Where the Bird Sings Best

The Farthest Land

After crossing the Atlantic and passing through the Straits of Magellan, the ship rode icy Pacific currents along such a jagged coast that the Rabbi, with an ominous look, exclaimed, “Oy vey! This must be the ass of the world, and God has really kicked it!” Finally, they dropped anchor at the port of Valparaíso.

Teresa had played the mute for four weeks, so now her mouth felt heavy, weighed down by a boulder of stifled insults. Every single day on the rocking ship flooded with smoke she’d been forced to hear the shacharit (morning prayer) and the minchah (afternoon prayer), accompanied by the vulture screeches of the seasick mystics as they vomited. No matter what, they always had their gartels around their waists, those black silk cords used to divide the body in two, the spiritual parts — the hands, the heart, and the brain, worthy of serving the Most High — and the profane parts: the stomach, the sex, and the legs. They could transform any place at all, no matter how vulgar, into a schul or synagogue just so they could drone their prayers to God, hour after hour, all twenty-four: “Oh Terrible One, we carry out our 613 commandments so you do not fulminate us; we are just because we are sodden with fear; you guide us with stabs, bullets, and bites; teach us with your fury and your curses.”

Teresa hated God more than ever. Just look where the Ancient Cruel One had led them! What was the meaning of that port, devoid of flat ground, with thousands of houses that didn’t seem man-made, but like abscesses spreading along the sides of the hills? The Russians may have been dangerous, but at least they didn’t eat human flesh. But the Indians here, who knows? Maybe not cannibals, but thieves, all of them! Anyway, what did that matter when not even the crumbs were left of the few dollars Moishe Rosenthal had given them?

Now at least she wouldn’t have to rub elbows with the Jewish wives (who didn’t know how to live without swapping things — a wool vest for three sets of underpants, half a loaf of onion bread for six rotten oranges) invading the kitchen to fry their latkes, boil up some kasha, or bake matzo, slapping their children, dribbling out a constant stream of proverbs—“Spare the rod and spoil the child,” “The answer is always in the question,” “God punishes those He loves”—and scaring off sheidim from every spoon, knife, fork, plate, and casserole. Teresa paid a waiter from the second class to bring them goy food in pots. Seeing these renegades devour impure food, the immigrants kept their distance: they preferred being even closer to one another so they could leave a six-foot ring around the apostates.

While the family slept, Alejandro allowed the Rabbi to put his mouth in the center of his heart, so he could recite prayers that would navigate through his blood and purify his entire body.

When the ship entered the docking area, the four children ran to the handrail, slipping through the chattering Yiddish crowd who recoiled from them in disgust. With great dignity, Teresa took Alejandro by the arm and caught up with her excited heirs to look contemptuously at the port. Clustered around the gangway, people were selling bananas, grapes, cherries, and many other fruit with strange names — chirimoyas, nísperos, avocados, and caquis. Others were waving bouquets of herbs and flowers. Their clothes were tattered and they had no shoes. But at the same time they had no feathers, no bows, and no arrows. A bit further off, groups of elegant people under multicolored parasols were awaiting first and second-class passengers. There were ships loading and unloading Italians, Englishmen, Germans, Swedes, Frenchmen. Painted-up women were pulling on the arms of the sailors, dragging them toward the bars. In their luxurious construction, the buildings on the narrow flat area beyond the dock, unlike the poor houses covering the hillsides, resembled the mansions of Paris.

The city — civilized, flourishing in a transparent, caressing breeze, deliciously perfumed, between the glitter of the rocky mountain range and the murmur of the sea — made Teresa smile, even if her strenuous effort not to show it made her face look like a sun-drenched apple. And as an orchestra, which included guitars and a harp played a kind of polka to a clapping, shouting, dancing, handkerchief-waving audience, Alejandro and the children hugged Teresa because they were carried away by an irrepressible joy.

The disembarking passengers were received with hugs and kisses. A well dressed group in the style of the goyim, received the immigrants, waving pennants emblazoned with six-pointed stars. To each newcomer they gave a package of food and clothing. They kissed the strangers as brothers, wept, sang hymns in Yiddish, and moved off into the port. Teresa’s smile inverted into a bitter frown. She shook off her husband and children as if they were dust and was no longer mute: “Don’t start in with this idiocy! Remember, we’re not Jews anymore! We’ve reached Hell, and not a single devil is waiting for us!”

Picking up a suitcase she walked haughtily down the gangplank to go through with the customs formalities. Her family followed her, trying to imitate her painful dignity. No one checked their baggage. Some dark men with black moustaches stamped their passports and, laughing among themselves, pointed towards the exit door.

It was 9:00 a.m. They were in the middle of the street in Valparaíso, the farthest corner of the world, unable to speak a word of Spanish, with no money and no friends. What should they do? Just as she had in Paris, Teresa sat down on the ground, closed her eyes, and said, “Fix things up the best you can. I’m not here.”

Fanny, Lola, Benjamín, and Jaime looked at their father. He responded: “Well, I think she’s asking me to summon the Rabbi again so he can save our skin.”

On this occasion, the Rabbi was unsure. This world was unknown to him. He doubted. “If a wise man is one who knows that he doesn’t know, then at this moment I’m a wise man. Let’s see. Everything revolves around money and death. Look in your pockets, Alejandro; one golden key opens a thousand doors. Perhaps you’ve got one last banknote.”

My grandfather carefully searched his deep pockets. In the fold at the bottom of his leather coat, he found a tiny coin. Half a kopek: worthless.

Alejandro shut his eyes and dropped down to the ground to sit next to Teresa. A jubilant shout from the Rabbi made him jump to his feet. “Mazel tov! Half a kopek, marvelous! Adonai is calling us. Remember Exodus, Chapter 30:

And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying,

12 When thou takest the sum of the children of Israel after their number, then shall they give every man a ransom for his soul unto the Lord, when thou numberest them; that there be no plague among them, when thou numberest them.

13 This they shall give, every one that passeth among them that are numbered, half a shekel after the shekel of the sanctuary: (a shekel is twenty gerahs:) an half shekel shall be the offering of the Lord.

14 Every one that passeth among them that are numbered, from twenty years old and above, shall give an offering unto the Lord.

15 The rich shall not give more, and the poor shall not give less than half a shekel, when they give an offering unto the Lord, to make an atonement for your souls.

16 And thou shalt take the atonement money of the children of Israel, and shalt appoint it for the service of the tabernacle of the congregation; that it may be a memorial unto the children of Israel before the Lord, to make an atonement for your souls.

“Do you understand, Alejandro? A silver coin, half a shekel, half a kopek, the same symbol, rich and poor giving a half, the mortal half, while receiving the totality of eternal life. You thought you’d lost everything, but Adonai left in the darkest corner of your clothing what you really needed, the half shekel of the offering so you can enter the Sanctuary and establish the union that will liberate you from mortality. Courage! God is waiting for us! You, I, your family, we are seven, the golden candelabra, the menorah! Let us arrange ourselves and in proper order climb up to the top of that peak. Do you see the Temple? There we will deposit your obolus and receive from the Eternal One an impulse to the new life.”

Alejandro squinted, trying to see what the Rabbi was talking about, at the top of that peak, itself covered with clusters of houses. He could make out a gray, rectangular house of some size with a chimney that was pouring out white smoke. “The fire of sacrifices.” As usual, my grandfather completely believed whatever the Rabbi said. He knelt and, spreading his arms, made his way to Teresa, who stubbornly kept her eyes shut.

A chorus of crystalline voices accompanied their short, uncomfortable walk. A pack of dark, ragged children, among whom there were two or three blonds and skeletal dogs, surrounded them, begging for money at the top of their lungs: “A penny! A nickel! A loaf of bread!”

Suddenly a rotten peach exploded on Benjamín’s bald head. Everyone laughed and went on tossing garbage.

“Teresa, you know by now that the Rabbi always saves us. If you wish, just go on pretending he doesn’t exist, but do what I’m asking you to do with your eyes closed. Line up in the order he tells us and we will go to the top of that peak. There, God will give us the help we need.”

Teresa, tense, implacable, breathing only slightly, intent on being a statue of salt, neither moved nor answered. Alejandro knew that his wife’s will was inflexible, as did the twins. But when the black pulp of an old banana smashed against her stubborn face, my grandmother opened her ferocious eyes, roared, leapt like a wild beast, smacked the head of one of the dogs with her suitcase, caught the biggest boy, pulled down his pants, and turning him over her knee, slapped his buttocks until they were red. She let him loose when she thought the punishment was enough, so he could catch up to his pals who were fleeing at top speed.

With that terrible face that could stop an army, Teresa stared at her husband, sank Fanny and Lola between her breasts and said, trying to give her words the hardness of stone, “A-le-jan-dro-Jo-do-row-sky, it’s your fault we are where we are. That insanity about the Rabbi has led us to misery. Here, the advice of your ghost means nothing. And I don’t want us to go on living as parasites on the Jewish community. The past is done and gone! New world, new life! This is the last time I’ll ever accept help from that freak. I’ll line myself up as you ask, and we’ll march up to the top of the peak. Let’s see if up there the Most High Villain gives us the help we need in exchange for half a kopek. But I swear on my life that if nothing happens, I’ll leave Jaime and Benjamín with you, take the girls with me, and we’ll go to a bar in the port and be whores forever!”

Alejandro swallowed hard, tried to kiss Teresa’s hand, though she pulled it back in fury, and arranged the family in a line. Next to Teresa, Fanny, and next to Fanny, Lola on the far left. Next to him, Benjamín, and next to Benjamín, Jaime on the far right. The Rabbi stood in the center. “Now we have formed the golden candelabra. Our souls are the seven flames. Now, holding hands, we shall climb up to deposit the half kopek in the Temple.”

“First ask your Rabbi if he’s going to be the one who carries the bags.”

Fanny and Jaime laughed. The Rabbi immediately whispered to Alejandro, “The wise Hillel said: ‘If you wish to possess everything, you must not posses something that is nothing.’ Leave what you have behind!”

“Teresa, sweetheart, as a wise man said, in order to possess everything you must possess nothing. We have to abandon our baggage.”

“Is that what your Rabbi advises you to do? Let people rob the little you have left? Let them throw salt in your eyes, pepper in your nose, and stones in your heart! Let them pull your guts out of your belly, wrap them around your neck, and then hang you with them from a tree! I hope you turn into a bird and he turns into a cat so he can eat you alive, choke, and you both die together!”

“Enough, Teresa! You promised to obey him one last time!”

“It’s pretty certain we’re going to prostitute ourselves. You will ruin your life and the lives of your daughters. You will die of shame.”

“I believe in him. Let’s go!”

The street snaked upward among small, one- or two-story houses with window boxes filled with geraniums or ferns. Compared with the other hills, where mansions, gardens, and churches were clearly visible, this one had to be the most modest in Valparaíso. The Chileans were not aggressive. From their rooms, they watched the family march up the middle of the street holding hands as if they were part of a parade that had lost its body with only the head remaining. They smiled, held out glasses of water or wine or slices of melon. Teresa, huffing and puffing, forced the twins to accept nothing despite the fact that, under this sun that was stronger than anything she had felt before, she too was parched, her lips cracking.

The gray, rectangular building, with a tin chimney spouting white smoke, turned out not to be a temple but a military barracks, with two soldiers standing guard at its metal doors. Barely hiding his despair, Alejandro looked more carefully and realized that the chimney did not belong to the barracks but was attached to a run-down wooden house with a clay oven and a tavern with chairs. A bald old man showing his last three teeth was offering his merchandise, pointing to two baskets covered with empty flour sacks.

“Have faith,” said the Rabbi. “Nothing is given to us, we have to earn it. God hides so we will search for Him. By learning to see Him in everything, we are born. The temple is a military barracks because obeying the law of God is the only freedom. And this modest shack that has summoned us with the smoke of its purifying oven is a holy place, the altar of sacrifice. Give me the half kopek of ransom so that, in the name of the Jodorowsky family, I can deposit it in consecrated hands.”

When Teresa saw Alejandro fall into a trance, adopting the refined gestures, the high-pitched voice, and the burning gaze of the Rabbi, she began to tear out her hair. “Once upon a time I would have said My God, but now what can I say? I’ll kill myself! It’s better to be a dead lioness than a mangy, living dog.”

The Rabbi, with the smile of one blessed, responded, “If God gave us thirst, he will give us water. If He gave us teeth, he will give us bread. Come to the altar.”

Teresa, overcome with fatigue, followed her husband. The old toothless man took a triangular patty out of each basket and said, “Cheese, meat.”

The Rabbi had no knowledge of empanadas, a Chilean dish made of baked dough stuffed with chopped meat or cheese, but he shouted in astonishment, “Praised be He!” God was speaking to him in symbols. The most sacred sign, the Shield of David, was there before them! He sniffed the meat empanada: “This is the Eternal One manifest in matter.” He sniffed the cheese empanada: “And this is the Eternal One manifest in spirit.” From the hands of the old man he took the two triangles, and placed one on top of the other to form a six-pointed star. The Magen David, the union of heaven and earth, fire and water, body and soul. “God is the food we will never lack. And he asked each member of the family to take a bite at each of the six points. Then he let them eat until the symbol disappeared.

The old priest then began to recite in Spanish a psalm of gratitude, incomprehensible to the others: “Who’s going to pay for the two empanadas?”

The Rabbi asked the family to repeat, in a chorus, the holy words. Their mouths, perfumed by cheese, onion, and meat, sang thankfully.

“Who’s going to pay for the two empanadas?”

The old man stretched out his open hand, shaking it urgently. The Rabbi began to leave. “I’ve completed my mission. Give him the obolus, and the Eternal One will manifest Himself.” The Rabbi disappeared. Alejandro, smiling happily, deposited the half-kopek in the old man’s dried out fingers. The old man stared at the tiny coin. His face turned into an ocean of wrinkles, his mouth transformed into a grimace like a fallen half moon, and he was about to hurl an insult. But before he could open his mouth, the ground began to shake.

The shack’s lantern, hanging on a dark wire covered with fly shit, bounced around furiously. A rain of dry leaves fell; the dogs barked so loudly they seemed to cough up their intestines; out of the ground emerged monsters of dust. Then came a gigantic howl, accompanied by much more intense aftershocks. A few houses collapsed. The human screaming began, a mix of horror and pain. The entire port began to waltz. Immense waves threw the ships against the sea walls. No one could keep his footing. The peaks split open like ripe fruit, showing dark red cracks. Horses fell down the hillsides.

Thousands of citizens blackened the streets, running from one place to another, keeping clear of the falling walls. Gas tanks split open. Explosions and huge flames magnified the hysteria. The shaking began again, even more ferocious this time. The entire harbor leaned to starboard and to port like a ship in a storm. No building was left undamaged. The military structure collapsed. The two soldiers stood at attention until a flying piece of sheet metal cut off their heads.

Alejandro herded the children toward an iron bench, bolted into the ground. There, piled on top of one another, they waited for the earthquake to pass. My grandfather began to recite some words dictated to him by the Rabbi. The disembodied one knew a treatise on magic that could calm the fury of tremors: KADAKAT, ARAKADA, DARENAK, AKESERA, KAMERAD, ADAKARA, TAKADAK. All of them, spun around and trembling with terror, repeated the formula.

Teresa went mad with rage. She stood up on the bench and held her balance with the skill of a sailor. It didn’t matter to her that trees, chunks of cement, windows, pieces of glass, and pieces of pipe as sharp as swords were falling all around her. She raised her fists toward the sky, bellowing, “May all the curses your murderous mouth has poured out since you created this world fall on you! Look at how much you’re destroying just to get me to submit! But you will never make me give in! Make the entire planet explode if you like, it doesn’t matter to me! What can you do to a woman with a withered heart? Kill me once and for all, because not even earthquakes can make me open my soul to you!”

She was foaming at the mouth, her face was as white as a sheet, and she was trembling even harder than the ground. Alejandro grabbed her by the calves and pulled her down into his arms. With the strength of a madman he pushed her under the bench, silencing her with a desperate kiss.

A deafening screech announced that the peak was splitting open. The old man, squealing like a hog, was swallowed by a crack. The iron bench went downhill, still bolted to an enormous chunk of the hillside. The Jodorowsky family gave a strange scream: a mix of Alejandro’s religious fervor, Teresa’s rage, the terror of Lola and Benjamín (both too delicate for these quakes), and the euphoria of Fanny and Jaime. To these two, they were on a toboggan going faster and faster. Their only thought was to get as much fun as possible from the ride down, never considering that awaiting them at the bottom was a collision that would smash them to atoms or sink them in the sea.

They got out from between the feet of the others and stood up on top of the iron seat, balancing as if they were on the crest of a wave. Tons of falling stone destroyed street lamps, crushed dogs and people, and demolished houses, leaving in their wake a trail of ruins and blood. They were nearly spinning out of control as Teresa, under the bench with Benjamín and Lola, who were sheltered under the roof of her breasts, cursed even louder. Alejandro, making a superhuman effort, got up from the bench, took hold of Fanny, and protected her with his own body. Jaime would not allow himself to be caught. He leaped off the bench and ran to the far edge of the sliding peak, shouting triumphantly and dodging large bits of wall, pieces of glass, roof beams, and human body parts all being tossed into the air by his vehicle.

They smashed against a shoe factory. The building, a modest structure, made principally of concrete slabs held up by thin columns, yielded to the chunk of mountain on impact and acted as an elastic brake, capturing the mass as if it were held in a cradle. The bench finally stopped, still perfectly horizontal. During the entire slide downhill, it would have been possible to hold a glass of water without spilling a drop.

“A Miracle!” said the Rabbi. “Tohu va’Bohu, chaos is an egg from which order is born! The new life begins here!”

Without hearing him, Alejandro remained with his family under the bench for an eternity, the time of the aftershock. It might have been seconds, minutes, or hours. He never knew and never tried to find out. His people had known innumerable catastrophes, and an age-old instinct made him give himself over to true time, the time that cannot be measured, where twenty years pass like an hour and a second can last a thousand years. He knew that the pain and pleasure of an entire life didn’t last more than an instant, but that each step he took on always-foreign lands took an eternity.

When the ground stopped moving, there came a silence that wounded their eardrums and then began to rise, accompanied by the laughter of Jaime, who invited them to come down from the peak by throwing all kinds of shoes at them. There was a braid of sorrow, thousands of human voices in protest, all mixed up with the howls of dogs throughout the country, up mountains and down in valleys, and the presence of death, the invisible tarantula covering Valparaíso.

Alejandro checked on each of them, then came out from under the bench and gave Jaime a slap. It was the first and last in his life, but nevertheless, that slap marked a turn, inching towards a definitive separation. Alejandro dug into the ruins to see if anyone could be saved. He found crushed, deformed, ripped-open bodies. He overcame his intense fascination — something, his animal nature perhaps, impelled him to dig through the detritus and smell the blood, see the mystery of the body, the secret viscera revealing their forms in broad daylight — because he heeded the Superior Will and believed that what God placed within the dark interior of the organism, protected from prying eyes, should be respected.

Seeing what has been revealed is an obligation, but the other thing, which appears in the misery of catastrophe, should be avoided. We must be prudent with our senses. There are things we cannot observe or hear or smell or touch or eat. A great vigilance is asked of us with respect to our organs of perception and also with respect to our desire, our need, our feelings, and our ideas. We cannot think without limitations. “Concern yourself with what it is permitted to know and forget mysterious things.” Ah, the good Talmud!

