Where the Bird Sings Best

by Alejandro Jodorowsky

  For Jaime, who wasn’t born in a circus tent, who hadn’t grown up on a truck, and who, for those very reasons, found it difficult to learn all these tricks, they found an easy but spectacular act. Aside from having to risk his life allowing his lover to outline him in knives, he was hung by his hair. Since he hadn’t had a haircut since his last match, he had a black mane of hair that was thick and straight. The acrobats coated it with pitch, inserted a wire as an axis, and transformed it into a ponytail that ended in an arc of steel. All he had to do when they hoisted him ten feet from the floor was to show off his muscles, eat the empanada that was his dinner, and then read the sheet of newsprint in which the empanada had been wrapped.

  This new life, within its magic, was a matter of routine. Monday: break down the tent. Tuesday: travel to another town. Wednesday: set up the tent. Thursday: march through the town in a publicity parade. Friday and Saturday: endure two performances. Sunday: add a “children’s matinee,” and then at night, get drunk, and make love under the grandstand. Sometimes the circus drew a crowd; most of the time, it was almost empty. Sometimes they performed for three or four people. No one grew sad. They didn’t want to get rich but rather to earn a living. In the spirit of those artists, there was no future. They had the mentality of birds. They got up at dawn, penniless, and worked all day to fill their bellies. They were all possessed of a strange happiness that soon spread to Jaime.

  To travel that way, free, with the family, enjoying the pure air of the open road, was a gift. Without haste, with the calm of migratory birds, they traveled the nation, village by village, always heading south. They knew how to take a simple chicken, season it with herbs they found in the forests, and transform it into a princely banquet. They filled the monotony of travel with songs and jokes. Isolda was a lover with such a wide range of orgasms, from a girlish squeal to a mammoth’s roar, that Jaime never felt the weeks go by. Toni Carrot, always arm-in-arm with Toni Lettuce—between them their ages added up to almost 190 years—came over to say to him:

  “Little friend, you have made our only granddaughter so happy that we want to give you a gift; we’re going to tell you a joke we’ve invented for you and you alone. Keep it like a jewel and don’t tell it to anyone so that when your first granddaughter has a lover who makes her happy, you can give it to him intact. Listen carefully, because we won’t repeat it:

  A man sees a frog. The frog says to him, “Kiss me, please.”

  The man thinks, “A frog that speaks must be an enchanted princess. I’ll kiss her, she’ll turn back into what she was, she will marry me, and I’ll be a millionaire.” The man kisses the frog, feels an explosion, and finds he’s been turned into a frog.

  The first frog says, “How wonderful. You were enchanted for ever so long, and, finally, I was able to save you!”

  Jaime never knew what effect the story had on him but instead of laughing, he began to cry.

  The two aged clowns applauded in satisfaction: “We were not wrong. You’re a sensitive man. Good jokes, like happiness, should provoke tears.”

  When they reached Puerto Montt, they were caught by winter, and the rains became torrential. There they remained for three weeks, hoping the deluge would cease. Water fell, fell, and fell some more. It was impossible to raise the tent on mud. They killed time playing cards secluded in the truck. The women went out to look for work so they would have something to eat. Jaime offered to accompany them, but the men simply put his cards in his hand and placed before him a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a huge glass of wine, insinuating that in the family, by tradition, the men never worked among the rubes, by which they meant all human beings who did not belong to the circus world.

  “We are pure and they false, like slips of paper stacked to look like money.”

  The grandmother was the only woman who stayed behind, taking advantage of that forced rest to try to train a toad. According to what Jaime was told, she’d begun with this one about ten years earlier, managing to make it say ”mama,” but that wasn’t enough for a public show.

  “Do toads live that long?”

  “Like turtles, they live more than a century. Maybe one day Toni Lettuce will get this one to take a mouthful of gasoline and spit it into a candle to produce huge flames.”

