Where the Bird Sings Best

Jaime and Sara Felicidad

It was extremely difficult for me to bring Jaime and Sara Felicidad together. When incarnating myself again in this world became a necessity, the man I chose to be my father was in a circus, way down in southern Chile, being hung by the hair. And the woman who was supposed to be my mother was locked away in a desert sanctuary way up north. Separated by more than two thousand miles, they never would have found each other if, in 1919, I didn’t decide to take those two people of such differing character — which is as much as saying they were opposites — to be the founding elements of my future body.

I don’t know if my memories of the time before my birth correspond to reality or if they are mere dreams. That doesn’t matter. In any case, reality is the progressive transformation of dreams; there is no world but the world of dreams. I am convinced that I chose and united the sperm and the ovaries that allowed me to be born again for the — who knows how many times I was born? Thanks to my iron will, when the chosen moment came and in the proper spot, an oasis in the middle of the pampa, I exacerbated the magnetic suffering that forced the paternal penis to penetrate the maternal vagina so that, in a cataclysmic joy that overwhelmed all its cells, it would let fly the radiant arrow that went to bury itself in the avid depth of her magic blackness.

I slid through that crack opened in space and time, intent on conserving my memory intact because I would need it to carry out the plan I’d been elaborating from life to life. But as almost always happens, the disturbance suffered by the subtle body when it penetrated the dense levels of this existence caused me to lose a large number of memories. Little remains of that incessant development of a spirit knowing itself. It’s a fragmented magma, shadowy sensations, colossal spaces, eternal times, births and collapses of universes, savage rivers of swept-away souls crossing infinite splendors in vertiginous orbits.

During some periods, there was total silence, as if God had never created ears, and after, the racket of galactic cars, carnival trucks showing off the spangles of their suns, advancing with no goal, pushed along by the goodness of an inexhaustible emanation, a unique principle that feeds myriad beings who only receive. With no fear of the ridiculous, I accept the fact that I was a metallic crag wandering through dark immensities with an impassioned thirst for light. Within my extreme density lived an exclusive desire: to create language, song, the Word itself, which had drawn me out of the nothingness. That ideal must have inflamed me. Perhaps I exploded into stars and planets and became crystal, amoeba, plant, animal, and then lost myself in an incessant line of men and women being born and dying in murderous religions, labyrinths of legends and symbols until I learned to open the eyes of my senses and learn to see that pure light that arises from the original fountain with my soul, without intermediaries.

Then the language of thought resounds, the silent voice that speaks to Being, perpetuating itself through time in order to create the true Tradition, “That which is received.” It seems that I was an initiate born in Germany in 1378. It’s clear that the year, composed of 13 and of 78, which is 13 x 6, transports a message. Those who have received a Masonic education will understand what that mans. In that life, because of misery, my parents abandoned me at the doors of a convent. The monks — who, lacking a sexual life, develop their intellect until it becomes a tumor — taught me to speak and read Greek and Latin before I was six.

When I was almost an adolescent, I accompanied the abbot on a journey to Jerusalem. He died there, granting me a freedom that by then had become essential for me. I sought the Truth among old Kabbalists, but when my organs of knowing developed, I understood that, unable to be universal, it presented itself as a violent belief. Then I sought a technique that would allow me to disconnect from that archaic desire. Truth would only be the world without my desire for it, and the technique would be to learn to disappear as a separated individual. To accomplish that, I had to confront inspired thought in other masters.

Egypt showed me its secrets in a numerical system: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, etcetera. Ascetic Turks showed me how to fall into a trance: I could open my abdomen with a knife, empty my guts out onto a plate, and dance, spinning dizzily, and at the end put them back in their place and seal the wound without leaving a scar. In Fez, I studied alchemy, how to spiritualize matter, and magic, how to materialize spirit. Finally, I was visited during a dream by the Knights of Heliopolis, those who consider physical death a sickness and who have the incredible patience to live more than fifteen thousand years.

Those ancients treated me like someone they’d been awaiting for a long time, and each one (there were seventy-eight) gave me his knowledge summarized on a rectangular sheet. When I was able to order those drawings into a hexagonal mandala that resembled a snowflake, I thought I understood the constitution of the Cosmos and the mystery of life. Considering, as did my masters, it useless to go on remaining in one single body, I decided to live 151 years and to continue, in another life, my work, which was to lead all beings to Awareness, progressively eliminating God by absorbing Him in existence so that we would all become an exclusively human Universe. All of that was achieved with the consent of the Father, who, out of absolute love, creates us so we will be his tomb. Out of the putrefaction of the divine our eternity will be born.

I returned to Germany, where I adopted an orphan girl. I instructed her for some years until she became my wife. With the immense fortune I accrued transforming base metals into gold, I had a temple constructed in the Alps, carved from the rock of the mountains themselves. I led the workers there blindfolded and returned them home without their knowing where the site was located. There, with my young lover and four friends chosen from among the most highly developed spirits of the period, protected by our disguised and impregnable nest, we locked ourselves away to decipher the miraculous language of geometry. Almost a century went by. I saw my disciples die placidly. I had met them too late, after society had already encrusted in their minds the programing of death and the triumph of old age. Since they believed in those two concepts, they achieved them.

Federica, my companion, educated by me, grew up without those prejudices and accompanied me until I was 151 years old. Young, only 110, she wanted to die with me, but I forbade it; she had to go on living for several centuries, if necessary — until, in another incarnation, I would remember her and seek her out to achieve our final union, the sacred androgyne.

The two of us constructed a seven-sided crypt. In the center of the roof, we hung three lamps filled with oil we’d managed to extract from gold, which, thanks to a wick made from chameleon spittle, could burn for a millennium. At the center of the heptagonal floor, we erected a round covered altar with a copper plaque on which I engraved Hoc universi compendium unius mihi sepulchrum feci and other important things that, unfortunately, I’ve forgotten. Finally, in a glass coffin, I lay down with my seventy-eight cards floating from one hand to the other like a rainbow.

Under the serene gaze of my faithful Federica, I began to give up my body. I separated first from my feet, in which I felt the enthusiastic faith of the always-growing toenails, the fierceness of the instep, the solidity of the soles giving roots to intelligence, and the clarity of the heels, round fertilizers of the planet. I loved them the way you love during farewells: more than ever. Then I withdrew from my skin, flesh, bones, viscera, until, separated from my matter and my needs, I began to do the same thing with my desires, which was relatively easy. Only one difficulty arose: the profound attraction I felt for my companion.

A sperm as brilliant as a jewel had been waiting for many years to inseminate her. I’d had to sacrifice that natural desire for reasons related to my initiation, which I do not understand. Then came the farewells from all the humans who gave me wisdom, from all the plants, animals, minerals, an army of beings with which I had established tender links and which I also thanked and quickly abandoned. Finally, I eliminated from my spirit my unfinished works, anxieties of being, doing, and living. With an immense felicity, I gave myself to the change and emerged in the limbos of the Interworld. I wandered in the Interworld, there where space and time are absorbed by the unthinkable creator, Eye.

In that splendor, impeding the disintegration of my awareness, I waited for the manifested Universe to perish and be reborn in order to reincarnate in an advanced era where man would have overcome his animal inertia. But I made a mistake and let myself be trapped by a certain orange-tinged light that cast me into an avid ovary during a primary era that corresponded in no way with the dates of my death. Trapped in the past, I was born in Lisbon in 1415, in the body of the Jew Isaac Abravanel.

I had the good luck to be part of a family of notable and eminent Talmud scholars, among whom I learned numerous languages. I stood out in the study of Law and developed the powers of my spirit, managing to be named Minister of Finances by Ferdinand of Spain. In that country, I met Salvador Levi, a lion tamer. Thanks to contact with the stares of his beasts, hunters of souls, I managed to turn one corner of the veil and remember the seventy-eight arcana that had been revealed to me in my former incarnation by the Knights of Heliopolis. The rest of that life you already know. Do you remember? Thanks to the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, I ended up in Italy, where, after many adventures, I decided to die like the clowns, by balancing on my head with my red shoes toward heaven.

By introducing the Tarot into the Levi genealogical tree, even if my material form hadn’t dissolved in their genetic codes, made it mine, and from the Interworld, with an astral vibration that might be compared, allowing myself all licenses, to human satisfaction, I watched the development, from generation to generation, of Cosmic Consciousness, which, without trying to make frivolous wordplay, is enormously comic. He who understands philosophy understands laughter. That mysterious Word at the beginning, mentioned in the Bible, is a divine guffaw.

All the ancestors of the woman who would be my mother were receiving, little by little, the infinite joy that emanates from the Creator. They shone like golden fruit among the branches that spread higher and higher. But none got as far in its glitter as Sara Felicidad. Her intense glow went beyond our solar system until, liberating itself from the attraction of the galaxy, reached the limits of the Universe and penetrated into the Supraworld, perhaps even farther than that. So much purity in love attracted me irresistibly.

I chose that woman as a crucible and, entering into her ovaries, I populated them with an imperious call. The task I took was a hard one, commensurate with my enormous life will: to make Jaime, whom I chose for the colossal energy that inhabited him, transport his sperm from the distant forests of the south to the desert, where my mother awaited him. That journey would take ten years. For mortals, an infinite waiting period, but for me, used to the time of the Eternal One, less than a tenth of a second.

Sara Felicidad’s illumination began after a long passage through abandonment. Ever since she reached Iquique, relegated to a room in an obscure boarding house on the outskirts of town, the gaze of the family and of others decomposed her instead of helping her to integrate herself. No one was able to be a positive mirror to reflect her values. No. All they showed her was disgust, indifference, or irritation. Who would want to be amiable with a strangely curved girl who smelled bad, was greasy, hidden behind thick black glasses, her hair gathered into a filthy beret, and who, although not mute, never spoke except for some catlike whispers? No one bothered to teach her to read, but she didn’t need reading. Ignorant, she was capable of conversing with the earth, the sky, the sea, and with all kinds of fire. She understood the language of the birds and of many other animals. Even rocks spoke to her. No element refused to sing with her, whether they were spiny plants or the clouds of red sand that rolled down the mountainsides like gigantic caterpillars. Human beings behaved in another way toward her. In the boarding house, The Schoolboy, a building of boards and cement with small windows that faced a bald mountain, Sara Felicidad ate lunch and dinner in the family dining room, where no one bothered to say hello to her.

One hot day in July, a cart overflowing with people in costume, men and women of all ages, stopped outside the boarding house. The dust, the burning sun, and the blinding glare forced them to stop. After swallowing a few bottles of water, gathering strength from a mysterious faith, they played drums, trombones, triangles, and horns and started dancing on the patio, where there was only cat and dog excrement instead of plants. One group, separated from the others, played flutes that, as it seemed to Sara Felicidad, imitated the cries of birds announcing rain. She tried to understand the costume of the dancers. What were they dressed as? Birds? Each wore a coffee-colored costume composed of a light helmet, a shiny shirt, trousers with lace hems, a belt covered with little mirrors, and a leather skirt, open in front, that reached to the heels. Also, a small white cape covered their shoulders. Multicolored flowers were embroidered on the chest and leg area of their costumes. One of them, in the ecstasy of his ritual dance, shouted, “Long live the Chinamen of the Virgin of the Carmen!”

My mother, thanks to the devout intonation, instantly understood that the word “Chinaman” meant “servant” for these people. The cap could be a crest, the skirt a tale, the white cape a pair of wings, the belt with mirrors reflecting the faces of the others, a desire for union, love of one’s neighbor. And the coffee color corresponded to the earth. The Earth transformed into a celestial florid bird carrying its offering, a collective consciousness, to the Universal Mother through the Cosmos. Birds that dance, announcing the rain in this inhospitable desert, fertilizing the sleeping dust with their dance steps, pouring out hope. Musical instruments making the mountains echo to proclaim the birth of a planet with a heart. To serve, to give oneself, to dissolve in the common uniform, to be a furrow open to all seeds, obeying the orders of the Lady Owner. Birds so believing that out of celebrating the rain in drought, they were creating it.

It began to drizzle, though the sun was shining brightly. Fine, almost imperceptible drops fell, forming a dome above the costumed people, an ephemeral temple. Sara Felicidad, who carried dance in her blood — Alejandro Prullansky’s movements had engraved themselves on her memory, decomposing into thousands of perfect sculptures — did not disdain the footwork of these poor folk. The beauty of art was not within them, but there was a sincerity like that of the water in a fountain. Each jump, each crossing of legs, each spin was at the same time a giving of thanks and a gesture of adoration.

Sara Felicidad felt transported and, joining the group, she too began to dance. Intoxicated by the drumbeats, she forgot to bend over, and her erect body reached its six-foot-three height. She shook her head, her beret fell off, and her splendid blonde hair, which she’d kept hidden, spread like a luminous spider. The drizzle focused on her, washing away the grime accumulated over so many years. Her white skin became whiter still among those dark-skinned people, and a general stupefaction stopped the rehearsal.

That giant girl could symbolize the purity that frightens away demons! Excited, they invited her to go away with them to adore the Virgin in the La Tirana sanctuary, forty miles away in the desert. They gave her a white gown, some cardboard wings covered with silver spangles, and a magic wand. No one asked what her name was. They adopted her with the simplicity of the people, where the group counts more than the individual.

They joyfully packed themselves onto the wagon and, still singing, went up toward the Tamarugal Pampa. They traveled that day and the entire night. At dawn, they caught up to other pilgrims walking in endless lines. Each group wore a different uniform but all in bright colors. There were Indians, gypsies, shepherds, blue princes, bears, tigers, and caliphs. All intoned hymns to the Holy Virgin:

We march along in search of her

We wait and wait and wait

We’ve traveled every land

Along crooked roads and straight

Those multitudes in festive mood — who, in their search for miraculous contact, allowed faith to enter the world thanks to their humble hearts — compensated my mother for the gray years she’d been forced to live hunched over. She tossed away the final bit of that dark era, the black glasses, and no longer felt ashamed of her blue eyes.

The wagon, followed by a tail of dust, reached La Tirana. Spangles, feathers, mirrors, ribbons, embroidery, lace, fringes, golden buttons, handbags covered with coins, necklaces, pennants, capes, masks, turbans, handkerchiefs, helmets, musical instruments, dances, prayers. Sara Felicidad, right in the middle of the febrile multitude shaking outside the church made of stuccoed wood, gave herself over to carnival. The military marches, the African rhythms, the play of flutes, put wings on her heels and a desire to speak aloud for the first time since her father died.

She wanted to say, “I love you all!” but instead of spoken words out came a song, so clear and powerful that it did not seem human. The multitude stopped its shaking, and the bands gradually stopped playing. The angel spread her arms and opened her hands to bless them all. They fell to their knees. The wind brought a flock of brown clouds that dissolved in a thunderstorm. The rain announced by the birds had arrived. The alliance of sky and earth was confirmed. Again the bass drums resounded, then the flutes, trumpets. The pilgrims, with more energy than ever, began dancing again. A priest, whose soutane was decorated with a red, white, and blue wool border came after her: “Child, stop singing and come into the sanctuary with me! Don’t change the festival on me! It isn’t you but the Holy Virgin of the Carmen who should be adored!”

And to hide her, he locked my mother up in a confessional. At night the religious brotherhoods lit bonfires, trying to protect themselves from the intense cold that replaced the intense heat. After celebrating, with astonished laughter and shouting, the explosion of some firecrackers, they began to enter the church. Without pushing or fighting for space, quite calmly, the bodies pressed together, yielding to the slow current that made them advance toward the altar.

Some inched forward on their knees, leaving bloody tracks erased by the innumerable feet of the human worm that came behind. Finally, there it was, before them, the sculpture carved in a single rock, the miraculous Virgin with her child God in her left arm and a woodcutter on his knees, adoring her amid tons of burning candles. The supplicating posture of that man of stone was identical to that of the throng, all asking for something, for themselves, for others, channeling their problems toward the only solution.

Sara Felicidad, who barely fit into the narrow confessional, waited for hours for the homages to cease, and when the supplicants left, walking backward, to eat and sleep around the bonfires, accompanied by the priest, who provided an example by putting up with the glacial wind right along with them, she left her hiding place. She went to check if the doors were locked, approached the altar, climbed up right next to the Virgin, and, using extreme care, removed her crown, her mantle, and her gown. Sara Felicidad spoke to the Virgin in silence, knowing she would hear her:

“They all never stop asking you for things. So it’s necessary for someone to give you something. I’m not asking for anything. Your infinite goodness moves me. You’ve spent so many years here granting your grace that you must be tired. You’re smiling, but your shoulders support the weight of our suffering humanity. Allow me, please, to take care of you. I am going to massage your stone body in order to remove the invisible film formed by the pain of others.”

And Sara Felicidad began to massage the Virgin’s cold back, her chest, her stomach, her arms, her legs, and her head. Little by little, the stone warmed and after a few hours reached the temperature of human flesh. My mother continued her labor until she thought she could hear, beneath the Virgin’s small breasts, the beating of a heart. She redressed the now-living statue and received her thankful gaze. The Virgin of the Carmen accepted her services and made Sara Felicidad her personal maid. Drunk with joy, she ran to hide in the confessional again. The sun had come up, and the multitude was impatiently pushing the doors. No sooner did the parish priest open them than the leaders entered, placed themselves at the service of the Virgin, and then announced the order of the guilds. These in turn entered one at a time on their knees to offer burning candles, not concerned that the hot wax was burning their hands.

After dancing for five minutes, they left, always walking backward, to allow the next group to enter. There were so many, and the air was so steamy that Sara Felicidad, worn out from all the effort she’d put into the massage (she’d put her soul into every caress), fell fast asleep. No one and nothing could awaken her, not the canticles of the processions, not the drum rolls, not even the explosion of more fireworks.

She opened her eyes the next morning. A great sadness possessed the plaza. All of the pilgrims, with wild eyes, piled onto the vehicles that had brought them and began their return to their place of origin. The priest locked the doors of the sanctuary with two huge locks and left with them. A soft wind brought a cloud of dust, and my mother, still wearing her angel costume, was left alone, without food, water, or a place to sleep.