A cry led Alejandro through the wreckage, and he found a man with a roof beam buried in his chest. His skin, getting whiter by the second, contrasted with the river of blood flowing out of him. The dying man held on tight to the handle of a leather suitcase. With the wise gaze of those who are entering the kingdom of death, he offered it to Alejandro, whispering words my grandfather couldn’t understand but could only feel. The man was giving him the most precious thing in his life, the tools of his work. Why? In the worker’s eyes there was a profound need and, at the same time, the intense happiness of making an offering of his conscience to death, like a wild flower, a sacrifice pure and simple, eternal disappearance, a debt repaid, serpent on the rock, bird in the sky, ship at sea, without leaving a trace, nothing to hang on to, only a small legacy, to everyone, to someone, his instruments, more valuable than existence, his true being. Knowing that hands as dutiful as his own would continue to work with those little angels of wood and metal — wise, useful, holy — would allow him to sink into the abyss with peace.

Alejandro opened the suitcase, took out the tools, kissed them and pressed them with respect to his heart, while the dying shoemaker, with only a tiny thread of voice left, gave him their names and uses in a Spanish so full of love that Alejandro understood it as if it were Russian. Hammer to flatten the leather, pincers to place the model over the last, small pliers for working the backstitch, curved awl to form the instep, spatula to spread the wax in the heels, chisel to cut the sole, stitching awl to perforate the leather, round pliers, gouge, a box of shoe polish, a small packet of pitch, and a bobbin of linen. Seeing my grandfather put the tools back into the suitcase and take possession of them, the man gave a long sigh and gave up his spirit with a smile.

The Rabbi said, “Do you see, Alejandro? God has given you a profession. You are a shoemaker.” My grandfather clasped the suitcase to his chest and burst into convulsive weeping.

Teresa and the children called him back at the top of their lungs. They were both curious and afraid. Alejandro, scrambling over beams as sharp as knives, reached the peak and climbed up to the iron bench. His family, sitting there as if in a theater, pointed to a figure that was approaching them, jumping along and shaking its backside to wag a hairy tail that hung from its clown costume. It spoke like a human being, but its face, with its narrow, prominent forehead, its sunken little eyes, its flat nose, its big mouth, and its pricked ears, was like a monkey’s. “Hurry up, come with me! There could be another tremor!” it was shouting in Spanish. Teresa shook her head and signaled that she did not understand. The simian repeated everything in Italian, French, German, English, Dutch, Portuguese, Polish, and finally in Russian. “Hurry up, come with me! There could be another tremor!”

They all ran toward this strange polyglot. He had them board a covered wagon decorated with trees made of sheet metal, resembling a tropical forest where a monkey-like clown seemed to fly over the green treetops. He translated the large red letters that covered the rear door: “Monkey Face. Individual Circus.” Then he gave a sigh of relief.

“Whew! How lucky we were! On this street they all died. But my wagon and the horses were left untouched. But we’ve got to get out of here right away. After the first quake, there always comes another. Without a first, there can’t be a second, as the flea said. You two sit next to me and put the four kids on the sacks of straw — excellent food for horses. Now, hooves: do your duty! Giddy up, Whitey! Giddy up, Blacky.”

The horse named Whitey was black, and Blacky was white. The beasts, thanks to the minimal energy they got from the “excellent food,” moved their bones as quickly as they could, a weary trot, and huffing and puffing they left Valparaíso. As they reached a valley of dark, almost red, earth, where the trees had hard leaves that glittered like kitchen knives, the second tremor erupted. There was a terrifying roar from the belly of the earth, dense clouds of dust, cracks that opened in long mordant grins, and they heard the howl of the victims being crushed in the port.

“That’s how the damned must howl in hell,” said the simian. And since both his hands were busy keeping the wagon from turning over, he crossed himself with his right foot. He was so flexible that his big toe could reach his forehead. Finally the tremors ceased. The crickets and birds sang. Whitey and Blacky, busy with their difficult digestion, went trotting along.

“I’m not very happy. What with this earthquake, the business is failing. Between Valparaíso and Santiago there are many villages where I put on my show. But now the peasants are probably making for the port to loot the houses and bodies before the army moves in. But in the end, when the going gets tough…”

He laughed and suddenly changed the subject: “So then, the fact is that none of you speaks a word of Spanish, right? But do you have friends in Chile, relatives, some society, someone to take you in?”

“No, sir.”

“Got any money left?”

“Not even a half kopek.”

“Clothes to sell?”

“Just what we’re wearing.”

“Any jewels, some valuable object?”

“These shoemaker’s tools.”

“Indeed not, my dear sir. With those tools, you can earn your living in Santiago. And what about you, madam?”

Seraphim — that’s what Monkey Face said his name was — looked toward the deep crevice between Teresa’s breasts, where a nickel-plated steel chain hung. My grandmother, to my grandfather’s surprise — he’d never seen her do it before — blushed. Since everything in her was exaggerated, the flow of blood, erasing her whiteness, made her face look like a mask of red clay. The children burst into giggles. Seraphim stopped Whitey and Blacky with a whistle, and with his hands together as if praying he leaned over Teresa, muttering, “The Holy Virgin of dawn,” and a deep wail, like the howl of a wounded animal, seemed to escape her insides.

My grandmother broke that strange moment with a tremendous belch: “I’ve gone crazy, too! This damned earthquake has made me forget my children. They haven’t eaten for ages.”

Monkey Face opened a cardboard box, took out four bananas, and gave them to the children. To Teresa and Alejandro he passed two apples. When they’d all finished eating, my grandmother extracted the old watch from the abyss of her bosom. Inside were the seven trained fleas: Baroco, Barono, Naprepeshev, Sedila, Casque, Barila, and Semudalalá. Semudalalá was the funny one. Before she bit, she executed a series of twenty-six somersaults.

Under the curious eyes of the family but especially of Monkey Face, she placed her right wrist close to the open watch case and called: “Baroco!” A flea jumped out to bite her in the spot where pulses are taken. She then put down her left wrist and called out “Barono!” Another flea jumped out to begin its dinner. She modestly raised her skirt and placed the watch case in the concave space behind her right knee.

Seeing the gleam of skin like white marble, Seraphim bowed again, praying: “The Virgin of the Snows!”

“Your dinner, Naprepeshev!” And the third flea jumped. The other leg was offered to Sedila, who also obeyed the call. Then my grandmother opened her blouse and allowed her two mother-of-pearl watermelons out. Monkey Face swooned and fell on his back among the sacks of straw. Alejandro instantly took off his jacket and covered his wife. “Casque, Barila!” And the fifth and sixth fleas each took possession of a nipple. Teresa pushed aside her husband, pulled up her skirt, pulled her drawers down a bit, revealed her deep navel, and with a childlike grin whispered, “Semudalalá.” The last flea executed its series of somersaults and burrowed into the delicious hole.

The children applauded. Alejandro perspired. Seraphim began to tremble like a man possessed by a fever of 104. Once their meal was finished, the seven fleas, having received no further orders, hopped toward their refuge. Teresa closed the watch case, sank it once again between her bosoms, and straightened up her clothes. The simian was panting. Alejandro, soaked from head to foot, lost his head. His eyes became bloodshot. His fly inflated. It seemed as if the monkey man had infected him with his fever. Teresa put on the rest of her clothing. Her husband took her by the hand, saturated with an authority that would have tamed a typhoon, made her jump down from the wagon, and dragged her toward a small hill covered with cactus. They disappeared from sight behind the spiny plants.

The monkey man let go the reins and again fell backward onto the sacks of straw, as if in ecstasy. The children got off the wagon to follow their parents’ footprints, at a respectable distance. It would have been impossible for them to pass through the cactus tunnel without being pierced by thorns; conversely, the intensity of Alejandro’s passion enabled him to open a path with impunity, leaving in his wake a trail dripping thick, green slime. The children followed it, carefully marking each step so they wouldn’t slip and have their eyes pierced by cactus spines.

The wind changed direction and, along with the viscous creaking of the torn cactus plants, it carried the voice of their father, a furious, painful, sexually aroused, lulling, insulting, begging voice: “You’re mine, only for me, do you understand? Something weird happened to you with that monkey. You showed him your teats and your navel. How is it possible? No one should see you, not even a monster. You are for my eyes, for my touch, for my mouth. I want no mysterious things. Wrap your will around your waist; don’t let madness take control of your sex — no disorder, no strange temptations. Give everything to me!”

In his jealous tone, there were black clouds, lightning bolts, wild gusts of wind. As he spoke, he shouted, sang, undressed his wife, tossing aside her clothes as if they were the sweaty skin of a sugary fruit. The children, picking up each item of clothing, reached the top of the hill and then saw their parents rolling, intensely coupled, over the sea of spines. When the steely points touched their skin, they burned, and the thick, hostile plants burst open to become slimy, fragrant cushions. Alejandro was moving his hips so hard he made the mountain shake.

“Take me in! Everything! Farther in! Farther still! Down to the infinity of your depth! Try to swallow my skeleton!”

It was his desperate desire for Teresa’s skin to split open and cover him like a wing, dissolving him in her blood. Then he could make his way through her totally, then nothing of her would be denied to him. He wasn’t seeking pleasure. What he sought was the explosion of his wife into thousands of burning crevices, that the pleasure he was going to give her would splatter her soul.

He moved furiously, more like a madman than an animal. With each lurch of his hips he seemed to want to give life. Enormous prickly husks fell onto his tensed back, sounding like the cracking of a whip, but it didn’t matter to him. Teresa corresponded by slapping his ribs with her inflamed bosoms, ravaging his waist between her mare-like thighs, moving her hips in a voracious grinding. But Alejandro’s despair would not abate; the more he gave, the more was asked of him. He knew his wife kept a secret, unconquerable citadel. Now his hip thrusts sounded like shots. It seemed my grandmother’s pelvic bones were cracking one by one. Attracted by the sugary juice of the smashed cactuses, hundreds, thousands of lizards began to gather, a green and shiny blot around the couple like a living halo. All those tiny tongues savoring the sap made the glassy sound of a stream. My grandfather could go no further. He threw his head back, arching his spine as if he wanted his hoarse whine to pierce the center of heaven, and sank himself totally into his wife’s stomach. She gave such a lurch that it tossed him on his back six feet way, with his sex exploding in a white bush.

“Don’t make me pregnant again! One more life is one more death! I don’t want to manufacture corpses for the Murderer!”

The semen fell onto the vegetal magma in thick, heavy drops that sank in and created small, ephemeral green crowns. From each of them was born a white butterfly. The tangle of white wings tried to seek out the light, but the lizards skillfully leaped up and carried all of them off, dying in their moist jaws.

Alejandro regained consciousness. He sank his head between Teresa’s bosoms and began to laugh shamefully. She calmed him, as if he were a child: “It’s nothing, silly boy. It’s the earthquake, it’s this new land, another sky, another sun. Soon we’ll get used to things and be just as we were. Come on, get dressed.”

The children cautiously approached their parents to hand them their clothing. Teresa checked to see if the seven fleas were in their place and, satisfied, she covered herself. Her husband as well. They took the children by the hands and went back to the wagon, strolling slowly as if they were parading through the florid gardens on the banks of the Dnieper in a year without pogroms.

Monkey Face, having recovered from his fainting spell, waited for them to climb aboard and then set the horses into motion again. “Get up there, Whitey! Get up there, Blacky!” Then, his tiny eyes filled with humility and sadness, he begged the couple: “Please, Doña Teresa and Don Alejandro, don’t misunderstand me. Don’t ascribe to me any bestial instincts. I’ve never known a woman. Besides what woman would want to be with me with this face of mine? I’m chaste, and despite being thirty I have no more experience than a child. Madam, allow me to explain my reactions. There is nothing lustful in them. According to what I’ve been told, my mother tossed me into a garbage can because I was ugly. Was she poor? Rich? Sick? A victim of rape or incest? I’ll never know. A beggar found me and dropped me off at the Red Cross. I caused a stir. I was two days old but I was covered with hair. They did all sorts of tests on me to figure out if I was a superior kind of monkey or a degenerate human. They accepted the second hypothesis. I regret it to this day.

“If they had chosen to declare me a highly evolved animal, I would have had a better life: luxury cages, first-class education, fame, worldwide respect. I was declared human, but the National Orphanage received me grudgingly and did very little to keep me alive. I grew up in a room smaller than a cage in the zoo. The guards only spoke to me to mock me, and the orphans only to teased me. And how could it be otherwise, when even the dogs barked and the cats hissed with their hair standing on end when they saw me? The only friends I had were a spider, a mouse, and a pigeon with a broken wing. When there were official parades, national holidays, Labor Day, the anniversary of the naval battle of Iquique, they left me locked up in the orphanage and absolutely forbade me to appear.

There, in the alienation and isolation of the vast building, where the dark corners hid foul perils and the shadows were as accusing as judges, I had no other refuge but the Chapel of the Three Marys. It was a long gymnasium converted into a temple. On the altar reigned three virgins. Since the guards were men, and in the orphanage the boys lived in one building and the girls in another, those statues were the only women I’d ever seen in my short life. One was white, made of marble, the Virgin of the Snows. The next was red porcelain, the Virgin of the Dawn. And the third was black, carved out of ebony, the Virgin of the Night. All beautiful, with the sweetest smiles. Taking advantage of the solitude, I climbed up on the altar to embrace them with my small arms and to cover their mouths with kisses, imagining my mother’s lips. The marble, porcelain, and ebony did not have the warmth of flesh, but to me that coldness seemed much warmer than the contempt of the guards and the orphans.

“Once I managed to steal a bottle of sleeping pills from the infirmary. Late that night, I slipped through the corridors, entered the chapel, and, kneeling before the three Marys, I decided to end my insignificant life. Just as I was about to throw a handful of pills into my mouth, a gush of milk bathed my face. At first, I saw nothing, blinded by the surge of warm liquid in my eyes. Then I realized that the milk was pouring from one of the breasts of the Black Virgin.

“When that miracle ceased, another began: the White Virgin began to weep. Two streams of water ran from her eye sockets. I leapt to kiss those tears, trembling with fever. When I licked the last drops, I saw that myriad rubies were sprouting from the forehead of the Red Virgin. I thrust my chest forward so it would be stained with that precious blood.

“In their own way, my three mothers had spoken to me: ‘Place your physical pain and your spiritual suffering in us, and we will nourish you with our love. You are not alone in the world. You exist for us. For that reason, then, live for us.’ And I did just that. I cast aside the poison and decided to live. That miracle for me, for me alone, would be the secret attraction that would allow me to face society. God the Father had abandoned me, but the Holy Maternal Trinity, in its infinite pity, adopted me. I thought: I’ll have a better chance if, instead of trying to go higher, I dash downhill. Instead off fighting to attain my legitimate human place, I should exaggerate my animal behavior, make myself more monkey than human, pass over their jokes, abase myself much more than they could abase me. If I exaggerate my sarcasm, losing my dignity in the process, aligning myself with the grotesque, they will find me sympathetic. Even if my isolation is complete, I will be surrounded by laughter.

At dinner, after an anemic soup or a thin stew, all the orphans had the right to dessert — guava jam or quince syrup with cheese or macaroons or, in winter, fritters in hot syrup — everyone except me. I was always served, accompanied by malicious giggles, a banana. That way my atrocious face was put on display. It was as if every afternoon, I was trying to hide my simian aspect — with refined gestures and expressions that were all too delicate — and they were unmasking me. As the saying goes, ‘You can dress a monkey in silk, but he’s still a monkey.’

“There I was, hunched over, my eyes fixed on the banana. And I didn’t eat it. I was going to sleep without a dessert I wanted badly. This time, when they placed the humiliating fruit before me, I commended myself to the Three Marys and let a stream of spittle pour out. I beat my chest, I sniffed the banana exaggeratedly, I made befuddled faces, I rubbed it all over my body as if it were soap, I tried to eat it unpeeled, and I made fierce squeals of disgust. Finally, I peeled it and studied the yellowish flesh, in a trance, as if I were seeing God Himself. I stuck my tongue out as far as it would go, I licked my lips, I bit, and chewing with the greatest pleasure, I fell back on the tabletop, scratching my rear.

“The entire orphanage roared with laughter and applause. I’d won my first battle. From that moment on, I would be more monkey than any monkey. After many, many hours of practice, I learned to use my feet in the same way as people who’ve lost their hands. One day, I could eat the banana using only my lower extremities. What a triumph! To see me repeat the trick, the boys gave me their desserts. I could enjoy myself to the fullest and eat as many as I wanted, the only price being occasional indigestion.

Soon I had to expand my repertoire — every day I had to eat the banana a different way. With rage: I bit ferociously, interrupting myself to chew with a big grin. This mixture of hate and pleasure won over the audience. With anguish: after hiding the banana, apparently without realizing it, under my napkin, I howled as I looked everywhere for it, even between my legs. My wailing broke their hearts, and when I finally lifted the napkin and squealed with joy, everyone applauded. But the number that was most popular, that I had to repeat innumerable times, accepting not only desserts but also marbles, tops, cup-and-ball games, and picture cards, was the poisoned banana act. I’d gobble it down like a starving man, overwhelmed to have something sweet into my mouth, a nip to catch a teeny-tiny chunk between my teeth (laughter) and then chew it for a long time as if it were huge (more laughter), swallow it to the tune of a satisfied belch and, a second later, to clutch my stomach as if attacked by an atrocious pain, then twisting up, screaming my lungs out. Overcoming my suffering, I’d drool again, smile, and take another bite. So from piece to piece, from belch to belch, from cramp to cramp, I increased the intensity of the attacks until I died. A highly celebrated death because, in the greatest pain, with my muscles tense, with my eyes rolled back, and with a horrible expression on my face, I would take one final bite of the murderous banana before bashing it majestically against my forehead. So, my popularity grew right along with my alienation. All human gestures were prohibited. Everyone thought that, by giving me little bags of peanuts, they were making me happy.

“One afternoon, the director of the orphanage had dinner with us, an obligation stated in some paragraph in the rules and regulations. He saw me perform. The number he caught was ‘The Bitter Banana.’ In this one, I, the poor, naïve monkey, hungry, deluded, thought I’d found the sweetest banana of all. I peeled it enthusiastically and raised it to my lips. Yuck! What a letdown! It tasted like bile! Then I walked around the tables, picking up as many sugar bowls as I could carry. I went back to my seat and began to pour sugar on the banana, a little, a lot, a ton, rivers of it, but no matter how much I sweetened its surface, it stayed bitter inside. I ended up, helpless, howling not like a monkey but like a whipped dog. Thanks to a little slice of onion I kept hidden in the palm of my hand, I could cry real tears whenever I rubbed my eyes.

“Amid the guffaws and whistles that cheered my misfortune, there was someone else weeping: the director. My act had touched a nerve. He got up from the table, called me over, and in a friendly way led me by the hand to his office, a mysterious, terrible, sacred place where no orphan ever set foot. The room, painted dark green, was Spartan: a filing cabinet, some diplomas displayed on a wall, a picture of the president of the Republic, a metal desk, a vase with white roses, three leather armchairs, and, on a small side table, the photograph of a young woman wearing a wedding dress. Her skin was transparent, almost luminous, and her blonde curls peeked out from beneath her white veil.

“The director asked me: ‘What’s your name, my boy?’

“‘Seraphim, sir.’

“‘Why? That name doesn’t go well with you.’

“‘I was given that name so that in my ugliness there would be at least one beautiful thing.’

“‘I understand. Seraphim, I hope you know you have a great talent. You are a real artist. What you did in the dining room has a deep meaning. It is, neither more nor less than, the picture of the life lived by all of us poor mortals. We try to sweeten it, but the agreeable part stays on the outside because life is always bitter within. Look at that photograph. She was my wife. I loved her as only a man thirty years older than his wife knows how to love. I was forty-seven, and she seventeen. To say I idolized her is to say nothing. She agreed to marry me; the great number of years that separated us mattered not a bit to her. She made me young again, I assure you of it. Every caress took years off me. Everything was sweet until reality revealed its bitter innards. Three days after our wedding, Rocío, in a fit of joy, started to dance. She tripped and fell out the window. We were living in an apartment on the tenth floor. An idiotic tale, a small slip, and an ocean of gall. I’ve spent years trying to get over it, trying to have fun, to love again. Impossible. Like you, I have nothing left but to howl at the fruit that can never satisfy me.’