  Toni Carrot was sure his wife would train the toad: “If she trained me, and I lived as a thief, stealing on the trolley, she can do it. She taught me my first number; dressed as a clown, I would make my way through the passengers; I would steal five wallets, toss them into the air, juggle them, and return them intact to their owners. Then I’d pass the hat around. By saving up those charitable offerings, we bought the canvas to make our circus.”

  The women always returned with full hands. No sooner did the rain stop than they put on their shows and continued traveling south. When they reached Punta Arenas, they would turn around and travel north, toward Arica. They thought to live their entire life that way, for various generations, transformed into a magic pendulum that would rise and fall along the narrow, long body of the nation like an incessant caress.

  They pulled Jaime up by the hair so much that he began to have intellectual ambitions. He really began to read the newspaper way up there. The circus folk made fun of him:

  “We, luckily, are out of the rube world, which is pure foolishness and lies. Nothing they tell you is true. Reality is not a pile of letters. The only defect you have, Jaime, is that you learned to read. Do you know why the rubes write so much? They transform the gestures they don’t know how to make into words.”

  All the headlines on the first page celebrated the heights the economy had reached. Jaime became upset: their continuous travel throughout the country allowed him to see the degrading misery in which the peasants and workers lived. How could they celebrate industrial success amid all that hunger? To understand that an even sharper mind would be necessary, one accustomed to having a bird’s eye view of events. Not knowing how to analyze what he was reading gave him a sensation much like being with one eye swollen shut against a champion who attacked from the blind side. He made a big decision. One stormy night, when the women did not return to sleep (“Don’t worry,” said his comrades. “They’ve probably finished their work late and, to avoid getting soaked, they’re sleeping in some cheap hotel, as they have on similar occasions.”), he hid in the cargo truck where they had the burro sleep in order to avoid being struck by lightning. After making sure the animal was asleep (he didn’t want even an irrational witness), he summoned the Rabbi.

  The Rabbi, surprised by such an unexpected signal of interest from someone who’d gone as far as epilepsy to force him to wander, dying of boredom, through the gray deserts of the Interworld, obeyed enthusiastically, like a lost dog who had found his master.

  “You shitass ghost! Stop bouncing around like a drunken crow and sit still in front of me, because I have a proposition to make you.”

  “Well, Chaim.”

  “My name’s not Chaim, not that or any other weird name! Call me Jaime, or I’ll expel you from this world!”

  “Well, Jaime.”

  “That’s better! I don’t know if you really exist or if you’re a family hallucination. My father died insane, and my mother is following in his footsteps. I wouldn’t be surprised if I were demented too. Be that as it may, you appear when I call you and you say coherent things I hadn’t even thought. You may be useful to me. I suppose you want to exist, which is why you’re here. But you depend on my will. Now listen: I have to understand what I’m reading in the papers. Chile interests me. The Jews and their tradition have nothing to do with me. I want you to wear different clothing; I can’t stand you tricked out as a rabbi. Invent a sober suit for yourself, a normal one, not that wild crap in central-European 1800s style. Appear without a beard and with short hair. Study this reality in depth, and never speak to me again about Adonai, the Torah, Kabbalah, or the Talmud. What do you say?”

  “Even though you abuse your power, Jaime, I realize that times change and
that the truths of one era and one place don’t work in other times and other places. My physical aspect, though for an eternity I haven’t wanted to recognize it, is pure illusion. I’m not made of matter but of memories. I’ll let them go straightaway. Look.”

  And the Rabbi, heroically overcoming his nostalgia, transformed into a clean-shaven, well-combed man dressed in an elegant gray suit, a white poplin shirt, a tie with discreet stripes, and an umbrella. Smiling, he said, “At your service, sir. What do you think?”

  “I think the umbrella is superfluous and the smile useless. I’ll call you only to discuss the news.”

  “Something, however small it may be, is much, much more than nothing, sir.”

  “Stop calling me sir, and speak to me in familiar terms. Now get lost.”

