Where the Bird Sings Best

by Alejandro Jodorowsky

  For months, along the roads on the pampa, they passed gray trucks full of soldiers. They passed them by without being bothered. The truck, now decorated with circus designs, aroused no suspicion. From time to time they were stopped and, after a rapid scrutiny, would be asked to tell a few jokes. Which was something Sofía knew how to do very well; she had a repertoire, learned from the whores at the port, that was so obscene she made those insensitive male pigs wet their pants with laughter. Then they’d be sent on their way. Those same soldiers, if they saw a miner walking the hills, wearing a white cotton outfit, would shoot him just to watch him wave his arms like a dove. The vultures, attracted by the abundance of carrion, began to darken the sky as they followed the army patrols.

  After each show, Teresa would invite Party members and, in secret, dodging informers, meet with them in some mine tunnel. For long hours she would recount her conversations with the man she’d venerated. Soon her gaze wandered, her voice would change along with her rhythm and gestures, and she would begin speaking as if she were Recabarren. Calm, profound, she would quote Engels, Lenin, Marx, and others to show her comrades the roads they ought to follow in the future. Elías would sit down near her legs, and she, never ceasing to lecture, would massage his hairy head, always shedding tears. Jaime and Sofía Lam, respectful, their bodies dried out after so many trips in the arid mining zones, would listen to her realizing that through a love that did not recognize death as a limit, that faithful woman kept the thoughts of the master alive.

  One Saturday night, so starry that they could see one another’s faces without lighting a lamp, forty comrades gathered secretly a half hour away from the Huara nitrate mine, listening with religious respect to the words of the “old lady.” They were interrupted by a messenger who arrived almost out of breath, madly pedaling his bicycle:

  “We’ve been betrayed, comrades! We caught an informer telephoning the soldiers at San Antonio. We made him confess; he gave them a list of our names and descriptions. All of us are marked men. He also squealed on our four friends, telling about the subversive labor they were carrying out. Right now, a truckload of soldiers is coming to arrest us. If we surrender, they’ll shoot us. If we run away, we’ll die of thirst in these arid hills or we’ll be shot by the patrols out ‘pigeon hunting.’ It’s better we fight, even if we have to throw rocks and die on foot!”

  Like a single man, they all began to pile up stones and dig a trench in the soft soil.

  “You, friends, do not have to sacrifice yourselves. Take your truck and run for Arica. If you get there, burn the truck and hide out in the home of some sympathizer—you’re all on the list.”

  Teresa embraced the miners one by one, sat in the truck, and, with painful rage, drove off. Her three collaborators, their eyes lowered, got in too, not wanting to see for the last time those men who would be massacred. Sofía began to cry:

  “They’re going to die, and it’s our fault. We brought them together.”

  Teresa abruptly changed direction; instead of driving north, she turned onto the road to San Antonio. “They won’t die. I can save them. You three get out! I’m going to ram the soldiers’ truck!”

  “I will accompany you, ma’am. I want to be worthy of my father. In any case, the police know who I am. Sooner or later, it’s all the same.”

  “The soldiers have killed off almost all my friends, of both sexes. Being homosexual in this idiotic dictatorship is a crime. One of these days, they’ll tie a stone to my ankles and toss me into the sea. I too will accompany you, Teresa.”

  “Allow me to sacrifice my life for the freedom of this country, which is now mine. We started out together, let’s end the journey together.”

  And with that my father, seated next to the door, locked it and held on to the seat. Far in the distance, the two headlights of military transportation blinked.

  “We’ll soon see you, Luis Emilio,” said Teresa, pressing hard on the accelerator. The stones from the desert valley began to run backward like rabbits. With savage hunger, the truck ate up the road. Sofía howled with enthusiasm, kissed Elías and Jaime on the mouth, lit four cigarettes and distributed them. They smoked avidly. Jaime smashed a fist through the windshield so they could feel the mountain air. Their blood was so hot they didn’t even feel the biting cold.

  The collision was imminent, and the body of my future father was going to be destroyed. I began to protest. All my efforts to get him to La Tirana, where the woman I wanted as a mother awaited him, would be in vain. I might need centuries to find another couple appropriate for my plans. Damn it! This young man was heading straight to his death, AND I WANTED TO BE BORN!

