I also believe that my fascination with theater entered my being due to three events that deeply marked my childhood soul: I participated in the burial of a firefighter, I witnessed a seizure, and I heard the prince of China sing.
Since Casa Ukrania was near the fire station, to fight off boredom my father soon enlisted in the First Company. Fires were rare in this small town, at most one per year. Being a firefighter thus became a social activity, with a parade every year on the anniversary of the fire company’s founding, as well as charity balls, public exercises to test the equipment, soccer tournaments between the companies (there were three of them), and band performances on Sundays at the gazebo in the town square. When they were raising funds to buy a new fire engine, the firefighters put on their parade uniforms—white pants and red jackets with a star over the heart—and a group photo was taken. My father offered me up as a mascot. The offer was accepted, and at age six I was magically converted into a firefighter.
In this perpetual dance of reality, just as the fireworks inaugurating the company were ignited, a fire erupted in the poor part of town. And so the company headed to the site of the fire, still dressed in their fancy uniforms that covered their fire truck in red and white. Although no one invited me, I tagged along. I did not extinguish any flames, but I was entrusted with the sacred task of keeping an eye on the axes because the indigents of the neighborhood were fully capable of stealing not only those but also the wheels, ladders, hoses, nuts, and bolts off the luxurious vehicle while the firefighters struggled to save them from the fire. Once the fire had been conquered, it was noticed that the company chief was missing. He was pulled from the rubble, entirely black. A vigil was held for the corpse in the firemen’s barracks, with a white coffin covered with orange and red flowers symbolizing flames. At midnight he was brought from there to the cemetery in a solemn procession. No spectacle had ever impressed me so much; I felt proud to participate, sorry for the bereaved, and, especially, terrified. It was the first time I had walked the streets at such a late hour of the night. Seeing my world covered in shadows revealed the dark side of life to me. Dangerous aspects were hidden within familiar things. I was terrified of the residents who crowded the sidewalks, the whites of their eyes glittering in their dark silhouettes as they watched us slowly walk by, our feet gliding without our knees bending. First came the band, playing a heartrending funeral march. Then I came, so small, concealing my immeasurable anguish with the face of a warrior. Next came the ostentatious coach carrying the coffin, and finally behind that the three companies in their parade outfits, each fireman holding a torch. By agreement, all the lights in Tocopilla were off. The siren rang constantly. The flames of the torches made shadows that fluttered like giant vultures. I kept going for about three kilometers, but then I stumbled and fell. Jaime, who was in the wagon next to the driver, jumped down and picked me up; I woke up in my bed with a high fever. It seemed to me as if my sheets were covered with ashes. The scent of the wreaths of flowers brought from Iquique was stuck in my nostrils. I thought that the shadow vultures nesting in my room would devour me. Jaime could think of no better way to calm me than to say, as he put wet towels on my forehead and belly, “If I’d known you were so impressionable, I wouldn’t have brought you to the funeral. Good thing I picked you up just as you fell. Don’t worry, no one saw what a coward you are.” For a long time I dreamed that the star on my uniform was clinging to my chest like an animal, sucking up my voice to keep me from screaming while I was shut in a white coffin and brought to the graveyard. Later, this harrowing experience taught me to use the metaphorical funeral for psychomagical healing: an impressive ritual in which the sick person is buried.
The First Company of Firemen of Tocopilla. I am the six-year-old child, circled, on the left side of the picture.
The Prieto family had built a public spa on the northern edge of Tocopilla. The large swimming pool, carved out of the rocks by the seaside, was filled by the ocean waves. I did not like to swim there because there were fish and octopuses. It was a very popular place. On several occasions I saw people running to a beach nearby because an unemployed bald man known as the Cuckoo was kicking up a cloud of sand, twisting in a fit of epilepsy. The spectators who had been busy bathing or drinking bottles of beer by the dozen would come to watch as the sick man began with hoarse grunts that increased in their intensity until they became deafening screams. Amidst a great deal of nervous excitement the group would carry him to a dark, covered room as he kept on howling, shaking, and foaming at the mouth. The excitement lasted for an hour, which was how long it took for the Cuckoo’s seizures to pass over. Proud of having saved him by tying his hands and feet and putting the handle of a feather duster in his mouth, they would then take up a collection and treat him to an empanada and a beer. Looking like a sad dog he would eat and drink, and then leave, hanging his head. I, like many others I suppose, felt very sorry for him.
