Where the Bird Sings Best

by Alejandro Jodorowsky

  The Russians were about to leave, guided by Monkey Face, who had listened to the peroration, applauding from time to time with hands and feet, when the Anarchist stopped them.

  “Brother Alejandro, allow me to ask you something: your companion says you want to be a shoemaker. Is that so?”

  “That’s the truth, sir.”

  “It isn’t worthwhile. It’s a known profession. The State will end up exploiting you. When you finish making your visits, come back. I’ll create a new profession for you. ‘Sweetener of Voids’ or ‘Corrector of Shadows,’ something.”

  “Thank you sir, it won’t be necessary. I think that by the way in which I’ll work, shoemaker will become a new profession.”

  Monkey Face led Teresa and Alejandro through the tenement, introducing them to the members of the Society of Free Brothers and Sisters. They met the “Disinfector of Mirrors,” the “Professor of Invisibility,” the “Fantastic Biologist-Body Inventor,” the “Funeral Clown,” and many others who were unable to explain what their activities were because Monkey Face, accepting a drink at every door, staggeringly drunk, forgot not only Russian but also all the other languages and translated their words into a strange tongue composed of belches, hiccups, and drooling. At the beginning, they at least managed to find out what the “Freckle Trainer” did.

  He was a pudgy, dark-skinned man who gave off a strong smell of wine, as did all the other goys they’d see in the tenement. A woman with few teeth accompanied him along with eight children who ran around the single room unconcernedly. The trainer beat a small drum and, opening his eyes with strange flashes of light, ordered the beauty mark to move. In effect, many ladies wanted to have their beauty mark next to the place where their lips met or on a cheek or between their bosoms or even in more secret places. The naïve client would be told that, over the course of time, the blemish would move, bit by bit until it reached the desired spot.

  Naturally, the drum, the flashing eyes, and the trainer’s hypnotic orders were not enough. The client also had to pray with faith. After a few sessions, the client would be told in no uncertain terms that the beauty mark had indeed moved several fractions of an inch. If the lady became bored with the large number of sessions necessary or if she began to complain about the slowness of their progress, the trainer would shrug his shoulders as if he were terribly offended and answer that the fault did not lie with him but with prayers without faith. And off he’d go in search of another victim. There was no lack of silly ladies to help him feed his numerous offspring. Sometimes, very rarely, the beauty marks did move.

  After visiting his comrades, Seraphim, thirstier and thirstier, led them to a room at the end of the corridor, just like all the others, but bearing a large sign: Happy Heart Bar. About fifty goys—men and women, shoeless, their tattered clothes stitched together, packed in to form a sweaty block with a harsh stench—were buying, for a few coins, glasses of wine that a short, potbellied Andalucian drew from a barrel painted bright red, which was in the center of the room. With the skill of a sailor, the quasi-monkey threaded his way through that wave of flesh and returned, hopping on his right foot, holding three glasses—two in his hands and the third in the toes of his left foot. He drank from the one in his left extremity and held out the glasses in his upper extremities to the Russians. Alejandro immediately made a sign of refusal. Certain religious principles prohibited him from drinking in a bar. The fifty goys wore offended faces, and one insisted, “Don’t insult us, comrade.”

  Sensing a storm brewing, Teresa raised her glass and emptied it down to the last drop. The block of bodies approved with a jolly grunt.

  The Rabbi advised my grandfather, “Look here, Alejandro, Hillel the Wise said: ‘When you’re among people wearing clothes, wear clothes; when you’re among the naked, go naked.’ Wine for these people is a kind of communion. I don’t think you can say no. They might kill you. Drink and apply the proverb: ‘As long as you’re going to sin, you might as well enjoy yourself.’”

  Then Alejandro took the glass and swallowed the wine with pleasure. He shivered five times, and a stubborn burning followed from his throat to his stomach. He began to cough. General laughter. Applause. Monkey Face returned with three more glasses. And the “Let’s drink to happiness” toasts went on for hours. My grandparents, trashed, crumpled, ended up as part of the human block, humming Chilean tunes amid fits of laughter and vomiting. The party was over when the barrel was empty. They awoke the next day stretched out on the cement floor of their tiny room, with thick tongues and tremendous headaches. The new life had begun. The children were hungry.