  Desperate, I emerged from the hiding place I’d made in Jaime’s testicles and sought out the Rabbi. He understood the situation immediately. He was horrified. My father was breaking many of the 613 commandments of his religion. It is forbidden to kill. When He created the world, God ordered men to increase and multiply so it would be inhabited. To destroy others and oneself is to destroy the world. Abstain from all labor on Saturday. Causing a collision is work. It is forbidden for any tribunal to sentence anyone to death on Saturday. The Eternal One has desired, in honor of that holy day, that even criminals and sinners find repose and tranquility on Saturday. It is forbidden to take vengeance. What happens to us, be it agreeable or annoying, has been desired by the Lord. The men who hurt us are instruments in the hands of the Creator. Our faults constitute the first cause of what happens to us. It is forbidden to hold rancor. It is unworthy to fix the offender in our memory and later imitate his conduct. It is forbidden to cut one’s own flesh…

  By now the trucks were so close that the Rabbi stopped enumerating the commandments that were being broken. He gathered strength and, transformed into a transparent spider, seized Jaime’s brain, and taking control of his body released the lock, opened the door, jumped toward the dry ground, and rolled away in a cloud of dust.

  The two trucks collided. The noise echoed throughout the silent pampa with such force that it seemed the sky had split. The boxes of hand grenades exploded. The pieces of bodies flew through a sphere of flames. A herd of guanacos, dazzled, crossed the road, trampling the bloody flesh. The Rabbi, his mission accomplished, returned to the Interworld, and I returned to my genital hideaway.

  Jaime, feeling himself a traitor, ashamed, limped over to see if anyone was still alive. But the vultures got there first. Nearly burning their feathers in the flames, they stretched out their black spines and began to devour the roasted remains. My father saw one of the raptors perch on Teresa’s decapitated head and a haughty gesture sink its beak into her eyes. The order of the world began to collapse. What meaning did a life so short have? Was sacrificing it worthwhile? How could a woman like that end up as food for vultures? Was it true that there was no fucking Destiny that rewarded virtue?

  If this sordid Universe was only able to give these heroes the gullet of those carrion-eating birds as a tomb, he, Comrade Lautaro Quinchahual, would take charge of their remains until he found them the sacred place they deserved because of their sacrifice! He took a piece of burning wood and, shouting his head off, attacked the vultures. The screeching cowards flew off in a compact cloud, leaving behind a rain of excrement. Jaime looked everywhere, trampling the guts and pieces of soldier that remained in the bonfire. The fire had consumed the bodies of Elías and Sofía. Of Teresa only the head remained, with the eye sockets empty and bloody. He took it by the hair and ran into the pampa, heading for the mountains.

  How many days did he walk, insane, under the burning sun, neither eating nor drinking, persecuted by a cloud of horseflies getting drunk on the juices that dripped from Teresa’s head? He couldn’t remember; it seemed an eternity. Forgetting himself in that harsh solitude, he sought a worthy place to bury what remained of his friend. He stuck out his swollen tongue, stared at the sun, and shouted defiantly. If he ran into a stone, he embraced it, kissed it with his cracked lips, leaving red marks. He made it an accomplice, gave it a
Mapuche name, and enrolled it in the clandestine Communist Party. He tried to form an army of rocks to help him implement the Galactic Revolution in order to shock the planet out of its orbit, transform it into a comet and lead it, tracing a straight line, out of this badly made Cosmos where spiders ate flies and newborn children were received by Death, who hunkered down and opened its crocodile maw right between the mother’s thighs. He ran barefoot over the surface of the salty earth. He fell face down and licked the dry cracks as if they were the sex of women, trying to give life to the landscape that had become sterile for lack of human love.

  “Where there is no heart, drought appears, and for that reason I sink my sex into the sand so that the rain may begin.”

  His father Alejandro came with a golden halo over his mane of white hair, offering him a perfect pair of shoes that he, his disdained son, had given him one day:

  “My son, the wounds on your feet acquire order in my bosom and form letters. They say: HOPE. What you gave me is restored to you. Don’t cut me off. Absorb me.”

