Where the Bird Sings Best

The Promised Pampa

The thirty-five days of the voyage passed quickly. The powerful Weser cut the waves with the same ease the waiters in first class cut slices from their collection of French cheeses. Whenever meals were served, those mixed odors of milk and dung descended like oily waves along the metal ladders and reached steerage to make the 1,200 dried-out mouths of the Jewish emigrants water. But Alejandro Prullansky, without envying the luxury surrounding his ex-colleagues from the Imperial Ballet, enthusiastically went on with his daily exercises.

Poised on a rope strung between two enormous packing cases, he repeated hour after hour his entrechats, leaps, and cross-steps, following the rhythm Icho Melnik generously supplied with his harmonica. In his memory, the pimp retained innumerable melodies by Chopin, Liszt, Mozart, and others. When his lips began to hurt from blowing so much through his small instrument, he would begin to recite thoughts from Seneca rhythmically, revealing a level of culture that in a man of his profession seemed absurd, all so his friend could continue training: “Work is not a good in itself. Then what is a good in itself? Contempt for work.” Icho would laugh but immediately continue: “On the other hand, those who make an effort to obtain virtue without allowing themselves to become dejected deserve applause.” And when he pronounced the word “virtue,” he used his fingers to mimic the act of counting money.

Jashe joyfully observed her husband’s perfect body. The splendid functioning of those wise muscles, producing gestures of superhuman delicacy, aroused in her a pleasure that made her forget the corruption of the flesh, evil, and hunger. She did not fear the future and, knowing she was pregnant, gave herself over sweetly to the new life. Her Alejandro was a living temple, and his dancing would change the world. The six prostitutes lavished tender care on her, making the voyage as comfortable as possible because she read the Tarot for them, giving profound answers to their silly questions: “Will my business improve if I dye my pubic hair red? Will I find an old man who will give me jewels and furs? Will I know love?” She predicted that two of them would marry military men; Marla, the tallest and most powerfully built, she saw paired up with an important politician; she lied to the other three, covering up her sorrow with nervous laughter, promising them long lives, health, and riches. They believed her because the gigolo began to make them work during the crossing. At night, he sent them to the cabins of the ship officers or to the service staff. They would come back at dawn carrying fruit, cigarettes, caviar, champagne, and chocolates. They shared everything. Icho, his belly swollen and with a smile from ear to ear, would quote before falling deeply asleep: “Life is a play. What matters is not that it lasts a long time but that it be well-acted.”

The coast of Argentina came into sight, and the ship made for the Río de la Plata. It was then that Simón Radovitzky, a tall, long-nosed boy with protruding ears, as skinny as a string bean, appeared before the prostitutes. He was pursued by a party of matrons frantically supporting his mother, who was tearing her hair out. Because of Simón’s black, bulging, and fanatical eyes, the rest of his body became invisible after a few minutes. When he spoke, the words seemed to come from his pupils: “Gentlemen, your good wives shave you every morning. Please allow them to cut off my beard. I want to get this superstitious tradition off my back. The past is a cage.”

While his mother twisted her fingers and howled “oy” piteously, her huge tears soaking the wool shawl covering the heads of her fellow gossips, the young prostitutes, happily chirping, lathered up Simón’s head and face. His mother tried to stop him for the last time by reciting a few proverbs in Yiddish: “A man’s stupidity complicates his path. With a lie, you go far, but you can’t come back. If you give the devil a hair, he’ll soon want your whole beard.” But the girls, after taking off his black overcoat, his fringed vest, and his leather cap, began to shave him.

When his payot, his side curls, fell, his mother muttered: “You are lost!” and bent over clutching her abdomen as if she were having a miscarriage. Her women still held her up so she wouldn’t fall to the floor. Making a supreme effort, she recovered; “It’s annoying to carry a hunched back, but painful to separate yourself from it. This man is no longer my son. He’s a drunk, a shikker. May your mother be one of these six kurvehs! May your brain dry up, may the worms start eating you while you’re still alive, may you walk on your hands as many years as you’ve walked on your feet, and for the rest may you drag yourself along on your backside!”

The Jewish matrons left steerage without looking back, reciting magic verses to purify themselves from the sacrilegious air they’d breathed.

Simón Radovitzky was happy to see his bare face and bald head in the hand mirror with floral frame Marla handed him. He exclaimed:

“Being a Jew is much more than a disguise and a mop of hair! You can’t spend your life believing in fairy tales and vengeful gods! We’re living in the twentieth century! We’re arriving at a young continent. We have to stop separating ourselves, stop living in an imaginary universe. Race, nationality, religion, customs — they’re all unlucky limitations. We belong to the world, and the world is ours, in the same way that all human beings belong to us. Let’s open our eyes, because the awakening of Awareness depends on Justice.”

Wearing white trousers and a yellow shirt with blue polka dots that Icho Melnik gave him, the new Simón Radovitzky, accompanied at a distance by my grandparents and the whores, ran to the deck to show himself to religious Jews, offering himself as an example. They all fled without looking at him as soon as he approached. He spread his arms, shouting at the top of his lungs, “Brothers, I’m not a wolf, and this is not a henhouse! Listen to me, I beg you! I too have tried to be a saint, but there is no saintliness to be gained by separating ourselves. With your noses buried in the Torah, you can only see yourselves, cut off from the world as you are by that ‘sacred’ text. For not wanting to give anything, for continuously washing your hands in a desire not to participate in sin, you have ceased to be useful to society. But since the universal law is that everything has a purpose, society uses you to make you into victims. You have constructed for yourselves a Destiny, to be clowns who receive blows from others. Enough! I will unite myself with the horrors of life. Whatever happens to others, happens to me. I shall denounce in all possible media — letters, newspapers, shouting in the street if it comes to that — the economic injustice that allows a few egoists to live in idleness, exploiting the labor of the workers. I shall ceaselessly demand the abolition of that authoritarian monster which is the State. I shall vomit on the lie of matrimony, a mercantile contract that legitimizes unions without love; I shall vomit on the patriotic lie that exaggerates natural affection for one’s native land to turn it into fanatical stupidity that keeps the proletariat from understanding that the social problem is cosmopolitan. And I’ll vomit on the religious lie that foments in the masses a servile attitude and enough resignation that they can bear the iniquities of earthly bandits with the hope of a celestial glory. I shall always denounce political necrophagy in favor of vital anarchy.”

The bearded religious Jews whispered to one another, touching their temples with their index finger: Mashugana! Then they erased him from their memory. Simón spit toward them and went back to the whores’ corner to brandish a knife he’d stolen from the kitchen. He swore, “From now on my life ceases to be at the service of death. Instead, I put death at the service of life. Tyrants become vulnerable when a decided individual appears.”

For my grandfather, those phrases shouted out by the young fanatic were a revelation. He, locked away from the age of five in the elegant prison of the Imperial Ballet, with no horizon other than dance, was unaware of the pain in the world. Life seemed to him a continuous party. All he had to do was move to experience the pleasure of the work of art. He saw everything as a dance where stars, landscapes, multitudes, animals, and machines mixed together in a harmonious coupling. But Simón’s inflammatory discourse brought him out of his naïve radiance and submerged him in the fog of madness.

The Weser began to skim along the banks of the river, entering the outskirts of the immense city of Buenos Aires, a hive of proletarian dwellings and unhealthy factories, a human worm nest. From those dark places poured garbage, chemical liquids, rotten hides, greasy cans, excrement, making the water into a pitch-colored magma. On the banks of pestilential streams, garbage and myriad rats splashed around on the ground turned into mud by flooding. The mists from the leather factories, the smoke, and the soot from chimneys darkened the sky. Arrows of green flies opened ditches in that dense, gray air, buzzing with murderous hunger.

The giant dancer, hiding his ears on the bosom of the small woman, fell to his knees. Immobile and white, he looked like a cadaver emptied of blood. It was not the flock of men, women, and children working in the tremendous labyrinth of sordid factories that affected him but the mooing of the steers they were sacrificing in the chilled meat plants to freeze their meat and send it abroad. There were thousands and thousands of sheep in mile-long lines, being led to death. Their anguished moans, their squeals of terror, their dying cries, the rivers of dark blood, the mountains of guts and skulls, the filthy piles of hides, the fetid stench all came together in the mind of my grandfather with the ghosts of even more millions of quadrupeds that had already been butchered, day after day for years. Pyramids of knives worn right down to the handle, torrents of yellow teeth, smashed eyes floating in lakes of pus, planets of meat dissolving into worms.

“Why this lack of awareness? They suffer, they are beings, part of myself. There they are before me, skinned animals, legs spread in a cross, an ocean of Christs with bleeding anuses, saints dismembered with mathematical slices. I know the pain of sheep; I’ve been raping them since I was in the sperm of Alejandro I, my demented grandfather writing a request for help with the guts of his victims. And then in the vital liquor of my degenerate father, murdering women and children like the owners of those factories. Forgiveness was already granted; my mother devoured the cadaver of my progenitor and purified it by immersing herself in white. White! White! I love you! My God, forgive the Argentines for they know not what they eat, because they do not realize that their country lives on the production of frozen cadavers!”

Suddenly my grandfather saw, galloping toward him over the waters of the Río de la Plata, myriad sheep metamorphosed into furious dogs. And when they began biting him until they’d devoured his body and there was nothing left but a voice arising from the void, he began to howl:

Because I walk in the valley of the shadow of death

I fear all evils if you are not with me!

Free my life from the power of the dog!

My God, hasten to help me!

Jashe, desperate seeing her husband immersed in madness, put one of her breasts in his mouth so he could suck as if he were her child. Then she put the red shoes on him. No sooner than he felt on his feet those ancient shoes did my grandfather smile in satisfaction and begin to snore. The swarm of flies scattered, shocked by the sirens in the port. The Weser was entering the capital of Argentina. The ships were all packed together like a nest of giant ants, dead ants drying out next to deserted sea walls. Not a soul walked among the mountains of merchandise piled up on the docks.

Under a murderous sun, five thousand freight cars loaded with agricultural products were waiting to be unloaded at the warehouses. A huge banner made of cloth fluttered weakly, caressed by the tiniest breeze: WORKERS YES! SLAVES NO!

When the Weser dropped anchor, it emitted a long blast of the foghorn, and without lowering the gangways, it seemed to pull back into itself like a sleeping turtle. The hours went by. Night fell. Dawn came. Marla, the captain’s favorite, carrying a Swiss cheese and some Italian nougat, brought the news: the Federation of Stevedores had begun a work stoppage supported by coachmen and other workers groups, that had degenerated into a general strike.

The conflict erupted because the stevedores, whose workday lasted fourteen hours, were forced to carry sacks that weighed more than two hundred pounds. The rationale behind this was that the importers from South Africa required large sacks because they had black laborers stronger than camels. The federation demanded a limit of one hundred and fifty pounds and workdays of ten hours, energetically demanding for its members the right to be considered human beings and not beasts of burden. The bosses were outraged and assumed an inflexible attitude, calling the strikers pernicious foreigners. Accordingly, they proposed to the government a bill of expulsion. Now the Congress was locked away in a special session to approve the law, declare a state of siege, obtain the right to sack citizens’ homes, dissolve riots and aggressive meetings, use troops for an armed defense of “the dearest thing the nation has: its grand harvest,” and above all, censor the majority of the newspapers.

Smiling, Icho Melnik shrugged his shoulders and quoted a thought of Maecenas: “Cripple me, make me lame, slap a hump on my back, loosen my teeth, crucify me… if you leave me alive, I’ll feel fine.”

Simón Radovitzky turned red with rage: “This period in Argentina will be tossed into the garbage can of history. In the future, no citizen will want to recall such infamy. Only a few scholars, while reading in some library dusty documents containing these miserable petitions to Congress, will shut their eyes in shame, afraid of catching an infection. How can one human being force another human being to carry two hundred pound sacks fourteen hours a day for a salary he can’t live on? These millionaire parasites have gone insane: they think they are the soul of the nation, when in reality they are devouring the nation!”

At midday, the asphalt began to tremble and a metallic, heavy noise made thousands of stevedores come out of the shadows. In a few minutes, a sea of human bodies filled the docks roasted by the implacable summer. Fatigue and anguish had transformed the workers into a tame flock. Five cars appeared, filled with soldiers and police, who quickly got out to point their rifles at the brutalized mass.

“What insolence!” Simón exclaimed.

From a motorcycle protected by an armored car and a group of thugs came the chief of police, Colonel Roberto Falcón. Some twenty or so men ran toward him to hand him papers. “Disgusting informers!” muttered Simón. “Look at them passing on their abominable blacklists!”