Three months passed. The priest, accompanied by Doña Pancha, a vigorous devotee all dressed in black, arrived from Iquique in a small station wagon filled with brooms, feather dusters, scrub brushes, pails, rags, soap, and a barrel of water to commence the trimester cleaning. Almost a mile away from the sanctuary, they began to hear the buzzing of bees. There seemed to be thousands. They counted about a hundred honeycombs hanging from the branches of the few trees in the area. The activity of the insects was incessant. They entered and left through the church towers.

In the semidarkness of the dawn, the priest and his assistant, pale with emotion, saw a glow arise from the windows. The house of God seemed full of light. Doña Pancha clutched her rosary and began to exhale a long prayer. They could clearly see that the two huge locks were intact. Through the cracks, coming from within the church, came the penetrating aroma of violets. When they opened the two doors of carved wood, they were assaulted by a vast wave of perfume, and for a moment, pleasure stopped their breathing.

It was hard for the priest to believe his eyes. Doña Pancha wept like a baby. The candles were lit! Those tons of candles offered to the Virgin three months earlier were still burning with their brilliant tongues of flame without being consumed. The myriad branches of carnations looked so fresh they seemed to have been placed before the altar that very morning. Next to the Virgin of the Carmen, a girl, blonde and naked, was deeply asleep. The priest recalled the angel that sang with the voice of a celestial trumpet. He looked around. The church was clean, the floor shone, and the bees came to feed at the flowers that had become perennial.

“A miracle,” muttered Doña Pancha.

The priest, rapping his knuckle on her head, said, also in a low voice, “Quiet, woman, this may be the Devil’s work. Run to the station wagon and bring me my spare cassock.”

Sara Felicidad awoke smiling.

While the devotee dressed her, the priest, his back to her, asked, “Tell me, my girl, who are you? How did you get into the church when the doors were locked? The windows don’t open, and the little holes through which pass the ropes for ringing the bells only let the bees in. How long have these candles been burning? Why don’t they melt? What did you do to keep the carnations from wilting? And there is neither food nor water here, so how did you live?”

My mother, who by now measured six feet seven inches in height (she would subsequently grow another three inches), bent over toward the priest and placed her hands below his nose. The man jumped back in horror. From those smooth palms, almost devoid of lines, arose the intense perfume that invaded the temple. When she tried uselessly to speak, musical notes instead of words came from her mouth, which smelled like honey. The priest thought, quickly and intensely. The beauty he was witnessing was too great to be demonic. A shame, because it was easier to expel a devil than an angel, but there’s a remedy for everything, even miracles, so better roll up the sleeves and take the saint by the halo. He picked up the old lady, who had fallen to her knees and was striking her chest, and said in severe tones, “Listen here, Pancha, let’s talk things over man to woman. For fifteen years, you’ve been at my heels. You bring me my chocolate in the morning, and you put out my lamp at night whenever I fall asleep reading. You are more than my housekeeper, and if it weren’t for the chastity imposed on us, you would have been my wife long ago. And it would have done you a world of good, because as a recalcitrant spinster you’ve begun to sprout whiskers. Face the facts, woman: what brings you close to the altar isn’t God but hormones. You’re in love with me. Easy now! Don’t faint! I’m speaking to you in this shameless fashion because the situation is serious, and you’ll have to make a choice. I’ll make it clear: you have to choose between God and me. I recognize that the Virgin has produced a miracle, and that this mute, feeble-minded girl may be a saint, but political interests sometimes have to take precedence over religious interests.

“The festivals at La Tirana arouse faith and spread our religion among the people. Any instruction given in the name of the Holy Virgin of the Carmen is obeyed in all points. We’ve found a way to absorb the ancient indigenous superstitions, and the annual carnival channels the despair of the miserable workers, which is so great, toward hope. The calm and endurance our Lady gives them are elements essential for the proper development of Chilean society. For that reason, everything must go on in the same way. This young woman, so beautiful, blonde, white, tall, pure, and witness of a prodigy in the eyes of the miners, could become the Virgin incarnate, a new Messiah, a catalyst for the masses. They won’t settle any longer for coming here to dance and march past the idol. No, they will take the angel away from this place to transform her into the leader of who knows what kind of revolutionary army. Peace in this country, which is as tranquil as a paradise, will end, and chaos will ensue. Do you understand, Pancha? Either you run off to tell about the miracle to all the faithful or you shut your trap and stay at my side, promising me you will never reveal our secret. Well then, make up your mind: God or me?”

Doña Pancha, as red as a tomato, replied in an intimate tone, “You, Lolo.” And since there was nothing to clean, there being not a speck of dust in the sanctuary, she withdrew to wait in the station wagon.

“Look here, girl, you don’t know how to talk, but I’m sure that you can hear and that you’ll understand what I’m saying. I realize that out of love for Our Lady you have become her servant. That sentiment honors you, and all I can do is accept you since She herself has done so. But there are certain important conditions: you must cease to live on miracles, perhaps by drinking dew and eating only honey. I will bring you fruit, vegetables, and jam. And bottles of water too. You will go on dressed in discreet fashion, in my cassock. You will extinguish the candles and allow me to remove all these flowers. And the honeycombs. I’ll come back later with the proper tools, and we’ll knock them out of the trees. During the three days of carnival, you will blend in with the crowd, and you’ll wear rubber gloves so the scent of your hands doesn’t arouse suspicion. Only in that way will you be permitted to be in charge, and how well you’ve done these past three months cleaning the church. Deal?”

Since the death of her father, Sara Felicidad was accustomed to living hidden away. It was easy for her to nod her agreement. In any case, my spirit had already entered her ovaries, vectoring her inexorably to the meeting that would make me be born. For waiting ten years for the man who would inseminate her, nothing would be better than absolute solitude. Satisfied, the priest handed her the keys to the two locks, and, along with the carnations that immediately began to rot, he drove off in the station wagon, defending himself from the “Lolos” and caresses that Doña Pancha felt she had the right to rain on him.

In Santiago, the disunited Jodorowsky family reached the year 1919. They thought it catastrophic, but you just never know. Some painful slashes today can tomorrow bring fecundity to a tree that was drying out. In any case, they felt like doves kicked by a mule. And they weren’t alone. Every Chilean felt a monsoon falling on his straw roof. In an instant, with the end of World War I, the export of nitrates, raw material for explosives, collapsed, and even though the market recovered in the following years, the workers, who could not see the future clearly, bottled up as they were in mines and factories, felt they were on the edge of unemployment. A malaise spread among the poorer classes in the country.

The rich also suffered their punch to the kidneys: the Red Octopus, not content with sowing chaos in its own territories, dared to found a Third Communist International in order to stretch its tentacles around the entire world, intent on fomenting workers’ revolutions. Of course, the military had the bottom dogs under control, but in any case it was bothersome to dance the Charleston with stones in your patent leather shoes. Could it be that because of this atmosphere of disquiet, the devils were loose in an island country that had never concerned itself with what was going on beyond its borders? Who can guess? If every event, the summation of all causes, is produced by the entire Universe, why ask questions?

The first to take a beating or lesson provided by Destiny was Lola. My aunt had become so thin that the drunks at the bars where she went along with the blind lady from Room 28 called her “The Knife that Sings.” She had big deeply set eyes, an expression of perpetual terror, and the only thing that could have made her attractive was her thick mane of straight black hair. But she insisted on braiding it and wearing it rolled up on her head like a large cone. Her thick lips, like those of a black woman, also tried to proclaim her femininity, but she silenced them with a layer of flesh-colored lipstick. To disguise her womanhood even further, she flattened her bosoms and used round glasses to imitate nearsightedness. Doña Pair — that was the name the blind woman gave herself, “because des-pair comes from hoping too much”—got used to Lola’s company. She took pleasure in teaching her to play the guitar, and they shared her tiny room and the tips the customers gave them. Perhaps out of nostalgia for the songs or because they were the least sensual couple in the world, they always respected both women and never tried to make them drink.

“Tell me Doña Pair, please, how many songs do you know? I’m copying down the lyrics and melodies in this notebook. I calculate more than two thousand!”

“You’ve done a very bad thing, Lola, in writing down those songs. They’re free. That way you make them into prisoners.”

“But if something were to happen to you, God forbid, you’d take a treasure to the grave.”

“I’d be taking nothing, child. I have no memory. My head is empty. There are no melodies inside it. The songs are like invisible birds; they go all over the place, flying. You call one, and it comes to perch on your tongue. If you fix it in a notebook, you kill it. When our Father made the world, along with the animals and flowers, He created songs. Once upon a time, all human beings could receive them, but their ears have been closing up. I think mine opened when I went blind. Aside from music I have nothing. I’m like a hollow reed. The songs can come to me because nothing bothers them. Perhaps one day you too will receive them. There aren’t thousands or millions — there is no limit. Do you think I’m lying to you or mouthing idiocies like a senile old lady? You’re wrong. Even though I’m ninety-two, I’m still young inside. My teacher, who blessed this guitar, is one hundred and eleven. I always divide the money we get in three parts, two for us and one for Carmelita, whom I visit every Sunday.”

“Oh, Doña Pair, how I’d like to meet your teacher! Wouldn’t you introduce me? I could also write down what she knows. Maybe we could make a book some day.”

“But what a stubborn fool you are, Lola! Whatever I tell you goes in one ear and comes out the other. Songs are born, they die, and if they want to come back, they come back. It’s they who decide, not you. And that way, without forcing things, everything works well. Things, when they are as they are, are perfect. There’s no reason to interfere. Look at that puddle. You think it’s filthy, but it’s tranquil. If you put your hand in it, the germs that live there go mad and many bite your fingers. Don’t break the balance, because you can bring us bad luck. Have faith. The world is like a record: everything is being recorded. To recover something all you need is the right needle. Give me the notebook. I’m going to tear it up. All right? Good. That’s how it is. You’ve understood. Tomorrow I’ll take you to Carmelita’s.”

Near Mapocho Station, they took a tram that went along San Pablo to Matucana Avenue. There they got off and continued walking until they turned left onto Andes. Beyond was Manzana de Altos. A square block of two-story houses (they could have been taller, but because of the earthquakes structures had to be smaller), all linked together. There was a legend that the police didn’t go in there because the few who dared enter never came out. Their bodies disappeared. Well, 98 percent of their bodies disappeared, to be precise. The remaining 2 percent, the testicles, were tossed from a window onto the street in a tin can.

The block was a refuge for cardsharps; worn-out whores; pickpockets; drunks with rotten peaches instead of noses; crazy children; unemployed workers; and blurry, perpetually pregnant women. At the center of the block was a patio with an opening like a pit, where everyone threw their garbage and emptied their chamber pots. Right below ran the powerful San Carlos canal. More than one child had fallen in. The current never asked questions and just carried everything away.

Lola, behind Doña Pair, made her way through the labyrinth of passageways, dodging from time to time a rat. The stench of wine came from every room, along with frying, rancid sweat, and excrement. If a ray of sunshine came in, it filled with dust, and its golden stain on the leaden ground was usurped by a mangy cat. No one bothered them. Carmelita lived in a room that opened onto the central patio. Her white door was framed with flowerpots filled with lilies and carnations. She’d glued a blazing heart of Jesus onto her windowpane. From within came an agreeable chirping of canaries mixed with the aroma of toasted flour.

Doña Pair opened the door, which was not locked, and without announcing herself, had Lola enter too. There, in that clean cubicle, with only a bed, a table, and a gas burner where a pot was warming, was a tiny old lady, almost a dwarf, wearing a chocolate-colored bathrobe and some high men’s boots. She had one incisor in her mouth, her eyes had lost almost all color and were a faded gray, on her head a net of fine white hairs did not hide her freckled baldness, and her hands looked like two small seas of wrinkles.

With the voice of a child, the mummy said, “Come on in, girls. I’ve got hot milk and corn porridge. Would you like some?”

She got off the bed where she’d been sitting and, caressing her guitar as if it were a spoiled cat, walked slowly toward the table, whistling like three canaries, and prepared two little plates of the sugary corn porridge. Meanwhile, the blind woman pulled out a roll of banknotes tied up with a pink thread and put it into a plaster figurine of a little man squatting down, who seemed to be defecating a peach pit.

“Thanks, Pair, for feeding my shitass there. God will give it back tripled. Oh, I see your little friend also brought her guitar! Let’s sing. After all, that’s why we came into this world.”

Lola began to play along with the old ladies, but after a few chords, she felt alone. Doña Pair and Carmelita strummed with such delicacy that almost imperceptible musical phrases arose from their instruments. She made a huge effort and managed to distinguish the beauty of the melody, a lullaby so tender, so saturated with maternal love that her eyelids became heavy, and she was about to fall asleep like a baby full of milk. She was distracted by something like a cool breeze making its way through the sunbaked grass of summer.

The old women, without moving their lips, their eyes fixed on the same infinity point, were singing. When Lola got used to that almost total absence of volume, she could listen to the words, verses as perfect as a pearl necklace, intense, revealing a sacred respect for life. Like clouds driven by the wind, the words sometimes changed rhythm and the song would acquire such force that its phrases seemed like rays of light. Then the immense calm would return, along with the oceanic sway of the rhymes. Lola began to suffer; those two ancients, luminous worms in the heart of a rotten apple, were creating an art that would not be transmitted for lack of witnesses. She did not deserve to be the only public for that marvel. That music was a national patrimony. All Chileans should know it. What a crime to allow such a heritage to be lost! Trying not to be noticed, she took a slip of paper out of her purse and tried to write down the music and the words that floated like a gold thread above the daily noise. Carmelita instantly stopped playing, as did the blind woman.

“That scratching of pencil over paper is so ugly! You’re offending the angels, my girl. If you wanted to write all they sing, there wouldn’t be enough forests to produce enough paper. You want to give others the songs you yourself don’t know how to receive. That’s laxity. You interrupted a holy rhythm. It may be that without wanting to you’ve provoked something terrible. Let’s pray that the Holy Spirit forgives the wound your pencil made in Him.”

The two old women made my aunt kneel and began to pray for her. Loud knocks shook the door.

“Open up, granny, your throat cutters are here.”

Six men, neither old nor young, in shirtsleeves, wearing muddy white sneakers and jeans whose right hand pocket was inflated by a knife, entered. They were smiling drunken smiles, and each one carried four bottles of pisco. Since there were no chairs, some sat on the edge of the bed and others on the table, their legs dangling.

“We were lucky, Doña Carmelita. We mugged a rich guy, and we’re celebrating. You’ll have to forgive us. We still have some pisco left, and we want to down it with a musical accompaniment. So, play. You know that nobody denies a poor man a song. And your friends can accompany you. To your health!”

The blind woman, used to dealing with drunken oafs, calmly adapted to the situation and, strumming her guitar, cackled out a jolly tune. The mummy accompanied her and invited Lola to throw off her stupor, whispering in her ear, “Don’t even think of putting up any resistance, girl. Sing without stopping until the wolves turn into groundhogs.”

Following the galloping rhythm of the three women, each bandit emptied a bottle of pisco with one swallow. The effect was instantaneous. Their gestures became soft. They sweated, and with swollen lips babbled incoherent phrases at the same time they made the floor shake with their heels. The jiggling went on for more than an hour. They demanded song after song, their favorite Chilean cuecas. Then, worn out, they drank half of the second bottle to get back into form. Then they demanded sailor songs, which they accompanied in their harsh voices. They went on drinking.

When they finished the other half, they began to get sad. The trio interpreted tonadas, songs from southern Chile, that talked about rain hanging from the sky like rags; about forests without owners, dying of sadness during the month of August; about swallows with clay masks. The third liter went down their throats like a funeral procession. Each swallow was a flaming coffin, and suddenly their sorrow burned off, and with their hearts turned into wounds, they began to laugh so hard it seemed they were vomiting. They rolled around on the floor, covering the tiles with spit and tears.

The most powerful took out his knife and sliced the air. They stopped laughing. Suddenly they found themselves there, crouching down, not knowing who they were or in what world they were sitting. Everything lost meaning. It was strange to be “that,” a body with head, trunk, arms, and legs. An infinitely empty instant. Ugly women playing at being scarabs and singing, far away, incomprehensible. Horrified at themselves, to be a man or a spider is equally odd. Someone made a voice that didn’t belong to him resound in order to mumble words he half understood: “Stop playing, ladies.”

The singers instantly obeyed. The satisfied killer farted. Then he smiled, compressing his lip and stretching his mouth in a grimace that seemed to split his face in two: “My fellow muggers, I think this ruin, Carmelita, has lived enough. God’s going to kill her soon, don’t you think?”

“We do!”

“Well then, why should we let that asshole have all the fun. Let’s kill her ourselves! Agreed?”

“Agreed!”

“And you, Grandma, do you agree too?”

The old lady, with her usual calm, answered, “If God decides that you are the one to finish me off, I agree.”

“Forget all that resignation, Grandma. Before I kill you, I’m going to rape you. What do you think of that?”

“I’d say I was sorry for you. I’m so ugly you’re going to suffer.”

“That’s just what I want: to add pain to the pain of being alive. Destroying the good is what counts. In this shitty world, goodness is the worst violence.”

And giving a sudden roar, he leapt on top of the old woman, pulled off her underwear, spread her legs, pushed them back over her head, and penetrated her brutally, kissing that flaccid, wrinkled mouth with his entire soul. Barking euphorically, another two jumped onto Doña Pair, splitting her black glasses and sticking their tongues into her eye sockets to lick her cataract-covered pupils. Then with two sweeps of the knife that opened two red furrows in her flesh, they ripped off her skirt and penetrated her sex and her anus simultaneously. The three remaining raped Lola. The one who got her mouth shouted, “Do a good job sucking. If you bite me, I’ll slit your throat!”

