The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography

FIVE. Theater as Religion

Before 1929 northern Chile attracted adventurers from all over the world, the Germans had not yet invented synthetic saltpeter, and natural saltpeter was known as white gold. Foreign vessels came to be loaded with thousands of kilos of this ambiguous, dual-natured, androgynous substance that on the one hand is an ally of life due to its application as a powerful fertilizer and on the other hand is an ally of death due to the application for which it was more coveted: making explosives.

In this world of miners money was made hand over fist. In Iquique, Antofagasta, and Tocopilla the bars, whorehouses, and artists all thrived. Huge theaters were built in the mining villages. All kinds of performers visited this new California. Great opera singers, dancers such as Anna Pavlova, and extravagant variety shows all came to perform. Around the time of my birth not only did the stock market collapse in the United States, but synthetic saltpeter also began to come on the market at a much lower price than what was produced in northern Chile. The mines and the cities that fed on them began their slow death. However, despite the economic crisis there was a kind of inertia that kept some performing companies, albeit the more modest ones, visiting those theaters as they slowly crumbled from lack of upkeep; the Municipal Theater of Tocopilla, which had been converted into a cinema, occasionally rolled the white screen back to reveal the large stage, especially in winter, the best season due to lack of rain. Many shows were put on there. Each one taught me something. This is not to say that my childhood brain translated this knowledge into words. My intuition absorbed it like seeds, which grew slowly over the years, changing my perception of the world, guiding my actions, and finally manifesting itself in psychomagic. Besides Fu-Manchu, the magician described in chapter 1, I marveled at seeing Tinny Griffy, an immense white woman weighing at least three hundred kilos who sang, performed, and danced, tapping her feet, dressed like Shirley Temple. The stage, corroded by the salty environment, could not support such a weight, and the fat lady fell through the floor. A compact group of men dragged her out, like ants carrying a beetle, and deposited her in a taxi that took her to the hospital in Antofagasta, a hundred kilometers away. In order to fit in the backseat Tinny Griffy had to stick her huge legs, which looked like enormous hams, out through a window. I learned that there is a close relationship between our gestures and the world. If we break through the resistance of our medium, then that medium, while being destroyed, destroys us at the same time. What we do to the world, we are also doing to ourselves.

A dog show also came to town. There were a great number of dogs of all breeds dressed like people: the nice young lady, her fiancé, the bad guy, the seductress, the clown, and so on. For an hour and a half I saw a universe in which dogs had supplanted the human race, which, I imagined, might have been decimated by plague. When I left the theater, the street seemed to me to be full of animals clad in human clothes. Not only dogs, but also tigers, ostriches, rats, vultures, frogs. At that early age, the dangerous animal part of every psyche became apparent to me.

The magnificent Leopoldo Frégoli also came to town. He played an entire theater company, changing costumes at a dizzying speed. He could be fat or thin, male or female, sublime or ridiculous. His performance made me realize that I was not one, but many. My soul was like a stage inhabited by countless characters fighting to take command. Personality was a matter of choice. We could choose to be what we wanted to be. An Italian family consisting of a father and mother with fourteen children also came to Tocopilla. The children, as obedient as dogs, danced, did acrobatics, performed balancing acts, juggled, and sang. My favorite was a three-year-old boy dressed as a policeman, whacking the guilty and the innocent alike with his baton. Thanks to them, I understood that the health of a family is maintained by shared labor, that there is not a moat separating the generations, that the rebellion of children against parents should be replaced by the absorption of knowledge, provided, of course, that the previous generation takes the trouble to expand its knowledge and pass on what it has acquired. Moreover, seeing children dressed as adults I realized that the child within us never dies, that every human being who has not done his spiritual work is a child disguised as an adult. It is wonderful to be a child during childhood and terrible when we are forced to be like adults at an early age. It is also terrible to be a child during adulthood. To grow up is to put the child in its proper place, to let it live within us not as the master but as the disciple. It should bring us everyday wonder, purity of intention, and creative games, but should never rule as a tyrant.

I also believe that my fascination with theater entered my being due to three events that deeply marked my childhood soul: I participated in the burial of a firefighter, I witnessed a seizure, and I heard the prince of China sing.

Since Casa Ukrania was near the fire station, to fight off boredom my father soon enlisted in the First Company. Fires were rare in this small town, at most one per year. Being a firefighter thus became a social activity, with a parade every year on the anniversary of the fire company’s founding, as well as charity balls, public exercises to test the equipment, soccer tournaments between the companies (there were three of them), and band performances on Sundays at the gazebo in the town square. When they were raising funds to buy a new fire engine, the firefighters put on their parade uniforms — white pants and red jackets with a star over the heart — and a group photo was taken. My father offered me up as a mascot. The offer was accepted, and at age six I was magically converted into a firefighter.

In this perpetual dance of reality, just as the fireworks inaugurating the company were ignited, a fire erupted in the poor part of town. And so the company headed to the site of the fire, still dressed in their fancy uniforms that covered their fire truck in red and white. Although no one invited me, I tagged along. I did not extinguish any flames, but I was entrusted with the sacred task of keeping an eye on the axes because the indigents of the neighborhood were fully capable of stealing not only those but also the wheels, ladders, hoses, nuts, and bolts off the luxurious vehicle while the firefighters struggled to save them from the fire. Once the fire had been conquered, it was noticed that the company chief was missing. He was pulled from the rubble, entirely black. A vigil was held for the corpse in the firemen’s barracks, with a white coffin covered with orange and red flowers symbolizing flames. At midnight he was brought from there to the cemetery in a solemn procession. No spectacle had ever impressed me so much; I felt proud to participate, sorry for the bereaved, and, especially, terrified. It was the first time I had walked the streets at such a late hour of the night. Seeing my world covered in shadows revealed the dark side of life to me. Dangerous aspects were hidden within familiar things. I was terrified of the residents who crowded the sidewalks, the whites of their eyes glittering in their dark silhouettes as they watched us slowly walk by, our feet gliding without our knees bending. First came the band, playing a heartrending funeral march. Then I came, so small, concealing my immeasurable anguish with the face of a warrior. Next came the ostentatious coach carrying the coffin, and finally behind that the three companies in their parade outfits, each fireman holding a torch. By agreement, all the lights in Tocopilla were off. The siren rang constantly. The flames of the torches made shadows that fluttered like giant vultures. I kept going for about three kilometers, but then I stumbled and fell. Jaime, who was in the wagon next to the driver, jumped down and picked me up; I woke up in my bed with a high fever. It seemed to me as if my sheets were covered with ashes. The scent of the wreaths of flowers brought from Iquique was stuck in my nostrils. I thought that the shadow vultures nesting in my room would devour me. Jaime could think of no better way to calm me than to say, as he put wet towels on my forehead and belly, “If I’d known you were so impressionable, I wouldn’t have brought you to the funeral. Good thing I picked you up just as you fell. Don’t worry, no one saw what a coward you are.” For a long time I dreamed that the star on my uniform was clinging to my chest like an animal, sucking up my voice to keep me from screaming while I was shut in a white coffin and brought to the graveyard. Later, this harrowing experience taught me to use the metaphorical funeral for psychomagical healing: an impressive ritual in which the sick person is buried.

The First Company of Firemen of Tocopilla. I am the six-year-old child, circled, on the left side of the picture.

The Prieto family had built a public spa on the northern edge of Tocopilla. The large swimming pool, carved out of the rocks by the seaside, was filled by the ocean waves. I did not like to swim there because there were fish and octopuses. It was a very popular place. On several occasions I saw people running to a beach nearby because an unemployed bald man known as the Cuckoo was kicking up a cloud of sand, twisting in a fit of epilepsy. The spectators who had been busy bathing or drinking bottles of beer by the dozen would come to watch as the sick man began with hoarse grunts that increased in their intensity until they became deafening screams. Amidst a great deal of nervous excitement the group would carry him to a dark, covered room as he kept on howling, shaking, and foaming at the mouth. The excitement lasted for an hour, which was how long it took for the Cuckoo’s seizures to pass over. Proud of having saved him by tying his hands and feet and putting the handle of a feather duster in his mouth, they would then take up a collection and treat him to an empanada and a beer. Looking like a sad dog he would eat and drink, and then leave, hanging his head. I, like many others I suppose, felt very sorry for him.

One Sunday morning, when the spa was full of people, I began to hear the bald man’s wheezing before anyone else did. I ran to the beach and saw him comfortably seated on a stone, taking great pains to raise the volume of his lamentations. He did not see me coming. He jumped up when I touched his shoulder, looking at me furiously. He grabbed a rock threateningly and said, “Get out of here, you little shit!” I ran, but as soon as I was hidden behind the rocks, I stopped to watch. When the bathers came running toward him, drawn by his screams, he put a piece of soap in his mouth, lay on the ground, and began to squirm and foam at the mouth. Who would have guessed that the Cuckoo was a rogue actor, as healthy as those who came to save him? When he writhed on the ground, with the soil full of sharp stones, he received painful cuts on his skin; his nervous saviors, lifting him up, would sometimes bang him against rocks; the empanada they bought him was mediocre, and the beer only one. Was it worth doing so much work for so little reward? I realized that what this poor man was after was the attention of others. Later I understood that all illnesses, even the cruelest ones, are a form of entertainment. At the basis of this is a protestation against the lack of love and the prohibition of any word or gesture clarifying this deficiency. That which is not said, not expressed, kept secret, can eventually turn into disease. The child’s soul, drowned by this prohibition, eliminates its organic defenses in order to let in the sickness that will give it the opportunity to express its desolation. Disease is a metaphor. It is a child’s protest turned into a representation.

There was a large room on the second floor of the firemen’s building that no one used. It occurred to Jaime that the company could take advantage of this space by renting it out for parties; time went by and, probably due to the financial crisis, no client rented it. My father said that it was not for lack of money but due to inertia: no one wanted to deviate from the customary ways. Large parties, weddings, and award ceremonies were held in the roller skating rink at the Prieto family’s spa, and that was that. “We’ll show them,” Jaime said, and after becoming a regular patron of the Jade Bridge Chinese restaurant in order to convince the owner to be his intermediary, he offered the space for free to the Chinese community and committed himself to arranging a lively ball with the bands of the three firemen’s companies playing. The Asian families danced tangos to the wind instruments, put on raffles, ate churrasco, and drank wine with peaches and strawberries spiked with aguardiente. This party, exotic for them, was such a hit that they gave my father a certificate declaring him a friend of the Chinese community. With the racial ice broken, some Chinese people came to our house to spend an evening playing mah-jongg.^*3 The most assiduous player among them was a young man with olive skin tending toward yellow whose face was perfectly smooth and unblemished. He had long, manicured nails, black hair trimmed with mathematical precision, and a face as perfectly sculpted as that of a porcelain figurine. His fine cashmere suit, cut to perfection, his wide-collared shirt, his exquisite tie, his gleaming patent leather shoes, and his silk socks all blended harmoniously with his distinguished gestures. Jaime called him the Prince. I, who had never seen such masculine beauty, looked at him ecstatically as if he were a great toy.

He smiled at me with his almond-shaped eyes. Then, with a hypnotic rhythm, he said things to me in Chinese that, though I did not understand them, made me laugh. One afternoon Sara Felicidad was very excited and said, “I have wonderful news: tonight the Prince is going to sing us an opera in the style of his country.” I understand why my mother was so moved: when she was young she had wanted to be an opera singer, but her stepfather and mother had told her this vocation was out of the question. The beautiful Chinese singer arrived at ten in the evening accompanied by two musicians dressed in skirts over satin trousers. One carried an unusual stringed instrument, the other a drum. The Prince, carrying a suitcase, requested that they give him an hour to get dressed and put on his makeup in the bathroom. My parents waited impatiently, playing dominoes. I, accustomed to going to bed early, fell asleep. When the Prince came before us a yawn froze in my mouth, Sara struggled to suppress a nervous cough, and Jaime opened his eyes so wide that I thought he would never be able to close them again. Our Chinese friend had become a beautiful woman. And to say beautiful is an understatement. Taking short and rapid steps to the plaintive sound of the stringed instrument and the metallic rhythm of the drum, he appeared to glide and float. His robe, made of silk and satin, was brightly colored in red, green, yellow, and blue, studded with glass and metal inlays. His small hands, which emerged from wide sleeves, were painted white with lacquered nails and waved an airy handkerchief. On his back were a number of rods with flags on them, by way of wings. His face, also white, had been transformed into the mask of a goddess, and his small lips moved like those of an eel. The Prince, or rather the Princess, was singing. It was not a human voice, but the lament of a millenarian insect. The long, intense, sinuous, otherworldly phrases were interspersed by sudden stops, accentuated by the two instruments. I fell into a trance. I forgot I was watching a human; before me was a supernatural being out of a fairy tale bringing us the treasure of his existence. Sara did not seem to feel the same way. With her face red and her breath coming in short bursts, she frowned as if witnessing an insane act. It was obvious that she could not accept the idea of a man playing at transforming himself into a woman. Jaime, after a while, seemed to comprehend the deeper meaning of the performance: he was watching an Oriental clown. The whole thing was a joke that his friend was playing. He began guffawing. The apparition stopped singing, bowed deeply, went into the bathroom, and thirty minutes later the Prince returned, impeccable as always. With haughty dignity, he descended the stairs, followed by his two acolytes, and went out into the street to be lost in the night and never to return.

