The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky: The Creator of El Topo

5. The Slashes of the Tigress’s Claws

Her voice was grating and harsh, like the sound of the lid of a badly made coffin.

SILVER KANE, LA HIJA DEL ESPECTRO

(THE SPECTER'S DAUGHTER)

Behind the dilapidated post office, amid bars, billiard halls, huge fruit stores, and hideous apartment buildings, the Frou-Frou Theater’s doors were open like an absurd flower. At the end of a long corridor whose walls were covered with photos of the Tigress, there stood a coffinlike counter and a cagelike ticket office protected with iron bars. Gloria, the cousin of the star, was counting the receipts of the performance already underway. To my great surprise (we had never been introduced), she emerged from her cage and embraced me enthusiastically.

“I heard about the reception of your film in Acapulco. The audience wanted to lynch you. Bravo! The boss will be very happy to see you — she loves scandals.”

She ushered me into the theater. Proudly, she showed me the vast salon and bar decorated in “French” style with two dominant colors: crimson and gold. There were little angels, floral motifs, Louis XV armchairs, dwarf palms, satin drapes, frivolous posters — and standing right the middle of all this bric-a-brac, there was a larger-than-life statue representing the naked Tigress. It had an upright bust, stringy arms, and voluminous thighs on colossal legs. Such bad taste made me want to laugh, but all mirth died on my lips when Gloria pointed to a certain place on the floor and told me: “Under that spot three sheep lie buried. To ensure prosperity, my boss had them slaughtered in a satanic ritual. Ever since, we’ve had sold-out houses every night.”

Then she led me into the theater, and offered me a special seat. Most of the audience seemed to be working-class males. There was an odor of mingled sweat and church incense. “This is the last act of Nana,” she whispered. “A prostitute lives in luxury, kept by bankers and aristocrats, but everyone abandons her in the end when she catches smallpox. I’ll take you backstage when it’s over.”

In a sordid room, Nana was lying on a bed of burlap potato sacks stuffed with cotton. A dark veil covered her pockmarked face as she sang a song of farewell to life. Suddenly, a huge drunken man in the front row started yelling: “No clothes! No clothes!” I shrank in my seat. This sort of hoi polloi came here only for sexual excitement. In some of the city’s theaters, a rumba dancer would even challenge a spectator to copulate with her on stage “because you’re so macho.” Such men had not the slightest interest in scenes of dying singers covered from head to toe. At first the Tigress merely gave him a baleful look without halting her swan song, but now he was standing and leaning over the stage, shouting even louder and adding phrases such as, “Show your tits!” and “Show your ass!”

Suddenly, she leaped off the bed and walked off stage. She quickly returned with a large pistol, walked up to the big man, and pressed the barrel against the front of his head. “Now listen, you son of a whore of a mother who gave birth to you! I don’t come harassing you in the middle of your work. So don’t come here fucking around with us artists! You either shut your mouth or you’ll wake up in hell with a hole in the front of your head! You understand?” By now the drunk lowered his upper body face down upon the stage and began kissing her feet. He answered in a child’s voice, “Yes, my little mother.” A large ovation from the audience supported her. Then the Tigress resumed her place upon the bed — still holding the pistol — and finished her song. There was a religious silence at the end; the curtain had already begun to fall when thunderous applause broke out. I could feel fascination, desire, and fear in the air. The big drunk applauded louder than anyone.

Gloria came for me and had me sit behind the curtain on a corner of the stage. “The boss is freshening up. She’ll have to sign a few autographs, and then she’ll receive you. She wants to see you alone. Chucho will keep you company while you’re waiting.” Chucho had long false eyelashes, fluorescent red lipstick, and a plaster cast on his right wrist. Uncomfortable with his arch winks, I asked him about the cast.

“Oh! During the scene when the Tigress sings and dances, fondled by her admirers, I squeezed her leg too hard. It enraged her, and right there in front of everyone, she broke my wrist. Then — though you’ll find this hard to believe — she dragged me off stage by the hair of my head!”

My mouth was dry and I was feeling distinctly ill at ease. I noticed that the stagehands, seeing me talking with Chucho, were making obscene jokes about my manhood. Offended, I strode backstage and gave a sharp knock on the Tigress’s door. A husky, mocking voice answered, “Enter if you dare.”

It was as if I had entered the cage of a wild beast. A person never forgets even a glimpse of a woman like that. The carnivorous look in her large eyes showed no sign of any sort of pity. Her lush, black hair surrounded the face of a country girl transformed by skillful surgery into that of an Aztec princess. Her teeth had even been filed, though not pointed, in order to suggest knife blades. Two silicon-enhanced breasts strained at an almost transparent bodice. Her very large legs were resting upon the dressing table. With her back reclining against the wicker chair, she regarded me in the mirror. A carelessly painted beauty mark glistened between her eyebrows, a little off-center. I wondered if this error might be due to the length of her clawlike false nails. It was impossible to guess her age. The surgery made her look thirty, but she might have been more than forty. Her voice was impossible to describe. Every word she spoke floated upon a muffled growl. At any moment, her words could become daggers. I tried to gather my courage.