“‘I’m very sorry for you. The lady was very pretty. Given my situation, I envy you, Mr. Director. Those three days will be eternal in your memory. I’ll never live anything like that, not even three minutes.’

“‘There’s another lesson you’ve taught me, Seraphim: things can always get worse. I like you and I’m going to do something for you. I think you have a profession. You’re a good clown. You can make a living from your jokes. I’m going to give you a wagon and two horses so you can wander the roads. By making faces, you’ll earn money. Tell me how you’d like to decorate the wagon and what name you’d like to have painted on it. I’ll have the workshop people do the job.’ He pulled a bottle of pisco out of one of the desk drawers. ‘Get out of here, Seraphim, I’m going to get drunk.’

“And that’s exactly what happened. He gave me this wagon. I never saw him again, but I found out he’d committed suicide by jumping out of the same window. I’ve been traveling the roads for many years now, just as he wanted. People are poor. When I pass the hat around, I pick up, along with a few pennies, a carrot, a fresh egg, a couple of pears. And that’s how I’ve been living. Once the show was over, no one ever came over to talk to me. Why would they? I had to content myself with exchanging whinnies with my faithful Whitey and Blacky. I really suffered when they died of old age, but the love I had for them didn’t keep me from slicing up their meat to dry in the sun to make jerky. My stomach was their grave.

“Luckily, I’d saved some money and replaced them with another pair of horses of the same colors. Putting on shows in Valparaíso, I realized that in the red-light zone there were sailors of all nationalities walking around not knowing a word of Spanish. They stood there, mute, getting drunk with the prostitutes. Sometimes they showed snapshots of women, children, dogs, and they’d wave them around, letting out alcoholic hiccups. That’s where I found another opportunity to get a bit of human warmth: I became an interpreter. I prayed to the Three Marys to help me find an instructor who could teach me lots of languages. The miracle happened: I found the Anarchist, a wise and generous man who taught me quickly and for nothing.

“I then divided my work in two parts. During the summer and the spring, I was a clown. During the fall and the winter, a translator, a mascot for the whores, sailors, and smugglers. It’s true that no one bothered to get to know my heart; all they were interested in was for me to transpose what they were feeling from one language to another, that’s all. Another accompanied solitude, but closer and closer. I could feel on my untouched skin the heat of their breath soaked in tobacco and alcohol. A minimal contact for normal beings, but enormous for me. Do you understand me now? Thanks to the earthquake, for the first time, someone has boarded my smelly wagon.

“When you’re all alone, you don’t take care of yourself, and I confess I don’t wipe myself or wash very often. When you, madam, blushed, I saw the Virgin of Dawn. When you fed your fleas and revealed your white flesh, I confused it with the Virgin of the Snows. I know that someday you’ll turn black — I can’t imagine how — and through you the Virgin of the Night will speak. My three saints have sent you. Our meeting was miraculous. Tell me, please, what do your fleas know how to do besides answering to their names?”

“They know how to jump through burning hoops, play tambourines, play ball, and tell the future.”

“Fabulous! You are just what the doctor ordered! The solitary circus is going to expand. If we join together and Madame Teresa presents her little animals, we’ll be a hit in Santiago and the other big cities. Monkey Face and Madame Ochichornia with Her Magic Fleas! We’ll earn a lot of pesos, which we’ll split equally. And that way you two can feed your family.”

Alejandro listened to all that not knowing how to react, but the children were fascinated. Teresa, uncharacteristically nervous and indecisive, felt a tingle. To turn herself into a fortune teller was an idea that — she had no idea why — filled her with joy. Seeing that his proposition wasn’t immediately and indignantly refused, Monkey Face sighed with relief.

“Without a no, there is still the possibility of a yes. Wonderful! I’m going to suggest something good for you. In Santiago, I have an empty room where you can stay and a few neighbors who can be useful to you, among them the Anarchist. Don Alejandro will look for a corner where he can set up his shoe shop, and I’ll introduce you to a dwarf lady who can take care of the children while you, Madame Ochichornia, go on tour with me and return every week with a good amount of money and food. We’re partners! Get up there, Whitey! Get up there, Blacky! We have to be there tomorrow afternoon!”

Lola seemed to hear the flies on that road singing, in tiny female voices, a celestial melody.

Seraphim lived in a tenement in the Independencia neighborhood. At the entrance there was a sign that read Society of Free Brothers and Sisters. We are not the State. When the Spanish word for tenement, conventillo, was translated into Russian for them as “little convent,” Alejandro and Teresa did not understand the name. The place was filthy and miserable. Its architecture seemed more inspired by a prison than by a temple, with a long central passageway and rooms arranged like jail cells along it. The families lived packed into those spaces without windows, spaces that at the same time were living room, bedroom, kitchen, and latrine.

“The Anarchist will explain the situation better than I can. Chile is not Europe. Here there are two separate realities. A few people live in paradise, and all the rest live in the greatest misery. Only the rich can become even richer; all we poor folk can expect is to become even poorer.”

“The Anarchist?”

“First, settle into this room, then I’ll introduce you. I’ll bring in some bags of straw you can use as beds. Other furniture you’ll have to make out of some empty boxes I’ve picked out of the market garbage. Here is a hammer and some nails. And also some onions, goat cheese, carrots, and a little pea soup. Try to use the charcoal stove as little as possible. It’s bad for your lungs. Organize the space, and I’ll come back to pick you up so you can meet your neighbors. Oh yes, I’d forgotten! In this hole in the corner, you can take care of your needs. It’s not very appetizing to mix the smells of the food on its way in with the smells of the food on its way, but that’s how the owners did it to save money on plumbing and make a few more rooms. Money calls the tune. Anyway, you’ll see that you’ll get used to it more quickly than you think.”

My grandparents were happy. No matter how horrible, better a roof over your head than no roof. They had a few morsels of food, an interpreter, nice neighbors, perhaps, and new professions. What more did they need to restart their lives in this unknown land? Teresa, in a short time, used the boxes to make a table, chairs, and dressers. Meanwhile, Alejandro prepared, with great dedication, his shoemaker’s bench. When Monkey Face returned with the bags of straw, he also brought some pieces of fabric, thread, and needles, so my grandmother could sew them together and make quilts, tablecloths, and curtains. He also gave them a collection of empty jars they could use as pots and dishes. He immediately brought them to visit their neighbors. They began with the Anarchist. Monkey Face explained:

“People say that this gentleman is a member of one of the richest families in Chile, but he got disgusted with money obtained by exploiting the poor. The fact is that he came to live in our tenement because he was attracted by the name of the neighborhood: Independencia. And instead of earning abominable pesos, he invents new professions so we can earn a living. In exchange for that, we pay his rent and give him food. You’ll see: he’s a great man. He was one of the few — I can count them with the toes of one foot — to recognize my human intelligence. A wise man who knows more than thirty languages, he taught me just what was absolutely necessary of several and made me into an interpreter. Money, love, food, vice: what more is there to know? We, his disciples, have formed the Committee of Brothers and Sisters, which does not consider freedom “rebellion,” but rather the retention of an imagination without limits under the restrictions imposed by power. Well, he’ll explain things better. Step inside, there’s no problem here.”

He opened the door of Room 9, where it was written, “No Name. Anarchist. Inventor of Professions.” They were received by a short man of undetermined age, bald, with thick glasses under long black eyebrows. He was biting his fine lips and shaking his pale, almost blue fingers, stained with nicotine. The walls of this room were hidden by piles of books that went from the floor to the ceiling. Instead of chairs, there were encyclopedia volumes. The tables were also a mountain of books, as was the object that should have been a bed.

“Greetings, brother Russians. Your homeland, once profound, now mobilizes the new, worldwide error: truth gagged by a centripetal power dictating relationships of vertical obedience. Luckily, you, pariahs of history, have fallen into the best company and belong, from now on, to our anarchist fraternity. But let us understand one another well.”

Alejandro and Teresa, their hair half standing on end, their feet frigid, lost in a miserable neighborhood of Santiago de Chile, the farthest corner of the world, listened to that extravagant being perorate in the most refined Russian they’d ever heard. About politics, they knew nothing. When they heard the “let us understand one another well” part, they tried to dissimulate their donkey faces by opening their eyes wide and cocking, with an index finger, the pavilion of their ear.

“We are not the sort of anarchists who rebel against God, Science, or the State. None of that. That struggle only garners for the poor a rain of beatings and bullets. The State, and through the State, Capital, whatever form it takes, has for two or three centuries won that war. Nothing will change the course of the Industrial Era. The worms have begun to eat the cheese, and no one can stop them. Production will not cease until the complete deterioration of the planet. Few will survive. In a near future, the poor will perhaps have better clothing, housing, and food, but they will still be poor. Which is to say, more and more in debt to power, if not paying with blood and lungs, then giving away something as precious as their laughter and their intelligence. The poor man will become a comfortable, serious fool. The obvious conclusion? The main thing is to survive! That the collapse of society doesn’t destroy us. But sit down, and let me explain.”

As stools, he passed them two histories of philosophy, one in French, the other in German. Monkey Face gave the children a bag of marbles and sent them out to the street to play. Alejandro and Teresa still understood very little.

“We, labor, instead of continuing to be exploited by the rich, should figure out some way to exploit them. Not robbing them, of course. None of that. We have to act where they can’t, where they don’t know how. This is not a solution for the majority, only for a few fleas with talent. The hog must eat garbage to make blood. The fleas, without getting dirty, suck the blood of the hog. So, when they roast the animal, they also burn the parasites, because the parasites are stupid. They could have jumped off in time and passed to the heads of the butchers. But let’s get to the point. Power is not creative, and rich people get bored. They have everything, but they do not have themselves. And it’s logical. To find oneself, it’s necessary to let go of everything. They, on the other hand, are appropriating everything. See?”

“Yessir! We see!”

“Any man with a known profession — shoemaker, baker, miner, carpenter, painter, watchmaker, doctor, engineer, etcetera — is easy prey for the State, which will exploit him until it sucks out his very marrow. Having a normal profession means losing your freedom. We have to have unknown professions that do not intervene in material life but do produce states of consciousness. We have to create new needs for the rich. To do that, we need no other raw material than our imagination. The pig is dexterous but stupid. We can live off his stupidity until the self-destruction takes place. Please visit my foster brothers. I’ve given them new activities that will enable them to survive any collapse of the world economy. Those so-called crises really only affect the poor and the lesser capitalists. The big ones, the few and supreme, do not lose power, which is to say, they lose nothing. The hog passes through the change in fine style. My disciples, in those obscure moments, will hang on to their sows even more tightly.”

The Russians were about to leave, guided by Monkey Face, who had listened to the peroration, applauding from time to time with hands and feet, when the Anarchist stopped them.

“Brother Alejandro, allow me to ask you something: your companion says you want to be a shoemaker. Is that so?”

“That’s the truth, sir.”

“It isn’t worthwhile. It’s a known profession. The State will end up exploiting you. When you finish making your visits, come back. I’ll create a new profession for you. ‘Sweetener of Voids’ or ‘Corrector of Shadows,’ something.”

“Thank you sir, it won’t be necessary. I think that by the way in which I’ll work, shoemaker will become a new profession.”

Monkey Face led Teresa and Alejandro through the tenement, introducing them to the members of the Society of Free Brothers and Sisters. They met the “Disinfector of Mirrors,” the “Professor of Invisibility,” the “Fantastic Biologist-Body Inventor,” the “Funeral Clown,” and many others who were unable to explain what their activities were because Monkey Face, accepting a drink at every door, staggeringly drunk, forgot not only Russian but also all the other languages and translated their words into a strange tongue composed of belches, hiccups, and drooling. At the beginning, they at least managed to find out what the “Freckle Trainer” did.

He was a pudgy, dark-skinned man who gave off a strong smell of wine, as did all the other goys they’d see in the tenement. A woman with few teeth accompanied him along with eight children who ran around the single room unconcernedly. The trainer beat a small drum and, opening his eyes with strange flashes of light, ordered the beauty mark to move. In effect, many ladies wanted to have their beauty mark next to the place where their lips met or on a cheek or between their bosoms or even in more secret places. The naïve client would be told that, over the course of time, the blemish would move, bit by bit until it reached the desired spot.

Naturally, the drum, the flashing eyes, and the trainer’s hypnotic orders were not enough. The client also had to pray with faith. After a few sessions, the client would be told in no uncertain terms that the beauty mark had indeed moved several fractions of an inch. If the lady became bored with the large number of sessions necessary or if she began to complain about the slowness of their progress, the trainer would shrug his shoulders as if he were terribly offended and answer that the fault did not lie with him but with prayers without faith. And off he’d go in search of another victim. There was no lack of silly ladies to help him feed his numerous offspring. Sometimes, very rarely, the beauty marks did move.

After visiting his comrades, Seraphim, thirstier and thirstier, led them to a room at the end of the corridor, just like all the others, but bearing a large sign: Happy Heart Bar. About fifty goys — men and women, shoeless, their tattered clothes stitched together, packed in to form a sweaty block with a harsh stench — were buying, for a few coins, glasses of wine that a short, potbellied Andalucian drew from a barrel painted bright red, which was in the center of the room. With the skill of a sailor, the quasi-monkey threaded his way through that wave of flesh and returned, hopping on his right foot, holding three glasses — two in his hands and the third in the toes of his left foot. He drank from the one in his left extremity and held out the glasses in his upper extremities to the Russians. Alejandro immediately made a sign of refusal. Certain religious principles prohibited him from drinking in a bar. The fifty goys wore offended faces, and one insisted, “Don’t insult us, comrade.”

Sensing a storm brewing, Teresa raised her glass and emptied it down to the last drop. The block of bodies approved with a jolly grunt.

The Rabbi advised my grandfather, “Look here, Alejandro, Hillel the Wise said: ‘When you’re among people wearing clothes, wear clothes; when you’re among the naked, go naked.’ Wine for these people is a kind of communion. I don’t think you can say no. They might kill you. Drink and apply the proverb: ‘As long as you’re going to sin, you might as well enjoy yourself.’”

Then Alejandro took the glass and swallowed the wine with pleasure. He shivered five times, and a stubborn burning followed from his throat to his stomach. He began to cough. General laughter. Applause. Monkey Face returned with three more glasses. And the “Let’s drink to happiness” toasts went on for hours. My grandparents, trashed, crumpled, ended up as part of the human block, humming Chilean tunes amid fits of laughter and vomiting. The party was over when the barrel was empty. They awoke the next day stretched out on the cement floor of their tiny room, with thick tongues and tremendous headaches. The new life had begun. The children were hungry.

Five years went by. Alejandro was a shoemaker, and Teresa a fortune teller. Madame Ochichornia went out on tours that lasted three or seven days, at times two weeks, and always returned with a wide smile and a basket filled with eggs, chickens, loaves of bread, fruit, greens, candy, and other foodstuffs along with a good number of pesos. Thanks to the veneration of Monkey Face, who never stopped idolizing her, she learned Spanish quite well, but of course retained her Russian accent, the better to impress the audience. The fleas told the future with incredible accuracy, and whenever they reached a town, their fame preceding them; the poor lined up to ask, almost always, the same things: Does so-and-so really love me? Did I make a mistake marrying this woman? Will my lost love return? Will I get over this illness? Will I find a better job? What good thing does life hold for me?

Benjamín, Jaime, Fanny, and Lola would hear her coming because of the jingling bells on Whitey and Blacky and would run up the street, shouting with joy, to meet her. They, too, spoke Spanish because they went to the public school, as was required by law. Along with lessons, they were also given a free breakfast. Alejandro, on the other hand, had only been able to learn one word of our language: “Wednesday.” Whenever a customer asked him when his shoes would be ready, he would answer, “Wednesday.” When they asked how much the repairs would cost, he’d say, “Wednesday.” If someone said the weather was fine, he’d say, “Wednesday.” But if he had no talent for languages, he had exceptional skills as a shoemaker.

He rejected the Anarchist’s proposition and did not sweeten voids or correct shadows, but he proposed, on the other hand, to develop his shoemaker’s vocation in an unusual way, that is, by making shoes to measure not only for feet but for the soul as well. And also with no fixed price: “Let each customer pay what he wishes or can. That will oblige him to take a moral position, to chose between paying the minimum, the proper price, or the maximum. This will help him know himself.” The Anarchist liked those ideas and granted my grandfather the title “Professor of Shoeology.”

Alejandro went to the city dump and picked up every piece of leather and thick fabric he could find. Also, the skins of rats, cats, and dogs. And pieces of wood and boards. All of that would be material for creating new models or making repairs. Back in his wretched room, he would stretch out to meditate and allow the boots and army shoes he’d shined while in the army for those five years to march through his mind. He saw how they were made and analyzed their parts:

“First and foremost a sole, a portable platform, protective support that should be invisible so that the sole of the foot would feel its existence as a second skin, safe, invulnerable, sensitive, and above all full of love. Soles like mothers, giving birth to each step with an iron will, giving full hope of arriving where desired; constant producers of the road, soles that were nations. And the heel? It should support with strength, inspire absolute confidence, be a wall that cuts away from the past and sets the step right in reality, the resplendent now, allowing the proud foot to conquer the place, to penetrate, to take full possession, to become the center of the joyous explosion of life. But it should not, at the same time, be hard or cutting, rather as delicate as it was powerful, not only pushing the foot forward to the future but also absorbing the oceanic impact of the past. And the tips? They should be fine without damaging the precious toes, so those toes might penetrate with the greatest ease into the future, which awaits us up ahead, which is always a prize because the end of all roads is God and not death, itself only a transformation. May each step a person takes in my shoes carry them to happiness, blessed be they.”

His first customers were poor devils who came to have their shoes repaired. Alejandro accepted all jobs, no matter how humble, and from those jumbled patches he made luxurious slippers. Slowly but surely middle-class customers came, and finally, aristocratic ladies and gentlemen appeared, with an air of adventure. Alejandro had to recruit helpers. He chose them from the tenement, and that way they worked without having to leave their rooms. Anyone who had no job could participate in the making of entirely handmade shoes, sewn and glued, no nails used, and made from simple but noble materials. My grandfather swore he would never use one of those impersonal machines. Each pair of shoes had to be a task carried out with love and completely different from the others. A man has fingerprints that are exclusively his, unique in the Universe, and that’s the way his shoes should be, for him and for no one else. The money received—“How much do they cost?” “Whatever your good will determines.”—he divided equally among himself and his workers. He earned, despite working an astonishing number of hours each day creating new styles, no more than the lowliest of his helpers, the one who prepared the molds in cardboard. Ultimately he came to have more than a hundred partner-workers, laboring with faces smiling.

Teresa, returning from each tour wearing more and more baroque turbans, more rings, bracelets, and necklaces, more mascara on her eyes, and with long, violet nails, would become furious: “This is stupid! There is something in your head that doesn’t work properly. That damned Rabbi must be the reason. How is it possible that you have an ever-growing number of clients, that a hundred people work for you, and yet you always earn the same amount, a pittance? Five years have gone by, and you still aren’t getting any richer. The rich people exploit you. It amuses them to pay you less than they would a beggar. They don’t see you as a saint but as a fool. It isn’t right! I have to wear out my fleas making them see the hopeless future for thousands of indigents so that between what you earn and what you give us we can live in a style barely different from misery. You still try to go on earning merit in the pitiless eyes of the Grand Villain. By wanting to be a just man you don’t enjoy life. You’ve sunk all of us in your mystical tomb. God only loves the dead! You have to return to reality!”

