“Pregnant? To see Raquel with a swollen belly, waddling like a duck, turned into a vulgar wench? Never! It is not my plan to have children. We have enough cripples between my mother and my sisters and brothers. Do not be afraid, Don Jaime. Raquel will continue being what she always has been. Far be it from me to besmirch such a sacred maiden.”
Jaime was quiet a good while. I imagine that his face grew purple. He pushed his future son-in-law out the door, slamming it with a bang and a frenetic yell of “lying bitch!” Then he burst into tears of rage.
The wedding was opulent. They bought me striped trousers, a black jacket, a shirt with a stiff collar, and a gray tie. I felt ridiculous thus attired, but none of the three hundred guests noticed me. Sara, putting on a show of fake happiness for every guest, making sure that the roasted chicken was not dry, that the stuffed fish, liver pâté, and egg salad were fresh, testing the quality of the sweet and salty beet soup, and lastly giving advice to the twenty-piece orchestra, had no time to think of me. Jaime, uncomfortable in his rented tuxedo, hid in the smoking lounge sipping one vodka after another. The guests, Jewish merchants not tied to the couple by any sort of true friendship, had cleared out the buffet before the ceremony even began. A hunchbacked rabbi yelled out the Hebrew text rather than sang it. The bride and groom said their “I do’s” beneath the ceremonial awning. Saúl, trembling, stomped on a glass that would not break at the first, the second, or the third try. At the fourth attempt he succeeded, finally allowing the orchestra to burst into a freilaj, a type of saraband to which young and old alike danced stiffly, all feeling guilty for shaking their legs in view of the baleful immobility of the Gross family. Raquel tossed her bouquet of paper roses at the two sisters, who fought over it like a pair of furious hippopotamuses, tearing it to shreds. (A month later, Berta threw herself naked into the sea near Valparaiso. She was found on the beach with the word “Ugly!” written on her belly, her legs spread apart, her crotch covered with scars from cigarette burns.) Suddenly, while the women and children were devouring huge pieces of cake, the men ran to a corner of the great hall and forming a close group around Jaime took him into the dressing room. I approached them. “What’s wrong with my papa?”
My sister, Raquel, Hollywood style
“It’s nothing, son, it’s nothing. Jaime isn’t used to drinking, and the alcohol and happiness together have gone to his head.”
I could hear snippets of my father’s voice. “Let me out of here, I’m going to break that thief ’s face! He’s not worthy!” Then a few grunts; tense hands were covering his mouth. Then silence. The party continued. Sara rose to offer a toast, but instead of speaking uttered theatrical wails. Jashe took her in her arms and comforted her. Fanny gave three cheers and shouted, “That’s enough; it’s a wedding, not a funeral!” She called for another freilaj and rescued Jashe, pulling her in to dance with her, followed by the three hundred guests, paying no heed to the distress—real or feigned—of her sister. Everyone moved without restraint now, because the group of cripples had gone home, as had Raquel and Saúl. After jumping around for another half hour, the guests, bathed in sweat, began departing. The only ones remaining were Sara, munching on silver sugar balls—the last remnants of the huge wedding cake—at one end of the devastated table . . . and I, at the other end, leaning over, my tie swinging like a pendulum. Jaime’s snores accompanied the orchestra’s final paso doble.
This marriage spelled the ruin of my father. He was furious for months, begging manufacturers for deferments, borrowing money from loan sharks, trimming costs. For a while our principal nourishment was bread and cheese and café con leche. Then, as if by a miracle, Jaime’s economic problems went away the moment that Raquel returned home. When Saúl came looking for her my father kicked him out the door, using skills learned in his circus career.
The marriage was annulled. Apparently, as I learned from our housekeeper, the new husband had turned out to be even more jealous than Jaime. Raquel had jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. Saúl’s jealousy was so great that he had forced my sister to wear ankle-length skirts, broad-brimmed hats that hid her face, and a corset that hid her breasts. She was allowed to go out into the street only for brief moments, measured by a stopwatch, and only to do the day’s shopping. Raquel, forbidden to have a social life, acquired a chick to keep her company. The bird followed her around the apartment, taking her for its mother. One morning, when she returned from the market, she found the chicken hanged with a shoelace. Another day, Saúl, thinking that his wife devoted herself too much to the piano, took advantage of a moment when she had gone out to buy aspirin at the chemist’s and sawed a leg off the noble instrument, making it fall on its side. He then explained to Raquel that ants had eaten away the leg. Four months after the wedding, my sister still had her hymen. Saúl’s excuse was that he could not attain an erection due to hemorrhoids, and he required his wife to anoint his anus with banana pulp every night.
