My father, determined to become the king of the neighborhood, hired more and more extravagant loudmouths to attract customers outside the shop door: a surgeon-clown stitching up a bloody doll with a dollar sign on its forehead (“El Combate forces prices down!”), a guillotine on which a magician decapitated fat men who represented exploitative businessmen, a dwarf with a booming voice dressed as Hitler (“War on high prices!”), and so on. Despite the prevalence of shoplifters he placed all the merchandise in piles on the tables, always wanting to give the impression of abundance. He set up a wooden counter with an opening in the center where he sat in plain view of customers using a sharp knife to cut thick cotton fabric according to patterns copied from American clothes. He hired girls who would sew the pieces of fabric together on the spot, making cheap articles of clothing that went directly from production to the consumer. He installed loudspeakers that played cheerful Spanish songs, always with lewd lyrics, at high volume: “Garnish the cock with cherries . . . While I put the moves on the hen . . . cinnamon, sugar, and cloves . . .” Fascinated laborers filled the shop. Many came in carrying baskets. I was forced to go to El Combate after finishing my homework to keep watch on the hordes of customers. If I saw some wretch trying to hide a wool vest, skirt, or some other piece of clothing at the bottom of his basket I would give a sign to my father. Jaime would then leap over the counter in a single bound, fall on the thief, and demolish him with blows. The poor man, feeling culpable, would meekly accept his punishment without defending himself. If the thief was a woman he would deliver huge slaps, rip off her skirt, and push her out into the street with a single kick, her knickers about her ankles.
In no way whatsoever did I approve of my father’s violence. My insides tied in knots and my chest burned when I witnessed these bloody faces, accepting their punishment as if they were receiving the wrath of God. It was less serious for a man to have a broken tooth or nose than it was for a woman to have her naked buttocks and torn-off knickers, sometimes full of holes, revealed to the eyes of the mocking public. The poor woman would be paralyzed, overwhelmed by embarrassment, hands covering her crotch, unable to reach for the torn-off underwear to pull it back up. Someone had to come—a friend, a parent—and cover her with a jacket or shawl in order to remove her from the hostile crowd. Every time I signaled a thief with my index finger, a bitter taste invaded my mouth; I did not want to harm these people, who stole because they were hungry, but I wanted to betray my father even less. The boss had given me an order, and I had to obey it, even when I felt that I was the one who was being humiliated and whose flesh was being wounded. After each beating, I shut myself up in the bathroom to vomit.
My body, which contained so much guilt, so many suppressed tears, and so much nostalgia for Tocopilla, began to turn sorrow into fat. At age eleven I weighed a little over 100 kilograms. Overburdened, I had trouble lifting my feet off the ground; my shoes scraped the pavement as I walked, and I breathed with my mouth half open, struggling to draw in the air that resisted me, my formerly wavy hair falling limp and lackluster on my forehead. Having forgotten that above me there was a sky without end, I walked with my head hanging down, my only horizon the rough concrete sidewalk.
Sara appeared to notice my sadness. She came back from her mother’s house carrying a black-varnished wood box in her arms. “Alejandro, the holidays are over. In a month you’ll be able to go to school and make friends, but now you need something to keep you busy. Jashe gave me her son José’s violin, may he rest in peace. It will make her extremely happy if you learn it and do with this sacred instrument what my poor brother was not able to do: play us “The Blue Danube” during family suppers.”