One Sunday morning, when the spa was full of people, I began to hear the bald man’s wheezing before anyone else did. I ran to the beach and saw him comfortably seated on a stone, taking great pains to raise the volume of his lamentations. He did not see me coming. He jumped up when I touched his shoulder, looking at me furiously. He grabbed a rock threateningly and said, “Get out of here, you little shit!” I ran, but as soon as I was hidden behind the rocks, I stopped to watch. When the bathers came running toward him, drawn by his screams, he put a piece of soap in his mouth, lay on the ground, and began to squirm and foam at the mouth. Who would have guessed that the Cuckoo was a rogue actor, as healthy as those who came to save him? When he writhed on the ground, with the soil full of sharp stones, he received painful cuts on his skin; his nervous saviors, lifting him up, would sometimes bang him against rocks; the empanada they bought him was mediocre, and the beer only one. Was it worth doing so much work for so little reward? I realized that what this poor man was after was the attention of others. Later I understood that all illnesses, even the cruelest ones, are a form of entertainment. At the basis of this is a protestation against the lack of love and the prohibition of any word or gesture clarifying this deficiency. That which is not said, not expressed, kept secret, can eventually turn into disease. The child’s soul, drowned by this prohibition, eliminates its organic defenses in order to let in the sickness that will give it the opportunity to express its desolation. Disease is a metaphor. It is a child’s protest turned into a representation.
There was a large room on the second floor of the firemen’s building that no one used. It occurred to Jaime that the company could take advantage of this space by renting it out for parties; time went by and, probably due to the financial crisis, no client rented it. My father said that it was not for lack of money but due to inertia: no one wanted to deviate from the customary ways. Large parties, weddings, and award ceremonies were held in the roller skating rink at the Prieto family’s spa, and that was that . . . “We’ll show them,” Jaime said, and after becoming a regular patron of the Jade Bridge Chinese restaurant in order to convince the owner to be his intermediary, he offered the space for free to the Chinese community and committed himself to arranging a lively ball with the bands of the three firemen’s companies playing. The Asian families danced tangos to the wind instruments, put on raffles, ate churrasco, and drank wine with peaches and strawberries spiked with aguardiente. This party, exotic for them, was such a hit that they gave my father a certificate declaring him a friend of the Chinese community. With the racial ice broken, some Chinese people came to our house to spend an evening playing mah-jongg.*3 The most assiduous player among them was a young man with olive skin tending toward yellow whose face was perfectly smooth and unblemished. He had long, manicured nails, black hair trimmed with mathematical precision, and a face as perfectly sculpted as that of a porcelain figurine. His fine cashmere suit, cut to perfection, his wide-collared shirt, his exquisite tie, his gleaming patent leather shoes, and his silk socks all blended harmoniously with his distinguished gestures
. Jaime called him the Prince. I, who had never seen such masculine beauty, looked at him ecstatically as if he were a great toy.