Jaime got out of his slump, paid his debts, bought delicious food, and resumed hiring criers to attract customers. Sara, for her part, began to degenerate, locking herself in the bathroom to smoke cigarettes in secret all day or spending hours making strawberry-filled pastries to send to her mother. Raquel, entrenched in her room, had decided to devote herself to poetry for evermore.
With so much going on, who could care about me? For Raquel, Sara, and Jaime, I did not exist. I knew, through our maid, that Sara had gotten her tubes tied after my birth, declaring, “The tubes are traps!”
With no photographs left to burn, I took a handful of ash, dissolved it into a glass of wine, and drank the grayish mixture. There was no doubt about it now. I had buried the past inside myself.
Now I understood the abuses to which my family subjected me. I saw the precise structure of the trap. They accused me of being guilty of every wound that was dealt to me. The executioner unceasingly declared himself the victim. In an ingenious system of denial, by depriving me of information—by which I do not mean oral information, but rather life experiences that were largely nonverbal—they stripped me of all my rights and treated me like a beggar, with no possessions of my own, to whom their disdainful magnanimity had granted a fragment of life. Did my parents know what they were doing? Not in the least. Devoid of awareness, they did to me what had been done to them. Thus, as the emotional wrongs were handed down from one generation to the next, the family tree had accumulated a load of suffering that endured for centuries.
I asked the Rebbe, “You, who seem to know everything, tell me what I can expect in this life, what is due to me, what my basic rights are.” I imagined the Rebbe answering me as follows:
“First of all, you should have the right to be conceived by a father and mother who loved each other, through a sexual act crowned by mutual orgasm, so that your soul and flesh might have pleasure as their root. You should have the right to be neither an accident nor a burden, but an individual, hoped for and wished for with all the force of love, a fruit to give meaning to the couple, creating a family. You should have the right to be born with the sex that nature intended for you. (It is abusive to say, ‘We were hoping for a boy and you were a girl,’ or vice versa.) You should have the right to be acknowledged from the first month of gestation. At all times, the pregnant woman should accept that she is two organisms on their way to separation, and not just one organism expanding. Nobody can blame you for the accidents that occur during childbirth. What happens to you in the womb is never your fault. Sometimes, due to anger against the world, the mother does not want to give birth and, through unconscious action, wraps the umbilical cord around the child’s neck and aborts it. Sometimes the mother does not want to give birth because the child has become an appendage of power, so she retains it more than nine months, drying up the amniotic fluid and burning the child’s skin; or making it turn until the feet, not the head, slide toward the vulva, sending the child feet first into death; or fattening the child until it cannot fit through the vagina, requiring a fr
igid caesarean birth, no more than the removal of a tumor, in place of a natural birth. Or, refusing to accept the responsibility of creation, the mother might call for the help of a doctor who squeezes the child’s brain with forceps; or due to a neurosis of failure, the child might be born blue, half-suffocated, forced to represent the emotional death of the parents . . . You should have the right to a profound collaboration: the mother should want to give birth just as the boy or girl wants to be born. The effort should be mutual and well balanced. From the moment that this universe produces you, it is your right to have a protective parent who is always present while you are growing up. Just as one gives water to a thirsty plant you have the right, when you are interested in some activity, to see before you the great number of possibilities that may develop along the path that you choose. You are not put on Earth to fulfill the personal plans of the adults who have set goals for you that are not your own; the greatest happiness life gives you is to allow you to become yourself. You should have the right to your own space where you can be alone in order to build your imaginary world, to see what you want to see without your eyes being restricted by antiquated morals, to hear what you want to hear even if the ideas are contrary to those of your family. You are not put on Earth to fulfill anyone but yourself, you are not here to take the place of any dead person, you deserve to have a name that is not that of a family member who died before you were born: when you carry the name of a dead person, it means that they have grafted a destiny onto you that is not your own, usurping your true essence. You have full right not to be compared to any sister or brother; they are not worth any more or less than you. Love exists when essential differences are recognized. You should have the right to be excluded from all quarrels between your family members, not to be used as a witness in their disputes, not to be the dumping ground for their economic woes, and to grow in an environment of trust and security. You should have the right to be educated by a father and mother who are ruled by common ideas, their intimacy with one another smoothing their contradictions. If they get divorced, you should have the right not to be required to see men through the resentful eyes of your mother or women through the resentful eyes of your father. You should have the right not to be torn away from the place where your friends, your school, and your favorite teachers are. You should have the right not to be criticized if you choose a path in life that was not part of your parents’ plan; to love whomever you want without the need for approval; and when you feel capable of doing so, to leave home and go live your own life; to surpass your parents, to go further than them, to do what they could not, and to live longer than them. Finally, you should have the right to choose the time of your death without anyone prolonging your life against your will.”