I was forced to take lessons at the Musical Academy, which was run by a fanatical socialist in the basement of the Red Cross building. I had to walk all the way across Matucana to get there. Instead of being curved in the shape of a violin, the black box was rectangular like a coffin. Seeing me walk by the shoe shiners would jeer sarcastically, “He’s carrying a dead body! Gravedigger!” Blushing with shame, my head hunched over between my shoulders, I was not able to hide the funereal casket. They were correct: the violin that it contained was José’s remains. Not wishing to bury him, Jashe had made me into his vehicle. I was an empty vessel used to transport a lost soul. Or better, I was the gravedigger for my own soul. I carried it, dead, in this horrible case. After a month of lessons, during which the black notes seemed to me to be in mourning, I stopped in front of the shoe shiners and looked at them without saying a word. Their jeering grew to a deafening chorus. Slowly, their hilarity was drowned out by the sound of an enormous freight train the color of my violin case. I threw the coffin onto the tracks, where it was reduced to splinters by the oncoming locomotive. The ragged people, smiling, began gathering up the pieces to build a fire, paying no heed to me as I stood before them, shaken by age-old sobs. An old drunk walking out of the bar put a hand on my head and whispered hoarsely, “Don’t worry, boy, a naked virgin will light your way with a flaming butterfly.” Then he went to urinate, hidden in the shadow of a pole.
This old man, made into a prophet by wine, pulled me out of the abyss with a single sentence. He had shown me that poetry could emerge even at the bottom of the bog where I was buried. Jaime, in the same manner that he mocked all religions, was merciless with poets. “They talk about loving women, like that García Lorca, but they’re all queers.” Later on he broadened his contempt to include all the arts, literature, painting, theater, and singing. They were all despicable buffoons, social parasites, perverse narcissists who were starving to death.
A Royal typewriter languished in a corner of our apartment, covered with dust. I painstakingly cleaned it, sat in front of it, and began my struggle against the image of my father that occupied my mind as a gigantic presence. He looked at me with disdain: “Faggot!” Transitioning from submission into revolt, I furiously destroyed the mocking god in my mind and wrote my first poem. I still remember it:
The flower sings and disappears.
How can we complain?
Nighttime rain, an empty house,
My footprints on the path
Begin to fade away . . .
Poetry brought about a radical change in my behavior. I stopped seeing the world through the eyes of my father. I was allowed to attempt to be myself. However, to keep the secret, I burned my poems every day. My soul, naked and virginal, lit my path with a butterfly on fire.
Once I could write without feeling shame and without feeling that I was committing a crime I wanted to keep my poems and find someone to read them to. But my father’s power, his worship of strength, his contempt for weakness and cowardice, terrified me. How could I announce to him that he had a poet son? Late one night I awaited his return from El Combate, determined to confront his tiredness and bad mood. As was his custom, he arrived home with a wad of banknotes wrapped in newspaper. The first thing he said to me, bitterly, was, “Bring me alcohol! I have to disinfect this stink!” He threw the wrinkled, foul-smelling, dirty bills on his desk and sprayed a sanitizing cloud over them. Putting on surgeon’s gloves, he began to sort and count them. Occasionally, cursing, he flattened out greenish bills that looked to me like the cadavers of marine insects. “Put on some gloves, Alejandro, so you don’t catch something from this filth, and help me count them.” I got up the courage to begin my confession.
“Papa, I have something important to tell you.”
“Something important? You?”
“Yes, me!” In this “me,” I tried to embody all of my new independence. “I am not you, I don’t see the world the way you do. Respect me!”
