Where the Bird Sings Best

by Alejandro Jodorowsky

  One morning, Jesús de la Cruz, highly excited, woke him: “Jaime, today you can take off your monkey suit and put your parrot costume back on. I mean, you can dress like a normal citizen even though the color is loud. We’re going to a workers’ demonstration. The city is full of thugs. Recabarren is coming!”

  “What? Recabarren?”

  “That’s right, Recabarren, your idol! It’s the First Congress of the Communist Party of Chile. They are going to officially declare their allegiance to the Communist International whose seat is in Moscow. Being inside that gorilla suit and bouncing all over the place, you haven’t been aware of anything. The leader has come out of jail, been elected a deputy, and the doors of Congress are open to him. Now it’s going to be difficult to cut him off. Tonight, for certain, there will be no beatings, even though they’ve put up posters everywhere that say, With Body and Soul We’ll be Red!”

  “But why are they meeting here, in Rancagua?”

  “It must be because there are so many peasants and also because lots of workers can come down from the El Teniente copper mine. They’re already arriving, peaceful, wearing their Sunday best. They say it’s one of the most transcendent events in the history of Chile.”

  “They say, they say. Who the fuck does all that saying? Pure publicity!”

  Jaime, not knowing why, had awakened in a bad mood. There was something that deeply bothered him, a negative foreshadowing that arose from the foundations of that city, with its typically Spanish configuration formed of eight by eight blocks with a plaza at its center. The surrounding streets did not start at the corner of the tree-lined rectangle but from the center of each of its sides. It was there that 1,500 patriots, defeated and perhaps betrayed, had died. All that put Jaime in a bad mood. He walked to the church, sat in a pew, and, pretending to pray, summoned the Rabbi, who was not slow in coming. Jaime, treating him coldly but courteously, laid out the situation. He got the answer he feared:

  “You’re right to be worried. Never disdain symbols. The Plaza of the Heroes is between four streets that form a cross. For a Catholic civilization that signifies martyrdom. In 1814, Bernardo O’Higgins (Christ) occupies the plaza to stop the Spanish army from advancing from the south toward the capital. Juan José Carrera (Judas), two leagues away, remains with a detachment of cavalry in order to support the bulk of the army when his help is requested. This, for reasons no one has been able to explain, he does not do.

  “Attacked in four places, the infantry is decimated, without giving up. The hero does not allow himself to be crucified, and in a ferocious attack opens a path to escape the disaster. The motive for the cruel sacrifice: naïve confidence in a bad ally. You, who, like all Chileans, know this battle by heart, are upset seeing Recabarren reproduce the same disastrous configuration without realizing it. By founding the Communist Party in Rancagua, he is expressing that, deep down, he is preparing for betrayal and defeat. He, a just spirit, a redeemer, a human canal of the Supreme Father, Lenin, will be badly judged, understood by few for none, and will see the people massacred around him. His triumphs will be tactical retreats; he’ll have greater sufferings. He will be abandoned and alone in adversity, deserted even by his guide. Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”

  “Fine. Now you’ve told me what I needed to hear: Recabarren should never have founded his party in this city of defeated heroes. Now go away. I’ve had enough hallucinations for one day!”

  And with his bad mood transformed into fury, he returned to the tiny room he shared with the hunchback. He shaved, cut his hair, and put on his green suit. Jesús de la Cruz looked like a boy going to the circus. With an air of complicity, he showed Jaime a package of chocolates and mints. He showed off a T-shirt with a mountain peak embroidered on the back. He had dyed his eggs red.

  A great multitude tried to enter the lecture hall of the municipality. Miners and peasants crowded around outside, orderly, knowing that the hall was filled to capacity. When they heard a round of applause, they too clapped and shouted support, not knowing for what and why. It took Jaime and the hunchback an hour to cross that tranquil and dense sea. They managed to get in using the pretext that they were carrying food for the members of the Congress. When they did get into the hall, Recabarren was speaking. There was nothing extraordinary in his looks. He was a serene man, clean-shaven, gray around the temples. His gestures were modest and friendly. His voice—devoid of oratorical tremolos—was plain, direct, and common, but it also possessed a conviction so deep that it electrified. His words went straight to the heart of his fellow believers with no need for shouting or gesturing.