  He began to shrink until he turned into a gnome two inches tall. Jaime picked him up, placed him next to his left nipple, and, pushing him hard, inserted him into his heart, where he dissolved.

  His mother’s body appeared, guillotined, spurting a fan of red gushes from her neck. She looked like a tree. She held out her hands, asking him for the head of Recabarren’s companion. Jaime hugged the corpse and, with painful rage, spit a ball of dry saliva into the bleeding wound. The headless woman twisted as if wounded by a bullet, her neck began to suck in air as if it were a mouth, and, moving its edges, spoke in a crusty voice:

  “We mothers have an infinite comprehension. Within your forehead are hidden all the stars, lying in wait like lions, to leap aboard the ship of God, when I caress you with my brains.”

  Jaime took her in his arms and kissed the oozing hole that was her neck. The wound whispered, “Enter into the deepest part. I want you to sink your tongue into my awareness like a blind fish so that once and for all that diamond star that is the child of our dissolution may appear.”

  Jaime, his thirst satisfied forever, turned into a solitary eye past which events slid as if over a dead whale. After the day came the night, and after the night, another, and there were no more days. Carrying the head, on which a beard of worms was growing, he advanced in the darkness. He knew he was seeking not only a grave but also a woman.

  He found himself wandering along the crests of a mountain chain parallel to the Andes. The horseflies, feeding on the rotten soma that dripped from Teresa, had grown to the size of cats, and, buzzing like airplanes, they pierced his body with their stingers, opening wounds out of which his reason poured in a gelatin of letters. His feet, so swollen that they couldn’t fit into his own footprints, forced him to stop. Jaime told the head that when he was a boy he had feet smaller than his footprints, which made him run all the time to fill them. Now, expelled from his steps, there was nothing left for him to do but become a statue of salt and die. He collapsed among the ovoid rocks like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

  He was grabbed by his mane of hair, which now reached his waist, and with a powerful tug he was set on his feet. It was Isolda, the Lightning Bolt of Limache, the knife thrower.

  “Don’t behave like a rube. You’re a circus man, uprooted and potent, not a formless mass. Give thanks to your skeleton and the muscles that mobilize you. Thanks to them you can oppose an authority you detest. Recover faith, your feet are the same size as your footprints. And those footprints were made before you were born. All you have to do is follow them. Have confidence in your bones. In any case, your hair grows straight to heaven.”

  Lola and Fanny, slithering like snakes, led him to a path where a line of steps was shining. Benjamín, with wings of red cartilage, flew around him:

  “On you converge the phosphorescent screams of the enchanted steps awaiting the kiss that will transform them into moon. Share with each one the inexhaustible skin of your tiger and the cerebral roots that make your feet flower. Go give the fish an idea of what water is!”

  But Jaime still did not have the strength to advance. Tralaf came:

  “Huinca, repeat after me: Amutan chengewe mapu mew, I am going to the land where the people become one. Leap toward the Future, put your feet on top of it to make it Present, flee from the borrowed sun, and live in your center.”

  Eleodoro Astudillo, the gravedigger, also came:

  “If you ask me, ‘What’s going on today?’ I’ll answer ‘Nothing is going on. It only goes.’ Let yourself be carried by them and become what takes place so that the poor, who neither see nor know and go around begging, take control of you and turn you into food.”

  The hunchback, Jesús de la Cruz, joined the group:

  “Why did you abandon me when I’m your golden goose?”

  He began to honk, his hunchback opened like the roof of an observatory, and out came a big golden egg that, flying before him, led him to the land of “Always Always.” Jaime walked and walked along his footprints until he reached the abyss where the aurora is born. He descended from those high peaks, crossed the deep glen, and reached a dry plateau where there stood a church with stone buttresses and towers crowned by wooden belfries. He entered. In the solitary temple, the flames of the candles, transformed into calcareous tears, tore the shadow that came from the glass rose. The floor was flooded with liquid lead, and blind doves devoured the flesh-colored scarabs that nested in the plaster sculptures. Above the altar, a bleeding Christ, with His arms spread but with no cross, was looking at him. Jaime grabbed an iron candelabra, and with one blow, decapitated Him. The crown of thorns remained floating in the air, like an opaque halo. He raised Teresa’s head and placed it on the wooden neck. The wounds on the hands and side closed. The chest became transparent. A heart, burning like the sun, filled the church with light.