“I have very much wanted to meet you, Madame. I congratulate you for your performance!”

“If you want to have an affair with me, don’t ever lie to me, you bastard. When I perform, I’m aware of everyone in the audience. When I was crying, you had to keep from laughing. Of course, this isn’t your sort of avant-garde cinema. But anyway, I also wanted to meet you.”

She lowered her legs. Her fine-pointed high heels scraped the floor, making a wailing sound. “I’m tired of standing up. The surgical filling in my calves weighs four pounds, but the masses get hysterical when I expose them.”

From a closet filled with gaudy costumes, she took a bottle of mezcal. Its label showed a crow perched on a skull. “Now let’s see if you’re an hombre,” she said, filling two water glasses full of this corrosive liquid. “Bottoms up!”

I accepted the challenge and drained the whole glass without stopping. She did likewise and filled the glasses again: “Bottoms up!” And again, we drained our glasses.

“Steady on now, don’t fall by the wayside!” she said.

“I’m quite steady, thank you, Madame — more so than you.”

After seven glasses, I saw a greenish aura around the empty bottle. “She is calling for her sister,” said the Tigress, and set down another full bottle. I was so drunk I had to hold on to my chair, but I continued to imbibe. She began to make a halting speech, finding it difficult to get from one concept to the next.

“I am what I want to be, that is my law. . When I first came here from my village, I felt defenseless before men. By luck, Diego Rivera had me model for his murals. . One afternoon, an Indian whom the painter knew well arrived from the mountains with a package. ‘Here you are, boss,’ he said. ‘Good fresh human meat. I guarantee that it was a Christian in good health. I killed him myself.’ Diego roasted the bloody meat on a spit, cut it into small pieces accompanied with chopped onions, coriander, and chili peppers, and made tacos, which he shared with me. . As I chewed this delicious meat, the beast that had been sleeping in me awoke. I could eat men. . I could make them fall to their knees before me. . In order to accomplish this, all I would have to do is transform my body into the body of their ape dreams. Big breasts? I’ll give them big breasts. Big buttocks? I got them with three hundred gelatin injections. Little by little, as my songs became hits, I saved up money for surgery on my cheeks, my chin, my full lips, my eyelids, hair implants, a thin waist. . Hell, creating your own body is just as impressive as creating a painting! I am the daughter of my own willpower. In my shadow, not even God calls the shots. . Besides, I’ve sent God to hell and chosen the devil. He’s a lot more useful. He buys your soul, he gives you power — and that’s everything in this world. . What do you think? Anyway, no matter what you say, you’re risking your life with me. My master is a jealous one. .”

In the dense alcoholic fog, struggling with my swollen tongue and my lust to possess this arrogant woman, I found myself reciting a koan: “What is the way?”

Quickly, the Tigress interrupted me, “I’m not a railroad track; don’t ask me. And you — do you know what the way is?”

This contemptuous retort made me aware of my mental confusion. The crow and the skull, life and death, good and evil, truth and lies — how to choose? In my all-consuming desire to master consciousness, I had lost the way. Tears came to my eyes as I quoted Master Haryo: “Because I was an open eye, I fell into the well.” The Tigress burst out laughing. She rocked so hard against the back of her chair that it fell over. Sprawled on the floor with open legs, showing me that dark mouth that all Mexicans desired to see, she said: “Good. Now, open your eyes and forget your bullshit way. Fall into my well — but I warn you, it has no bottom.”

Suddenly, all my reason vaporized. Heedless of the consequences, I leaped at this wild beast on the floor, lifting her up with great effort (her body seemed to weigh a ton). Then, half undressed, I had her straddle my back. She giggled like a girl. We both arose and staggered out of the dressing room. Laughing constantly, we stumbled on, ignoring the astonished stares of the stagehands, dancers, and striptease artists. We walked out of the theater toward the street exit. Gloria ran behind us, speaking with urgency: “Beware, my boy! Get her into the car very quickly so that the caliph doesn’t find out and make mincemeat out of you!”

A long, silver limousine with a chauffeur dressed like a Mexican cavalier pulled up in front of us. I got her inside and sat beside her. We began fondling and kissing each other with brutal, drunken lust. A small overhead lamp cast a dim light in the interior of the car.

“Turn it off, faggot!” she ordered the chauffeur.

“I can’t, boss; my orders are to have it lit at all times.”

“No one spies on me!” She smashed the lamp with her fist and wiped the blood from her knuckles on the seat of the car.

“And lower that fucking mirror — if you try to spy on us, I’ll tear out your eyes!” Obediently, the chauffeur lowered the rearview mirror, relying only on the side-view mirrors as he drove. Then, with no witnesses in sight, we attempted to make love in the shadows, but we both passed out.