He smiled at me with his almond-shaped eyes. Then, with a hypnotic rhythm, he said things to me in Chinese that, though I did not understand them, made me laugh. One afternoon Sara Felicidad was very excited and said, “I have wonderful news: tonight the Prince is going to sing us an opera in the style of his country.” I understand why my mother was so moved: when she was young she had wanted to be an opera singer, but her stepfather and mother had told her this vocation was out of the question. The beautiful Chinese singer arrived at ten in the evening accompanied by two musicians dressed in skirts over satin trousers. One carried an unusual stringed instrument, the other a drum. The Prince, carrying a suitcase, requested that they give him an hour to get dressed and put on his makeup in the bathroom. My parents waited impatiently, playing dominoes. I, accustomed to going to bed early, fell asleep. When the Prince came before us a yawn froze in my mouth, Sara struggled to suppress a nervous cough, and Jaime opened his eyes so wide that I thought he would never be able to close them again. Our Chinese friend had become a beautiful woman. And to say beautiful is an understatement. Taking short and rapid steps to the plaintive sound of the stringed instrument and the metallic rhythm of the drum, he appeared to glide and float. His robe, made of silk and satin, was brightly colored in red, green, yellow, and blue, studded with glass and metal inlays. His small hands, which emerged from wide sleeves, were painted white with lacquered nails and waved an airy handkerchief. On his back were a number of rods with flags on them, by way of wings. His face, also white, had been transformed into the mask of a goddess, and his small lips moved like those of an eel. The Prince, or rather the Princess, was singing. It was not a human voice, but the lament of a millenarian insect. The long, intense, sinuous, otherworldly phrases were interspersed by sudden stops, accentuated by the two instruments . . . I fell into a trance. I forgot I was watching a human; before me was a supernatural being out of a fairy tale bringing us the treasure of his existence. Sara did not seem to feel the same way. With her face red and her breath coming in short bursts, she frowned as if witnessing an insane act. It was obvious that she could not accept the idea of a man playing at transforming himself into a woman. Jaime, after a while, seemed to comprehend the deeper meaning of the performance: he was watching an Oriental clown. The whole thing was a joke that his friend was playing. He began guffawing. The apparition stopped singing, bowed deeply, went into the bathroom, and thirty minutes later the Prince returned, impeccable as always. With haughty dignity, he descended the stairs, followed by his two acolytes, and went out into the street to be lost in the night and never to return.
Thinking again and again about this tense situation, which left an indelible impression on my memory, I realized that every extraordinary act breaks down the walls of reason. It upends the scale of values and refers the spectator to his or her own judgment. It acts as a mirror: each person sees it within his own limitations. But those limitations, when they manifest, can cause an unexpected burst of awareness. “The world is as I think it is. My ills come from my distorted vision. If I want to heal, it is not the world that I should try to change, but the opinion I have of it.”
Miracles are like stones: they are everywhere, offering up their beauty, but hardly anyone concedes value to them. We live in a reality where prodigies abound but are seen only by those who have developed their perception of them. Without this perception everything is banal, marvelous events are seen as chance, and one progresses through life without possessing the key that is gratitude. When something extraordinary happens it is seen as a natural phenomenon that we can exploit like parasites, without giving anything in return. But miracles require an exchange; I must make that which is given to me bear fruit for others. If one is not united with oneself, the wonder cannot be captured. Miracles are never performed or provoked: they are discovered. If someone who believes himself to be blind takes off his dark glasses, he will see the light. That darkness is the prison of the rational.
I consider it a great miracle that the choreographer Kurt Joos, fleeing Nazi Germany accompanied by four of his best dancers, arrived in Santiago de Chile. Another miracle was that the Chilean government admitted him and gave him a grant that allowed him to open a school with large rooms where all the expressionist ballets could be re-created. Most of the great foreign performers of that era were hosted by the Municipal Theater, a beautiful and spacious Italianate building in the city center built before the economic crisis. My poet friends and I, having discovered a service door at the rear of the building that was not kept locked, would wait for the performance to begin, slip off our shoes, and sneak through the shadows to the sides of the stage from where we could watch the show. My friends saw La mesa verde, Pavana, and La gran ciudad only a couple of times. I saw at least a hundred performances. Such was my devotion that I knelt while watching these splendid choreographies. In La mesa verde a group of hypocritical diplomats discussed peace around a green table, only to finally declare war. Death appeared dressed as the god Mars, played with great verve by a Russian dancer, showing us the horrors of war. In Pavana an innocent girl was crushed by a ritual court; in La gran ciudad two idealistic teenagers came to New York and, in their eagerness for success, were destroyed by the vices of the relentless city. For the first time, I saw a technique that astutely used the body to express a wide range of feelings and ideas. The ballet troupes that visited the country had left behind a fastidious legacy: so-called classical dance schools that crammed all bodies into the same mold, deforming them in the quest for a hollow and obsolete beauty. Joos, staging the most urgent political and social problems with sublime technique, planted the seed that later grew in my spirit: the ultimate goal of art is to cure. If art does not heal, it is not true art.
