As we crossed the street toward the artists’ entrance, Carrot Clown took me by the hand as if I were his child. Although we walked with dignity a group of children followed us, laughing. Once inside the ring, we mingled with the other clowns. Our task was to fill the time necessary for the workers to take down the trapezes and safety nets. The routines were simple, and with my experience as a puppeteer, I had no trouble in performing them. But the circular theater, full of people all around, made an impression on me. In a puppet show, one performs facing forward. Puppetry has a form like the human head, with the eyes facing forward and darkness behind. I realized that since childhood I had been accustomed to seeing the world from the outside: as I watched events happen I sometimes moved toward them, but most of the time they were directed toward me. Being surrounded by the audience immediately makes one into the center, rather than looking in from the outside. For an action to be seen by everyone, it is necessary to turn constantly. This gives us a bond with the planets. We are not outside humanity; we are its heart. We do not come as strangers to the world, the world produces us. We are not migratory birds, but the fruit offered by the tree. Thinking thus, I had an idea for a joke that I told to my friend Carrot Clown. He very kindly decided to premiere it that very evening.
“Hey, clown, tell me what you are.”
“I am a foreigner, sir!”
“And what country do you come from?”
“From Foreignia!”
This absurd dialogue caused no laughter. I felt very embarrassed. The clown Piripipí approached me, inviting me to his dressing room. He was different from the others. Outside of the ring, he spoke with a heavy German accent. When performing he answered everything that was said to him without speaking a word by playing various musical instruments. His wife and daughter joined him in the final part of his act, where after having fought to obtain a large sum of money and then being accused of avarice he began to throw his coins onto a rectangle of wood that was lying on the ground in order to show his disinterest in them. As they fell there, each coin emitted a musical note. Piripipí got excited, and threw the coins in such a way as to play a waltz. The two women accompanied him, playing accordions, then the whole circus orchestra joined in.
I went into the dressing room feeling very nervous. His wife served me maté tea in a gourd with a silver straw. She was Argentinean. Piripipí, wearing a well-cut suit, shirt, and tie, still had his makeup on.
“Do not be surprised,” he said. “A few years ago I lost my human face. I do not live in disguise. This clown mask is my real face. My old face remained behind in Germany: my family was Jewish, and they brought it with them to the concentration camp. I was a fairly well-known orchestra conductor. Thanks to a few loyal fans, I was able to hide in the hold of a cargo ship in Hamburg that brought me to Argentina. Another time I’ll tell you how I became the clown Piripipí. I liked your joke. It’s different. It allows for profound interpretations. It should not matter to us that sometimes the audience does not laugh. You’ve seen it already: when I drop my coins, some people look serious and some even cry. True comedy permits many levels of interpretation. It begins with laughter, and then arrives at the understanding of beauty, which is the brilliance of unthinkable truth. All sacred texts are comic at their first level. Then the priests, who completely lack any sense of humor, erase the laughter of God. In Genesis, when Adam believes he is guilty of disobedience and hides when he feels ‘the footsteps of the Lord,’ that’s something humorous. God doesn’t have feet; he is incommensurable energy. If he creates the sound of footsteps, we can’t imagine that he wears clown shoes. ‘Where are you?’ he asks, pretending to be searching. If God knows everything, how can he ask a little human being where he is? This joke turns into an initiatory lesson when the ‘Where are you?’ is interpreted as, Where are you within yourself? I, not being anywhere, having no homeland, do not exist as a human being. I’m a clown. An imaginary being who lives in a dream world: the circus. But dreams are real as symbols. The spectacle takes place in a circular ring, a mandala, a representation of the world, the universe. The same door is both the entrance and the exit. That’s to say that the goal is the origin. Interpret this as you like; you come from nowhere, you go nowhere.