THREE
First Acts
If Matucana felt like a stifling prison to me, then so did my body. Feeling ill at ease in my flesh, I fled into my intellect. I lived shut away in my mind, levitating a few meters above a walking corpse that felt alien to me. I was conscious of myself as a multitude of disordered thoughts that eventually lost their meaning and became masses of empty words without any roots to nourish my being. I was a dry well in which phrases floated around, accumulating into a fabric of anguish. I knew that I was somewhere in there, behind my face, but I could not tell who or what this self of mine was. I felt cold, heat, hunger, desire, pain, and sorrow, but at a distance, as if they were in an alien body. The only thing that kept me alive was the ability to imagine. I dreamed of adventures in exotic lands, colossal triumphs, virgins sleeping with pearls in their mouths, elixirs that conferred immortality. Everything that I wanted could be summarized in a single word: change. The essential quality that I needed in order to love myself was to become what I currently was not. Like the frog awaiting the princess, I waited for the arrival of a superior and compassionate soul who would overcome disgust and approach me to give me the kiss of knowledge. Unfortunately I only had two friends, and they were imaginary: the Rebbe and the aged Alejandro. For what I wanted to achieve, I needed more than a couple of ghosts. I decided to be my own helper.
Even after meditations that seemed eternal, I was not able to dissolve my intellect within my body. Getting out of my own head was as impossible as escaping from a strongbox. It was impossible to get rid of the supremacy of my identification with the flesh. Therefore, I decided to try the opposite: since I could not go down, I would make all my sensations ascend! Beginning as pure intellect I began by considering my physical form, then my needs, desires, and emotions. I examined how I felt, then what it was like to live with this sensation. I realized that so-called “reality” was a mental construct. Was it a total illusion? This was impossible to know, but quite clearly I never perceived what was real in me in its entirety. Intellect always provided me with an incomplete fantasy, distorted by the false consciousness of myself with which my family had imbued me. “I am living inside a madman! My rational ship is sailing on a sea of insanity!” What at first I thought was a nightmare changed, little by little, into hope. Since everything that presented itself to me as part of “my being” consisted of illusory images, nothing more than dreams, I was able to change my sensation of myself.
Thus, a long process began. I focused my attention on my feet. They felt heavy, numb, distant, incapable of balancing properly. I began to imagine them as light, fine-tuned, sensitive, confident, their toes extending intrepidly onto the paths of life. I imagined myself with the feet of Christ, pierced by a single nail that fastened them to the pain of the world, a bleeding wound offering ascendancy to change lamentation into prayer. I imagined that the wounds I endured were not mine but those of humanity, and that through those wounds I absorbed the suffering of others and let it circulate in my blood like a balm, transforming it into happiness.