My grandfather would smile, kiss his wife on the forehead, and go back to his waking dream about how to improve his work. Now he was seeking the formula that would allow him to make shoes that would pray as people walked!

Suddenly Shorty Fremberg appeared, the first Jew my grandfather had ever seen in all those years. He was really repulsive, with an enormous head, short legs, a long torso, no neck, a potbelly, hairy, with one eye coffee-colored and the other green. He would shake his wrist to show off a gold watch that looked like an alarm clock, thinking that it made him attractive to women. He strutted around in front of the female workers as if, at a snap of his fingers, they would drop the soles to dive toward his fly. He turned up out of curiosity — some friends had told him about the madman who worked for whatever people gave him — to order a pair of low boots. When he got them, he offered ten times less than what they were worth. Alejandro stared at him with his eyes burning and only said, pointing toward the rooms where his helpers worked: “Thank you, for their sake.” Fremberg, surprised, ashamed, gave a few more pesos and muttered, “For the tip,” and then exclaimed in Yiddish:

“But, please, Don Alejandro! My friends told me you were crazy, and they were right. What does this mean? When you divide up what you earn, everyone, even the snot nose kid who cleans the holes you call toilets here, gets the same amount as you! Do you call that conduct worthy of a Jew? Because you are as Russian as I am Polish. Forget the masks! It seems to me you’ve confused the goys with Hasidim and confused decay with saintliness! A real manufacturer fixes prices high and salaries low. We’re living in the Industrial Age, my friend! There are great opportunities for the middle class. In this land of the lazy, we foreigners can make a fortune. Labor costs are practically nothing. These illiterates have no unions and no social guarantees. The military men protect us. If the workers go on strike, just beating them up is enough. You saw what happened in María Elena. They wanted to riot and they were crushed like dirt. Besides, you could set up a store next to the factory and pay them with coupons, that way they’d have to spend whatever they made in our store at the price we set. The situation is ideal. Take advantage of it, Don Alejandro! With the artistic talent you have and with my business skills, we can become millionaires. If we become partners, we won’t need God to help us.”

Alejandro smiled, saying neither yes nor no but still working. And suddenly he whispered sweetly, moved at once again, speaking Yiddish, “We’ll talk this over some Wednesday, Mr. Fremberg. I have to think it over.”

Shorty shrugged his shoulders. It was clear my grandfather, absorbed as he was in inventing a different style for each client, was never going to think it over. Nevertheless, once a week, Fremberg resumed his attack.

Everything seemed to have entered into an invariable, eternal rhythm when the letter arrived. A homeless child delivered it. He’d been given a hardboiled egg to hand the letter directly to Alejandro. Although the Professor of Shoeology was illiterate, he recognized Teresa’s handwriting — Monkey Face had taught her to write. It was voluminous, important, confidential; if not, why would his wife have gone through so much trouble? A painful foreboding clenched his chest, and, dropping his tools, he ran to the Anarchist to have him read it. The professor ran his eyes over the pages in a couple of seconds — he read at a dizzying speed — shook his bald head with sorrow, had the bell rung that called everyone to a meeting, and dragged Alejandro to the bar. In the Happy Heart, the Free Brothers and Sisters were waiting, forming a block around the wine barrel.

“Comrades,” said the Anarchist, “this is a delicate moment in a man’s life. We shall see the collapse of what he thinks is his normal personality, and we shall see appear the other, which is hidden under his skin, the man of heart who only awakens if he is mortally wounded. You won’t understand what I’m going to read because I’m going to translate it into Russian — his wife knows Spanish. Females learn languages through a kind of osmosis, while we poor males have nothing but our awkward intellects for such tasks. But when you see the facial reactions of this friend, with whom we must sympathize deeply — the wound a woman causes is more painful and deep than the slash of a saber — you’ll realize what it’s all about.” And he went on in Russian:

Dear Don Alejandro:

“Don’t drink wine, but drink instead this bottle of pisco. Empty it. To withstand the letter, you will have to be very drunk. Yes, I know, your beliefs prohibit your drinking here. Today, make an exception or you may die on us. Come on, have a drink! To your health! Now I begin my translation:

Husband, I know you. You were surprised to receive a letter from me. Of course, when in person we never speak more than three or four sentences about money, the children, or your shoes, what can I tell you in writing? You’ve thought it must be something terrible, and you’ve run to the Anarchist. Now you are listening to his translation. After a few moments, you will be asking for my pity. I won’t be able to give it to you. I have to tell you all at once, even if you don’t believe it and you ask to this sentence repeated several times: Seraphim and I have fallen in love, and I am his lover. It is such an intense feeling that I cannot go on living with you or the children. You and they represent my past, a time I now see submerged in darkness. I thought I loved you, but it was only an animal need, the desire for a male member, the desire to have children, instincts similar to those of cows. We joined together, but we never saw each other. Me getting fatter, accumulating frustration, struggling in each one of our couplings to reach an explosive cataclysm, ferociously, without refinement. Neither you nor I knew how to touch, to be tender, to fuse the one into the other. You were involved in your world, the Rabbi, God, the shoe factory; I was involved in mine, bread, the house, excrement, hatred for Creation; separated. You never knew what I was, what I had within me. You saw a brooding saint in a home that was a tomb instead of a temple. You let me get bored; my dreams meant nothing to you. We behaved like primitives, simple single-stringed instruments. We lost the salt of life, tender pleasure. I was drying up. The happiness I didn’t have was inflating my body. At times, I would look at other men as if they were marvelous but forbidden fruit. Guilty, hypnotized, I was drowning in you, in your void, your brutality, an unaware illiterate with no doubts about the sacrifice of the best years of my youth. I sought your eyes with mine so that we could live as something else, a union outside of this world; but no, you only knew how to possess me with the fury and overwhelming power God taught you. All you could think of was to give me a cruel orgasm, and there you were, thrusting your hips, great for breaking stones but not for loving a woman. You were cold and clumsy. I didn’t realize it because I had neither experience nor any basis for comparison. Sunken in misery, which your delusions of righteousness brought us, what hope was left to me? But the miracle, not divine but human, exists. Love is a miracle that you couldn’t see because you were involved only with yourself. You put me at your service, just as your father did with his wife and the father of your father, obeying the Great Villain who denies above all things the magical pleasure of the flesh. It’s true that in my animal state I thought I loved you, but I fell in love with Seraphim as a human being. This is something grand you don’t know how to know. Don’t think I wasn’t sincere, that I played you for a fool. How I would have wanted to be faithful to you until death so you wouldn’t suffer as I know you are suffering in this moment. But it is not possible to fight nature. It happened suddenly, without premeditation, a catastrophe as great as the earthquake. Seraphim, when he picked us up in Valparaíso, remember, looked at my breasts, and I blushed. Without realizing it, I recognized in his burning eyes my repressed desires. His gaze reached my ovaries, and my sex filled with water. I did not wish, in anyway, for this to happen to me, especially with a being that ugly. With a great effort, I became dry and rejected that unknown female who was taking over my vagina. But a moment later, when I was feeding my fleas, an intense desire to show myself naked before him overcame me. I felt him tremble as each inch of my skin appeared, and his uncontainable fervor made my cells vibrate, my blood boil. You, in some obscure way, realized that I was in heat, and you possessed me with the power of despair because, without knowing it, you already felt I was lost forever. And you stole from me an orgasm that should have been for him and not for you. That pleasure hurt me as if you’d pulled out one of my teeth. I thought I was insane, I convinced myself that the earthquake had affected my nerves and said nothing because anything to do with Seraphim seemed absurd, shameful. I went back to being what I’d always been, a mother submerged in the dry reality of the family. I went on getting fatter in order to contain with that inert shield, the despair burning me from within. Without love, my eyes were deserted, my ears withered, my touch harsh. Air was poisonous, and each new day I had to cross a black bridge mounted on a blind mare. The tours with Seraphim calmed me a bit, but we did not want to recognize the mutual attraction that was wounding us. He, feeling himself unworthy to be loved, placed himself at my service, humble, vulnerable, sad, with the delicate attitude of a monster. I was convinced that he was the ugliest man I’d ever seen in my life. A week ago we performed in the Lota coal mine. The miners wanted us to go down into the deep tunnels so laughter and wisdom might reside there for once in that somber world. Seraphim performed as never before, even making use of prestidigitation: he was a new King Midas except that everything he touched turned into a banana. I felt he was saying: ‘Everything is food, even pain.’ Then I only read favorable predictions, giving to each of those moles the promise of air and light. They loved us a great deal, and as a sign of friendship they put their metal hats on our heads and marked our faces with soot. Back in the wagon, Seraphim looked at me, fell into convulsions, and went down on his knees before me, whispering: ‘The Virgin of the Night.’ I caressed his hairy nape. He crawled like a child and squirmed between my breasts. Sobbing, he asked me: ‘Make the miracle, give me your holy milk.’ And, incredible as it sounds, moved by the infinite sweetness of his voice, my breasts began to flow, bathing his body with the white juice. Then I wept. Licking away my tears, he murmured: ‘The Virgin of the Snows.’ Then from my forehead blood burst out, as if a crown of thorns were being pressed into my skin. He said in a trance: ‘The Virgin of Dawn.’ The full moon made us silvery. ‘You are mine, look at me for the first time,’ he begged, and I, drunk, with my heart practically leaping out of my mouth, set my eyes on him. And instantly my prejudices vanished; I truly saw him and became aware of his sublime beauty. If Seraphim is compared with other men, and if the old canons of beauty are used, he is a monster. But if you abstract him from this setting, see him in isolation, without references, in himself, he is a perfect being. His deep eyes possess an angelic goodness, his well-delineated features move the soul, his muscular flesh and his silky fur are infinitely agreeable to the touch, his breath is sweet and very perfumed when he awakens, his movements have the grace of dance, each word he says enters my brain with the splendor of a jewel. Actually he never speaks because his voice sings. When he felt the heat of my gaze, he took off his clown suit and showed me his entire body, a living sculpture. During the ecstasy that nakedness produced in me, I held out my hands and let his sex rest on my moist palms. I was used to a voluminous, hard, insensitive member with its arrogant, naked head. Seraphim’s phallus is pale, thin, smooth, and, above all, complete. Its tender foreskin gave it a sensual secret, a modesty linked to a powerful attraction, in sum, the tranquil, animal normalcy without the knife slash of religion, with no debt to God. Whenever you penetrated me, God accompanied you. He had ordered that a piece of you be cut off so he could appropriate your pleasures. I kissed that skin with delight, and I fervently offered him all the openings of my body. Not only did my sex long for him but also my mouth, my anus, my ears, my navel, my pores, and my soul. I led him to me the way a mother leads her child, slowly. He, who’d never known a woman, gave me his celestial purity. No brutality, no haste, tenderness, sensuality, respect. When he was within me, he became the only interest in my life. Seraphim stopped moving, stopped seeking the pleasurable friction, the final discharge, and staring me fixedly in the eye, making me drunk with his breath, began to speak. His voice, the most delicate I’d ever heard in my life, revealed the feelings he’d hidden from the instant when I blushed for the first time. Listening to him that way, fulfilled, I loved him so much that I could stand, even accept, that our love united us to God. Yes, even though it may be hard for you to believe, thanks to Seraphim, to the magical pleasure he was giving me, I forgave the Great Villain because He’d allowed the existence of love. Seraphim told me, and I’ll never forget his words: ‘There are no limits between you and me. Our chiaroscuro origins mix together, dance in the eternal ocean. We are two screams musically in tune with each other who arise like a jewel from this death, which is nothing more than another mask of God. You and I are the joy of the Divinity made manifest in matter. Between us there exists confidence, the attainment of the sacred, the advent of hope, and the blooming of faith. We are the left and right hands of the great work that is the unification of the world and the offering of forgiveness. Through our pleasure, God is pleased to manifest His love. We are the road transformed into light. We are two solitudes that move forward perfectly intertwined. Our pleasure is a sanctuary.’ And he kissed me, and his mouth was sweet. I began a chain of orgasms that grew greater and greater, like waves running through me from the beginning until the end of time. I exploded one hundred times, without guilt, without remorse, oblivious to everything except him. We giggled like mad, we wailed, we shouted, we wept with joy. From then on we haven’t stopped coupling at any time of day, in any place, an uncountable number of times, all different. When his member is not submerged in my sex, I feel incomplete. We are two bonfires that will shine for years. We want to travel, to know the Americas, Argentina, Peru, who knows what. We need little to live, and the miracle is continuous. Now I love the earth, the sky, sunrise in his arms, the taste of air, the planets, and even human beings. I want to go to parties, enjoy myself, smoke a cigarette, be present. I lose a pound every day. Seraphim wants me agile and thin; I’m going to satisfy him. Good-bye forever, poor Alejandro. I regret the fact that you never knew how to love. Don’t search for me, because the Teresa you knew no longer exists. Consider me dead. The children don’t need me. I hope that they grow, that they discover.

— Teresa Seraphim

During the reading of the letter, which the Anarchist translated in a compassionate voice, three of my grandfather’s ribs, seized by pain, snapped. They sounded like rifle shots. Bloody saliva mixed with his silent tears. The bar, filled with comrades jammed around the Russian to hold him up when his knees went weak, seemed silent despite the heavy breathing, like that of a wounded bull, of my grandfather and of the soft murmur of the wise man’s voice. Those poor folk understood pain and, with pitying respect, witnessed the demolition of his heart. Wine ran down their throats, gurgling like a spring. The Freckle Trainer, to sweeten the mood, began to whistle, imitating a canary. So he could withstand these huge revelations, they gave the Professor of Shoeology large glasses of pisco. The floor began to spin, the walls became porous and let in the noise of the world, the laughter of children, the gossip of women, the clatter of broken-down vehicles, the cries of hucksters. Inside, a husband was dying; outside, the city continued on its indifferent march. Someone began to sing; another began to drum on the wine barrel; the entire block began to dance; the party exploded. From embrace to embrace, the victim, brutalized by drink, was passed around, kissing men as if they were his relatives, kissing hands that shoved him so he wouldn’t dissolve in a bitter river that would empty into death. He poured out vomit, blood, and pisco, and he finally fell down in a faint. They opened his mouth with a spoon and emptied half a bottle more down his throat. He was drunk for seven days. He visited, one by one, all the rooms in the tenement and embraced every single family — the old, the young, men, women, cats. Smiling, they allowed him to do it because a lovesick drunk was sacred there. He destroyed his clothes and, naked, insulted the moon. He ran around on all fours with the stray dogs. He threw all his shoes into a ditch and wept, wept, wept.

When he finally recovered from his drunkenness, he found himself in his room, with all the furniture Teresa had built reduced to a pile of broken boards. His mouth was bitter, not from alcohol but from sadness. A sadness that fastened itself to the inside of his chest like a somber crab. The images from the letter haunted him, buzzed in his brain: his wife’s sex receiving the phallus of a goy, all moist; her shrieking with joy, swallowing semen; her legs spread, offering herself, shaking her hips, forgetting him in the pleasure of being penetrated totally by another man, younger, handsomer, more intelligent, more skillful. She, Teresa, so good, capable of giving tenderness honestly, a pure caresses, giving her life to a monster, giving to the monster what she never gave to him. Oh, what a stab! What a savage blow! He considered her guilty, then innocent, then he pounded his head: “It’s my fault; I didn’t even know how to kiss her, giving myself to the liquor of her lips; not giving her my entire soul, choosing to grant it instead to God; not caressing her; not offering her the place of a total queen; never fastening my mouth to her sex as if I were dying of thirst; making her revolve around me; drowning her in obligations; boring her; giving her an iceberg for a home; possessing her with the thrusts of a billy goat; spitting my sperm into her belly; never trembling with excitement while staring at the landscape; never sacrificing sleep so we could spend the night together just talking nonsense, smelling each other’s skin, staring into each other’s eyes. I’ve lost her. And now that she’s not here, I finally know how much I loved her. I’ll feel her absence for the rest of my life. I love the empty space she’s left, where she is missing is now my place. The light is gone.”

He lost his appetite. Every day, he only ate a piece of cheese and some lettuce. His shoulders slumped, he began to swim in his clothes. He tried to hate her, but he couldn’t. Then he tried to hate Monkey Face. He couldn’t do that either. That innocent, an orphan like that, was not guilty. In burning love, no one is guilty: it is a gift of God. He tried to be happy, thinking about Teresa’s good fortune, copulating every day with a being she found so beautiful, finally enjoying her life. But the somber crab crushed his chest with its claws. He fell down amid the wreckage of the room, intent on not moving until he died. The anarchists pounded at his door. They shouted. “Nothing!” He refused to open the door. The shoe workers came. “Nothing!” His four children came. “Nothing!” That sorrow, that humiliation — because humiliation is what it was, so great that his penis hurt, as if he’d cut it with a knife — would never diminish. Nothing tied him to life. “Nothing!”

The only person who managed to penetrate that room, now turned into a fortress, was the Rabbi. He took up a position inside Alejandro’s mind, and no matter how much the man twisted around, spit insults, he would not move from there, waiting for Alejandro to wear himself out so he could make himself heard.

“Friend, I know your body. This disaster has deteriorated your heart, and soon you shall die, which is what you desire. But first you must straighten matters out with God. Your pain offends Him because He, Blessed be He, knows what He is doing, and his ways are mysterious to us. You have forgotten you are a Jew. Before you die, you must return to the bosom of the community, which rejected you because of your wife. You became a goy, and just look at what’s happened. As penitence, you must leave your name inscribed among the benefactors of our race. While you were drunk, I went to take a look at the synagogue. Just imagine: in this city, they pray without an authentic Torah, on parchment, copied by hand, enclosed in a luxurious ark. What a tragedy, a Jewish colony without its Holy Book! Forget your pain. Go to Argentina and bring back a true Bible. Later you can die if you wish. Your life will have served a useful purpose.”

Argentina? He would have to cross the enormous mountains of the Andes on a mule, to and fro, carrying the Torah. He stood up. His entire body, his being, was looking for an excuse to go on living, to fill the universal void left by Teresa. The Rabbi was right. He would show everyone he did serve a useful purpose. By carrying out this huge task, he would regain his dignity. Perhaps Teresa would learn of his heroic act and admire him, just a little.

“No! Enough! I must not give myself hope, because it simply worsens my pain. I have to return to reality, accept the break, and carry out this act, only for myself and for God.”

He left the room, sat down at his shoemaker’s bench, and ignoring the joy of his workers, began to work. He would make a pair of boots lined in sheepskin for cold nights. He would never sleep again. The sadness of being abandoned, the sorrow of imagining his wife in someone else’s arms, eliminated that ability. Sleep disappeared forever, and being perpetually awake made him fuzzy, as if he were living asleep. When he finished the boots, after thirty hours of ceaseless work, he had purple shadows under his sunken, veiled eyes, both present and absent, locked in themselves by the pain of existing; the merest glimpse of Teresa pierced his pupils, walking jail cells which burned like wounds.

He called Shorty Fremberg and signed with him a contract written in a Spanish, not one word of which he understood. Shorty assured him that everything was proper. Jews among themselves could be trusted. He would take charge of the organization, of charging fees and distributing the money, as usual. Alejandro would leave him a collection of shoe models, along with the addresses of his clients. About the children, he didn’t have to concern himself. A friend of his would care for them.