When I awoke, I had lost all sense of time. The Tigress snored, her head on my lap. The car was gliding through quiet streets in a wealthy neighborhood. Only high walls could be seen, hiding the houses behind them. We pulled up before a vast edifice, an imitation medieval castle built out of cement. The front gate lowered like a drawbridge. The Tigress awoke abruptly and gave me a strange look. I thought she was going to bite me, but then she smiled and looked carefully out the window. “Get out with your head lowered, and go inside fast. Don’t let them get a photograph of your face. The caliph has spies in the house across the street.”

I did so and entered the anteroom of the castle. I was standing in front of the statue of an enormous devil with raised wings and a huge phallus. Offerings of flowers, marzipan fruits, and incense sticks were scattered at its feet. As in the Frou-Frou, everything was colored red and gold.

The Tigress waited for an old lady dressed in a Huichol Indian costume to turn the handle that raised the gate. She took me by the hand, saying, “The chauffeur will sleep in the limousine. When you leave, wake him up and tell him to take you to a taxi stand. Never let him take you to your house. I think he is also a spy. If they find out where you live, they could send guerillas there to castrate you. Now come with me!”

She led me through her castle. In the kitchen there was barely room for an enormous Chinese banquet table with twelve chairs decorated with monks and dragons. In the saloon I saw a magnificent 1950s phonograph and awnings decorated with photos of various Mexican presidents, especially Diaz Ordaz, with his big mouth and his tiny, fanatical iguana eyes.

We crossed a small cactus garden, arriving at her bedroom door. I drew back in surprise, seeing that a real, live tiger seemed to be lying there! She gave a cruel chuckle. “Whoever wants paradise must deserve it. Stroke his back. If he growls, it means he accepts you and you can go in. But if he doesn’t like you — well, I won’t say what will happen.”

Though I could now see that the cat was not so big, the hair on my neck was bristling and my body was trembling. Nevertheless, my pride made me not only stroke the beast but also massage its neck. Soon, not only did it growl, it turned over on its back with lazy sensuality and offered me its stomach to scratch. The Tigress now made fun of me: “Actually, it’s a harmless ocelot. I’ve had its teeth and claws removed.” And she pushed me into the room.

The bed was round with blood-red silk sheets and covers. At the head there was an enormous seashell ten feet high and about seven feet wide with a predictable gold color. On one side of the bed was a holster with a large revolver and extra ammunition.

“Now the tourist visit is over. Get undressed.”

Lighting a violet candle, she turned out the lights. I found myself stretched out next to the naked Tigress in the middle of the red circle. I tried to excite her by caressing her smooth, cold body with my humid hands. It felt as though it was not flesh I was touching. Her breasts, her legs, and her buttocks were as hard as marble. Also, she was totally passive, which caused my erotic passion to wither. In a few seconds, my phallus became a mere penis.

Seeing this, she demanded, without an ounce of sympathy: “You must do everything. I have no reason to do anything at all.”

“But. .” I stammered, “it’s impossible like this. After all that mezcal, fatigue, and danger, you won’t even participate. It’s too difficult. .”

“Shut up. I don’t want to hear your excuses. If you don’t get it up, I’ll tell the journalists and all Mexico will know that you’re impotent.”

It was a serious threat. She had important connections to the media. If I did not succeed, I would be humiliated by banner headlines in the newspapers.

I concentrated as never before. Rummaging in all my pornographic memories, I opened the doors to everything bestial in myself. After a short but agonizing moment, I had an erection. Fearing that it might be short-lived, I climbed immediately onto the statue and, with the aid of saliva, began to penetrate her indifferent vagina — but she stopped me. “Calm down, artist. You’ve proved that you can do it. Even more important, you’ve proved it to yourself. That’s enough. I don’t need your sperm. What I want is your talent. With this act, we’ve signed a contract. We’re going to work together. I have a big project, but now I want you to let me sleep. Leave quickly. The caliph could arrive at any moment, and what belongs to him. . never mind. Come to the theater tomorrow.”

She inserted earplugs, closed her eyes, turned over on her stomach, and fell into such a deep sleep that it seemed like an implosion.

The object of lust for thousands of Mexicans, not only because of her voluptuous curves (artificial or not) but also because of her legend as the presidential whore, the Tigress had attained a status of mythic femininity rivaled only by the Virgin of Guadalupe. In spite or because of this, she now occupied the summit of my mental pyramid. She was an authentic warrior, knowing how to survive and prevail in a world dominated by corrupt politicians. If she had to give her body, she managed to do it without dishonor, distancing herself from it and transforming herself into an invulnerable and implacable creature. The people had reason to elevate her to a popularity comparable to that of the dark Virgin — for this woman was able to maintain an impenetrable purity in her mind. To seduce her, to succeed in inflaming her real desire, to become the soul of her inward castle seemed like an impossibility to me. I knew that she regarded our relationship as a game of chess in which I was a simple pawn to be moved by her — and this fascinated me. I was curious to see how she would use me, and I wondered how I would be able to transform this humiliating situation into a victory. A true koan!