Roberto Falcón jumped on top of a barrel and, with ferocious contempt, stared at the strikers. His impeccable suit without a wrinkle; his black hair plastered down with hair tonic, shining like a helmet; his patent leather boots; his striped tie with pearl clasp; his white silk scarf, all contrasted scornfully with the filth and poverty of the silent workers. Suddenly the colonel began to shout like an animal trainer, as if he were talking to dogs:

“The jig is up, faggots! You lost the battle! The Congress unanimously voted to give us legal powers to launch the largest repressive campaign our country, Argentina, has seen to date! The general strike is liquidated! We’re going to cleanse the nation of anarchists, active militants in trades unions, leaders of workers, the editorial staff of critical press, seats of labor, and the rest! Hear what I said, you jackass gringos? Get back to work immediately and let us, if you want to save your scummy hides, get on with the arrest of the malevolent agitators whose names we have on the lists our wise informers have given us!”

The soldiers penetrated the crowd guided by the squealers, who shouted out the names of the guilty at the top of their lungs. The accused, with their eyes averted and without trying to run away, turned themselves in to the men in uniform, who first beat them with night sticks and then locked them away in black riot trucks. The other stevedores headed for the mountains of sacks and began to carry them. The rays of sunlight made those packages shine and gave them the air of shells transforming the saddened workers into slow-moving reptiles. The ships, shaking off their lethargy, filled up with sailors. The cranes screeched, the gangways stretched out their avid arms, and the port, with the tremors of a woman giving birth, gave out a dismal whine. A compact sphere of flies, flashing green in the sunlight, paused over the colonel’s head. He extracted a thin stiletto from his walking stick and plunged it into the buzzing planetoid. The flies separated and fled to land on the carloads of rotten vegetables.

“Fucking bugs. Only force can pull them apart. The only reason they listen to is the whistle of weapons. Remember my name, you living rag dolls. In the name Falcón, there is a falcon. Anyone who doesn’t obey will fall into my clutches and get the pecking he deserves. If you don’t understand, I’ll reward you with a beating salad. You are the scum of your nations. If you want to live in this country, don’t behave like uppity parasites. Gringos have no rights here. No say, no vote. Be thankful we’ve let you live. Anyone who stops working today, even if it’s to pee, will be shot to pieces. Hard laws only apply to some people, which is the way it should be. Get the hell out of my sight!”

Haughty, the colonel grabbed hold of the shoulders of a young man with the profile of a Greek statue and rode off on his motorcycle, heading for the center of the capital. The strong blast from the exhaust pipe gave Radovitzky chills. He waved a kitchen knife around, muttering, “You get the hell out of my sight and may you rot in hell, Roberto Falcón! I know we shouldn’t hate the dog but the owner of the dog, but you carry out your disgusting task with too much pleasure. You add torture to the legal punishment, only to blow up the stinking balloon of your image of power. One day a knife will burst that balloon and make you go back to being what you’ve always been: a dead man.”

“Calm down, boy, and hide that knife,” said Icho. “What you say about the colonel is valid for all living beings. What is life if not a slow death?”

My grandfather woke up very rested, but it took him ten minutes to recover his senses. Meanwhile Jashe combed her blonde hair and made a braid down to her nape. Then she examined that piece of work with intensity. Seeing the dancer’s transparent beauty, his blue eyes like a constant dawn pouring an immemorial love onto the world, that smile of a newborn, that powerful chest breathing with such delicacy that the foul air left his mouth transformed into a balm, my grandmother wept with rapture and thanked heaven Alejandro hadn’t seen the atrocious beating. She would have wanted to be a magician to cleanse the world of ugliness and offer this divine man a life equal to his purity.

The first-class passengers began to disembark. The Imperial Ballet was received by an elegant committee that filled the arms of the ballerinas with roses of all different colors. Marina Leopoldovna, making her way down the gangplank, cast a rapid look toward the emigrants crowded together on the deck. When she saw the blond giant shining like a lotus flower in the pool of pitch formed by the Israelites’ black overcoats, she murmured malignantly, “Your career is over. You will never dance again. My father will have your legs cut off.” They all got into a dozen taxis and left the port for the colonnaded Colón Theatre.

As the procession passed, the workers took off their caps and saluted the ballerinas as if they were magical abstractions, butterflies made of human flesh, ambassadors from a paradise yet to come. Seeing the tremendous impression they made, Vladimir Monomaque thought to satisfy the multitude by tossing out handfuls of coins, which for dignity’s sake no one picked up. Marina Leopoldovna, refusing to flash her famous smile, preferred to sink into the seat of the car and, under the pretext of an attack of sneezing, hid her face in her shawl.

When the Ballet and the committee disappeared, eight immigration inspectors entered the ship to receive the Jewish farmers. Seeing those bizarre costumes, those long beards, those interminable sideburns, they were astounded. Then they burst into curses: “We asked for farmers, not a bunch of lunatics! These skinny worms couldn’t even lift a shovel!”

The immigrants shook their pale hands to show the calluses they’d acquired on the voyage by rubbing their hands with ropes.

The chief inspector howled, “Captain, send barbers! No one gets off this ship wearing a beard, sideburns, and long hair! And to salute our flag, they all have to take off those ridiculous little hats!”

When some of the stewards appeared waving razors and scissors, the women went down on their knees howling doggish lamentations, and the men gathered behind them intent on dying before they let anyone cut off a single hair. Not knowing what to do, the immigration authorities went up to the bridge to communicate with their superiors by telegraph.

Icho Melnik said, “Our compatriots worry a lot about something that matters little. After all, how important can it be to avoid for more or less time what is inevitable? They’ll end up shaven!” He spread his arms to receive his brother Yumo, who came to Buenos Aires three years earlier. It was he who sent the tickets. He ran a bordello for the wealthy in the center of town. All the girls were foreigners, preferably Jews, because they were the most sought after.

The fat pimp spoke with his brother in hushed tones, and then said to his new friends, “Alejandro, Jashe, Simón, following what my master teaches, the site where we stop matters little, as long as we can arrange a good exit. For the moment, you have no place to stay. It would be better if you came to our bordello. There, no one will bother you and, in exchange for some small services, you can stay as long as you need. There are lots of empty rooms. While Jashe helps in the kitchen and Simón makes the beds and brings fresh towels to the rooms, Alejandro can give dance classes to our protégées so their backsides fatten. Agreed? Well? Then come along with us. The authorities, with regard to whores and money discretely allotted, will provide all the facilities we need to disembark.

In the car that carried them to the center of the city, distancing them from miserable neighborhoods and bringing them closer to baroque constructions where myriad styles and luxurious materials all mixed together, Alejandro was discovering within his spirit an infinite field of new possibilities. Unable to contain himself, he poured into the ears of my terrified grandmother words so optimistic that in this world, sinister for being so unknown, they glittered like demented jewels.

“Do you know, Jashe, until now I never thought. I lived like an animal, only feeling things. But that young anarchist’s speech caused a moral earthquake in my soul. You said my body was a temple, and you were right because within me God has appeared. He speaks to me ceaselessly. Listen to what he says:

My son, you are what you are in the present. Leave the past behind; don’t carry blame. Eliminate all anxiety about the future. Prepare to work for your evolution until the last instant of your life. Let no one be your judge; be your own judge. If you want to triumph, learn to fail. Never define yourself by what you possess. Never speak about yourself without allowing yourself the possibility to change. Think that you do not exist individually, that what you do does itself. Only by accepting that nothing is yours will you be the owner of all. Become a total offering. Give, but oblige no one to receive. Make no one feel guilty; you are an accomplice to whatever happens. Stop asking for things and start thanking. Obtain in order to give away.”

With tears in her eyes, Jashe kissed her giant even though he was unable to cut off his monologue. Their four lips stayed together, and he deposited in her throat his incessant necklace of phrases:

“Discover the universal laws and obey them. Don’t eliminate; instead transmute. Teach others to learn from themselves. With the little you have, do the most you can. Give a hungry man something to eat, but don’t keep him at your table. Don’t ask yourself where you are going; just move ahead taking proper steps. Leaping is as beautiful as crawling: don’t compare yourself; develop your own values. Change your world or change worlds.”

Alejandro said so much that Jashe, to her profound regret, was only able to remember a tiny bit. They reached the bordello. A sumptuous house surrounded by rose bushes, quite proper looking, but with a red light at the door. They were received by twelve girls dressed in bright costumes, wearing exaggerated makeup, which, even at that time of day, could not hide their dry faces. They passed through a salon covered with golden drapes, containing furniture with red velvet upholstery. They marched up four flights. There they were given an attic decorated in bohemian style with lots of cushions and a grand but low bed opposite a huge mirror. Alejandro, still in a trance, was aware of nothing. Like an infinite river, he spoke without eating or sleeping for three solid days:

“What is necessary is possible. If you want to end the vices of others, purify yourself. What you see is what you are. Sicknesses are your teachers. Do not touch another’s body to get pleasure or to humiliate him; touch him to accompany him. Don’t boast of your weaknesses. Act for the pleasure of acting and not for the favorable results it may produce. Forgive your parents.”

Then he slept for three days. Meanwhile, my grandmother, who had already learned, while still on the ship — from the lips of Marla, who spoke Ladino — the words necessary to survive in this country. With unbreakable energy, she had flyers printed up praising the qualities of the ex-first dancer of the Imperial Ballet and distributed them among the people who formed immense lines outside the ticket office of the Colón Theatre. In the neighborhood of the bordello, she found a large study, rented it, and received the inscriptions of enthusiastic girls and effeminate young men who wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to learn classical dance with a high-ranking professor.

On the fourth day, she woke her husband, bringing him breakfast in bed, fresh fruit. Waiting for him in the gymnasium were 150 students. Alejandro ate an entire pineapple, threw on his clothes, and noted with surprise that one of his red shoes, the right, had turned blue.

“The grand change is beginning. From intervention I’m passing on to reception. I will not teach classical techniques, because they correspond to the limitations society imposes. To the contrary, I shall liberate their bodies so they once again find their natural expression. Animals are a continuous dance. So is man. God creates the gestures, which is why every sincere movement is a revelation.”

The Argentine students, the children of the rich, knew little about the history of dance and did not intend to dedicate their lives to art. What they were looking for was some cultural varnish to justify their idle lives. And for that, the classes given by the Russian were perfect. Alejandro, without realizing how frivolous his students were, dedicated his entire being to the exercise. He felt a constant interaction between his body and the Cosmos, coming to believe that the slightest movement of his fingers could influence the Destiny of the galaxies. One night he excitedly embraced Jashe and declared, “I’m going to recount a miracle. Today I made a chain of dance steps so beautiful that up in heaven two suns were born.”

The months passed. Alejandro, never weakening, like a shepherd of wild goats, buried himself in his academy, making his inconstant students rehearse a ballet titled Life about a thousand times. He only returned to the bordello to kiss his wife — who was showing a belly that was more and more prominent — spread her legs, visit the secret temple, rapidly deposit his offering, and then sleep like a stone. From time to time, Icho Melnik and his brother Yumo would visit the attic Jashe had transformed into an enchanted palace by decorating it with paper flowers and pieces of bottles. There they would drink boiling, highly sugared tea with lemon and complain about the cruel manias of their clients and consult the Tarot.

The good life was making Icho fatter day by day. In the kitchen he had a personal refrigerator full of prize beef, two hundred pounds, and at every meal he would eat six steaks along with the other dishes on the menu. He justified his gluttony quoting Seneca: “If you do not take control of time, time will run away from you.”

Yumo preferred moderation. Despite his hair, which was red but tending toward carrot in color, his face marked with freckles, and his muscular torso resting on thin legs, he tried to dress with elegance. For him, prostitution was a respectable business, and he had visiting cards printed up with his name and below that “Supplier of Feminine Beauty. Imported.” He was not ashamed to visit the synagogue, even though the congregation refused to say hello to him, thinking he was a temeim, an impure person.

He argued, “I do not understand your disdain. My girls are as sacred as the Torah. We Jews are a chosen people, and our mission is to lead the goys to holiness. God is hidden in the depths of the Hebrew female sex. Every vagina is a sacred place. When the member enters there, it receives its baptism of fire about which so many speak without knowing what it’s all about. In a certain sense, the clients die when they possess my hetaeras. And when they withdraw, they are in reality born. A new life awaits them. To ejaculate into Jewish whores is, dear friends, doing it in the open emptiness of God.”

No one bothered to listen.

