Where the Bird Sings Best

by Alejandro Jodorowsky

  Horse checked through some drawers and found a ring of keys. They walked to the big cage of the Bengal tigers. There were four adult tigers, one male and three female, along with half a dozen pups, each no larger than a cat. Night was falling. The tigers, emerging from their daytime torpor, suffocated in that space—which, even if it was big, was limited by bars—paced back and forth with a regularity that seemed insane.

  Jaime’s task was to enter the cage, walk to the center, and remain there, seated, until dawn without being eaten. My father put the key into the lock, turned it slowly, opened the door inch by inch, slipped in, shut the door, and, oblivious to himself, an empty vehicle, walked to the indicated spot, passing among the tigers without their noticing his presence. He sat down with his legs crossed and remained mixed with the air, the darkness, the cold, with no divisions, without a single word coming to his mind, without a single feeling occupying his heart, without wanting or needing anything, beyond all possession.

  The beasts did not see him. Moreover, a female came to him to sniff, scratched the ground, and peed a hot spurt on his back. When, with the first rays of sunshine, the bars produced long black tongues that cut the floor into brilliant rectangles, Jaime, walking with normal steps, not trying to hide, zigzagged among the supine tigers getting ready to sleep and left the cage. Unable to move his mouth to smile, he emptied a little bottle of rum the euphoric Horse handed him. Together, proud, they jogged six miles back to the tenement.

  “Now you’re ready, my Russian friend. The man who can beat you hasn’t been born. Baby Face will leave this bout with an old face. You will be National Champion.”

  The fight was widely publicized in the newspapers, and the basketball court where the ring had been constructed was full. Everyone was a fan of the Baby, and they all came intent on seeing how he would break my father’s neck. Jaime walked toward the ring accompanied by Horse amid hisses and tossed bottles that burst scattering beer or urine. After the customary introduction, the fighters took off their robes, and the audience burst into laughter. Opposite that tall mastodon, wide, heavy, full of muscles, my father looked like a weak dwarf.

  One fanatic shouted out, “I bet Baby knocks him cold in under two minutes!”

  No one argued the point; they all applauded. Jaime, little by little, began to disappear. When the bell sounded to call him for the first round, he was invisible. He was a body with no one, a demolition machine, nothing more. The giant had no idea where to begin. Every punch he made landed in the void. His enemy was an agile, cold shadow that ducked and stepped back without ever showing himself. When the rest period came, the Baby, sweating in the heat, his breath short, felt alone. He was fighting against a waft of air that stared at him with the eyes of a dead man.

  The bell sounded. Baby again found himself transformed into the center of a comet that spun around him counterclockwise. How the hell was he going to land a punch? Upset, he dropped his guard for a second and felt an explosion in his liver followed by a hook to the jaw that made him stagger. The audience was silenced. The shadow struck again, and the left eyelid of the favorite opened like a ripe pomegranate. Before he could react, he was hit with three more smacks of the glove. The blood poured out, leaving him only one good eye. Jaime used that advantage to break Baby’s nose.

  The round ended. The three members of the official champion’s team closed his cut with Vaseline, stuffed cotton into one nostril, and passed him the pail so he could spit out two broken teeth. Explaining that these contusions were a mere accident, a normal mistake, we all get distracted for a second, they predicted that in the next round he would make the poor contender into mortadella.

  The bell rang. Jaime, tranquil, observing at a distance of two thousand years, advanced toward his rival with his arms hanging at his sides. Baby lurched forward, transformed into a bull at his judgment day, and began to throw a series of punches that were lost in a space that had become immense. The enemy offered no resistance, and suddenly he clenched with Baby, and boxing became dance. He wasn’t a man but a snake. Disconcerted, he stopped in the center of the ring, emptied of aggression, waiting for a response.

  Jaime began a kind of dance, jumping forward and backward, cutting at times to one side then the other without throwing a punch. The audience began to protest. They no longer knew which one they were against. The Russian lost that nationality along with his face and silhouette, his person. No one could judge him; he was someone being no one. Baby, tired, perhaps hypnotized, dropped his gloves, and then the lightning bolt struck. He received an incessant beating, in the stomach, the ribs, the chin, the nose, the eyes, the temples. He looked like a house being torn down.

