Strangely, perhaps due to the magic of the puppetry, my parents’ attitude toward me was more understanding and loving once I decided to resume relations with them. Also, my grandmother, without ever mentioning the tree incident, invited me to have tea with her and, for the first time ever, gave me a gift: a watch that had an elephant in place of hands, marking the minutes with its trunk and the hours with its tail. A miracle! I explained to myself that the image we have of another person is not that person but a representation. The world that is imposed on us by our senses depends on our way of seeing it. In many ways, the other is what we believe it to be. For example, when I made the Jaime puppet I modeled it in the way I saw him, giving him a limited existence. When I brought him to life in the miniature theater other aspects that I had not captured came to light, rising up from my obscure memory and transforming the image. The character, enriched by my creativity, evolved to reach a higher level of consciousness, changing from fierce and stubborn into friendly and full of love. Perhaps my individual subconscious was closely linked to the family subconscious. If my reality was different, then my relatives’ reality was also different. In a certain way, when a being is portrayed a nexus is established between the being and the object that symbolizes it. Thus, if changes come about in the object, the being that gave rise to what it represents also changes. Years later, when studying medieval witchcraft and magic, I saw that this technique had been used to harm enemies. A necklace made that contained hairs, fingernails, or shreds of clothing from the intended victim was put on the neck of a dog that was then slaughtered. After engraving a patient’s name in the bark of a tree, incantations were recited in order to transfer the disease to the tree. This principle has been preserved in popular witchcraft in the form of pictures or wax figurines that are impaled with pins. My attention was also drawn to the belief in the transfer of personality through physical contact. Touching someone or something means, in a certain way, becoming it. Medieval doctors, in order to heal knights wounded in tournaments, used to spread their healing ointments on the sword that had inflicted the wound. I was not aware of this topic at that time in my life, and yet I applied it intuitively and in a positive way.
I told myself, if the puppets I make come to life and transmit their essence to me, instead of creating characters I despise or hate why not choose characters who can transmit a knowledge that I do not yet possess? During those years Pablo Neruda was regarded as the greatest poet, but like many young people a spirit of contradiction caused me to refuse to be his ardent follower. Suddenly, there came a new poet, Nicanor Parra, who rebelled against the genius Neruda who was so visceral and politically compromised, writing verses that were intelligent, humorous, and different from all other known poetry; these he dubbed “anti-poems.” My enthusiasm for this was delirious. Finally an author had descended from the romantic Olympus to discuss his everyday anxieties, his neuroses, his sentimental failures. One poem above all made an impression on me: “The Viper.” Unlike Neruda’s sonnets, this poem was not about an ideal woman, but about a real bitch.
For many years I was condemned to worship a despicable woman,
To sacrifice myself for her, to suffer countless humiliations and ridicule,
Working day and night to feed and clothe her,
Perpetrating some crimes, committing some offenses,
Small thefts by the light of the moon
Falsifications of incriminating documents
Under the threat of falling into disgrace in her fascinating eyes.
How great was my envy, having never even made love to any woman, of Nicanor Parra having known such an extraordinary female!
For long years I lived as a prisoner of this woman’s charm
She used to show up in my office completely naked
Performing the most difficult contortions imaginable . . .
I immediately made some paste and started to model a puppet representing the poet. The newspaper had not published any photos of him, but in contrast to Neruda, who was rather bald, stocky, with a Buddha-like air, I sculpted Parra with hollow cheeks, intelligent eyes, an aquiline nose, and leonine hair. Enclosed in my little theater I manipulated the Nicanor puppet for hours, making him improvise anti-poems and, above all, relate his experiences with women. Stifled by my chastity, having had a mother whose torso was always encased in a corset and who blushed at the slightest sexual reference, women appeared to me the greatest mystery of all . . . but once I was imbued with the spirit of the poet, I felt myself capable of finding a muse, preferably on par with the Viper.
In the city center, Café Iris opened its doors at midnight. There, illuminated by cruel neon tubes, the night owls drank beer on tap or else an extremely cheap wine that made them shudder with every sip. The waiters, all dressed in black uniforms, were older people who walked unhurriedly from table to table, taking small steps.