Next, I focused on my bones, felt them one by one. How forgotten was this humble structure! I had lugged it around as a symbol of death, not realizing its vital power. I recreated my skeleton, giving it a strong and flexible material like that of a steel sword, bones almost weightless, with a core of molten lava, like those on which the eagle soars. Suddenly, I realized that I had created the skeleton of a dancer—the skeleton of my maternal grandfather. Without the intervention of my own will I then felt long, powerful muscles and indestructible entrails forming around this luminous structure, with abundant golden hair falling around its shoulders like a liquid halo. I realized that during my gestation Sara had unceasingly desired to recreate her father, the legendary dancer turned into a burning torch. Those wishes had infiltrated my cells, a mandate contrary to the natural order of things, causing me to be born giving forth cries of dissatisfaction. I was myself—what a sin!—and not the seven-foot-tall giant, the practically weightless solar Hercules. In order to be loved, I would have had to make myself into that myth. The flaming dead man was my ideal of perfection . . . I wanted to undo all of that and imagine another ideal body for myself. And yet, for all that I tried, I could not get rid of it. I recognized that I carried that model embedded in my genes, that every cell in my body aspired to be him. To keep struggling to change the effigy would be to deceive myself. Perhaps for centuries, from generation to generation, nature had been striving to produce that entity. Why not obey her? And if this meant that in a metaphorical manner, I would become my mother’s father, then what of it? She had dreamed of being the daughter of a strong yet sensitive man, an artist. Once, shedding many tears, Sara had told me that when her father, Alejandro Prullansky, was dancing down the street engulfed in a rose of flame he had shouted out poems instead of screaming, until he crumbled to ashes.
Feeling myself living in this graceful imaginary body, I now became capable of movements that I had never known before. Space, which had previously seemed to me a terrifying abyss, enveloped me like a soft coat and showed me where to go; it became a protective carpet and ceiling, stretched to the horizon like an enormous harp, standing before me offering views through infinite windows. For the first time, I felt at ease
in the world. The sensation of divergence disappeared. Countless invisible threads tied me to the center of the Earth, to the land, to the sky. With the whole planet licking the soles of my feet, I was moved to dance, to jump higher and higher, to go beyond the stars, into the depths of the sky.
What I am relating may seem absurd. What could be the use of such self-deception? My answer is that as a young man struggling to escape the weight of depression during that time, imagining myself to be strong and weightless offered me a lifeline that saved me from suffocating in the trap that was my family and allowed me to undertake liberating work. But, without any guide, where was I to start? Sometimes in those moments of greatest abandonment when we feel utterly deserted a sign appears where we least expect it and shows us the way. Those who dare to advance into darkness, expecting nothing, will at last find their shining goal. On a page torn from a book, which an autumn wind blew around my feet, I read the words that showed me I was on the right path: “The initiate who sets out in good faith to find the Truth, only to find, on all sides, the inexorable barrier that throws him back into the ‘ordinary tumult,’ will hear the Master say: ‘Watch out, there is a wall.’ ‘But is this wall temporary?’ asks the restless soul, ‘can I pass through it or demolish it? Is it an adversary? Is it a friend?’ ‘I cannot tell you. You must discover it for yourself.’”
Who had written these lines, brought to me on a piece of paper that flitted down the street like a dirty butterfly? Was someone trying to tell me that my own being, which I myself despised, was worthy of attention from magical chance? And that I was not a vacant entity, that inside me there existed the power to cross or demolish the wall, because it was I myself who had built it? By saying, “Watch out, there is a wall!” the Master had stated that the disciple was not seeing due to distraction. Perhaps I was confusing the wall with reality, mistaking my mental limits for the natural boundaries of the world. Here is how I saw myself: since childhood I had been robbed of my freedom, my mind enclosed by a fence that prevented expansion. I closed my eyes. I saw myself submerged in a black sphere. This was the wall. As soon as I shut my eyelids, I found myself compressed within a dark skull. And because I felt blind, the possibility of existing escaped me. To lose sight of the outside world was to lose myself. The solitude became even greater when I plugged my ears with my fingers. Blocked off from light and sound, my wretched condition, my lack of sensation, my nothingness, manifested with implacable cruelty. In fact, I told myself, this blackness is impalpable. And if it is impalpable, then it does not have to be a thick barrier; it can be an infinite space. That’s it! When I close my eyes, I will imagine that my consciousness is floating at the center of the cosmos.
The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography Page 7