  Jaime’s punches, implacable, accurate, echoed like shots, penetrating the innumerable holes allowed by the stupefied defense. The colossus, bent on knee, groaning, almost suffocated. The referee counted to eight. Baby came staggering back into the fight. One of Jaime’s punches seemed to break his ribs. Another bloodied his mouth. His swollen lower lip hung like a dead oyster. A jab seemed to burst his eye. The huge man, reaching desperation, terrified, stretched out an arm to ask for help from his trainers, wanting them to throw in the towel. Since it was a useless movement in terms of the fight, it surprised Jaime, and purely by chance, it caught him right in the forehead. His head shot back, scattering a halo of sweat. The impact wasn’t strong enough to knock him out, but because it was such a surprise, it produced a mental short circuit; a space the Rabbi used to introduce himself into his spirit and take control.

  For many years, since the death of Alejandro the shoemaker, the Rabbi had not manifested himself. Jaime defended himself from him with his attacks of epilepsy. But now, with all his accumulated desires to exist, he turned Jaime into his mount. Jaime seemed to grow thin, his shoulder hunched, his gestures became refined, his voice became shrill, and his eyes burned. With infinite pity, he observed the bloodied Baby, who was so beaten up he was completely idiotized. He embraced him, kissed his cheeks, and said, “Brother goy, I can’t go on hitting you. Commandment 216: ‘We should love our fellow man.’ Commandment 251: ‘It is forbidden to hurt another with wounding words.’ If bad words are forbidden, then the prohibition logically extends to punches. Commandment 300: ‘It is forbidden to hit anyone without authorization.’ God, blessed be He, has not authorized boxing. Neither you nor I is a criminal to deserve flagellation. Commandment 302: ‘It is forbidden to feel hatred for our fellow man or humiliate him in public.’ Forgive me, Baby, for what my ignorant guest has done to you. Commandment 319: ‘It is forbidden to strike one’s parents.’ All human beings in one moment of history have been or will be our parents. For having damaged your body, Jaime deserves strangulation. Forgive him. From the depth of my being, I implore you, oh Lord!”

  Baby, during that monologue, had enough time to recover, and seeing his enemy with his flaccid arms extended toward him, took advantage and hit him with a left hook to the abdomen that terminated the speech. An enthusiastic shouting arose from the audience: “The kitchen!” The fans were begging the champion to splatter the traitor’s stomach. He went on punching. The Rabbi did not defend himself. He even offered his face for punishment:

  “If that’s the way you want it, come on, brother. Punch until you’re tired. I shall convert your hatred into caresses.”

  Baby smashed his face. The Rabbi asked for more punches. Baby smashed his ribs. Jaime raised his arms as if in the shower to offer a better target. A molar went flying. The Rabbi smiled, spitting red with a saintly face. He began to look for punches, and he found them. He charged forward, threw himself into the arms of the ferocious monster to allow himself to be broken, eaten. The murderous crowd asked for more. The Rabbi, miraculously still on his feet under a demolishing rain, began to recite a psalm: Truly my soul finds rest in God; my salvation comes from Him.

  González the Horse threw in the towel and immediately jumped over the ropes to pull Jaime out of Baby’s arms. Baby, desperate because he couldn’t knock him out, was squee
zing his throat to strangle him. Horse dragged Jaime to his corner and emptied a pail of ice water on his head. The sudden chill made Jaime react and frightened the Rabbi away. No sooner had the spirit fled than the pain began. My father fell, writhing, to the floor with four broken ribs. He had to be carried out of the ring on a stretcher. His boxing career ended that night.

  Horse got drunk so he could tell him, with great sadness, “My boy, you could have been number one, but you’re crazy. We missed the train, and there won’t be another. I’m old now. I’m going to Chañaral to the house where I was born. I’m going to plant tomatoes, because they’ll remind me of boxing gloves. Good-bye.”

  It took Jaime three months to recover from the beating. When he left the hospital, he found out that Horse had given up the room in the tenement, so he’d have to find a new one. He went to the apartment of Teresa and Benjamín to see if they’d let him stay there for a while.