As I waited on the stage for her to finish her autographs, Chucho bustled up to me, whispering with a confidential air, “Hey, you — I don’t know why I should take a liking to you, but that’s how it is. I’m offering you a warning. That woman is a real witch. Her chauffeur, who knows quite a few things, told me (for a bribe) that he drove her to a sordid neighborhood where sorcerers live, and that they sold her a plant that had been germinated in the sperm of a hanged man. Who did they hang to get the sperm? We’ll never know. Did they also splatter the poor Christian with dog’s blood? We’ll never know. The Tigress paid a big wad of bills for that plant. Then she peeled the plant, sprinkled it with lemon juice, and ate it. Ugh—how dreadful! But that’s not all. A week ago, they brought her a live badger. She called me into her dressing room and made me hold the poor animal down while she slit its throat. That’s exactly what she did. Then she took a black knife and dug through the dead animal’s organs, looking for something. I was so horrified I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, she was holding a small bone, and she put it into a powerful blender with I don’t know what horrible liquid inside it, ground it all together, and drank the mixture. It’s obvious that woman is capable of doing anything to obtain power. You be careful or you’ll wind up like that little badger’s bone.”

Now Chucho was staring at the other side of the theater with a fearful expression. “What do you see up there, in that old disused balcony condemned by the theater authorities, to the left of the front row?”

“I think it’s a mannequin dressed in old-fashioned clothes. .”

“That’s right. But that dummy is possessed by the devil. No one is ever allowed up there. It’s crowded with old, useless debris. Yet every night, the dummy changes its place. Mireya, a dancer friend of mine, ridiculed our fear of it. One night, at midnight, she sneaked up onto the balcony, cleared her way to the dummy, threw it on the floor, and stomped it to pieces. The next night, it was sitting in an armchair, completely intact. From that time on, Mireya has been cursed by horrible luck. Her agent put a bullet through his head, her father was murdered, her fiancé left her for another woman, and now she has become obese and has had to quit dancing. She went on all sorts of diets but gained a hundred pounds. She finally went insane, dreaming every night of being devoured by a pack of dogs.”

Noticing my skeptical look, Chucho shrugged, turned away huffily, and left, dismissing me forever from his sphere of interest.

As I continued to wait for the Tigress, sitting on the same burlap sacks where Nana sang her swan song twice a day, I dismissed the perturbations in my mind caused by the dancer’s gossip and arch looks and tried to concentrate on my own reactions.

Mexico: a country where two old women organized a concentration camp for prostitutes, exploiting them and then murdering them by the dozens; a country where a schoolteacher strangled his mother, ate her entire body, bones and all — and then, in prison, having already experienced the supreme culinary delight, refused any other food and died of hunger; a country where a famous singer killed herself by swallowing a glass full of needles; a country that has an entire market specializing in sorcery materials right in the center of the capital; a country in which a male prostitute, just before servicing an aged tourist, makes the sign of the cross with his penis, waving it in the four directions and thereby transforming his sordid virility into a sacred act. Yes, I could well believe anecdotes about mandrake plants and badgers, but a lifeless mannequin animated by the devil was a bit much. Yet in Tepozotlán, in times of drought, prominent elder citizens speak to the mountain (which appears to them in a vision as a white-bearded man), offering candles, T-shirts, and house shoes to induce him to bring rain; and in the back room of an esoteric bookstore, a Huichol shaman comes once a week to cure patients by sucking out their sickness and then spitting it out in the form of pebbles; and the grandmother who eats sacred mushrooms leaves her body and enters other people’s dreams; and in the mountains live sorcerers who claim to transform themselves into crows or dogs.

How much truth is there in all this? Over the real world soars an imaginary world that is far more active. If the truth is that all is illusion, then I must learn to imitate life. I thought of the Tibetan holy man Marpa,^*10 who grieved inconsolably over his dead son. His disciples asked him: “But Master, why do you weep when you have taught us that all is illusion?” The old man answered: “It is true, my son was an illusion — but he was the most beautiful of illusions!”

Reality is aggressive, murderous, unknown, and ugly. Only illusory beauty makes it bearable. If truth is a fathomless mystery, then we can only edify it with lies. As for myself, I seemed to be playing the role of an artist, sitting in this imitation Italian theater, watching an imitation French melodrama that’s played by a diva with an imitation body of Venus who owns an imitation castle with a tame ocelot that imitates a fierce tiger and sleeping in a bed with a huge seashell at its head in imitation of Botticelli. And what if the story about her being the mistress of the president of Mexico turned out be just another lie, a rumor she cultivated? Perhaps even the fat drunk whom she threatened with a revolver was a hired plant. How did I know she had even met Diego Rivera, with whom she claimed to have eaten tacos containing cooked human flesh? Even the story about selling her soul to the devil could be seen as self-promotion. A person could easily arrange for the porter to earn a bonus by moving the mannequin each night when the theater was locked and no one could see him. Even if all this was true, however, I realized I was still interested in her. Even if she used trickery, she was still a magician capable of organizing the imaginary world and living in it.