Thinking again and again about this tense situation, which left an indelible impression on my memory, I realized that every extraordinary act breaks down the walls of reason. It upends the scale of values and refers the spectator to his or her own judgment. It acts as a mirror: each person sees it within his own limitations. But those limitations, when they manifest, can cause an unexpected burst of awareness. “The world is as I think it is. My ills come from my distorted vision. If I want to heal, it is not the world that I should try to change, but the opinion I have of it.”

Miracles are like stones: they are everywhere, offering up their beauty, but hardly anyone concedes value to them. We live in a reality where prodigies abound but are seen only by those who have developed their perception of them. Without this perception everything is banal, marvelous events are seen as chance, and one progresses through life without possessing the key that is gratitude. When something extraordinary happens it is seen as a natural phenomenon that we can exploit like parasites, without giving anything in return. But miracles require an exchange; I must make that which is given to me bear fruit for others. If one is not united with oneself, the wonder cannot be captured. Miracles are never performed or provoked: they are discovered. If someone who believes himself to be blind takes off his dark glasses, he will see the light. That darkness is the prison of the rational.

I consider it a great miracle that the choreographer Kurt Joos, fleeing Nazi Germany accompanied by four of his best dancers, arrived in Santiago de Chile. Another miracle was that the Chilean government admitted him and gave him a grant that allowed him to open a school with large rooms where all the expressionist ballets could be re-created. Most of the great foreign performers of that era were hosted by the Municipal Theater, a beautiful and spacious Italianate building in the city center built before the economic crisis. My poet friends and I, having discovered a service door at the rear of the building that was not kept locked, would wait for the performance to begin, slip off our shoes, and sneak through the shadows to the sides of the stage from where we could watch the show. My friends saw La mesa verde, Pavana, and La gran ciudad only a couple of times. I saw at least a hundred performances. Such was my devotion that I knelt while watching these splendid choreographies. In La mesa verde a group of hypocritical diplomats discussed peace around a green table, only to finally declare war. Death appeared dressed as the god Mars, played with great verve by a Russian dancer, showing us the horrors of war. In Pavana an innocent girl was crushed by a ritual court; in La gran ciudad two idealistic teenagers came to New York and, in their eagerness for success, were destroyed by the vices of the relentless city. For the first time, I saw a technique that astutely used the body to express a wide range of feelings and ideas. The ballet troupes that visited the country had left behind a fastidious legacy: so-called classical dance schools that crammed all bodies into the same mold, deforming them in the quest for a hollow and obsolete beauty. Joos, staging the most urgent political and social problems with sublime technique, planted the seed that later grew in my spirit: the ultimate goal of art is to cure. If art does not heal, it is not true art.

I might have fallen into the trap of limiting myself to an art preoccupied solely with asserting political doctrines, but fortunately, another miracle occurred. The lead dancer, Ernst Uthoff, came into conflict with the brilliant choreographer and decided to form his own ballet, drawing on elements of classical dance. Setting aside the problems of the material world, perhaps wanting to forget the suffering of war, he staged a fantastic tale: Copelia. I still remember the name of the dancer who played the puppet whose creator wished to make her human by stealing the soul of a young man in love: Virginia Roncal, a woman who devoted her life to dance. She was not exceptionally beautiful and was short in stature, but her talent was outstanding. The first time I saw her rise up from the table where the inanimate body of the young man whose soul had been stolen lay — first making the rigid movements of an automaton, then little by little feeling life invade her, then finally shaking off the mechanical movements in a sort of frenzy and dancing like a real woman, but then, upon discovering the lifeless young man and realizing that this soul was not her own, returning the life that did not belong to her in a kiss with a supreme effort of honesty and love, then finally resuming her automatic movements — I was moved to tears. I realized that art should not only heal the body but also the soul. All objectives are summarized into one: realizing human potentialities in order to transcend them. Sacrificing the personal in order to achieve the impersonal means nothing is for me that is not for others.

Copelia awoke such admiration in me that I approached Uthoff ’s school to seek admission. While there I was smitten with a dancer with thick curly hair, strong as an oak tree and tall as a magical horse. Fortunately for me, she liked me; I became absorbed by her. I learned to dance through her movements in love. One night when the electricity was out we embraced on the desk where André Racz had done his drawings. A sticky wetness covered both our bodies. Inflamed with pleasure as we were, we were not concerned. Suddenly, the light came back on, and we found that all our skin was stained black. In our enthusiastic movements we had overturned a large bottle of Chinese ink. Nora saw this as a sign: my enjoyment of her movements had made me forget my talent as a dancer. She did not want to be guilty of destroying a vocation that was sacred to her, so she ended our relationship and introduced me to the Yugoslav Yerca Lucsic, a passionate teacher of modern dance. Her courses were intense, the creation in them unceasing. I learned to move according to the nine characters of Gurdjieff ’s enneagram, to imitate all kinds of animals; also to give birth and breastfeed, experiencing what it is to be a mother, analogous to women who danced imitating penile erection and ejaculation. We investigated the expression of the wounds of Christ. I had to dance the spear into my side, the crown of thorns onto my head, and the nails into my feet and hands. Dancing became an activity that allowed me to know what I was, but also what I was not.

Yerca wanted to push beyond limits. And because of this, she died. With her savings she had bought a house on an ocean beach near the capital and spent her weekends there. She entered into a relationship with a fisherman. He was a handsome but uneducated man. Rather than educating him, she encouraged him to affirm himself. She dressed him as a traditional fisherman, in a starched white calico suit with bare feet and a red bandanna around his neck, and introduced him to her friends who came to visit on the weekends who were dancers, artists, professors, university alumni, and people of high society. The couple was very popular. She talked incessantly while he mutely served the drinks. One day we waited, but Yerca did not come to class. Not that day, nor the whole week. We learned from newspapers that the fisherman had murdered her, cutting her body into little bits with a pair of pliers and a knife. By the time they took him to prison, denounced by his comrades, he had already used half of my teacher’s body as bait.

Criminal acts, despite their horror, sometimes cause the same fascination as poetic acts. For this reason, apprentices in psychomagic must be very cautious. Every act must be creative and must end with a detail that affirms life and not death. The fisherman destroyed the body of the dancer. Yerca destroyed the spirit of the fisherman. If, instead, she had made an effort to involve him in her creative world while at the same time she learned to fish, then he might not have murdered her, and perhaps she would have created a beautiful ballet with fishing as its theme.

Lihn, seeing me frustrated by my lack of classes, suggested that we put on a dance recital. “How, where, with what music?” I asked. He replied, “Naked, with only loincloths so that they don’t put us in prison, next to the embassy’s electric station, the generators will be our music.”

The United States Embassy, which was across from Forestal Park, produced its own electricity with powerful generators so that the frequent tremors would not plunge it into darkness when they affected the central power plant. These generators echoed with a regular rhythm for an hour every day beginning at around ten o’clock at night. We invited our friends, and when the rough rhythm began we undressed and began dancing like madmen. The audience soon followed suit. I realized that everything could be danced and that artistic achievement was the result of passionate choices. Once offered the cake, we had only to see it; we grabbed a slice and ate. It was Alice’s cake: when she ate it, she grew or shrank. Such was life, and such was art, a matter of vision and choice. And I finally understood that it was the same for negative aspects. The spirit of self-destruction presents an individual with a menu of all sorts of diseases, physical and mental. The individual chooses his own illness. In order to cure an illness it is necessary to investigate what has led the sick person to select this particular illness and not some other one.

While it is true that reality gives us cake, this does not mean that we should wait motionless with our mouths open. To bring ourselves to fruition, instead of just asking for opportunities to be given to us, we artists, though seemingly insignificant, can offer opportunities to powerful people. This is how I presented myself, carrying a basket full of my puppets, to the offices of the prosperous Teatro Experimental de la Universidad de Chile (TEUCH), the government agency that put on grand shows and ran a theater school. I was received by Domingo Piga and Agustín Siré, who were the general directors, and I said at once, “I want to direct the TEUCH Puppet Theatre!” They responded that TEUCH did not have a puppet theater. I opened my basket and I dumped the puppets out on the desk: “Now you have one!” They immediately gave me the abandoned room behind the clock that adorned the facade of the central building. The poets and their friends helped me to clean away the dust that had accumulated over half a century, and there we began to build the Bululú. This was an activity in which artistic pleasures were mixed with amorous pleasures. The administration provided us with an old bus, and we joined forces with the university chorus and together — the chorus numbering sixty people and we puppeteers consisting of six men and six women — toured throughout northern Chile giving performances. It was a very beautiful, essentially anonymous activity. Hidden, with our arms raised manipulating these heroes, we learned to sacrifice individual exhibitionism. We knew how to put ourselves at the service of the puppets and the audience. What difference was there between puppeteers who were hidden in the shadows, giving energy to the characters that evolved above us, and a congregation of monks concentrating their prayers on exalting God? After putting on a show for the children of miners one of the best puppeteers, Eduardo Mattei, told me, “I feel like a toad full of love, getting glimpses of the full moon.” I hid a wry smile, for his words seemed corny. But I realized how sincere he was when, at the end of the tour, he bade us adieu and became a Benedictine monk. The puppeteers all attended the ceremony at the monastery of Las Condes in which the abbot washed Eduardo’s feet and gave him his new name, Frater Maurus. Thanks to his work with the puppets, Eduardo had found his faith.

Some time later, I went to visit him. Frater Maurus, dressed in his beautiful Benedictine habit, looked happy. I told him that I was thinking of leaving Chile to study in Europe. He responded, “They will teach you a science of voids; they will show you where there is nothing. They are experts in this: like vultures, they detect cadavers perfectly, but are incapable of finding where the living bodies are. There is only one way to make a chalice, but a thousand ways of breaking it!” I respected his sentiments. It was a position opposite to mine: I wanted to cut my roots in order to span the entire world. He had decided to confine himself there at the monastery, at the foot of the mountains, and sing Gregorian chants for the rest of his life. It was all the more heroic a decision because, as I knew, he had been in love with one of our actresses. For his devotion to God, was it necessary to eliminate women and family from his life? Eduardo’s profound vocation revealed the sacred character of theater to me. How could I, who had been raised as an atheist, aspire to holiness? Every religion has its holy men, and Frater Maurus quickly became a Catholic holy man; there are also Muslim holy men, Jewish holy men known as the “righteous,” enlightened Buddhist holy men, and so on. Religions have appropriated holiness. To be holy means to respect dogmas. What remains for those of us who are not theological standard bearers, those of us whose animal nature makes us want to be united with a wife? It is impossible to believe that God created women as an evil, just to tempt good men. If women are as sacred as men, intercourse is also sacred, and if this act leads to orgasm, it should be accepted and enjoyed as a divine gift.

I decided that I could become a civil holy man: holiness did not necessarily have to be contingent on chastity or on the renunciation of sexual pleasure, the basis of the family. A civil holy man need not ever enter a church, nor does he need to worship a god with any defined name or image. Such a man, having risen above purely personal interests — not only socially and globally conscious but also cosmically conscious — is able to act for the benefit of the world. In knowing that he is united with others he understands that their suffering is his suffering, but their joy is also his joy. He is able to sympathize and help the needy, but also to applaud those who are triumphant, as long as they are not exploitative. The civil holy man makes himself the owner of the Earth: the air, the land, the animals, the water, the fundamental energies, are all his, and he acts as their possessor, taking great care not to damage this property. The civil holy man is capable of generous anonymous acts. Loving humanity, he has learned to love himself. He knows that the future of the human race depends on partners capable of achieving a relationship in equilibrium. The civil holy man struggles to ensure that not only children are well treated, but also fetuses, which must be protected from neurotic couples who have conceived them as well as from the toxic industry of childbirth. He also struggles to liberate the field of medicine from large industrial companies, makers of drugs that are more damaging than diseases. To achieve civil holiness — to be outside of any sect, sweetly impersonal, capable of accompanying a dying person whose name I did not know with the same devotion as if she had been my daughter, sister, wife, or mother — seemed impossible to me. But, inspired by some initiatory tales in which the heroes are apes, parrots, dogs, all animals capable of imitation, I decided to use this as my technique. By imitating civil holiness over and over, eventually I would authentically achieve it in my actions.