  It was December 1919. The heat was unbearable, but all the shops were decorated with snow, sleds, and Santa Clauses dressed for a polar cold. In that ridiculous festive setting imported from the European winter so it could be transplanted in the heart of summer, the evil surprises continued. Now it was Teresa’s turn. Simply put, she went insane.

  Where did she get the rifle? No one ever found out. She stepped out onto the balcony and began shooting. Luckily, her rage was attenuated by a rejection of death; she only wanted to wound people in the legs, as she expressed it screaming amid the firing, in order to keep her victims from marching in repugnant flocks. The hatred that seized her was directed at all uniforms. She would shoot and shout, “Down with equality! Long live difference!”

  She maimed one policeman, two soldiers, a café waiter, a lycée student, an ice cream man, three boys wearing soccer uniforms, a government official, a nurse, and a Santa Claus who passed by selling sugared peanuts. When Jaime arrived, the shooting had been going on for half an hour, and the victims were moaning where they fell in the street, trying to staunch the blood pouring out of thighs and calves. The Red Cross was slow in coming. Benjamín and Lola, on their knees amid the wounded, implored their mother to cease firing.

  When the neighbors formed a chain to keep passersby from walking into danger, Teresa, with extraordinary marksmanship, began to kill pigeons, howling that those birds from hell were also in uniform. Then she shot at shadows because they were all the same color. When she decided that human bodies, because they were all the same—head, trunk, and extremities—were uniforms, chaos ensued. Benjamín and Lola fled, dodging bullets, and hid under a cart. Finally the police arrived along with an ambulance and a fire truck. They recommended waiting until she ran out of ammunition.

  When they heard some clicks from her weapon, the ambulance personnel ran to pick up the wounded, and the firemen stretched out a ladder to block the window and keep the mad woman from diving down to the street. Had she really run out of bullets or was she crouched down with the reloaded rifle, waiting for someone to approach so she could open her vengeful fire again?

  Jaime, without asking himself that question and forgetting his own pain, ran up the firemen’s ladder, slipped over the steps, and, making a huge leap, landed right in the dining room. On the table, with only her head protruding from the soapy, dark water, Teresa was lying naked in a metal tub. The rifle, empty now, was taking a bath with her. Her eyes were wide open, round, flashing, and the skin on her face was stretched, as if it were too small to hold in so much bitterness. Without recognizing her son, she spoke through him to address someone who was standing behind her back:

  “Don’t ask yourself who you are, because you are no one. You’ve never existed. Like me. We are impostors in this world, which is not authentic, where there is nothing true and what is real is a mirage. Uniforms all over the place, copies of copies of copies, each suit, each body, each soul is a disguise. The surface is everywhere and the center nowhere. A piece of rock, a piece of flesh, a flood, a fire, a massacre, the void’s same old hypocritical game. We’ve been dead since the beginning of time. No one has ever been born. Strangle me, get me out of this lie!”

  Teresa’s disillusionment was so great that Jaime stretched out his hands, wishing to obey her. She got on her knees, revealing her long, wide bosoms, large bananas that reached her navel.

  “I’ve lost my strength. You, a good executioner, change the world. Make it finally be born.”

  Jaime, retaining the compassion that was leading him to matricide, ran to open the door. The police came in scrambling like clowns from one place to another, shouting orders, pointing their carbines, shaking clubs, trembling as if the poor woman were a rabid gorilla. Behind them, whiter than a paraffin candle, came Benjamín and Lola. Teresa did not recognize them either. She sank completely into the water, trying to drown herself. The cops could find no other way to save her except tipping the tub over. The water splashed over the floor, giving off a pestilential stink. Aside from the grease and the soap, it contained leftover food, books dissolving into jelly, pieces of photographs, excrement, and little crystal balls.

  They tied her hands, wrapped her in a blanket, and carried her away. As she passed by Jaime, she had a lucid instant: “My son, go see Recabarren. He was the only one who didn’t lie to us.”