But like a banknote encrusted with mud, blood, or vomit, Jaime brushed me aside and, uttering maledictions, began to scrape the crud off the bills with a nail file. I got ready to yell at him for the first time in my life. “Imbecile, notice that I exist! I am not your gay brother Benjamín, I am myself, your son! You have never seen me! This is why I’ve gotten fat, so that you’ll
notice me, at least my body if not my spirit! Don’t ask me to be a warrior; I’m a boy! No, not a boy, because you’ve killed the boy! I am a phantom that wants to flee the obese cadaver that makes it sick by imprisoning it in a living body that wants to be free of your concepts and judgments!” But I could not even utter the first syllable, because at that moment a tremendous underground roaring announced the arrival of a tremor threatening to grow into an earthquake. As the floors and walls vibrated, one might have thought a huge truck was passing in the street. But when lamps started swinging like pendulums, chairs slid across the room, a dresser fell over, and a shower of dust fell from the ceiling, we knew that the Earth was angry. This time, her fury seemed to be turning into mortal hatred. We had to grab onto the iron bars in front of a window in order not to fall down. The walls cracked, and the room was like a boat rocking in a tempest. We heard cries of the panicked masses from the street. Jaime grabbed me by the hand and dragged me, stumbling, to the balcony. He began guffawing. “Look at these hypocrites, ha ha, they fall on their knees, they beat their chests with their fists, they piss and shit, they’re as cowardly as their dogs!” Indeed the dogs were howling, hair standing on end, voiding their bowels. A utility pole fell. The electric cables wriggled on the ground, throwing off sparks. The crowd ran to take refuge in the church, whose single tower was wobbling from side to side. Jaime, more and more full of joy, kept me next to him on the balcony that threatened to collapse, stopping me from running down to the street.
“Let me go, Papa, the house could fall down! We’ll be safer outside!”
He slapped me. “Quiet, you’re staying here with me! You’ve got to trust me! I’ll never let you be a coward like the rest of them! Don’t take the earthquake’s side. Fear makes the damage worse. If you pay attention to the Earth, she’ll take your confidence away. Ignore it. Nothing’s happening. Your mind is more powerful than a stupid earthquake.”
The tremors stopped growing. Then, little by little, the ground returned to its habitual calm. Jaime let me go. Smiling like a hero, he looked at me as if from the top of an inaccessible tower. “What did you want to tell me, Pinocchio?”
“Oh, Papa, it can’t have been important; the earthquake made me forget it!”
He sat back down at his desk, plugged his ears, and returned—cursing as usual—to counting the laborers’ sullied bills as if I had ceased to exist.
I went to my room feeling like my soul had been run over by a steamroller. My father’s bravery was invincible, his authority absolute. He was the master, I the slave. Unable to rebel, all I could do was to remain obedient, cease my creative activities, and not exist except as a guided being: the unavoidable meaning of life was to worship my omnipotent father.
Again I had the urge to jump out of the window, this time to be flattened by one of the trains that passed by at all hours of the night, their whistling penetrating my dreams like a pin impaling a dragonfly. One thought held me back from jumping: “I do not want to die without knowing my father’s sex. He must have a penis as large as a donkey’s.”
I waited until four in the morning when my parents’ snores, as powerful as locomotives, filled the house. I walked on tiptoe trying not to think for fear that the vibration of a word in my mind might escape through my skull and cause the walls, floor, or furniture to creak. The minute that I spent opening the door to the bedroom felt like an hour. I was hemmed in by rancid darkness. Fearing that I might trip over a shoe or the chamber pot full of urine that my mother emptied every morning while Jaime and I were eating breakfast, I froze like a statue until my eyes adjusted to the blackness. I was getting close to the bed. I dared to light my torch. Taking care not to let any ray of light fall on their faces, I looked over their bodies.
It was the hottest time of the year. They were both sleeping naked. A few flies, drunk on the penetrating odor, buzzed around their armpits. My mother’s white skin still had red marks from the corset she wore from morning to night. Her breasts, like two enormous fruits, lay serenely on her chest. A Rubenesque goddess of abundance, she was sleeping with one small ivory hand lying on the thick mat of my father’s pubic hair. My surprise was so great that my swollen tongue began to palpitate as if it had turned into a heart. I wanted to laugh. Not from joy, but from nervousness. What I saw dealt a demolishing blow to the mental tower in which Jaime’s authority had imprisoned me. The warmth of Sara’s nearby fingers had given him an erection. For sure, the circumcised member was shaped like a mushroom, but—incredible!—it was much smaller than mine. It looked more like a little finger than a phallus.