My intent to imitate civil holiness gave me justification for living. However, I committed some grave errors trying to apply what in those years were only theories. An example was the de-virginizing of Consuelo, a young woman I met at Café Iris who had been invited there by her sister, a painter. Consuelo had an ungainly physique but sensuous curves, a wide mouth, deep-set eyes, and protruding ears that gave her a sympathetic simian air. She was introduced to me, and we sat down to talk at a separate table. While combing her hair, which was cut short in a masculine style, she explained that she was a lesbian. Most of her sexual relationships had been with married women who had refused to leave their husbands to go and live with her. Since Consuelo was interested in literature, we began a friendship in which she behaved like a man. Everything was going well, we took great pleasure in getting together to explore bookstores or sit and drink coffee at various popular spots, but my desire to imitate civil holiness came into the mix. I asked if she still had her hymen. “Of course!” she told me proudly. Carried away by the desire to do good in a disinterested way, I replied, “My friend, I know that phallic penetration does not interest you at all, but it would be unfortunate for a future great poet like you to have to grow old as a virgin. As long as you keep this veil, you will never be an adult, nor will you know why you reject the male member: you will be afraid of it; you’ll feel it stalking you in the shadows like an implacable enemy. Prove to yourself that you are strong. I propose the following: let’s get together in my studio at a precise time. I will borrow an operating table, there’s one in the university theater that was used for a play. You will arrive wearing a coat, with hospital pajamas underneath. I will be dressed as surgeon. We will not touch each other at all beforehand, I’ll lay you down on the table, pretend to anesthetize you, take off your pants, open your legs, you will pretend to be asleep, and then, with precision and extreme delicacy, I will penetrate you as a purely medicinal act. Once the hymen is torn, I will retreat with the same delicacy with which I entered. There will not be any pleasure; any form of foreplay is excluded. It will be a surgical operation between friends, nothing more. Once this poetic act is finished, you can live your life free of this cumbersome hymen.”

She liked my idea. We set the meeting time and performed the operation exactly as planned. Consuelo, happy not to have suffered any trauma, thanked me for the impeccability of my technique, and with her face glowing from having released herself from this troublesome detail, she went out with her friends. However, the following evening, suppressing her drunkenness, she came to me to confess that she had felt a form of pleasure that she wanted to investigate. She literally dragged me to the studio, threw me on the bed, and sucked on me frantically. Although she was not the type of woman who excited me, I responded to her touch due to the energy of my age. After we finished, all I wanted was to be as far away as possible from this impassioned woman. Unfortunately, from that day on, she began a fierce pursuit. Wherever I went, she would show up. If a girl approached me at a party, Consuelo would drive her away with insults and shoving. It did no good to tell her I did not love her, that she was not my type, to remember that she was a lesbian, and finally to leave me alone. She cried, threatened to kill herself, cursed me. My life became unbearable. I talked to her sister and begged her to assist with my plan. Understanding the seriousness of Consuelo’s delirium, the painter agreed. I locked myself in my studio and did not leave for a week. Enrique Lihn phoned Consuelo and asked to visit her at her home, because he had some serious news to tell her. When he arrived, dressed in black and feigning grief, he told Consuelo that I had been hit by a bus and had died. Her older sister, bursting into fake sobs, told Consuelo that she had been aware of the fatal accident but had not said anything for fear of causing her atrocious pain. Consuelo fell to the floor in a nervous fit. Her sister took her to a vacation house they owned in Isla Negra. She stayed there for three months. When she returned to Santiago and saw me sitting in Café Iris safe and sound she slapped me, burst out laughing, and began passionately kissing a female friend. She never bothered me again. For my part, I decided to stop imitating civil holiness for a long time.

I was drawn to another idea: reality, being amorphous in principle, organizes itself around any given act that is put forward, whatever the nature of that act may be, positive or negative, and adds unexpected details. Thus thinking, I decided to carry out an act in the greatest possible secrecy to see if I received a response. I went to a shop that specialized in manufacturing footwear for artists and asked them to make me a pair of clown shoes forty centimeters long. I asked for them to be made of patent leather with red toes, green heels, and gold edges. I demanded further that whistles be affixed to the soles that, when stepped on, would emit a meow. Dressed in a very proper gray suit with a white shirt and discreet tie, I walked through the streets of the city center at midday when they were filled with people, the time when people would take a coffee break or have a snack. Uttering one meow after another, I moved among them. Nobody seemed to consider the shoes abnormal. They would cast a quick glance down at my feet, then continue on their way. Disappointed, I sat on a terrace having a drink, crossing my legs to raise one shoe, but with little hope of provoking a reaction. I was approached by a well-dressed gentleman of around sixty years old who had a serious face and an amiable voice.

“Will you allow me to ask you a question, young man?”

“Of course, sir.”

“Where did you get those shoes?”

“I had them made, sir.”

“Why?”

“First of all, to attract attention, to introduce something unusual into reality. And second, because I love the circus, especially clowns.”

“I’m glad to hear you say this. Here is my card.” The gentleman handed me a business card with his name inscribed on it in small letters, and then in large orange letters: TONI ZANAHORIA (Carrot Clown).

Oh, what an incredible surprise, I had met him in Tocopilla when I was a child! He had placed a lion cub in my arms.

“What’s your name, young man?” When I gave my name, he smiled. “Now I understand; you’re one of us. I worked with your father. He was the first man to hang by his hair; before that it was only women. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: these shoes show that you want to return to the world where you belong. And this meeting is no coincidence. We’re performing in the Coliseo Theater. There are international artists and a group of comedians: I (the first donkey), Lettuce Clown, Chalupa Clown, and Piripipí Clown. Pacifier Clown walks with the bottle in his mouth, as we say among ourselves. He’ll be drunk for a fortnight. We love him, and we’re worried that the owners will kick him out. You seem to love the circus so much; if you want to try the experience without anyone knowing, you can wear our friend’s costume, wig, and nose, and stand in for him while he’s drunk. The routines are easy; it’s not that much to do. You stick a fake ax in my head, cluck like a chicken while throwing wooden eggs at Chalupa Clown, and participate in a farting contest where you squirt out clouds of talc from a tube hidden in your pants. If you get there a couple of hours before the first act, we’ll teach you the basics and you can improvise the rest.”

“I don’t think I could do it.”

“If you have anything of the child left in your soul, you can. Here’s an example: you ask me in a falsetto voice, ‘How is a live bull a like a dead bull?’ and I answer, ‘Easy, mess with a live bull and you’re bound for grief.’ You say, ‘What about the dead bull?’ and I say, ‘Ground for beef!’ And the audience laughs and applauds. It’s that easy. Now, have you decided?”

I went to the small apartment that Carrot Clown rented across from the Coliseo to put on Pacifier Clown’s costume. It was astonishing to see the ceremony in which the upstanding gentleman I had spoken with on the café terrace was transformed into an orange clown. I had the sensation of seeing the rebirth of an ancient god. This mythical personage then helped me to dress and put on my makeup. In the same way that my friend had designed his costume using the colors of the root vegetable that was his namesake, Pacifier Clown was dressed like a big baby: a ridiculous diaper over long underwear, a hat with bunny ears, and a bottle in his hand; a thick drop of wool representing a booger hung from his false red nose. As soon as I was in the costume, my personality began to fade away. Neither my voice nor my movements were the same. Nor could I think in the same way. The world had returned to its essence: it was a complete joke. With my exterior aspect dissolved into that grotesque baby, I had the freedom to act without repeating the imposed behaviors that had become my identity. How old was Pacifier Clown? No one could know. Mix together the infant, the adult man, and also the adult woman, and here was the ultimate and miserable manifestation of the essential androgyne. When one is young, an immense distress exists beneath one’s joy in life. Once transformed into Pacifier Clown only my euphoria remained; my anxiety vanishing along with my personality. I realized once again that what I believed myself to be was an arbitrary deformation, a rational mask floating in the infinite unexplored internal shadows. Later, I understood that diseases do not actually sicken us; they sicken what we believe ourselves to be. Health is achieved by overcoming prohibitions, quitting paths that are not right for us, ceasing to pursue imposed ideals, and becoming ourselves: the impersonal consciousness that does not define itself.

A reunion in Chile, forty years later, with Pacifier Clown. This clown, who used to play a baby, is now dressed as his mother.

As we crossed the street toward the artists’ entrance, Carrot Clown took me by the hand as if I were his child. Although we walked with dignity a group of children followed us, laughing. Once inside the ring, we mingled with the other clowns. Our task was to fill the time necessary for the workers to take down the trapezes and safety nets. The routines were simple, and with my experience as a puppeteer, I had no trouble in performing them. But the circular theater, full of people all around, made an impression on me. In a puppet show, one performs facing forward. Puppetry has a form like the human head, with the eyes facing forward and darkness behind. I realized that since childhood I had been accustomed to seeing the world from the outside: as I watched events happen I sometimes moved toward them, but most of the time they were directed toward me. Being surrounded by the audience immediately makes one into the center, rather than looking in from the outside. For an action to be seen by everyone, it is necessary to turn constantly. This gives us a bond with the planets. We are not outside humanity; we are its heart. We do not come as strangers to the world, the world produces us. We are not migratory birds, but the fruit offered by the tree. Thinking thus, I had an idea for a joke that I told to my friend Carrot Clown. He very kindly decided to premiere it that very evening.

“Hey, clown, tell me what you are.”

“I am a foreigner, sir!”

“And what country do you come from?”

“From Foreignia!”

This absurd dialogue caused no laughter. I felt very embarrassed. The clown Piripipí approached me, inviting me to his dressing room. He was different from the others. Outside of the ring, he spoke with a heavy German accent. When performing he answered everything that was said to him without speaking a word by playing various musical instruments. His wife and daughter joined him in the final part of his act, where after having fought to obtain a large sum of money and then being accused of avarice he began to throw his coins onto a rectangle of wood that was lying on the ground in order to show his disinterest in them. As they fell there, each coin emitted a musical note. Piripipí got excited, and threw the coins in such a way as to play a waltz. The two women accompanied him, playing accordions, then the whole circus orchestra joined in.

I went into the dressing room feeling very nervous. His wife served me maté tea in a gourd with a silver straw. She was Argentinean. Piripipí, wearing a well-cut suit, shirt, and tie, still had his makeup on.

“Do not be surprised,” he said. “A few years ago I lost my human face. I do not live in disguise. This clown mask is my real face. My old face remained behind in Germany: my family was Jewish, and they brought it with them to the concentration camp. I was a fairly well-known orchestra conductor. Thanks to a few loyal fans, I was able to hide in the hold of a cargo ship in Hamburg that brought me to Argentina. Another time I’ll tell you how I became the clown Piripipí. I liked your joke. It’s different. It allows for profound interpretations. It should not matter to us that sometimes the audience does not laugh. You’ve seen it already: when I drop my coins, some people look serious and some even cry. True comedy permits many levels of interpretation. It begins with laughter, and then arrives at the understanding of beauty, which is the brilliance of unthinkable truth. All sacred texts are comic at their first level. Then the priests, who completely lack any sense of humor, erase the laughter of God. In Genesis, when Adam believes he is guilty of disobedience and hides when he feels ‘the footsteps of the Lord,’ that’s something humorous. God doesn’t have feet; he is incommensurable energy. If he creates the sound of footsteps, we can’t imagine that he wears clown shoes. ‘Where are you?’ he asks, pretending to be searching. If God knows everything, how can he ask a little human being where he is? This joke turns into an initiatory lesson when the ‘Where are you?’ is interpreted as, Where are you within yourself? I, not being anywhere, having no homeland, do not exist as a human being. I’m a clown. An imaginary being who lives in a dream world: the circus. But dreams are real as symbols. The spectacle takes place in a circular ring, a mandala, a representation of the world, the universe. The same door is both the entrance and the exit. That’s to say that the goal is the origin. Interpret this as you like; you come from nowhere, you go nowhere.

“When we see beautiful horses, elephants, dogs, birds, and all kinds of animals working in the ring, we understand that consciousness can tame our animal nature, not by repressing it but by giving it the opportunity to perform sublime tasks. The animal jumping through a flaming hoop overcomes the fear of divine perfection and jumps into it. The strength of the elephant is put to constructive use. The cats learn to work together. The knife thrower teaches us that his metal blades, symbolizing words, can surround the woman tied to the target, a symbol for the soul, without wounding her. Words are mastered in order to eliminate their aggressiveness and put them in the service of the spirit: the purpose of language is to show the value of the soul, and that value is absolute surrender. The sword swallower shows us that divine will can be obeyed completely, without offering any resistance. The least resistance causes fatal injuries. Obedience and surrender are the basis of faith. The fire breather symbolizes poetry, illuminated language that sets the world ablaze. The contortionists teach us how to free ourselves from our ossified mental forms: one must not aspire to anything permanent. We must bravely build in impermanence, in continual change. The trapeze artists invite us to rise above our needs, desires, and emotions to the ecstasy of pure ideas. They evolve toward the celestial, which is to say the sublime mind. The magicians tell us that life is a marvel: we do not perform the miracles; we learn to see them. The acrobats show us how dangerous distraction is: achieving a balance means being completely in the present. Finally, the jugglers teach us to respect objects, to know them profoundly, to place our interest in them and not in ourselves. It is harmony in coexistence. Thanks to our affection and dedication that which appears inanimate can obey and enrich us.”

