookers, yelling with hilarity, made a game of kicking around the pieces of human flesh.
The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography Page 4