My grandfather asked an empanada maker to give him the dog skins he’d been hiding. He used them to make a long overcoat. With only a walking stick and without a penny to his name — his meager savings had been entrusted to Fremberg for the twins in case of a fatal accident — he started out for Viña del Mar with the intention of moving on to Quillota, Llay-Llay, Río Blanco, Portillo, Paso del Bermejo, crossing the Andes, and continuing on along the vast Argentine valley to Mendoza. From there he would make his way to Buenos Aires. Would that be about twelve hundred miles on foot? He didn’t know and it didn’t matter to him. How long would it take? He no longer had time; it had escaped him. He lived outside of time.

He covered long distances, eating the blackberries that grew alongside the road. He also found pomegranates, figs, and apples. Some carts carried him over short stretches, but his bizarre figure inspired fear, and the peasants preferred to avoid contact. Children hounded him, pelting him with stones, while others gave him water and fresh eggs. He walked by day, he walked by night, hearing his heart beat with more and more clarity. How it pained him! He tried not to think about her, but like a cruel wasp she pursued him to show him unbearable images and sting him. Another man’s saliva in her mouth. God help me. White sperm, thick with passion, flowing over her vulva. God help me. Comparing the beauty of the other man’s teeth with his, which were yellow and chipped. God help me. She sleeping, extenuated, satisfied, with her lover’s testicles in her hand. God help me. She, completely given over to him, running behind him like a lamb following its mother. God help me. Walk, walk. Try to forget.

Filthy, bearded, covered with dust, he was becoming a ghost. So the authorities wouldn’t arrest him, he walked in shadows, hunched over, febrile. Finally, he took the road to the mountain range. Unable to find wild fruit to calm his pangs of hunger, he ate butterflies, flies, ants, worms, scarabs, and spiders. The sky covered over with clouds, and the night grew dark. Seeing practically nothing, he felt his way along, looking for the paths upward. When the moon became full, he found himself surrounded by snowcapped peaks. The insidious wind blew. Stones and more stones. Nothing seemed to live there, aside from the cold. His lined boots and the dogskin coat were not enough to keep him alive. He might have frozen to death, but the bonfire of jealousy burning in his gut saved him. Even though it was impossible for him to hate her — she was right — there was fury and sorrow in his heart, an incessant flow of affliction that became a fever. He kept moving forward, against the frost, the wind, the snow, the frozen downpours of dawn, against the intense pain in his legs, which, in any case, was smaller than the pain in his soul. He got lost. Days later, his stomach empty and his throat dry, he fell between some rocks, dying of inanition. He summoned the Rabbi.

“You got me into this. I want to finish what I started, so make a miracle.”

“There is only one miracle, Alejandro. The miracle of faith! Don’t give in. Believe until the very last. As long as you have even a thread of life, there is hope. Keep at it. If you are breathing, it is because God is helping you.”

Alejandro smiled bitterly. “Of course, God is helping me.” Then he heard the footfalls of animals and barking. Three enormous wild dogs lunged toward him, leaping over the rocks, their fangs bared, ready to destroy him. The Rabbi let out a nervous laugh, embarrassed by the situation. But he repeated, “Have faith!” and fled to the Interworld. My grandfather was furious. The attack of the beasts was the last straw. He was being persecuted too much: he’d had everything taken away from him, rejected, castrated, sunk into the grave, and now, to finish things off, the dogs were going to eat him. Well, why not? Did he perhaps deserve a dignified death? He, a contemptible nothing, incapable of making himself loved by the mother of his children? He wasn’t worth more than a dog, so he would behave like a dog. By now the wild dogs, snapping at him, were getting close. He suddenly went down on all fours, showed his teeth, and, shaking himself, bellowed out deafening howls with such rage that the echo, multiplying them, caused a far-off avalanche. Surprised, the three dogs stopped, and with their fur standing on end, stared at him, growling. The crazed shoemaker barked again and charged toward them, thirsty for blood. He wanted to rip open their bellies with his teeth and pull out guts — not theirs, but through them, God’s. The three dogs retreated. He called them, sobbing, chased them for a mile, wanted to die taking their lives, wanted to show the Supreme Being what His cruelty had made of him.

The dogs scattered, jumping over the ridges, and my grandfather sat down on the stony path and buried his bearded face in his hands, ashamed of his hatred for the Maker. When his breathing returned to normal and the silence of the mountains showed him the bitterness of his infinite solitude, something rubbed against his legs. It was the dogs, returning to accept him as their master. They wagged their tails, they licked him, they frolicked around him, humbly awaiting a pet.

“A miracle!” shouted the jubilant Rabbi. “We’ll call them Kether, Hokhmah, and Binah, like the three first sephiroth of the Tree of Life!”

Alejandro growled. The Rabbi, hanging his head, returned to his astral hideaway. “I’ll call them Joy, Sadness, and Indifference,” said my grandfather. Worn out, he could barely pat their backs. He slept deeply, as he hadn’t slept for weeks. When he awoke, there were the dogs, looking as if they were smiling. And at his feet, a huge, dead hare. With a sharp knife, he skinned it, divided it into four parts, and shared it with his new friends. After they devoured even the bones, they went to lick snow from a peak.

Alejandro continued his march. Joy, Sadness, and Indifference took charge of feeding him, and after a great deal of whining, they forced him to rest, protecting him with the heat of their bodies while he remained awake and they slept. To banish the images of Teresa — who he saw more and more in love with Monkey Face, sniffing his armpits, swallowing liters of semen, allowing herself to be sodomized, staring at the reflection of the stars in his eyes — he began to pray, using the rhythm of his heartbeats. “I-am-yours-Have mer-cy-u-pon-me.” From that moment on, he never stopped repeating these words twenty-four hours a day. The pain remained, curled up behind his ribs, but now it didn’t bother him as much.

One night he met a group of men mounted on mules. They had machetes hanging at their waists and rifles hanging from their saddles. One got down to touch him. He wanted to take Alejandro’s coat and boots, but the smell they gave off made him grimace with disgust.

The man asked the one who seemed to be the chief, “Should I cut his throat?”

The robber answered, “Better leave him alone. He’s a madman. Jesus protects madmen because he too was mad. Ask him to bless us.”

“Hear that, you holy bastard? Bless us!”

Alejandro, who did not understand what they were saying to him, spread his arms with his hands held out to show he understood nothing. The thieves took his gesture as a sacred sign, crossed themselves, and went their way. Alejandro realized he would have preferred to be murdered. He was no longer himself. He’d lost himself. The wound was eating him up. He tried to see himself and found in his place a complete stranger.

Bit by bit, he forgot Russian and Yiddish. Actually, he simply stripped himself of those languages as if they were dead skin. He no longer thought, simply letting his heartbeats pray. He barked. So, a dog among dogs, he scavenged for eagle eggs, ate lizards and snakes, drank in muddy puddles. Finally, he reached the end of the mountains and the beginning of the Argentine pampa. Joy, Sadness, and Indifference stood on the last rock, raised their muzzles to the sky, and howled as if someone had died. They were mountain animals and could not survive on the flat lands. The peasants would shoot them dead. My grandfather also howled to express his sorrow at saying good-bye. Then he pulled three pieces of skin out of the inside of his overcoat, from the sweatiest parts, and tossed them to his comrades. Each one caught his in the air, and carrying it in his teeth, went back to the mountains.

Once again, Alejandro was alone. He prayed with more intensity, adding “I-put-my-faith-in-you” to his cardiac rhythm. From there to Mendoza and from Mendoza to Buenos Aires he did not feel the road. He traversed it sleeping awake. He passed through cornfields, vineyards, apple orchards, rivers, creeks. Some peasants, seeing him pass by making the bubbling sounds of a mute or a moron gave him pieces of bread, dry meat, and also yerba maté. People regarded him with superstitious respect. They let him pass, crossed themselves, and from time to time a rider would gallop to catch up to him and toss a bottle of milk or wine. He reached Buenos Aires not knowing if he’d been walking for days, weeks, or months. A cloud of flies, like a black mist, surrounded him, endlessly biting him. Tired of brushing them off, he let them settle on his face, so his eyelids were covered with them. That way, asking from a distance because the people held their noses, he reached the Israelite Club, site of the synagogue.

At first, confusing him for one of the many vagrants who came from the hinterlands to beg in the capital, they tried to throw him out, drenching him with a garden hose. But when, possessed by the Rabbi, who was trying to help him out of trouble, he began to recite from memory, word for word, the first tome of the Talmud, they understood he was a compatriot. That caused a commotion. The Jewish colony, concerned about showing the Argentines a good face, was ashamed of this pariah. They bought him clothing and offered him towels, soap, scissors for his hair, and free access to the baths. He rejected all of it. He remained at the door of the synagogue, reciting now the second tome of the Talmud.

A young rabbi opened a window and asked him directly, “What’s your name? Where do you come from? What do you want?”

My grandfather could not answer the first two questions, because he’d forgotten his name and his past. The third glowed like a point of fire in his awareness: “I want one of the two Torahs you possess for the synagogue in Santiago de Chile.”

The young rabbi laughed. “Is that all? It is true we have two. I suppose you want to buy it. It’s expensive. Very old. It was brought here from Poland.”

“I’ll pay with my labor.”

“You could work twelve hours a day for the rest of your life, and you still wouldn’t make enough.”

“I’ll work twenty-four hours a day.”

“No more jokes. I can do nothing. The Rebbe is locked away studying the commentaries of Rashi to the Holy Book and won’t appear in public for two months.”

“I’ll wait here.”

The decision was final. How would the dignified members of the Club react to seeing a lunatic like this one stretched out on the synagogue stairs? Expelling him by force was impossible: he was a Jew, and a wise Jew, because, intermixed with his conversation, he was now reciting the third book of the Talmud. He consulted with two other young rabbis. They offered him a room and three meals a day. He didn’t accept, but, making a titanic effort, spoke to them in Yiddish: “Do you have guard dogs?”

“Of course.”

“Then I want to sleep and eat with those animals. Whatever you give them will be fine for me.”

No one could change his mind. He responded to all arguments by carrying on his recitation of the Talmud. When they heard him reach the fourth book, they gave in and let him move into the kennel. The dogs, perhaps because of his coat, received him as a brother.

There, for two months, praying with his heartbeats, he remained, curled up without closing his eyes, gnawing on bones, scraps, and leftover food. Sometimes, when Teresa reappeared to him, naked, with a hot, euphoric face, he would explode in desperate howls that knocked him out. The young rabbis, thinking he was howling from hunger, tossed him pieces of raw meat, which he swallowed without chewing, as dogs do, perhaps trying to choke himself to death.

The Rebbe finished his annual reading of Rashi’s commentaries and with a luminous face, beautiful clothes, doused in cologne, he visited the synagogue. The inspection satisfied him: his helpers kept the place orderly, without a speck of dust in the corners. He decided to check the patio, where the kennels were, to see if they’d received the same treatment. The young men began to tremble. They hadn’t dared to tell him about the smelly madman surrounded by a cloud of flies, who was now reciting the fourteenth book of the Talmud.

When the Rebbe entered, Alejandro stood up tall and straight and, with eyes burning, stretched out his hands so far it seemed he wanted to pull his arms from his shoulders.

“I want one of the two Torahs for the synagogue in Santiago de Chile.”

The old man turned pale and, bursting in to tears, not thinking about the grime or the flies, embraced the scarecrow to the complete surprise of the other rabbis. “Winding and strange are the roads of God. Last night, I fell asleep next to the Scriptures, blessed be they, and I dreamed that a being, half-man and half-dog, emerged from the scrolls. A voice ordered me: ‘Do not disdain my emissary, because he is the crown of my heart! Give him what he requests! Through the mouths of the mad I speak!’”

Alejandro left Buenos Aires mounted on a mule, carrying the Holy Book wrapped in fine blankets inside a luxurious box. By order of the Rebbe, he was given two more mules loaded with sausages and all sorts of kosher food of long duration. He retraced the same road he’d used to reach Buenos Aires, only stopping to rest his mules. Very often he shared his food with tramps who were walking over the pampa going nowhere in particular. Bored, they abandoned their work and began to travel the world with empty pockets. There was something in them — perhaps the humble peace of hearts devoid of hope — that gave Alejandro a bit of calm.

It was night when he reached the foot of the Andes, his food sacks almost empty. The two extra mules were now a useless worry. He saw a farmhouse where a candle was fluttering. He approached the house to give away the mules. No one came out to receive him. He pushed the door open and entered. On a miserable cot lay a woman whining. Alejandro touched her forehead: it was burning. He summoned the Rabbi. “You know medicine. Help me cure her. This woman represents Teresa. Perhaps she, somewhere in the world, is also suffering.”

The Rabbi examined the woman. “It’s very serious. Contagious. You could catch the illness.”

“No. It’s a human sickness, and I’m a dog.”

They spent a week with the woman, lowering her fever with rags soaked in cold water and placed on her abdomen. They gave her liters of juice made from herbs the Rabbi picked on the rocky terrain. When her temperature fell too low and she began to tremble, Alejandro took her in his arms and slept with her. He gave her the tenderness he never knew how to give his wife. On the eighth day, the woman recovered consciousness. She was a widow, without children, who had just buried her husband.

Without waiting for any thanks, my grandfather pointed to the two mules, made a gift-giving gesture, then another of farewell, and went off on foot, leading the mule carrying the Torah. After a few minutes, he heard the footsteps of the woman. She was running toward him, barefoot, carrying something wrapped in a blanket. When she reached him, she unwrapped the package and offered him a cross with a Christ made of lacquered wood. While Alejandro did not want to take it, she tied it to the ropes holding the Torah and ran off.

My grandfather wanted to get rid of that sacrilegious doll, but he noticed that at its bleeding feet was an inscription in Hebrew. He asked the Rabbi to translate it.

The Rabbi read in Russian, “Father, why have you abandoned me?” Then he corrected himself: “My God, why have you forsaken me?” Alejandro stifled a heartrending wail and continued on his way, keeping the crucifix but wrapping it in the blanket the woman had left behind. Leaping among the snow-covered rock, came Joy, Sadness, and Indifference. For the dogs it was a moment of almost unbearable happiness. They trembled, put out their tongues, rubbed against Alejandro’s boots, whipped him with their wagging tails, put their paws on his chest, covered his face with saliva. Suddenly they ran toward a cave and, after looking around inside, returned at top speed, each one with his piece of Alejandro’s coat in his jaws. Their master kept them as gifts, and they went on together along the steep trail. They brought him what they’d hunted, and he divided it into four equal parts.

They were passing through a narrow gorge, when a rain and windstorm broke out. In a single downpour, entire lakes fell. Torrents of muddy water like giant spider feet leapt over the rocks. To protect the Holy Book, Alejandro, guided by his dogs, took refuge in a crevice and unloaded the mule. The cave was immense, and the light of a candle was shinning in its black depths.

There were the robbers, waiting for the storm to pass. They approached my grandfather with mocking smiles on their faces: “The old lunatic again. It seems he likes the pure mountain air. He should be more careful. After all, he’s already lost his head, and he just might lose his guts. There are beasts that get pleasure tearing people up. Ha, ha!”

They patted the mule. They looked over the bundle next to it.

“Well, well, old boy, it looks as if you got rich. What’s in this big package and in this little one? Presents for us?”

They unwrapped the Torah. They opened the box, which was encrusted with gold, their brutal faces shining with greed. The Hebrew letters made them step back. Their illiterate instincts recognized the power of those letters.

“I think this is witchcraft,” one of them muttered. They opened the small package. By the light of the candle, the Christ revealed his pain. The lacquered finish resisted the water that penetrated the blanket, but the red paint, perhaps of a different quality, was dissolving. Like drops of blood, it ran out of the wounds on Jesus’s forehead and side, from his hands and his feet. The thieves fell on their knees. The chief whispered, “I told you this madman was a saint. Now I think he’s also a wizard. He’s got the wounds of our Lord.”

The cold had split open the skin on Alejandro’s forehead and the palms of his hands. He opened his arms like the crucified Jesus and gave himself over to the murderers. Ever since God had forsaken him, he felt pierced by lances, nails, and thorns. Without Teresa, his soul was bleeding like Christ’s body. The two of them, the sculpture and the man, were one. The same disillusionment united them. If they wanted to gut him, they should do it now. After all, his mission was a failure. These men without faith would use the crucifix and the Holy Book to make a fire to keep warm.

“The storm is calming. Let’s get out of here before Heaven gives us the punishment we deserve.”

The thieves left at Alejandro’s feet six apples, a bottle of wine, and a piece of dried beef. They disappeared in the shadows of the mountains. My grandfather hugged the Christ against his chest and fell asleep with it in his arms, covered himself by Joy, Sadness, and Indifference. He woke up three days later. The sky was clear and a splendiferous sun transformed the wild flowers into jewels. Everywhere the yellow was bursting into bloom, and the buzzing of bees, multiplied by the echo, transformed the morning into a festival. On the ground were three dead hares, and his friends, wagging their tails, were waiting for their portion.

Alejandro, perhaps because he was rested, felt a bit better. The pain had disappeared from his guts, but even so, despite the drunken jubilation of nature, a thick sorrow overtook him, as if his lungs were full of oil. He gave each dog a dead hare, and he contented himself by sucking on a round stone. He realized he would never again be able to eat red meat. Not understanding why, he thought it seemed like devouring Teresa. With great tenderness, he carried the Jesus to the highest peak and arranged it facing the immense landscape.

“My friend, I bless the Earth just as you blessed it. And also like you, I bless humanity. Someday our sacrifice will be useful. You are made of wood. I know that soon you will throw down roots and then branches, leaves, flowers, and fruits. I’m leaving, but I’ll still be here with you.”

My grandfather scrambled down from the peak, jumping from rock to rock like a wild dog, and then went his way. He again ate insects and nettles. His skin took on a greenish tone. Catching sight of his reflection in a puddle, he discovered his mane of hair and beard had turned white. As he descended the mountains toward the Chilean side, the three dogs barked, demanding their pieces of overcoat. He handed them over, covering the dogs with kisses. Then he closed his eyes so he would not see them move off to the peaks. Carried along by gravity, he walked blindly. When he opened his eyes, it was already growing dark. Since the mule needed rest, he camped under a fig tree, fighting with all his strength to keep the scent of the ripe fruit from restoring his taste for life.

At dawn he moved on. He fell into a kind of trance, in which, neither asleep nor awake, he advanced as transparent as the wind. At dawn one day, he reached Santiago, crossed half the city, and knocked at the door of the synagogue. A fat watchman, in a nightshirt and bowler hat opened the door, thinking that at this hour it could only be a telegram bearing bad news. In Yiddish, with enormous effort because his tongue felt like wood, my grandfather stuttered, “Adonai sends this holy present to the Chilean Jewish community. Wake up the Rebbe and inform him that the Torah he lacked has arrived.”

“But who are you?”

“No one. It’s the wind speaking. I am a dream of God.”

And Alejandro went off, making leaps and waving his arms, relieved at having fulfilled his mission. The watchman, his eyes veiled by rheum, watched him fly. The dog fur of the overcoat looked like feathers to him. He ran to get the Rebbe out of bed to tell him that an angel had brought them the precious text from heaven. Later the religious folk whispered that it was Moses himself who came to bring them the Divine Book.

Alejandro had no need for recognition. All he wanted was to get back to the tenement and submerge himself forever in the making of his shoes. He did not find the sign Society of Free Brothers and Sisters. We are not the State. In its place there was another: Grand Factory of Warsaw Footwear. The day was growing brighter. In his room, the four children were sleeping naked, in the company of a dozen cats. Alejandro observed them with tears in his eyes. Asleep like that they looked healthy, bigger. The girls already had brilliant bosoms blossoming. On Fanny’s pubis tiny red hairs were growing. He saw the leftovers from dinner: beans, cheese, pork chops. He felt like throwing up. He sat in the doorway to wait for day to finally come.