  Five years went by. Alejandro was a shoemaker, and Teresa a fortune teller. Madame Ochichornia went out on tours that lasted three or seven days, at times two weeks, and always returned with a wide smile and a basket filled with eggs, chickens, loaves of bread, fruit, greens, candy, and other foodstuffs along with a good number of pesos. Thanks to the veneration of Monkey Face, who never stopped idolizing her, she learned Spanish quite well, but of course retained her Russian accent, the better to impress the audience. The fleas told the future with incredible accuracy, and whenever they reached a town, their fame preceding them; the poor lined up to ask, almost always, the same things: Does so-and-so really love me? Did I make a mistake marrying this woman? Will my lost love return? Will I get over this illness? Will I find a better job? What good thing does life hold for me?

  Benjamín, Jaime, Fanny, and Lola would hear her coming because of the jingling bells on Whitey and Blacky and would run up the street, shouting with joy, to meet her. They, too, spoke Spanish because they went to the public school, as was required by law. Along with lessons, they were also given a free breakfast. Alejandro, on the other hand, had only been able to learn one word of our language: “Wednesday.” Whenever a customer asked him when his shoes would be ready, he would answer, “Wednesday.” When they asked how much the repairs would cost, he’d say, “Wednesday.” If someone said the weather was fine, he’d say, “Wednesday.” But if he had no talent for languages, he had exceptional skills as a shoemaker.

  He rejected the Anarchist’s proposition and did not sweeten voids or correct shadows, but he proposed, on the other hand, to develop his shoemaker’s vocation in an unusual way, that is, by making shoes to measure not only for feet but for the soul as well. And also with no fixed price: “Let each customer pay what he wishes or can. That will oblige him to take a moral position, to chose between paying the minimum, the proper price, or the maximum. This will help him know himself.” The Anarchist liked those ideas and granted my grandfather the title “Professor of Shoeology.”

  Alejandro went to the city dump and picked up every piece of leather and thick fabric he could find. Also, the skins of rats, cats, and dogs. And pieces of wood and boards. All of that would be material for creating new models or making repairs. Back in his wretched room, he would stretch out to meditate and allow the boots and army shoes he’d shined while in the army for those five years to march through his mind. He saw how they were made and analyzed their parts:

  “First and foremost a sole, a portable platform, protective support that should be invisible so that the sole of the foot would feel its existence as a second skin, safe, invulnerable, sensitive, and above all full of love. Soles like mothers, giving birth to each step with an iron will, giving full hope of arriving where desired; constant producers of the road, soles that were nations. And the heel? It should support with strength, inspire absolute confidence, be a wall that cuts away from the past and sets the step right in reality, the resplendent now, allowing the proud foot to conquer the place, to penetrate, to take full possession, to become the center of the joyous explosion of life. But it should not, at the same time, be hard or cutting, rather as delicate as it was powerful, not only pushing the foot forward to the future but also absorbing the oceanic impact of the past. And the tips? They should be fine without damaging the precious toes, so those toes might penetrate with the greatest ease into the futur
e, which awaits us up ahead, which is always a prize because the end of all roads is God and not death, itself only a transformation. May each step a person takes in my shoes carry them to happiness, blessed be they.”

  His first customers were poor devils who came to have their shoes repaired. Alejandro accepted all jobs, no matter how humble, and from those jumbled patches he made luxurious slippers. Slowly but surely middle-class customers came, and finally, aristocratic ladies and gentlemen appeared, with an air of adventure. Alejandro had to recruit helpers. He chose them from the tenement, and that way they worked without having to leave their rooms. Anyone who had no job could participate in the making of entirely handmade shoes, sewn and glued, no nails used, and made from simple but noble materials. My grandfather swore he would never use one of those impersonal machines. Each pair of shoes had to be a task carried out with love and completely different from the others. A man has fingerprints that are exclusively his, unique in the Universe, and that’s the way his shoes should be, for him and for no one else. The money received—“How much do they cost?” “Whatever your good will determines.”—he divided equally among himself and his workers. He earned, despite working an astonishing number of hours each day creating new styles, no more than the lowliest of his helpers, the one who prepared the molds in cardboard. Ultimately he came to have more than a hundred partner-workers, laboring with faces smiling.

  Teresa, returning from each tour wearing more and more baroque turbans, more rings, bracelets, and necklaces, more mascara on her eyes, and with long, violet nails, would become furious: “This is stupid! There is something in your head that doesn’t work properly. That damned Rabbi must be the reason. How is it possible that you have an ever-growing number of clients, that a hundred people work for you, and yet you always earn the same amount, a pittance? Five years have gone by, and you still aren’t getting any richer. The rich people exploit you. It amuses them to pay you less than they would a beggar. They don’t see you as a saint but as a fool. It isn’t right! I have to wear out my fleas making them see the hopeless future for thousands of indigents so that between what you earn and what you give us we can live in a style barely different from misery. You still try to go on earning merit in the pitiless eyes of the Grand Villain. By wanting to be a just man you don’t enjoy life. You’ve sunk all of us in your mystical tomb. God only loves the dead! You have to return to reality!”

