Where the Bird Sings Best

by Alejandro Jodorowsky

”Yes, an illusion but so beautiful.”

  “Benjamín, I want you to bury my body next to your father’s. Under the same stone.”

  “I promise I will.”

  “Finally I know peace. How marvelous, how marvelous, how mar—”

  And she expired sweetly. Jaime found her smiling in the arms of his brother, who kissed her with devotion. He attempted to come close, but Benjamín made a violent gesture of rejection.

  “Get out of here. Her death is mine. I will bury her. You never did anything for her. You were born an orphan with no father or mother. You aren’t even my brother.”

  Jaime said nothing. He’d tortured Benjamín when they were small by making fun of his weaknesses, so he understood that hatred. He felt compassion for Benjamín: until the end of his days, he would be married to Teresa’s ghost, with no wife, no children, making his language harder and harder to understand until he severed all communication with the world. Poetry would gag him. He left his brother there, clinging to the smiling body, and went to see Recabarren.

  He crossed the Mapocho River, which flowed with chocolate-colored water, as if grumbling about the passage of time, stubborn, not wanting to leave the past, denying the city, showing with its mild current the difficulty of passing, going toward itself, dense in its fight not to move forward, trying to turn itself into a liquid lance, seeking immobility without ever finding it, and raging because it had to dissolve in the gluttonous ocean.

  He shook his head to stop identifying himself with the river, using it as a mirror, and tried to find number 360 on Andrés Bello Street. It was a modest house with a well-tended garden. A bronze fist at the center of the blue door was the knocker. Jaime began to tremble. Something was telling him that when he stepped over the threshold his life would change. He needed to find a root to draw him out of madness, to drop the anchor in solid ground, to find beings without illusions, building on rock instead of sand, knowing someone honest on this planet full of crooks and vampires. He made only one knock, which tried to be discreet but sounded like a pistol shot.

  An amiable woman with intelligent eyes opened the door: Her hair was cut short like a man’s, and her face was mature but without wrinkles. She wore no makeup. Her goodness was clearly the result of her tenacious, direct spirit, which had abandoned the mirages of seduction. Even though everything about her was feminine, the narrowness of her hips showed she’d never had a child.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m Jaime Jodorowsky. Mr. Recabarren offered me a job.”

  “Ah, the young man who speaks Russian! Luis Emilio has already told me about it. Come in. I’m his companion, Teresa.”

  Teresa! This woman had the same name as his mother. He’d just lost one, and the magic of chance was giving him another, perhaps better, as if the first had been the rough stone uncarved and this one the geometric form, realized. He knew he was going to love her, without sex, without demands, with an unlimited admiration. All he needed was to see her this way, so complete, to take her as a model for all women. She hadn’t said she was the “wife” of the leader, but his “companion.” This woman could never accept anything other than love and political ideals to unite her to her man. Marriage for her had to be one more farce in the capitalist system. The house seemed as clean as a warship. The furniture was solid and in the strictly necessary quantity. There were no pictures on the walls, no adornments. Nor were there any crucifixes or other religious images. But covering the entire ceiling of the living room was a portrait of Lenin painted in tempera.

  “You can move in here.”

  She gave him a room with a narrow bed, a chair, a dresser, a bathroom, and a pitcher full of water.

  “I’m going to serve bean soup, bread and butter, and coffee. After you eat, you can begin to put the books in order. They’re still in boxes. What with all these sad events, we haven’t had time to unpack them.”

  Was she referring to the betrayal involved in the way the government of Alessandri thanked the people for the support they’d given him? Five hundred miners murdered in the San Gregorio nitrate mine, coal miners shot by the police in Curanilahue, demonstrations broken up by beatings, massacres of workers in El Zanjón de la Aguada, women fired for holding a meeting in Santiago at the site of the O’Higgins monument, peasants from the La Tranquilla ranch in Petorca murdered? The denial of the right to gather, jailings, deportations, torture… Or was she talking about the internal squabbles that broke out immediately after the founding of the Communist Party?