The two old ladies, with that peace you see in gazelles hanging from the jaws of a lion, allowed themselves to be tortured without moving or screaming. The chief murderer buried his dagger in Carmelita’s neck. A spurt of blood left her, pushed by a long, intense wheeze that became fainter and fainter, but never finished, as if it were a serpent of air with an infinite tail. The men began shouting, because at the sight of the red blood, all six ejaculated at the same time. Following the example of the leader, they took out their knives and sank them into the body of the oldest woman. Amid insults, grunts, and coughing, they dismembered her, emptied out her guts, and decapitated her. Only when they shoved the plaster shitass in her vulva did the blind woman start screaming, as if she were seeing it. They threw themselves on top of her and cut her, too, to pieces.

Pale, huffing and puffing, soaked with blood, they opened their last bottles and emptied them in the pot of corn porridge. To make it look like a bowl of punch, they threw in the four ears they’d cut off and a bunch of fingers. They forced themselves to swallow more than their throats could take. Then belching and belching, they stared, with wide smiles, like little boys asking someone to complement them for something clever, at Lola, who sobbed, hugging Carmelita’s guitar. The surfeit of alcohol began to drown them. They piled up the body parts in the only sheet on the bed, made a package, and stepped out onto the patio. The chief walked over to the pit that led to the San Carlos canal, staggered, and threw the remains into the current below.

“Bye-bye, little friends. See you later.”

He smiled, thought for a second, looked toward the square piece of sky that crowned the rectangular chimney full of windows, where neighbors looked out with the indifference of nocturnal animals, and said, “Let’s not leave for later what we can do today! Anyone with guts should follow me!”

Jumping like a broken doll, he dove into the pit. One of his comrades shouted, laughing, “A perfect night for a swim!” And he too dove toward his death. Barking with desperate jubilation, the other four followed suit. The inhabitants of Manzana de Altos halfheartedly applauded each dive. Silence came, slipped under the white door, and filled up the bloody room like thick syrup. It seemed that all the calm of the Universe had concentrated there. Lola, without understanding why they’d left her alive, threaded a needle she found in a small sewing basket, mended her destroyed clothes, combed her hair, put the old lady’s guitar in its case covered with flowered cloth, and, holding it close, limping, made her way through the labyrinth of passages and short stairways, trying to find the exit. No one spoke to her. From time to time, a door would open and an index finger would point to where she should go. After an eternity, she found herself on the street, knowing that in a couple of months she’d have to have an abortion, that her ovaries would become infected, that after an almost mortal fever, they would have to be removed, and that never in her life would she have an orgasm. But nothing of that seemed terrible, because with the holy guitar she held in her hands, she would be able to capture thousands and thousands of angels in the form of songs.

What happened to Fanny in that damned year was very different. She had no talent for being a victim. Above all things, she admired executioners, considering them champions. When she turned sixteen, she considered herself a professional. The dwarf whore, Ruby of the Street, had nothing left to teach her. For a teacher she had her body. Her red hair hung down to her waist like a gush of blood; her legs, fleshy but long, marched along with the elegance of a giraffe; her thick lips looked like two sleeping piranhas; her fertile pubis produced hairs so hard they passed through whatever she was wearing like tiny flames. Each breast was so full it seemed to contain a baby, and her prominent ass — fat, jolly, aromatic, with its deep crevice — made all temples envious. Sculpted like that, she felt able to drag along any well-off man by the moustache. The only weakness she had left was her virginity.

Considering it dangerous to give it to a man — it might create sentimental ties — she decided to use a chair as a lover. She flipped it over, greased up one of its legs, and squatting over it, absorbed the wooden column as she finished eating an empanada. Now she was ready.

To move the world she would need a fulcrum point. A strange intuition — so strange that despite the fact that she obeyed it, she herself found it insane — ordered her to look for that point in the outskirts of the city, along the highway to Valparaíso. She walked for six miles, until she found a dingy gas station with blind hens squabbling about on the cement floor, covered with black grease. The attendant, a wide, undefined man with a tonsure-shaped bald spot and hands full of fingers as large as bananas, fell to his knees, splashed around in the oily gelatin, kissed her feet, and ran to light a candle at the statue of the Virgin Mary, who reigned in a niche protected by green, fly-specked satin curtains, when he saw Fanny and heard her say, “Unless you object, sir, I’ll be your lover for a short time. The only thing I ask for is a dish of food, a bed, that you bathe before sleeping with me, and that you let me dispense the gasoline. I don’t need a salary.”

Did Fanny put her trust in the will of Destiny or did she force it to act as she wished? Impossible to explain. If it was absurd to sink into a cloaca in order to reach the heights of society, perhaps for that reason, because reality is not logical, it worked out for her: after three weeks of patient waiting, the luxurious car of a government minister stopped there. My aunt observed the man, the son of people from Cataluña: in his fifties, a chest like the prow of a ship, teeth like a horse, and the short legs of a thieving conqueror. She saw in his dry skin the melancholy absence of pleasure and in his irritated nostrils cocaine substituted for love. When the driver, a dark-skinned man proud of his uniform with cap and gloves, gave her a tip, she exhaled deeply into his face, a breeze hot enough to make him drunk: “Pick me up tonight, as soon as you’re free. I feel like dancing.”

He obeyed her order. As soon as night began to fall, the automobile arrived, flashed its lights, and blew its horn three times. Fanny, wearing her impeccable white dress, her red high heels, her mane of hair exalted by brilliantine, gave a farewell pat to the garage attendant’s sex, sat down next to the chauffeur, plastered her lips to his mouth, and absorbed his entire tongue. The dark-skinned chauffeur, shocked, thought her vigorous sucking would pull it out by the roots, but in a fit of manliness, desire ate away at his brain like an acid; he relaxed and, almost choking, yielded his rough appendage. For this woman he would sacrifice even the ability to speak. She released him and told him to get going, and as they approached Santiago, she bent over between the shift lever and his legs and worked so hard that Ceferino went off the road, tardily slammed on the brakes, and found himself ejaculating with a dying cow under his wheels.

That’s how Fanny began her ascent. She never lied to anyone. She warned each man that she was a short-term gift. From Ceferino she went on to the doorman at the Ministry, from the doorman to the messenger, from him to an assistant to the subsecretary, from there to the secretary, then to the chief bodyguard, then to the principal councilor, and finally she was received by Don Manuel Garrázabal, the minister. All that in under fourteen weeks.

The frowning official looked at her above the photo of his wife, a vain devotee, and a pair of children, tyrants growing up to be cynics. He coughed, lit a cigarette, and offered it to Fanny. My aunt uncrossed her legs, pulled her skirt up (she wore no panties), and introduced the cigarette into her small sex with its pink lips. That way, with her thighs spread, she showed that she knew how to smoke through there, exhaling spirals of smoke. Meanwhile, as if that circus act were the most natural thing in the world, she proposed an amorous relationship to the functionary in exchange for a spacious house where she could carry on her business, that is, a luxury bordello.

The man went crazy. With febrile enthusiasm, he fell on his knees between those alabaster legs and kissed her sex so hastily that he swallowed the cigarette. After half a dozen rapid, nervous assaults, he agreed to everything — but only if she swore absolute fidelity to him. Fanny, who said her name was Princess Rahula and showed, as proof of her blue blood, the black beauty mark she had on her forehead, accepted the killer imposed on her as a guard dog, so that at night, with his pistol in his belt, he would sleep under her bed.

That sacrifice was worthwhile. She created a decent bordello, which had a sublime success. Her ideas were original. Instead of demanding a mansion in a well-to-do neighborhood, which would end up generating scandals among its sanctimonious neighbors, she asked for all the little houses along a passage off seedy Bulnes Street, always full of atrocious whores. The men who ventured into that territory came out with their lapels destroyed by the avid tugging of the women trying to seduce them, all ugly, drunk, and falling apart. Politicians, important businessmen, famous men, aristocrats. To each one she offered a complete apartment supplied with a salon, bar, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and a garage from which they could enter the house. That way, no busybody could see the client get out of his car, and discretion was absolute.

My aunt had her ideas about masculine sexuality: a man who hires a whore is not, deep inside, looking for sex, but tenderness. More than a woman, he wants a confessor. She scoured all of Santiago looking for twenty expert women between the ages of fifty and fifty-five. She chose, if not the most beautiful — after all, so many years of prostitution, alcohol, abortions, and pimps took their toll — then at least the most dignified. She gave them severe looking outfits, hairdos like ladies, and discreet makeup. She taught them how to speak delicately and to erase lasciviousness from their faces, to exchange it for the expression of tender mothers.

“Sexually speaking, you know everything but about maternal caresses, you know nothing. Learn to touch the clients as if they were your own sons. At the beginning, during initial contact, if you arouse their antipathies (they perhaps hold deep anger against the author of their days because of a bad birth or a lack of milk and care or who knows what, some wish left unfulfilled), it doesn’t matter. Go to them so they can reject you. Let them love those enemy hands, and let them begin to massage. The first thing you must respect are defenses. And as if you were all Virgin Marys, caress them inch by inch, right down to the heart, with extreme delicacy and total attention, dissolving the tiniest contractions, one muscle after the other, giving firm support to each area, so that the client never gets the impression that any part is overlooked, no matter how small. To massage in that style, you should breathe regularly, with absolute calm; you must revere; be an empty receptacle, with nothing to request, nothing to impose, a simple refuge, not an invader, an infinite and eternal company, discreet, ready to become invisible at the slightest movement of rejection. If you give in with love, it is God who will touch the other through you. If you don’t give your hands to God, they can’t really touch. If the mother is not divine, she is not a mother.”

Prepared in that way, those women knew how to use sweet voices; to bathe the politicians, singing them lullabies; to powder them with talcum; to take them in their arms; to squeeze an ear between their breasts and hold them there for hours, submerged in the rhythm of the heart; at the end, when they were stretched out on their backs in bed, with no defense, to caress their sex in such a vigorous fashion, from scrotum to glans, that they would emerge from their mental stupor transformed into dragons. They possessed those old ladies, who on all fours, made obscene squeals, spoke phrases of a diabolical lasciviousness, and led the men to an indecent pleasure bordering on madness. Then they would accept the lash that the temptress would pull out from under the pillow when she sensed they were reaching an orgasm. They would spurt the final discharge under a rain of blows.

Afterwards, they would pay considerable amounts of cash. Fanny’s success was so great that the clients had to sign up two months ahead of time to get a date. When it was a matter of a party involving several men, Fanny would offer the rear apartment, which was three times larger than the others, decorated in French style. Gorged with champagne, cocaine, and women, they would demand the eccentricity of the house, as a challenge, in order to prove who was more macho. My aunt brought three nandus, Argentine ostriches, to the patio. The gentlemen, standing on top of a hassock, laughing their heads off and making obscene faces, would possess the birds.

Princess Rahula had to live in a setting worthy of her rank. She had her rooms decorated in maharaja style, with shiny curtains, columns being born from thick lotus flowers, immense cushions, Buddhas, Ganeshas, Shivas, offerings of rice pudding, candles instead of electric lights, and incense that stank of patchouli. She would wear a turban; a long, sleeveless vest; baggy trousers; and slippers whose toes pointed up — all of it in velvet, cloth-of-gold, and transparent silk. Besides, the Minister, as payment for her absolute fidelity, covered her with jewels. Fanny was taking discreet steps in order to be introduced to the president of the republic, when suddenly her periods stopped. To give birth at seventeen did not trouble her a great deal. Her protector tripled her salary, because her breasts that promised milk and her protruding belly made her even more attractive.

Fanny discovered she could meditate crossing her legs, just as her Buddhas did it. In that position, one day at dawn, resting after having scrupulously noted the earnings and expenditures of the day, she heard a telepathic message from the fetus: “Remember me? The last time we saw each other was in Russia, and you were a little girl. I introduced myself as a cobra trainer. I told you that in a previous life, where I had been your father, a king, you were named—”

“Rahula! That’s true. Now I realize I never forgot you.”

“We share a long history. In even more remote lives, you have been my father, my mother, my brother, my sister, my wife, my lover, my teacher. We have passed through almost all the forms of the realization of love. Now we have nothing more to do in this world. In the next transformation, we shall be one entity. Our souls, finally amalgamated, will help in the gestation of a new Universe, one more conscious than this one. The only thing I haven’t been for you is a stillborn child, present in your spirit all the days you have left of life. It will be the greater love, the love of the frustrated mother whose breasts drip milk without a precious mouth to suck them; with hands like the eye sockets of the blind, holding an absent body; a trunk grown old without seeing the branches grow; a heart weeping for a child with no name, no body, no age, no presence; pure promise; a never-sprouted seed; a mute road where known and beloved footsteps will never echo. That great love will unite us definitively. Later, the happiness of not having the limitations of flesh and the ecstasy of transparency. For having been faithful for so many centuries, we deserve to be the architects of new worlds.”

From that day forward, at every dawn, the fetus repeated the same words, and she listened to them each time with the same emotion, as if she’d never heard them before. She stopped smoking opium to see if the message was an auditory hallucination produced by the drug. Nothing changed. The spirit spoke to her for nine months. In March of 1919, the wind carried a dry leaf through the window. It settled on her lap. She made an emergency call for an ambulance. The birth was normal, easy. A beautiful child with open emerald-colored eyes. When it was placed at her bosom, it smiled, fixed its penetrating eyes on hers, took a deep breath, crossed its legs, joined its hands in the attitude of prayer, and died.

A black dot, like spilled oil, appeared on its forehead and spread rapidly until it covered the baby’s face, head, neck, and, finally, its entire body. The flesh fossilized. Fanny left the hospital, carrying a small ebony Buddha in her arms. Despite the fact that its fate had been revealed to her, an animal grief invaded her cells, pierced her like a red-hot dagger, surrounded her soul with a corset of thorns. It amputated her ambition to be Queen of Chile.

She went back to the camouflaged bordello, placed the idol at the head of her bed, spent her free time praying before it, and gave herself to the Minister, imitating torrential orgasms in order to convince him to build a secret tomb on San Cristóbal Hill. And one morning, in November of the same year, she walked down the marble steps of the newly finished chapel, got into the bronze coffin with her petrified child in her arms, closed the lid, and abandoned this plane of existence forever. Two days later, Don Manuel Garrázabal was murdered by unknown assailants, perhaps killers in the pay of the man who would be his successor. It is possible that accidents, sicknesses, and attacks are hidden forms of suicide. Since the politician had used prisoners that he himself ordered killed in jail, no one ever found out about the existence of the subterranean mausoleum. For her mother and siblings, Fanny disappeared without leaving a trace. The prostitutes claimed she’d run off to India to enter a monastery located on an island that had the same shape as the Sanskrit syllable “aum” or that she’d been carried off by a rajah who held her prisoner in the harem of his palace in Mysore, only feeding her French garlic sausages and pink champagne.

For Benjamín too those were evil times. He was eighteen and still conforming to his childhood desires. He had not a single hair on his body — not on his head, face, armpits, or even his pubis: he was as smooth as a tortoiseshell doll. Always disgusted by his animal parts, he would also have wanted to have no teeth or nails and to be translucent like a jellyfish. But he did not get what he wanted. His nails grew hard and long with wide half-moon marks; his teeth were amazingly white, well-rooted in pink gums. Even though he never wanted to brush them, they seemed intent on resisting a century of bacterial attacks. His skin was as smooth as a girl’s and shone with a flesh color that was so natural it looked artificial. To cover up those talonish nails, he covered them with polish the same color as the skin on his fingers.

His way of speaking was so complex and his gestures so exquisite that no boy wanted to become his friend. Aside from his mother, whom he dined with every night and slept with in the same bed (taking advantage of the fact that the lady slept like a log, he sucked her breasts passionately), he knew no one. He worked like a sleepwalker in the Rubén Darío bookshop, desiring only one thing: to be a poet. How was that vocation born in him? Benjamín explained it enthusiastically to the first person who did him the honor of accepting him as a comrade, Birdie Baquedano (a boy typographer with a wire-shaped body and the black eyes of a Spanish gypsy, which he inherited from his father, an immigrant who never wanted to work a single day and who, abusing his charm as a singer, his heron-like silhouette, and a member more robust than those of ordinary mortals, lived off Birdie’s mother, a long-suffering, hard-working laundress).

“Benjamín, explain to me just what it was that made you decide to write poems.”

“Oh, it was the void, a dominion where light supplants the forms. It appeared in my heart, which in turn began to imitate an opening in the heavens. Life swelled and confused the lines; illusion beat regularity. I had to remake reality according to other combinations. What was known was nothing more than a preamble to the imagining of the unknown. My coarse impulses leapt beyond thought, giving voice to Art amid the deformed silence of the world. And my temple was swept away by the emboldened elements.”

“Hmm… I understand what you mean. What is your goal?”

“With just one more step, I’ll be a mirage of potential forms, discovering another dawn at the end of this night where men-boys wander around not knowing their brothers, in a false absence that progressively corrodes them.”

“Quite clear. What do you see?”

“Beyond death, whose simulacrum I feel, I half-see, knocked down by ecstasy, an eternal reality. All that remains in the empty world is the palpitation of our two souls.”

Answering that final question as if in a trance, Benjamín, who emerged from the depths of his abyss, bit his lips, because he realized he was making a declaration of love to his first friend. Birdie Baquedano, subtle thing that he was, instantly caught the insinuation. He smiled mockingly but did not reject it. He was made for solitary types. Even in the cradle he’d been rejected by everybody, even though he was a pretty, charming, and intelligent baby. He was born with only one defect, a big one: stench. He reached our planet with a mysterious glandular disorder, secreting a stink so horrible that not even his own mother wanted to put her nipples in his mouth.

The acidic stink, bitter, irritating, and sticky as well — it impregnated everything his skin touched: clothing, books, food, furniture, family members — was unbearable. After a few minutes, it would pass through the handkerchief of the person who gave him his bottle or changed his diapers, causing retching and vomiting. He grew up isolated, without friends, caresses, or toys. Even those who had to see him didn’t dare come closer than three yards.

The only job allowed him was goalkeeper in soccer matches, though he had to wear thick rubber gloves to touch the ball. He never would have found work if it weren’t for a socialist who — nauseated but still applying his humanitarian theories — taught him from a distance to use the machine that made letters from lead. He made him a typographer.