After twenty days, when I thought I was going to be a clown forever, the real Pacifier Clown appeared. His face was swollen. Chalupa Clown had tracked him down at the bar to cut off his drinking. The performers thanked me for my collaboration, and as a courtesy let me give a final performance during which I cried genuine tears while at the same time squirting out fake tears three meters out. That night, when the artists had gone to dinner at the theater restaurant, Piripipí led me to the center of the empty ring and handed me a pair of scissors.

“Clip your fingernails and toenails and a lock of your hair.” He lifted the rug and showed me a crack in the ground. “Leave these parts of yourself here. Then your soul will know that you have a root in the circus.”

I did as he said, while Piripipí hummed a song:

Among the ten commandments

there’s only one for me:

be as free as the wind

while keeping my roots.

“Now that your nails and hair are part of the ring, you’ll always be in the mandala.” He took the velvet box in which he kept his coins and placed it in my hands. “Throw them on the floor. If you follow the order they are in and the rhythm that I give you, you’ll play the waltz.” I did so. The melody did not sound out perfectly, but however ungainly it may have been, it had the power to move me. “My friend, hear this from someone who lost everything he had in one painful moment, then realized that thanks to that he had found himself: don’t let yourself be dragged down by a false conception of money. Always earn it with activities that give you pleasure. If you are an artist, live art. If you are not going to be a professor of philosophy, why do you want that diploma? Leave the university; don’t waste your time there. Life is composed of different pastimes for each individual. Play your own game. You’ll see, when you’re an old man and you take your grandchildren to the circus, some clown there will be saying, ‘I am a foreigner, I’m from Foreignia.’ See? You’ve left your mark here forever.”

I followed Piripipí’s teachings to the letter. I withdrew from the Department of Philosophy, where I had endured three years, and enrolled in experimental theater courses at the University of Chile. I did not stay there long as a student, because my handling of puppets had made me a good actor. I was given the opportunity to act in Cervantes’ La guarda cuidadosa, Tirso de Molina’s Don Gil de las calzas verdes, and George Kaufman and Moss Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You. From TEUCH I went on to the TEUC (Teatro de Ensayo de la Universidad Católica). There I performed in Giraudoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot and Cocteau’s L’Aigle à deux têtes. I was fairly successful. I was then asked to act in the professional theater alongside the legendary Alejandro Flores, the best known of the Chilean actors. This did not mean performing for the crème de la crème on the weekends, but for the general public all through the week, two shows a day and three on Sundays. It was exhausting but exhilarating work. The play was called El depravado Acuña; in those years the popular imagination had been ignited by a serial rapist named Acuña. Alejandro Flores was in his seventies by then, tall and slim, with a noble face, elegant gestures, long pale hands, a warm voice that resonated in his solar plexus, and a sardonic, intelligent gaze. I am not sure that he was a great actor, but he had a magnetic personality. In all the roles I saw him in — whatever the style of the play — he did not change. And this is what delighted his audience so. They went to see him, and he never let them down. Flores taught them that a man of the people, of the humblest birth, could carry himself like a prince.

Although he was haughty at our first meeting, looking down at me from a glorious height, he became my master from the moment he first spoke to me.

“Young namesake, this is not an amateur theater. Theories are worth nothing here; Stanislavsky and his cronies are no use to us. Nobody will tell you how to talk, move, make yourself up, or dress. You have to figure that out on your own. On the stage, the one with the most saliva swallows the driest bread. We are not working to go down in history, but to bring home the bacon, not to be admired, but to have fun for a couple of hours. It is your duty to entertain them, and if you can’t make them laugh you must at least make them smile. We are not seeking perfection, but effectiveness. Understand? Vanity will not do you any good. All that is required is that you learn the text by heart. There is no such thing as a bad comedian who knows his lines. If the audience applauds you, you’ll finish the season with us. If they don’t like you, we’ll replace you with someone else after seven days. But since I see you’re listening to me with the respect I deserve, let me give you one tip, and only one. Ask them to let you into the theater in the mornings. At that time no one is there. The cleaning crew starts after lunch. There is a work light, so you won’t have to be in the dark. Walk around, not only on the stage but also in the gallery and the auditorium; sit in each seat, take in the space, the floor, the walls. Stand in the center of the stage, look at all the angles, so that no detail escapes you. Integrate the room into your memory. Never forget this: an actor’s body starts in his heart, extends beyond his skin, and ends at the walls of the theater.”

Poster for the comedy El depravado Acuña by Santiago del Campo, inwhich Alejandro Flores played the role of Álvaro and I the mute Evaristo.

I could see Alejandro Flores’s effectiveness when the performances began. When speaking with another actor he did so facing the audience, never turning his head, like a cobra hypnotizing a crowd of apes. Every time the spotlight moved, whether or not the script justified it, he would move toward the illuminated area like a moth at night so that his eyes always gleamed. If another actor was speaking quietly, he raised the volume of his voice. If someone spoke too loudly, he would lower his voice to a mutter. He never let anyone else become the center of attention; he was the boss, and he made that clear at every moment. If someone had a long speech, he would fiddle around in order to attract attention, jingling a few coins in his pocket, struggling to adjust the knot in his tie as if his life depended on it, or simply having a coughing fit. He did all this in a pleasant, elegant manner, without any rudeness. It was an indisputable fact that the people came exclusively to see him. Flores liked indisputable facts. I remember one of his quaint phrases, uttered during conversation in the dressing room: “The fool, when he doesn’t know, thinks he knows. The wise man, when he doesn’t know, knows he doesn’t know. But when the wise man knows, he knows that he knows. The fool, on the other hand, when he knows, doesn’t know that he knows.” Being bald, he wore a toupee. It was not of very good quality. Before going onstage, I noticed that a few locks of hair had fallen off it, leaving a visible patch of bare skull. I drew his attention to it. He, with exemplary self-confidence, did not even make any gesture to touch his head. “Don’t worry, boy,” he said to me. “All of Chile knows I’m bald.” I do not know whether the calm he always exhibited was natural. Every day, before the curtain went up, a heavyset man of about fifty years old, with the face of a former boxer, would arrive carrying a doctor’s bag. He and Alejandro Flores shut themselves in the latter’s dressing room for a few minutes. “They’re my vitamins,” the star explained. “It’s morphine,” the other actors gossiped. Which was the truth? What does it matter! After the injection, even if the theater collapsed, the lead actor would have continued displaying his amiable, handsome smile. I remember on opening day we were all concerned because we could not find certain props that were necessary for staging the play. Flores shrugged. “The theater is a continuous miracle. If a play begins with a group of men in capes and the actors are missing their capes a second before the play begins, then when the curtain rises, the actors will be perfectly caped.”

The villain was supposed to shoot Flores from the shadows at the end of the first act. Flores was meant to collapse, making the audience think he had been murdered, only to reappear alive and bandaged in the second act. In one performance, the revolver did not work for lack of blanks. Flores, who was putting on his boots, waited a few moments for the gunshot, and seeing that it was not going to come, exclaimed, “Acuña has poisoned my boot!” Then he collapsed. “Life is a gray road: nothing is ever absolutely bad, nothing is ever absolutely good” was another of his maxims.

Since the audience applauded my performances, Flores granted me the honor of visiting him in his dressing room. The first thing that drew my attention was a toilet seat hanging from a nail on the wall.

“Boy,” he said, “however lofty the king may be, he still has to sit his buttocks on the miserable bowl. Hygiene, in most of the theaters where I act, is not very reliable. My faithful seat cover is always with me. In the same way that an actor respects his name, he must respect his ass.”

I then noticed that on a tall stool next to this intimate object was a bronze sculpture consisting of fifteen thick letters thirty centimeters high, forming a shiny ALEJANDRO FLORES.

“Do not be surprised, young namesake: although as a sculpture they are a vulgar jumble, those letters deserve my veneration. Today’s public is not attracted to the bag of bones that is my body, but to my name. While it is true that in the beginning I invented that name and put my energy into it as a father does with his son, today it has become my father and my mother. Alejandro Flores is a sound amulet that fills theaters. For example, when I go onstage the audience does not hear, ‘Good morning,’ but ‘Alejandro Flores says good morning.’ My name is what speaks and what exists. I am merely the anonymous owner of a treasure. I have heard that people in India keep statues of their gods in their homes to which they offer flowers, candied fruits, and incense, making the statues into idols, giving them the power to perform miracles through religious fervor. That is how I treat this set of letters, as an idol. Every day I polish them and perfume them. I offer the flowers people give me to them. When my mind is tired, I touch my forehead to them and recover. If business is bad, I rub them with my hand for a long while, and soon the money flows in. If I wish I had a woman to take away the night’s worries, I prop my heart up on them. They never fail me. Choose a name with fifteen letters, because that is the number of the Devil Tarot card, a potent symbol of creativity. The devil is the first actor in the cosmic drama: he imitates God. We actors are not gods, but devils.”

It was the first time that someone had told me that if one exalts one’s name, it becomes the most powerful of amulets. Jaime, wanting to become assimilated in Chile, to be equal to others, hating exclusion, never signed with his surname. His checks bore a brief Jaime. The Polish-Russian name Jodorowsky bothered him. Over the years I grew to understand that one’s first and last name contain mental programs that are like seeds; fruit trees or poisonous plants can grow from them. In the family tree, repeated names are the bearers of drama. It is dangerous to be named after a dead sibling; it condemns one to be the other and never oneself. If a girl is named after an old lover of her father’s, she is doomed to play the role of his girlfriend for life. An uncle or aunt who has committed suicide turns his or her name, over the generations, into a vehicle of depression. Sometimes it is necessary to change one’s name in order to stop these repetitions that create adverse destinies. A new name can offer a new life. This, I understood intuitively, was why most Chilean poets had achieved fame using pseudonyms.

I asked the actor to give me the great honor of polishing his name every morning. He flatly refused.

“No, boy. I know your intentions are good, that you admire me, but in order to be, you have to learn not to want to be anyone else. By polishing my letters, in a way, you would steal my power. Your name is Alejandro, like mine. Your devotion is bound to turn into destruction. One day you will have to cut my throat. In primitive cultures, the disciples always finish by devouring their master. Go and fertilize your own name, learn to love it, exalt it, discover the treasures contained in it. You have nineteen letters. Find the Tarot card called The Sun.”

The performances continued. The audience filled the theater. My acting was getting better, causing more laughter and applause every time. On the day when a fan threw a bouquet of flowers to me, the lead actor once again called me into his dressing room.

“I’m sorry, young namesake, you must come here no more. I will give you seven days. I have to replace you.”

“But, Don Alejandro, the theater is full for every performance, I receive applause, good reviews, and all my jokes make them laugh.”

“That’s the trouble. You stand out too much. You think only of yourself and not of the entire work, and I am the only one here who has the right to think of only himself. A wheel holds up an axle, nothing more. It is I who they come to see. Everything must revolve around me. Understand: I am taller than you, and taller than all the other actors. I only hire people shorter than me. And so I stand out. And that’s fair. When you enter a game, you must respect its rules or the referee will expel you from the court. You have been increasing the humor of your scenes. Since I have to maintain the overall balance, I have to struggle to outshine you in every performance. If this continues, I will have a heart attack soon. Look, boy, I became an actor mainly out of laziness: I do not like to work or make any great effort. Above all, I do not like fighting to defend what is mine. And don’t look at me like that, as if you think I’m an immense egotist. I don’t have to give you what I got with my own efforts, with no one helping me. The audience that comes to this place, which not by coincidence is called the Empire Theater, is mine and no one else’s. You don’t get to steal it from me, shielding yourself behind the hypocritical belief that because you are young the old winner should give you his secrets and hand over what he’s earned from a life of efforts. In any case, the people who come here correspond to my human and cultural level. They will never understand you: their ordinary taste will limit you. Go create your own world. if you can. You will have to shackle your inner child, which is afraid of investing and is constantly asking for things to be given to it.”

“But Don Alejandro who will be able to replace me in seven days? In a certain way, of course second to you, I’m holding up the show.”

“You’re naive, namesake. In my company, all are necessary but none is indispensable, except for me.”