  “Comrades, without the blood of the thousands of worker martyrs cruelly spilled by the exploiter classes in the ferocious repressions that have taken place since 1900 right until today, 1922, without the anti-imperialist struggle kept up for years by patriotic elements, it would have been next to impossible for the conditions to be created in Chile for our dream to become reality. The Communist Party is born by assimilating the ideology that corresponds to the proletariat: Marxism-Leninism. The Party is born carrying high in the air the red banner, the emblem that synthesizes the most noble ideals, the purest aspirations, the most sublime visions of those who desire to construct a better humanity, a more perfect, more human society that will definitively liberate man from exploitation, that will eliminate need, that will extinguish the anxieties of insecurity, that will tear open all the veils of ignorance and inaugurate the kingdom of happiness.”

  Despite the pain the purity of that man gave to him by fighting for ideals that manifested his immense love for humanity and which would lead him, when he collided with innate human perversity, to martyrdom, Jaime found himself applauding, galvanized like the rest. Recabarren, fearless, read a declaration of principles, attacking the juridical, political, and economic structure of society, appealing to the class struggle to inaugurate, by means of the proletarian revolution, a Communist government.

  As an essential measure of that program, he announced the foundation of a newspaper that would be the organ of the National Executive Committee. Then a brass band, not quite in tune but energetic, played “The International,” which was sung by all present under waving red flags. Recabarren, not wanting to be the center of this fervor of the people, disappeared among the Congress members, but many workers began to shout “Recabarren!” so he came back with his arms outstretched (like Jesus, thought Jaime), in order to receive the vibrant ovations.

  My father, dissolved in that enthusiastic mass, tried to approach the politician he admired and felt so sorry for, not with the hope of speaking to him—many rings of comrades surrounded him, making incessant commentaries, trying to hear from his lips a phrase that would be a personal memory—but to get the energetic contact of his invisible aura. He managed to get five yards from his goal and felt happy. He could see the chest of the historic man rising and falling. Perhaps he’d have the luck that his eyes, which already belonged to legend, would meet his own for an instant.

  Surprised almost to paralysis, he heard the leader say to him, “You there, the young man in the green suit, come over here.”

  The bodies immediately separated, opening a narrow path. As if submerged in a dream, with the intense palpitation of a heart witnessing a miracle, he walked toward Recabarren, who gave him a hearty handshake and invited him to follow along to a private office where he was going to rest.

  Now Jaime began to think: “Could he see that I’m inhabited by a Jewish monster? Did he recognize Teresa’s face in mine? It isn’t possible that I, among thousands of enthusiasts, could interest him! Or maybe I do. He’s an extraordinary man; he must perceive things differently, see into our interior, know the quality of our souls. I’ve always known that I’m great, that my secret spirit is as pure as a diamond, and that I have the strength to move mountains. If he organizes a workers army and gives me command of it, I won’t lose a single battle. No Rancagua for this boy. I’ll even demolish the ruins of this sick capitalism and pitilessly c
ut all the heads off the dragon!”

  Recabarren observed him calmly, offered him some tea in the cup from a thermos bottle, and asked him: “Tell me, young man, where did you buy that suit?”

  Jaime fell from his delusions of grandeur to the size of a flyspeck. “To tell the truth, I didn’t buy it. A gravedigger gave it to me. It belonged to a dead man who had neither friends nor family.”