“When we see beautiful horses, elephants, dogs, birds, and all kinds of animals working in the ring, we understand that consciousness can tame our animal nature, not by repressing it but by giving it the opportunity to perform sublime tasks. The animal jumping through a flaming hoop overcomes the fear of divine perfection and jumps into it. The strength of the elephant is put to constructive use. The cats learn to work together. The knife thrower teaches us that his metal blades, symbolizing words, can surround the woman tied to the target, a symbol for the soul, without wounding her. Words are mastered in order to eliminate their aggressiveness and put them in the service of the spirit: the purpose of language is to show the value of the soul, and that value is absolute surrender. The sword swallower shows us that divine will can be obeyed completely, without offering any resistance. The least resistance causes fatal injuries. Obedience and surrender are the basis of faith. The fire breather symbolizes poetry, illuminated language that sets the world ablaze. The contortionists teach us how to free ourselves from our ossified mental forms: one must not aspire to anything permanent. We must bravely build in impermanence, in continual change. The trapeze artists invite us to rise above our needs, desires, and emotions to the ecstasy of pure ideas. They evolve toward the celestial, which is to say the sublime mind. The magicians tell us that life is a marvel: we do not perform the miracles; we learn to see them. The acrobats show us how dangerous distraction is: achieving a balance means being completely in the present. Finally, the jugglers teach us to respect objects, to know them profoundly, to place our interest in them and not in ourselves. It is harmony in coexistence. Thanks to our affection and dedication that which appears inanimate can obey and enrich us.”
After twenty days, when I thought I was going to be a clown forever, the real Pacifier Clown appeared. His face was swollen. Chalupa Clown had tracked him down at the bar to cut off his drinking. The performers thanked me for my collaboration, and as a courtesy let me give a final performance during which I cried genuine tears while at the same time squirting out fake tears three meters out. That night, when the artists had gone to dinner at the theater restaurant, Piripipí led me to the center of the empty ring and handed me a pair of scissors.
“Clip your fingernails and toenails and a lock of your hair.” He lifted the rug and showed me a crack in the ground. “Leave these parts of yourself here. Then your soul will know that you have a root in the circus.”
I did as he said, while Piripipí hummed a song:
Among the ten commandments
there’s only one for me:
be as free as the wind
while keeping my roots.
“Now that your nails and hair are part of the ring, you’ll always be in the mandala.” He took the velvet box in which he kept his coins and placed it in my hands. “Throw them on the floor. If you follow the order they are in and the rhythm that I give you, you’ll play the waltz.” I did so. The melody did not sound out perfectly, but however ungainly it may have been, it had the power to move me. “My friend, hear this from someone who lost everything he had in one painful moment, then realized that thanks to that he had found himself: don’t let yourself be dragged down by a false conception of money. Always earn it with activities that give you pleasure. If you are an artist, live art. If you are not going to be a professor of philosophy, why do you want that diploma? Leave the university; don’t waste your time there. Life is composed of different pastimes for each individual. Play your own game. You’ll see, when you’re an old man and you take your grandchildren to the circus, some clown there will be saying, ‘I am a foreigner, I’m from Foreignia.’ See? You’ve left your mark here forever.”
I followed Piripipí’s teachings to the letter. I withdrew from the Department of P
hilosophy, where I had endured three years, and enrolled in experimental theater courses at the University of Chile. I did not stay there long as a student, because my handling of puppets had made me a good actor. I was given the opportunity to act in Cervantes’ La guarda cuidadosa, Tirso de Molina’s Don Gil de las calzas verdes, and George Kaufman and Moss Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You. From TEUCH I went on to the TEUC (Teatro de Ensayo de la Universidad Católica). There I performed in Giraudoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot and Cocteau’s L’Aigle à deux têtes. I was fairly successful. I was then asked to act in the professional theater alongside the legendary Alejandro Flores, the best known of the Chilean actors. This did not mean performing for the crème de la crème on the weekends, but for the general public all through the week, two shows a day and three on Sundays. It was exhausting but exhilarating work. The play was called El depravado Acuña; in those years the popular imagination had been ignited by a serial rapist named Acuña. Alejandro Flores was in his seventies by then, tall and slim, with a noble face, elegant gestures, long pale hands, a warm voice that resonated in his solar plexus, and a sardonic, intelligent gaze. I am not sure that he was a great actor, but he had a magnetic personality. In all the roles I saw him in—whatever the style of the play—he did not change. And this is what delighted his audience so. They went to see him, and he never let them down. Flores taught them that a man of the people, of the humblest birth, could carry himself like a prince.