On Mondays, his only day off, he would visit bookstores, since women were out of the question. Seeing as the other customers and the staff ran away when they smelled him, he would simply pocket with impunity whichever books he wanted, and if he didn’t do that, the owner would run after him to beg him never to come back and that, by the way, he might take with him this “gift of the house” since the paper stank so strongly after his hands touched it.

The first person not to retreat from his presence was Benjamín. The bald man stared at him with his angelic eyes and smiled warmly. He invited him to look over a collection of poets translated from the French and had a long conversation with him, inviting him to lunch the next day on his free time. In reality, my uncle, in his immense desire to eliminate animal traits, only ate rice and dried fruit and lived with an anesthetized sense of smell. He did not need olfactory perceptions. As he put it, it was a good sense for dogs or cats, but for no one else.

The lunch began badly because the owner of the restaurant, between bows and smiles, covering his nose with a napkin soaked in mentholated alcohol, begged them to leave immediately, hoping they’d have the goodness never to return. Birdie Baquedano, pale, walked out to the street, hopped on a streetcar, and tried to get lost in the city. Benjamín, insane, ran after him for about two hundred yards, chasing him on foot between the rails until, exhausted, he fell on his knees, touching his forehead without eyebrows to the indifferent cobblestones. Four blocks ahead, Birdie was kicked off the tram, which continued its journey with windows wide open despite the cold.

Benjamín bought two apples, some cornstarch pudding, and a bottle of wine. He happily invited the typographer to a picnic in the garbage dump next to the Mapocho River. There, surrounded by a pestilence that for them was non-existent but which scattered passersby, they could develop their friendship. My uncle, searching for a language that would be worthy of his friend’s beauty, dedicated himself to getting him out of his depression:

“Everything you fought for and seemed a defeat, a mire of dry leaves, dense emotions, plans that smashed into walls, and, even more, nightmares, desires suffocated by enormous shame, now burst out transformed into fertile land, like a fire of such living green. It comes from below, from the clear root of sex, which feeds on the great hidden coal, and its growth — if you don’t fight it; if you learn the language of what is pure, conscious power; and if you give it blindness as a goal — will drag you toward all that you thought you desired, but which after all was the desire for Life seeking itself.”

Birdie Baquedano, without realizing it, drunk on those words and the wine, ate the two apples and the cornstarch pudding. Benjamín became lyrical:

“Open doors toward the south, the north, to the right, to the left; that’s right, open yourself as if you were a flower, from the center extending your invisible petals. Make yourself a wheel of hands that give, bless, and receive. Transform yourself into a long bridge along which pass unthinkable energies, which are impossible to define but in which you feel that distant immensity that soaks you to the bones. Let the entire Earth come to you so you push it toward the sky. Let spaces without depth come to you so you can submerge them in the earth. Make yourself a point where all roads cross.”

A small stray dog clutched Benjamín’s calf with his front paws and began to hump him. The poet refused to take any notice of such lowly stuff and, without bothering to scare him away, left him in his rapid hip work, continuing with his fiery speech:

“The angel of flesh, the angel transformed into earth, there, within the dark skull, pure from the beginning of time, accumulating virgin energy, he, with his cosmic trumpet voice, speaks to you, singing from the flower of the instant. His belly, like an oven hotter than a thousand moons, spurts out tongues of cold fire that dissolve the frontiers of our two languages. Your body swimming in its own soul, thanks to that grace, will always have something new to offer me. Open your mouth so the cataclysm may enter!”

At that moment, perhaps hypnotized by the last sentence, Birdie Baquedano kicked the dog aside and kissed my uncle Benjamín on the mouth, a kiss that lasted at least five minutes. When their lips separated, they didn’t know what to do. The poet stood there with the muse caught in his throat. They were staring into each other’s eyes as if a mountain had fallen on their heads. The first to speak was the typographer:

“Let’s not be ashamed. The greater suffering is being separated. Let’s accept the freedom of tying ourselves to those we love. What we give, we shall give it to ourselves. We are recalling the existence of the bridges because everything that seemed cut has been united for all eternity. Let’s submerge into each other’s dreams, and let’s find the road without limits.”

My uncle was left agape, in blessed admiration. Birdie too was a poet! They kissed again. Benjamín felt a desire to dance. He tried a few steps in the garbage, but he came back chased by a furious rat. Birdie smashed it with a brick. Feeling himself protected, Benjamín dreamed aloud:

“Let’s imitate the poet Augusto D’Halmar and Tolstoy, Gorky, Zola, and Maupassant by going to live in the virgin territories of southern Chile to plant roses and fruit trees, to teach literature to the peasants.

“Look, Baldy (please let me call you by that pet name), it’s my duty to remind you that when D’Halmar, supplied only with a wide-brimmed black hat and a Spanish cape, reached Concepción in his search for Arauco, he couldn’t even find anything to eat, he found nowhere to sleep, and he got lost out in the country. He was almost raped by a group of horsemen. He quickly came back to the capital and with three friends founded, just outside the city, an agrarian colony that failed because they planted out of season, their neighbors stole their water, and their oxen ran away.”

“Quite right, Birdie, but we can save ourselves from the materialist world living like the ‘Group of Ten’ in a tower facing the sea.”

“I’m sorry, Baldy, but those writers froze in the winter because the tower’s windows had no glass in them. Then it filled up with bats. Finally — remember, they wanted to live only from fishing so they wouldn’t exploit the people — some sea urchins they pulled off the rocks near the beach (none of them knew how to dive) gave them such bad hives they all ended up in the hospital, covered with rashes and swollen so much they looked Chinese.”

“Why is your name ‘Birdie’ when you put so many obstacles to taking flight? “Could it be because your last name, Baquedano, ends with a ‘no’? Change it to a ‘sí!’”

“Baquedasi? I’m Chilean, not Italian.” So let’s stop beating around the bush. What we want is to sleep together. At the printing house, they’ve lent me a room (for obvious reasons) out on the upstairs terrace, where no one ever goes. It isn’t a tower, but it’s just as isolated, and from the window you can see the ocean; it’s on the building across the street, which has a seafood restaurant in it, so it’s all painted blue. Shall we go?”

Benjamín, with a broken voice, answered in verse:

Like transparent vessels

Sailing immortal

Along the river of death.

Then he lowered his eyes, blushing, only to raise them again immediately, because they fixed on an indiscreet bulge growing in his friend’s fly. They walked along the banks of the river, holding hands. Benjamín’s mind filled with words, but he didn’t dare speak them. (I only want to breathe the air that comes from your mouth; kiss you with ten thousand lips; cover your body with my saliva, that of a revived dead man; run my tongue over your brains with the thirst of an Arab dog; place you on the pedestal of the goddess. I also want you to murder me with kisses, like someone who enters the darkness of a millennial temple seeking the luminous frog in order to cook it nailed to a cross. I want you to pierce me surrounded by a black aura so that nothing more transpires and everything becomes eternal.) This mixture of high-pitched lyricism and volcanic desires aroused a curious feeling in him where felicity galloped riding on anguish. The fight transformed into rabid hunger. When they reached the fire escape ladder, he didn’t dare climb it and suggested to his friend that they go into the seafood restaurant.

“What are you talking about? I’m broke. Besides, you’re a vegetarian.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve got my week’s pay on me. I should go to the market to do my mom’s shopping, but we have to celebrate finding each other. Let’s have a banquet.”

“And then what will your mother eat?”

“Parrot food: banana and rice for seven days. It will do her good because she’s getting very fat.”

“In that case, let’s have the banquet!”

Benjamín went in first and asked for an isolated table at the rear of the garden. Birdie Baquedano followed, crossed the main room so he’d leave just a whiff of himself, and sat down shouting out an order for two bottles of chichi, or corn whiskey, and the menu. They chose fried silverside, mussel soup, conger eel with tomato, meat and vegetable stew with algae, stuffed crabs, meat with tomato and onion, and fish stew. For dessert, two more liters of chicha and crullers in syrup. Alternating between hilarity and high seriousness, they devoured everything, satisfying simultaneously their hunger and the sadness of many years. Before leaving, Benjamín, in the style of an Oriental prince, emptied his pay envelope into the waiter’s hand.

“Keep it all. Whatever’s left is your tip.”

The old waiter, after counting the money, ran after them: they were eighty cents short on the bill. The typographer dug around in his pockets, but found only some type: the word “hope.” Benjamín luckily discovered a peso in the hem of his trousers.

“You keep the twenty cents left. They don’t mean much in monetary terms, but they do if you accept that the person giving them to you is a future celebrated poet of important historical value.”

Laughing their heads off, they reached the “fire escape ladder,” which was not a ladder but an ascending row of rusty iron bars stuck into the wall. They would have to climb four stories, clinging like lice to those precarious steps to keep from smashing into the sidewalk. Birdie, used to risking his neck climbing up and down at least once a day, suggested that my uncle go first so that he, right behind, could keep him safe, pushing him along on the buttocks. Confessing he suffered vertigo, he accepted this rather undignified help and began to climb up. That hot hand on his backside produced a disquiet that had so little to do with his spirit that, with a shake of his head, he forced his spirit to immerse itself in an interior monologue:

“(This matter of having half a soul is a serious thing. You make your way along the river of illusions with a thirst for something enormous, which is nothing more than the other piece of the lyre. And that thirst, understood as solitude, is satiety. Because both parts, no matter how far apart they are, have never stopped being, from the start of History, united. Yes, beloved, it seems we’ve been walking together forever. But it’s one thing desiring it, imagining it, and another finding it. What a cataclysm, what pleasure, what uneasiness, what doubt, and also what a marvelous blooming of enthusiasm! Your paradisaical gardens sprouting in my earth, which before you seemed a desert. Your painful caresses that fill my… my shoulders with happiness. And this shameful desire that you spit into my nine doors. It seems that in the dream I’ve lived in, you are the first reality. Sometimes I believe it, sometimes I don’t. What does it matter! Our love will be as long as God’s tongue.)”

Finally they reached the terrace. In one corner lurked a small whitewashed room, with a thin door and a window not even a cat could slip through. Before he entered, Benjamín became tense: he’d glimpsed a bed. He rubbed his chest, trying to calm the chaotic beating of his heart.

Baquedano shouted, “If we want to make a necklace, we have to pass the string through the first bead!” and with a push he forced Benjamín to enter. Since the room was dark, the typographer tried to light a candle. Benjamín blew out the match. Transforming the half-light into an accomplice, they fell, embracing, onto the bed. My uncle, on the verge of a heart attack, allowed himself to be undressed by his friend’s avid hands.

“You don’t have the smallest hair on your body! Your skin is like that of those women who don’t want to come near me.”

“Friend, let’s not think about the flesh but about the spirit. Let’s join our voices, allow our phrases to caress each other until they fill with words in flames. Let each of us be the perfect mirror of each other…”

Birdie Baquedano, deafened, interrupted him by letting all the desires he’d held in for so long loose. He flipped my uncle over and awkwardly — he had no experience — penetrated him with his sex, dilated and about to explode. That rude contact cut off the poet’s breathing, erased language, and made him gasp like a fish out of water. He had a touch of lyricism left to compare himself to a feathered galaxy and then he yielded himself to the energy of his friend, now transformed into a beast. He took him in completely, flew over a golden ocean, crossed forests of petrified trees that creaked deafeningly and produced green branches, rose toward a space studded with distant stars; he went, he went, he went, and suddenly he fell, vertiginously, through atmospheres that became thicker and thicker, sulphurous, rotten, only to incarnate once again. Animal pleasure, rejected until now, flooded his flesh like a tidal wave, giving life to what seemed sterile: he recovered his sense of smell. The abominable stench of his lover — atrocious, nauseating — assaulted him. Without realizing this change had taken place, Birdie Baquedano galloped with tremendous vigor, his saliva, the opposite of perfumed, all over my uncle’s neck. The poet held in his gagging, then his stomach ached, and later, with dizzying rapidity, came the grandest of diarrheas.

A spurt of hot, fetid water bathed the typographer’s stomach. He jumped back only to receive another, uncontainable blast right in the face. The liters of chicha, plus the soups and seafood, along with other material and fecal juices, stained the bed, the floor, the walls a coffee hue. Even the ceiling was spattered. When that storm ceased, the two lovers, covered with shit from head to toe, stared at each other in consternation.

Birdie Baquedano, assuming the tone of a man of the world, tried to say something, but Benjamín, crying out in pain, ran along the terrace in search of a non-existent latrine. A new attack had begun. He spent several hours squatting over a pail until his guts emptied along with his heart. He washed himself off as best he could in a tub of disgusting water, got dressed, climbed rapidly down the vertical stairway, and walked toward his apartment followed by a pack of stray dogs who sniffed at him, wagging their tails. He took a shower, soaping himself seven consecutive times, and never saw his friend again. Nor did he want to meet any other men. He abandoned poetry and, aside from taking care of his mother and selling books, began to wait for a blessed illness to get him out of this world. His apathy reached such a point that even the absurd ending of his first and last friendship left him indifferent.

One of the iron bars in the ladder gave way, and Birdie Baquedano fell, striking his head. Since he was unconscious, he was taken to the Red Cross. A male nurse, unaware of Birdie’s nature, seeing him on the stretcher, assumed by the smell that he was a cadaver in an advanced state of decomposition and put him in the morgue’s refrigerator. There, locked away, the typographer died, frozen to death.

Jaime too in 1919 suffered a collapse of his plans, to the point that he found himself tossed toward cloudy paths without knowing exactly why he was walking them. González the Horse had made a good boxer of him, but it wasn’t the technique he’d learned nor the strength he’d developed breaking skulls with his fists, which gave him wins by knockout in the seventy-five bouts he fought: it was rage.

All the Chileans he fought had roots, grandfathers, homeland. In their blood circulated beloved drinks and dishes cooked with nostalgia. They talked about “my” land, “my” mountain range, “my” sea. They felt they were the owners of the air they breathed and were convinced that the very ground loved the caress of their footsteps.

On the other hand, he—“Jaime the Russian,” ferocious champion from the steppes, raised by bears and a bicephalic eagle, also known as “The Bonebreaker” or “The Ring Murderer” or “The Damned Gringo”—had no one who would grant him a gram of tenderness. His father? A saint drowned in the glow of goodness. His mother? A crazy renegade with hands so full of hate that they burned rather than caressed. His brothers and sisters? Martyred emigrants from the Kingdom of Never Ever, with their souls enclosed in a diver’s suit into which no air was ever pumped, islands without bridges, relating to one another by smacks, like billiard balls.

The fury of not belonging made him deliver outsized punches, real “Here I am!” punches that broke ribs. He was eager to enter the country by breaking the bodies of its neighbors, winning recognition by destruction. He loved to challenge the audience. When their favorites fell with broken jaws or with their kidneys or liver smashed, or knocked cold and on the verge of death, he received the jeers holding his testicles with one glove while he made the gestures of a phallus penetrating them with the other. That hatred was his food. Money aside, he fought not for the pleasure of winning but to exacerbate rejection and to turn that into his homeland. To be a negative hero was a thousand times better than living anonymously and separately.

The illegal bouts, which always came after dogfights, were bloodier than those of the animals. There was no boxing; the fighters simply beat each other without stopping until one fell over. The matches were held in improvised rings in bars, slaughter yards, garages, vacant lots. The high betting made people thirsty, and barrels of wine, beer, and brandy were consumed. Jaime did not win easily. Since no one bothered to make sure the boxers were of equal weight, sometimes he was up against tanks. In those difficult cases, he would use the tricks of the trade the Horse had taught him: elbowing, low blows, head butts to the cheeks, scratches with the inside of the gloves, blows to the nape, suffocating clinches, foot stomping, sarcastic remarks that made the adversary lose control. No matter what, he always came out with a swollen eye, his ribs bruised, and his nerves a wreck. The aftereffects would last two weeks; he would sleep badly, dreaming about cats eating his penis, and wake up screaming. In June of this dark year, González the Horse came to see him and say in his nasal voice:

“Enough with these illegal bouts. We’ve been offered a nice contract for the National Championship, in a real ring. You’ll have your picture in the newspaper. If you win, they’ll pay us very well, and the good life will begin. If you accept — you’d be nuts to play hard to get and turn down the opportunity — I’d have to prepare you using my methods, because there’s no time to perfect your technique. You’ve got more than enough strength, your hooks are like mule kicks, and you’ve got winning in your heart, but you’re missing something. Maybe it’s something you’ve got too much of: rage. You put too much into it, then you lose control, waste energy, drop your guard, and have the bad habit of charging with your head exposed, risking a split eyebrow and being blinded by blood. All that is from an excess of hatred. I want you to be capable of reaching indifference. In a month, you’ll face the Baby, a colossus who weighs 265 pounds. Before turning professional, he killed three in the illegal bouts. If you learn to control yourself, you’ll win.”

“You want me to change my nature in a month? You’re batty, Horse. It can’t be done so quickly, and besides it’s impossible.”

“If you’re a man, we can give it a try.”

“You doubt my virility? I’m no fag.”

“Maybe a coward.”

“Me? Let’s see.”

“We will see. First, it will be easy. I’ll tickle you with a feather, and you’ll have to hold in your laughter. When you get past the tickles, I’ll move on to the second test, and that’s when you can begin to break down. To console you, I’ll tell you that my secret method has only four steps. Few but decisive.”

“Go get your feather. If I decide not to laugh, I won’t laugh. With will power you can achieve anything.”

Things weren’t that easy. The feather was hard, an eagle feather. Bearable in the armpits and the back but annoying on the soles of the feet and a torture in the nostrils and the interior of the ears. It took Jaime a day to dominate those feelings and make himself feel nothing. Only once did Horse catch him off guard and make him jump up — by scratching his anus. Finally, he could touch the feather to Jaime’s open eyes and he wouldn’t even blink.

Then the pricking began. He had to let himself be pricked with a needle without reacting. That took a week. His teacher showed no mercy. He sunk the tiny point in everywhere, including the genitals. Jaime put up with the pain, overcame his reflexes, and became as passive as a corpse.

Horse gave him four days of rest while he went north to find an important ingredient for the third test. He returned with a carefully sealed cigar box with tiny holes in the lid.