No sooner had the first rays of sunlight shone like gold through his white beard than a chauffeur-driven car deposited Shorty Fremberg outside the tenement. Shorty checked the three gold watches on his wrist, hastily opened a box set in the wall, and pulled a whistle. The doors of the rooms shook like filthy tongues, and two hundred women wearing blue uniforms emerged to greet the boss. Then they went back into their cells and the dry rumble of machines resumed. Alejandro grabbed Fremberg by his lapels and shook him. To do so he had to bend over because he was tall and the Pole almost a dwarf.

“Machines? Whistles? Uniforms? Where is the Anarchist? The Free Brothers and Sisters? What happened to the Happy Heart Bar?”

“Let go of me, Alejandro. This is legal, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s very clearly stated in the contract you signed that I am the one who decides everything. You, without doing anything, if that’s what you’d like, earn the same salary as a regular employee. Wake up to reality, artist! We’re living in 1912, the Industrial Era! People no longer want handmade products. Machines are the present and the future. Open your eyes! You’re not in some village! You’re living in a great capital city! Around here no one wants to be a saint, and the only God is money! Anarchist dreams are over. The police came and kicked your friends out. I think the most fanatical were shipped to Easter Island. I’ve rented the entire tenement. In each room there are sewing machines or electric saws to cut leather, make heels. It’s a marvel. The orders just keep pouring in. We make hundreds of pairs of shoes every day. And the women we have working follow orders! For three pesos they work a ten and a half hour day with no right to any social benefits. If an agitator turns up, I have him arrested. What do you think? Lose that cemetery face and be happy. Your children are well, though I almost never see them. They only turn up to eat and sleep, but they look healthy and happy. What more do you want? You can work or not, but you get a salary either way. And that’s not all you should thank me for: I kept your room just as it was. I could have put a machine in it.”

From then on, Alejandro said nothing. He sat at his bench, surrounded by the mechanical screeching, and made shoes by hand and to order for the few clients he still had. Few not because his work wasn’t of interest but because he was so stubbornly insistent on making perfect shoes that it could take him a year to make one pair. He would put them together, make corrections, take them apart, start all over again, incessantly, never satisfied. The buyers, fed up with coming back to try them on so many times, ended up never coming back. The perfect pairs of shoes, covered with dust, were stacked in a corner of the room.

Shorty Fremberg was moved. He could not stand to see his partner sunken in such solitude. Now he had six gold watches, two cars, a chalet in the outskirts of the city, and four lovers, drawn from among the workers, who went along with his caprices for a pittance.

“Come on, Alejandro. You’re wasting your time. Perfection is not of this world. Accept that reality has changed. Come along and take a look with me. You’ll see just how beautiful our machines are. And sometimes the girls who run them, too. You’re still young. Not even fifty yet. Make an effort.”

And the Pole pulled my grandfather along by the hand toward the end of the corridor, to the room where the bar had been. He wanted to proudly show him the machine that cut patterns into the leather. It was run by Fresia, the youngest of Shorty’s lovers, thirteen years old, freckled, and with big eyes.

“Why don’t you try to work it, Alejandro? You’ll see how easy and gratifying it is. You push a couple of buttons and the pattern engraves itself. Try it, please. Let’s see now, Fresia, let this gentleman take your place!”

Fresia showed my grandfather how to produce the finished pattern and left him sitting at the machine while she followed Shorty behind a curtain to give him the oral caresses he’d requested by making an imperious gesture with his pudgy fingers. Just when he was ejaculating a flood of warm magma into the young lady’s throat, he heard a howl. The machine coughed as if clogged up. Fresia and Shorty quickly ran over. They found Alejandro in a faint, his right hand caught in the machinery. To get it out they had to take apart much of the machine. My grandfather woke up in the hospital in intense pain. The doctors requested authorization to amputate his hand, but Alejandro refused.

He went back to the tenement with his hand hanging at his side, dead. He sat in his doorway and stayed there, mute, not even communicating with his children. Fremberg continued to send Bertita, one of his lovers, a woman of forty with whiskers and the backside of a mare, to cook for the children. They would arrive like famished shadows, eat, and then go back out on the street. Alejandro, in another world, gave nothing, asked for nothing. When it began to grow dark, he would light a candle and, with a nimble movement of his left hand, catch nocturnal moths in order to devour them. One morning, they found the doorway empty. No one in the tenement could imagine where he’d gone. He returned after midday and sat down again, but something had changed in his eyes. A vehement fire was burning in his pupils. On the back of his paralyzed hand, he’d had the machine tattoo a heart and inside it the name Teresa.

The first people to realize that Alejandro could work miracles were the homeless children. One fell at his feet, twisted in pain after eating garbage. Alejandro put his dead hand on the child’s stomach, and the pain disappeared. A few days later, a boy with mange on his legs appeared. The dead hand cured him too. The rumor began to spread. A little girl brought her cat, crushed by an automobile. The cat revived. A boy showed him his face covered with pimples dripping pus. After five minutes of the cold contact, he walked off with clear skin.

Adults began coming. They submitted to his paralyzed hand tumors, fevers, impotence, all kinds of physical disorders. With a sweet smile and with fire in his eyes, always mute, Alejandro would slowly raise his right hand, kiss the tattooed heart, and place it with a profound, humble delicacy on the sick parts, which always healed. A fetus, condemned to be born feet first, he made turn around and emerge headfirst.

He accepted no payment, no money, objects, flowers, or food. Hearing the words “thank you” made him close his eyes and turn pale. His love for Teresa had overflowed the dikes and spread now toward all of humanity. Because he understood better than anyone what emotional pain was, he also managed to calm depression, jealousy, rage, and hatred. A mere touch of his hand to a martyred chest and that person left with new hope. There on that miserable threshold Alejandro stayed for two years, curing without interruption every sick person who asked for help.

The Rabbi had nothing to do with those miracles. His journey had brought him to sainthood. Out of discretion, the Rabbi left him alone during that time, but now he had to deliver sad news: “Good Alejandro, the final moment has come. Your heart has deteriorated completely. You are going to die.”

“I’m ready. I’ve lived all I had to live because God taught me to love. For great evils we need great remedies. I was a man of stone; He made me feel pain. I am infinitely grateful.”

After breaking his silence, he asked that the design machine be removed, that his bed be brought into what had been the Happy Heart Bar, and that they place a big barrel of wine next to him. He went to bed and entered into a placid dying. The worker girls and their companions began to arrive and drink in a block, as in the old days. The Anarchist, who had been in hiding, suddenly appeared wearing dark glasses to hide his missing eye. He said nothing, but on his knees alongside Alejandro’s cot, he kissed the dead hand.

The bar began to fill up with wildflowers. They forced their way through tiny cracks in the cement and covered the grayness with a multicolored blanket. Benjamín, Lola, Fanny, and Jaime, accompanied by Fremberg and his four girlfriends, entered, nicely combed, clean, and sad. Alejandro smiled. The Rabbi told him, “At the end everything returns.” Alejandro smiled again. The crowd parted slowly in order not to trample the flowers. A slim silhouette hesitated at the door. The children shouted “Mama!” and ran to clutch her in their avid arms. Teresa’s head was shaved, she was skin and bones, dressed as a man, and wearing no makeup. She did not cry, but tears ran ceaselessly down her torpid face, a face you’d say was paralyzed.

Alejandro extended his right hand, and his inert hand came to life. The white fingers recovered the color of living flesh and, losing their cold, moved slowly to call Teresa. The woman approached without separating herself from the children and, on her knees, placed her face in the revived hand. Alejandro touched her devotedly, trying to give the hollow of his hand the sweetness of a cradle. He whispered:

“I’m not going to forgive you, because there is nothing evil to forgive. You obeyed life. Everything natural is good. Your soul is pure light. I thank you for existing. Don’t tell me why you’ve returned. There’s no more time. You’ve come, and that’s enough. I am going to die for you, not because of you. You became my teacher. The only thing I did well in this world was to learn to love you. I depart satisfied. Don’t put my name on my grave. I want a simple stone with a six-pointed star. In the center of the two interlaced triangles have inscribed: I Am Yours And You Are Mine.”

Teresa kissed his forehead. My grandfather smiled again and began to give up his soul. The Rabbi, nervous, shouted to him, “Wait! Hold out a little longer! You want to go, but I want to stay here. The eternal nothingness is not for me. Pass me on!”

“Pass you on?”

“That’s right! I am your best inheritance: tradition. Give me to one of your children.”

“To which one?”

“The way things are going, your twin girls will never be mothers, and Benjamín will die chaste. The only one who will be able to pass me on to one of his children is Jaime.”

Alejandro signed to Jaime that he should come close. Jaime was not moved. A dull resentment kept him from suffering. He’d often tried to approach his father, always crashing against a barrier of incomprehension. They were different, and that was that. Jaime had the right to not want to be a just man. In a society of thieves and exploiters, egoism was not only allowed but it was also the only intelligent thing a person could do. Nevertheless, once, to please his father, Jaime took on the task of making a pair of boots. For three months, in secret, he dedicated himself to that painful work. The result was not unworthy of Alejandro himself. Proud of himself, he showed his father his work and expected that after the congratulations he would keep the boots in a dresser as a souvenir. That did not happen. The next day, his father sold them to a poor client for an absurdly low price.

“Good shoes should be on feet and not in a dresser. We don’t make them to exalt ourselves but to serve. Remember, son, serving is the greatest human value.”

Jaime never forgave him. He felt that Alejandro held his work in contempt, that he refused to give him the recognition he deserved. He swore he’d never again make a shoe, never again serve anyone.

“Come here, my son.”

He’s going to give me a farewell kiss, but what good is it to me now when he never did it before. I would have preferred kisses that began something, not kisses that end things. “I’m coming, father.”

He pressed his lips together and brought his face close to that of the dying man. Alejandro, with his resuscitated hand, took hold of Jaime’s nape and immobilized his head. Following the Rabbi’s instructions, he fastened his mouth around Jaime’s nose and breathed, a final, long, interminable breath. The Rabbi entered through Jaime’s nostrils into his spirit. Alejandro died. Jaime fell to the floor, writhing in rage and screaming: “I don’t want your madness! No! I don’t want it! Get out of me, you shitty ghost!”

A pale old woman, waving a newspaper, came to announce that war had broken out in Europe.

Teresa no longer wanted to think about her children. Never again did she bathe or leave the small apartment Shorty Fremberg had given her in exchange for the percentage of Warsaw that belonged to her husband. She spent her time staring out the window at the nothingness. If she spoke, it was only to curse, keeping secret the name of the person she was cursing. Fanny, Lola, and Jaime, tired of her incessant bad humor, looked, each on his or her own, for some way to earn a living. Soon they stopped visiting. Benjamín could put up with being mistreated and worked as a salesman in a bookstore so he could feed his mother. They began to sleep together in the same bed.

Lola began to study guitar with the blind woman in Room 28. The old woman knew myriad songs and went from bar to bar offering her broken-down voice. The drunken patrons, overwhelmed with sorrows of the heart, requested melodies that would remind them of the woman who betrayed them, and she always knew them. An astonishing memory. Lola, late at night, transformed into a guide-dog, accompanied the old woman from bar to bar, singing duets with her.

Jaime became violent, rejecting the appearances of the Rabbi with epileptic fits. González the Horse, mentally retarded, with a long face, thick lips, and enormous teeth, formerly a champion boxer, accepted him as a student. The boy’s aggressive energy enabled him to win good money in that sport. He took part in clandestine bouts: before dog fights, the organizers would present two or three fights between boys because they were popular with homosexual bettors.

Horse had very personal training methods. He would go with Jaime to the potter’s field at the General Cemetery to steal skulls. Then, in Room 35, completely painted white with posters and trophies covering the walls, now transformed into a gym, he would have his student demolish skulls with his fists. “Remember: your punches must pass through flesh, which is illusion, to break the real bones.” Every feint or duck provoked reflections that, despite being said in an alcohol-soaked voice with a cross-eyed diction, taught Jaime how to fight against that fierce enemy, life.

Fanny accepted that Ruby of the Street, the tenement prostitute, should educate her. The sensual dwarf informed her: “With that red hair, that body, and that face, your future is secure. You’ve got long legs, full lips, a tangled pubis, firm breasts, and a round ass, which is to say, you’ve got everything! All you need is to learn to know men. By knowing them you’ll be able to dominate them. Understanding what they’re made of, you become their mother. You’ll appear docile, and they’ll think that they’re the boss, but in fact they’ll obey orders. And the best way to drag them around by the nose is to give them sexual pleasure. I’m going to teach you all the techniques. You’re just a girl, but you’ll memorize everything I tell you, and later it will be precious to you, pure gold. Each penis is different and has a special way of getting satisfaction. You will become ductile, malleable, changing. You won’t be just one woman but thousands, and your muscles and orifices will be proficient in giving the maximum pleasure. And you won’t disdain using certain objects. From this moment on, I’ll hide you in my armoire, and looking through a little hole you’ll see what I do with my clients. If you clean off the soot, every man is a diamond.”

Fanny was so interested in this apprenticeship that she decided to become the best whore in Chile.

Teresa never told why she came back until, many years later, Benjamín punched her in the face, desperate because of her ill treatment and her attacks of absurd rage. Then he tied her to the bed, and using a pail he forced her to swallow half a liter of vodka. The alcohol finally loosened her tongue.

“After sending your father that letter in which I announced our break, I forgot, I must confess, the whole family. I felt as if a dry skin had fallen off my body, allowing me to be born again. For forty days, I stopped having sexual relations with my lover, and I stretched out in the darkness of the wagon to wait for a new hymen to grow within me. I got up free, perfectly sealed. At that moment, we were passing through a tiny village called Las Ventanas. From the street came the smells of bread and wine. Everything in me, now, was virgin, even my sense of smell. Those perfumes of wheat and grape, transformed by baking and fermentation into sacred food and elixir, moved me profoundly. I wanted with the totality of my being to receive Seraphim’s sperm in order to engender a perfect son, the fruit of love, not like you and Benjamín, the fruit of obligation.

“Seraphim did not behave the way I saw him — an angel sent by God, who to reach the stable where I awaited him naked, offering him my thirsty chalice, had to cross the entire Universe, slip through the whine of galaxies being born, gallop over careening comets, and fall into the dense matter of the Earth, attracted by a center more brilliant than the sun, my interior light. Instead, he insisted on being a monkey, hanging by his feet from a tree, his head hanging down, and he squealed with rage: ‘You’re mocking me, Teresa. No woman can desire to have a child with me, ever. Another monster would be born.’

“‘I do want to have your child! To shine, I have eliminated pain. Now, in this place, I am what I am, nameless, without problems, a flower open in the present, saturated with love down to the last particle of flesh, and for that very reason nonexistent when it’s alone. Have faith in my open sex: enter entirely into it to give content to my empty form.’

“‘That love of yours, immense as it is, is not enough to convince me that deformity is beauty.’

“‘Who will you believe, those who despise you, or me? If you let yourself be guided by what they think, you are your own worst enemy. Stop hating yourself and accept the miracle! We are two candles on the shrine. Our son will be a god. I want him to look like you.’

“I took a branch and broke it from the tree like a ripe fruit. He fell on me, biting, scratching, expelling his insides, sucked by the black ocean heaving in my ovaries to emit his ardent liquor with a squeal of pain-pleasure, collapsing exhausted next to my bosom to sleep for nine months. I desired to conceive with such intensity that I clearly felt the moment when his sperm fertilized me. In the depth of my womb, a point of immense energy vibrated. It opened like a door toward another dimension, receiving a river formed of millions of universes. All my flesh, in the presence of that potent flash, felt the drowning of death, the anguish of having lived in the shadows, separated. That new energy flooded my bones, my guts, my blood, purifying and fortifying each cell, eliminated the impurities and pain. My movements became delicate, prudent: I was the coffer that held within itself a diamond. I believed I saw a sheaf of fine rays emerge from my womb to illuminate the sordid wagon. I was overwhelmed by a millennial peace. Like a bird that begins its migration, my spirit emerged from the rot.

“Soon that divine being would nourish itself from my flesh: I had to reach total extinction in order to offer it a matter produced in the light of forgiveness. To forgive, I had to understand, and understanding meant recognizing essential love. I recovered God as never before and stopped seeing him as a murderer. Being Everything, He cannot end. And if we abandon solitude to submerge ourselves in Him, we shall not die. I separated from José, my poor drowned son. For many years I had not let him depart, turning him into my accomplice in my hatred of the Father.

“I allowed him to dissolve in the Divine Beginning, and as such I felt him participate in the creation of the new being. With invulnerable faith, absolute confidence, sovereign calm, I opened myself in a total listening. That child was not the confirmation of my existence. He was himself and for himself. He directed, he knew. In complete ignorance, I was there only to obey. My vagina, my uterus, my tubes, my ovaries, full of God, were engendering the savior of the world. Meanwhile, Seraphim went on sleeping. In his dreams, he told me later, there appeared someone like a wise carpenter, of kind and noble aspect, making a cradle out of wood from trees that came flying from the four corners of the Earth.

“As my belly grew larger, I felt the child’s spirit more and more. He communicated with me, and the bones of my pelvis responded by separating in order to prepare a perfect exit. An immense joy invaded my body. My lungs took in polluted air and exhaled pure oxygen: through them, my son was cleansing the planet. As he was becoming incarnate, the heart of the world was forming.

“The seven trained fleas made me enough money to survive. During those nine months, Seraphim neither drank nor ate, sleeping next to me, wrapped up like another fetus. I gave myself over in such a way to that marvelous symphony of sensations that is gestation that I did not feel the passage of time. It began to rain with ferocity. The huge drops crashing against the clay made the gelatinous noise of frogs exploding. The sun came out. A white crow brought me a branch of cinnamon.

“The moment to give birth had arrived. ‘These are the last instants when you are within me. We shall have to separate. Bless me.’ Yes, I asked the fetus to bless me because, since he was infinitely superior to me, it did not fall to me to do it. Grabbing onto a rope that hung from the ceiling, I hunkered down to give birth. I said to him, ‘From now on, you are you, and I am me. Let’s work together. Between the two of us we’re going to carry out a perfect birthing.’

“‘Make that three!’ exclaimed Seraphim, who woke up at that moment. He got down right in front of my spread thighs and held out his hands to keep the child from falling to the floor. Trembling, he tried not to close his eyes, not to escape again into sleep, heroically facing up to his fear of seeing a monster emerge.

“The baby intelligently adapted itself to my bent body and began to effect a slow movement of rotation, which became a spiral as it developed. My vagina caressed every inch of his body with infinite love.

“In the moment when the cranium appeared within the oval of the vulva, forming an eye with it, Seraphim stepped back a bit in order not to be directly opposite the baby. He whispered with veneration: ‘I’m receiving you from the side so that you see the world, because you belong to it and not me.’ The baby revolved, got out first its left arm, then the right, and finished the rotation offering himself like someone crucified. Seraphim delicately pulled him by the nape and extracted him from my lips, which kissed his heels with adoration.

“Breathing with difficulty, so proud was he, he held the baby up like a trophy: the boy — he was in fact male, as we had always supposed — possessed great beauty. His skin was dark, almost green; his eyes were yellow like sunflowers; his features were fine, Oriental. His elongated skull and his serene expression made him seem like a pre-Colombian sculpture. Shedding tears, Seraphim, along with me, pronounced the name that suddenly occurred to us without our thinking about it: Almo.

“I received Almo on my bosom, and there he stayed, so calm that his heart was drawing mine to slowness, and when we awoke in the same beatific rhythm, I cut the umbilical cord with my teeth, because I never, out of respect, would have dared to terminate our sacred union with a knife.