Although he was haughty at our first meeting, looking down at me from a glorious height, he became my master from the moment he first spoke to me.
“Young namesake, this is not an amateur theater. Theories are worth nothing here; Stanislavsky and his cronies are no use to us. Nobody will tell you how to talk, move, make yourself up, or dress. You have to figure that out on your own. On the stage, the one with the most saliva swallows the driest bread. We are not working to go down in history, but to bring home the bacon, not to be admired, but to have fun for a couple of hours. It is your duty to entertain them, and if you can’t make them laugh you must at least make them smile. We are not seeking perfection, but effectiveness. Understand? Vanity will not do you any good. All that is required is that you learn the text by heart. There is no such thing as a bad comedian who knows his lines. If the audience applauds you, you’ll finish the season with us. If they don’t like you, we’ll replace you with someone else after seven days. But since I see you’re listening to me with the respect I deserve, let me give you one tip, and only one. Ask them to let you into the theater in the mornings. At that time no one is there. The cleaning crew starts after lunch. There is a work light, so you won’t have to be in the dark. Walk around, not only on the stage but also in the gallery and the auditorium; sit in each seat, take in the space, the floor, the walls. Stand in the center of the stage, look at all the angles, so that no detail escapes you. Integrate the room into your memory. Never forget this: an actor’s body starts in his heart, extends beyond his skin, and ends at the walls of the theater.”
Poster for the comedy El depravado Acuña by Santiago del Campo, inwhich Alejandro Flores played the role of Álvaro and I the mute Evaristo.
I could see Alejandro Flores’s effectiveness when the performances began. When speaking with another actor he did so facing the audience, never turning his head, like a cobra hypnotizing a crowd of apes. Every time the spotlight moved, whether or not the script justified it, he would move toward the illuminated area like a moth at night so that his eyes always gleamed. If another actor was speaking quietly, he raised the volume of his voice. If someone spoke too loudly, he would lower his voice to a mutter. He never let anyone else become the center of attention; he was the boss, and he made that clear at every moment. If someone had a long speech, he would fiddle around in order to attract attention, jingling a few coins in his pocket, struggling to adjust the knot in his tie as if his life depended on it, or simply having a coughing fit. He did all this in a pleasant, elegant manner, without any rudeness. It was an indisputable fact that the people came exclusively to see him. Flores liked indisputable facts. I remember one of his quaint phrases, uttered during conversation in the dressing room: “The fool, when he doesn’t know, thinks he knows. The wise man, when he doesn’t know, knows he doesn’t know. But when the wise man knows, he knows that he knows. The fool, on the other hand, when he knows, doesn’t know that he knows.” Being bald, he wore a toupee. It was not of very good quality. Before going onstage, I noticed that a few locks of hair had fallen off it, leaving a visible patch of bare skull. I drew his attention to it. He, with exemplary self-confidence, did not even make any gesture to touch his head. “Don’t worry, boy,” he said to me. “All of Chile knows I’m bald.” I do not know whether the calm he always exhibited was natural. Every day, before the curtain went up, a heavyset man of about fifty years old, with the face of a former boxer, would arrive carrying a doctor’s bag. He and Alejandro Flores shut themselves in the latter’s dressing room for a few minutes. “They’re my vitamins,” the star explained. “It’s morphine,” the other actors gossiped. Which was the truth? What does it matter! After the injection, even if the theater collapsed, the lead actor would have continued displaying his amiable, handsome smile. I remember on opening day we were all concerned because we could not find certain props that were necessary for staging the play. Flores shrugged. “The theater is a continuous miracle. If a play begins with a group of men in capes and the actors are missing their capes a second before the play begins, then when the curtain rises, the actors will be perfectly caped.”