“What I’ve got here is a dozen tarantulas. I had to go all the way to the Andes to hunt them down. They’re big and very poisonous. Luckily they walk more slowly than turtles. Look.”

He opened the box. There were the hairy animals with their long legs and the orange stripe on their bulging bellies. Horse took a twig and flipped one over.

“Take a good look, my Russian friend. Here underneath the thorax they have two black teeth. Those they will use to bite and kill you. They aren’t aggressive, but they have a very bad character. The slightest unexpected movement makes them snuffle, trying to inject their venom. And just so you see I’m not lying…”

With some tweezers he picked up a tarantula and tossed it on a mangy dog that had wandered into the slum to sniff around the garbage. The dog jumped three times, howled, tossed the spider off, but after a few minutes began to wheeze, fell to the ground shaking, and died. Jaime swallowed hard.

“Go to bed early because tomorrow we’ll get up at dawn.”

Before sunup, they left with the cigar box and a cask for San Cristóbal Hill. Horse poured the tarantulas into the cask and turned it over next to Jaime, who was lying on the ground trying to turn himself into stone. They waited a couple of hours until the sun warmed the ground. The spiders lost their torpor and tried to get out of the cask. To do that, they had to walk along Jaime’s legs, stomach, sex, chest, and face. He was naked. His body temperature seemed agreeable to them, so they stayed on top of him for half an hour, which to my father seemed like an eternity. But it wasn’t disagreeable because, distanced from his body, he fell into a beatitude that united him to the entire Universe. He realized that beneath the terror of existence, that life threatened by hunger, catastrophes, illness, human beasts, there extended an infinite peace. A sentence came to his mind and for the time he had the tarantulas on top of him he repeated it again and again: “I without the world, no; the world without me, better.” Finally they left. González the Horse, pale, handed him a heavily sugared cup of coffee he poured from a thermos.

“You are an extraordinary boy. You’ll be the champ because you’re not afraid to die. Now all you have to do is learn to become invisible. You’ll move on to the final test, the hardest.”

When Horse explained what he wanted him to do, Jaime became furious and called him a mad man. Then that state of cosmic peace he’d acquired with the tarantulas invaded him, and he accepted with indifference.

At six o’clock in the afternoon, when the zoo was closing, they visited, with four bottles of red wine in hand, Don Gumercindo, the old watchman, a friend and former admirer of Horse. He received them with open arms. The business of spending nights alone amid roars, crowing, and erotic whistles, had made him thirsty, not only for wine but also for human company. The boxer had him swallow glass after glass until most of the four bottles was in his stomach. He collapsed onto his military cot, snoring so loudly that the three-year-old calendar on the wall went flying.

Horse checked through some drawers and found a ring of keys. They walked to the big cage of the Bengal tigers. There were four adult tigers, one male and three female, along with half a dozen pups, each no larger than a cat. Night was falling. The tigers, emerging from their daytime torpor, suffocated in that space — which, even if it was big, was limited by bars — paced back and forth with a regularity that seemed insane.

Jaime’s task was to enter the cage, walk to the center, and remain there, seated, until dawn without being eaten. My father put the key into the lock, turned it slowly, opened the door inch by inch, slipped in, shut the door, and, oblivious to himself, an empty vehicle, walked to the indicated spot, passing among the tigers without their noticing his presence. He sat down with his legs crossed and remained mixed with the air, the darkness, the cold, with no divisions, without a single word coming to his mind, without a single feeling occupying his heart, without wanting or needing anything, beyond all possession.

The beasts did not see him. Moreover, a female came to him to sniff, scratched the ground, and peed a hot spurt on his back. When, with the first rays of sunshine, the bars produced long black tongues that cut the floor into brilliant rectangles, Jaime, walking with normal steps, not trying to hide, zigzagged among the supine tigers getting ready to sleep and left the cage. Unable to move his mouth to smile, he emptied a little bottle of rum the euphoric Horse handed him. Together, proud, they jogged six miles back to the tenement.

“Now you’re ready, my Russian friend. The man who can beat you hasn’t been born. Baby Face will leave this bout with an old face. You will be National Champion.”

The fight was widely publicized in the newspapers, and the basketball court where the ring had been constructed was full. Everyone was a fan of the Baby, and they all came intent on seeing how he would break my father’s neck. Jaime walked toward the ring accompanied by Horse amid hisses and tossed bottles that burst scattering beer or urine. After the customary introduction, the fighters took off their robes, and the audience burst into laughter. Opposite that tall mastodon, wide, heavy, full of muscles, my father looked like a weak dwarf.

One fanatic shouted out, “I bet Baby knocks him cold in under two minutes!”

No one argued the point; they all applauded. Jaime, little by little, began to disappear. When the bell sounded to call him for the first round, he was invisible. He was a body with no one, a demolition machine, nothing more. The giant had no idea where to begin. Every punch he made landed in the void. His enemy was an agile, cold shadow that ducked and stepped back without ever showing himself. When the rest period came, the Baby, sweating in the heat, his breath short, felt alone. He was fighting against a waft of air that stared at him with the eyes of a dead man.

The bell sounded. Baby again found himself transformed into the center of a comet that spun around him counterclockwise. How the hell was he going to land a punch? Upset, he dropped his guard for a second and felt an explosion in his liver followed by a hook to the jaw that made him stagger. The audience was silenced. The shadow struck again, and the left eyelid of the favorite opened like a ripe pomegranate. Before he could react, he was hit with three more smacks of the glove. The blood poured out, leaving him only one good eye. Jaime used that advantage to break Baby’s nose.

The round ended. The three members of the official champion’s team closed his cut with Vaseline, stuffed cotton into one nostril, and passed him the pail so he could spit out two broken teeth. Explaining that these contusions were a mere accident, a normal mistake, we all get distracted for a second, they predicted that in the next round he would make the poor contender into mortadella.

The bell rang. Jaime, tranquil, observing at a distance of two thousand years, advanced toward his rival with his arms hanging at his sides. Baby lurched forward, transformed into a bull at his judgment day, and began to throw a series of punches that were lost in a space that had become immense. The enemy offered no resistance, and suddenly he clenched with Baby, and boxing became dance. He wasn’t a man but a snake. Disconcerted, he stopped in the center of the ring, emptied of aggression, waiting for a response.

Jaime began a kind of dance, jumping forward and backward, cutting at times to one side then the other without throwing a punch. The audience began to protest. They no longer knew which one they were against. The Russian lost that nationality along with his face and silhouette, his person. No one could judge him; he was someone being no one. Baby, tired, perhaps hypnotized, dropped his gloves, and then the lightning bolt struck. He received an incessant beating, in the stomach, the ribs, the chin, the nose, the eyes, the temples. He looked like a house being torn down.

Jaime’s punches, implacable, accurate, echoed like shots, penetrating the innumerable holes allowed by the stupefied defense. The colossus, bent on knee, groaning, almost suffocated. The referee counted to eight. Baby came staggering back into the fight. One of Jaime’s punches seemed to break his ribs. Another bloodied his mouth. His swollen lower lip hung like a dead oyster. A jab seemed to burst his eye. The huge man, reaching desperation, terrified, stretched out an arm to ask for help from his trainers, wanting them to throw in the towel. Since it was a useless movement in terms of the fight, it surprised Jaime, and purely by chance, it caught him right in the forehead. His head shot back, scattering a halo of sweat. The impact wasn’t strong enough to knock him out, but because it was such a surprise, it produced a mental short circuit; a space the Rabbi used to introduce himself into his spirit and take control.

For many years, since the death of Alejandro the shoemaker, the Rabbi had not manifested himself. Jaime defended himself from him with his attacks of epilepsy. But now, with all his accumulated desires to exist, he turned Jaime into his mount. Jaime seemed to grow thin, his shoulder hunched, his gestures became refined, his voice became shrill, and his eyes burned. With infinite pity, he observed the bloodied Baby, who was so beaten up he was completely idiotized. He embraced him, kissed his cheeks, and said, “Brother goy, I can’t go on hitting you. Commandment 216: ‘We should love our fellow man.’ Commandment 251: ‘It is forbidden to hurt another with wounding words.’ If bad words are forbidden, then the prohibition logically extends to punches. Commandment 300: ‘It is forbidden to hit anyone without authorization.’ God, blessed be He, has not authorized boxing. Neither you nor I is a criminal to deserve flagellation. Commandment 302: ‘It is forbidden to feel hatred for our fellow man or humiliate him in public.’ Forgive me, Baby, for what my ignorant guest has done to you. Commandment 319: ‘It is forbidden to strike one’s parents.’ All human beings in one moment of history have been or will be our parents. For having damaged your body, Jaime deserves strangulation. Forgive him. From the depth of my being, I implore you, oh Lord!”

Baby, during that monologue, had enough time to recover, and seeing his enemy with his flaccid arms extended toward him, took advantage and hit him with a left hook to the abdomen that terminated the speech. An enthusiastic shouting arose from the audience: “The kitchen!” The fans were begging the champion to splatter the traitor’s stomach. He went on punching. The Rabbi did not defend himself. He even offered his face for punishment:

“If that’s the way you want it, come on, brother. Punch until you’re tired. I shall convert your hatred into caresses.”

Baby smashed his face. The Rabbi asked for more punches. Baby smashed his ribs. Jaime raised his arms as if in the shower to offer a better target. A molar went flying. The Rabbi smiled, spitting red with a saintly face. He began to look for punches, and he found them. He charged forward, threw himself into the arms of the ferocious monster to allow himself to be broken, eaten. The murderous crowd asked for more. The Rabbi, miraculously still on his feet under a demolishing rain, began to recite a psalm: Truly my soul finds rest in God; my salvation comes from Him.

González the Horse threw in the towel and immediately jumped over the ropes to pull Jaime out of Baby’s arms. Baby, desperate because he couldn’t knock him out, was squeezing his throat to strangle him. Horse dragged Jaime to his corner and emptied a pail of ice water on his head. The sudden chill made Jaime react and frightened the Rabbi away. No sooner had the spirit fled than the pain began. My father fell, writhing, to the floor with four broken ribs. He had to be carried out of the ring on a stretcher. His boxing career ended that night.

Horse got drunk so he could tell him, with great sadness, “My boy, you could have been number one, but you’re crazy. We missed the train, and there won’t be another. I’m old now. I’m going to Chañaral to the house where I was born. I’m going to plant tomatoes, because they’ll remind me of boxing gloves. Good-bye.”

It took Jaime three months to recover from the beating. When he left the hospital, he found out that Horse had given up the room in the tenement, so he’d have to find a new one. He went to the apartment of Teresa and Benjamín to see if they’d let him stay there for a while.

It was December 1919. The heat was unbearable, but all the shops were decorated with snow, sleds, and Santa Clauses dressed for a polar cold. In that ridiculous festive setting imported from the European winter so it could be transplanted in the heart of summer, the evil surprises continued. Now it was Teresa’s turn. Simply put, she went insane.

Where did she get the rifle? No one ever found out. She stepped out onto the balcony and began shooting. Luckily, her rage was attenuated by a rejection of death; she only wanted to wound people in the legs, as she expressed it screaming amid the firing, in order to keep her victims from marching in repugnant flocks. The hatred that seized her was directed at all uniforms. She would shoot and shout, “Down with equality! Long live difference!”

She maimed one policeman, two soldiers, a café waiter, a lycée student, an ice cream man, three boys wearing soccer uniforms, a government official, a nurse, and a Santa Claus who passed by selling sugared peanuts. When Jaime arrived, the shooting had been going on for half an hour, and the victims were moaning where they fell in the street, trying to staunch the blood pouring out of thighs and calves. The Red Cross was slow in coming. Benjamín and Lola, on their knees amid the wounded, implored their mother to cease firing.

When the neighbors formed a chain to keep passersby from walking into danger, Teresa, with extraordinary marksmanship, began to kill pigeons, howling that those birds from hell were also in uniform. Then she shot at shadows because they were all the same color. When she decided that human bodies, because they were all the same — head, trunk, and extremities — were uniforms, chaos ensued. Benjamín and Lola fled, dodging bullets, and hid under a cart. Finally the police arrived along with an ambulance and a fire truck. They recommended waiting until she ran out of ammunition.

When they heard some clicks from her weapon, the ambulance personnel ran to pick up the wounded, and the firemen stretched out a ladder to block the window and keep the mad woman from diving down to the street. Had she really run out of bullets or was she crouched down with the reloaded rifle, waiting for someone to approach so she could open her vengeful fire again?

Jaime, without asking himself that question and forgetting his own pain, ran up the firemen’s ladder, slipped over the steps, and, making a huge leap, landed right in the dining room. On the table, with only her head protruding from the soapy, dark water, Teresa was lying naked in a metal tub. The rifle, empty now, was taking a bath with her. Her eyes were wide open, round, flashing, and the skin on her face was stretched, as if it were too small to hold in so much bitterness. Without recognizing her son, she spoke through him to address someone who was standing behind her back:

“Don’t ask yourself who you are, because you are no one. You’ve never existed. Like me. We are impostors in this world, which is not authentic, where there is nothing true and what is real is a mirage. Uniforms all over the place, copies of copies of copies, each suit, each body, each soul is a disguise. The surface is everywhere and the center nowhere. A piece of rock, a piece of flesh, a flood, a fire, a massacre, the void’s same old hypocritical game. We’ve been dead since the beginning of time. No one has ever been born. Strangle me, get me out of this lie!”

Teresa’s disillusionment was so great that Jaime stretched out his hands, wishing to obey her. She got on her knees, revealing her long, wide bosoms, large bananas that reached her navel.

“I’ve lost my strength. You, a good executioner, change the world. Make it finally be born.”

Jaime, retaining the compassion that was leading him to matricide, ran to open the door. The police came in scrambling like clowns from one place to another, shouting orders, pointing their carbines, shaking clubs, trembling as if the poor woman were a rabid gorilla. Behind them, whiter than a paraffin candle, came Benjamín and Lola. Teresa did not recognize them either. She sank completely into the water, trying to drown herself. The cops could find no other way to save her except tipping the tub over. The water splashed over the floor, giving off a pestilential stink. Aside from the grease and the soap, it contained leftover food, books dissolving into jelly, pieces of photographs, excrement, and little crystal balls.

They tied her hands, wrapped her in a blanket, and carried her away. As she passed by Jaime, she had a lucid instant: “My son, go see Recabarren. He was the only one who didn’t lie to us.”

Then she howled like an animal and began to fight against the uniformed ambulance people, foaming at the mouth. Her screeching could be heard until, finally, the ambulance that carried her to the insane asylum became a white dot far down Independence Avenue. Lola left, following the police and firemen without saying a word. Benjamín, holding back his sobs and his nausea, put on one of his mother’s aprons and began to wash the floor. He too said nothing. Jaime felt like a stranger. He knew his brother would see to it Teresa was moved to a decent clinic. After all, the old girl belonged to him. She was almost his wife. Offering him help would only arouse his jealousy. It seemed far better to lock oneself in a cheap hotel until this damned year ended.

He spent seven days in Room 13, without turning on the light, without talking to himself, without reading newspapers, stretched out like a corpse. When the sirens announced the New Year, he paid his bill with the last money he had and walked out to hug people in the street. The first person to fall into his arms was a muscular dark-skinned woman, beautiful and virile. Their embrace grew closer and closer, each one advancing with no modesty toward the intimacy of the other, charging like two warships, giving each other kisses like cannonades, and there, standing up, they fornicated for hours.

After ejaculating four times, Jaime asked what her name was. It turned out to be Isolda, the Lightning Bolt from Limache, a knife thrower. My father showed her the empty lining of his pockets and proposed that she take him on as her assistant. From her knapsack, the girl removed seven wide knives, placed Jaime next to a wooden entryway door, stepped back a few paces, and with glacial severity challenged him: “Will you take the dare?”

Jaime felt his knees grow weak, but his hunger advised him to risk his skin, despite the alcohol on the woman’s breath.

“I won’t even blink!”

She threw the knives at him. The first almost caught his ear. The second threateningly missed his ribs. The third caressed his calf. That took care of the left side. Three more tosses balanced the right.

“Spread your legs a bit. Still going to take the dare?”

Jaime separated his legs and said nothing, not out of bravery but because he’d lost his voice. The seventh knife struck so close to his perineum that if it weren’t that his scrotum had contracted like a cotton vest washed in hot water, she would have castrated him. The year 1920 offered him his first opportunity: he would be the target of dark-skinned Isolda in Toni Carrot’s circus.

The tent, formerly white but now gray because of being handled so often, spotted with patches and stains like purulent wounds, was small. For seating, the spectator was offered a gallery of splintered planks, and the performance space, marked by gasoline cans painted the red, white, and blue of the Chilean flag, since it lacked good mats, was covered by a carpet of potato sacks. In one truck traveled the baggage and the trained burro and in the other, the entire company, composed exclusively of family members. Toni Carrot, whose real name was Don Hernán Cañas, dressed completely in orange. He said he was a descendant of José Joaquín Cañas Aldunate, the priest of Carahue, who in the high spirits of the days of Independence committed the indiscretion of founding a discreet family. He was the artist’s grandfather.

His wife, Emilia Cañas, a.k.a. Toni Lettuce, was completely dressed in green. For her part, she claimed to be the granddaughter of Blas Cañas Calvo, the priest who organized the Congregation of the House of Mary, who, on the day the convent was inaugurated, imbibed too much punch and sinned with a nun. As soon as her belly began to protrude, she was expelled and had to give birth on the watermelon truck giving her a lift to the Talcahuano whorehouses. She managed the business affairs of the group, distributing the pesos and the food with a severity worthy of King Solomon.

The two trapeze artists, jugglers, tightrope walkers, trainers of the donkey who knew how to bray the national anthem, were the parents of Isolda and her three brothers. The three remaining women were the mobile wives of those same brothers. Each night, they drew lots to decide who would sleep with whom. The children, an indeterminate number, called all the women mom and all the men dad.