  “Family he did have, at least one, me. Vicente was my uncle, a traveling salesman in the clothes business. He made that suit from the fabric on the mattress of his mom’s bed. He was always an old bachelor, very discreet. When my grandmother died, he poisoned the thirty cats that lived with them. He was the only son of that recalcitrant widow, and he buried her on a bed of cats. As you see, thanks to your glaring clothes, we’re almost members of the same family. Besides, you get an inheritance. Cut open the shoulder pads: Vicente always hides a few pesos there folded up in case of emergency.”

  “Thanks a lot. I’ll do just that, Don Luis Emilio.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jaime Jodorowsky, at your service.”

  “An odd name. Is it Polish?”

  “It is, but my family is Russian. I’m lying. They’re Jews.”

  “But do you know how to speak Russian?”

  “I’m lucky enough not to have forgotten it.”

  “Want to work with me?”

  “Of course!”

  “My obligations as a member of Congress oblige me to live in Santiago. Here on this card is my address. I have a pile of Russian books, all disorganized. You will be very useful to me. Not only to me but also to the entire working class. Your translations can be published in our newspapers. Come to see me as soon as you can. But remember: the trains leave on time and if you’re a second late, you’ll miss a long trip.”

  In the cotton stuffing of the shoulder pads, Jaime found a lot of money. He gave half to his partner and with the other half bought a navy blue suit and a ticket to Santiago. The hunchback got drunk, burned the gorilla suit, and began to pelt him with hardboiled eggs dyed black. My father had to run to the train to escape his fury. He reached the capital one Sunday at 6:00 a.m. When he entered Benjamín’s apartment, he found him fully dressed, eating breakfast:

  “What are you doing here? I’ve got no need for you. You spent almost two years without writing or worrying about my mother’s health. You should be ashamed. If it weren’t for the fact that I’ve gone back to divine Poetry, I’d be a goner by now. Thanks to poetry, in these immobile rivers, the crutches of long journeys have become baroque chargers. I gallop mounted on a violet blast between the ancient eyes of men who reflect the geometric formulas of this unbalanced world.”

  “Stop, Benjamín. Stop reciting with that diva’s voice and tell me where Teresa is, since she’s also my mother.”

  “She’s made notable progress. Even though she has serious cardiac problems, the wandering truths have returned to take refuge in the divine architecture of their demolition.”

  “You’re busting my balls with your babble! Explain clearly to me!”

  “She’s become a nice lady. On Sundays, they let her out of the madhouse in my custody. We have a puppet theater, and we put on shows in the hospital for children with tuberculosis. Will you come? Today we’re debuting ‘The Soldier Who Overcame Death.’ A traditional theme, but I’ve rewritten the dialogue. Art keeps cemeteries alive thanks to the play of its cadavers!”

  The puppet theater stood in the somber patio filled with yellowish children, wearing old army jackets with gray blankets covering their shoulders. It was a blue screen emblazoned with the name of the company: The Booloolu. A cloth with a medieval castle painted on it was the only scenery. The small patients shouted, demanding the performance begin. Severe nurses handed out crepe paper balls filled with sawdust. A bullying doctor waved a Chilean flag, asking everybody to sing the national anthem. Jaime couldn’t see Teresa. Benjamín sat him with the mob, and said, “Now you’ll have to concentrate. You’ll see my mother when the show is over. I made the heads of the puppets and she the costumes. The one who acts is me, Teresa is my helper. We make a great couple.” Then he ran to hide himself behind the screen. A cardboard trumpet hooted. Death appeared carrying a young blonde woman with red cheeks, wearing a bridal gown. The girl, fighting to escape the skeleton’s embrace, bowed toward the children, asking for help:

  “Don’t let him take me away. Before I die, I want to see my fiancé, a soldier. He promised me he would return from the war.”

  The sick children bombarded Death with their sawdust balls. But Death, emitting lugubrious guffaws, held the girl even more tightly. With great stealth, the puppet master removed his hand from the sleeve. The bride hung empty in the embrace of Death. Inside the little theater, Benjamín extended his left hand toward Teresa so she could slip on the soldier. His uniform was filthy and torn. Meanwhile, my uncle began to act in three different voices.

