Jacob the Mutant

by Mario Bellatin

  They were displayed on wooden shelves.

  At that time there were six pairs lined up.

  In the same room were the working tools: a harness maker’s tools, enormous scissors, thread, and sewing materials.

  On the floor, stacked on top of each other, there was a pile of soles of various sizes.

  The back room was set up as a bedroom for those nights when the fighter wasn’t let in to the boarding house.

  In one corner there was a bed covered with tulle netting that hung from the ceiling.

  Opposite that a thread that hung from one side of the wall to the other.

  Approximately one-and-a-half meters away from that thread some pieces of raw meat were hanging.

  Below each piece there were some metal boxes, each with a hatch on top and a thin metal tube that went from the piece of meat to the cage’s opening.

  At the slightest movement the meat fell, bringing with it the entire animal and instantly closing the opening to the cage.

  Rats, whose skin we know was used to make the shoes, would crawl in at night to eat those bits of meat, and they would fall into the boxes without any chance of escape.

  Each night the fighter captured four or five animals.

  The next morning he would butcher them on the back patio.

  He would bring them out alive, and with a wooden stick he gave them a light blow to the snout that would kill them instantly.

  He would then open their stomachs with a special knife, and with his pinky finger—whose nail he kept quite long for this sole purpose—he would rip out their entrails.

  In that particular state of perception, doubtlessly motivated by the thousands of times I had already repeated the names of God, it occurs to me that my grandfather would have never accepted a pair of shoes made by a martial arts fighter.

  My grandfather was an incredibly scrupulous dresser.

  He was one of those people who only have one change of clothing, but of the highest quality.

  Enter the Dragon had not only been the most commercially successful film, it was also that fighter-turned-shoemaker’s favorite.

  Macaque even believed that her lover had been involved in the creation of the film.

  On more than one occasion that fighter had made references to personal details of the actor’s life.

  He spoke about the contacts he maintained with the Chinese mafia, one of the bloodiest mafias known.

  Aside from the gated rattraps, in one corner of the patio there was a series of regular traps.

  Some skins in the process of being treated were kept on a table.

  Macaque was summoned to the morgue to identify the body.

  One of the officers accompanied her.

  On the way back to the boarding house she suddenly saw her dead lover’s face in the middle of the sidewalk.

  That face was there, on top of a pile of martial arts movie posters.

  When she approached the vendor to ask about it, they told her it was the actor Bruce Lee.

  Macaque found the portrait identical to her lover.

  She had never seen Bruce Lee’s face before.

  She purchased the poster, and it is that poster that now hangs in the camper where she lives.

  On a certain occasion I remember having asked my grandfather if the zoo had a closing time.

  My grandfather answered that of course it did, for it was strange to come across someone who could focus on nature while working in the dark.

  I remember that he told me this while throwing a candy into the seal pool.

  One should never visit a zoo at night, was what he told me at first.

  Although after a few minutes he told me that he remembered during his childhood it was known that in a nearby village there was a saloon that had a zoo that only showed its animals at night.

  Nonetheless, he indicated that the inhabitants of the village where he lived found this strange.

  My grandfather never thought of going to visit the camels by night.

  They were old animals.

  Their fur was matted.

  They barely even moved.

  Their nights must have been even sadder.

  A particular kind of sadness.

  Perhaps similar to that which I thought I saw appear on my grandfather’s face when any allusion was made to his prohibited native tongue: Yiddish.

  After having spent nearly thirty hours in my prayer cell at the advice of the sheikha of my Sufi order, I suddenly remembered that my grandfather told me how on a certain night that they spent awake past their normal bedtime, Macaque confessed to Master Porcupine that she had kept the proof necessary to show that Bruce Lee had not died a natural death.

  That she was certain that her assassinated lover was Bruce Lee himself.

  Nonetheless, for the American police, the case of the actor’s death was closed.

  My grandfather told me that Macaque began to tell Master Porcupine the true story of Bruce Lee in Yiddish: the language of his ancestors.

  When I tried to tell him that that was not possible I felt that suddenly my grandfather began to disappear.

  I don’t know how to explain this process properly.

  There, before the camels covered in dust, my grandfather, the one I’d always known, the one who took me on these walks, began to fade before my very eyes.

  As though a higher force were erasing him from an imaginary piece of paper he had been drawn on.

  Nevertheless, this type of disappearance of the image of my grandfather next to me does not mean that he ceased to be present.

  No.

  He was there without being there in reality, and without being an animal or plant or mineral substance either.

  Maybe this is why the separation was not so traumatic for me.

  My grandfather—in spite of the phenomenon that I began to perceive—was there, at my side, grasping my arm.

  Many a person can ponder the relationship that might exist between this text I am now writing and the book Jacob the Mutant that precedes it.

  The mystery could lie in the idea that stayed with me for many years, that my family thought that my grandfather could have transformed into some kind of animal, plant, or mineral.

  But no, as I said, my grandfather seemed to find himself situated in a perpetual present, one in which a string of different languages—both living and dead—were able to converge on a single point: him.