The most tedious aspect of the performances was the continuous change of costumes. Toni Carrot and Toni Lettuce retained their identity, but the others, dressed as musicians, began playing a polka next to the ticket stand improvised on the bed of the passenger truck to summon the audience. Then they would run to put on the jackets of an usher, sweeper, assembler of trapezes, seller of balloons, chocolates, or lollipops. Then the changes would multiply, because it was the turn of the contortionists and acrobats, those who mounted a bicycle, eight at a time, those who danced a rumba on the tightrope, those who tossed the burro up in the air to catch him on the soles of their feet and make him spin around along with two huge wooden balls.

For Jaime, who wasn’t born in a circus tent, who hadn’t grown up on a truck, and who, for those very reasons, found it difficult to learn all these tricks, they found an easy but spectacular act. Aside from having to risk his life allowing his lover to outline him in knives, he was hung by his hair. Since he hadn’t had a haircut since his last match, he had a black mane of hair that was thick and straight. The acrobats coated it with pitch, inserted a wire as an axis, and transformed it into a ponytail that ended in an arc of steel. All he had to do when they hoisted him ten feet from the floor was to show off his muscles, eat the empanada that was his dinner, and then read the sheet of newsprint in which the empanada had been wrapped.

This new life, within its magic, was a matter of routine. Monday: break down the tent. Tuesday: travel to another town. Wednesday: set up the tent. Thursday: march through the town in a publicity parade. Friday and Saturday: endure two performances. Sunday: add a “children’s matinee,” and then at night, get drunk, and make love under the grandstand. Sometimes the circus drew a crowd; most of the time, it was almost empty. Sometimes they performed for three or four people. No one grew sad. They didn’t want to get rich but rather to earn a living. In the spirit of those artists, there was no future. They had the mentality of birds. They got up at dawn, penniless, and worked all day to fill their bellies. They were all possessed of a strange happiness that soon spread to Jaime.

To travel that way, free, with the family, enjoying the pure air of the open road, was a gift. Without haste, with the calm of migratory birds, they traveled the nation, village by village, always heading south. They knew how to take a simple chicken, season it with herbs they found in the forests, and transform it into a princely banquet. They filled the monotony of travel with songs and jokes. Isolda was a lover with such a wide range of orgasms, from a girlish squeal to a mammoth’s roar, that Jaime never felt the weeks go by. Toni Carrot, always arm-in-arm with Toni Lettuce — between them their ages added up to almost 190 years — came over to say to him:

“Little friend, you have made our only granddaughter so happy that we want to give you a gift; we’re going to tell you a joke we’ve invented for you and you alone. Keep it like a jewel and don’t tell it to anyone so that when your first granddaughter has a lover who makes her happy, you can give it to him intact. Listen carefully, because we won’t repeat it:

A man sees a frog. The frog says to him, “Kiss me, please.”

The man thinks, “A frog that speaks must be an enchanted princess. I’ll kiss her, she’ll turn back into what she was, she will marry me, and I’ll be a millionaire.” The man kisses the frog, feels an explosion, and finds he’s been turned into a frog.

The first frog says, “How wonderful. You were enchanted for ever so long, and, finally, I was able to save you!”

Jaime never knew what effect the story had on him but instead of laughing, he began to cry.

The two aged clowns applauded in satisfaction: “We were not wrong. You’re a sensitive man. Good jokes, like happiness, should provoke tears.”

When they reached Puerto Montt, they were caught by winter, and the rains became torrential. There they remained for three weeks, hoping the deluge would cease. Water fell, fell, and fell some more. It was impossible to raise the tent on mud. They killed time playing cards secluded in the truck. The women went out to look for work so they would have something to eat. Jaime offered to accompany them, but the men simply put his cards in his hand and placed before him a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a huge glass of wine, insinuating that in the family, by tradition, the men never worked among the rubes, by which they meant all human beings who did not belong to the circus world.

“We are pure and they false, like slips of paper stacked to look like money.”

The grandmother was the only woman who stayed behind, taking advantage of that forced rest to try to train a toad. According to what Jaime was told, she’d begun with this one about ten years earlier, managing to make it say ”mama,” but that wasn’t enough for a public show.

“Do toads live that long?”

“Like turtles, they live more than a century. Maybe one day Toni Lettuce will get this one to take a mouthful of gasoline and spit it into a candle to produce huge flames.”

Toni Carrot was sure his wife would train the toad: “If she trained me, and I lived as a thief, stealing on the trolley, she can do it. She taught me my first number; dressed as a clown, I would make my way through the passengers; I would steal five wallets, toss them into the air, juggle them, and return them intact to their owners. Then I’d pass the hat around. By saving up those charitable offerings, we bought the canvas to make our circus.”

The women always returned with full hands. No sooner did the rain stop than they put on their shows and continued traveling south. When they reached Punta Arenas, they would turn around and travel north, toward Arica. They thought to live their entire life that way, for various generations, transformed into a magic pendulum that would rise and fall along the narrow, long body of the nation like an incessant caress.

They pulled Jaime up by the hair so much that he began to have intellectual ambitions. He really began to read the newspaper way up there. The circus folk made fun of him:

“We, luckily, are out of the rube world, which is pure foolishness and lies. Nothing they tell you is true. Reality is not a pile of letters. The only defect you have, Jaime, is that you learned to read. Do you know why the rubes write so much? They transform the gestures they don’t know how to make into words.”

All the headlines on the first page celebrated the heights the economy had reached. Jaime became upset: their continuous travel throughout the country allowed him to see the degrading misery in which the peasants and workers lived. How could they celebrate industrial success amid all that hunger? To understand that an even sharper mind would be necessary, one accustomed to having a bird’s eye view of events. Not knowing how to analyze what he was reading gave him a sensation much like being with one eye swollen shut against a champion who attacked from the blind side. He made a big decision. One stormy night, when the women did not return to sleep (“Don’t worry,” said his comrades. “They’ve probably finished their work late and, to avoid getting soaked, they’re sleeping in some cheap hotel, as they have on similar occasions.”), he hid in the cargo truck where they had the burro sleep in order to avoid being struck by lightning. After making sure the animal was asleep (he didn’t want even an irrational witness), he summoned the Rabbi.

The Rabbi, surprised by such an unexpected signal of interest from someone who’d gone as far as epilepsy to force him to wander, dying of boredom, through the gray deserts of the Interworld, obeyed enthusiastically, like a lost dog who had found his master.

“You shitass ghost! Stop bouncing around like a drunken crow and sit still in front of me, because I have a proposition to make you.”

“Well, Chaim.”

“My name’s not Chaim, not that or any other weird name! Call me Jaime, or I’ll expel you from this world!”

“Well, Jaime.”

“That’s better! I don’t know if you really exist or if you’re a family hallucination. My father died insane, and my mother is following in his footsteps. I wouldn’t be surprised if I were demented too. Be that as it may, you appear when I call you and you say coherent things I hadn’t even thought. You may be useful to me. I suppose you want to exist, which is why you’re here. But you depend on my will. Now listen: I have to understand what I’m reading in the papers. Chile interests me. The Jews and their tradition have nothing to do with me. I want you to wear different clothing; I can’t stand you tricked out as a rabbi. Invent a sober suit for yourself, a normal one, not that wild crap in central-European 1800s style. Appear without a beard and with short hair. Study this reality in depth, and never speak to me again about Adonai, the Torah, Kabbalah, or the Talmud. What do you say?”

“Even though you abuse your power, Jaime, I realize that times change and that the truths of one era and one place don’t work in other times and other places. My physical aspect, though for an eternity I haven’t wanted to recognize it, is pure illusion. I’m not made of matter but of memories. I’ll let them go straightaway. Look.”

And the Rabbi, heroically overcoming his nostalgia, transformed into a clean-shaven, well-combed man dressed in an elegant gray suit, a white poplin shirt, a tie with discreet stripes, and an umbrella. Smiling, he said, “At your service, sir. What do you think?”

“I think the umbrella is superfluous and the smile useless. I’ll call you only to discuss the news.”

“Something, however small it may be, is much, much more than nothing, sir.”

“Stop calling me sir, and speak to me in familiar terms. Now get lost.”

The obedient spirit dissolved. From then on, Jaime would see him whenever he isolated himself to defecate. A solemn moment that justified the newspaper he carried folded up in one hand and authorized the solitude necessary to engage in dialogues that, to the others, seemed a madman’s monologues.

“Jaime, I’ve finished studying the matter. This period of prosperity the journalists talk about so much is a whited sepulcher. The truth, absent from the editorial pages, can be found in the business section. The country you call yours, I hope you’re not making a mistake, is being sold, mine by mine, field by field, to the Yankees. Of course, the dollars seem a blessing for those who live by speculating, but they are papers that will vanish. The wealth of the land is being taken away by foreigners. Your Chileans are not getting rich but getting into debt. A dangerous situation. The people’s hunger may produce a revolution, but with the presidential elections they’re going to try to cover it all up.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Jaime, you are already a circus man. You know that the big-time rubes use lies as a universal remedy. Remember the comic numbers: a clown can’t make people laugh by himself. He needs a partner to be his straight man and make comments. Toni is exuberant, charming, full of colors and wise cracks; his partner, Augusto, is disagreeable, severe, gray, and says little. They seem enemies, but between the two of them they create the laughter that makes the circus work.

“At the moment there are two candidates for president: Arturo Alessandri, the Toni, who is emotional, outspoken, popular, and optimistic; and Luis Barros Borgoño, the Augusto, who is academic, cold, aristocratic, authoritarian. The first one talks about a prosperous future, the second about a threatening present. One asks for freedom, the other oppression. Behind them, both have the same supporters. They both want the same thing: to fool the poor, making them believe they participate in the Destiny of the nation. The more disagreeable Borgoño gets, the more Alessandri will shine among the people, who, uniting around an illusion, may elect him president.

“But the capitalist regime, aside from some superficial reforms, will go on exactly as it is. It will go right on selling the country, and hunger will only be calmed with bullets. There is a third candidate that few see, who has no possibility of being elected because he preaches outside the circus, that is, from jail. He’s proposing an impossible truth, this Luis Emilio Recabarren. Instead of asking for small conquests, like a monkey in the zoo who demands to be well treated by his keepers — a few extra nuts — but doesn’t consider destroying the cage, Recabarren wants everything; he wants to abolish borders, to turn the planet into one single nation, declare war on war, expropriate land to distribute it among the peasants, end private property, demolish the capitalist system, give sovereignty to the people, augment public education.

“In sum, he wants to repeat the Russian Revolution. This man will suffer a great deal. There are no large fortunes to support him; he works against power, and the immature people prefer to listen to the ‘luminous’ words of Alessandri, contenting themselves with promises. Even though he’s an almost saintly warrior, he does have a defect: like Don Quixote trying to follow in the footsteps of Amadís of Gaul, Recabarren tries to imitate Lenin. The thing is, the Chileans, high and low, because they’ve been dominated for so many centuries by foreign conquistadors, have lost their identity. It’s always the neighbors who tell them what they should want. No level in this society has its own ambitions. Everything is done by imitation. The capitalists copy Europe and the United States, the workers imitate the Bolsheviks. Too many mirages, Jaime. Those implanted desires will lead them to failure and violence. Recabarren, because he is incapable of inventing his own path, will some day end up the victim of his ideal.”

These conversations with the Rabbi went on for most of the winter. But wherever they went they heard nothing but talk about Alessandri. So great was the fervor for this candidate, that on the days when the rain allowed them to perform, the audience, before the show began, would stand up and sing, as if it were the national anthem:

We’ll have victory,

Little Darling,

The radicals,

Little Darling,

So that all Chileans,

Little Darling,

Will be equals.

Jaime, hanging by his hair, after having exposed himself to the tossed knives of the Lightning Bolt of Limache, felt that the skin on his cranium, as it stretched, unfolded its circumvolutions to turn his brain into a flying carpet. Teresa’s insane words—“Change the world. Make it finally be born.”—pursued him, buzzing like wasps. His mother was asking him to become a prophet, him, the most miserable and uprooted of beings, the one who believed in nothing, who wandered about, begging content in a world without meaning.

It all made him want to go on hanging there, spinning forever, never coming down until he dried out. Or the opposite, to submerge himself in the impossible struggle of the workers, to be a scapegoat, to become a martyr, to donate his grain of sand so the Earth could become a paradisaic garden, where good people, without anguish or war, would run about like bland ants, trying to resuscitate God so that with His punishments he would remove them from boredom and restore the taste for life to them. Bah! It was better to slip the cylinder into your woman’s hairy tunnel in order to spit your despair transformed into semen into her carnivorous flowers.

In Osorno, it rained for nine days, and frozen rocks poured down. The patter didn’t let them sleep or play poker. They tried to set up the tent, but the wind shook it so hard that the patches flew off like a flock of dirty pigeons. The men, happy deep down about the incident because it gave them something to do, spent their time secluded in the truck, sewing up tears while the five women worked in the city. That night they did not return, and they stayed away the next night too. On the third day of their absence, Isolda’s father asked his sons to go with him and find all the women. Jaime insisted on going with them. They shrugged their shoulders: “If you want to come, come along. You’re one of us. You’ll understand.”

Toni Lettuce gave them a tiny piggy bank where they’d put away some scanty savings. Protecting their heads with ponchos, they moved through the storm, soaked to the skin. They went directly to the police station. Of course, there they all were, waiting for their men to pay their fine. They’d been arrested for the illegal exercise of prostitution. The business was swift. Clowns and acrobats were accomplices. The piggy bank always contained a few banknotes for such cases. In the towns, everyone knew that when the circus couldn’t put on shows, the circus women would put on another kind of performance. From time to time, to satisfy the wife of some mayor, they were fined. It never went further than that. Sleeping with a circus artist was a highly esteemed pleasure.

Jaime returned without speaking to anyone, staring at the ground. When they reached the truck, the women removed from their sex the money they’d hidden. The men applauded. They ran to buy food, and the party began. Jaime, risking being sliced open, gave Isolda a slap when she tried to kiss him. Toni Carrot grabbed him by the arm, dragged him into a corner, and whispered into his ear:

“If you put a cube of sugar in your tea, it dissolves. If you put in a cube of marble, nothing happens. What matters is the feeling. The other is a mere rubbing of flesh. Fornicating with a rube is just another job, the same as hanging from a trapeze or balancing on a tightrope. No need to be jealous. If she’s unfaithful with someone from the profession, another circus man, that’s different. You can kill her or scar her face. That’s customary, take it or leave it. We have no other way to survive. That’s how we’ve lived until now, that’s how we’ll go on living.”

Jaime’s head began to ache. He liked to travel this way, but he couldn’t stand his lover being a whore. Hanging by his hair became martyrdom. His temples palpitated as if they were going to explode. Amid the mists of a high fever, he saw forty-foot-high waves coming and began to scream to frighten them away. Toni Lettuce made him swallow a liter of hot wine with lemon and cinnamon. He began to pour out sweat and fell asleep.

In those moments of deep depression, I entered his organism. When he awoke, with his pulse normal again, he felt his testicles. They seemed different, more compact and noble. He wasn’t alone. He was the root of a tree that would spread its branches throughout eternal time. I was asking him to be born, to rise toward the woman I needed to be my mother. That made him consider his relationship with the Lightning Bolt of Limache.

What did he feel for her? Something like what dogs feel for bitches. At the animal level of desire, he or any other would be the same. A warm body, a welcoming hole clinging to his savage thrusts, the explosions of orgasm and the cow-like company, the daily nonsense, sentimental marmalade, moistening chatter of cracks. Aside from throwing knives and prostituting herself, Isolda had nothing extraordinary to her. If he stayed with her, he would never progress. His head ached again. One of Isolda’s brothers practically carried him on his shoulders to the outskirts of town where he deposited Jaime at a forest that got lost in the distance and covered the hills.

“Follow this path for one mile. When you find a rock painted black, make three long whistles. A Mapuche Indian named Tralaf will come for you. He will cure you. A lady in the audience told me.”

Shaken by chills, Jaime marched through the trees. A frozen wind made the rain fall from the leaves. As he moved forward, he broke through the frost that covered the ground. He reached a clearing of red earth. There, in the center of that sterile space, surrounded by exuberant vegetation, there was a huge black stone. It looked like an eagle rolled up in itself, in the style of an armadillo that rolls itself into a ball whenever it feels threatened. To Jaime it seemed that it was sinking its beak into its chest to drink the blood from its own heart.

Dense clouds began to cover the sky. The light changed, and the eagle slowly vanished so that, thanks to the absence of contrast created by lights and shadows, it transformed into a smiling human cranium. My father, nervous, felt his forehead to see if he still had the fever. It was frozen. He shook his head and whistled three times. It began to rain and lightning began to flash. The thunder made the ground shake. The sun came out again. Jaime, soaked to the skin, was going to whistle again, but some footsteps interrupted him. They were so soft and agile that Jaime climbed up on the rock, fearing the arrival of a puma. A Mapuche, old but vigorous, appeared carrying a full sack.

He said, mockingly, “Hey there, huinca, what are you doing there on top of Amoihuen? It can’t be you’re afraid of a poor old man like me, can it? Come down, this place is protected. No puma, wildcat, big fox, or peccary, not even llamas or mice dare to pass through here. Greet with me my huecufe. Mari, Mari… If you’ve come to see me, it’s because you’re suffering. Say nothing: I see with my hands.”

He knelt before Jaime, and beginning at his feet and working his way up, he palpated his body. When he reached Jaime’s head, he emitted a cough of comprehension.

“Here the apparent evil reveals itself. But it’s good. With children, their jaw hurts if they get new teeth. Your cranium hurts because your spirit is growing. Many centuries ago, you lost the landscape, and without roots there is no health. You are trying to open the cocoon to start flying. Your hair has been pulled so much that below it you have a lot of accumulated blood. If you want the pain to go away, you must allow your hair to be cut.”

“I can’t do that. They hang me by my hair in the circus. It’s my job.”

“Change jobs. It is not good for any man to live hung by other men. The only one who has the right to pull us up is Amoihuen, the mask of the Supreme Being.”

Something took place in Jaime’s spirit. He abruptly abandoned the circus, just like that, without thinking it over, like something constructed over a long time in the darkness that suddenly emerges, complete, toward the light.