With the exception of Ejo Takata, I had always lived among human beings who were incapable of being themselves, who always wanted to have what others had, who creating facades, copied values, schemed to obtain diplomas, danced for pay in a barbarous carnival. I’m not saying I felt superior to them, but I certainly felt like a foreigner — not in some other country, but in strangeness, the unreal zone of the unadapted: “to be in the world, but not of it.” This was of no help to me, for my soul, like an exhausted bird flying over the scene of a disastrous deluge, could find no place to land. If I learned to die as an intellectual, no place in the illusion could harbor me. Reality — that which is without beginning or end — seemed impalpable, indifferent, with no relation to my life, a life that was 99 percent antisocial. At that moment, sitting upon those absurd burlap sacks, I understood that the Tigress, queen of the world of imitation, could, through her poisonous machinations, become the guide who would give me the necessary maturity to build a temple in the dimension of mirages.

When I entered her dressing room, she was wearing only panties of minuscule size and was occupied with the task of putting black dye on the long hairs on her legs. “I want them to see that I’m not another Indian but the descendant of Spaniards!”

I sensed that in her feline mind I was conquered prey. Now I was so much hers that she didn’t bother to hide her tricks from me. It was not a female seductress that I saw before me, but a cold strategist.

“We’re going to bring down the house and give them the scoop of the year! You are an avant-garde director whose audience never amounts to more than a thousand people, but the critics praise you because they believe that everything European is worthy of admiration. For me, they have only derision. What I do seems contemptible to them. Yet my audience is never less than five hundred. I think we must unite our forces. Using all your talent, you shall direct me in a theater piece which will please the people. We’ll create a brilliant and lavish production of Lucretia Borgia. You’ll have a percentage of the profits. You’ve never made a peso with your obscure, incomprehensible films. With me, you’ll be rich. Is it a deal?”

The prospect of directing her fascinated me. “It’s a deal!”

“I knew you’d like the idea — but we must proceed carefully. We don’t want to rush our car down a slope that drops us off a cliff. If we offer this me-and-you cocktail too suddenly, it would be undrinkable, both for the pop audience and for the intellectuals. We must file and smooth the rough patches, creating a huge sense of expectation. I don’t mean an artistic one — that wouldn’t bring any audience at all; I mean a sexy one. Fame is nothing; notoriety is everything. Only scandal brings success. I’m going to propose something outrageous now. I’m telling you in advance not to worry, your life will be in no danger, because the caliph will know it’s all fake and will agree to the plan. What we shall do is announce that we have fallen in love and are going to get married!”

“Er, I regret to say that although the idea seems excellent, we can’t just do it like that. You see, I’m already married.”

“Who do you think you’re dealing with? I have my sources. Your wife, Valerie, wants success as an actress. You are her sun; she orbits around you. If you promise her a good role, with her name in huge letters on the marquee, she’ll do anything you ask of her.”

“Anything but divorce. And I don’t want that either.”

“Nor do I! Don’t you get it? The whole thing from A to Z will be fake. When we announce that the great avant-garde theater director is divorcing his wife for the vulgar Tigress, the newspapers will eat it up. During the rehearsals, your wife will fake a suicide attempt. You and I, in our extravagant compassion, will help her out of her depression by offering her the role of a witch, the enemy of Lucretia. And we can count on people’s morbid curiosity to fill the theater; they’ll want to see our tormented triangle acted out on stage. We’ll rake in the profits as you’ve never imagined!”

“When should we announce it?”

“Next week, in a big hotel on Reforma Avenue, all the journalists will be celebrating Press Day. Because the hotel offers free dinner and drinks in exchange for the publicity, all the scroungers are bound to be there — reporters, editors, photographers, critics, TV and movie stars, athletes — in short, the cream of the shit of the Mexican media. Right in the middle of the festivities, we’ll drop the bomb!”

Valerie and I went over the Tigress’s plan point by point. The first obstacle we had to overcome were the doormen, five guerillas who absolutely demanded a photo ID of every guest. The Tigress had obtained one for herself and one for me, because we were known artists. Valerie, however, was still unknown, and had no access to Parnassus. We decided to hide her in the trunk of the limousine. The plan was for her to lie there for an hour until the time was right. This was made even more difficult by the Tigress’s insistence that Valerie wear a plaster cast on her leg to appear with a limp.

Inside, obscure reporters wandered around with a bored air. For once, they instead of “stars” were the ones being honored. Nevertheless, there was a constant clicking of hidden cameras, like a chorus of crickets. The stars were there, walking around with a false ease, aware constantly of being reduced to images.