Simón Radovitzky also came to visit Jashe, but only on the odd afternoon. Always busy, he did his work with the same fanatical concentration with which he defended anarchism. Every bed he made was a work of art: well-beaten mattresses, geometric folds, total absence of wrinkles. He would hand his clients perfumed towels and then stand before them with impeccable dignity, making himself invisible, only allowing his ardent eyes to float about. When they gave him his tip, he thanked them with an elegant nod of his head. That elegance was actually comic, because the shame of being reduced to beggar status made his protruding ears bright red. During his tiny bit of free time, especially during the early hours — the whores slept from seven until three in the afternoon — he dedicated himself, not earning a cent, to writing for clandestine anarchist publications and then selling them, risking his life in the process. Aside from attacking the tyranny of the government and its “barbarous thugs with sabers and whistles,” the mass arrests and the expulsion of “pernicious foreigners,” which were all grist for his mill, he attacked the socialists, those “traitors and cowards who took advantage of the persecution to accuse the anarchists of being violent and move into leadership roles in the trade unions.”

One May, there was a strike by restaurant waiters protesting a municipal ordinance that forced them to shave off their moustaches. Simón, even though he no longer wore that virile ornament because he’d decided not only to live outside of religious customs but also outside of seduction (Never adorn. The free man does not sell himself, does not produce effects, does not solicit; he creates connections because severing them in order to produce archipelagos of island beasts makes no sense. The free man’s encounter with a woman should be magic, instantaneous, without calculations, definitive, and total. Why seek her when all the powers of the Universe have her reserved for you anyway?), accepted the idea that the strikers considered the new rule a grievance and opposed the cutting of that bit of hair with energetic resistance: the oligarchy needed eunuchs to serve them, and in this instance testicles and moustaches had the same meaning.

Writing in the pages of The Sun — the only workers newspaper which hadn’t been closed, as its editor was a well-known native Argentine poet — Simón, who wrote his articles in Russian and saw them translated not only into Spanish but also into Italian, German, English, and French because most of the workers were immigrants, ripped into the authorities:

The climate of cowardice engenders tyrannies. If everyone says ‘let’s give in,’ they become accomplices in the raising of the machete, in thought control. This infamous attempt to castrate the workers originates in the upper classes who, in order to erase the spiritual power of the individual, make all uniform. Everything uniform — be it religious, military, or unionized — is an assault on the always-different nature of each being. Protest, brothers! Protest out of self-defense, out of pure self-interest, because tomorrow all will be measured by the same yardstick, because the abuse committed against any member of a collectivity, even the most insignificant, becomes the shame and insult of those who tolerate it.

Radovitzky’s words affected his readers like a lit match dropped into a lake of alcohol. The coachmen’s boys joined the strike along with the leather cutters from the shoe factories. Then the port workers, sailors, stokers, and stevedores. They all asked for human respect and a ten-percent salary increase. With the good wishes of the police, the large companies, taking an intransigent attitude, began to employ strikebreakers. To stop the unloading of ships, the strikers attacked the traitors. The disturbance extended along the docks. Simón Radovitzky, part of the tumult, took out a revolver and fired. Other workers carrying weapons followed his lead. But the timidity of the workers, accustomed to bowing their heads, caused the bullets to fly over the heads of the police and land in the mountains of rotten melons waiting to be loaded. The soldiers’ ferocious cruelty, their lack of imagination, and their intelligence cut in uniform patterns caused all their bullets to land in the heart of Paolo Zapoletti, an Italian emigrant, who fell backward with his chest turned into a strainer. An enormous red stain began to surround the body until it became a halo like those that surround the Virgin.

The fighting stopped. That single casualty grew in the minds of the spectators until it became a giant. Many hands lifted the fallen man. They put him on a cot to carry him in a slow, silent march, interrupted from time to time by hoarse he-man voices singing revolutionary songs with such heartrending force they seemed like arrows. In that way, they marched for hours through the poor neighborhoods. More than ten thousand new strikers joined the funeral march. Simón began to shout, “An eye for an eye, death for death!” The crowd imitated him, repeating his motto, louder and louder. The police, fearful that the public outcry would increase and that the workers would attack the police stations, used a detachment of cavalry to stop the procession, disperse it with sabers, and take away the body. Once the scare passed, a wave of rage was unleashed among the workers. Even though they outnumbered their enemies, they panicked at the presence of a small group of horses and a few whistles.

Simón howled, “Comrades, to break bones you’ve got to sacrifice some meat! Let a few of us die willingly to exterminate all of them! Let’s be daring! Let’s continue the strike until we finish off the State!”

More modest spirits requested that the meeting be dissolved to allow time for the various associations to meet and publish a protest statement supported by organized elements of the worker mass: Socialist Party, Federation of Dependents, unions, anarchist groups, etcetera. The workers of Buenos Aires, setting aside their ideological differences, would march united, as a colossal body, denouncing the abuses of the stinking cops so the exploiting classes would understand that social issues could not be resolved with prisons, persecutions, or deportations.

Two days later, with government authorization, the demonstration began. Having received an order from Roberto Falcón, the workers did not wave red flags and accepted to suppress the violent criticism against the measures adopted by the police during the state of siege, all in order to avoid provocations that might bring about bloody reprisals. More than forty thousand workers marched in severe calmness from Constitution Plaza to Plaza Lavalle. All along the path of the march police were standing guard, and many agents on horseback closely followed the demonstrators. When they reached Plaza Lavalle, the speakers began to take their places on an improvised stage.

Simón Radovitzky pulled out a red flag he’d hidden under his leather overcoat and waved it in the face of one of the thugs on horseback. The soldier charged toward Simón, intending to crush his skull under the horse’s hooves. Several demonstrators interposed themselves, trying to prevent the incident. The man with the big ears would not let up. He waved his rag as if he were facing a bull and in precarious Spanish shouted to him, “If you strike me, you strike yourself, you savage on a horse! Let your murderous blows fall on me, cover my skin with red splotches where you’ll be able to read your Destiny!”

Those words were incomprehensible to the uniformed laborer. He took them to be a string of insults, so he unsheathed his saber and, making threats, swung it around wildly. Simón, shrieking euphorically, fired five shots into the air. Roberto Falcón, on his motorcycle, sitting behind his helper with the Greek profile, whispered into his ear. The driver honked his horn three times. Instantly the police opened fire on the workers. A single fusillade was all it took to bring down many victims. Amid an enormous confusion, a general retreat began, but the situation worsened when companies of firemen arrived and used their powerful hoses to decimate the demonstrators. The motorcycle horn honked again. Silence. Colonel Falcón smiled in satisfaction.

Scores of wounded and dead were pouring out blood, whose stains seemed to write out a melody on the five parallel lines painted on the asphalt. The only person who could see that was Radovitzky, who observed the massacre hidden in a cart loaded with artichokes. He copied out the musical phrase in his notebook and watched the police chief pass by on his ridiculous motorcycle, probably on his way to a press conference where he’d communicate the official version of events to calm public opinion. Then he slipped off the cart, and staying close to the shadowed walls, lightly made his way, satisfied, toward the bordello.

By provoking this loss of workers blood, he’d created martyrs, who in turn would create hatred and the desire for revenge. For him, the most powerful weapons in a revolt were innocent victims: “The lives of many are won with the death of a few.” He did not feel guilty, because he himself was ready to sacrifice himself at any time. He’d donated his existence to humanity a long time ago.

As soon as he reached the mansion with the red light, he asked Icho Melnik to play (never mentioning its source) the musical phrase created by the workers’ blood on his harmonica. Out came a proud lament which, in tango rhythm and arranged for accordion and a string trio, became the house anthem and made the sensual orgies of the clients more pleasing.

Jashe, on the eve of giving birth, all dressed in white, wrapped her arms around her enormous belly and danced that stabbing tango, which came from the floor below, with her unborn daughter for a partner.

In the absence of Alejandro, who would come home after midnight, give her a kiss on the forehead, and collapse into bed to (for the first time since they met) snore like a locomotive, she conversed with the fetus, communicating her hopes. For her, there was neither past nor present, only future. Nothing existed here and now, neither there nor before. Everything was nowhere and later… Yes, someday things would come to be. The money they’d saved would be enough to buy a property with mansion, gardens, and private cemetery. The cypresses would grow around that transparent house, and their children and grandchildren, playing trombones, tubas, and cornets, would put their bodies inside a grandfather clock in order to throw them, their limbs interlaced, into the well-mausoleum, which would reach the enormous heart of fresh water that was the center of the planet.

The indefatigable giant dancer, with his blond beard and mane of golden hair that caressed his waist, persevered in trying to stage his ballet Life. It was like trying to trace a star on the surface of a lake with one finger and forever. His inconstant students did not like rehearsals or philosophic messages, but they did spend whole hours before the mirror admiring themselves in their tights, tutus, wool stockings, wide belts, and slippers with steel toes. Alejandro would pull them out of their self-amazement by striking the floor with his long walking stick to make them repeat, once, a thousand times, the four parts of the choreography.

First, “The Great Yes” would express the struggle against doubt through the unconditional acceptance of existence. Second, “The Unlimited Gratefulness” would show the end of asking and the ecstasy of constant gratitude. Third, “The Rapid Farewell” would describe the abandonment of all possessions and the tranquil acceptance of death, making it the most beautiful moment of life. Finally, “The Instantaneous Return” would show the rapid reincarnation of souls, not as punishment but as a means of progress. But the Argentine dancers thought that dance was a circus show and were only interested in competing to raise a leg higher or complete more spins on the tip of a toe.

Alejandro, with his minimal Spanish, tried to open their awareness and reveal to them that God inhabited them and to convince them to yield their bodies to mystery so they could carry out movements reason was unable to imagine. Useless! Locked within their proud mediocrity, they could not allow their legs, arms, torsos, or hips to live their own lives as autonomous organisms fed by the wisdom of the stars. My grandfather, at times right in the middle of this inept group, would fall to his knees sobbing desperately. His female students fought to dry his tears with delicate licks accompanied by such hot sighs that shame would burn their cheeks. He would arise in a rage to shake his body, trying to shake off those sexual meanings as if they were fleas.

Jashe gave birth helped by the bordello midwife, an old German woman, Bettina the Turtle. She’d acquired that nickname because a jealous Argentine had clipped her ears and nose. My mother, Sara Felicidad, was born, a baby as white as marble with two huge lapis lazuli eyes and four nipples, which would later become, I think, four large breasts where I could suck, unless it’s a false memory, a double portion of milk. Alejandro didn’t realize he’d become a father. He was so stubbornly intent on his work that around the dance, the world vanished. He no longer saw people but misty shapes. He marched through the world without belonging to it, listening to the interminable river of phrases God dictated to him: “I am the summa of your calls. Present is the complete perception of yourself. Don’t try to be another, allow the other to exist in you. Never express more than what you feel. To give is to know how to receive.”

A tranquil Jashe fed her invisible daughter, preparing monumental fruit salads that Alejandro, now a vegetarian, devoured directly from the plate, on all fours like a ruminant. The woman had to buck up her courage because my grandfather, trying to express his animal nature freely, took it upon himself to defecate in corners or on an armchair, sometimes under the table. Jashe, in the moment these things were happening, saw them as past and, thinking about the future of sanity and happiness that awaited them, cleaned up those eccentricities with good will.

On her own, she devoted herself to educating Sara Felicidad. On the wall next to the cradle, she tacked the seventy-eight Tarot cards so her daughter would quickly learn to count by pointing to the cups, coins, clubs, and swords. At six months, the child said her first word “MAT,” and by one, she already knew how to speak some Russian and a lot of Spanish. Instead of saying “papa,” she loved to say “paradise” and instead of “mama” she would say “marvel.” At eighteen months, she began to sing, first imitating Marla’s nightingale, then the violin from the tango quartet, later the she-cats in heat, and finally Bettina the Turtle, who during the Catholic festivals of the month of May intoned “Come, and let us all go with flowers to Mary” so the Virgin would grant her the miracle of allowing her to grow another nose and two new ears.

The high, crystalline voice of the baby made the dust fall off the mirrors and, for a few seconds, calmed the wrath of drunken clients. As soon as they started flashing their knives, Jashe would come down with Sara Felicidad so she could sing “Canción Mixteca,” thus transforming rage into nostalgia and then into beatitude. The bestial masks would fall off, and the little boy faces would appear.