“I agree, Tralaf. Cut off my hair.”

The Indian rubbed his head with a tree bark that produced foam, and, using a sharpened stone, he shaved him. After that, he pinched the skin of his scalp and gave it two crossed cuts. Jaime shrieked in pain.

“You’ve got to take it, huinca. There’s a lot of daylight left, and the road you’re to follow is long, endless. I have to make eight more crosses.”

And around his cranium, like a crown, he made other cuts. The blood ran down his face, his ears, his nape. My father began to tremble.

“Be brave, huinca. Our eagle came from the sun. You are not alone. Within you is the soul of an ancestor. He sustains you. Stop whining like the horse who didn’t want to walk on a suspension bridge. Give yourself over to the control of the rider. Advance step by step, attentively, awake. If you become distracted, the abyss will devour you and you’ll fall into the river of death. There you will dissolve because you do not carry the flower of awareness. The one who is asleep knows nothing about you. Only awake can you open the door so the Supreme Being can enter.”

Tralaf took a bottle of water out of his jacket. It contained nine leeches, and he placed them over the wounds. They immediately began to suck blood. The Mapuche started a fire with branches of a reddish coffee color that gave off a smell like bread and began to sing following the rhythm of a drum. Time passed, the leeches, which were long and thin, now gorged, looked fat, enormous. They began to uncouple and fall into a clay platter the shaman placed before my father’s knees while making him lower his head. He squeezed the leeches so they would vomit the blood they’d sucked. Then he washed them and put them back in the bottle of water. He dug around in his bag and found some dry twigs covered with very smooth bark, as smooth as human skin. And with a small mallet, he pounded them in a mortar to mix them with the coagulated plasma. He kneaded it into gelatinous, blackish bread. Then, using a carved spatula, he gave it the form of a snake.

“If you’ve got good aim, the fox won’t get away from you. Overcome your disgust, eat the caicai: serpent of serpents, enemy of human kind, it brings the flood from the depths, erases everything; you cease to be flesh and are left pure spirit. It won’t give you health, because you already have it; it will dissolve only the sickness you invent.”

Jaime, with his mind clear for the first time in his life, thanks to the blood, discovered the essential trait of his character: curiosity. He loved nothing but wanted to know everything. Whichever way he went, he would find ignorance. Any idea seemed a violence, the description of a feeling never stopped seeming ridiculous, the content of a concept led to another concept, and so on until infinity. Thinking was merely believing; meanings changed as rapidly as clouds; reality was covered with mental constructions that, in complicity with one another, became a language. And he wanted to push aside the veil, know the meaning of life, the secret of the Universe, the structure of that which people called God.

“We always follow the trail of the good. Don’t miss this opportunity. Run and see, huinca!”

As the Mapuche pounded the drum made of wood and horsehide, Jaime, holding back his gagging, devoured the blood.

His entire body began to tremble; his temperature rose; he perspired; he became cold; he lost dimensions; he felt himself a giant, tiny; his tongue burned; flames shot out of his mouth; his left ear grew until it was five times larger than the other; he understood the forest animals; each roar, meow, trill, buzz, taught him something; even the belches of the toads transmitted profound thoughts. In the face of such wisdom, he felt himself to be a miserable being and giggled at his ignorance. Then his incredulity fought against the drug.

“They’re auditory hallucinations. Whatever the animals say I invent. I’ll have them sing an Italian song.”

And from the forest arose an animal chorus singing the melody of “Torna a Surriento.” Tralaf gave him a ferocious kick in the chest. A bloody wound opened. He felt that his heart was pouring out of that wound, but in its place arose a black feline, rolled up like a fetus.

“The cat can’t see the mouse without wanting to kill it. No matter what they say, the animals speak to you in any case. They provide the raw material; you make the message. Ditch the cat, let the mouse live.”

Jaime split in two. Everything he saw became a mirror. Then he was three and finally four. He realized he could multiply until infinity and be in innumerable places at the same time. Again he laughed. For so many years, an entire lifetime, he’d been one, a prisoner of an imagined body, like concrete, clinging to its exterior form purely out of fear. What cowardice, this being stuck to the Earth! Better to toss the burden overboard. He began to feel himself lighter, floating. Tralaf jumped and fell on his back transformed into a green puma. He drew his muzzle close to Jaime’s left ear and said in a hoarse voice, “Now you’ve got the gaze of the condor. You are going to fly to Tierra del Fuego to give life to the forgotten gods.”

They skimmed through winds and storms, above dismembered coasts lashed by waves, shaped like cathedrals; they crossed archipelagos, fjords, canals, and descended into a volcanic crater, right in front of an extensive field of lava. The cavity was dotted with burned human skeletons. Flames burst out of the green puma:

“Accept the purification of fire. Be able to imagine yourself calcified. Deliver the personality that limits you. Make yourself a receptor without edges.”

Jaime allowed his body to burn. From the depth of the cave, leaning on one another, like a group of sick men, advanced three painted-up Indians. Beneath the dots and the horizontal and vertical bars that decorated them, appeared their mummified flesh. They complained with every step.

“That’s the pain of oblivion. They are the creators of the world. Kosménk, the father; Xalpen, the mother; Keternen, the son. You, who have been able to turn your form into a fire, let Kosménk possess you. Give your awareness over, now!”

And Jaime ceased clinging to himself and became an invisible vulva the size of the sky in order to allow himself to be possessed by the father, an unlimited force that dragged him out of time and space. Kosménk entered absolute negation, falling as if down a black well, where everything that appeared was instantly erased; crossing levels of existence that vanished; rejecting so that at the end, the heart of the infinite No would be the greatest of affirmations. Out of unlimited goodness arose Xalpen, his wife. Jaime was fragmenting in a cloud of burning drops, and comprehension came; he circulated in all the currents of the firmament, of the earth, of the ocean, of sap, of blood. He expanded into a network of waves, like a disproportionate spider made of spirals. Life was an empty labyrinth twisted by a torrent of passion, Xalpen, the continuous orgasm. Kosménk, eternally immobile in the dark night, root of all suns and of all conscious light, father of Xalpen, becomes her lover in order to sink into matter, itself transformed into a song of happiness, and then to be born as her son: Keternen, the golden child, fragile and tender bread that feeds the one who destroys it. Keternen, born from the sacrifice of Kosménk, savior of the human race, creator of the new universe where no one eats anyone else and flesh is transparent, where all beings, transformed into conscious comets, trace a cathedral of fire in the sky. The pleasure of the Mother is so intense that it seems pain, because the explosion is vertiginous and never stops growing. Then it grants its greatest gift, Death, so that everything once again returns to Kosménk.

Jaime awoke naked in the forest clearing. Tralaf, next to the black rock, was playing something that looked like a violin: a bow of bone held by a single string of woven hair that he leaned against his upper incisors to play with another identical bow, making arise from the instrument a wail that was between human and divine. Jaime had never known that enormous feeling. His thoracic cage was beating as if his trunk had become a single heart. He felt he had no head, decapitated. He was viscera with arms and feet, nothing more. All his life he thought that he lacked sensitivity, that he was emotionally dead, but now he realized that he’d been asleep. Now he expanded, ceaselessly giving.

His spirit belonged to another world, outside of forms. He perceived everything as presences, energies, entities that had no relation to the size of the bodies in which they manifested themselves. An immense raulí tree mattered less to him than a baby eagle that landed on his shaved head. That was because the ancient tree bent over, transformed into a thin hair of violet light, while the bird gave off golden rays in all directions of space. He began to vomit coagulated blood. The Mapuche held his head.

“Like the tiger, you looked, opening your eyes halfway but choosing the fattest llamas. He who decides to live never again breathes the breath of Death. Since the war is over, you shall dance as long as you have heart. Good work, huinca. Cheer up: you returned from the zone of the ancient gods; you will no longer be the same. You will go on fighting, acquiring, but you will be from far off, because you know that everything is changing, fading, and that any tie is a trick.”

The gagging ceased, and Jaime, his stomach empty, without pain in his head, felt rested, tranquil, in peace.

“Thank you, Tralaf. Your drug has cleansed and enriched me. I’ll never go back to the circus. Something mysterious is asking me to go north. That there, at the far end of the nation, my realization awaits me.”

Obviously, it was I who, taking advantage of that magnificent occasion when my future father delivered himself to lunar reception, incited him to embark on that pilgrimage so he would again give me the possibility of being incarnate. Jaime dressed, bade a thankful farewell to the Indian, and set out on the return road. As he advanced along the narrow path, the virgin forest did not seem dark, dangerous, or strange. For the first time, he felt he owned the earth, with roots as deep as those trees that caressed him with a thousand different vibrations. He was going along like that, enjoying the openness of his senses, when a tremendous roar made him stop short. Right before him stood a puma showing him his teeth. Abandoning prudence, he turned on his heel to try a vain run. He collided with Tralaf.

“So the huinca thought he was leaving without paying me!”

“I’m sorry my friend, I had no idea. I came without money.”

“That I know. When you were out of your head, I checked your pockets. Zero! Nor did I find a bottle or two of pisco, which is the custom. You’re the kind that always thinks they deserve everything free. That the knowledge you give them, you get just like that without lifting a finger.”

“Forgive me.”

“Excuses are worth nothing. I spent a good part of my life suffering horrors to obtain what I gave you once. If you get it for nothing, what value will it have for you? Do you know how far I had to walk through the mountains to find that bark you ate? Try to catch just one leech. Find the cavern of the ancient gods. A lifetime wouldn’t be enough for you to reach it.”

“Calm down that puma of yours, please. Let me go. I’ll work for a few weeks and come right back to give you whatever I’ve saved.”

“If you know you have to give it, you’ll never earn any money. That’s how you huincas are. You hate to pay your debts.”

“Not me!”

“You’re lying. You’ve been lent a life, and you spend all your time complaining because someday you’ll have to give it up. If you don’t pay me right now, I’ll set the puma on you!”

The puma, as if to confirm the witchdoctor’s threat, came forward, growling, toward Jaime. Then it went up on its hind legs and rested its huge front paws on Jaime’s shoulders. With the beast’s huge maw in front of his face and its three hundred pounds resting on him, my father weakened and sank to his knees.

The Mapuche said, “Tüngn.” And the animal stepped back to leap onto the trail, sniffing the maqui bushes. Tralaf pulled a necklace of human teeth out of his jacket.

“I need one molar to make it complete. When I have it, I’ll be the owner of my soul. I’ll be able to enter and leave the huenu, the place of the spirits who know. Give me that tooth! You’ll be left with a hole in your gums and that will always remind you of the freedom you obtained.”

Jaime said nothing. He opened his mouth wide. The Indian chewed some herbs, spit them out in the form of a paste, coated the base of the molar with that green material, and then, tying it up with a little hair rope, pulled it out with one yank. Jaime, who had his eyes closed, suffered not one bit. When he finally raised his eyelids, neither the puma nor Tralaf was there.

Returning seemed easy; all he had to do was to follow the tracks he himself had made on the muddy path. Unfortunately, it began to rain. In a short while, the ground turned into a long puddle, erasing the path. When the rain stopped, a dense mist darkened the forest. Jaime began to walk without knowing where he was going. He walked for hours. A glacial cold hardened his wet clothes.

Worn-out, he finally found himself in an esplanade where a church stood. He ran to beg refuge. The three doors of the wide portico were locked, as were the windows. On both sides of the wooden building, the roof hung down, providing some protection. He stretched out there to rest on the dry ground. He slept deeply until the cold woke him. It was snowing. He could barely feel his feet. If he stayed there any longer, he would die frozen. With strength drawn from desperation, he kicked open the main panel of the central door and entered the nave.

Judging by the amount of dust that had accumulated, it was clear that no one had visited the place in a long time. Jaime undressed and used a small lace mantle that was spread over the altar to dry himself. Suddenly he felt he was being watched. From a corner, half-hidden by the semidarkness, a priest was watching him. My father, naked as he was, hiding his sex with his hands, walked toward the priest to apologize. He found himself facing a cast-iron Saint Francis, dressed in a wool cassock.

Laughing like a madman, he stripped the statue of its cassock and put it on. The wool heated him a bit, but the temperature went on dropping. He searched the church. In a small armoire, he found candles and matches. He broke up two chairs, piled the pieces on the altar, and made a fire. The heat lulled him. He sat down at the foot of the cross that was on the back wall and, accompanied by the serene gaze of the wooden Christ, went back to sleep.

A gust of wind came through the broken door and made the flames fly up. Jaime awoke in the middle of a fire. The avid flames were devouring the temple. Half of the roof collapsed. Amid sparks, flames, and tongues of smoke, almost blind, Jaime, who knows why, instead of escaping immediately, fought to pull off the wall the cross, which along with its Christ must have weighed more than a hundred pounds. Finally, carrying it on his back, he managed, with a few light burns, to make his way to the esplanade.

The building was a total loss. By daybreak, it had become a large rectangle of ash and blackened beams. As the sun rose, amid a deafening chorus of birds, the heat came. Jaime found himself clean shaven, dressed as a Franciscan monk, and without a penny. If he didn’t want to return to the circus, the only possibility he had to get some money was the crucifix. Then the thought came to him:

“In every town there is a church. I’ll carry the cross for a few miles, no more than ten for sure, and I’ll give it to the first priest I see, explaining to him that I saved it from a fire caused by lightning; that in committing the heroic deed I lost my clothes from being attacked by the immodest flames and ended up naked; that I had to cover myself with Saint Francis’s cassock, which miraculously escaped the fire. Yes, Your Eminence, all the money I had in the world was turned to ash, but what does my misery matter if this most holy Christ was saved? Of course, a bit of help from Holy Mother Church, if willingly given, would not be scorned. And if to those abundant coins or banknotes, whichever pleases your respectable will, could be added trousers and a woven vest, and perhaps also a T-shirt to be worn below it, because wool scratches, and a pair of shoes — socks are unnecessary because I never use them — my thanks would be sincere and my faith solidified.”

Hope gave him courage, and he carried the weight of the grand crucifix, assuming with a smile the posture of Jesus marching toward Calvary.

“It is,” he thought, “after all, a comfortable position. Resting the base on the ground helps a good deal. If you keep your spine straight, there’s no need to get melodramatic.”

After an hour and a half, he entered a village. Disillusioned, he noticed it had no church. He calculated, judging by how few houses there were, that no more than four hundred people could have lived there. He swallowed hard and advanced, sweating, step by step along the town’s only street. The few inhabitants who were at their windows watched him pass with their mouths hanging open. A few children came running out to follow him. An old lady approached and, after giving him two potatoes stuffed with meat, dried the sweat on his brow.

“Ma’am, where does this road go?”

“It goes up toward Valdivia, holy penitent.”

Holy penitent? Now they were confusing him. Better to keep moving in order to find a church as soon as possible. He passed through four more towns. In each, he was given food and wine. As he passed, the men would remove their hats and the women would weep. When night fell, a peasant let him sleep in his stable, preparing a good bed of hay for him near the cows. After kneeling before the cross and praying, with a pail of fresh milk next to him, he gave Jaime a wrinkled banknote he’d been keeping in the lining of his hat: “For when you reach the Sanctuary. Light some candles in my name, Juan Godoy.”

He heard himself say, sweetly, “That is what I shall do, brother,” before he fell asleep snoring. He left early in the morning, after evacuating the diarrhea caused by so many empanadas, fruits, glasses of wine, and gallons of milk. After four hours of easy walking downhill, he reached the Llollelhue River, which wound its way around a small city, La Unión. In the distance, the steeple of a church stood out, calling the faithful to mass with its bells. As he crossed the bridge, a lady approached dressed in black, carrying a basket filled with cheeses and bottles of chicha.

Jaime did not need to be asked twice. And while the lady struggled and puffed under the weight of the Christ, he swallowed half a liter of the chicha and devoured a cheese.

“I have to make this effort. Because of my bestial temperament, I killed my husband. I made him screw me every night until dawn. When his heart exploded, he spit a spurt of blood into my mouth along with his last words: ‘Horny bitch!’ I was right in the middle of an orgasm, and he cut it off. I’ve remained ever since with that lack of satisfaction. I can’t stand it.”

“How long ago was it that your husband died?”

“I buried him yesterday.”

Jaime understood. The woman wasn’t ugly, and under her mourning costume, the bulge of her buttocks was promising. Without saying anything more, they walked into a wheat field, allowed themselves to be covered by the sheaves, and fornicated until the sun began to set.

“Take this money, holy penitent. When you reach the Sanctuary, light a few candles before the Holy Virgin in my name, Guacolda Verdugo.”

That was the second time he was told the same thing. He asked, curious but astute and addressing her in familiar terms,

“Are you sure you know what I am and where I’m going, Guacolda?”

“Do you take me for an idiot, Pedrito?”

He had told her his name was Pedro Araucano, just in case this slut became pregnant and tried to find him.

“Dressed as a Franciscan monk and with a cross on your shoulder, you must be a tremendous sinner. Maybe you killed your own father and have vowed to carry that heavy cross on foot to the Sanctuary of the Virgin of Tirana in the grand north. That kind of penance is very popular in our region. Several before you have tried to carry it out, but the heat of the desert killed them. Look here, Pedrito, I have another banknote! If you like, you can give me a farewell.”

And the widow kept him prisoner between her powerful thighs for an hour and a half. Jaime did not enter the city. He decided to skirt it. He realized that walking around clean-shaven, dressed in a cassock, and carrying a crucified Christ was good business. He would slowly make his way through the villages being fed by simple, superstitious people, passing himself off as a repentant sinner. Then he’d get to Santiago, plump and with a bankroll.

That night and all the following nights, it was easy for him to find someplace to sleep. All he had to do was knock at a door and beg for a bed with a martyr’s face. They would give him a bed, dinner, and, if it was a woman by herself, even naked company. Jaime was surprised to discover that holiness was a powerful attraction for female believers. Before leaving, he was in the habit of saying, “If you wish, I’ll light some candles for you when I get to the Sanctuary.” They would always slip a carefully folded banknote into his hand.