  Jaime ate with a good appetite, washed his dishes and silverware in the kitchen sink, and opened the boxes. He was so excited to touch the books that formed Recabarren’s spirit that he forgot his internal vigilance, which the Rabbi took advantage of by appropriating his personality. What the Rabbi loved above all things was books. Under Teresa’s astonished eyes, he organized the books, capturing the essence of their contents in two or three pages, while emitting exclamations of pleasure in Yiddish.

  He separated literature from pure philosophy and gave a preferential place to political texts. He put poetry on the highest shelf. He did not order the books alphabetically but by theme, not concerned in the slightest about which language they were written in. He understood everything. He read paragraphs in Russian, Italian, German, and French. Also in Spanish.

  Each new idea filled his mouth with saliva, as if he were sampling an exquisite dish. For the pleasure of feeling the miraculous structure of a sentence, he recited it, giving musical intonations. He sang the books, or rather, he stored them in his mind, whistling their rhythms. He fluttered about with the open books in his hands, looking like a bird.

  “The songs of my language have eyes and feet, eyes and feet, muscles, soul, sensations, the grandeur of heroes, and small, modest customs. Mmm... Touch her body, touch her body, and your miserable fingers will bleed! Great poet! Oy vey! The signs by which the gods revealed themselves were often very simple: the noise of the sacred oak’s leaves, the whisper of a fountain, the sound of a bronze cup caressed by the wind. This aesthetic isn’t bad. God appears, man is nullified: and the greater divinity becomes, the more miserable humanity becomes. Ase méne dermante zir in toite! When you think about death, it’s because you aren’t sure about life. These anarchists who grind up God so much make holy sausages.”

  Making an effort so intense that it used up his energy and he had to lie down for a few hours in bed, Jaime recovered control of his mind. Teresa, making no comments, brought him a glass of hot milk and covered him with a wool poncho.

  “Sleep in peace. My companion Recabarren will be here at ten tonight. We’ll dine together.”

  The crowing of a rooster woke him. A soft, reddish light entered through the window. The glass that was on the floor next to the bed projected a long shadow that reached the shoes of Luis Emilio Recabarren.

  “Last night you were sleeping so soundly that we didn’t want to interrupt. Around here, we get up early. Come have breakfast with us.”

  Teresa served café con leche, highly sugared, and a little basket of sweet rolls. She offered them fried eggs and ham with slices of fresh tomato. Jaime, timid, ashamed at the Rabbi’s invasion, could say nothing. Recabarren calmly read his workers paper. He folded it carefully, put it in his pocket, and brusquely said, “Well, Don Jaime, what are you waiting for in order to join the Party?”

  My father choked up, spit out some crumbs, and answered without thinking, “If you accept me, it will be a great honor to do so right now.”

  Recabarren’s face opened into a glowing smile. He dug around in a drawer in his desk and pulled out a small red identification book. “We’ll have to find you a name. Because of all the persecution, every comrade signs in with a pseudonym. How about a Mapuche name like Lautaro Quinchahual?”

  This time the nation was indeed opening a door for him, not through a hook from which he’d be hung by the hair, not through the hallucinations of a plant, not through the implacable womb of a grave, not through a stolen cros
s or the anonymous darkness of a gorilla suit. He was being baptized a second time, causing him to be born in a homeland accepting him as a native son, granting him a brotherly people. An official membership card for the Communist Party, signed and sealed by an admirable being, someone who saw the splendorous reality beneath obscure dreams!

  “Comrade Quinchahual, I want you to know that the red on this membership card is not the red of violence but of the blood spilled by our martyrs. Today we are few, barely two thousand militants, a small figure if you take into account the total number of people in the working class, but the political importance of a party is not only measured by numbers of members but also by the efficacy with which it is able to broadcast its influence and weigh over society. For that reason, you are going to be very useful to me. Teresa’s told me how you go into a trance and speak myriad languages. I know some Russian and more than a little German. We’ll have to translate Marx, Lenin, and Engels. The degree of illiteracy among the workers is enormous. For centuries, the exploiters have had them buried in ignorance. Better than buying rifles is founding newspapers. Come with me to the press.”