Meanwhile, Alejandro, who remained blind and deaf to the fact of his daughter, was beginning to lose hope about the realization of his dance. Whenever a girl managed to learn the intricate steps, she would fall in love, get married, become pregnant, and abandon art forever. If it was a young man, he would get his law or architecture degree, or kill himself, or run off with some low-class lover and his mother’s jewels. He would get furious over nothing, a slice of apple with a seed in it, someone looking distracted when he was speaking about his problems with the dancers. He would threaten to beat his wife to a pulp. Then he would fall to his knees to kiss her feet, begging forgiveness. One day, at three in the afternoon, his breakfast time, Yumo Melnik burst into the dining room, waving a blue telegram:

“Girls, eat quickly and run to fix yourselves up and slip into your sexiest clothes! Two hours from now, the chief of police, Roberto Falcón, will honor us with a visit! He’s coming to throw a party for his twenty bodyguards. Every year, as a bonus, the chief grants them a wish. This year they asked to screw Jewish whores. Dearhearts, you are model professionals. It’s extremely important for the future of our business that you not reject any whim. They are murderers, yes, of course, but they see sex like boys. If you don’t contradict them and give in, smiling to their oddities, they will become as tame as little lambs. And swallow these pills, which will keep you awake until the stiffest pricks collapse!”

Simón Radovitzky, his face solemn, went over to Marla, taking advantage of the fact that she was drinking her coffee in the shadow because daylight irritated her eyes.

“Marla, I know you’re going to be very busy with those killers. Even so, and with the greatest respect, I’m going to ask a favor. My life won’t be long. Maybe it will be over before the sun comes up tomorrow. Don’t interrupt me, please! What I’m telling you is serious, because I’m talking to you as if I were sentenced to death. Look: in this jacket I have all the money I’ve been able to save. I’m giving it to you. It’s more than you earn in a month of work. Initiate me, Marla! I’m a virgin. Make me a man. I want to learn in the two hours we have before the police come the depth of pleasure, to pour out the semen of an entire life, to fornicate in different positions and through all doors, to give you my heart like an animal on the sacrificial altar. I want my spirit to bury itself in yours and die there so that later they shoot what is only an empty body. Oh, Marla, forgive me. I think I love you.”

The prostitute said nothing. She slowly put the money into her black satin bag, finished her coffee, took Simón by the hand, led him to the third floor where he entered the room decorated like an underwater grotto, stripped him, bathed him in the big marble conch, dried him with a towel cut in the shape of a sardine, got into bed with him under silk sheets stamped with breaking waves, and gave herself to him in body and soul.

After those two hours, a different Simón Radovitzky walked down the stairs. The adolescent had become a mature man. His footsteps were heavy, intense, decisive, but his eyes were veiled, like those of a dead man. He sat down next to the armoire filled with clean sheets and waited with the patient calm of a dog sleeping in the shade on a summer day. Roberto Falcón offered his followers a party without limits. They devoured three roast pigs and emptied uncountable bottles of brandy. While they danced the house tango, they allowed themselves to tear the dresses and underpants of their partners, to carry them again and again to the private rooms. Finally, staggering, they possessed them right there in front of everybody, on the salon carpet or on the bar chairs. Falcón drank, accompanied by his driver, without touching the girls. When he saw all of them awkwardly go through the motions like swings, fall, vomit, and snore in surfeit, their testicles empty down to the last drop, he made a sign to the boy with the Greek profile, and the two of them, with the discretion of shadows, locked themselves away in the preferential suite on the second floor.

Marla, squashed under an orangutan who’d wet his pants, saw Simón, barefoot, make his way up the stairs and enter the luxurious apartment. She felt her heart was breaking, forever, like a crystal vase, and she bit her lips trying not to sob. A red drop slipped down her chin until it fell into the open mouth of the hairy client who, without waking up, savored it smiling. The next day, she would have her left breast tattooed with the letters S.R.

Simón committed the first murder in ten seconds. Falcón was on his knees, with his head buried in a pillow, while his assistant penetrated him, giving rapid and violent thrusts of his hips. The shrieks of pleasure-pain silenced the steps of the anarchist, who, with a wisdom derived from his animal nature, cut the lover’s jugular vein with one slice of a kitchen knife. He did it so decisively that he almost separated the head from the body, and without stopping, like the harmonious continuation of the same movement, drove the knife between the two bodies and cut off the driver’s member, which remained stuck in the chief’s anus. While the body fell, pouring out bright red spurts, Simón put the knife in his other hand, took out his revolver, and pointed it at Falcón: “Don’t scream or I’ll blow your brains out! Stand up in front of me, because I’m your death, faggot!”

The colonel, whiter than the corpse of his lover, stood up next to the bed. The piece of phallus slid out of his anus and, with a watery noise, fell between his feet like a mollusk without a shell. He vomited.

“Lick up your garbage!”

Falcón went down on his knees and passed his tongue over his puke.

“Swine! I should give you a contemptible end, stick this knife into that stinking hole and open you up right to your guts, pull out your tripes, and tie you with them to your boyfriend, then break your skull, empty out your brain and shit in it, as if it were a toilet bowl! Give thanks to anarchism, you moral dwarf. I don’t want to dishonor my comrades by exterminating you with the same viciousness you used to torture and murder so many innocent workers just to satisfy your vanity. I’ll give you a clean ending.”

“Have mercy. A sack of diamonds for my life.”

“You’re mistaken, colonel. I’ve always wanted to live in noble poverty,” Simón answered with a sweet smile and killed him with a perfect shot right between the eyes. Then he sat down opposite the two dead men, put a finger in the pool of blood, and drew the A of Anarchy on his forehead. The bodyguards, aroused by the shot, quickly kicked open the door. Radovitzky was beaten to a pulp — broken nose, three broken ribs, and six broken teeth. They dragged him down to the bar and tortured him in front of the prostitutes. Even though they slowly but surely ripped off all his skin, he died without betraying any member of his group. The police arrested all the witnesses, cursing them the whole time.

The crime stirred public opinion. The authorities blamed the Jewish community, especially the Russian immigrants: “The government is firmly resolved to take energetic measures to avoid the entry into this country of dangerous people and to eliminate those found here.” This the new chief of police declared, and protected by the state of siege, began a search for anarchist leaders among the non-naturalized Jews. By virtue of the Residence Law, several hundred were expelled from the country. Among them were the Melnik brothers and their whores, who, without a cent (the police had confiscated their savings as the price they’d have to pay for the “favor” of not sending them back to Russia), were put on a train that took them directly to Uruguay.

When they got out in Montevideo, Icho rubbed his enormous belly and said good-naturedly, “If the wise man thinks above all about poverty, even if he is amid wealth, we, amid poverty, will think above all about wisdom. Courage, girls! Every man is a possible client. Don’t ask God to give, but that he put you where they are.”

The Turtle, who had been set free because she was a pure German and an Argentine citizen, came to the study, passed through the rows of students, and with her strange, noseless voice urged Alejandro to run to the jail to get his wife and daughter before they were both shipped to Europe. The news of his friend’s death had shaken my grandfather and made him come down from the clouds. He suddenly felt alone and realized that he had a daughter and a wife who felt a great love for him, and it was thanks to their love he went on living. To lose Jashe and Sarita would mean becoming a tree without roots, floating aimlessly in a river of turbid water. He reached the prison waving press photographs, programs from the Imperial Ballet where his name appeared in large letters, his Russian passport, and his marriage license. In the room where he spoke to the police, he showed what he meant by giving the three highest leaps of his entire career, along with the most sublime suite of steps. His blond mane brightened the somber building. The guards admired him open-mouthed and released his small family.

Out on the street, Alejandro fell to his knees and kissed the feet of his wife and daughter, begging their forgiveness. The shoe that was still red turned blue. Jashe, her breath short from emotion, raised him up to offer him her mouth. He kissed it as never before, trying to press his lips to hers forever. Sara Felicidad began to sing the tango Simón Radovitzky had brought to the bordello. The melody began heartrendingly only to fill with triumphal tones. Alejandro felt his heart full of light. “You are my soul,” he said to the child and, putting her on his shoulders, began to leap along the street, trying to fly. After twenty blocks, he fell exhausted next to a garbage can. Sarita went on singing. The passersby gave them coins. They piled up before them. When Jashe reached them, she silenced her daughter and, her face burning with shame, picked up the coins.

Alejandro took her by the waist, looked at her with infinite tenderness, and said, “You gave me a daughter, you brought me out of madness. A great change has just taken place in my spirit.

Simón’s marvelous sacrifice and this charity have made me understand that as an artist I’ve been a parasite. My dancing is only entertainment for rich people who applaud as long as you don’t show them anything real. I mean, human misery and the industrial destruction of the planet. I’ve been training my entire life for an audience that requires beauty without truth. I’ve submerged myself in myself, becoming an island of form without mind, in an exhibitionist of naïve vanity. The Imperial Ballet separated me from the people, and Vladimir Monomaque separated me from human feelings. I grew up like someone mutilated, with no relationship with others, drunk on my own limitations. That dancing is a trap that makes us collaborate with exploiters and murderers. The money they gave me and the money I’ve earned giving classes to frivolous students is stained with blood. We should give it away. If I want to be a real artist, I have to know poverty, share life with my brother workers. I know, Jashe, that I’m asking both of you to make a great sacrifice, that you and Sara Felicidad put up with misery, I don’t know for how long. For that reason you have to decide immediately: either you leave with the child and you make a new union with a sleeping man who will give you comforts obtained by robbing the health of others or you come with me to the poor neighborhoods to redeem the injustice of this world with the sacrifice of your life, as Simón Radovitzky sacrificed his.”

Without hesitating, Jashe answered, “To whom do we give the money?”

“If we divide it, each recipient will get little. It would be better for a single person to get all. God tells me it should be poor Bettina. Our gift will console her for her mutilations.”

The workers in the meatpacking plants didn’t last more than five years. They would die or catch chronic illnesses. For that reason, getting work there was easy for Alejandro. He left Jashe and Sara Felicidad living in a room that was seven feet wide and nine deep, with a chamber pot for a bathroom and an electric grill for a kitchen, and went to carry out his penitence.

The frozen meat industry, controlled by foreign capital, was “untouchable” by the national authorities. Because there was no union, the working conditions could not be worse. Alejandro began in slaughtering. In the open areas where the animals were killed, he was permanently exposed — in winter to rain and cold, in summer to gaseous emanations and sickening smells. After the initial cut, the blood poured out onto men and tools and then ran, in part, through the floor, forming thick layers of a dark red color. Amid excrement and urine, he had to skin animals and then toss them onto tables, divide them up, and carve them.

The saws whined, tossing into the air the sawdust of bones. The mill, the carts, the pulleys, the chains, the grunts of the dying animals kept him from conversing with his fellow workers, those sad, bloody, and fetid men who wore all sorts of amulets around their necks to keep the animals from transferring their infections to them: skin tumors, mouth ulcers, trichinosis. In those early times, Alejandro had some very difficult moments. Not only was the work horrifying because of the huge number of murdered animals but also because of a hallucination that ceaselessly repeated itself: the ghosts of sheep transformed into furious bitches sank their teeth into him. Restraining his anguish, he let his body be devoured, never ceasing to cut, select, and put into separate piles the intestines, the livers, the kidneys, the hearts. He imagined that the thousands of snipped off tongues were his own, and he made them recite in chorus, “Now I live in a reality that is as atrocious as madness, but at least I can share it with the needy. I can no longer allow myself private nightmares. I am no longer an individual. The madness of the poor is work.”

Making titanic efforts, he managed to free himself from the demented images and, with the help of his interior God, went on with his repugnant labors. When he brought the pieces of meat to the cold room, everything instantly froze. Often he saw workers who entered there daubed with blood with frozen faces or with their hands stuck to their knives. To avoid that, Alejandro, like the others, wrapped his head and his extremities in rags and newspapers and put on old wool vests, one on top of the other. If his clothing was soaked with blood, it froze immediately. When he couldn’t take the cold any longer, he would go outside and warm himself by placing his legs, hands, and face inside the bodies of the steaming animals that had just been cut open.

In the sections where saltpeter was used in the preparation and conservation of meat, the chemicals ate away shoes and boots. In a short time, the workers’ feet acquired open wounds that never healed. My grandfather passed through all that. His powerful physical constitution allowed him to survive longer than the others, but his arms turned red, his joints swelled, and a mass began to grow under his chin. Fearlessly, he asked to work in the phosphate fertilizer section, the worst part of the industrial chain, the “human slaughterhouse.” Those who fought in that hell for two years went either to the hospital or the cemetery. It was there the remains were dried and the bones ground to extract the albumin.