When the Tigress and I entered together, hand in hand, they all froze for a minute then got on with their farce, trying to hide their curious glances at us behind a ridiculous air of indifference. No one seemed to notice us, but we knew we were center stage in their minds. I was dressed in a very sober black suit, but my companion wore a brazenly transparent chemise; leather spike heels eight inches long, her naked legs sporting her hairs, dyed bright silver for this occasion; and a skirt covered with green, white, and red sequins — the color of the Mexican flag. The skirt was so short that every swishing step she made revealed her crotch. In order to hide the intimacy of her real vagina, she wore a specially made shell covered with what seemed to be pubic hair. Glued to her vulva, it suggested that any possibility of penetration was forbidden. This detail inspired a cynical explosion of flashbulbs.

We took our seats in the most distant corner. This was Press Day and the tacit agreement was that no journalist was supposed to try to interview us. Nevertheless, they walked back and forth in front of us like hungry dogs. An hour passed. Only the bones of the banquet were left on the table. Cheap rum had replaced the good drinks. The guests were now beginning to weave and stagger as if on an ocean liner in heavy weather. The sound of voices, which had been clear before, thickened into a gelatinous rumble. This was the moment the Tigress had chosen for Valerie’s entrance.

She duly appeared with her leg in the cast, holding two crutches. Her dress was ordinary and full of stains, her hair was greasy, her face was without makeup, and her eyes were full of artificial tears. She seemed plunged into deepest sadness. Like a wounded crow, she made her way across the room, directly toward us. In an instant, the alcoholic fog lifted. As Valerie arrived at our table, she let a crutch fall. In the deadly silence, it bounced loudly on the floor. Then she took me by the hand and began moving her lips. Her voice was so low no one could hear what she said (in reality, she was reciting multiplication tables), but everyone believed she was imploring me. I moved my lips in reply, gesturing with my hand toward the Tigress. Of course they interpreted this as my telling her that I loved the other woman. Valerie collapsed onto a chair. I gathered her crutches, helped her up, and accompanied her to the door, and she exited the scene. Then I came back to my chair next to the Tigress and pretended to break into tears. Still showing her crotch, she took my arm and left with me, practically dragging me along. Hardly had the door closed when we heard a deafening uproar of voices break out behind it.

Just as predicted by this clever scheme, the entire Mexican press, from the most abject rags to the most “serious” journals, announced the event in headlines. On that day alone, tickets sold out for the next three months of performances.

Events were now happening rapidly. In two hours of concentrated work, I managed to concoct a medley of situations that could have come from the lowest-grade novels and films, added some songs, and finally arrived at an erotico-musical tragedy that the Tigress demanded to sign as coauthor. I brought together a troupe of respectable actors, found a high-quality stage designer, a very talented musician, an excellent choreographer, and a very fashionable Argentine singer for the important role of Julius Caesar. In ten days, rehearsing twelve hours a day, I fixed the style of the actors’ interpretations, the décor, the dances, costumes, and musical accompaniments. And I accomplished all of this without the presence of our Lucretia, whom we had decided would prepare her songs separately. When she finally was to appear in rehearsal, we were waiting with great enthusiasm and impatience, eager to see the creation of the complex character of the poisoner. I was confident that, with intense work, I would be able to present her to the public transformed into a great actress. Rehearsal time was set for nine in the morning, but the Tigress did not show up. Five hours passed. We left to eat some cheese crepes. When we returned, she was still not there. At six o’clock the stagehands evicted us, because they had to set up for the 7:30 performance of Nana. Worried, I asked Gloria if her cousin was sick. She only shrugged, dashing my hopes.

“That’s the way my boss is. She doesn’t like rehearsals. She’s very tired when she finishes performing. She sleeps late and then has to deal with the press, her makeup, and so forth, and the day just goes by.”

“But what are we going to do if she doesn’t rehearse?”

“Trust her! On opening night, right in the middle of your strict scene, she’ll improvise everything. And don’t worry about her memorizing the text; she has these little electronic devices to wear in her ears, and a prompter will be whispering her lines to her.”

I paled. I was about to protest, but Gloria changed the subject.

“How is your wife doing? Are the rehearsals going well for her? No problems?”

“None. She is a responsible individual. Her sorceress will be a true creation.”

“I must warn you to beware. In my boss’s mind, though these press stories are of course instigated by her, what the media say is more real than the truth. This morning, she sent me to a pet store to buy a black cat, and she also had me buy silk ribbons and beeswax. I’m sure she’s preparing a curse to separate couples. With the beeswax she’ll make two dolls, a man and a woman. After painting them with her menstrual blood, she’ll pin photos of you and Valerie on the head of each doll. Then she’ll fasten them to two boards with black, white, and red ribbons woven together, and throw the boards in two gutters, very far away from each other. . I repeat: Beware! Don’t drink anything she offers you. She’s planning to sacrifice the cat, and she’ll try to get you to drink a bit of its blood, which could be mixed with anything. Also, she’ll keep the severed head of the cat in her refrigerator, and in its mouth will be the names of you and Valerie, written on a bow of ribbons stolen from a cemetery. The head will remain in the refrigerator until the day you separate.”