  That’s how the new life began. Jaime had finally found the perfect father, almost the antithesis of Alejandro the shoemaker, the mystic, the madman, the universal victim. Recabarren was an atheist saint whose loyalty to the people was solid, so honest that, in this society of thieves, he seemed a fanatical idealist.

  To achieve his objective—a happy, free humanity—he’d limited his imagination, his loves, the development of his personality. Dry, austere, focused, more than a man, he was a sword. Every night, after his meager dinner (he didn’t like to eat meat much and didn’t smoke), he reviewed his day out loud, as if it were someone else’s life, and criticized even the slightest weakness, incisively seeking the errors in order to discover a lesson. “Let’s see now, Lautaro. Let’s study what Luis Emilio’s day was worth. He got up fifteen minutes late. Careful! The comrade must not let discipline slip. The mattress is the worst enemy of action!” He recalled every sentence spoken during meetings, the details of the international news, the intimate problems of hundreds of militants. My father saw two aspects in him: one, the impetuous, spontaneous, intense horse; the other, the implacable rider, capable of sacrificing everything, even his own life, to get a just world. Being alongside that man was to be with all workers: “If you look inside me, all you’ll find are other people.”

  Two years of intense activity went by. Arturo Alessandri did not carry out his program. For Recabarren, the president was a puppet of the oligarchy, playing at being an impotent revolutionary in order to trick the proletariat and slow its social evolution.

  “This is a very well-organized comedy. The opposition Congress keeps the reforms proposed by the government from materializing. The workers think their scarecrow president will get them better days. Meanwhile, there are repressions, firings, and massacres. Today the president and the parliament accuse each other of being responsible. The conservatives sing arias charged with noisy words: ‘dictatorial intentions,’ ‘administrative corruption,’ ‘incompetence.’ Tomorrow, instead of resolving the crisis, his Offended Excellency will resign. A drumroll and a triumphant march, please: the military will arrive. Applause from the ignorant public. The oligarchy will accept superficial changes and will pretend to be docile in the face of what’s going on because the warrior heroes, students of Mussolini, will be nothing more than their lackeys. Militarism, Comrade Quinchahual, is the implacable enemy of the independent and revolutionary workers movement.”

  Jaime translated articles, printed and sold newspapers, helped foment strikes, was persecuted and beaten. He observed how Recabarren faced up to a myriad forms of violence, insidious calumnies, and attacks of all kinds, suffering defeats, winning victories, passing through betrayals and desertions, feeling his efforts were compensated for by the loyalty and affection conferred on him by the workers.

  He always tried to coordinate his actions with the teaching of Lenin, “the genius of theory.” At the end of the year, Recabarren announced he was going to make a trip to Russia, where he would stay for several months. Teresa and Jaime saw him off in Valparaíso. The man was very excited. Finally he would see with his own eyes a nation that had completely rooted out the exploiting regime. And possibly, in the meeting of the Congress of the Third International, he might speak to Comrade Lenin and shake his hand.

  “You know, Quinchahual, that we love you as if you were our own son. Protect my companion. The enemy can always deliver tricky blows, and it’s better to prevent than to cure.”

  Teresa was so discreet she seemed a shadow. She never made even the slightest noise. She was the only person my father ever knew whose footsteps made no sound. She slipped around like a ship in a tranquil lake. Around her, beings and things put themselves in order. She would step out into the garden and, very quietly, would stretch out her hand to offer a slice of pound cake that only she knew how to bake. Soon flocks of sparrows would come to flutter around her body, pecking at the spongy mass and sometimes perching on her shoulders and head.

  If another person approached, they would flee in nervous confusion. My father stood still for two hours in the garden with a slice of Teresa’s pound cake in his hand, but not a single bird came near. But no sooner did the woman come out and put her hand on his arm, than a cloud of tiny birds surrounded him. If she released his elbow, they flew away.

  During those long days when he missed the presence of his master, Jaime decided to find a lover to kill his nostalgia. The only female member of his cell supplied with sufficient breasts and backside, Sofía Lam, was a lesbian and long-suffering. She had three or four scars on each wrist, the result of failed suicides caused by married women, who when push came to shove decided not to abandon their husbands. Her long, plump, and flexible body excited him, but her face, with its large mouth and tiny nose, round eyes and sagging ears, seemed as ugly to him as a Pekingese pup.