All the workers had to cover their mouths and noses with huge handkerchiefs to avoid the stench, but the ammoniac composition of the fumes made their neutralization impossible. A smoke with the taste of acid penetrated and bit the throat. Amid coughing and gagging, the workers, to fight the cold, tried never to stand still and would run from one place to another as if insane. Alejandro, forgetting his pains, gave himself to that crazy tumult with profound piety, but at the same time feeling an aesthetic pleasure, because he saw it as a beautiful dance. He understood that authentic art appears only in a secret place that resides between life and death. As his blue shoes began turning white, the voice of God repeated to him: “There is a precise instant when the world is marvelous: now.”

Meanwhile, in the seven-by-nine-foot room, Jashe painted the walls white; constructed a folding bed; and invented, using boards and hinges, a table that could be hung on the wall after dinner and a box containing five more boxes, one inside the others, that could be used as chairs. Thus she began her struggle to dominate space: every single thing she allowed to enter that room was essential and had a preplanned shape so it would fit in with the others. Objects took on the existence of domestic animals. (My grandmother never forgot her tender blanket made from stray dog fur. She would call the dogs over, give them leftover food, and then shave them. Nor did she forget her humble wooden cup that each morning opened its mouth like an enchanted frog.) And that way, like someone who comes home and can’t find their cat and anxiously looks for it in all the neighborhood streets, if suddenly she did not have her electric stove, a solid and simple apparatus in which she cooked (using bones and vegetables picked out of the market garbage) the most complex stews, she would have suffered.

Because the tenderness she had for her small helpers was corresponded, and they, she was sure, were worried about completing a labor impossible to obtain outside of an atmosphere like that one, Jashe wrote one afternoon to her sister Shoske:

“A plant the doorman gave me because I begged him not to throw it in the garbage had apparently died. With its dead stems and all, I put it next to the window and stopped worrying about it for a long time. But every day I watered it, distractedly, thinking about other things. Suddenly, just yesterday, I don’t know through what miracle, it produced a leaf. It surprised me so much I began to cry. I understood that love is a grand thank you to the other for existing.”

Two months before Sara Felicidad turned four, Alejandro arrived with a bouquet of daisies and his minimal weekly pay:

“Jashe, this morning God said to me: My son, today you must stop working. You’ve grown thin, you’re losing your hair, your teeth are beginning to rot, your cartilage is inflamed, you have a tumor, your lungs have become weak, and you can no longer move with your former grace. But your soul has been forged in suffering and shines like a great firefly. Go back to dancing: those physical limitations are your honor and make you a man instead of a machine. Show the world what Art is. Yes, Jashe, I wasted my time teaching the children of the rich. Now I will dance by myself, but once. Sincere works should not be repeated; they have to be unique. The performance will be short, ten minutes, but it will have such intensity that anyone who sees it will never forget it. I don’t want to present myself in a theater but out in the open, at night in the kiosk of a poor plaza.

“I won’t need spotlights, because I will be light. Even if there is no moon or stars, everyone will see me. And I don’t need an orchestra: the voice of my daughter is enough. Don’t worry about costumes; God tells me that only a naked body can reach the sacred. The press will take an interest. It will be an historic event. After my performance, dance will change. I want rich and poor to come, to mix around me. The wealthy, at the end of the act, will toss banknotes, which will be distributed to the poor. I was first dancer at the Imperial Russian Ballet; Argentina has to respect me. While I’m visiting newspaper offices, you, Jashe, will have to work.”

My grandmother was hired as a worker in a felt hat factory. The site was watery and humid. The fumes from the mercury used in the preparation of the hair formed a thick mist that poisoned the place. With her hair and clothes always wet, breathing in that vapor, Jashe began to tremble, a tremor that spread to her lips, her tongue, her head, until it took over her whole body. She put up with those symptoms with a smile, and then rheumatic pains soon followed. Because visibility was so poor, several of her fellow workers lost fingers, and one child laborer, nine years of age, dropped dead, poisoned.

Not many articles announcing the show appeared in the newspapers. The journalists saw a filthy giant limping toward them wearing a tattered suit, his eyes opened far too wide, speaking an incomprehensible Spanish, and took him for a drug addict. The few lines that did appear were written with contempt and mockery. My grandfather did not lose courage:

“Only a few spectators will come, but if they are high-quality spectators, they will be enough. Only twelve witnesses saw Christ, and all humanity learned of Him. My dance will be engraved in the collective memory.”

The great day came. That morning they celebrated Sara Felicidad’s birthday. They gave her a can of peaches in syrup and a dancer made of rags whose hair was made of wool dyed yellow. That afternoon, Alejandro gave her the final instructions:

“You will sing without stopping, no matter what happens, until I stop dancing. You will forget all the songs you know to allow your voice to take the paths it wishes. Make yourself into a channel open to the passage of two rivers: the dark and the celestial. What your will tries to do is of no interest to you, only what you receive will be good.”

When night came, Alejandro stood in the center of the kiosk of a rundown plaza, and his daughter began to sing. The only spectator was Jashe. No one, poor or rich, came. No reporters either. Some dogs tried to howl, but the girl’s voice enchanted them, and soon they listened to her in silence, wagging their tails. Rising from the half-light like long crystal knives, my mother’s voice reached every window. Strange sounds that were not interrupted by silences, thanks to the fact that her vocal chords vibrated both when she breathed in and when she breathed out. Those superhuman notes woke exhausted families of workers and little by little the plaza filled with men, women, and children who came up to the kiosk with the same respect with which they entered church every Sunday.

Alejandro Prullansky, very slowly, as if he had a thousand years to do it, took off his clothes. It took him half an hour to remove his trousers and his shirt, the only clothes he was wearing. He kept his white shoes on. With the same slowness, he crouched to open the cardboard suitcase and remove from it an apple. With a serious, rhythmic voice, impregnated with an immense goodness he said, “The artist defines the world and transforms it into his work. If a poet eats this apple, that act is a poem. If a musician does it, it’s a symphony. And a sculptor, on eating it, will be making a sculpture. I dance.”

And, slowing the velocity of his movements even more, he bit the fruit. Sara Felicidad and he, in the darkness of that cloudy night, looked like two black statues. Despite the intensity of the singing, which was so fine it cut the leaves of the few trees there like a scalpel, dropping a dark green rain on the heads of the workers, the noise of the chewing arose intact and gave the steely tones of the girl a watery bed. No one blinked. Aside from the sound, nothing was happening, but the shadows of the kiosk promised that something important was going to take place.

Alejandro opened his spirit in two wings of great length and absorbed the taste of the apple. From the center of his brain came an iridescent ray that pierced the sky. The clouds were swept away by his breath, and stars appeared, which began to spin around the seeds he kept in a triangle on his extended tongue. There he placed his awareness and showed it to the public as if it were a consecrated host. Following the silvery roads the voice of his daughter showed him when she was bathed in the light of the stars, he launched the crown of his thoughts into space. The sacrificial animal appeared, a man of pure flesh, headless, pouring out his redeeming blood to quench the thirst of so many people in misery. That was the mission of Art. Now he had to overcome his swollen joints, give power to his wasted lungs, recover the elegance of his footwork, and gesture toward the point where limits disappear.

He removed six bottles from his suitcase; removed the corks; emptied the gasoline they contained over his entire body; lit a match; set fire to himself; and, transformed into a bonfire, showed human beings what true dance was: a body making sublime movements in full ecstasy as it was being consumed.

Jashe made a shout of horror, then she covered her mouth with her hands, ashamed of herself, of her egoism. The beloved was giving himself to the world, dying for it, and for that very reason, causing an immortal Art to be born. By including Death in the creation of beauty, he ended death.

Sara Felicidad, obeying her father’s order—“You will sing without stopping no matter what happens”—saw him run, leap, laugh, and combine marvelous steps, all with his flesh spurting flames like a sun. That image remained engraved in her mind, and she transmitted it to me, her son, every night during my childhood. So that as I would fall asleep, she would sing me a lullaby where her father, transformed into a star, crossed the firmament, granting men a Destiny:

“Making tracks in the sky is like opening their soul. That torch Alejandro lit, you, who bear the same name, must in turn transmit it so his sacrifice won’t be in vain. Someday, thanks to you, humanity will become aware of this ephemeral spectacle, eternal monument of the art of dancing, and millions of hand will applaud your grandfather with thanks.”

Prullansky, the giant, without realizing he was dying, almost burned to a crisp, made an enormous leap and, like a bird with long red and yellow feathers, fell in the center of the plaza. The people who had witnessed the act, respectful, immobile, fascinated, were suddenly possessed by panic. The beauty seemed to them terrible, and they ran screaming to their houses to close doors and windows, afraid the monster would enter in order to burn up the little they owned. The noise of shutters and wooden frames slamming on sills was interpreted by Jashe as the announcement of future applause. Her husband gave up his soul dancing and, in full flight, fell to the cement pavement to become a pile of smoking bones.

The child stopped singing. Her mother removed the Tarot from her bosom and, card by card, burned it in the glowing coals, where the shoes’ remains were glowing like two red rubies. During the fire, they had recovered their original red.

“There will never be another like him, Sara Felicidad. His memory will accompany us forever. I’ll live alone only so that you can grow up well, but in reality what you see is a body moved by the tiniest part of my soul. The rest went with him. The woman who will marry again, have more children, get old, and die will be a different woman.”

Sara Felicidad witnessed the change to her mother’s face. Her skin, with its mother-of-pearl sheen, darkened; her nostrils became smaller, allowing only two needle-fine breaths of air to pass; from the edge of her lips toward her chin, fine wrinkles snaked along; and her eyes became covered by an invisible curtain that separated her from life. The Jashe of today was possessed by the Jashe of the future, a long-suffering, indifferent lady, her sensibility asleep, passing through the days like a ship with no navigator. Before submerging her daughter in that gray existence, she said, “I’m going to ask that as long as you are with me that you never sing again.”

In that moment, my mother was four years old. Tall, like her father, she looked ten. The same golden hair reached down to her waist, and her eyes were dark blue, translucent at the edges, each one as big as her mouth, they shined with millennial depth. Alejandro’s burning did not perturb her. On the contrary, it was an example of strength, enrichment of soul, treasure of beauty, fountain of joy. But Jashe’s request fell on her like a fatal lightning bolt, a threat that was not only moral but also organic. Her body fell in agony. To take away her singing was also to rip out her tongue, fill her heart with sand, burn her wealth of life in one blow. She had to defend herself. She had to mature in just a few minutes, establish around her innocence the armor of an adult. Down her legs ran a hot, thick, sticky liquid. Blood. At the age of four, she had her first menstruation. She ceased to be a child and became the protector of that semi-empty shell that her mother now was. Since she was forbidden to sing, she also stopped talking. But, absolute mistress of her interior world, she filled it with music. She ceaselessly repeated songs she knew and immediately invented others. She created for herself a symphony orchestra and composed her accompaniments. And that way, developing her mute voice more and more, she became an opera singer who dominated all registers. For years she was a performer as well as her own audience. That permanent interior singing bestowed on her a happiness that allowed her to survive in the sad world that was going to swallow a large part of her youth.

Jashe put the calcified bones of her husband into a cracker box, which she tossed into the Río de la Plata. She tied the box to a rubber ball so it would float until it became lost in the ocean. Then she worked one final week in the hat factory, and one Monday in the morning she went to ask help from the Jewish Colonization Association.

Aboard the Weser, Marla had told her that the Jewish immigrants, who had separate kitchen equipment and livestock so they could eat kosher food, were going to Argentina at the invitation of the Jewish Colonization Association, which had at its disposal more than almost five hundred thousand acres of land and maintained close ties with the highest spheres of both the provincial and the federal government. The purpose of this society was not to extract earnings from its enormous investments but to establish in the new country an ample and solid stratum of Jewish peasants who would, each of them, work their own land and derive from it a convenient living. Therefore, the JCA could easily give her a farm on the pampa. After all, she was still as Jewish as the others, and, despite the tremor that shook her body, she was able to farm a piece of land and get crops that would feed herself and her daughter.

To save the trolley fare, she walked with her daughter from the industrial outskirts to the center of Buenos Aires, twelve miles. They were exhausted when they reached a five-story building with a façade of white marble and no windows but with two enormous, light-blue columns on both sides of its entry gate, where a six-pointed star was shining. The haughty luxury of this palace curved Jashe’s shoulders and made her aware of the hunger biting her stomach. If something could get them out of misery, it was this institution. She nervously looked over at Sara Felicidad. She looked more Russian than anything else. She sighed in resignation. In any case, her husband’s name was written in the passports, and she could do nothing to hide the fact that she was the widow of a goy. She shook her stitched-up overcoat and did the same with her daughter’s, naively trying with a few pats to turn their rags into proper clothing.