  My grandfather would smile, kiss his wife on the forehead, and go back to his waking dream about how to improve his work. Now he was seeking the formula that would allow him to make shoes that would pray as people walked!

  Suddenly Shorty Fremberg appeared, the first Jew my grandfather had ever seen in all those years. He was really repulsive, with an enormous head, short legs, a long torso, no neck, a potbelly, hairy, with one eye coffee-colored and the other green. He would shake his wrist to show off a gold watch that looked like an alarm clock, thinking that it made him attractive to women. He strutted around in front of the female workers as if, at a snap of his fingers, they would drop the soles to dive toward his fly. He turned up out of curiosity—some friends had told him about the madman who worked for whatever people gave him—to order a pair of low boots. When he got them, he offered ten times less than what they were worth. Alejandro stared at him with his eyes burning and only said, pointing toward the rooms where his helpers worked: “Thank you, for their sake.” Fremberg, surprised, ashamed, gave a few more pesos and muttered, “For the tip,” and then exclaimed in Yiddish:

  “But, please, Don Alejandro! My friends told me you were crazy, and they were right. What does this mean? When you divide up what you earn, everyone, even the snot nose kid who cleans the holes you call toilets here, gets the same amount as you! Do you call that conduct worthy of a Jew? Because you are as Russian as I am Polish. Forget the masks! It seems to me you’ve confused the goys with Hasidim and confused decay with saintliness! A real manufacturer fixes prices high and salaries low. We’re living in the Industrial Age, my friend! There are great opportunities for the middle class. In this land of the lazy, we foreigners can make a fortune. Labor costs are practically nothing. These illiterates have no unions and no social guarantees. The military men protect us. If the workers go on strike, just beating them up is enough. You saw what happened in María Elena. They wanted to riot and they were crushed like dirt. Besides, you could set up a store next to the factory and pay them with coupons, that way they’d have to spend whatever they made in our store at the price we set. The situation is ideal. Take advantage of it, Don Alejandro! With the artistic talent you have and with my business skills, we can become millionaires. If we become partners, we won’t need God to help us.”

  Alejandro smiled, saying neither yes nor no but still working. And suddenly he whispered sweetly, moved at once again, speaking Yiddish, “We’ll talk this over some Wednesday, Mr. Fremberg. I have to think it over.”

  Shorty shrugged his shoulders. It was clear my grandfather, absorbed as he was in inventing a different style for each client, was never going to think it over. Nevertheless, once a week, Fremberg resumed his attack.

  Everything seemed to have entered into an invariable, eternal rhythm when the letter arrived. A homeless child delivered it. He’d been given a hardboiled egg to hand the letter directly to Alejandro. Although the Professor of Shoeology was illiterate, he recognized Teresa’s handwriting—Monkey Face had taught her to write. It was voluminous, important, confidential; if not, why would his wife have gone through so much trouble? A painful foreboding clenched his chest, and, dropping his tools, he ran to the Anarchist to have him read it. The professor ran his eyes over the pages in a couple of seconds—he read at a dizzying speed—shook his bald head with sorrow, had the bell rung that called everyone to a meeting, and dragged Alejandro to the bar. In the Happy Heart, the Free Brothers and Sisters were waiting, forming a block around the wine barrel.

  “Comrades,” said the Anarchist, “this is a delicate moment in a man’s life. We shall see the collapse of what he thinks is his normal personality, and we shall see appear the other, which is hidden under his skin, the man of heart who only awakens if he is mortally wounded. You won’t understand what I’m going to read because I’m going to translate it into Russian—his wife knows Spanish. Females learn languages through a kind of osmosis, while we poor males have nothing but our awkward intellects for such tasks. But when you see the facial reactions of this friend, with whom we must sympathize deeply—the wound a woman causes is more painful and deep than the slash of a saber—you’ll realize what it’s all about.” And he went on in Russian:

  Dear Don Alejandro:

  “Don’t drink wine, but drink instead this bottle of pisco. Empty it. To withstand the letter, you will have to be very drunk. Yes, I know, your beliefs prohibit your drinking here. Today, make an exception or you may die on us. Come on, have a drink! To your health! Now I begin my translation:

  Husband, I know you. You were surprised to receive a letter from me. Of course, when in person we never speak more than three or four sentences about money, the children, or your shoes, what can I tell you in writing? You’ve thought it must be something terrible, and you’ve run to the Anarchist. Now you are listening to his translation. After a few moments, you will be asking for my pity. I won’t be able to give it to you. I have to tell you all at once, even if you don’t believe it and you ask to this sentence repeated several times: Seraphim and I have fallen in love, and I am his lover. It is such an intense feeling that I cannot go on living with you or the children. You and they represent my past, a time I now see submerged in darkness. I thought I loved you, but it was only an animal need, the desire for a male member, the desire to have children, instincts similar to those of cows. We joined together, but we never saw each other. Me getting fatter, accumulating frustration, struggling in each one of our couplings to reach an explosive cataclysm, ferociously, without refinement. Neither you nor I knew how to touch, to be tender, to fuse the one into
the other. You were involved in your world, the Rabbi, God, the shoe factory; I was involved in mine, bread, the house, excrement, hatred for Creation; separated. You never knew what I was, what I had within me. You saw a brooding saint in a home that was a tomb instead of a temple. You let me get bored; my dreams meant nothing to you. We behaved like primitives, simple single-stringed instruments. We lost the salt of life, tender pleasure. I was drying up. The happiness I didn’t have was inflating my body. At times, I would look at other men as if they were marvelous but forbidden fruit. Guilty, hypnotized, I was drowning in you, in your void, your brutality, an unaware illiterate with no doubts about the sacrifice of the best years of my youth. I sought your eyes with mine so that we could live as something else, a union outside of this world; but no, you only knew how to possess me with the fury and overwhelming power God taught you. All you could think of was to give me a cruel orgasm, and there you were, thrusting your hips, great for breaking stones but not for loving a woman. You were cold and clumsy. I didn’t realize it because I had neither experience nor any basis for comparison. Sunken in misery, which your delusions of righteousness brought us, what hope was left to me? But the miracle, not divine but human, exists. Love is a miracle that you couldn’t see because you were involved only with yourself. You put me at your service, just as your father did with his wife and the father of your father, obeying the Great Villain who denies above all things the magical pleasure of the flesh. It’s true that in my animal state I thought I loved you, but I fell in love with Seraphim as a human being. This is something grand you don’t know how to know. Don’t think I wasn’t sincere, that I played you for a fool. How I would have wanted to be faithful to you until death so you wouldn’t suffer as I know you are suffering in this moment. But it is not possible to fight nature. It happened suddenly, without premeditation, a catastrophe as great as the earthquake. Seraphim, when he picked us up in Valparaíso, remember, looked at my breasts, and I blushed. Without realizing it, I recognized in his burning eyes my repressed desires. His gaze reached my ovaries, and my sex filled with water. I did not wish, in anyway, for this to happen to me, especially with a being that ugly. With a great effort, I became dry and rejected that unknown female who was taking over my vagina. But a moment later, when I was feeding my fleas, an intense desire to show myself naked before him overcame me. I felt him tremble as each inch of my skin appeared, and his uncontainable fervor made my cells vibrate, my blood boil. You, in some obscure way, realized that I was in heat, and you possessed me with the power of despair because, without knowing it, you already felt I was lost forever. And you stole from me an orgasm that should have been for him and not for you. That pleasure hurt me as if you’d pulled out one of my teeth. I thought I was insane, I convinced myself that the earthquake had affected my nerves and said nothing because anything to do with Seraphim seemed absurd, shameful. I went back to being what I’d always been, a mother submerged in the dry reality of the family. I went on getting fatter in order to contain with that inert shield, the despair burning me from within. Without love, my eyes were deserted, my ears withered, my touch harsh. Air was poisonous, and each new day I had to cross a black bridge mounted on a blind mare. The tours with Seraphim calmed me a bit, but we did not want to recognize the mutual attraction that was wounding us. He, feeling himself unworthy to be loved, placed himself at my service, humble, vulnerable, sad, with the delicate attitude of a monster. I was convinced that he was the ugliest man I’d ever seen in my life. A week ago we performed in the Lota coal mine. The miners wanted us to go down into the deep tunnels so laughter and wisdom might reside there for once in that somber world. Seraphim performed as never before, even making use of prestidigitation: he was a new King Midas except that everything he touched turned into a banana. I felt he was saying: ‘Everything is food, even pain.’ Then I only read favorable predictions, giving to each of those moles the promise of air and light. They loved us a great deal, and as a sign of friendship they put their metal hats on our heads and marked our faces with soot. Back in the wagon, Seraphim looked at me, fell into convulsions, and went down on his knees before me, whispering: ‘The Virgin of the Night.’ I caressed his hairy nape. He crawled like a child and squirmed between my breasts. Sobbing, he asked me: ‘Make the miracle, give me your holy milk.’ And, incredible as it sounds, moved by the infinite sweetness of his voice, my breasts began to flow, bathing his body with the white juice. Then I wept. Licking away my tears, he murmured: ‘The Virgin of the Snows.’ Then from my forehead blood burst out, as if a crown of thorns were being pressed into my skin. He said in a trance: ‘The Virgin of Dawn.’ The full moon made us silvery. ‘You are mine, look at me for the first time,’ he begged, and I, drunk, with my heart practically leaping out of my mouth, set my eyes on him. And instantly my prejudices vanished; I truly saw him and became aware of his sublime beauty. If Seraphim is compared with other men, and if the old canons of beauty are used, he is a monster. But if you abstract him from this setting, see him in isolation, without references, in himself, he is a perfect being. His deep eyes possess an angelic goodness, his well-delineated features move the soul, his muscular flesh and his silky fur are infinitely agreeable to the touch, his breath is sweet and very perfumed when he awakens, his movements have the grace of dance, each word he says enters my brain with the splendor of a jewel. Actually he never speaks because his voice sings. When he felt the heat of my gaze, he took off his clown suit and showed me his entire body, a living sculpture. During the ecstasy that nakedness produced in me, I held out my hands and let his sex rest on my moist palms. I was used to a voluminous, hard, insensitive member with its arrogant, naked head. Seraphim’s phallus is pale, thin, smooth, and, above all, complete. Its tender foreskin gave it a sensual secret, a modesty linked to a powerful attraction, in sum, the tranquil, animal normalcy without the knife slash of religion, with no debt to God. Whenever you penetrated me, God accompanied you. He had ordered that a piece of you be cut off so he could appropriate your pleasures. I kissed that skin with delight, and I fervently offered him all the openings of my body. Not only did my sex long for him but also my mouth, my anus, my ears, my navel, my pores, and my soul. I led him to me the way a mother leads her child, slowly. He, who’d never known a woman, gave me his celestial purity. No brutality, no haste, tenderness, sensuality, respect. When he was within me, he became the only interest in my life. Seraphim stopped moving, stopped seeking the pleasurable friction, the final discharge, and staring me fixedly in the eye, making me drunk with his breath, began to speak. His voice, the most delicate I’d ever heard in my life, revealed the feelings he’d hidden from the instant when I blushed for the first time. Listening to him that way, fulfilled, I loved him so much that I could stand, even accept, that our love united us to God. Yes, even though it may be hard for you to believe, thanks to Seraphim, to the magical pleasure he was giving me, I forgave the Great Villain because He’d allowed the existence of love. Seraphim told me, and I’ll never forget his words: ‘There are no limits between you and me. Our chiaroscuro origins mix together, dance in the eternal ocean. We are two screams musically in tune with each other who arise like a jewel from this death, which is nothing more than another mask of God. You and I are the joy of the Divinity made manifest in matter. Between us there exists confidence, the attainment of the sacred, the advent of hope, and the blooming of faith. We are the left and right hands of the great work that is the unification of the world and the offering of forgiveness. Through our pleasure, God is pleased to manifest His love. We are the road transformed into light. We are two solitudes that move forward perfectly intertwined. Our pleasure is a sanctuary.’ And he kissed me, and his mouth was sweet. I began a chain of orgasms that grew greater and greater, like waves running through me from the beginning until the end of time. I exploded one hundred times, without guilt, without remorse, oblivious to everything except him. We giggled like mad, we wailed, we shouted, we wept with joy. From then on we haven’t stopped coupling at any
time of day, in any place, an uncountable number of times, all different. When his member is not submerged in my sex, I feel incomplete. We are two bonfires that will shine for years. We want to travel, to know the Americas, Argentina, Peru, who knows what. We need little to live, and the miracle is continuous. Now I love the earth, the sky, sunrise in his arms, the taste of air, the planets, and even human beings. I want to go to parties, enjoy myself, smoke a cigarette, be present. I lose a pound every day. Seraphim wants me agile and thin; I’m going to satisfy him. Good-bye forever, poor Alejandro. I regret the fact that you never knew how to love. Don’t search for me, because the Teresa you knew no longer exists. Consider me dead. The children don’t need me. I hope that they grow, that they discover.