  Then she howled like an animal and began to fight against the uniformed ambulance people, foaming at the mouth. Her screeching could be heard until, finally, the ambulance that carried her to the insane asylum became a white dot far down Independence Avenue. Lola left, following the police and firemen without saying a word. Benjamín, holding back his sobs and his nausea, put on one of his mother’s aprons and began to wash the floor. He too said nothing. Jaime felt like a stranger. He knew his brother would see to it Teresa was moved to a decent clinic. After all, the old girl belonged to him. She was almost his wife. Offering him help would only arouse his jealousy. It seemed far better to lock oneself in a cheap hotel until this damned year ended.

  He spent seven days in Room 13, without turning on the light, without talking to himself, without reading newspapers, stretched out like a corpse. When the sirens announced the New Year, he paid his bill with the last money he had and walked out to hug people in the street. The first person to fall into his arms was a muscular dark-skinned woman, beautiful and virile. Their embrace grew closer and closer, each one advancing with no modesty toward the intimacy of the other, charging like two warships, giving each other kisses like cannonades, and there, standing up, they fornicated for hours.

  After ejaculating four times, Jaime asked what her name was. It turned out to be Isolda, the Lightning Bolt from Limache, a knife thrower. My father showed her the empty lining of his pockets and proposed that she take him on as her assistant. From her knapsack, the girl removed seven wide knives, placed Jaime next to a wooden entryway door, stepped back a few paces, and with glacial severity challenged him: “Will you take the dare?”

  Jaime felt his knees grow weak, but his hunger advised him to risk his skin, despite the alcohol on the woman’s breath.

  “I won’t even blink!”

  She threw the knives at him. The first almost caught his ear. The second threateningly missed his ribs. The third caressed his calf. That took care of the left side. Three more tosses balanced the right.

  “Spread your legs a bit. Still going to take the dare?”

  Jaime separated his legs and said nothing, not out of bravery but because he’d lost his voice. The seventh knife struck so close to his perineum that if it weren’t that his scrotum had contracted like a cotton vest washed in hot water, she would have castrated him. The year 1920 offered him his first opportunity: he would be the target of dark-skinned Isolda in Toni Carrot’s circus.

  The tent, formerly white but now gray because of being handled so often, spotted with patches and stains like purulent wounds, was small. For seating, the spectator was offered a gallery of splintered planks, and the performance space, marked by gasoline cans painted the red, white, and blue of the Chilean fl
ag, since it lacked good mats, was covered by a carpet of potato sacks. In one truck traveled the baggage and the trained burro and in the other, the entire company, composed exclusively of family members. Toni Carrot, whose real name was Don Hernán Cañas, dressed completely in orange. He said he was a descendant of José Joaquín Cañas Aldunate, the priest of Carahue, who in the high spirits of the days of Independence committed the indiscretion of founding a discreet family. He was the artist’s grandfather.

  His wife, Emilia Cañas, a.k.a. Toni Lettuce, was completely dressed in green. For her part, she claimed to be the granddaughter of Blas Cañas Calvo, the priest who organized the Congregation of the House of Mary, who, on the day the convent was inaugurated, imbibed too much punch and sinned with a nun. As soon as her belly began to protrude, she was expelled and had to give birth on the watermelon truck giving her a lift to the Talcahuano whorehouses. She managed the business affairs of the group, distributing the pesos and the food with a severity worthy of King Solomon.

  The two trapeze artists, jugglers, tightrope walkers, trainers of the donkey who knew how to bray the national anthem, were the parents of Isolda and her three brothers. The three remaining women were the mobile wives of those same brothers. Each night, they drew lots to decide who would sleep with whom. The children, an indeterminate number, called all the women mom and all the men dad.

  The most tedious aspect of the performances was the continuous change of costumes. Toni Carrot and Toni Lettuce retained their identity, but the others, dressed as musicians, began playing a polka next to the ticket stand improvised on the bed of the passenger truck to summon the audience. Then they would run to put on the jackets of an usher, sweeper, assembler of trapezes, seller of balloons, chocolates, or lollipops. Then the changes would multiply, because it was the turn of the contortionists and acrobats, those who mounted a bicycle, eight at a time, those who danced a rumba on the tightrope, those who tossed the burro up in the air to catch him on the soles of their feet and make him spin around along with two huge wooden balls.