  Having fulfilled his mission, Jaime fell into a chute and, sliding at dizzying speed, advanced toward death.

  In the sanctuary of La Tirana, my mother awoke with a deep pain in her ovaries. From her sex ran a perfumed blood, so hot that when she held it in her hands it gave off steam. She put a drop on her tongue. It tasted sweeter than honey. She daubed the face of the Virgin with the red plasma and murmured a melody meaning:

  “Today make the unknown man arrive who I’ve been awaiting for ten years.”

  I rolled around within her womb and established an invisible bridge between her ovaries and my father’s testicles. He was stretched out, almost dead, shaken by fever, twenty miles away. Sara Felicidad immediately obeyed the call. Because of her speed, her steps lengthened, and in twenty strides, each a mile long, she reached the small church where all the horseflies of the region, eager for its interior light had landed, transforming it into an enormous cathedral.

  Next to the altar, under the wooden Christ with the fleshy head, lay Jaime, dying of hunger, his skin hugging his bones, his swollen tongue sticking out of his mouth like a white horn. My mother, to keep him from dying of thirst and hunger, spread her legs, brought her sex to my father’s mouth, made his hard tongue penetrate her hymen, and absorbing it until her vulva stuck to his teeth, fed him with menstrual blood.

  He began returning to life. On his knees before the gigantic woman (she now measured six foot nine), he realized the profound love that had made him travel for ten years on the trail of an unknown woman. There she was, born from his dreams. Her soul had made a tiger’s leap, piercing his skin, and fell before him. He remained there staring at her with inexhaustible pleasure.

  They did not feel the passage of days. Once I proved to myself that my mother’s ovaries were fertile, I ordered them to couple. They lay down naked in the church. My father’s sex swelled with such force that it became purple, and my mother’s red-hot oval secreted a white torrent in which the two of them submerged, transformed into aquatic angels. Pleasure transformed their flesh into consciousness, the stars began to travel the heavens filling them with s
ilver lines, the semen galloped through the canals and surged, bubbling, to fill the magic cavern with foam. I wasn’t mistaken. Those two beings, saturated with love, their breath braided together, were giving me the miraculous opportunity to once again possess a body.

  During the months that followed, I grew in tranquility. Having successfully joined my selected progenitors, I yielded myself to the wisdom of the cells. They possessed the millennial knowledge to form me. Only one task was left to me: to have myself born in the exact geographic site, during the proper month and time of day so that my Destiny would be in accord with my ambitions.

  Jaime was a man of normal height, five foot nine, but my mother’s extra twelve inches made him look like a dwarf when he walked at her side. Nevertheless, the strength that emanated from his spirit, granting his body a beast’s dignity, and the balanced sobriety of his gestures, complemented my mother’s supernatural beauty instead of contrasting with her. When the couple entered Iquique, traffic stopped dead, and the city quieted down as they passed. Normal people viewed them as beings from another world, and the beauty of that love became so enormous to them that they, who knew nothing of the delirious extremes of the soul, became terrified.

  A nervous crowd, about to throw stones, saw them disappear into the Six W’s (Wonderful, Wholesome, Wise, Wholesale, Welcoming, White), the enormous store owned by Jashe, Shoske, Moisés Latt, and César Higuera, named in honor of the six points of the Jewish star. Everything there was white, from the food—cheese, milk, eggs, rice, chicken breasts, and fish fillets—to the clothing, kitchen articles, and even the children’s toys, transformed into a collection of ragged ghosts that represented all human activities—train conductors, deep-sea divers, pilots, doctors, etcetera.

  Not one, not even her own mother, recognized Sara Felicidad. The image she had of her was of a mute, ragged, hunched-over child, who had died lost in the hills. She knew Sara Felicidad was her daughter when she picked up a pencil and rapidly drew, line for line, some of the greater arcana of the Tarot. Jashe suddenly recovered her memory and, whispering, “Alejandro, Alejandro,” sank her face into the blonde hair of my mother, who had fallen to her knees. She wept bitterly. The wound had not healed and would never heal. The Russian dancer was still burning in her heart like a sacred fire.