  Nevertheless, he thought, “It doesn’t matter; I can have sex with her in the dark, or on my back, or with her skirt pushed up to cover her face. The bad thing is she always wears trousers.”

  One night, when the meeting was over, he invited her to have coffee, to see what possibilities there might be to found a new newspaper. They chatted for a few minutes, and then suddenly he asked her out of the blue, “You’re a virgin, correct?”

  “Not a virgin, though my hymen is intact.”

  “Would you like to have it broken?”

  “With a man? Men disgust me.”

  “How do you know, if you’ve never tried a man?”

  “Men are sticky. Full of vanity. When they penetrate, they insult.”

  “Do I? Do I make you vomit?”

  “I never thought about you in that way. You’re discreet. Don’t spoil things.”

  “Now, are we or are we not revolutionaries, comrade? Why do you limit yourself so much? You should yield to noble experiments! You might not change, but you would certainly be enriched! Let me take you in my arms, and just see what you feel.”

  “All right, but don’t get mad if I find you repugnant. I’ll be frank.”

  “Exactly what I’d expect you to be.”

  Jaime approached her bit by bit, with the slowness of a dream. He made his spirit neutral and did not embrace her the way a man embraces a woman but the way one person embraces another. He pressed his body to hers, taking the care of not applying any pressure that might be interpreted as overpowering or even as a sexual advance. He offered his physical company, nothing more.

  “How strange, Lautaro! Contact with you doesn’t bother me. You’re the first man to have that effect on me.”

  “Well then, Sofía. Let me suggest the following: with no commitment of any kind, I can free you of your hymen. You should take it as a simple surgical procedure. We won’t mix in desire or feelings. I assure you I will be objective. Nothing will upset you. After, you will be able to move with much more ease.”

  “Wh
ere and when?”

  “I have to prepare the ‘medical’ material. I’ll await you tomorrow night in Recabarren’s house. I have a separate room there, so no one will bother us.”

  He bought prophylactics, rubber gloves, a surgical mask and cap. He put the bed up against the wall and the desk at the center of the room covered with a sheet. He placed the lamp at the foot of the bed so the “operating table” would be bathed in light. When Sofía whistled to him from the street, he first sprinkled a bit of ether and alcohol on the floor so the place would smell like a hospital. Then he let her in and ushered her into his room without saying a word. He washed his hands under her eye, making lots of foam with the soap. Then he dried them and powdered them with talcum powder. He put on the cap and gloves, then he covered his face with the mask.

  “Get into bed here, naked.”

  The girl stripped immediately, with no sensuality, and stretched out on her back, inert, on the desk. Jaime moistened her pubis with warm water, soaped it up, and began to shave the brownish stain. She did not complain. He disinfected the skin on her stomach and breasts.

  “Spread your legs wide, I’m going to proceed to the operation.”

  Sofía revealed her sex, a line like a doll’s. Jaime rubbed in some Vaseline, leaned over her and, taking her from below her knees, raised her thighs. Then with extreme care, he pushed his erect sex in and made it touch the hymen.

  “The scalpel is in position. Now you’ll have to be brave and push. Don’t think that I’m penetrating you but that you are absorbing me.”

  And she, pressing her heels on the sheet-covered surface, applied pressure with her hips toward the root of the phallus. The membrane resisted. Exasperated, she gave a violent push and swallowed the entire membrane. Jaime felt the sticky warmth of the blood running down his testicles. Sofía moaned, smiled, and with inexhaustible energy yielded herself to a series of slips and slides, rubbing her clitoris against my father’s curly pubic hair. The rhythm began to possess her. Subtly, slithering like a snake among rocks, Jaime began to synchronize with her, and then, suddenly, both were enmeshed in a furious series of hip-thrusts that ended when Sofía’s body contracted until it seemed made of stone and she emitted a hoarse howl. Jaime removed the prophylactic full of semen and, showing it to her, said with affected coldness, “The operation is over. You can get dressed, thank the surgeon, and go home.”