In this calm place, time seemed to stand still in an eternal instant where there was no room for sorrow or anguish. Nor was there room for any great happiness. They drank in silence, as if in purgatory. Nothing new could happen there. And yet, on the very night that I decided to go to Café Iris to find the woman who would become my ferocious muse, Stella Díaz Varin was there. How to describe her? It was 1949, and we were in the most remote country, where no one wanted to be different from everyone else, where it was almost mandatory to wear shades of gray, where the men had to have closely cropped hair and the women had to have chitinous coiffures sculpted at beauty salons, forty years before the first punks emerged. I had just settled down over a cup of coffee when Stella (who had just been fired from the newspaper La Hora for her article about the deforestation brought about by the logging industry, which would later devastate the southern part of the country) appeared before me shaking her amazing head of red hair, a sanguine mass that reached below her waist; it was not hair but a mane. I am not exaggerating, never in my life have I met a woman with such thick hair. Rather than powdering her face, as was customary in Chile at that time, she had painted it pale violet using watercolors. Her lips were blue, her eyelids were covered with green eye shadow, and her ears were shining, painted gold. It was summer, but over her short skirt and a sleeveless shirt that highlighted her arrogant nipples she wore an old fur coat, probably made of dog hair, which came down to her heels. She drank a liter of beer, smoked a pipe, and without paying attention to anyone, locked in her own personal Olympus, she wrote something down on a paper napkin. A drunken man approached her and whispered something in her ear. She opened her coat, lifted her shirt, showed him her opulent breasts, and then quick as lightning dealt him a blow to the chin that sent him sprawling three meters away on the ground, unconscious. One of the old waiters, not greatly perturbed, poured a glass of water on his face. The man got up, offered humble apologies to the poet, and went to sit in a corner of the café. It was as if nothing had happened. She continued writing. I fell in love.
My encounter with Stella was fundamental. Thanks to her I was able to move from the conceptual act of creation, through words and images, to the poetic act with poems resulting from a sum of bodily movements. Stella, defying social prejudices, behaved as if the world were a ductile material that she could model at will. I asked the old bartender if he knew her.
“Of course, young man, who doesn’t? She comes here often to write and drink beer. She used to work for the secret police, where she learned karate chops. Then she was a journalist, but they fired her for being too controversial. Now she’s a poet. The critic in El Mercurio says she’s better than Gabriela Mistral. He must have slept with her. Watch out, young man, that beast can break your nose.”
Trembling, I watched her finish a second liter of beer, feverishly fill several pages in her notebook, and then walk haughtily out into the street. I followed her as inconspicuously as possible. I noticed that she was walking barefoot, and her feet were painted in watercolors, forming a rainbow from the red nails to the violet ankles. She got on a bus that ran all the way along the Ala
meda de las Delicias toward the central station. I got on as well and sat in front of her. I felt her eyes on the nape of my neck, piercing me like a stiletto. The night became a dream. To be in the same vehicle with this woman meant moving toward our common soul. Suddenly, as the bus was starting to move again after a stop, she ran to the door and jumped out. Surprised, I begged the driver to stop, which he did two hundred meters farther on. I walked toward the point where Stella had jumped off. I saw with surprise that she was looking at me, motioning to me to stop. With my heart pounding in terror, I stood still. I closed my eyes and waited for the fierce punch. Her hands began to touch my body, without sensuality. Then she opened my fly and examined my penis like a doctor. She sighed.
“Open your eyes, squirt! I can see you’re still a virgin! I’m too much for you. An ostrich can’t hatch a pigeon’s egg. What do you want?”
“I hear you write. So do I. Could I have the honor of reading your poems?”
She smiled. I saw that one of her incisors was broken, giving her a cannibalistic air.
“You’re only interested in my poetry? What about my ass and my tits? Hypocrite! Do you have some money?”
I dug in my pockets. I found a five-peso bill and showed it to her. She snatched it.
“There’s a café open all night next to the Alameda Theater. Let’s go there. I’m hungry. We’ll eat a sandwich and drink a beer.”
So we did. She opened her notebook and, munching bread with salami, her lips whitened by beer foam, began to read. She recited for an hour, which seemed like ten to me. I had never heard poetry like this. I felt each sentence like a knife. In the instant that I heard them these verses transformed themselves into deep but pleasurable wounds. To listen to this real poet, liberated from rhyme, meter, and morality, was one of the most moving moments of my youth. The café was dirty, ugly, lit by glaring lights, and full of sordid, bestial patrons. And yet, as I heard those sublime words, it became a palace inhabited by angels. There was the proof that poetry was a miracle that could change one’s vision of the world. And to change the vision was to change the perceived object as well. The poetic revolution seemed more important than political revolution to me. One part of that reading remains in my memory like treasure from a shipwreck: “The woman who loved doves in a virgin’s ecstasy, and fed irises at night with her sleeping nipple, dreamed with her back to the wall, and everything seemed beautiful without being so.” She abruptly closed the book and, not wanting to hear my words of admiration, got up, took me by the arm, went out into the street, and led me to the nearest corner by the Pedagogical Institute. A narrow door was the entrance to the boarding house where she rented a small room. With a push, she sat me down on the stone step in front of the door, knelt beside me, and caught my right ear in her sharp teeth. She stayed like this, the way a panther holds its prey in its mouth before crushing it. A thousands thoughts ran through my mind. “Maybe she’s crazy, she might be cannibalistic, she’s testing me; she wants to see if I’ll sacrifice a piece of ear to get her.” Well, I decided to sacrifice it, knowing this woman was worth such mutilation. I calmed down, stopped tensing my muscles, and gave myself over to the pleasure of feeling the touch of her moist lips. Time seemed to solidify. She made no move to let go. Instead, she squeezed her teeth a little more. I tried to remember where the nearest open pharmacy was, so that I could run there after losing part of my ear to buy alcohol, disinfect the wound, and stop the bleeding. Miraculously, I was saved by an exhibitionist; he passed by us, face covered with an open newspaper, his fly open to show his bulky phallus. Stella let go of me to drive him away, kicking him. The man, running as fast as his legs could carry him, disappeared into the night. The poet, laughing, sat down beside me, wiped the sweat off one of my palms with her hand, and examined my lines by the light of a match.