  He made a cavernous laugh as Death: “You are mine, forever!”

  He exclaimed as a damsel in distress, “No! Help! Oh my love, come help me!”

  He shouted in a romantic soldier’s voice, “Oh my bride, hang on! I’m on my way!”

  Teresa began to stagger, about to fall in a faint. Benjamín whispered, “Quickly now, slip the soldier on tight. What’s wrong with you?”

  “It’s nothing. A passing malaise. Go on. Don’t worry.”

  Death opened the gates of the castle and locked the sagging bride inside. The soldier appeared.

  “Old lady Death, open your eight invisible legs and give me back my bride!”

  “Too late! Her soul will dissolve into white butterflies.”

  “Never! If she disappears, you would erase me from all mirrors. Instead, I’ll kill you!”

  “Kill me? Do you want to cut a sword with a thread? Ha, ha, ha!”

  The ragged soldier engaged in a fierce fight with Death. Saber against scythe. Teresa, biting her lips, fell with an unbearable pain in her heart. Benjamín, never leaving off acting with his two puppets, who battled in silence, looked down to where his mother had fallen.

  “I’m telling you not to worry, son. The show must go on.”

  “But?”

  “Whatever begins must end. Go on.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s this worn-out heart. My time has come.”

  “No!”

  “Go on, I’m ordering you!”

  Amid the shouting with which the consumptive children cheered on their hero, the soldier, who dodged Death’s scythe by sinking down into the invisible floor only to pop up like a spring to surprise his adversary from the back. He pierced Death through and through with his saber, proudly exclaiming, “I’ve killed Death! Here I am, my bride! I got here in time!”

  The hero, furiously applauded by the audience but worn out by the fight, made a supreme effort, opened the gate, and entered the castle. The stage was empty. The children asked their frowning nurses whether the soldier was going to find the girl dead or alive. Benjamín, with the soldier on one hand and the bride on the other, kneeled next to his mother.

  “Don’t quit on me. I still need you.”

  “Now you see you can’t finish the show on your own.”

  The impatient children began to call to the hand puppets, “The bride and groom! We want the bride and groom!”

  Benjamín made Teresa comfortable on the floor, shouted with the bride’s voice, “We’re on our way!” Then, with the voice of the soldier, “We’re enjoying a kiss!” He imitated the noise of a huge smack and sighed: “OOOOH!” General laughter broke out.

  Teresa pressed her chest with her open hands. “I’ll hang on until the end. All you have left is the dance. Get up. Do it!”

  Benjamín, his eyes filled with tears, raised the puppets. The soldier and his bride left the castle. The children received them with a warm ovation. He hugged her in his arms and said, passionately, “Tattoo my chest! Cover it with flames!”

&nbs
p; And she answered, “Tiny needles grow on my lips, which for you spurt ink like little squids!”

  And he: “Let me introduce the Universe between your lips!”

  And she: “I have pieces of gods at the back of my tongue!”

  The two papier mâché heads made a tremendous kiss. The children howled hysterically. The bride and groom separated and fell at the edge of the stage, worn out, panting. Then they jumped up and kissed again. The kiss made them spin around. More howls. Laughter. They began to dance a waltz: “We have conquered Death! Children, say it with us!”

  The consumptive audience, like a single actor, exclaimed, “We have conquered Death!”

  “Now together forever!”

  The curtain fell. Jaime waited for the sick children to leave, not knowing that behind the screen, his mother, in his brother’s arms, was dying.

  “Do not suffer, Benjamín. We aren’t born, and we don’t die. Life is eternal.”

  “I know it. I’ll have to be the soldier who conquers Death.”

  “You already are, and you have conquered it. We shall remain forever alive. Together forever. We shall go from transformation to transformation, never ending. We lose nothing because we are everything.”

  My uncle could no longer hold back and began to sob.

  “Don’t cry. My form is nothing more than an illusion.”