In spite of my awareness that the cousin could be lying about this, I felt a shudder through my entire body. I remembered a koan from the secret book that I hadn’t understood until then: “While Master Rinzai was going toward the great hall to give a speech, a monk interrupted him: ‘What if they threaten us with a sword?’ Rinzai muttered: ‘Disaster! Disaster!’ and added the commentary: ‘When waves rise up like mountains and fish become dragons, it is stupid to use a bucket to try to empty the ocean.’”

Rinzai was about to speak to his disciples — in other words, to use intellectual means to communicate knowledge to them. The monk was saying that beautiful ideas are useless in the face of an enemy who can kill us. Yet Rinzai’s repetition of the word disaster did not refer to the impotence of the intellect when we have a sword at our throat. Nor was he saying that to be threatened with death is simply a catastrophe, in spite of all edifying teachings. The two disasters refer instead to the notion that the monk held of himself and of his master. When teachings are reduced to mere explanations, it is a disaster, because the monk is identified with his own intellect. When we identify ourselves with a system of ideas, with who we think we are, then we are paralyzed with the fear of losing ourselves in the face of death. But Rinzai has realized his awakening and surrendered to the simple happiness of being. He has ceased to identify himself with his own image and dwells in inner silence. He is not identified with his teachings, for they are not himself; they are only efforts to describe impersonally the way to peace.

Takata said of this koan: “Some come, others go. I am a stone on the road. Rinzai tells the monk: ‘You see yourself and me as two minds. Disaster and disaster. That is why you think a sword could upset us. A murderer might be able to cut off my head without blinking an eye, but I can also let my head be cut off without blinking an eye.’ Even when the waves and sea creatures attack you (for reality does not behave according to your expectations), your inner silence is unperturbed. To measure life with your intellect is as stupid as trying to empty the ocean with a bucket. Zen is the same, whether in the peace of a monastery or in the midst of combat. The disaster is not in the attack. Let go of the separate self and give yourself to the combat with joy, as if it were a dance with yourself.”

I brought the members of the troupe together and calmly informed them of the problem. I proposed that we walk out on the Tigress and find another theater where we could stage an honest performance with a genuine actress. With the exception of the Argentine singer, everyone agreed that it was degrading for us to serve the vanity of a capricious diva, and they decided to follow me.

The newspapers were chock-full of headlines announcing the end of the romance. Finally, someone had dared to defy the Tigress. . and her response was not long in coming. It was a low blow, something I had not expected at all. In several tabloids headlines appeared that said such things as “Avant-garde Artist Swindles the Tigress!” Others said I was in hiding, sought by the police. The diva herself was quoted as saying I had stolen a large sum of her money. In their legal consequences, these lies were harmless, but they certainly succeeded in tarnishing my image. I could have denied the libel strenuously, but in Mexico it seemed useless, because of the power of the proverb, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” So now I was a crook.

This insult created a breach in my intellect, like a koan. My feeling of shame became a good lesson. Until this point, my disputes with the Tigress had been a kind of game, a sort of artistic bargaining. By accusing her of laziness, it’s true that I was making fun of her, but with a sane humor and one that was based on truth. She had responded with the arms at her disposal: newspaper scandals and clever lies. I had discredited her artistically, but she had demolished me socially. I recalled her words spoken with great conviction during the night of our mezcal drunken session: “A small, weak boxer is in the ring with a big, strong adversary. The big guy starts to beat up the little guy. Now that little guy is me. When the big guy rushes at me for the KO, I pull a pistol out of one of my gloves and shoot him. Never fight an even battle!”

Another attack occurred, whether organized by her or simply a random act of violence inspired by the climate of tension. Late at night, unknown vandals threw rocks at my house, breaking all the windows. I rented an apartment in the suburbs and began to slink down public streets, breathing anxiously. I had the impression that a thug might jump out and shoot me at any moment. But after a few days, I became ashamed of giving way to such panic. I thought of a koan from the secret book: “Master Ungo meditated with his disciples in a place known as the Dragon Door. One day, one of the monks was bitten on the leg by a serpent. Master Botsugen said to Ungo: ‘How can your disciple be bitten by a serpent at the Dragon Door?’ Ungo replied by jerking up his leg, as if he had been bitten by a serpent, and calmly saying, ‘Ouch.’”

In China the mythical dragon is the guardian of hidden treasure. In order to attain immortality, the hero must conquer this powerful adversary. The terrestrial dragon grows wings and is transformed into the celestial dragon. In other words, the self cannot prevail until it has integrated and tamed unconscious drives.

Botsugen’s question insinuates that the perfect dragon (the enlightened monk) should not fall victim to the evils of the material world (the serpent’s bite), but Ungo avoids this trap, suggesting that awakening does not exempt us from animal nature. When he imitates being bitten, he demonstrates that it is a mistake to think of awakening as an escape from pain. When in pain, the awakened human being accepts it with an untroubled mind.