She timidly pushed the metal doors, whose hinges were so well greased that they opened wide. Not finding a living soul, mother and daughter wandered the gleaming stone corridor in this labyrinth decorated with pictures representing the life of Moses. Finally they entered a gigantic hall filled with silent men modestly dressed in peasant clothes, pale women with sad backs, and astonishingly thin children. Their fetid breath told Jashe that they, like her, had empty stomachs. They were all staring toward a barred little window, at which an elegant functionary with slicked-down hair, rings, and a gold bracelet arrived to observe them. He was as severe and immobile as a wax manikin.

One of the immigrants, a being who seemed to be thirty years old in his body and seventy in his face (because he was toothless), approached him to say in the hushed tones of despair: “Please allow me, Mr. Representative of our worthy association, to introduce myself: Moisés Latt, elected by chance to speak for the colony of Clara. Our penury is so great that we have come to ask you to communicate to Baroness Clara de Hirsch, widow of our benefactor, who has left us orphans with his premature decease, this letter, which I will now read to you:

Madam: With all our hearts we long to become a nation of farmers, as your husband dreamed. But help us to persist, so our children do not die of hunger and need before reaching that goal.”

The functionary opened the barred window; stuck out his pudgy hand; accepted the letter; and without saying a word, closed the window again and disappeared into the palace’s interior. After half an hour, a natty gentleman, looking rather like a banker, appeared at a high balcony and whispered, perhaps because raising his voice was unsuitable for his position, “The JCA has learned of your problems and will communicate this missive to the Baroness. For now, we can do nothing more. Return to your hearths, and if the Council decides to give you help once again, we will inform you. Now, please leave the hall quickly, because we have to wax it for Shabbat. Thank you.”

And making a slight bow of farewell, he stepped back until he disappeared. The settlers remained immobile, thinking over with difficulty, a situation hard for them to digest.

The toothless man smiled bitterly: “We’ve done all we can. We propose, and now may God dispose. It may be that this time He decides to stop punishing us for some old sin of which we have no memory.”

Dragging their feet, they began to make for the exit to the street. Seeing that the place was emptying out, Jashe ran to Moisés Latt and tugged at his sleeve. (Why did she choose him and not another of the hundred or so men who filled the hall? It was certainly not because he was handsome. That mouth, with its black, hard gums, like a crack in dry dirt; that head, shaved as if by knife slashes, which tossed left and right two huge ears with fleshy lobes covered with hair; that skin of a brownness tending toward watery chocolate did not constitute a very attractive combination. Nevertheless, she wanted to join with him for the rest of her life. He was the insignificant companion that answered the need of her worn-out heart.)

Moisés Latt was thankful, in the deep pit of his solitude, for that tug at his sleeve. He was the human version of an abandoned dog: an orphan, ugly, poor, toothless, a pariah. When he was ten, during a pogrom, a Cossack forced him to drink a bottle of poison. He was dying from spring until fall. Along with the autumn leaves fell his thirty-two teeth. He had to learn to speak all over again because his tongue, deprived of the barrier of incisors and canines, tended to fly out of his mouth along with a rain of saliva. His gums hardened until he was able to chew the small ration of hard meat allotted him by the community of Grodno, the place where he was born by means of a long cut that opened his dying mother’s belly. By clacking one gum against the other, he could imitate the sound of Spanish castanets. Thanks to that noise, highly celebrated by the cooks, he managed to double his meager ration of meat (and shrink his dignity a bit more). He was delighted that this lady had a daughter. He never aspired to have a wife but a mother — distant, absent, as dead in life as that small woman, young but aged, scum of an implacable society. He and she, remains of different shipwrecks, stuck on the same shore.

“I need your help, Moisés. My name is Jashe Trumper, widow of a goy. This is my daughter, Sara Felicidad. I am from Lodetz, Lithuania.”

“Jashe Trumper? Trumper? Oh, yes! On the ship that brought us there was a Shoske Trumper, married to a crippled Sephardi, César Higuera.”

“Oh! That’s my sister! Shoske in Argentina and married!”

“Married and lucky. The Jewish Association gave them good land in Entre Ríos.”

They looked at each other, openly, without trying to dissimulate their intentions. Sara Felicidad discreetly moved a few steps away.

“Let’s go and work with them, Moisés. We’ll get married. I’ll give you children, God willing, and we’ll finally live quiet lives. My sister will get us out of this misery.”

“Yes, Jashe. Thank you. Come with me to Clara, so I can liquidate the little I have, and then I’ll go with you to your brother-in-law and his wife.”

They left the other settlers sitting in the street next to the iron gate, where they embarked on a hunger strike to demand return tickets to their countries of origin, and went to the waiting room at Retiro Station to sleep. At 5:00 a.m. they squeezed onto a train carrying Italian immigrants to work on the plantations in Tucumán. The cars were packed with miserable people. Each one had received from the Immigration Committee a half-pound of bread and a pound of dried meat for a trip that would last two nights and two and a half days. Digging around in his underpants, Moisés found a wrinkled banknote that allowed him to buy two rolls and a small goat cheese from a blind woman carrying a basket.

It was very cold, and an icy wind blew. Crowded together on wooden benches in rows, they were being ground to pieces by the bouncing train. They were kept from sleeping by a continuous coughing, along with the watery noise of the workers’ mouths as they spent hours chewing the bread and the insipid meat without swallowing it so the tiny amount of food would seem to calm their hunger. With a bland smile taking up half his face, Moisés Latt divided the cheese in half, one piece for Jashe and the other for Sara Felicidad, and he gave them the rolls. “Eat and don’t worry about me. I’m never hungry, perhaps for lack of teeth.”

Secretly swallowing his saliva, he made the two women eat. When they’d devoured even the tiniest crumbs, he covered them with his huge cape and, shivering, watched them sleep. Nevertheless, in his chest, despite the cold, he felt an agreeable tingle. He would never again be alone in the world: finally he had a family. Seeing the girl’s bluish toes poking through her worn-out shoes, he took off his socks, shook out the dirt, and devotedly put them on her. He then picked up the wrinkled bread wrappers and covered up his own feet before putting his boots back on. He lit a cigarette butt he kept with another three in a little tin box and, taking a short puff, let time pass.

A fly landed on his hand. He didn’t shoo it away. He let it walk around and suck as much as it wanted. Then he slowly opened the window, stuck out his arm, and waited for the wind to blow it off. He was very fond of those animals, because they were his only toys when he was a boy. He would open his pockets wide and put a few grains of sugar inside so they’d fill up with flies. He moved and walked with extreme care so he wouldn’t hurt the insects. When he thought about the sweets that children with parents ate, he would skillfully pat his trousers to scare his little friends, who would fly out of his pockets like a buzzing black cloud, making him smile again. He smoked half of his fourth butt and finally fell asleep.

In Tucumán, a squad of police woke everyone by banging their nightsticks on the sides of the cars. Not wanting to hear explanations, they forced Moisés, Jashe, and Sara Felicidad to get out along with the workers. From a carriage pulled by two horses, a government employee, loudmouthed and despotic, ordered them to follow him. They all pitched their belongings onto their shoulders and were forced to walk almost two miles to the Immigrants’ Hotel. The Tucumán natives frowned as they walked by, and the children, amid perverse sneers, shouted, “Gringo bastards!”

At the “hotel,” actually an empty barn, they could throw themselves on the ground to rest. No one was allowed to go outside. They were prisoners. Moisés opened his tin can and offered a guard the half butt he still had left, at the same time that he tried to explain that he and the women with him hadn’t been contracted by any company and that they were traveling on the train on their own toward Clara. The soldier spit into the can, ruining the butt, and slapped Moisés so hard he fell among the workers having their siesta on the dusty floorboards.

No one brought them food or water. In the afternoon, they opened the door and began to load the workers onto some flat open carriages. There were thirty passengers standing on each platform shoved against one another in a terrible fashion. It was raining, a fine drizzle. They passed a loaf of bread to each one and drove them off, soaking wet, to a distant farm. Dying of thirst, the travelers stuck out their tongues to drink the water falling from the sky.

Moisés, holding the child in his arms so the others wouldn’t trample her, pelvis to pelvis with Jashe, apologized with a discreet smile for the erection he couldn’t hold back. Jashe realized that Destiny had put Moisés in this tight spot to make him overcome his sickly timidity. For years he’d thought his penis was dead, but now, thanks to that long and direct contact, it was erect, alive, hard, almost burning his stomach.

They traveled that way until late at night, happy, consolidating their friendship, pressed together among those miserable souls trembling with fever, tied to contracts that would have them work without rest for some stew and a handful of corn. Three German foremen with pistols on their belts received them along with a detachment of drunken soldiers. Under the celestial dome with its thousands of stars, they had to rest stretched out on the moist soil. It had been seventy-two hours since anyone had eaten a hot meal. Then a cart appeared loaded with raw meat. They gave a bloody piece to each person, three hundred grams carefully weighed on a portable scale, and they made a fire so the immigrants could cook their meat as best they could. The penetrating drizzle did not cease all night. They awoke in a puddle.

The foremen, beating iron tubes, hustled them onward so they would run to work. Moisés, making a thousand bows, approached a German with the intention of showing him his papers to make him understand the mistake. Barely had he said “Good day, sir,” when four soldiers grabbed him, hit him with their rifle butts, tore off his cape, and kicked him in the back, causing him to smash his forehead into the ground. Then they aimed their rifles at him, and one barked that they would shoot him if he spoke one more word. Jashe, in desperation, took off the handkerchief covering Sara Felicidad’s head, lifted her up, and shook her so her golden hair would wave like a flag. The beauty of those long, luminous tresses fascinated the foreman and his guards. My grandmother took advantage of the calm, opened their passports before their eyes, and made them understand the injustice they were committing. Moisés got up to dry, without anger, the blood running over his face. They let them go, giving them seven pounds of wormy corn as an apology.

An orange seller, who couldn’t keep his hands off Sara Felicidad, took them away on his cart, pulled by a nervous burro, all the way to Clara. Numerous Jewish families lived packed into small rooms, huts made of mud and straw, freight cars abandoned on the tracks, or in tin shacks, exposed to wind and rain, suffering hunger and cold, surrounded by the cries of sick children. Outside every door there was a huge pile of dry manure they used instead of wood to warm themselves and cook.

“This is how things are, Jashe. Not even in the worst Russian villages were living conditions this precarious. And what’s worse is that the Jews already established here, the owners of these shacks, charge us rent as high as a third of the monthly salary we get as workers during the winter season. That is, if we manage to work. There is such a supply of labor and the harvest time is so short that our compatriots prefer to employ peons who aren’t Jews, people they aren’t ashamed to exploit. We had bad luck.

“We came here because we were told this was the new Eldorado. Many of us, naïve, brought leather valises we were going to fill with the gold and silver we’d earn. When we got to Buenos Aires, Rafael Hernández, the owner of the lands where we were supposed to settle, backed out of the contract signed in his name. During the seven months since he authorized his representative on the old continent to sell us land at a certain price, its value on the market went up considerably. According to the original contract, the Argentine government lent us the money for our passage so we would pay for it — and the land — here with the earnings from our labor.

“Hernández’s betrayal left us poor and in debt up to our eyeteeth, with nowhere even to drop dead. The implacable, indifferent authorities piled us onto a train so we could beg work from the Jews already established in the Clara colony, named to honor the wife of Baron de Hirsch. It was the end of August, on the eve of Shabbat. Since we were forced to travel, breaking the ritual rest period during Elul, our sacred month of penitence, which precedes the new year festival, we felt cursed. With our spirits at their lowest, we found out that our tribulations were only beginning.

“You, Jashe, are seeing what kind of lodging we had. Penury caused us to lose our character, and an environment of suspicion, accusation, and fights split us apart. Couples stopped living together, children fell ill and died in scores, girls fell into the nets of the impure and became prostitutes. Others, begging help for years, managed to return to their native cities. Those of us who remained have had to go from door to door hungry and desperate in search of work and bread. But your sister Shoske has been lucky. Those who came invited by the Jewish Colonization Association were given comfortable farms and, apparently, good land in Entre Ríos. Maybe there we three will find a place. We are members of the same family. We’ll help them make the land fruitful and live without despotic and arbitrary foremen.”