  The obedient spirit dissolved. From then on, Jaime would see him whenever he isolated himself to defecate. A solemn moment that justified the newspaper he carried folded up in one hand and authorized the solitude necessary to engage in dialogues that, to the others, seemed a madman’s monologues.

  “Jaime, I’ve finished studying the matter. This period of prosperity the journalists talk about so much is a whited sepulcher. The truth, absent from the editorial pages, can be found in the business section. The country you call yours, I hope you’re not making a mistake, is being sold, mine by mine, field by field, to the Yankees. Of course, the dollars seem a blessing for those who live by speculating, but they are papers that will vanish. The wealth of the land is being taken away by foreigners. Your Chileans are not getting rich but getting into debt. A dangerous situation. The people’s hunger may produce a revolution, but with the presidential elections they’re going to try to cover it all up.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Jaime, you are already a circus man. You know that the big-time rubes use lies as a universal remedy. Remember the comic numbers: a clown can’t make people laugh by himself. He needs a partner to be his straight man and make comments. Toni is exuberant, charming, full of colors and wise cracks; his partner, Augusto, is disagreeable, severe, gray, and says little. They seem enemies, but between the two of them they create the laughter that makes the circus work.

  “At the moment there are two candidates for president: Arturo Alessandri, the Toni, who is emotional, outspoken, popular, and optimistic; and Luis Barros Borgoño, the Augusto, who is academic, cold, aristocratic, authoritarian. The first one talks about a prosperous future, the second about a threatening present. One asks for freedom, the other oppression. Behind them, both have the same supporters. They both want the same thing: to fool the poor, making them believe they participate in the Destiny of the nation. The more disagreeable Borgoño gets, the more Alessandri will shine among the people, who, uniting around an illusion, may elect him president.

  “But the capitalist regime, aside from some superficial reforms, will go on exactly as it is. It will go right on selling the country, and hunger will only be calmed with bullets. There is a third candidate that few see, who has no possibility of being elected because he preaches outside the circus, that is, from jail. He’s proposing an impossible truth, this Luis Emilio Recabarren. Instead of asking for small conquests, like a monkey in the zoo who demands to be well treated by his keepers—a few extra nuts—but doesn’t consider destroying the cage, Recabarren wants everything; he wants to abolish borders, to turn the planet into one single nation, declare war on war, expropriate land to distribute it among the peasants, end private property, demolish the capitalist system, give sovereignty to the people, augment public education.

  “In sum, he wants to repeat the Russian Revolution. This man will suffer a great deal. There are no large fortunes to support him; he works against power, and the immature people prefer to listen to the ‘luminous’ words of Alessandri, contenting themselves with promises. Even though he’s an almost saintly warrior, he does have a defect: like Don Quixote trying to follow in the footsteps of Amadís of Gaul, Recabarren tries to imitate Lenin. The thing is, the Chileans, high and low, because they’ve been dominated for so many centuries by foreign conquistadors, have lost their identity. It’s always the neighbors who tell them what they should want. No level in this society has its own ambitions. Everything is done by imitation. The capitalists copy Europe and the United States, the workers imitate the Bolsheviks. Too many mirages, Jaime. Those implanted desires will lead them to failure and violence. Recabarren, because he is incapable of inventing his own path, will some day end up the victim of his ideal.”

  These conversations with the Rabbi went on for most of the winter. But wherever they went they heard nothing but talk about Alessandri. So great was the fervor for this candidate, that on the days when the rain allowed them to perform, the audience, before the show began, would stand up and sing, as if it were the national anthem:

  We’ll have victory,

  Little Darling,

  The radicals,

  Little Darling,

  So that all Chileans,

  Little Darling,

  Will be equals.

  Jaime, hanging by his hair, after having exposed himself to the tossed knives of the Lightning Bolt of Limache, felt that the skin on his cranium, as it stretched, unfolded its circumvolutions to turn his brain into a flying carpet. Teresa’s insane words—“Change the world. Make it finally be born.”—pursued him, buzzing like wasps. His mother was asking him to become a prophet, him, the most miserable and uprooted of beings, the one who believed in nothing, who wandered about, begging content in a world without meaning.