My understanding of this koan enabled me to accept my symptoms of fear without shame. I remembered another koan: “The Diamond Sutra^*11 says that when a person is ridiculed by others, the sins of their previous lives are the cause. Yet at that moment, by submitting to ridicule, the sins of their previous lives are erased. Is this so?” The response: “Repulsive idiot born through an anus!”

The sutra interprets evils of the present as the result of sins committed in previous lives and affirms that redemption and liberation reside in these very evils. Yet the disciple’s insulting reply means that it is useless merely to justify an evil by looking for its cause in previous lives. We must face the present difficulty before us immediately, without stopping to wonder about its causes or worrying about the consequences of our present actions. When confronted with an attack, what counts is a response that is unencumbered by mental doubts. If we allow even a hair’s breadth to appear between being and nonbeing, we lose our life.

This second koan returned me to myself. I understood that feeling fear was natural, but that this fear need not become cowardice. So I stopped slinking around and made a phone call to ANDA, the national actors union. Invoking my union rights, I demanded a meeting with the Tigress to decide who had the legal right to produce the show.

At ten in the morning the very next day, a noisy crowd was gathered around the entrance to ANDA. My actors were there as well as the actors of the rival troupe and a swarm of journalists. The diva did not deign to appear, but she had sent two muscular bodyguards. They gave me menacing looks and showed me the machine guns they had hidden in golf bags. As her representative at this dispute (which she felt certain of winning because of her political connections), she had sent the Argentine singer. Parroting his boss, he proclaimed my dishonesty in front of the union officials. When I realized that these bureaucrats were looking at me with ill-concealed contempt and that the mocking journalists were harassing me with their flashes, I decided to resort to the weapon of lies myself — but on a grander scale. Instead of limiting the scope of the scandal to a simple dispute among theater people, I decided to make it into a political affair that would affect the whole country.

“The Tigress has informed me that every two months, carrying a diplomatic passport, she travels to Switzerland in a Mexican military jet. She delivers a trunk full of gold, which the president has stolen from the public treasury, to be deposited in a Swiss bank.”

This caused such a stir that all the officials left their desks and went off to consult with their superiors. A deadly silence filled the building. Little by little, the journalists left. The Argentine was summoned to the telephone. He listened, nodding his head several times, and hung up. Looking toward me as if I were invisible, he left the building, followed by his associates and the two gorillas. The union officials finally returned with the verdict: Both rival theater troupes would perform the premiere of Lucretia on the same day at the same time with the same music, costumes, and sets. The public would decide which performance was the most deserving.

I understood what had happened. The Mexican people had long been whispering that their presidents stole the country’s money. A scandal involving the head of state could trigger a national crisis. I was certain the Tigress had received orders from very high up to put an end to this farce. As if by magic, the newspapers stopped attacking me and nothing more was heard about the affair.

An ambitious impresario signed a contract with us to open at the Teatro Lirico, a swank hall with more than a thousand seats. Because my actors were terrified by our enemy’s reputation as a witch, I asked a friend who was an expert in popular sorcery to “clean” the theater. He purified the orchestra pit and balcony with vast clouds of incense. Then he sprinkled holy water in the corridors, on the chairs, and in all the corners with a brush made of the fresh leaves of seven herbs. We were all relieved, but fear returned when we learned that in that same evening, my friend had to have emergency surgery to remove an enormous boil that had appeared on his anus.

I was lucky to find a very respected and talented actress for the role of Lucretia. She agreed on condition that she never be required to dress in tight clothing. We rehearsed at least ten hours a day and were ready with an impeccable show on opening night.

As for the Tigress, things went badly for her at first, because she hadn’t bothered to rehearse and wandered around the stage like a blind animal, listening to a prompter whose voice was so loud it could be heard all over the theater. But then, in defiance of censorship rules, she suddenly took off every stitch of clothing, sporting only a fluffed-up mass of pubic hair dyed green. This audacity brought her resounding success. Avid voyeurs flocked to the theater every night. My Lucretia Borgia ran for four months. Hers ran for two years.

When our run was over, I sent a telegram to the Tigress congratulating her on her success. She replied with another telegram inviting me to have a cup of coffee and pastry with her at the Frou-Frou.

The actors of both companies were bewildered by this, for they saw us as mortal enemies. For the occasion, I wore a white suit. The Tigress was “a bit late”—an hour and forty minutes, to be exact. She also appeared dressed entirely in white! We both burst out laughing, sensing that something miraculous was concealed in this apparent coincidence. We drank our coffee calmly and shared a tarte aux pommes. Public life was one thing, private life another. Now that the battle was over, we could communicate as simple human beings. A current of sympathy united us, like two old enemy soldiers reminiscing about the war.

“That was one glorious scandal!” she said. “Thanks to the war with you, I made a fortune. Please allow me to offer you a little gift.”

I knew I could not refuse, and I allowed her to put, on my left ring finger, a gold ring ornamented with a skull.