I received the lesson of my life: when I attended my replacement’s first performance, wearing a sarcastic smile, I saw that he was none other than the ex-boxer and injection assistant, grotesquely dressed in a costume that was a poor imitation of what I had created for my character. This clumsy man, with his disastrous diction, was more of a rock than an actor. Bathed in sweat, badly doing as best he could, he made me feel pity. I thought, “That’s it for this play. At the end, people are not going to clap; Flores will finally see what I contributed.” But to my surprise, the audience applauded with the same enthusiasm as always. The curtain went up and down seven times or more. The star of the show, with his long arms spread open amidst his modest supporting actors, received the usual ovations. El depravado Acuña finished up the season with a full house. I was reminded of a fable from Aesop: a mosquito comes and settles in the ear of an ox. It announces, “Here I am!” The ox continues plowing. After a while, the mosquito decides to leave. It announces, “I’m leaving!” The ox continues plowing.

I tried to form my own theater company, but very soon lost enthusiasm. I realized I did not like theater that imitated reality. To my mind, that kind of art was a vulgar expression: trying to show something real actually recreated the most apparent and also the most vacuous dimension of the world as seen within a limited state of consciousness. This “realist theater” seemed to me to be uninterested in the dreamlike and magical dimension of existence, and I still believe today that generally speaking human behavior is motivated by unconscious forces, whatever the rational explanations they may attribute to them. The world is not homogenous, but is an amalgam of mysterious forces. Viewing reality as nothing more than immediate appearances betrays it. Thus, detesting this limited form of theater, I began to feel repulsion for the notion of authorship. I did not want to see my actors repeating a previously written text like parrots. Making them creators, rather than interpreters, required everything other than speaking: their feelings, desires, needs, and the gestures they made to express those things. I decided to form a silent theater company for which purpose I began studying the body, its relationship with space, and the expression of its emotions.

I found that all emotions began with the fetal position — intense depression, extreme defense, hiding from the world — to arrive at what I called “the euphoric crucifix,” joy expressed with the trunk erect and arms spread out as if to embrace the infinite. Between these two positions was the full range of human emotions, just as all human language stood between a firmly closed mouth and a fully open mouth, just as everything from selfishness to generosity, from defense to surrender, existed between a closed fist and an open hand. The body was a living book. On the right side, ties with the father and his ancestors were expressed; on the left side, ties with the mother. In the feet was childhood. In the knees was the charismatic expression of male sexuality; in the hips, the expression of feminine sexual desire; in the neck, the will; in the chin, vanity. In the pelvis, courage or fear. In the solar plexus, joy or sadness. This is not the place to describe everything that I discovered during this epoch. To deepen this knowledge, I did what many do: I began teaching what I did not know. I started a silent theater class. And, while teaching, I learned a great deal. (Years later, I became convinced that the healer who is not sick cannot help his patient. In trying to heal another, one heals oneself.)

My best student was an English teacher in a boys’ boarding school who had a monstrous but extraordinary physique. He was extremely thin, with a head that looked as if it had been crushed from the sides; even seen from the front, his face looked like a profile. His name was Daniel Emilfork. He had been an accomplished dancer. For sentimental reasons he had tried to commit suicide by jumping in front of a train; he had survived but lost the heel of one foot. No longer able to dance as he used to, for a few select admirers he would dance to Bach and Vivaldi records in his apartment, balancing on his good foot, moving his trunk, arms, and mutilated leg. Some friends took me to see him. I fell into ecstasy: here was the perfect actor for my silent theater. I suggested he collaborate with me. Daniel, earnestly melodramatic, told me, “I have suffered martyrdom beyond the stage. If you propose that I act in the manner you have described, you come as an angel to transform my life. I shall abandon the boarding school and dedicate myself body and soul to following your instructions. However, you must know that I’m a homosexual. I do not want any misunderstandings between us.”

Around that time, the French film Children of Paradise had come to Chile. Seeing it, I realized I had invented something that had already existed for a long time: pantomime. I immediately christened the future group Teatro Mímico and started looking for beautiful young women to join the company while at the same time satisfying my sexual needs. At first, everything went very well. But after a while, I was astonished to find that the women stopped coming, one after another. I discovered with dismay that Daniel, apparently in love with me, was driving them away out of jealousy. I asked him to explain why what began as sweet wine should so quickly turn to vinegar; I ended up expelling him from the company. Emilfork, determined to continue his life in the theater, asked the directors of the theater school at the Catholic University to grant him an audition. They agreed to his urgent request, because the fame of his talent had spread across all cultural circles.

The audition took place in the school’s small theater. There was a creaky wooden stage with burlap curtains in front of twenty seats. The directors, designers, and actors in this group were amateurs belonging to high society. They wore gray suits, ties, and their severely groomed hair shone. They told Emilfork to lie as if dead, and then, little by little, interpret the birth of life. My former friend, without giving anyone time to stop him, stripped naked and fell to the floor. He remained as he had fallen. Still, like a stone, apparently not breathing. A minute passed, then two, five, ten, fifteen, it seemed as if Daniel would stay there forever as a corpse; the examiners begun to fidget in their seats. After twenty minutes they began whispering among themselves, fearing that the actor had suffered a heart attack. They were about to get up when a slight tremor began in Emilfork’s right foot, then grew more and more and spread throughout his body. His breathing, which had been unobservable, was now growing in volume and deepening until it became the gasping of a beast. Now Daniel, as if in an epileptic fit, dragged himself into each corner of the stage, uttering deafening howls. The energy that possessed him kept on increasing, seeming limitless. With flaming eyes and an erect penis, he now began to take huge leaps, climbing up the curtains, which soon broke free of their rods. Emilfork then shook the wooden walls that surrounded the stage. They shattered into pieces. Next, with incredible strength, he began unpinning the floorboards and waving them around as weapons. Then he jumped into the audience. The honorable members of the theater school fled, squeaking like mice, leaving the deranged actor locked inside. His screams were heard throughout the building for an hour. Then they died down. There was a long silence, followed by a few discrete footsteps inside the door. They opened it, trembling. Daniel Emilfork emerged, impeccably dressed, well groomed, calm, with his usual gestures like those of a Russian prince. He looked at the group from the heights of a profound contempt. “You bunch of ninnies, you’ll never know what life is, and so you won’t know what real theater is. You don’t deserve me. I withdraw my application for admission.” And he not only left the school, but he left Chile. He moved to France, never spoke Spanish again, and lived unceasingly in the world of theater and film, enduring innumerable privations until he finally achieved fame.

We were all affected by Emilfork’s departure to France. Some of us, more than others, felt asphyxiated living in Santiago de Chile. Television was not yet fully commercialized, and one had the sensation that nothing new could happen in this city so far from Europe that was surrounded by a ring of mountains that felt like prison walls. There were always the same people, always the same streets. I knew that there were great mimes in France: Ettienne Decroux, Jean Louis Barrault, and above all, Marcel Marceau. If I wanted to improve my art I should do as Emilfork, drop everything and leave. But I had some very close ties that kept me there. First of all, there were my friends, girlfriends, and my commitments to the Teatro Mímico, which had already held some successful performances. Then there was my ambition to test the effectiveness of the poetic act on a large scale. Finally, deep down in the shadows, there was my desire to take revenge on my parents, to rub their faces in the suffering they had caused me through their lack of understanding. I discovered that rancor can be as constraining as love and entered into a foggy period during which I was unable to make decisions; a deep inertia had taken possession of my soul. I spent the days locked in my studio, reading. I excused this manner of killing time by telling myself that in order to know an author, one had to read all his works. At a forced pace I read everything by Kafka, Dostoyevsky, García Lorca, André Breton, H. G. Wells, Jack London, and oddly enough, Bernard Shaw.

First reunion. From left to right: Daniel Emilfork, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jacques Sternberg, the incendiary anarchist Fedorov, Fernando Arrabal, Topor, Lis (Arrabal’s wife), and Toyen (surrealist painter).

One night my poet friends showed up, almost too drunk to stand, dressed in black and carrying a funeral wreath with my name on it. They lit candles and sat around me, pretending to cry while drinking even more wine. Reality was dancing again: at two in the morning, someone knocked frantically on the door. We opened it. My father walked in barefoot, waving a lamp.

“Alejandro, our house burned down!”

“The Matucana house?”

“Yes, my house, your house, with the furniture, clothes, Raquel’s piano, everything!”

“Oh, my writing!”

“Fuck your writing! You’re thinking about some filthy sheets of paper and not my money that I kept in the shoe box in the closet, my stamp albums, twenty years’ worth of collecting, my cycling shoes, the porcelain your mother kept since we got married, you don’t have a heart, you don’t have anything, I don’t know who you are, we thought we’d come to sleep here, but this is a nest of drunks, we’ll go to a hotel!”

And he grunted in exasperation while the poets, elated with the news, danced around. We took up a collection to rent three victorias. We made the journey to Matucana. The weary steps of the horses gave a metallic voice to the dying night. We improvised elegies to the burned house over the rhythm of the horseshoes.

When we arrived, the fire was out. No one was there. Sandwiched between two ugly concrete buildings, my old home slept like a black bird. The poets got out of the carriages and danced in front of the remains, celebrating the end of one world and the rebirth of another. They dug through the rubble in search of the red worm into which the phoenix would have transformed itself. They found nothing but my mother’s blackened corset. Ah, poor Sara Felicidad! After all those years without exercise, spending ten hours a day behind the shop counter to the point that her elbows were covered with calluses from so much leaning on that hard surface, and also eating compulsively to compensate for the lack of love in her life, she had grown fat, lost her figure, and felt as if she was drowning beneath a magma of flesh, while my father, under the pretext of door-to-door sales, had become the “neighborhood Casanova,” riding his bicycle around, committing adultery left and right with female customers. In order to set herself limits that would reassure her that she was alive, that the world was governed by infallible laws, that she was not open like a river to the thirsty snout of any rapacious beast that might arrive, Sara had donned this corset, constructed of steel rods, which encased her from breasts to midthigh. The first thing she did when she awoke in the morning was to shout for the maid, who came grumbling as usual to help her to tie its laces. She exited her bedroom rigid but with form, her animal nature compressed, a self-confident lady feeling no shyness in front of the scrutinizing gaze of others. At night, returning from the shop with swollen feet and eyes reddened by the neon lights, she would again call the maid to help her out of this instrument of torture. This was done at a time when we should all have been in bed. I always knew that I would not be able to fall asleep immediately. My mother would begin scratching herself with her long fingernails, which were always painted red. Her skin, dry after so many hours of confinement because the canvas fabric of the corset prevented her from sweating, made an insidious, pervasive sound like paper ripping. The concert would last for half an hour. I knew from the maid’s gossiping that Sara soothed her itching from her neck to her knees by smearing herself with her own saliva. Her obesity, her elbow calluses, her swollen feet, her itching, were things that I always viewed with a kind of sarcasm, as if my mother were guilty of this ugliness, an ugliness that she had to hide in a corset. Now, watching the poets kicking around this blackened framework and giggling, I felt sad for her — poor woman, naively sacrificing her life simply due to lack of awareness. Her myopic husband, mother, stepfather, half-siblings, and cousins had been unable to see her glorious whiteness of body and soul. Punished as a child, considered an intruder even before her birth, given birth to apathetically, received into a cold cradle, she was a swan among proud ducks.

Dawn was breaking. Reality resumed its dance. A man passed by selling red heart-shaped balloons. With a harsh shout, I stopped the poets’ soccer game. With my remaining money I paid the three carriage drivers and bought all the man’s red balloons. I tied the corset to the volatile bunch and released it. It rose up until it was just a small black spot in the middle of the rosy dawn sky. I compared this ascent to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. I started coughing and had to take a long drink. Perhaps it was then that I understood the close union that the subconscious forms between people and their intimate objects. For me, releasing my mother’s corset, sending it high into the sky carried by heart-shaped balloons, was like setting her free from her daily imprisonment, her lackluster life as a shopkeeper’s wife, her sexual misery, the blinders of an unwanted fatherless child, and her absolute lack of love. I had spent all those years complaining about her lack of attention and tenderness to me, but I had been unable to give her the slightest bit of affection, blinded as I was by my own spite. As for her, a prisoner of her narrow consciousness, there was little I could give her. I offered my love to her corset, making it into an angel.