  And only in a present of this nature was the apparition of the Sacred Sephirot, as well as the idea that there is no God but God and nothing exists outside of Him.

  Not even a seal fleeing toward the sea could provoke such an occurrence.

  Some might even ask themselves how it was possible that Jacob wasn’t needed for labor the way that the other inhabitants of his town were.

  He wasn’t called upon by the forces of the new order because he remained asleep for the duration of that season.

  As though floating within the liquid that contains the columns that sustain the world.

  In any case, questions about the perennial survival of Jacob will have to be asked of the English investigator who rescued the remains of the manuscripts from the German publishers.

  I also don’t believe we will ever know Master Porcupine’s reasons for trying to develop his Mariotic Theory

  Likewise, if the martial arts fighter was indeed Bruce Lee himself.

  In the meantime, as these and other mysteries are slowly elucidated, the only thing left as something tangible is this book, Jacob the Mutant.

  The aforementioned work and the group of camels that I used to visit with my grandfather before he disappeared from my life forever.

  All the while I should not forget that, when I finish this state of prayer I find myself submersed in, the tasbih—that type of Muslim rosary—ought to be saved as if it were a relic.

  Set next to a group of hardboiled eggs, like those prepared in the Catholic Church each afternoon.

  A prayer rosary—tasbih—that, in some
way, could bring the reader closer to the mystery that only the vision of a group of sheep grazing among rocks is capable of creating.

  Let us have faith in it.

  The Wait

  The forms remain in suspense. The men’s skin perpetually wet. A golem. A dozen boiled eggs. The Stroemfeld publishing house’s employee, trying to blot out the traces of the text. No mutation is produced. All that appears is the image of some sheep grazing among rocks.

  Explanatory Map, Number 2

  by Zsu Szkurka

  The Diary of Rose Eigen: A Translator’s Afterword

  by Jacob Steinberg

  Someone who maintains a routine life in his or her existence could perhaps have difficulties understanding some of the occurrences in the text Jacob the Mutant. Difficulties not only in understanding the characters, but also the fates, the physical or geographical spaces, and even the words that the reader must face. Each one of these elements, among other aspects, seems to avoid any aspect related to stability.

  By writing these—now lost—texts whose rescued and compiled fragments that have been rescued and compiled make up a portion of the book we now call Jacob the Mutant, the writer Joseph Roth gives the impression of having created a world inhabited by characters without fixed identities, a universe that seeks to give way to new contexts, to realities that the reader unfamiliar with such forms—mentioned more than once in the book as aphoristic transformations—could deem absurd, or completely lacking sense.

  But I know that there exist readers who understand—even some who have no alternative other than to understand—and know how such transformations work. They seem to understand them for the mere reason that they, themselves, have experienced similar mutations in the occurrences of their own lives.

  Until recently I—now the book’s translator into English—didn’t have a precise idea of what it was that attracted me to such a text. I recall being overly intrigued by the somewhat strange occurrences that allegedly occurred in that border zone of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, events that gave way to the migration of a good number of Jewish immigrants to New York City, the place where I currently find myself writing this text.

  In 1907, in New York City, a woman was born by the name of Rose Eigenmacht. Rose was the daughter of Charles and Yetta, immigrants from Eastern Europe (as were the greater part of the Jews who had settled in New York in that period). According to the gravesite of her parents—still today a tombstone bearing their names, both in English and Hebrew, and their dates of birth and death continues to watch over the plot they share in a cemetery in the Borough of Queens—they were members of the Independent Skoller Lodge #220, a Jewish fraternal society for travelers who had come from the Galician city of Skole, territory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  I don’t remember many other details I may have acquired regarding Rose’s childhood. In fact, until just about seven or eight years ago, I didn’t even know her name.

  According to the data taken in the national censuses of the era, around the end of the Great War, Rose changed her last name to the shorter (and less German) Eigen.

  In June of 1926, she married Benjamin Steinberg. One year later they had a son. Benjamin was also the child of Jewish immigrants, but unlike Rose, who had been born in these lands, Benjamin’s parents brought him to this continent at three years of age.

  Benjamin was seven years older than Rose. When they married, she was nineteen years old.

  The family lived in a building on the Lower East Side. In those days the Lower East Side was the main area where one could find Jewish boarding houses.

  It was around 1930 or 1931 that everything shifted. That year Rose had an affair with the superintendent of their building. Upon finding out about the affair, Benjamin divorced her, winning sole custody of their son.

  Benjamin began to cut up the family photos. He made the bizarre decision to keep the photos that featured Rose, simply removing her face, perhaps so the eyes of that woman whom he hated so much couldn’t be seen.

  Very soon after, Benjamin replaced Rose with another woman, for the moment more faithful.

  The only persistent reminder of Rose’s existence for the new family was her monthly visits to the son she shared with Benjamin.

  Despite the visits, the father taught his son to gradually come to despise his biological mother.