I might have fallen into the trap of limiting myself to an art preoccupied solely with asserting political doctrines, but fortunately, another miracle occurred. The lead dancer, Ernst Uthoff, came into conflict with the brilliant choreographer and decided to form his own ballet, drawing on elements of classical dance. Setting aside the problems of the material world, perhaps wanting to forget the suffering of war, he staged a fantastic tale: Copelia. I still remember the name of the dancer who played the puppet whose creator wished to make her human by stealing the soul of a young man in love: Virginia Roncal, a woman who devoted her life to dance. She was not exceptionally beautiful and was short in stature, but her talent was outstanding. The first time I saw her rise up from the table where the inanimate body of the young man whose soul had been stolen lay—first making the rigid movements of an automaton, then little by little feeling life invade her, then finally shaking off the mechanical movements in a sort of frenzy and dancing like a real woman, but then, upon discovering the lifeless young man and realizing that this soul was not her own, returning the life that did not belong to her in a kiss with a supreme effort of honesty and love, then finally resuming her automatic movements—I was moved to tears. I realized that art should not only heal the body but also the soul. All objectives are summarized into one: realizing human potentialities in order to transcend them. Sacrificing the personal in order to achieve the impersonal means nothing is for me that is not for others.
Copelia awoke such admiration in me that I approached Uthoff ’s school to seek admission. While there I was smitten with a dancer with thick curly hair, strong as an oak tree and tall as a magical horse. Fortunately for me, she liked me; I became absorbed by her. I learned to dance through her movements in love. One night when the electricity was out we embraced on the desk where André Racz had done his drawings. A sticky wetness covered both our bodies. Inflamed with pleasure as we were, we were not concerned. Suddenly, the light came back on, and we found that all our skin was stained black. In our enthusiastic movements we had overturned a large bottle of Chinese ink. Nora saw this as a sign: my enjoyment of her movements had made me forget my talent as a
dancer. She did not want to be guilty of destroying a vocation that was sacred to her, so she ended our relationship and introduced me to the Yugoslav Yerca Lucsic, a passionate teacher of modern dance. Her courses were intense, the creation in them unceasing. I learned to move according to the nine characters of Gurdjieff ’s enneagram, to imitate all kinds of animals; also to give birth and breastfeed, experiencing what it is to be a mother, analogous to women who danced imitating penile erection and ejaculation. We investigated the expression of the wounds of Christ. I had to dance the spear into my side, the crown of thorns onto my head, and the nails into my feet and hands. Dancing became an activity that allowed me to know what I was, but also what I was not.
Yerca wanted to push beyond limits. And because of this, she died. With her savings she had bought a house on an ocean beach near the capital and spent her weekends there. She entered into a relationship with a fisherman. He was a handsome but uneducated man. Rather than educating him, she encouraged him to affirm himself. She dressed him as a traditional fisherman, in a starched white calico suit with bare feet and a red bandanna around his neck, and introduced him to her friends who came to visit on the weekends who were dancers, artists, professors, university alumni, and people of high society. The couple was very popular. She talked incessantly while he mutely served the drinks. One day we waited, but Yerca did not come to class. Not that day, nor the whole week. We learned from newspapers that the fisherman had murdered her, cutting her body into little bits with a pair of pliers and a knife. By the time they took him to prison, denounced by his comrades, he had already used half of my teacher’s body as bait.
The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography Page 15