The burned house seemed to send us a message that one world was ending and another was about to be born from the ruins. This event coincided with the end of winter and the beginning of spring. Realizing that no carnival had been held in Chile for more than twenty years, we set out to revive the Spring Festival. There were three of us who had this idea: Enrique Lihn; José Donoso, later well known as a novelist (The Obscene Bird of Night); and I. Every day at six in the evening, the time at which people left work and filled the streets, we went out in costumes in order to create collective enthusiasm. Lihn dressed as a thin, electric devil, wiggling like a scarlet noodle, waving his hard arrow-tipped tail, questioning passersby about their intimate depravities with an underhanded canniness. Donoso, dressed as a nymphomaniac, wearing black with two soccer balls as breasts, went around sensually assaulting men who escaped from his attacks amidst collective laughter. And I, dressed as Pierrot, in white from head to toe, exuding a universal loving sadness, would nestle in the arms of women in order that they might cradle me like a wounded child. Other poets and a group of college students followed our example, and soon a euphoric costume show was there for passersby to see every day in the city center. Some astute shopkeepers made the most of the idea and organized a dance at the National Stadium. It was an unprecedented success. The seats all filled up, and also the stands, and then the exterior grounds and adjacent streets. One million people danced, got drunk, and loved one another that night. We, the initial performers, had to pay admission like everyone else. Nobody thanked us. We had turned into part of the general anonymity. Disgusted, knowing that a bunch of businessmen had robbed us blind, we went to drown our sorrows at a bar near the Mapocho station, where we drank under the spell of the strident noise of the trains. We no longer had the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita: “Think of the work and not of the fruit.” We were annoyed that we had not been recognized. I learned years later from certain bodhisattvas to secretly bless everything within my view. That night we wanted to be congratulated: “Thanks to you, a marvelous celebration has been reborn. You deserve an award, a cup, a diploma, or at least a hug or free entry to all the festivities.” We got nothing, not even a smile. We decided to celebrate in the Mapuche style: we put the chairs on the table and sat on the floor with our legs crossed, forming a circle. We stopped talking, and each one of us drank with a funereal rhythm from his own bottle of rum until it was finished: one liter of alcohol per head. My friends crumpled in silence. I felt like I was dying. I was drowning in the excess of alcohol. I ran out into the street, threw up next to a street lamp, walked with my arms open to the sky, and finally sat down in the ditch at a solitary corner. The sadness of Pierrot began to invade me. Who was I? What was my purpose in life?

Thus I sat, ruminating on my ideas, pierced by the cold of dawn, when I heard the tapping of velvety paws. I raised my head, which I had buried in my chest, and saw the dog approaching. I do not say simply a dog, I say the dog for I have seen this dog again and again in my memory so many times that it has become an archetypal example of something marked by the divine. He was of medium size, with a shaggy coat that might have been white had not the vicissitudes of life turned it gray and crusty. He had a limp in his right front leg. In short, a miserable dog, with that look of doleful pride mixed with humility that is common to dogs without masters. He approached me with an intense need for companionship. His heart was beating so hard that I could hear it pounding. His tail, scarred from bites, was wagging happily. When he came up to me, he let a white stone fall from his mouth with great delicacy. His eyes revealed a love so profound, I had never before received such a sign of affection, and it made me suddenly see how little I had been loved in my life. Aided by drunkenness, which brought down the walls of my shame, I began to cry. The animal gave a couple of feeble jumps, ran a few yards away, stopped, came back, and licked the stone. I understood. He wanted to play. He was asking me to throw the stone so he could chase it, pick it up in his mouth, and bring it back to me. I did so, many times, at least twenty. A cyclist passed by. The dog ran off after him. Both disappeared around a corner. They did not return. I was alone with the white stone. That stone was my ancestor. Millions of years old, it had dreamed of speaking, and there I was, Pierrot, as white as the stone, becoming its voice. What did it want to say? I waited to receive the most beautiful of poems, dictated by this stone dropped from the muzzle of a dog. In my mind I received something that I can only compare to a blow from a hammer! This stone was going to last longer than me! I understood with a hallucinatory lucidity that I was a mortal being. My body, with which I so deeply identified, was going to age, rot, and disintegrate. My memory was going to dissolve into nothing. My words, my consciousness, everything, would fall into the black well of oblivion. The houses and streets would also disappear, and all living beings — the planet, the sun, the moon, the stars, the entire universe.

I flung the white stone away, as if it were a witch: it had injected an anguish that would last for all of the short life that indifferent fate had granted me. I had not received any metaphysical bromides from my father. He had never inculcated any idea of an afterlife in my youthful mind: reincarnation, the hope of a merciful God, an eternal soul, or all those myths that the religions so effectively proclaim in order to comfort the mortals. I set off running through the streets, howling. No one was surprised to see this clown, thinking I was a last remnant of the carnival ball. I arrived at my studio, fell on the floor, and slept like a piece of inanimate matter.

This fear of dying would haunt me for the next forty years. It was an anguish that drove me to travel the world studying religions, magic, esotericism, alchemy, and the Kabbalah. It drove me to frequent initiatory groups, to meditate in the style of numerous schools, to seek out teachers, and in short wherever I went to search without limits for something that might console me in light of my transient existence. If I did not conquer death how could I live, create, love, prosper? I felt separated not only from the world but also from life. Those who thought they knew me only knew the makeup on a corpse. During those excruciating years, all the works I accomplished, as well as all my love affairs, were anesthetics to help me bear the anguish that gnawed at my soul. But in the depths of my being, in a hazy kind of way, I knew that this state of permanent agony was a disease that I had to cure by becoming my own therapist. At its heart, this was not about finding a magic potion to keep me from dying, but above all about learning to die with happiness.

By a thousand ingenious methods (including selling myself for a couple of nights to an elderly millionairess), I earned the money to buy passage on an Italian ship, the Andrea Doria—fourth class, in a dormitory with twenty beds, living on dried scallops, wine made from water and powder, and flavorless tomatoes — bound for France. I gave away everything I had: books, puppets, drawings, notebooks full of poems, sets and costumes from the Teatro Mímico, a few pieces of furniture, and my clothes. With nothing but a suit, a coat, a pair of socks, a pair of underpants, and a nylon shirt that I washed every night; with no suitcase and a mere hundred dollars in my pocket; after throwing my address book into the sea I began a five-week journey up the Pacific coast to the Panama Canal, and from there to Cannes, where I landed in France without knowing a word of the language.

The act of throwing away my address book was a fundamental necessity for me. Those pages were my connection to the past; the connection was all the stronger for having been pleasant. I did not leave my country as a political exile, a failure in life, or someone hated by society. I was leaving a country that had accepted me as an artist. I was leaving a company of twenty mimes that already had a solid repertoire. I was leaving kind friends, many of whom were great poets, and impassioned young women, one of whom I could have married. I was also leaving my family for good; I never saw them again. Nor did I ever again see my friends: forty years later when I returned to Chile I found that they had all died, succumbing to tobacco, alcohol, or Pinochet.^*4 It was a form of suicide for me to disappear. To rid myself of emotional knots, to stop being someone born of painful roots, to change myself into someone else, a virgin ego, permitting me — by being my own mother and my own father — to eventually become what I wanted to be and not what family, society, and my country imposed on me. On that third day of March, 1953, at the age of twenty-four, as I threw my address book into the sea, I died. Forty-two years later, in 1995, also on the third of March, my beloved son Teo died suddenly, also at the age of twenty-four, in the midst of a party. With him, I died once again.

To arrive in Paris without speaking French, with barely enough money to survive for a month, without any friends, and wishing to be successful in the theater, was madness. The painter Roberto Matta once said with humor, “It’s very easy to succeed in Paris, only the first fifty years are difficult.” I believed with ingenuous self-confidence that I was coming to Europe as a savior. The first thing I did after I got off the train at two o’clock in the morning was to call André Breton, whose telephone number I knew by heart. (In Santiago, the fervent surrealist group La Mandrágora maintained relations with the poet, who was married to a Chilean pianist, Elisa; he had nailed down the lid of her piano out of hatred for music.) He replied thickly, “Yes?”

“Do you speak Spanish?”

“Yes.”

“Are you André Breton?”

“Yes. Who are you?”

“I’m Alejandro Jodorowsky and I come from Chile to save surrealism.”

“Ah, well. You want to see me?”

“Immediately!”

“Not now, it’s late, I’m in bed. Come to my apartment tomorrow at noon.”

“No, not tomorrow, now!”

“I repeat. This is not the time for visiting. Come tomorrow and I’ll gladly talk with you.”

“A true surrealist is not guided by the clock. Now!”

“Tomorrow!”

“Then never!”

He hung up. Only seven years later did I have the pleasure of meeting him, in the company of Fernando Arrabal and Topor, at one of the meetings held at the café La Promenade de Venus.

During those first months in Paris, I saw my illusions crumble. I made a living doing all kinds of miserable work: collecting old newspapers from apartment buildings in order to sell them by the kilo to an Armenian man who ran a paper mill, selling my drawings on café terraces, sticking stamps on mountains of envelopes, packaging suppositories for a flu epidemic, and so on. Through hard work, I earned enough money to study for three months with Ettienne Decroux. Pantomime had become a religion for me. I was ready to devote my life to it. I believed that my collection of laudatory newspaper articles and photographs showing my creations would secure me the master’s admiration. After all, we were both struggling to establish the same art form, generally considered a decadent historical curiosity. I had never imagined that this legendary creator of modern mime, a man with a broad frame, large hands, and a nondescript face, would be so cruel, so bitter, and so envious of the success of others. I knew he had performed with his students in London that year at the same time as Marcel Marceau. Marceau’s show was declared the best of the year; Decroux’s was declared the worst. His implacable, inhuman technique, which required incredible effort to make each movement, bored the spectators. By contrast Marceau’s finesse, his ingenuity, his airy gestures that conveyed everything so effortlessly, were enchanting to the audience. Decroux shuffled through my photos with ostentatious contempt, asked me to undress, and calling his son Pepé to act as a witness, proceeded to examine my body, classifying its defects with medical coldness. “Early stage scoliosis, Semitic body type with protruding buttocks, atrophy of the abdominal muscles: in a few years he will have a pot belly.” He asked me to move. I tried to make some beautiful gestures. He concluded, “He pulls his elbows when he moves. Bad expressionist style.” Then, dismissing me to oblivion, he left the meager room where he received his students. Pepé, with a cruel smile, handed me a receipt for three months of lessons paid for in advance. As I was leaving, I picked up a program. There I read that the teacher, in the company of his wife and son, had been giving a performance in this small apartment every night for the last two years for an audience of only four people.

The first lesson with Decroux was a paradox, like a koan: “Pantomime is the art of not moving.” To explain this, he told us, “The turtle is a cat inside its shell,” “The greatest force is the force that is not used,” “If the mime is not weak, he is not a mime,” and “The essence of life is the struggle against gravity.” For endless hours, we studied the mechanism of marching, the expression of hunger, thirst, heat, cold, overly bright light, darkness, the various attitudes of a thinker, and finally, all the ranges of physical suffering: pain caused by diseases, broken bones, wounds (in the back, chest, side, extremities), burns, acid, asphyxiation, and so on.

We met in a large school gymnasium once a week. With an old man’s lewdness Decroux declared, “Men do not interest me,” and had us stand in the back. (I was reminded of the old pain of knowing that Jaime had eyes only for Raquel.) When he gave his demonstrations he rolled up his baggy trousers and, often, as if unaware of doing so, exposed his testicles. I hated his Chaplinesque imitations. He made mime into an art as strict as classical ballet. The only thing that was different was the awareness of weight: “Only idiots stand on their tiptoes.” We analyzed the laws of equilibrium, the mechanisms of loads, pulling and pushing, we studied the manipulation of imaginary objects, we learned to create different spaces with our flat hands. The knowledge he transmitted to us was conveyed slowly, drop by drop, as if he were reluctant. Despite charging a very high price for his classes, he gave us the feeling that we were robbing him. He quoted a phrase from Breton to justify this attitude: “‘A bad writer is like a water stain on paper; it spreads quickly but soon evaporates. A good writer is like a drop of oil: when it falls it makes a small spot, but as time goes on it extends to fill the entire sheet.’ The lessons I’m giving you now will last you ten years.” He was right. His surgical cruelty, which eliminated any sort of warm relationship, forced me to be the judge of myself without expecting any external confirmation. In order to resist contempt and deconstruction I had to seek and find my own values, like a fisherman who dives into the dark ocean and comes up carrying a pearl. I learned that creativity cannot be effective if it is not accompanied by good technique and also that technique, without art, destroys life.

When Marcel Marceau arrived six months later, my theatrical destiny took off. The mime accepted me into his company after a minute examination, giving me a very minimal role to show me that even if I had been somebody in my country, I was still nobody in France. Little by little I gained his appreciation and eventually rose to the highest role he granted to a collaborator: holding the signs announcing his pantomimes. Thus I accompanied him on his tours through several countries. While my friend slept late, exhausted from the previous night’s performance, I would get up early and visit whatever teacher or sacred place I could find. Since I did not have the opportunity to realize my ideas, I decided to give them to Marceau. I wrote The Mask Maker, The Cage, The Heart Eater, The Samurai’s Sword, and Bip the China Salesman for him, pantomimes that would bring new energy to his career. Having decided that I did not want to grow old making mute gestures with makeup covering my wrinkles, I bade adieu to Marceau. Unemployed again and with a young wife to support, I had to take a job as a house painter.