Moisés showed them the tiny cabin made of rotten wood, covered with burlap sacks where he’d slept for so many years with his legs bent for lack of space. Jashe gave him a questioning look: why had they made this atrocious trip when there was nothing of value here? Just a few rat skins Moisés used to make belts or wallets, perhaps to go out as a peddler in the workers’ communities. Moisés pulled up one of the floorboards, dug into the earth below, and pulled out a rusty can. He opened it. Inside there were fifty gold coins, three rings, a gold watch, and a green scarab.

He put the scarab back into the can and said, blushing, “Well, this little bug is worthless, but it does bring good luck. The rest is a treasure left to me by my mother. It was given to me when I was seven, and I’ve always kept it. Now I’m giving it to you. It may get us out of a serious bind. Although, I have to say that until now, for three or four generations, despite expulsions and pogroms, no one in my family has found himself in a serious bind. You will be the one who decides how to use it. In giving you my gold, I give you my life.”

When Jashe kissed Moisés on the mouth, she did not feel love because that sentiment had been pulled out of her by the roots. But she did feel a profound respect, an intense thankfulness, and a sincere friendship. Feeling no disgust, she licked his hard gums, and then, possessed by a strange spirit, she said, without understanding her own words, “When you broke the old mirror, you made me yours. And when you made me yours, you were mine. I am the door of dreams, the infinite oyster, the devourer full of death-life, of light mounted on darkness. But you can walk my labyrinth without getting lost, because you have become the pearl of answers. Cross my arid world, follow my river of lost souls dissolving in the acids of illusory times, walk down my somber circles, find the swamp of ebony and become its star. Then rise up, trace the rings of glory and, higher than the peak, take your place like a magnetized moon to receive the song of love from all the entities that live within me. Now I am the perfect mirror of your infinite feelings. Come, unite yourself with me!”

Moisés Latt stopped his mind and murmured, “Thy will be done.” Then he submerged in the non-being of both. Jashe took the gold rings, placed one on Moisés’ left ring finger, another on her own, and the third on Sara Felicidad’s right thumb. With that ceremony, the marriage contract was signed. Now they were a family united until death did them part.

Moisés suddenly shouted, “Dolores!” And an old black mule, chased by clouds of flies that took delight in the stench of her backside, came out of a corral and limpingly galloped toward them. “My poor and faithful friend, you are going to make your last journey. You will take us to Entre Ríos. Once we’re there, you will die of fatigue. Console yourself with the thought that with your end our sorrows will end.”

The three of them mounted the animal, and under a huge umbrella covered with patches of indecisive colors, they began the slow, four-week journey that would get them to Shoske and César’s farm. During that time, they slept outdoors and ate, because Moisés managed to get small jobs like splitting logs, fixing shoes, rooting out nettles, cleaning lavatories, cutting hair, delousing children using a fine comb, and sharpening knives on his rat skin belt.

Meanwhile, Sara Felicidad hid her joy. She saw no misery anywhere. Traveling like that was a gift. Sleeping at the roadside, protected by the sky loaded with stars; breathing in the fragrances of the earth; saturating herself in the blessed smell of the mule; eating delicious dry bread accompanied by a tender, wrinkled apple; sharing landscapes with sparrows and ants; passing beneath trees, feeling the different caress of each shadow on her skin; all of it gave her the sensation of having no limitations. Within her spirit, a chorus made up of all human voices, those of now, of the future, of the past, began to resound in her spirit, a grateful sun arising from an infinite ocean of souls above which flew, illuminating it all, her father, transformed into a comet.

Yes, she had to hide, aside from the song, her joy. Jashe and Moisés, in order to subsist without love, fed on sadness. Submitting themselves to what they thought was Destiny, increased their mutual esteem, giving them the pride of resistance. The ability to withstand everything united them more than any passion. If they realized they were living in abundance, they would cease to be an essential solution, the one for the other. It was better to let them get along on the black mule, under the patched umbrella, locating their hopes in a future that would never exist, putting up with the instant as if it were a curse.

They reached Entre Ríos. The fertile, dark, moist lands became milky, arid, hostile. A frozen wind carried along balls of burned grass and huge tongues of dust. In those solitary places, amid a wheat field so dry that the ears of wheat sounded like bone rattles in the wind, languished Jashe’s sister’s farm. Before they entered the property, Dolores fell, fulminated. Having no shovel, they covered her with chunks of dirt as hard as rock and reached the door on foot.

“Jashe!”

“Shoske!”

Their sobbing embrace lasted for a quarter of an hour. A dark skinned man with curly hair and round eyes, of medium height but with large hands, observed the new arrivals with a timid smile. Hiding behind his robust right leg was his left, crippled by some childhood illness. Moisés offered him a game bag made of rat skin and a bouquet of wild flowers he’d cut on the road. César Higuera accepted the gift and embraced in his muscular, short arms the dry body of the man without teeth. The two sisters dried their tears and went into the modest house made of whitewashed adobes. Despite the year’s difference in their age and the fact that their bodies were different, they seemed like twins. Even though Shoske was much smaller, with narrow hips and very small breasts, now — because of the abandonment of the magic in Jashe — their two spirits had become identical, and the same sadness made them victims for all eternity. Shoske, without consulting her husband — not out of despotism but because of an absolute complicity — said to them, “We are one single family. Just as one part of my heart belongs to you, half of these lands, from now on, belong to you. We shall divide earnings and losses, our few joys and our many sorrows, and also this small cabin, which consists of nothing more than a dining room, bedroom, kitchen, and bath.”

Jashe, also without consulting Moisés, answered by emptying her treasure on the table. She gave her sister twenty-five coins and the watch, because they kept the rings. They drank a glass of brandy and immediately went to work. The wind never stopped blowing all day, constantly bombarding them with tiny stones and carrying off a large part of the wheat they were trying to store in a broken-down barn.

Sara Felicidad waited for them, wandering around the untilled land. She knew that lost place in the interminable plain would be her new home for a long time. Instead of rejecting that soil closed to the hand of man like a curled-up porcupine, populated by aggressive forces in the shape of scorpions, poisonous spiders, and snakes, she stretched out face down in a crack, kissed the arid land, and, opening her heart, poured into it an infinite river of love. She gave and gave until she fainted. When she recovered consciousness, she knew that the land had adopted her by causing a carpet of blue flowers to grow around her. The buzz of a hive of bees, hidden between the wheels of an old cart, called to her, offering honey, and a flock of sparrows perched on the barbs of the wire fence formed a wall of feathers that offered her a cool bit of shade. Snakes slithered over her legs, giving her long caresses without biting. She had placed love where there was none, and the wild land gave it back to her multiplied, transformed into a marvelous garden. When the sun went down, she went back to the house and waited for her elders, playing with her rag dancer. They returned with their eyes red and swollen, their hands covered with scratches. Shoske heated up some lentil soup containing bits of meat.

“You might as well know it, Jashe, Moisés, and Sarita. The meat is cat. We’re overrun with feral cats that eat our hens. Since we have to kill them, we’ve learned not to waste their meat. I suggest you start eating it right now. This land gives us very little food.”

My grandmother and my mother pursed their lips and stared at the plate with badly dissimulated sadness. Latt emptied his glass in one gulp and raised a piece of cat to his mouth to grind up, making exaggerated sighs of satisfaction. Jashe, with her chronic resignation, followed the example of her husband. The meat had a strange but not disagreeable taste. She took a bit of it and forced it into her daughter’s mouth. Sara Felicidad wept a pair of tears and, aware of her obligation, ate another piece. This communion by means of the sacrificed feline provoked a pleasant relaxation.

Shoske interrupted it: “Sister, you have to know: papa and mama are dead.”

Moisés and Sara Felicidad clung to Jashe, holding her up in their arms.

“When you left, I felt very alone, like a shadow that had lost its body. Not having anyone to follow, I felt non-existent. A short time later, César arrived looking for work. He came from Russia. He was a schoolteacher, but tired of the jokes his students made about his limp, he decided to change countries. Remember how our parents were: two complicated people fighting all their lives to be simple. They believed in good and evil spirits, in magic, in the powers of every animal, object, or plant, but because of a fear that extended to the entire Universe, they submerged themselves in ignorance. They never read a book or talked to each other. They spoke only to communicate practical things. When they had nothing to do, they were mute, one next to the other, staring at the fire or the clouds in the sky.

“César, because of his invasive character, which perhaps comes from his name, even if he’s a terrible peasant because of his leg, stayed here, taking on the task of filling our heavy idle moments with an incessant chatter. I learned everything they didn’t teach me from him. Reading, for example. Without knowing how it happened, we became engaged and soon after married. About the same time you gave birth to Sara Felicidad, I gave birth to Salvador Luna. He would have been the same age as her, but he died, strangled by the umbilical cord. We were so sad that we decided to live in Russia, in order to forget.

“We were about to leave, when my father said to me, ‘Dear Shoske, you are the only relative left to us. You’ve been an obedient, perfect daughter. Now that you’re leaving, we have nothing left to do in this life. We’ve lost interest. We need you for one final service. Your mother and I, even though we’re in good health, have decided to die. No, don’t think we’re going to commit suicide. In no way. We are going to abandon existence, that’s all. You will bury us. To live, you have to love. When you stop loving, life is over.’

“What could I say to them? They had already made their decision, and nothing or no one could have convinced them to change their minds. They had a good meal, bathed, put on their Sabbath clothes, lay down on top of the bed holding hands, looked at each other for the last time, closed their eyes, and after a long wheeze, they died. Don’t suffer for their sake, Jashe, because, just as I’m telling you, they passed from one life to the other with complete ease.

“César, back in his village, went back to giving classes in the school. The boys made fun of him again. After a few months, an agent from the Jewish Colonization Association came around and, in the name of Baron Mauricio de Hirsch, proposed that we emigrate to Argentina. They would give us passage and fertile land. They assured us that the Russian authorities, happy to get rid of its Jews, would give us passports and exit visas. Finally, we would possess a corner of the planet where we could throw down roots! The moment of the new Exodus had come. We accepted the voyage with pleasure, and here you have us, on the Promised Pampa. At least we’re back together. God knows what he’s doing.”

César Higuera, seeing the consternated faces of Moisés and Jashe, brusquely stood up, opened the window, insulted the wind that barked crossing the plain, closed the window, sat down again, angrily chewed a piece of cat meat, and, taking long swallows from the bottle, launched into a speech:

“The powerful go mad, and we poor pay the broken dreams. Baron Hirsch, for most of his life, was a Jewish aristocrat, a citizen of the world, equally comfortable in Bavaria, Belgium, France, Austria, and England. Thanks to his privileged connections, he was in no way affected by the bloody persecution we had to tolerate. He lived on the margin of our disasters until his son Lucien, thirty years old, was cut down by death.

“That the Cossacks massacred our children by the thousands had not the slightest importance. But that such a thing should happen to him, the possessor of one of the greatest fortunes in Europe, that he should lose a son — and not from a shot or a beating but from a sickness so that he died in his bed — was a disaster that all Jews, present and future, should remember! Shit! What does he know about life, real life, the one you have to earn with the sweat of your brow? What does he know about the poor multitudes of the world when he inherited from his banker father and grandfathers an immense fortune made even larger by the dowry of his wife, also the daughter of bankers?

“A man like that, immersed in international business, dealing with powerful governments, intoxicated by the heights, manages to forget the fifty-six years his compatriots have been stoned, insulted, stripped of rights. Only when he loses Lucien does the pain that invades him in torrents open his eyes: ‘Good heavens, others suffer as well!’ But vanity closes them: ‘To honor my deceased son, I will mobilize millions of dollars in order to become the new Moses. I will be the father of another immense migration. And even if Jews have not had their own land for centuries and have developed their mental faculties, this does not mean that they can’t be magnificent peasants. Their pale hands, their shriveled bodies, and their brains that navigate in the meanders of the Kabbalah are ideal for covering the soil of Argentina with vineyards and fig trees. Those lands are for sale precisely because no native dares to farm bottomless swamps, sandy stretches, and steppes invaded by scrub, where torrential rains are followed by droughts, plagues, and windstorms. I will give them a new home there as free farmers on their own land, ignorant, long-suffering, giving their lives to the land, that is, buried alive. Without creating political problems that hurt my prestige, they can become useful citizens for the nation that tolerates them. I am good, I am grandiose, I am a great benefactor; my name will shine in all Jewish encyclopedias, and my son Lucien will be applauded for centuries for his inspiring death.’