“Seraphim, on his knees, prayed to him: ‘Son, you are my master. Teach me to be, teach me to live, teach me to create, open my soul so that I can love even more.’ Just then, Almo spread his legs. Below his testicles and before his anus, he had a perfect female sex.

“‘A hermaphrodite!’ Seraphim shouted in consternation. ‘I knew it. Before, you gave birth to normal children. I’m the one with poisoned semen. What could come from me but an aberration? We have to kill it!’ He was so desperate and I so worn out that I felt unable to convince him that his son-daughter was more beautiful than any normal human, than an androgyne achieved the maximum dream of any individual: to possess both sexes at the same time like God. I gave myself over to Fate. Without protesting, I lifted the child and offered him to the murderous fury of his father. Seraphim took him, intent on throwing him to the floor and then kicking his skull in. But Almo fixed his eyes on those of his father, and instantly Seraphim’s face became transfigured, passing from bestial hatred to a balmy peace, because those tiny golden pupils reached his essence and transported him to a mental level he’d never known before.

“Death disappeared forever. His soul recognized itself as invulnerable, and suffering dissolved into a sweet ocean, which was unceasing. Time offering its eternal present, Life. Seraphim thought he could guess the thoughts of the newborn and repeated them aloud: ‘With this gaze I seal my alliance with you. I accept you as my father. I give you all the rights because you deserve my confidence, so that you educate the child in whom I am.’

“Smiling, Seraphim placed Almo next to my left breast and saw him suck for the first time. A cloud of melancholy darkened his happiness. I offered my right breast. Seraphim sat down whining and accepted the nipple to receive, finally, the milk he’d been denied as a baby.

“We decided for the moment to forget our child was a hermaphrodite: we would figure out how to deal with the problem later. Perhaps Almo himself, our Master, would guide us. We began to travel north, fleeing the rains and exuberance of the south. We needed a dry climate. We were so full of spirit that we could only stand a desert landscape. We performed all along the coast, passing through Coquimbo, La Serena, Copiapó, Taltal, Antofagasta, and Tocopilla, until finally we reached Huantojaya, a silver-mining town near Iquique. There they let us use the great gymnasium of the Coeducational School No. 28. That was the school used by the children of workers from the region’s mines: The Discoverer, The Saint John, The Laura, The Saint Peter, The Disdained — names of prostitutes or saints, as if digging a mine shaft were for them a search for vice and sacred things at the same time. Seraphim, exploring the area, noted that the miners were not our usual audience. The dust, the sun, the hostility of the excavation, the blast of the exploding dynamite, the exhausting workdays had hardened them, giving their faces the consistency of stones.

“On Saturdays, they would go into the bordellos to play cards; lose the money they’d earned during the week; drink a minimum of two dozen beers, lining up the empty bottles to show how much they could drink; and fall asleep next to the urinals without saying a word. Making them laugh seemed impossible. Seraphim begged me to participate in his act this time. He had to offer them a strong program, low-down, one that would pull laughs out of them by main force, like pulling teeth.

“I was supposed to be the lazy guard of a bunch of bananas. I would ask a monkey to help me move the fruit from one place to another on the improvised stage. While he worked, I would have a nice siesta. The monkey would take advantage of the siesta to steal a banana and try to hide it without finding a place on the empty stage. He would try to hide it in his clothes but would realize he had no pockets. Finally, in a crisis of anxiety, he would drop his trousers and put it in his anus. (Seraphim had invented, using a rubber tube, a special holder hidden under his false tail that would allow him, with great realism, to imitate that penetration.) When he was finished with his chore, I would check him over to see if he was hiding a stolen banana. Satisfied with my employee’s honesty, I would shake hands and send him on his way paying him a tiny coin. The monkey, alone now, with a triumphal air, would try to eject the banana, but it would refuse to leave. After huge efforts, pushes, shrieks, he would manage to excrete it with tremendous pain. Jumping for joy, despite his broken anus, he would peel the banana and try to eat it. But with expressions of disgust, he would throw it far away because now it would have an unbearable stench of excrement.

“The night of the performance, the five hundred school chairs were occupied by a silent crowd of men, women, and children. Sitting there, serious, immobile, they looked like stones in the middle of a desert. When I entered carrying the bananas, transformed into the sleepy guard (thanks to some woolen whiskers and a uniform made of sacks dyed blue and metal buttons made from beer caps, the families applauded. Their hard, dried-out hands sounded like bone castanets. Nervous because it was my debut, I felt like a dove receiving shots from five hundred rifles.

“Seraphim made his entrance. He was applauded as I was, but no one laughed. He exaggerated his grimaces. Nothing. He chased his tail trying to bite it. Sepulchral silence. Then, with barefaced immodesty, he began to scratch his testicles. An attack of laughter. He scratched himself furiously. More laughter. The more he dug around in his balls, the more the audience giggled. But since he couldn’t go on doing that all night, we began, in a once-again taciturn environment, the program we’d rehearsed.

“Those granite spectators weighed tons. We made the first movements mechanically, burdened by failure. We weren’t even sure if they were really looking at us with their expressionless eyes. But when the monkey stole the banana and tried without success to hide it, the audience, interested, made a strange murmur. Then, when the animal introduced the fruit in his anus, some growled protests I couldn’t manage to understand. When the monkey painfully tried to excrete his theft, they began to stamp their feet and whistle. And when he tried to eat the smelly fruit, groups of furious miners leapt toward the stage with the clear intention of demolishing us with their fists. Seraphim and I didn’t understand. Most of those workers had no religious morality and spent most of their free time submerged in alcohol, coca leaves, gambling, and prostitutes. What could have offended them? They were just beginning to knock us around when a thick voice shouted: ‘Halt comrades! These good clowns weren’t trying to make fun of you! Sit down and listen because what I’m going to say is important!’ The miners knew and respected that voice because they released us and went back to their seats.

“A middle-sized man with black hair and a moustache, penetrating eyes, a frowning brow, and an ungainly manner stepped onto the stage. He wore wide trousers, and the pockets of his jacket seemed stuffed with papers. He shook hands with us out of sincere respect, and, as if he had a thousand years ahead of him, took his place before the audience, looking at everyone there, one by one.

“When he finished that profound and mute contact, he said in a severe voice: ‘Good evening, comrades.’

“Most answered, ‘Good evening, Recabarren!’

“Out of his pockets, he pulled several small newspapers. ‘Here I have for you the first issue of the worker’s paper Workers Awaken!. It only costs twenty centavos, less than a beer. Practice reading, comrades, and stop sleeping. The Chilean worker has no defense against industrialists, neither unions nor social legislation. And even though you know you should fight against the bosses because they exploit you pitilessly, you fight as individuals instead of organizing into cooperatives. The only revolt you practice is theft. Which is why these clowns annoyed you so much. You saw yourselves reflected as if in a mirror. Don’t put on innocent faces. Let me refresh your memory: you mold the grains of silver until you give them the form and size of a cigar. Then you wrap them in a rag you cover with suet and you slip them in, just as this monkey did with his banana. Then you stroll by the mine guards, who have no idea a theft took place. No, don’t interrupt me, because I’m not finished yet: once you’re outside the mine you expel the cigar with a lot of pain, but sometimes it can’t come out and you have to go to doctors in Iquique, who demand most of the silver to carry out the operation. The money you get that way cheapens you, because to get it you sacrifice your manhood. It isn’t right to punish a clown because he reminds you that you’re screwed over. You should really be thanking him. Stolen money stinks of shit, comrades! We’ll have to conquer the well-being we deserve the honest way, by forming unions, creating a workers’ party, by not selling our votes, and by organizing ourselves to win elections! Circulate Workers Awaken! and form, starting right now, a cooperative. Together you’ll get what you could never get on your own. And applaud these two humble clowns because they are your brothers, children of the same hunger.’

“The miners did applaud. The man named Recabarren stepped down from the stage to hand out newspapers. Almo began to cry, needing to be fed. We had him covered up in a corner of the stage. While Seraphim passed the hat, I changed Almo’s diaper and gave him milk. The workers left, arguing with the leader. Seraphim came back happy, waving a ten-peso note.

“‘Recabarren gave it to me in the name of the miners to avoid my thanks. That man is extraordinary. He wants nothing for himself that isn’t also for the others, and he fights so justice will triumph in this unjust world. If I had to choose a father, it would be Recabarren. Let’s follow him wherever he goes.’

“Suddenly, out of the shadows emerged a thin, beardless, one-eyed Indian with long hair arranged in a braid. He was wearing a white cotton robe, a straw hat, and a poncho made of vicuña wool.

“‘Please excuse this interruption. Let me introduce myself: Rosauro, medicine man for many and witch doctor for some. I can cure all ills with herbs, even internal tumors. I can also set fractures, give massages, remove the evil eye. I can make lost lovers return. I know the legends.’ After introducing himself that way, the Indian stood there in silence, staring at us with strange intensity, retaining an emotion that made his one eye moist. The two of us, disconcerted, stared at him, immobile, not knowing how to react.

“Seraphim broke the silence with a short introduction: ‘Teresa, Seraphim. Glad to meet you, sir.’

“The shaman took off his hat, fell on his knees before Almo, and whispered with great effort: ‘Yeco, you have finally come,’ and then, curling up his body until he looked like a ball, he burst into convulsive sobs. Concerned, Seraphim brought him a glass of water. The Indian took a sip, went face down on the floor, took my feet, and covered them with kisses. ‘You are the mother of God!’

“Thoroughly confused, Seraphim brought him to his feet. “‘What did you say, my friend?’

“‘The truth! I was going to stay here tonight in a corner of the stage, so I wouldn’t have to pay for a hotel room — I’m following Recabarren — when I saw Madam Teresa change the baby’s diapers. I was able to realize that he was the hermaphrodite announced by the Tradition. Here in the Great North we believe in a prophecy that comes from the colonial era: before the year 2000, there will appear in the desert an olive green child with yellow eyes and double sex. He will be God incarnate once again, a new Christ who will come to overcome those who oppress the people: the Yeco, crow of salt and fresh water. Black feathers that in flight become light. As a river bird, he is Energy; as an ocean bird, he is Equilibrium. The salt water Yeco wants to dissolve in the fresh water Yeco who awakens and begins to fly. As he flaps his wings, he creates things, but when he stops, he destroys everything. And again he goes to sleep so the other will awaken him. And on and on. When he tires of annihilating, he dissolves in himself. There aren’t two different crows. There is only one, the ocean crow. The lake crow comes and fuses with him. One bird is male, the other female. After all, Yeco has both sexes. It is a legend, but very real. This divine child will unite the miners and with them initiate the Proletarian Revolution. There will be no more poverty; we shall be partners, not employees; a garden will arise from the arid desert! You, Don Seraphim, do not have to follow Recabarren. He’s a magnificent agitator, but he does not possess the magnetism of a god. On his own, he will not be able to unite men consumed by work and vice. Recabarren will make them take one step forward, but later they will take two back. To rid them of alcohol, prostitutes, gambling, and theft we will need something more than a human being. Yeco will do it! The mass of workers will organize around him, and he will achieve victory.’

“‘But, sir,’ Seraphim answered him, so moved that his forehead, nose, and cheeks — the little skin there was on his face — was white, ‘we don’t know you, and though we would like, with all our hearts, to believe you and accept that Almo has come to fulfill a prophecy, we can’t stop thinking that for strange reasons you are mocking us, poor comedians that we are.’

“I nodded, holding the baby against my chest. Nevertheless, despite those natural misgivings, I was overcome by a great feeling of well being, since I’d always believed in Almo’s superior Destiny. The Indian’s words were the confirmation of my dreams.

“‘Friends, in this evil society there is no truth other than money. Let’s let it speak,’ he said. He took off his hat and extracted from it a thick wad of banknotes.

“Seraphim whistled in shock. ‘I’ve never seen so much money in one place before!’

“‘It really isn’t much, sir, but enough for what we want. Let me explain: here in the north, in the mining region, is where a few of us shamans live. We are the guardians of the Tradition. Without us, the heritage of our race would be lost. Foreigners have invaded our land with their capital. Now potassium nitrate, copper, iron, silver, and gold all belong to the English and North Americans, who are linked to the government, which belongs to the rich. We shamans have saved up most of the money we’ve earned awaiting the arrival of the Yeco so we can offer it to him in his war against the oligarchy. But time doesn’t pass in vain. So much misery and social injustice made us lose patience and decide to set aside our beautiful legend to act in this ugly reality. I was sent here with the savings to give it to Recabarren and help him that way to create the Socialist Workers Party. Luckily, God wanted me to take refuge on the stage and see your baby naked. This money is for you. Accept it. It will allow you to rent a comfortable room in Iquique, eat well, and dress decently for four months. The time we’ll need to travel around the region announcing the good news and prepare a triumphal reception for you. The only thing I’ll ask of you is that when you’re in the port you bring the child to a certain photographer, a friend of mine, so he can take a picture showing the child’s two sexes. We’ll make copies and distribute them to all our offices. The workers will finally understand that the miracle exists, that God has come down here to Earth and is among us.’

“That roll of bills, coming from a humble man, convinced us. A new life was beginning. A life with an immense ideal. And we did go, as he suggested, to Iquique. He went with us. On the way there, he never spoke a word, and when he stopped, he’d hunker down for hours and hours never taking his eyes off Almo. In a small hotel at the port, they let us board Blacky and Whitey and rented us a room with a kitchen, bath, and windows overlooking the sea.

“Rosauro brought us to his friend, who specialized in identity card photographs, and got a picture of Yeco with his little legs spread, showing his penis and his vagina. He made a date with us: ‘On December 25, I’ll be waiting for you in the canton of Alto San Antonio, one of the most prosperous in the nitrate region. Look for the San Lorenzo mine. Be punctual. That date is important. Yeco must bring us the light that will begin the flight of darkness.’ He made his farewells sharing a bottle of pisco and headed for the desert.

“The four months passed quickly, but a notable change took place in Seraphim. He finally felt himself recognized by society. His child was not a monster but a God. All the injustices he’d suffered in life he now attributed to a dictatorship disguised as a democracy that he was going to help destroy. His abominable poverty and isolation were reaching their final days. Now a free workers’ paradise awaited him. All this thanks to the marvelous Almo. Seraphim stopped dressing like a clown. He bought himself two gray suits, shirts, ties, a felt hat, and a razor. He shaved off the hair on his face and used adhesive tape to pull his ears closer to his skull. Though I didn’t like the change, I understood him. Now he could walk unnoticed through the streets. He was, a delight to his soul, just one more person. After taking advantage of our vacation, eating delicious seafood, basking in the sun at the beach, and loving each other better than ever, we packed up our wagon to go to San Lorenzo, calculating our arrival for the assigned date.

“In those lonely highlands, night came on suddenly. It seemed to rise up out of the ocean and flow to the mountains like a black wave. We could see each other’s faces but not our feet. The dense fog, given off by the extremely dry land, fought to reach the sky, but it was so dense it could not rise. It was a cloud with roots. The mist became so thick that it ate up the road and horses.

“‘Let’s stop. It’s too dangerous to keep moving, and we might fall into a gully. Think of the child,’ I said to Seraphim.

“‘The fact is,’ he answered, ‘that with Almo here nothing can happen. God is protecting us. It’s now we have to show our confidence in him.’ And cracking his whip, he made Whitey and Blacky gallop. At first I was terrified. Then, as the wagon seemed to shake without moving forward — the compact mist and the moonless blackness proved impenetrable to our lantern, keeping us from seeing how the landscape slipped behind us — I gave myself over calmly to the rocking, as if I were in a huge cradle. I think Seraphim fell asleep as well.

“We woke at the edge of a precipice of white stone, an immense excavation resembling a stadium where they mined saltpeter. A group of miners carrying torches surrounded us. Rosauro was with them. ‘Yeco is making miracles. Even though you can see practically nothing, you arrived exactly on time to the place where we were waiting for you. Follow us.’ They guided us to the encampment. ‘Come down from the wagon, please. Our comrades will take care of the horses. Pass through here.’

“We entered a bar called Coquimbo Girls. Waiting for us there, all packed in, were about a hundred miners, waited on by three charming young ladies, daughters of the old couple who owned the place. It seemed incredible that the husband and wife, whose faces were so wrinkled they looked a hundred years old, could have such young daughters. But seeing them move made us realize that their wrinkles came from the salt that had creased their skin, not from age.

“Rosauro was highly excited. He took Almo out of our hands, undressed him, spread his legs, and showed his double sex. The workers fell to their knees whispering: ‘It’s true. He is the Yeco. Blessed be God.’

“Rosauro turned to us: ‘You can rely on these comrades. They come from all the different mines in the region. They’ve heard Recabarren’s speeches and want to fight for workers’ rights. But they haven’t been able to unite. Now, above them, in the Yeco, all our ideals converge. Now, thanks to the presence of this child, they can act like one single man. Tomorrow we are going to declare a strike in San Lorenzo. Then we’re going to extend it to the other centers. Here are the Ruiz brothers, who represent the workers. Yesterday they delivered a request for a wage increase to the mine administrator, Mr. Turner, an Englishman who refused to respond without speaking to management in Iquique. The brothers went on, aloud this time, to explain to Mr. Turner that the miners are paid four pesos for a criminally long workday. The price of a loaf of bread is a peso — that is, one quarter of a day’s pay. At that rate, it is impossible to live. Today, bright and early, the gringo told us that the company refused the increase. Which was what we wanted! Our goal is not to earn a few pesos more but to initiate the Total Revolution that will bring down the exploiters and take control of the Chilean government. Now we have a motive for beginning the process. With Yeco, the sacred flame, present we shall make the grand conflagration explode. There will be thousands of us abandoning our jobs. We shall march down to Iquique like a sea of ants. The authorities will simply have to hear us out. That’s how we’ll win the first battle. We shall go back to the mines, but we will also demand the right to form unions. Which will not be allowed. Then we’ll cause a general strike throughout the nation. The soldiers, who are also of the people, will disobey their chiefs and help us bring down the president and his court of thieves. Tomorrow we shall begin the revolt, and we shall not stop until the final victory!’

“We were able to sleep for four hours before daybreak. At sunrise, the whistle blew to wake up the workers. Instead of the usual three short blasts, there was a howl that went on for five interminable minutes. It was the official announcement of the strike. The group of leaders we’d met in Coquimbo Girls waving Chilean flags and signs, marched toward the Santa Lucía mine, which, five miles away, was working. Seraphim and I, holding Almo up like a standard, led the parade.

“The presence of the child-god convinced all the workers to take part in the strike. Like a growing flood, we rolled across the pampa, for three days, from mine to mine. The workers followed us, bringing along with them their wives and children. That multitude, which grew larger hour by hour, had to spend the cold nights out on the pampa, next to campfires. Since the fire was insufficient to warm them, the couples began to have sex among their sleeping children. That forest of febrile lovers made the ground tremble, giving life to the saline rigidity of the place. Seraphim, too, had me lie down on the vibrating wasteland. As he possessed me, I saw the desert become a garden: the thousands of ovaries of the women there, like my own, were the flowers of that region, which would never be sterile again. The enormous number of naked bodies made beautiful by the nocturnal dew that turned their bodies into mirrors that reflected the flames of the campfires, flesh burning without being consumed, increased the excitement of every couple. For hours, the gigantic waves of the orgasm traversed that stormy human sea.

“On the fourth day of the strike, the rumor spread that the chief administrator of the province would come up to Alto San Antonio to speak with the workers. It was false information that Rosauro, working with the other leaders, had put about. Tomás Eastman, the administrator, was in Santiago, replaced by a secretary with no authority who would never dare engage in dialogue with the strikers.