In this dance of reality it happened that Julien, the head of the company, was a member of a group organized by Gurdjieff and his collaborator, the philosopher Amir Sufi. Painting an entire house with them on the outskirts of Paris became a mystical experience. The owner of the mansion, an obviously incapable pseudoaristocrat, claimed to be an abstract painter and sculptor. He made striking splotches on large canvases using a whip dipped in paint. As a sculptor, he made imprints of his buttocks in a mold and used them to manufacture plastic chairs. We dubbed him the Furious. His wife had beautiful green eyes, and Julien loved her. One night, as an exotic spectacle, the Furious invited us to dinner with him and his friends in a pavilion that was painted in gold, blue, and red — colors that, according to them, were worn by the kings of France. We drank a lot of wine. Possessed by a poetic furor, I improvised verses composed exclusively of insults. The guests were terrified and began to leave. When only we three painters remained, an out-of-control “workers’ trio,” our trembling hosts placed three bottles of wine in front of us and went upstairs to the mezzanine to sleep. After a while, filled with the euphoria of breaking down limits, I went into their bedroom and lay down between them, not even taking off my shoes. Before falling asleep, I penetrated the Furious’s wife, very briefly, as a way of saying good night.

Early in the morning, I left my snoring employers and went to work. The Furious arrived at noon, smiled at me, and set about painting his canvases with his whip as if nothing had happened. Julien, however, did not conceal his bad mood. He pointed to my abundant hair and growled, “With that artist’s mane, you’re not real to them. They take you for a fool. If you want to break down conventions, make yourself into a normal man, like us, so that you’ll learn to savor the consequences of your actions. These people are dangerous, the power is on their side; our lives are practically in their hands.” And straight away, brandishing a pair of scissors, he cut my hair almost down to the scalp. Then he sent me to clean up a ceiling covered with spider webs, knowing that I had a phobia of those creatures: “Neither the poor, nor any sentient beings, have the right to have phobias.” When I went to the bakery splattered with plaster and paint, my new look drew the attention of several well-dressed ladies. They desired me, taking me for a socially inferior man, while making a show of rejecting me. I realized that the world was composed not only of artists, who are a tiny minority, but also of millions of anonymous people, destined for oblivion. In those people beliefs, feelings, and desires took on strange forms. Something was wrong. My view of life was lamentable. I was not yet ready to accept life for what it was. I needed to take refuge in a theater, sleep and eat on stage, not read newspapers. and grow my hair back.

Just then, I was surprised to see a luxury car arrive, its seats covered in leopard skin. The chauffeur, wearing a blue Hollywood-style uniform, entered the house and inquired after me. I presented myself, covered in flecks of paint. “Monsieur Maurice Chevalier wants to speak with you.” I followed the chauffeur, stepped into the Rolls Royce, and found myself face-to-face with the famous singer, who at that time was already over seventy years old. “The impresario of your trio, Mr. Canetti, who is also my impresario, recommended you highly to me.” (While working with Marceau, I had made a foray into the music hall, directing a group of singers called the Three Horatios.) “I would like you to help me improve the gestures in my songs and put on a couple of comic pantomimes. I am returning to the stage after a long break, and I want to surprise the audience with new things. If you are a true artist and not a house painter, come with me.” I took a moment to say goodbye to Julien, Amir, and the owners of the house, who, open-mouthed, watched me depart for good.

For a month, the old celebrity came three times a week to my staff quarters, two meters wide by three meters long, where we rehearsed with great discipline. Canetti, for his part, told me a secret: “Chevalier is already passé. His success does not interest me; I believe it impossible. Instead, I know a great young musician, Michel Legrand: I’m going to take advantage of the show to launch him. I’m hiring a one-hundred-piece orchestra, something never seen before. It will be an absolute triumph. He’ll fill the Alhambra Theater. I’m asking you to accentuate his presence with your staging.”

I set up the hundred musicians on a wide staircase, forming a wall at the bottom, each wearing a suit of a different color in order to reproduce a painting by Paul Klee. Legrand was dressed in white. His arrangements of popular melodies were truly outstanding. But he, his hundred musicians, and the monumental sound of the instruments, were all overshadowed when the old man entered, dressed as a vagrant, with a red nose and a bottle of wine in hand, singing “Ma pomme.” It was a delirious success! So much so that the show, which had been expected to stay in theaters for a month, kept running for a year. The theater was renamed the Maurice Chevalier Alhambra. The singer rented an apartment across the street, so that every day he could look at the huge illuminated letters of his name.

From that moment on, I never ceased my theatrical and poetic activities. To relate everything I experienced during those years would be a subject for another book. Because Marceau’s sign holder had fallen ill he asked me, as a special favor, to replace him for the tour of Mexico. I did so. I fell in love with the country and stayed there, founding the Teatro de Vanguardia and putting on more than a hundred shows over the course of ten years. We worked with the greatest actresses and actors of the day; we premiered works by Strindberg, Samuel Beckett, Ionesco, Arrabal, Tardieu, Jarry, and Leonora Carrington, among many others, as well as the works of Mexican playwrights and my own works. We adapted Gogol, Nietzsche, Kafka, Wilhelm Reich, and a book by Eric Berne, Games People Play, which is still being performed today, thirty years later, and for which I had to assert myself, fight against censorship, and at one point even spend three days in jail. Some of my performances were shut down; at others, members of the extreme right wing stormed the theater, throwing bottles of acid. I had to flee in the dark, hidden in the back of a car, to avoid being lynched when my first film, Fando y Lis, premiered at the Acapulco Film Festival. Gradually, between successes, failures, scandals, and catastrophes, a profound moral crisis was demolishing the fanatical admiration I held for the theater. Theater, as a profession, is characterized by a display of those vices of character that people who are not artists do their absolute best to conceal. The egos of the actors are displayed in full view, without shame, without self-censorship, in their exaggerated narcissism. They are ambiguous, they are weak, they are heroic, they are traitors, they are faithful, they are stingy, they are generous. They fight for recognition; they want their name to be bigger than everyone else’s and to be at the top of the poster, over the title of the work. If they all earn the same salary, they demand that an envelope be slid into their pocket containing a few more dollars. They greet each other with great embraces but say horrible things about one another behind each other’s backs. They try desperately to get more lines; they steal the scene by stealthily calling attention to themselves. They are full of pride and vanity but also have no security in themselves, they want to be the center of attention, and they never stop competing, demanding to be seen, heard, and applauded at all times, even if they have to prostitute themselves in commercial advertisements. They only know how to talk about themselves, or about humanitarian problems such as a famine, epidemic, or genocide if they happen to be the lead promoters of some superficial solution. To increase their popularity they pass themselves off as devotees, tagging along with the pope or the Dalai Lama. All in all, they are adorable and disgusting, because they show in full daylight what their audience keeps hidden in darkness.

The cast of my theatrical work Zaratustra (Mexico, 1976). From left to right, back row: Henry West (musician); Héctor Bonilla (actor);Mickey Salas (musician), with his son; Carlos Áncira (actor); IselaVega (actress); Jorge Luque (actor); and Álvaro Carcaño (actor), with his son. Front row: Luis Urías (musician); Brontis Jodorowsky; Valérie Trumblay (in her womb, Teo Jodorowsky); El Greñas (seller of programs for the play); Alejandro Jodorowsky with Axel Cristóbal Jodorowsky; and Susana Camini (actress), with her son.

I wondered, Would it be possible for the theater to dispense with the actors? And, Why not the audience? The theater building seemed limited, useless, outdated. A show could be created anywhere, on a bus, in a cemetery, in a tree. It was useless to interpret a character. The person acting — not an actor — should not be putting on a spectacle to escape from himself, but to reestablish contact with the mystery within. The theater ceased to be a distraction and became an instrument of self-knowledge. I replaced the creation of written works with what I called the “ephemeral.”

During the performance of Zaratustra in Mexico, with Fernando Arrabal and the Zen master Ejo Takata. Photo: Hermanos Mayo.

During a performance an actor should completely melt into the “character,” fooling himself and others with such mastery as to misplace his own “person” and become another, a character with concise limits, made from sheer imagination. In the ephemeral, the acting person should eliminate the personality and attempt to be the person he is playing. In everyday life so-called normal people walk around in disguise, playing a character that has been inculcated by family, by society, or that they themselves have fabricated: a mask of pretense and bluster. The mission of the ephemeral was to make the individual cease to play a character in front of other characters, and ultimately to eliminate that character and suddenly become closer to the true person. This “other” who awakes amidst the euphoria of free action is not a puppet made of lies, but a being with minor limitations. The ephemeral act leads to the whole, to the release of higher forces, to a state of grace.

Without my realizing it, this exploration of the intimate mystery was the beginning of a therapeutic theater that ultimately led me to the creation of psychomagic. If I did not imagine this at the time, it was because I thought that what I was doing was a development of theatrical art. Before happenings began in the United States, I put on spectacles that could take place only once; I introduced perishable things like smoke, fruit, gelatin, the destruction of objects, baths of blood, explosions, burns, and so on. Once we performed in a place where two thousand chickens were clucking; another time we sawed through a double bass and two violins. I proceeded by searching for a place that someone would let me use, any sort of place, as long as it was not a theater: a painting academy, an asylum for the mentally ill, a hospital. Then I persuaded a group of people I knew, preferably not actors, to participate in a public presentation. Many people have an act in their soul that ordinary conditions do not allow them to carry out, but under favorable circumstances they rarely hesitate when offered the opportunity to express what sleeps within them. For me, an ephemeral had to be free to attend, like a party: when we staged them, we did not charge the guests for food or drinks. All the money I could save was invested in these presentations. I would ask the participant what he wanted to expose, then give him the means to do so. The painter Manuel Felguérez decided to slaughter a hen in front of the spectators and do an abstract painting on the spot using its guts, while at his side wearing a Nazi soldier’s uniform was his wife Lilia Carrillo, also a painter, who devoured a grilled chicken. A young actress who later became famous, Meche Carreño, wanted to dance naked to the sound of an African rhythm while a bearded man covered her body with shaving cream. Another woman wanted to appear as a classical dancer in a tutu without underwear and urinate while interpreting the death of a swan. An architecture student decided to appear with a mannequin and beat it violently, then pull several feet of linked sausages out from the crushed pubic area. One student came dressed as a university professor carrying a basket full of eggs and proceeded to smash one egg after another on his forehead while reciting algebraic formulas. Another, dressed as a cowboy, arrived with a large copper basin and several liters of milk. Lying in the container in a fetal position he recited an incestuous poem dedicated to his mother as he emptied the milk bottles, drinking the contents. A woman with long blond hair arrived walking on crutches and screaming at the top of her lungs, “My father is innocent, I am not!” At the same time she took pieces of raw meat from between her breasts and threw them at the audience. Then she sat down on a child’s chair and had her head shaved by a black barber. In front of her was a crib full of doll heads without eyes or hair. With her skull bare, she threw the heads at the audience, screaming, “It’s me!” A man dressed as a bridegroom pushed a bathtub full of blood onto the platform. A beautiful woman dressed as a bride followed him. He began to fondle her breasts, crotch, and legs, and finally, getting more and more excited, submerged her in the blood along with her ample white dress. He then rubbed her with a large octopus while she sang an aria from an opera. A woman with a great deal of red hair, pale skin, and a gold dress that clung close to her body appeared with a pair of shears in her hands. Several brown-skinned boys crept toward her, each one offering her a banana, which she sliced while laughing out loud.

Smashing a piano on Mexican television, in 1969.

Destruction and restoration of a piano.

All of these acts, these true delusions, were conceived and realized by persons considered normal in real life. The destructive energies that eat away at us from the inside when they are left stagnant can be released through channeled and transformative expression. Once the alchemy of the act is accomplished, the anguish is transmuted into euphoria.

The ephemeral panics were conducted without publicity, with the place and time given out at the last minute. On average about four hundred people would attend through this system of word of mouth. Thankfully, no articles about them were published in the newspapers. The government’s office of performances, headed by an infamous bureaucrat named Peredo, exerted an imbecilic form of censorship. In one theatrical work I was forced to hide a character’s belly button. In another, the actor Carlos Ancira wore a cape with two balls about the size of soccer balls hanging at the bottom; the troublesome civil servant considered them too suggestive of testicles and made us remove them. Thanks to the discrete and free nature of our ephemerals, we were able to express ourselves without any problem. The reaction was very different when I was invited to perform one on national television.