“Nonsense! Even if this place is, as its name suggests, between two rivers, like the ancient holy land, this pampa will not be ours or anyone else’s. It can’t be farmed. Given his influence among the Turks (it was he, after all, who built for our eternal enemies a railroad line through the Balkans to Constantinople, with immense financial success), it would have been better if the Baron had sent us to Palestine. That money he invested here, trying to become a prophet, could have opened the doors of Eretz Israel.”

Shoske corked the almost empty bottle and interrupted him: “Shut up, César! You’re drunk again. Stop insulting the dead. At least in his way Baron Maurice tried, mistakenly it’s true, to help us. There are others who wouldn’t give a hair off their ass for their compatriots in dire need. Enough rage. We’re not going to stay here forever. We’ll figure out a way to save, and our children, because we shall have them, will become educated — they’ll get to be doctors, engineers, architects — and will have the life a human being deserves. Now, let’s stop jabbering and go to sleep, because early tomorrow morning begins another rough day.”

That first night, Jashe, Sara Felicidad, and Moisés slept next to the kitchen on the cement. At dawn, the crowing of an army of roosters awoke them. It was colder than ever, and a torrential rain mixed with hail as big as eggs bombarded the zinc roof, transforming the house into a drum. Shoske put some wood on the fire.

“The annual hail. At midday, the rain will stop and an invasion of mosquitoes will begin. Take these strips of veil to protect yourselves. Soon you’ll get used to it. Sometimes I have my entire face covered by them, but I don’t waste time scaring them off. There will be so much mud that we won’t be able to work today. Let’s drive the cart to town. We’ll buy another bed. When night comes, we’ll put plugs of wax in our ears so we can carry out our conjugal obligations without hearing one another. But my niece will have to sleep outside. We’ve been thinking of getting her a wooden barrel, hot when it’s cold and cold when it’s hot.”

Back from the general store, they hung a curtain between the two beds and put the barrel behind the house. Moisés installed a little window in it and a door through which you’d have to crawl. Jashe covered the inside with a floral print cloth and put a straw mattress on the curved floor. Sara Felicidad entered that small space, which she saw as a palace, and the years began to run by. Years struggling against annual monsoons, droughts, parasites, floods that would destroy everything growing, windstorms that little by little blew away the topsoil, leaving enormous sand dunes. Years trying to decipher the signs that announced cold or heat, storms, fires that would burn up dried out brush. Years building low dikes to stop the advance of the sand; installing mills, tanks, reservoirs, sheds; spending almost everything they earned on maintenance; at the same time carefully rotating crops in order not to exhaust the soil.

And when they thought they’d overcome the attacks of nature and everything seemed flourishing, along would come locusts trying to eat even the last green leaf. The hungry hordes would advance in thick rows, five hundred or even a thousand yards wide and twenty or thirty yards deep, covering half a mile a day. They had to channel that voracious army using metal fences vectored toward a long ditch they’d urgently prepared, digging day and night. The jumping creatures would fall in, getting tangled up among themselves because of their long, spurred legs. They killed them by covering them up with dirt, smashing them with sacks filled with sand, or burning them with kerosene.

The smoke that the burning wings of the insects gave off had an aphrodisiac effect. Losing their reason for a moment, the two couples would also fall into the mile-long ditch and thrash about on top of the cushion of dying insects that gave off a deafening buzz announcing the end of the world. The couples would get up ashamed, their bodies covered with dead locusts, sculptures so strange that all the dogs would start howling. When, on the way, they passed by Sara Felicidad, who could not avoid seeing the epileptic tumbling and celebrated it with jubilant laughter, Jashe slapped her and ordered her into her barrel with nothing to eat until the following day.

Time passed, and their four faces were becoming wrinkled, their shoulders bowed, and their characters embittered. César and Moisés, after serious conversations, reached the conclusion that it was useless to cultivate vegetables, wheat, corn, grape vines, or fruit trees. If they wanted to emerge from poverty, they had to become cattlemen. Even though it was an almost sacred tradition to not spend it, they convinced Jashe and Shoske that they should invest the rest of the inheritance in the purchase of sheep, which were the white gold of the pampa.

Once again, they plowed the land and simultaneously planted alfalfa and rye. The rye would sprout first and, until spring, protect the alfalfa, which, weaker, would be planted between the furrows of rye. Then the fragile but perennial plant would continue for about five years, while the strong but short-lived plant would die that year. Jashe and Shoske understood the language of rye and alfalfa: they would one day be widows. That thought united them more than ever.

When the crops were growing well, the two men made a trip. They visited Río Negro, Viedma, Patagones, anywhere they might buy sheep or cattle at a decent price. By preference they went to zones where there was a drought or the grass was thin. The fifty gold coins, the three rings, and the watch enabled them to buy 1,500 thin sheep and some Lincoln rams for breeding. When they got back, they set about fattening the animals and then sold them to refrigerated meat companies for four times what they’d paid. They also retained lots of lambs. They picked up a hundred cows, almost skin and bone, and a pair of bulls, to which they quickly added sheep, lambs, capons, and young rams. They learned to work the land to fight erosion, choosing crops more and more appropriate for fattening cattle. And the business grew.

The two sisters announced they were pregnant, and eight months later they gave birth on the same day, Shoske a boy and Jashe a girl. Two dark-skinned children, Jacobo the First and Raquel the First. A year and a half later, again on the same day, they gave birth again, Shoske a boy and Jashe a girl. Another two dark-skinned children, Jacobo the Second and Raquel the Second.

During that good period, they had to employ Russian peons, perhaps the same Cossacks who’d martyred them during the pogroms. Now they were thankful, people who worked ten-hour days for a few pesos and a piece of roast meat. When the sun came up, Jashe, carrying her daughters, each one of whom was sucking on a bosom, followed by Shoske, also feeding her boys, came to Sara Felicidad’s barrel. Jashe, disgusted, observed Sara Felicidad asleep with her nose stuck in the yellow wool wig of the dancer doll.

“Wake up, woman. Yes, even though you’re young, you’ve turned into a woman because of your menstruation. The Russian peons never stop taking suspicious looks at you. One of these days you might be raped, and to make sure there are no witnesses they’ll kill all of us. That mane of blonde hair, those blue eyes, and your white skin are too attractive. Put this infusion of walnut on your hair, start wearing these dark glasses, and stop bathing so the dirt makes you as dark as us. Also, bend over when you walk, because you’re too tall, a giant like your dead father.”

My mother smiled, sang a ballad in her heart, dyed her hair, put on the glasses, bent over, stopped bathing, and only came out of her barrel at night to go to the kitchen to eat the leftovers. She knew she just didn’t fit in with the family and tried to pass unnoticed. When everyone slept, she would use some interior singing to attract frogs by the thousands. They would come out of the swamps to croak around her, following her silent melody. They opened their jaws wide, hoping that the fireflies would fall into their throats. In the darkness, those mouths filled with light looked like the stars in the firmament. The Earth disappeared for Sara Felicidad, and she felt herself floating in a space without beginning or end. Like one more star.

One morning during the month of April, as usual, the women got up half an hour before the men to prepare breakfast. They felt an irritation in their eyes, but what caught their attention most was the darkness that persisted at that hour when the most beautiful light should be sweetening the hostile landscape. They tried to go outside to see if the sky was covered with black clouds, but they found the door locked. They had to wake up their husbands, and all four of them had to push to open it. A thick layer of ash covered everything.

The peons brought the news: the Descabezado Grande volcano, located in Mendoza, had thrown into the sky an immense eruption of ashes that the trade winds and counter-trade winds had scattered over hundreds of miles. Swallowing curses, they plowed the land again and again, trying to mix in the ash. Impossible. The hungry animals cut open their gums chewing the grass covered with mineral dust. An anthrax epidemic broke out, and all the animals died. They would have to start all over again! They dug the rubber bag in which they’d hidden their earnings out of the excrements in the black pit, and Moisés and César went out to buy livestock. They came home with an enormous herd of pigs.

Shoske and Jashe, terrified, ran to hide themselves in a bed, pulling the sheet over their heads: “Forbidden food! God will punish us! How could you buy those disgusting animals that adore garbage? They are the Devil!”

César and Moisés, delicately folding back the sheet little by little, finally got the women to show their faces. Since they seemed unwilling to stop complaining, Moisés rattled his gums, producing a deafening clickity-clack. Impressed, the two women fell silent. César gave them each a glass of brandy, serving himself a large glass as well. Then, drying his mouth with his sleeve, he said, severely, “Ladies, times change. We have to adapt or we’ll die of hunger. The volcano ruined our land. Years will go by before the ash is washed away by rain or gets mixed in with the mud. We’ll never equal our production from before the disaster. If you want our children to have, some day, the economic means to study and get to be respectable citizens, we must progress. Forbidden or not, these pigs are right for us. They eat everything, and they are tough. They’re not even exported. Instead of fattening them and selling them off to the chilled beef industry, we will install a factory right here to produce hams, sausages, bacon, lard, and many other products. We’ll make lots of money.”

“But what will the other Jewish settlers say?”

“When there’s no more meat, it’s time to gnaw the bones. If what you want in this world doesn’t exist, you have to want what there is. Our compatriots can say whatever they like because we’ll stop seeing them. We don’t need them for anything. If they hold us in contempt, we’ll marry our children among ourselves, even if they are cousins. The Law does not forbid it. Do you want to get out of this hell someday? Then let God take care of tomorrow, and let the pigs take care of us today. Decide! Moisés and I are going to roast a piglet. Eat with us. All roads, even the smoothest, have stones in them. Harden your feet!”

One hour later, Jashe and Shoske came over to the fire and sat next to their husbands who cut big, juicy slices off the piglet and offered them. With sighs of resignation and their eyes raised to heaven, they chewed, slowly at first, overcoming their repugnance, only to devour pork later with an irrepressible appetite. When the banquet was over, the two women announced they were pregnant. Eight months later, they gave birth, as usual on the same day, one boy, Jacobo the Third, and one girl, Raquel the Third.

Time galloped on. The emblem of the Flying Hog ham factory, a pig with swan wings flying over a landscape painted in the colors of the Argentine flag, became famous all over the nation. When World War I broke out, they had to bring in workers from Buenos Aires, all goys apparently, to keep up with the numerous orders that came from abroad, especially from England. The exploitation of flesh forbidden by the Prophet allowed them to get through the crisis, amassing a huge fortune.

Since they did not want to live the rest of their lives isolated out on the pampa in the nauseating stink of their thousands of pigs, they decided to move to Chile. Iquique was a port visited by ships of all nationalities; with schools appropriate for the children, all kinds of businesses, enormous hotels, theaters, libraries; and boulevards where tourists, mine administrators, sailors, and workers who came down from the mines to spend the money they’d made over months could provide an inexhaustible source of income. They would open a huge store where there would be everything: food, clothing, furniture, kitchenware, toys for children, clocks, watches, jewels, and — why not? — a booth for buying and selling gold and silver.

While all that was being discussed, my mother turned thirteen without her family realizing it. Still faithful to the order to dye her hair, wear dark glasses, never bathe — her skin was covered with a dark, greasy coating that stank like the pigs — and walk bent over, she had created a situation in which no one wanted to be anywhere near her, not even the workers who butchered the animals. If by accident during the day she wandered near the house, her half-brothers and half-cousins would start howling with terror, and she would have to run off.

But Sara Felicidad did not suffer. For her, this shabby aspect of things belonged to the world of forms. Beneath that was the world of essences, which only she could perceive. There she could sing as loud as she wished and show herself with her white skin, golden hair, blue eyes, her six-foot-three height. There, the Earth was an amorous being granting long caresses lasting millions of years, where atmospheric changes were the jolly games of a God at play, and where human beings were angels riding on pigs that really did have wings.

Late on nights when there was a full moon, Sara Felicidad would climb the ombu tree and from there see emerge from the sleeping men and animals a second, transparent body that allowed them to travel, without their being able to remember it when awake, throughout the Universe, until they sank into the final abyss, where they would find the consciousness that was the origin of life, and then emerge covered with luminous scales, larger than the planet Jupiter, and spin and dance, emitting the music of a whirling top, with the spirits of the dead, who are always happy.

For Jashe, Shoske, Moisés Latt, and César Higuera, bringing Sara Felicidad along was a problem. Secretly, they all wanted to leave the pigs and her. No one would dare propose it, so when the time came to leave, they gave her a third-class ticket while they and the six children traveled in first class. They hoped the wind of the train would carry off her fetid stench. When they got to Iquique, they would replace the barrel with an annual allowance and a room in a boarding house, as far away as possible, so they could once again forget about her existence.