“The unity of the workers, thanks to the Yeco, was beginning to consolidate itself, but it was still green. What was needed to make it mature was a great anger. For the moment, the strike looked like a pagan festival. Seeing the great numbers, everyone was certain the crisis would be resolved in a few hours. The industry could not allow a stoppage of this magnitude. They would go en masse to Alto de San Antonio. The place would boil over with the animation of the workers. Improvised orators would speak from the music kiosk. Raising the miserable salary would most certainly happen.

“Everything happened exactly as Rosauro predicted. The horde of miners invaded the town in a festive mood. The Coquimbo girls, who knew how to sing and play the guitar, organized a collective dance. Revolutionary commissions requisitioned the four local bars, so the wine was free. The dancing and the drunkenness lasted until dawn. Then the Indian came running out of the telegraph office waving a phony message that one of the Ruiz brothers had supposedly sent him.

“‘The administrator will not condescend to come here! He only has contempt for us! He thinks the strike is unimportant! Comrades, we cannot allow ourselves to be humiliated! If this son of a gringo won’t come to us, we’ll go to him!’

“A shout of rage rose from myriad throats, and the multitude, like a single man, began the march to Iquique. The way was long, hot, an oven during the day and frozen at night. Pointy rocks cut feet, and thick clouds of flies took possession of the space overhead, barely letting the sunlight through. Anger caused the strikers to leave without bothering to carry food. To get to the port, they would have to fast for two days. No one cared. From living so long among the rocks, they’d become as hard as rocks. Their dried-out bodies were used to withstanding hunger. Forty-eight hours without food were nothing. And it would be easy to slake their thirst at night by licking the stones moistened by the mist.

“Rosauro called an emergency meeting of the leaders.

“‘We have to spread the word that no one is to go down there carrying a weapon. There’s a lot of dynamite in the region, and it’s possible that some fanatic will try to use it. Let me remind you that this first phase of the Revolution should seem inoffensive. We’ll show the bosses — peacefully — that without us the industry won’t function. Seeing us united like this, they will certainly raise our salary. Then we’ll go back to the mines and, little by little, arm ourselves for the final phase. Also, to avoid catastrophes, we have to give our march an intelligent head. As we go through the streets of Iquique, the Yeco will go first, along with his holy parents, then we leaders. After us, a group of comrades whom you will choose because they are fully aware of the political problem thanks to the teachings of the anarchists or Recabarren. No more than two thousand. And finally will come the enormous mass of workers whose only guide is misery, a mass we will have to learn to control.’

“The order of march was adopted unanimously. The shaman had the talent to be a general.

“On the fifth day of the strike, a Sunday, we appeared in the hills above the port, surrounding it like a horde of ants. We made our way down the slopes without a single shout, darkening the brownish earth. The people of Iquique filled the streets with great expectation. When we entered the town and organized ourselves according to plan, into a slow and mute parade, not even our footsteps echoed on the asphalt — almost all of us were barefoot because our shoes had been destroyed by the sharp rocks. The people of Iquique ran to offer us baskets filled with food, energetically commenting on the heroism signified by our long and self-sacrificing march from the highlands for the sake of justice.

“The authorities, on the other hand, treated us with a disdainful coldness, as if we were a small group of crazy pilgrims. But among those stiff bureaucrats trembled Guzmán García, Tomás Eastman’s secretary, denouncing this unheard-of arrogance. The Ruiz brothers approached him, demanding an immediate decision. His clothing soaked through with sweat, the secretary muttered: ‘I can say nothing. But the chief administrator has left Santiago and will arrive here tomorrow. He bears precise instructions on how to deal with the problem.’

“The forty thousand strikers assumed the battle had been won. They began to hug one another, and joy exploded. The strike leaders ran from one group to another but could do nothing to stop bottles of wine from being uncorked and the food baskets from being emptied. Many workers, convinced that triumph was imminent, tried to return to the pampa. For a few minutes, chaos ensued. It ended with the arrival of an army of cavalry and infantry following a noisy military band. By the time they surrounded us and the music stopped, the people’s joy had frozen.

“Guzmán García, shouting nervously despite the fact that with such a deathly silence you could hear the buzz of the desert flies, proposed to house the strike leaders in the Santa María school and the rest of the workers in the Sporting Club hippodrome. The town would lend us camp stoves, supply us with wine, fish, and beans. We applauded, and in the greatest order, marched, guarded on both sides by the soldiers, in a column that filled the street. We first went to the school, whose students, it seemed, were on vacation. The two thousand worker-leaders filled the classrooms and immediately stretched out on the benches for a siesta to rest after the march. Once the other workers got to the hippodrome and found themselves out of the watchful eye of their severe comrades, they scattered over the extensive property and recommenced the party, welcoming with pleasure the arrival of a multicolored flock of prostitutes on their day off. The Coquimbo sisters agreed to sing, and the snapping heels of the cueca dancers made the track tremble, as if herds of demented horses were running around it.

“Two hours later, in the school building, Rosauro woke everyone up and, helped by the Ruiz brothers, organized work groups to search for formulas to resolve the conflict. In addition to the salary raise, they would ask for greater security on the job — there were many accidents, and many miners, a few children among them, had been blown to bits by dynamite — and better hygienic conditions: the saltpeter powder affected the workers’ lungs, and they received no medical assistance. Their miserable living quarters were infested with fleas and lice.

“But while the head was lucubrating, the body was giving itself over to drunkenness. So that the workers wouldn’t forget what the goal of the struggle was during the heat of the party, Rosauro suggested that Seraphim, Almo, and I visit the Sporting Club. But we were to do so covertly: to keep the reprisals of the bosses from falling on the child, his messianic nature had been kept secret. When the multitude marched down the hills in exemplary obedience, it repressed any shout that might have revealed the marvelous secret. The Yeco united them with a silence more powerful than ten thousand inflammatory speeches. Even though the streets were filled with police, they didn’t stop us. For a second, their faces would turn toward us with interest and immediately turn away indifferently, as if they’d only seen three skeletal street dogs walk by.

“At the hippodrome, the drunken party was in full swing. The bodies were shaking, extracting unsuspected energy from the depth of exhaustion. The Coquimbo sisters, with booming voices unthinkable in their delicate throats, were singing verses stronger than cavalry charges. In corners, people were vomiting and fornicating. Seraphim, seeing the multitude completely out of control, began to stutter: ‘Wait a bit, Teresa. What are we going to do here? These drunks will never take any notice of us. Besides, we’ve already carried out our mission. The strike is victorious. Let’s leave right away!’

“And dominated by his timidity, he took hold of me as if to protect me and tried to walk out. But a couple interrupted their hip-shaking and ran toward us murmuring, ‘The Holy Family. Blessed be you.’ They kissed the blanket wrapped around the baby, and immediately, with sincere respect, invited us to begin a walk around the racetrack. Other workers surrounded us with such fervor that we couldn’t say no. As we passed, the couples would stop dancing; join hands as if they were praying; and whisper, obeying the rule of keeping the secret: ‘Thanks, Little God.’

“But no sooner had we passed than they went back to dancing frenetically. We had the feeling we were carrying an island of peace through a stormy sea. It took us much more than an hour to walk the entire course. The concealed veneration of those thousands of poor Chileans filled us with a limitless optimism, satisfying our primordial needs for security, love, integration, and social recognition. For once, ‘we’ was much more important than ‘I.’ I felt that roots were bursting out of the soles of my feet. This land had become mine.

“Seraphim said, ‘After this, it doesn’t matter to me if I die. These people love and respect me; what more can I ask of life? I never dreamed I would attain so much. I owe it all to you.’

“I answered by giving him a long kiss, and we returned to the school, where we realized that it wasn’t called Santa María by accident. Rosauro and the comrades thanked us for our sacrifice, and since we were worn out by the long march, they gave us the director’s office so we could sleep in his comfortable armchairs.

The enormous orgy lasted all night. Just at dawn, silence once again reigned. All Iquique slept until two o’clock on Monday. The people’s deep sleep was interrupted by a long, hoarse blast from a foghorn. It was the warship carrying the chief administrator. We ran in a mob to the dock and lined the seawall. The army followed us like a gray shadow. Three hundred sailors armed with polished rifles disembarked from the ship to form a double column through which Tomás Eastman soon made his way.

“He was a thin, dried-out old man dressed in black. Taking small steps, he walked toward the administration without raising his eyes from the sepia puttees adorning his honor guard. We crowded together under the principal balcony with a knot in our throats, nervous about the cannon pointed at us from the ship. Eastman came out onto the balcony and spoke only one sentence before going back in: ‘I carry official instructions from the government to resolve the conflict. Go back to the pampa.’ A jubilant din drowned out the noise of the waves. The workers considered their participation in the strike over, and now it was up to the leaders to negotiate the best conditions. Accordingly, they headed for an esplanade where the train track passed.

“We then heard train whistles, and two locomotives pulling a long line of flat cars arrived. The miners and their families crowded onto them. They looked like herds of animals. After this train pulled out, many more pulled in. The mining company had organized an efficient but undignified transportation system. The group of two thousand workers possessed of social awareness ran to the hill called La Cruz, which overlooked the esplanade, and from there, waving flags, they shouted, ‘We aren’t sheep to travel this way! Don’t leave, comrades! Nothing has been decided yet!’ But no one paid them any attention.

“No sooner had the last train pulled out, than the army, announcing a state of siege, herded the rest of the revolutionaries toward the Santa María school. Rosauro told everyone to obey, that nothing had been lost, and we shouldn’t give the authorities any reason for justifying the use of force. As soon as we entered the school, the military surrounded the building. The combined force of soldiers, sailors, and police was about eight hundred men. Not content with simply pointing their rifles and machine guns at us, they brought in a cannon and placed it opposite the main door.

“‘Victory, brothers!’ shouted the Indian. ‘If they’re waving around so many weapons, it’s because they’re afraid of us. And what do they fear, since they know we are unarmed? They fear our spirit! Perhaps some spy told them about the Yeco. That makes me happy because now the great moment has arrived. The prediction, which until now has been accurate at every stage, says that at the feet of the Sent One all armies will fall to their knees. If we send Don Seraphim and Doña Teresa so they show the child to the troops, the Yeco will shine like a sun, appearing in all his majesty. Seeing him, a colonel mounted on his white horse will fall as if struck by lightning. And the regular soldiers, realizing we are brothers, will turn their weapons against the exploiters.’

“At that very moment, a trumpet sounded. We went to the windows and saw a colonel mounted on a white horse arrive. With a castrato’s voice he shouted to us: ‘This is Colonel Roberto Silva Bernard speaking. I order you here and now to evacuate this school in order for you to be transferred to the hippodrome. There you will be sentenced for insurrection. You have five minutes to leave. If you disobey, I will order my men to fire.’

“Seeing that the arrival of this Napoleon coincided with the legend, the miners smiled in relief. Everything was happening as in a marvelous dream. The Indian suggested we open a few bottles to make a toast in honor of us, the Holy Family. We drank a glass of wine. Then the workers hugged us with great emotion and accompanied us to the main door. When they began to open it, I felt my legs weaken. I lost strength and had to ask Seraphim to carry Almo. I felt unbearable shame. I had never been a coward and didn’t understand why now, when I needed the most courage so I could be an example, I was feeling dizzy. I took the arm Rosauro offered me and mumbled to him: ‘Friend, for what you venerate most, keep me from falling. I don’t want the comrades to realize my weakness and to think I’m having doubts. I, more than anyone else, have faith in the power of my son.’

“‘Don’t worry, Teresa,’ he whispered into my ear. ‘I’ll accompany you, holding you up until the spell passes. Be brave.’

“And, giving the strikers an explanation I didn’t hear because I was holding back my vomit, he walked out onto the street with us. We were four human beings against an army armed to the teeth. Under my sweating feet, the ground moved like the deck of a ship on the high seas. My dry tongue had turned into a piece of wood. Seraphim held up the child and spread his legs to show his two sexes. I took a deep breath and concentrated my will, trying not to faint. Almo smiled. I waited for him to shine like a sun so the colonel would fall as if struck by lightning. Suddenly Rosauro took me by the back of my neck and brutally forced me to run toward the soldiers. I was so weak I couldn’t resist. When the soldiers, smiling, opened a path for us, Silva Bernard howled: ‘Open fire, God damn it!’ And a cannon shell blew my lover and my son to pieces. It had to be a nightmare. The Indian was laughing. There on the street, the flesh of my two beloved beings was falling in shreds like a slow rain.

“The machine guns began to bark. The soldiers tossed hand grenades and tear gas. They put on masks. They fixed bayonets. The cannon thundered again. The school door became a sun of splinters. I forgot my name, forgot where I was. An overpowering need to sleep made my eyelids swell. I knew my heart was tearing apart, but I felt that pain as if it were distant, above; my body transformed into the surface of a black well where my awareness was submerged. Soldiers and sailors dashed into the school. Everything became mixed up. Shouts of rage and agony. Packs of dogs coming to lick up the blood. Men, women, and children shot to pieces on the upper terraces. Miners running through the street with their guts in their hands. Brutish soldiers finishing off the wounded with knives. Masked men in gray dragging corpses by the hair. I begin to faint.

“The Indian carries me like a package, enters the administration building, goes upstairs to an office, locks the door, throws me onto an armchair, lifts my skirts, tears my panties off, mauls my breasts, and possesses me three times in a row. I vomit in his face. He laughs and drags me by the foot to the bathroom. He takes off his clothes, finishes undressing me, turns on the shower, and under the cold water rapes me again. Whistling a popular song, ‘We Who Love Each Other So,’ he brings me back to the armchair.

“I fall into a deep sleep. When Rosauro wakes me up, it’s already nightfall. I barely recognize him. He’s no longer an Indian or one-eyed, his skin is much lighter, his hair is short, he’s wearing a suit of English cut, a striped shirt, and a green tie with a clip in the form of the Chilean seal. Seeing my surprise, he whirls like a fashion model, guffaws aggressively, takes me by the waist, and forces me to look out the window. While the soldiers, with innocent faces, pile corpses onto garbage trucks, he, standing behind me, sexually assaults me like a wild animal.

“Hatred mixes with suffering, but pleasure, a pleasure only located in my sex, increases, and I can do nothing to stop it. It is like a soft crab that grows in my guts, stretching its sickening legs out further and further. My body betrays me. I explode, want to die, punish myself. I try to jump out the window. He punches my breasts and tosses me, splayed out, onto the armchair. He penetrates me again and, with no modesty whatsoever, roars and drools until he ejaculates.

“I scream, insulting him. Then he ties my feet together and puts handcuffs on my wrists. He pulls over a chair, sits opposite me, and lights a cigarette: ‘You won’t get anywhere screaming, Teresa. No one will come. I suppose they expect me to kill you. There’s still room in the last garbage truck. You must be wanting to die as well. But I’m going to disillusion you. I’ve decided to keep you for a while. The moment I saw you breastfeeding the baby in that miserable scene, I decided to get control over you. A Russian like you, with huge tits, a big ass, and skin whiter than your own milk — that’s not something you find every day in this country.

“‘I requested you as a prize if I carried out my task. The government has wanted to cut off that damned Recabarren for a long time. With his poisonous newspapers, taking advantage of the eternal discontent of the poor slobs, he was churning up political agitation that was very dangerous for the mining companies. Even though it would have been easy, it wasn’t convenient to assassinate him. Transformed into a martyr, he would end up unifying the workers around his myth. Better to defame him. The secret police sent me disguised as an Indian so I could catch him in something bad. I followed him for months, shadowed his every footstep, but it was useless. The bastard is straighter than my dick. He even looks like a saint. He doesn’t smoke and doesn’t drink, so he won’t assist bourgeois business. If you offer him cocaine, he rejects it in a rage. He’s faithful to his girlfriend and has no children we would have liked to lead into degradation. He never goes to parties and only likes to read. This shitty traitor is an enlightened nut. I was about to throw in the towel when I saw you clean your kid’s ass. At first his double sex disgusted me. Then I was happy, because a genial plan came to me, a plan that would win me a promotion, money, vacation, and your ass. I made up a legend in the asshole style of the Mapuche Indians, and you and your husband, like all parents who just drool over their kids, swallowed the hook.

“‘I sent you to Iquique for four months to have time to spread the story among the superstitious miners and convince them, showing them the photo of the monster, that he was God incarnate. I communicated with my chiefs, we coordinated the action with the mine administrator, the city, and the army, and the plan was set. We managed to eliminate all the strike leaders. The dragon lost its two thousand heads. The mass of workers, who only think about fornicating and getting drunk, will be happy with a pay increase of a few pesos. Recabarren will need many years to recruit new disciples. And what you thought was cowardice was the effect of a sleeping drug I put in your wine during the last toast. I’m talking to you, but I don’t want you to answer. What you think or feel doesn’t matter a bit to me. So I can make good use of your body, I want you to keep your mouth shut. And if you do say something, I’ll knock your teeth down your throat. We’re going to spend two months by the sea, far away from the world, in a chalet they’ve lent me, located between Iquique and Tocopilla. I’m going to have you at least six times a day. When I get tired of you, I’ll sell you so you can work as a whore in Peru or Argentina. If you do everything I want, you can grow old in those slimy bars, but if you make trouble, I’ll blow your brains out.’

“I gave in. Something in my brain had broken. I stopped thinking or having emotions. I assumed the role of his faithful bitch — to the point that when my executioner went to buy provisions, leaving me locked up, I whined by the door until he came back. I had to follow him wherever he went. When he cleaned his pistol, I stretched out at his feet, naked, waiting to be raped. I actually licked his boots clean and smiled when he peed on my face.

“One day, after he drank a dozen beers, he fell asleep in my arms. Suddenly I recovered my identity along with my anger and fury, and with one snap of my teeth, I severed his jugular vein. He got up and ran along the beach with a red line trailing behind him. He fell in the sand, transformed into a white rock. Even though I knew he was dead, I fired his pistol into his head. His skull split open, and a gray mass flowed out, which the crabs immediately devoured. I let them eat until they had enough. Then I dragged his remains to the hills, dug a deep grave, and buried him. When I’d tossed on the last shovel of dirt, I realized I had no idea what his real name was.

“I cleaned up the blood, and among his clothes, I found a suit, a shirt, shoes, and a hat. I put the rest of his things in two suitcases and buried them too. This way his bosses would think he’d left with me for some other country. I cut off my hair and, disguised as a man, with the little money I found, I bought a train ticket for Santiago. No one bothered me on the trip, because I pretended to sleep with an empty bottle in my hand — just another drunk. If I’d had anywhere else to go, I wouldn’t have come back to the tenement, to a past that was no longer mine. I got here when Alejandro was dying, the last person I might have been able to confide in. It didn’t matter to me that the world war broke out. Maybe it even made me happy, since I could take it as some kind of revenge. I knew I would be forever isolated, desolate, useless. Life? To be born for no reason, to suffer constantly, to die ignorant. God? Extant but unreachable. Blind, deaf, and mute for His creatures. Human society? A prison filled with lunatics, thieves, and drunks. Everything and everyone deserve only my curses.

“So now you see, Benjamín. You wanted to know the Truth; here you have it with the smell of rot. Stop sighing, untie me, bring more vodka, and let’s drink together. The best thing in this world is not to have been born.”

My uncle untied Teresa, brought another bottle, and they began to empty it. He’d felt himself depicted in my grandmother’s final words. He understood that much more than hating other people, he hated himself. He was a transparent angel fallen into a filthy sewer, his body. Before starting to snore with his nose stuck into his mother’s navel, he muttered:

The night comes with its she-wolf fury

Promising the birth of a sun in love

But shade can only give birth to shades

Nothing is born, nothing dies

And creation is oblivion.