In a flash I understood Jaime’s aggressiveness, his vindictive pride, his constant anger at the world. He had precipitated me into weakness, slyly forming me into a character of cowardice, an impotent victim, in order to make himself feel powerful. He made fun of my long nose because he had something short between his legs. He had to prove his own power to himself by enticing customers, dominating my large mother, bloodying shoplifters. His powerful will compensated for his barely adequate penis.
The giant collapsed before me—and with him, the whole world. None of the beliefs that had been inculcated in me were true. All the powers were artificial. The great theater of the world was an empty shell. God had fallen from his throne. The only true strength I could count on was my own, meager as it was. I felt like someone with no skeleton whose crutches had been taken away. However, a miniscule truth was more valuable than an immense lie.
I was enrolled in the Applied School, a magnificent building with capable teachers and an optimal program of studies, but with an unexpected difficulty: the alumni were Nazi sympathizers. Perhaps due to the influx of German immigrants or the influence of Carlos Ibáñez, the dictator who had emerged from an army trained by Teutonic instructors, during the war more than 50 percent of Chileans were Germanophiles and anti-Semites. The obligatory collective shower after gym class was enough for my mushroom to betray me. With shouts of “Wandering Jew!” I was ejected from all the games that the students organized during breaks. I had the privilege of a whole bench to myself during classes: no one wanted to share the double seat with me. I did not understand this exclusion at first. Jaime had never told me that we belonged to the Jewish race. According to him, my grandparents were of pure Russian stock, communists who had fled the irate Tsarists; and the Jews, just like the Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, and other religious people, were a bunch of madmen who believed in fairy tales. Little by little, receiving one insult after another, I understood that my body was formed of a despised material, different from that of my classmates. During the first trimester I took my revenge by becoming the top student. This was not difficult; my parents did not talk with me—one sentence too many would convert their weariness into exasperation—and, submerged in the silence to which my peers had condemned me, the only entertainment left was to study for hours and hours, day and night, not for pleasure or out of duty but as a drug that stopped me from confronting my anguish. In this bottomless swamp, like the flowers on a lotus, a few short poems blossomed.
This feeling rational to the point of boredom
watching the mad carnivals pass
waving obscene banners in the streets
as if all were dead clad in gold
while I make my corner into an empty temple . . .
Tired of living as a victim, I tried to participate in the high jump competition. In the middle of the schoolyard was a rectangular pit filled with sand. A horizontal rod between two pillars measured the height of the jumps. As soon as the bell announcing recess sounded, the boys ran there and formed a long queue. One by one, they tried to outdo each other at high jumping. They did quite well. Sometimes the bar was raised to 170 centimeters. When I tried to join the line they pushed me out, muttering “fat stinker” without even looking at me.
I had accepted humiliation from a young age, viewed my being different as a kind of castration, but now that I knew I was equipped with a larger penis than my father I decided to show
my enemies that they could not conquer me. I went to the office of the school president, a sacrosanct place that no student dared enter, explained my problem to him, and asked him to help me survive the endeavor I wanted to undertake. He agreed!
When the bell sounded the students in each grade got into formation in the first and second floor loggias, in front of the classroom doors, awaiting the president’s arrival. The square yard, with its sandy jumping area, was at the center of the crowd. For five minutes, the president allowed me to try jumping. Given my excess weight, I was far from being an athlete. I decided to start at a meter and a half. At first, it was impossible for me to jump it. I ran toward the bar amid general mockery—there were at least five hundred students watching—put all my energy into a leap as if my life depended on it, rose into the air, knocked down the bar, and fell sprawling in the sand. Laughter rang out. Paying no attention to the deafening hilarity, I tried again. And so, six times a day for five minutes straight without stopping, again and again, failure after failure, I continued for four months. Little by little I lost weight, from a hundred kilos down to eighty; although I was still obese, my new muscularity enabled me to jump over 160 centimeters. In the last two months I lost another ten kilos, and like the best of the jumpers I passed over the bar at a height of 170 centimeters. My success was crowned by furious silence.
The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography Page 5