“You got talent, kid. We’ll get along well. Come and pee.”
She led me to a nearby church. Next to the gate was a sculpture of St. Ignatius of Loyola.
“Do it on the saint,” she said, rolling up her skirt. “Praying and pissing are both sacred acts.”
She wore no panties, and her pubic hair was abundant. Kneeling beside me, she let a thick yellow stream fall onto the monk’s stone chest. I, with a stream that was thinner but went farther, bathed the statue’s forehead.
“I warmed his heart and you crowned him, boy. Now go to bed. I’ll see you tomorrow at midnight at Café Iris.”
She gave me a quick but intense kiss on the mouth, walked with me to the central station, and the moment I turned my back on her, kicked me in the rear. Without offering any resistance I let myself be pushed, took four precipitous steps, then regained my normal gait and, with great dignity, walked away from her without looking back.
The next day the hours slipped by without my noticing anything. Immobilized, I moved through flat, gray time as through an empty tunnel, at the end of which the anticipated midnight hour shone like a splendid jewel. I arrived at Café Iris at twelve o’clock sharp, with my Nicanor Parra puppet hidden, clutched to my chest. It was a gift for Stella . . . but my beloved had not yet arrived. I ordered a beer. At 12:30 I asked for another; at 1:00, yet another, and at 1:30 another; another at 2:00, and another at 2:30. Drunk and sad I finally saw her enter, looking smug, accompanied by a man shorter than her with a face like a boxer and wearing that sardonic expression common to those broken offspring of Spanish soldiers and raped Indian women. Glancing at me defiantly, she sat in front of me with, I assumed, her lover. They both smiled, looking satisfied. I was furious. I slipped my hand under my vest, took out the puppet, and threw it on the table. “Let this Nicanor Parra be your teacher! You deserve to be with a poet of this dimension, not to debase yourself with down-and-outs like the one you’re with right now. If you read his brilliant poem “The Viper” you will find your portrait. Goodbye forever.” And, stumbling, getting caught in the legs of the chairs, I headed for the exit. Stella chased me down and brought me back to the table. I thought the insulted boxer would punch me, but no. With a smile he held out his hand and said, “I appreciate what you said. I am Nicanor Parra and the woman who inspired me to write ‘The Viper’ is Stella.” While it is true that my creation bore no resemblance to the features of the great poet, I felt certain that I had my puppet to thank for my having met him. This miracle came from one of the threads from which the world is woven together. Parra graciously gave me his telephone number, informed me with a single glance he was not Stella’s lover and that I had a good chance of being that, and said goodbye to us.
Faced with this extravagant and beautiful woman, I was speechless. My drunkenness had dissipated as if by magic. She looked at me with the intensity of a tiger, inhaled the smoke from her pipe, and blew it in my face. I started coughing. She gave a hoarse cackle that drew the attention of everyone in the café, then turned serious and said in an accusing tone, “Don’t deny it; you have a knife. Give it to me!” Embarrassed, not wishing to deny it, I dug in a pocket and pulled out my modest knife. She took it, opened it, looked at the half-rusted blade, and asked what my name was. She spread out her open left hand on the table, and with the knife in her right hand made three cuts on the back of it, forming a bloody A. She licked the blood off the blade and returned it to me, wet with saliva. With dizzying speed, I thought, “The A is formed by three straight lines, which makes the cuts easier. If I cut an S I’ll have to make a long curvy wound; I might cut a vein, I don’t have oily skin like her. What should I do? I’m being tested. I’m going to look like a stupid coward. I have to find an elegant solution.” I took her hand and licked the wound, five, ten, endless minutes, until not a drop of blood was left. I offered her my red-stained mouth. She kissed me passionately.
The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography Page 11