  It all made him want to go on hanging there, spinning forever, never coming down until he dried out. Or the opposite, to submerge himself in the impossible struggle of the workers, to be a scapegoat, to become a martyr, to donate his grain of sand so the Earth could become a paradisaic garden, where good people, without anguish or war, would run about like bland ants, trying to resuscitate God so that with His punishments he would remove them from boredom and restore the taste for life to them. Bah! It was better to slip the cylinder into your woman’s hairy tunnel in order to spit your despair transformed into semen into her carnivorous flowers.

  In Osorno, it rained for nine days, and frozen rocks poured down. The patter didn’t let them sleep or play poker. They tried to set up the tent, but the wind shook it so hard that the patches flew off like a flock of dirty pigeons. The men, happy deep down about the incident because it gave them something to do, spent their time secluded in the truck, sewing up tears while the five women worked in the city. That night they did not return, and they stayed away the next night too. On the third day of their absence, Isolda’s father asked his sons to go with him and find all the women. Jaime insisted on going with them. They shrugged their shoulders: “If you want to come, come along. You’re one of us. You’ll understand.”

  Toni Lettuce gave them a tiny piggy bank where they’d put away some scanty savings. Protecting their heads with ponchos, they moved through the storm, soaked to the skin. They went directly to the police station. Of course, there they all were, waiting for their men to pay their fine. They’d been arrested for the illegal exercise of prostitution. The business was swift. Clowns and acrobats were accomplices. The piggy bank always contained a few banknotes for such cases. In the towns, everyone knew that when the circus couldn’t put on shows, the circus women would put on another kind of performance. From time to time, to satisfy the wife of some mayor, they were fined. It never went further than that. Sleeping with a circus artist was a highly esteemed pleasure.

  Jaime returned without speaking to anyone, staring at the ground. When they reached the truck, the women removed from their sex the money they’d hidden. The men applauded. They ran to buy food, and the party began. Jaime, risking being sliced open, gave Isolda a slap when she tried to kiss him. Toni Carrot grabbed him by the arm, dragged him into a corner, and whispered into his ear:

  “If you put a cube of sugar in your tea, it dissolves. If you put in a cube of marble, nothing happ
ens. What matters is the feeling. The other is a mere rubbing of flesh. Fornicating with a rube is just another job, the same as hanging from a trapeze or balancing on a tightrope. No need to be jealous. If she’s unfaithful with someone from the profession, another circus man, that’s different. You can kill her or scar her face. That’s customary, take it or leave it. We have no other way to survive. That’s how we’ve lived until now, that’s how we’ll go on living.”

  Jaime’s head began to ache. He liked to travel this way, but he couldn’t stand his lover being a whore. Hanging by his hair became martyrdom. His temples palpitated as if they were going to explode. Amid the mists of a high fever, he saw forty-foot-high waves coming and began to scream to frighten them away. Toni Lettuce made him swallow a liter of hot wine with lemon and cinnamon. He began to pour out sweat and fell asleep.

  In those moments of deep depression, I entered his organism. When he awoke, with his pulse normal again, he felt his testicles. They seemed different, more compact and noble. He wasn’t alone. He was the root of a tree that would spread its branches throughout eternal time. I was asking him to be born, to rise toward the woman I needed to be my mother. That made him consider his relationship with the Lightning Bolt of Limache.

  What did he feel for her? Something like what dogs feel for bitches. At the animal level of desire, he or any other would be the same. A warm body, a welcoming hole clinging to his savage thrusts, the explosions of orgasm and the cow-like company, the daily nonsense, sentimental marmalade, moistening chatter of cracks. Aside from throwing knives and prostituting herself, Isolda had nothing extraordinary to her. If he stayed with her, he would never progress. His head ached again. One of Isolda’s brothers practically carried him on his shoulders to the outskirts of town where he deposited Jaime at a forest that got lost in the distance and covered the hills.