  It may be difficult to believe—decidedly more difficult for those uninitiated in the art of the transmigration of souls—but I, Jacob Steinberg, the English translator of Jacob the Mutant, am the reincarnation of that woman, Rose Eigen.

  Perhaps I should also make note here that I am her great-grandson.

  To better understand the history between Rose and me, maybe I should divide it into mutations.

  I believe that the first occurred when my great-grandfather cut up the family photos, leaving only Rose’s faceless silhouette, and almost completely replaced the figure of Rose with that of his second wife, whom he married quite shortly after having been cheated on.

  It is for that reason that my grandfather, Rose’s son, acted as though Benjamin’s second wife had been his mother.

  It seems that the hostility ran so deep that his father taught him to never refer to his mother by name.

  That is why for a good portion of my life I only had an intuition that such a woman formed a part of my family.

  I had heard certain allusions, loose facts that clued me in to her existence in the family tree.

  Many years had to go by before my grandfather, a nearly eighty-year-old man, felt the inexplicable need for me—his grandson—to at the very least know that woman’s name.

  The loose details that I previously knew about that woman, scant as they were, had always been an obsession for me.

  When my grandfather revealed her full name to me, I immediately looked for her in the City Municipal Archives.

  I researched her parents, the addresses where they lived, and information about the children her brothers and sisters may have had. Perhaps I was searching in those relatives for some memories that somehow belonged to me—memories that I had the purpose of recovering.

  My paternal grandmother (who divorced Rose’s son over fifty years ago) was the one who told me the story of Rose (whose name even my grandmother never knew) in more detail.

  In her memory remained the fact that, shortly after having been married, she received a letter by mail containing a photograph and a letter.

  It turned out to be a missive from her husband’s mother, something that seemed exceedingly peculiar given that there was another woman that she believed was her mother-in-law.

  The groom’s mother, introduced as such, had been in the wedding, and it wasn’t possible that her husband had two mothers.

  Upon opening the envelope, my grandmother came across a missive and a recent photograph of one Rose Eigen.

  Despite the fervor with which my grandmother narrated this incident to me, my grandfather completely denies it.

  He does uphold that he stopped seeing his mother after turning eighteen years old—the point at which he and his father were no longer legally obligated to welcome that woman in their home.

  My grandmother recalls that her father-in-law, Benjamin Steinberg, was present when she received the envelope, and upon learning of the contents of the envelope, he ripped the photo and the letter to shreds and then threw them into the lit fireplace.

  Some might think that the years I spent trying to investigate the details of the life of my great-grandmother were sad ones.

  Nevertheless, the chiaroscuro of that character and of how she was presented was, for me, essential. I immersed myself at that time in the mystical studies of my religion, in the body of spiritual knowledge known as the Kabbalah. Furthermore, I experienced a series of important relationships—two in particular—in which I was emotionally shattered by unfaithful men, men who left me to pursue their romantic flings.

  At that point in my life, I questioned, among other things, the biophysical struct
ures that define the limits of the body, the ability of two beings to trust in each other and become one. I even came to question something else: the supposed evil of that woman, my ancestor, Rose Eigen. I began to see her as a somewhat embittered and depressed figure, as a young woman who, in moments of extreme ecstasy (comparable to Hasidic dancing) exceeded her structural limits and, as a consequence, missed out on one of the possible lives that awaited her.

  The issue around Rose is complicated.

  The avid reader must certainly already recognize certain similarities between my great-grandmother’s story and that of the book Jacob the Mutant.

  Both the wife of Joseph Roth’s Jacob and my great-grandmother Rose are women who cheat on their husbands, becoming involved with men who are significantly younger (in Rose Eigen’s case, the superintendent of the building where she and her family lived; in the case of the rabbi’s wife, the young Anselm who helped run the tavern).

  I find another commonality between my life and Jacob the Mutant: the mystical influence of the Kabbalah, which played a central role both in Jacob Pliniak’s training and during my years of formal academic research.

  Furthermore, the transformation of one woman into another, both in the case of the actress Norah Kimberley and in the two wives who appear in Benjamin Steinberg’s family photographs.

  Both the author of the book and I, you could say, are people investigating the truth, searching for it within textual fragments contained in different archives.

  I’d like to digress here and mention another event that transpired in my personal life. Something independent from my work as the translator of the book Jacob the Mutant.

  Approximately one year has lapsed since I had my palm read by one who was an expert in those matters, the daughter of a well-known Kabbalistic rabbi. At the time, I did not know much about that woman’s talents; I was merely certain that she possessed an unmatched talent.

  Many details about my life were revealed to me during the course of our session. Details pertaining both to this present life and to others that I don’t remember with precision.

  I’d like to share one aspect in particular. The woman spent a great deal of time observing one particular small, curving line. A line that connected my middle finger with my ring finger on my right hand. According to chiromancy, this line indicated that I had a tikkun—a Hebrew word that implies a type of cosmic burden or correction—to be made in this lifetime with men who cheat on their spouses.