My work in the Teatro de Vanguardia had drawn the admiration of Juan López Moctezuma, a writer and journalist who was the host of a cultural television program. He had been given an hour of airtime without any commercials because an American TV series that attracted the majority of viewers was on at the same time on a different channel. Juan asked me to do whatever I wanted during those sixty minutes. I concentrated deeply, then knew precisely what ephemeral act I wanted to perform: what I had hated most, back in my dark days, was my sister’s piano. That instrument, smiling sarcastically with its black and white teeth, showed me that Raquel was my parents’ favorite child. Everything was for her, nothing for me. I decided to destroy a grand piano on camera. The explanation I gave to the public on this occasion was the following: “In Mexico, as in Spain, bullfighting is considered an art. The bullfighter uses a bull for performing his work of art. At the end of the fight, when he has expressed his creativity by means of the bull, he kills it. That is to say, he destroys his instrument. I want to do the same thing. I will put on a rock concert, then I will kill my piano.”

I found an old grand piano in the newspaper classifieds that was within my price range and had it sent directly to the studio where the cultural program was filmed. I also hired a group of young amateur rock musicians. When the broadcast began, after reciting my text I gave the order for the group to start playing, pulled a sledge hammer out of a suitcase and began to demolish the piano with great blows. I had to use all my energy, which was augmented by the rage that I had built up over so many years. Smashing a grand piano to pieces is not easy. I progressed slowly but incessantly in the demolition. The few spectators called their family and friends. The news spread like an uncontainable flood: a madman is smashing a grand piano with a hammer on channel 3! After half an hour, most Mexican viewers had switched from their favorite programs to see what this strange man was doing. The phone calls rose in quantity from one hundred to a thousand, two thousand, five thousand. Parents’ groups, the Lions Club, the minister of education, and many other notable entities protested. How dare this man destroy such a precious instrument before the eyes of so many poor children? (At that hour, the children were asleep.) Who had allowed this scandalous act of violence to be shown? (The American program being aired at the same time was a bloody war show.)

By the time I finished my work, lying amidst the rubble with a couple of pieces on top of me in the shape of a cross from which I extracted a few plaintive notes, the scandal had reached national proportions. The next day, all the newspapers mentioned the ephemeral. I had stripped Mexican art of its virginity in a brutal manner. I was admired for my audacity while also considered a cursed artist. Satisfied with the enormous notoriety I had achieved, I declared that on the next program Juan López Moctezuma would interview a cow to show that she knew more about architecture than university professors. The television station declared that this program would not take place, because “no cows are allowed in the studio.” I answered, “That is not true, many cows perform in the soap operas.” There was a fresh scandal in the press. The students of the School of Architecture offered me their department’s amphitheater in which to interview the cow. I arrived there, in front of an audience of two thousand students, along with my cow, which a veterinarian had previously injected with a tranquilizer. I presented the animal with its rear, which I compared to a Gothic cathedral, facing the public. The interview lasted two hours with the laughter growing and growing, until a group of burly employees arrived to tell me, and my bovine companion, to leave that honorable place and never return.

Ephemeral Panic (Paris, 1974). Bathing the father (dressed as an enormous old rabbi) with a liter of milk before castrating him.

These ephemerals showed me the enormous impact that they could produce, much greater than conventional theater. In those formative years I believed that in order to change the collective mentality I had to attack the fossilized concepts of society; it did not occur to me that a sick person needs to be healed, not assaulted. I had not yet conceived of the social therapeutic act.

After returning to Paris I met with Arrabal and Topor, and for three years we attended meetings of the surrealist group. Breton, a few years before his death, old and tired, was already a supreme pontiff surrounded by untalented acolytes who were more concerned with politics than with art. It was then that we founded the panic group. We opened it with a four-hour ephemeral that I have described in another book. This show ended a stage in my life. In it, I was symbolically castrated, had my head shaved, was whipped, opened the belly of a huge rabbi from which I extracted pork offal, and was born through a huge vulva into a river of live turtles. I came out of it sick, exhausted, and anemic. Despite its success—Plexus magazine called it “the best happening Paris has seen,” and the beatnik poets Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gregory Corso praised it and included it in their City Lights Journal—I was not satisfied. I saw the specter of dark destruction prowling about me and felt more than ever that theater must go in the direction of light. In search of positive action I abandoned all exhibitionist theatrical activity, with its desire for recognition, awards, reviews, and mention in the media, and began the practice of theatrical advising.

Ephemeral Panic (Paris, 1974). The “ furies” use scissors to cut me a suit made of raw beef. The meat was later fried and served to the audience. Photo: Jacques Prayer.

Ephemeral Panic (Paris, 1974). One woman dressed as the moon and another dressed as an executioner shave my head on stage. There is a viper on my chest. Photo: Jacques Prayer.

Ephemeral Panic (Paris, 1974). I submit to torture in order to rid myself of my physical narcissism. The executioner whips me until I bleed. Photo: Jacques Prayer.

If someone wanted to express his psychic residue, the serpents of shadow that gnaw at him from within, I would communicate the following theory to him: “The theater is a magical force, a personal and nontransmissible experience. It belongs to everyone. If you simply decide to act in a different way from how you act in everyday life, this force will transform your life. Now is the time to break away from conditioned reflexes, hypnotic cycles, and erroneous concepts of the self. The literature devotes a great deal of space to the theme of the ‘double,’ someone identical to you who gradually expels you from your own life, takes over your territory, your friendships, your family, your work, until you become an outcast, and even tries to kill you. I am here to tell you that in fact you are the ‘double’ and not the original. The identity that you think is your own, your ego, is no more than a pale imitation, an approximation of your essential being. If you identify with this double, as ridiculous as it is illusory, then your authentic self will suddenly appear. The master of the place will be restored to its rightful position. At that moment, your limited ‘I’ will feel persecuted, in danger of death, which indeed it is — because the authentic being appears by dissolving the double. Nothing belongs to you. Your only possibility of being is by appearing as the other, your profound nature, and eliminating yourself. This is a holy sacrifice in which you will give yourself entirely to the master, without fear. Since you live as a prisoner of your crazy ideas, your confused feelings, your artificial desires, and your useless needs, why not adopt a completely different point of view? For example, tomorrow you will be immortal. As an immortal, you get up and brush your teeth, as an immortal you get dressed and think, as an immortal you walk around the city. For a week, twenty-four hours a day, and with no spectator observing it other than yourself, be the man who will never die, acting as another person with your friends and acquaintances, without giving them any explanation. You will become an author-actor-spectator, presenting yourself not in a theater but in life.”

Although I devoted most of my time to filming, creating movies such as Fando y Lis, El Topo, The Holy Mountain, and Santa Sangre—an activity that gave me experiences that would require a whole book — I also continued developing the art of theatrical advice. I established a series of acts to perform in a given time: five hours, twelve hours, twenty-four. It was a program developed as a function of the problem brought in by the patient, aimed at breaking the character with which he had identified in order to help him restore ties with his profound nature. “Whoever is depressed, delusional, or failing, that is not you.” To an atheist, I assigned the task of taking on the personality of a saint for some weeks. To a woman who suffered from a hatred of her children, I assigned the duty — in a written contract, signed with a drop of her blood — of imitating motherly love for a hundred years. To a judge, concerned with the power he held to punish in the name of a law and a morality that he doubted, I assigned the task of dressing up as a vagrant to go begging in front of the terrace of a restaurant while taking handfuls of dolls’ eyes out of his pockets. To an unhealthily jealous man of questionable virility I assigned the task of showing up at a family reunion dressed as a woman.

In this manner I created, overlaid on the personality, a person intended to visit everyday life and make it better. At this point my theatrical quest was acquiring a therapeutic dimension. I transformed myself from writer and director into an adviser, instructing people in order that they might free themselves from their personalities and conduct themselves as authentic beings in the comedy that is existence. The route I offered them was that of imitation. Gone was the inexpert youth who, believing himself to be imitating civil holiness, had sexually exploited a poor young woman. Now the process was based on a real desire to change.

Converted into a film actor in El Topo.

The character transforms violence into (musical) art.

If a good Catholic practiced the imitation of Christ, why shouldn’t an atheist who is tired of his disbelief begin to imitate a priest? Why shouldn’t a weak man, feeling impotent, imitate virile strength by painting his testicles red? Why shouldn’t a woman, raised as a boy by her family, overcome her sterility by sticking a pillow under her dress to imitate pregnancy? I myself, imitating what I needed most — faith — realized how far I was from believing in God, in human beings, or in anything at all. I doubted art. What was it for? If it was to entertain people who were afraid of waking up, I was not interested in it. If it was a means of succeeding economically, I was not interested. If it was an activity taken on by my ego to exalt itself, I was not interested. If I had to be the jester for those in power, those who poison the planet and leave millions of people starving, I was not interested. What then was the purpose of art? After a crisis so profound that it led me to think of suicide, I arrived at the conclusion that the purpose of art was to heal. “If art does not heal, it is not art,” I told myself, and I decided to unite my artistic and therapeutic activities. I do not wish to be misunderstood: the only therapy I had known was carried out by scientific minds, confronting the chaotic subconscious and trying to bring order to it, extracting a rational message from dreams. I approached therapy not as science, but as art. My goal was to teach reason to speak the language of dreams. I was not interested in art turned into therapy, but in therapy converted into art.

I owe this profound entry into the expression of the unconscious force — which, if we listen to it, is not our enemy but our ally — to Ejo Takata, who was my Zen master for a period of five years. Without really knowing what I was getting into, I agreed to be part of a group that meditated for seven full days, sleeping only twenty minutes each night. Full of courage, I knelt with my buttocks supported on a cushion, crossed my hands, put my thumbs together with minimal precision as if I were holding a cigarette paper between them, stretched out my spine, felt myself anchored in the ground and united to the center of the Earth while my skull reached up toward the sky, relaxed my face and then the rest of my muscles, eliminated all words and feelings from my mind, and, believing my technique to be perfect, prepared to remain there motionless, like Buddha, for a week. After barely two hours, the torture began. My knees, legs, back, and entire body hurt. If I moved just a little, the giant Mexican patrolling with his baton would give me a hiding on the shoulders. If I winced when flies walked on my face, the master would yell demonically. My imagination flared up, and so did my anger. What was I doing here, suffering needlessly in the midst of these enlightened shaved heads? I saw my shoes in a corner, like open mouths, inviting me to fill them and leave this hell. At the sound of a gong, we had to run to the dining room and gobble down a bowl of rice, almost boiling hot, in two minutes, without leaving a single grain in the bowl. We returned to meditate with bloated bellies. A concert of belches and continuous farting began. With anger and shame I noticed that the others, especially the women, were holding it in better than I. At midnight we lay down like dogs to sleep on the floor for those divine twenty minutes. We awoke to screams and insults and had to run to sit and continue our meditation. We were allowed to go and defecate once a day in a communal latrine, where a row of holes over an artesian well invited men and women alike to completely give up privacy. I resisted and resisted, out of pride rather than mysticism. Takata began playing the drum, singing the Heart Sutra. Luz María, a chunky lesbian in front of him who also was playing the drum, flew into a rage and threw her instrument at his head. The monk made a minimal movement, ducking by a few centimeters so that the heavy instrument passed millimeters from his ear and smashed into the wall, leaving a hole. Ejo, not in the least perturbed, kept chanting the Sutra. No comment was made about this assault.

By the fifth day I had become a scarecrow. My knees were swollen and bloody, my belly was full of gas, my eyes were tear filled, and there was a pain in my chest. At three in the morning, I was dragged by two aggressive students to a room where the master was going to give me a riddle, a koan. I was forced to fight and defend myself as the fanatical pair rained blows on me. I crept down the stairs and sat in front of the curtain hiding the sacred room.

“My chest hurts,” I said. “I think I’m going to have a heart attack.”

“Break yourself!” they replied, and left.

A gong sounded, indicating that I should go in. And so I did. There was Ejo, transfigured, dressed in a ceremonial robe that made him look like a saint. He looked at me with an objectivity that I construed as contempt and said to me as I knelt before him with my forehead touching the floor, “It does not begin, it does not end. What is it?”

I had been prepared to respond to a classic riddle, “This is the sound of two hands clapping, what is the sound of one hand clapping?” to which I would have raised my open right hand, answering with a broad smile, “Do you hear?” Or, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” to which I would have responded by screaming, “Mu!” But when asked this question, so simple, so ingenuous, so obvious, I could only stammer, “Ejo, what do you want me to say? God? The universe? Me? You? All of this?” The monk took up a hammer and hit the gong, signaling for all the zendo^*5 to hear that I had failed. I bowed, humbled, and began to leave. Then Ejo yelled, “Intellectual, learn to die!” These words, spoken in an atrocious Japanese accent, changed my life. Suddenly, I realized that all my searching up to that point, everything that I had done, had been carried out by a cowardly intellect that, afraid to die, was clinging to the iron bars of reason. Existence began when the actor-self stopped identifying with the observer-self. In a flash, I entered the world of dreams.