The villain was supposed to shoot Flores from the shadows at the end of the first act. Flores was meant to collapse, making the audience think he had been murdered, only to reappear alive and bandaged in the second act. In one performance, the revolver did not work for lack of blanks. Flores, who was putting on his boots, waited a few moments for the gunshot, and seeing that it was not going to come, exclaimed, “Acuña has poisoned my boot!” Then he collapsed. “Life is a gray road: nothing is ever absolutely bad, nothing is ever absolutely good” was another of his maxims.
Since the audience applauded my performances, Flores granted me the honor of visiting him in his dressing room. The first thing that drew my attention was a toilet seat hanging from a nail on the wall.
“Boy,” he said, “however lofty the king may be, he still has to sit his buttocks on the miserable bowl. Hygiene, in most of the theaters where I act, is not very reliable. My faithful seat cover is always with me. In the same way that an actor respects his name, he must respect his ass.”
I then noticed that on a tall stool next to this intimate object was a bronze sculpture consisting of fifteen thick letters thirty centimeters high, forming a shiny ALEJANDRO FLORES.
“Do not be surprised, young namesake: although as a sculpture they are a vulgar jumble, those letters deserve my veneration. Today’s public is not attracted to the bag of bones that is my body, but to my name. While it is true that in the beginning I invented that name and put my energy into it as a father does with his son, today it has become my father and my mother. Alejandro Flores is a sound amulet that fills theaters. For example, when I go onstage the audience does not hear, ‘Good morning,’ but ‘Alejandro Flores says good morning.’ My name is what speaks and what exists. I am merely the anonymous owner of a treasure. I have heard that people in India keep statues of their gods in their homes to which they offer flowers, candied fruits, and incense, making the statues into idols, giving them the power to perform miracles through religious fervor. That is how I treat this set of letters, as an idol. Every day I polish them and perfume them. I offer the flowers people give me to them. When my mind is tired, I touch my forehead to them and recover. If business is bad, I rub them with my hand for a long while, and soon the money flows in. If I wish I had a woman to take away the night’s worries, I prop my heart up on them. They never fail me. Choose a name with fifteen letters, because that is the number of the Devil Tarot card, a p
otent symbol of creativity. The devil is the first actor in the cosmic drama: he imitates God. We actors are not gods, but devils.”
It was the first time that someone had told me that if one exalts one’s name, it becomes the most powerful of amulets. Jaime, wanting to become assimilated in Chile, to be equal to others, hating exclusion, never signed with his surname. His checks bore a brief Jaime. The Polish-Russian name Jodorowsky bothered him. Over the years I grew to understand that one’s first and last name contain mental programs that are like seeds; fruit trees or poisonous plants can grow from them. In the family tree, repeated names are the bearers of drama. It is dangerous to be named after a dead sibling; it condemns one to be the other and never oneself. If a girl is named after an old lover of her father’s, she is doomed to play the role of his girlfriend for life. An uncle or aunt who has committed suicide turns his or her name, over the generations, into a vehicle of depression. Sometimes it is necessary to change one’s name in order to stop these repetitions that create adverse destinies. A new name can offer a new life. This, I understood intuitively, was why most Chilean poets had achieved fame using pseudonyms.
I asked the actor to give me the great honor of polishing his name every morning. He flatly refused.
“No, boy. I know your intentions are good, that you admire me, but in order to be, you have to learn not to want to be anyone else. By polishing my letters, in a way, you would steal my power. Your name is Alejandro, like mine. Your devotion is bound to turn into destruction. One day you will have to cut my throat. In primitive cultures, the disciples always finish by devouring their master. Go and fertilize your own name, learn to love it, exalt it, discover the treasures contained in it. You have nineteen letters. Find the Tarot card called The Sun.”
The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography Page 17