When he passed by a large estate near Valdivia, he saw a long line of trucks carrying peasants. All of them, even if they lacked Sunday clothes, were well combed and had a clean handkerchief tied around their necks. Before they helped them onto the trucks, some well-dressed strongmen gave them a cardboard box adorned with the face of the presidential candidate Don Luis Barros Borgoño. Jaime bent over as if totally weighed down, put on his tragic face, and advanced as if an invisible centurion were whipping him. The driver, the strongmen, and the peasants all crossed themselves. An elegant fat man ran behind him and, helping him lift off the cross, gave him a cardboard box:

“Pray for us, holy penitent, but right now, because God will hear you better than anyone else. Today is Election Day, and our candidate has to win!”

Jaime went down on his knees, put his hands together, and, since he knew no prayers, muttered the multiplication tables. He tried to cross himself: he touched his belly, then his head, then his right side, and finally his heart. It didn’t occur to him to kiss his fingers.

When he saw they were staring at him in an odd way, he said, “Whatever I say or do does not come from me. God has made me insane in order to separate me from men of sin and make me His slave. Don’t try to understand. The snail is also a rose.”

They were dumbfounded. Jaime went his way toward Valdivia. In the box he found half a chicken, half a liter of wine, half a bar of chocolate, half a pack of cigarettes, and a five-peso note. How little a vote was worth! It saddened him to think about those ignorant people trucked like sheep, selling their freedom for a miserable sum. He passed by the entrance to another large farm. Again he saw a line of trucks carrying peasants. Bribery much like the first case: these too were handing out boxes. The only difference was that the candidate’s picture had changed: now it was Don Arturo Alessandri Palma.

My father pretended to stumble, fell on his knees, and with crocodile tears began to mutter multiples of five, the ones he knew best. He waited for everyone to make the sign of the cross, carefully noting the movements so he wouldn’t make another mistake. He too made it, and then, trying to improve the business, shouted, “Long live Christ the King!”

They all responded at the top of their lungs: “Long live Christ the King!”

Then he added: “Long live the Lion of Tarapacá, our future president, Alessandri!”

The reaction was less enthusiastic but more professional. Despite his efforts, they gave him a box and nothing more, asking him to implore their triumph. Then they helped him to put the Christ back on his shoulders. He walked a couple of miles and sat down to rest under a willow tree next to the river. Majestic white clouds were passing through the sky, the wild flowers were offering their nectar to the greedy insects, the birds were singing to celebrate the first heat of spring, and the murmur of the river contaminated the world with its peace.

Jaime opened the box of the intransigent bourgeoisie and also that of the candidate of the Liberal Alliance. Both Barros Borgoño and Alessandri offered the same menu and the same miserable amount of money. It was clear that the food came from the same wholesale caterer. Jaime, in a terrible mood, put together the two halves of the chicken. They fit together perfectly! Astounding coincidence! He’d been given the two halves of the same chicken. In his hands he was holding the long-sought national union.

He tried to join the two halves of the chocolate bar, but that did not work. He felt disillusioned. It would have been fantastic if they, too, had fit together. Then he would have been forced to believe in miracles. Finally he settled for having reunited the body of the chicken. He decided not to eat it but to give it a proper burial. He was on the side of the road, digging a hole, when the trucks belonging to the two parties passed in Indian file, a demented worm infecting the calm with its shouts of false enthusiasm:

“Hurrah for Don Luis!”

“Boo! Long live Don Arturo!”

“Boo!”

When peace was restored and the trail of dust the trucks had left had dissolved, Jaime opened the half liters and drank from both bottles at the same time. Then he put both half bars of chocolate in his mouth and, with his cheeks ballooned out, lit the twenty cigarettes in order to smoke them all at the same time. Then he vomited, shit, and wiped his backside with the two five-peso notes. He wanted to sleep and never wake up.

No matter what he did, no matter what he searched for, no matter what he found, he’d always end up without roots, living somewhere between heaven and Earth. Despite the fact that he firmly believed that having a nationality meant being sick, that reaching patriotism meant also reaching caricature, that imposing borders on the Earth was a blasphemy, that speaking a single language was a form of mental retardation, he desired desperately to acquire those limits. Jodorowsky. What a hideous last name he’d been given! Jodo, joder, to annoy to a great degree, to fuck, to rob, to walk with bad luck. From then on, he would use only his first name, just Jaime. At least in French and by adding an apostrophe Jaime turned into J’aime, I love. Do I love? Did I love? Shall I love? What does that mean? Of what concept with no basis in reality was being talked about? By naming something, all you create is one thing: a new word, as empty as the old ones, another illusion. He felt like calling the Rabbi. He refrained from doing so. He began to think:

“If I give him a lot of importance, that freak will end up invading my mind the way he did with my father. Why do I want to see him? So he can analyze this political masquerade for me? He won’t tell me anything I don’t already know. Both the landowning oligarchy and the Liberal Alliance fear the independent development of the proletariat because it could lead to a revolution. Alessandri, a clever demagogue, will take control of the masses, promising the moon and the stars all in order to subordinate them to the economic interests of the bourgeoisie. And the immature poor will sell their rights for a bowl of lentils. Appearances are always deceiving, and words take the place of realities.

“This crucifix, which is supplying me with a delightful life simply because I carry it, is another falsity. Why do they sculpt Him in such pain? A simple fakir can sleep on a bed of nails and pierce his flesh with needles without blinking an eye. Three or four wounds are going to make a God moan? Absurd. It hurts, sure, but it’s something anyone can stand. His situation is a joke; he’s been sentenced to death, him — he’s immortal. Up above, the Father, the Holy Spirit, and the angels are laughing their heads off. After the farce of dying, barely three days later, he will arise again in full majesty.

“Nailing him to a cross cannot reduce His power much, not the one who can produce an earthquake with a shout, split the veil of the temple, and paralyze the sun, causing such an uproar that the dead leave their graves to see what’s going on. Why don’t they show a luminous, triumphant Christ in churches? It would be a bad example to the workers. If I, instead of lugging around these hundred pounds, were shooting light all over the place, I wouldn’t get the money, food, and sex I get but instead whippings and a sore backside for being a political agitator.”

He felt a desire to go to the city to see how the bribers watched over the herd so it would vote correctly. He staggered as he walked. That wine was pure alcohol. He saw an old man sitting on a paving stone.

“Good day, holy penitent. May God forgive you and help you. Want a piece of my sausage?”

“No, my good man. The Eternal One has already given me my daily bread and wine. But, tell me, aren’t you going to vote?”

“I wanted to, but the hen got sick, and I took care of her and missed the truck. They’d already left.”

“Which trucks?”

“Either group. It’s all the same to me. As long as they pay me.”

“Does that seem right to you?

“Not exactly right. If it were a ten-peso note and a whole chicken, then that would be perfect.”

“So why don’t you walk to the voting place?”

“For nothing? Never!”

“Look here my friend. I’ll buy your vote.”

“I believe you. You can’t be making fun of me, because the saints don’t lie. How much?”

“Come with me. When we get there, I’ll give you a whole chicken and the ten pesos you wanted. Deal?”

“Deal! For whom do I vote?”

“Luis Emilio Recabarren. I want him to have at least one vote. He deserves that.”

And they went to Valdivia. Before they entered the city, they crossed paths with the trucks that now carried a flock of drunks. Each one had invested his five pesos in red wine. They no longer cheered the candidates, but they were certainly shouting:

“Long live my buddy Lucho!”

“Hurrah for my bay mare!”

“The Calle-Calle River shall triumph!”

He made sure the old man voted and didn’t betray him. He then bought him a liter of wine, a chocolate bar, a pack of cigarettes, and handed him the ten-peso note. The peasant, out of pure pleasure, began to dance a cueca that made him shake so much his false teeth fell out. Jaime, disgusted with himself, walked right down the main avenue, intent on crossing the city, all the time thinking:

“I too behave like a jerk. In truth, I walk around disguised as what I am. I’ve always lived like a martyr, carrying the weight of some unknown guilt. The only ugly thing is that I can’t be myself except by disguising myself. When I take off the mask, I lose my identity. Walking this way, through here, I run the risk of meeting up with a priest. He’ll treat me as a thief, a fraud, a profaner, and he’ll be right. They’ll throw me in jail. Maybe behind bars I’ll find my homeland. Name: 34735870. Nationality: prisoner. Country: jail. Sex: unsatisfied. Special markings: mutilated in the faith.”

He stopped outside the church. It was locked up. He took off a shoe and threw it against the door with such force that the noise of the impact made the bell vibrate. A priest came out, his face red with rage. He stared at him from the portico. Then he hitched up his cassock and picked up Jaime’s shoe. He poked his index finger through the holes in the sole. He slowly walked down the steps, staggering like a drunk, and threw himself into Jaime’s arms, transformed into a fountain of snot and tears. His weeping was so heartbreaking and his embrace so sincere that Jaime, either out of contagion or shame, also wept. The monk separated himself, went running into the church, and returned with a pot of water, towels, and soap. He began to wash Jaime’s feet, murmuring in a heavy German accent, “This is how I should imitate Christ. So many years sacrifice calls me and I continue clinging to my obligations, which give me excuses for not carrying the cross on my shoulder. You redeem us, holy penitent! If we do not imitate Jesus in His martyrdom, how will we know his infinite pity? Carrying this crucifix along the roads, you transform the whole nation into a temple. If now I cannot abandon my flock and go with you, at least give me the opportunity to follow your footsteps.”

And the German took off his brand-new boots and put them on Jaime’s feet. The fact is that my father had been suffering because of his worn-out soles and the new boots, solid and fine, made with the love of a blessed shoemaker, gave spirit to his brave walking, but instead of rejoicing because of this gift, Jaime grew sad. He remembered the rancor he held for his deceased father. He too had made a pair of boots, placing his tenderness in the work, and Alejandro, instead of keeping them as a souvenir, sold them to some flea-ridden fool for almost nothing.

Now those shoes, which he had considered lost, were restored to him in order for him to forgive his father, a man thirsty for holiness, serving his fellow man out of love for the divine work. Whether or not the Creator existed, what difference did it make, the help was the same! Now it was his turn to discover gratuitous love with no other future than the worms of the grave, with no rewards, no harps, no halos, no wings on his shoulders. Even if God were an invention, the greatest devotion to the world was owed Him, in this way, without reason, without moral obligations, without commandments carved in stone.

As Jaime left Valdivia behind, the priest had the bells rung. The faithful came to their windows to watch him pass. Soon a procession of about two hundred people was following him. They sang hymns and tossed flowers at him. When he reached the river and began to cross a bridge for carts with no guardrail, they waved handkerchiefs, giving him a fervent farewell. Since the cross practically immobilized his head, he twisted around as much as he could, holding in the “I’m a fucking cynic” that filled his mouth, and gave them the blessing they expected. He began to shout, “In the name of the Father, of the Son, and—” but he couldn’t finish, because the stumble he made against one of the arms of the cross threw him off the bridge. He only fell ten feet, and the water served as a mattress, but the thick wood smacked right into his clavicle, throwing it out. The crown of thorns scratched his forehead, and with his face bathed in blood he began to drown. His lungs filled with water. He lost consciousness.

He awoke late at night with his shoulder bandaged, stretched out on a grave in a cemetery. A gentleman with calloused hands offered him hot coffee in a clay cup.

“I’m the cemetery guard, the gravedigger as well, and in my free hours a bone setter. I fix up twists, breaks, dislocations and give massages for stiff necks. Luckily for you, you got only a dislocation. I fixed it up perfectly. Eleodoro Astudillo, at your service.”

“Many thanks, Don Eleodoro. How much do I owe you?”

“Saints don’t pay. Pray for me, that will be enough.”

“I certainly will. Could you tell me where and with whom you learned your trade?”

“I learned it here, and my teacher’s name is Don Pepe. Don Pepe, come over here!”

A gray cat came running through the graves and rubbed itself, purring, against the gravedigger’s legs.

“He taught me everything. Consider this: if you touch your joints carefully, without allowing yourself to be distracted by any thought, you’ll understand how the animal has been set up by God. A small pressure here, another there, and after a few more, he comes apart. See?”

The gentleman, not causing Don Pepe any pain, disjointed his legs and neck. The feline was left stretched out on the gravel path like a rug, purring even more loudly.

“In the same way, digging graves is nothing for me now. Before, yes, it was hard, and that was even when I was young. But little by little, I set pride aside and let the Earth be my teacher. She showed me her hard spots, her soft spots, her empty places. If you take a good look at where and how you sink in the shovel, the ground opens and in you go like a knife through butter.” In a few seconds, he reassembled the cat’s neck and legs, and off the animal dashed, chasing a nocturnal butterfly. “Do you understand the language of things? Look carefully at that small refuge.”

Jaime realized that Don Eleodoro was enjoying himself immensely talking to him. Perhaps it was the first night in many years he had company like this, drinking coffee under the moonlight. In any case, he turned to look in the direction the knotty finger was pointing. At the end of a branch, a nest glowed.

“What does it say to you?”

“It looks pretty, like a magic fruit.”

“It may be true but that is what you create; pretty or ugly comes from you, not from the nest. The truth is that the little house is built at the end of a fragile branch. The bird calculated by instinct the weight of the branches that crisscross and the weight of the little birds that nest there in order to construct his work at the limit of the bearable. One gram extra and the branch breaks or it bends, causing the chicks to fall. If it constructs its nest on a thick, safe branch, the cats will come to eat everything. As it is, no feline will dare come close. So I understand that sometimes it isn’t good to seek security, because it leads to death. Sometimes it’s better to live in uncertainty. But you know these things because you’re a saint. What work it has cost you to purify you soul. I saw it on your body. You’ve been beaten, had ribs broken. You’ve had to fight against many wills. You feel your parents didn’t love you as they should. All that weighs more than the Christ on His cross. If you like, I’ll lighten you. Memory is like a corset. Your memories stick to your chest, your back, all over your skin, and they form an invisible shell that separates you from the world.”

The gravedigger stripped him and began to scrape him with a bone knife, inch by inch, with intense dedication, as if he had to pull off a label glued to each part. He began with the soles of Jaime’s feet, using the scraper with such skill that he felt no tickles. Then he went up, along his legs, sex, and anus to his chest and back, not forgetting the arms, neck, and finally Jaime’s entire head. When he finished, dawn was beginning. Since Don Eleodoro had undone the bandage so no part of his body would not be scraped, Jaime had a pain in his shoulder that seemed light because of the joy the rest of his body was giving him.

He felt that he’d taken off many, many years of suffering. His body breathed like a huge lung. Each pore, transformed into a tiny mouth, sang a hymn to freedom. All his fears had been removed: fear of dying, getting sick, being abandoned, being invaded, failing, losing, suffering, being bored, having no meaning, being unnoticed, growing old. For the first time, he enjoyed his matter, and the flesh was no longer an executioner allied with Time taking away his life in little bites with its seconds, but a paradisiacal garden where his spirit danced like a formless angel.

“My friend, holy penitent, in this region there are many witchdoctors who call themselves wizards. They’re going to offer you plants that grant visions and take you to other levels of reality. In my opinion, seeing things as they are, united, not separated, that’s a miracle. Are you sleepy?”

“A bit. We haven’t slept all night.”

“Make an effort. Come with me. Out in the fields stands a solitary apple tree. If we know how to see it, it will speak to us about this plane, which is as marvelous as one of those hallucinations.”

He led Jaime out of the cemetery. At the entrance, was the cross, standing upright in a niche in the high wall. Christ looked so well there it seemed as though He’d been carved for that site, like the figurehead on a ship manned by all the dead. They followed a path bordered by lavender bushes that purified the air with their sweet perfume. In the middle of a field of dark, almost black earth grew a leafy tree covered with yellow apples transformed into gold by the rays of the rising sun.

“What do you see?”

“A tree with lots of ripe, shiny apples.”

“Is that all?”

“I can’t say it’s beautiful or ugly, because that would come from me.”

“Don’t look with your eyes but with your spirit.”

“My spirit tells me those fruits are very sweet, and my stomach believes it.”

“Since you feel half-blind, you don’t face the bull and you start playing. It would be better to dance. Here everything is dancing, from the stars to the smallest speck of dust. Realize this: the tree stuck into the planet spins with it around the sun. Each apple, according to its position, receives the sun’s rays in a different way. Some, those that hang on the side where the sun rises, will be bathed by a young light that will go from weakness to strength; others, those who face the sunset, will receive an aged light that will go from strength to weakness. Those that grow at the top of the tree will be fed by a mature vertical light, short but always intense. Each apple is different, because during their growth each receives the sun in a different way. Each has a different taste; some are friends of the morning, others of the afternoon, and a few of midday. But there is one apple, the highest and most central, in intense communication with the zenith, that is the queen.”

The gravedigger stretched out his arm and cut off an apple. Then, with astonishing agility, he climbed to the top of the tree to cut another.

“Take a bite of one from below. Now eat a piece from this one, the queen, and compare.”

The first fruit, fresh, with hard, sugary flesh, seemed delicious to Jaime. He bit the other, and a concentrated, vibrant, unbreakable force overwhelmed him. The tense and juicy flesh, like sweet crystal, crunched melodiously. When it dissolved into juice, beneficent acid, it instantly penetrated Jaime’s tongue and went into the river of his blood, which heated up, giving him a euphoric fever. When he finished eating that apple, he felt that his life had been prolonged.

“I think we are the same as the trees; in each situation, we grow a thousand gestures. We have to prefer the kingly gesture, the one closest to the vital principle. And we should make that one, not the others. But never disdaining them. They are the power behind every realization. Well, I’ll let you sleep. Get into this grave. I’ve put a blanket in it. You’ll have to get used to this deep bed because I have no other to offer you.”

Jaime dropped into the grave and, lulled by the sweet and sour smell of the earth, fell asleep. He dreamed he was in the arms of a dark-skinned woman. Between their two naked bodies, he noted there was a huge quantity of white jelly.

“What’s this?” he asked the woman.

“Don’t worry, it’s my depilatory cream.”

“You like to lose your body hair, but I, a man, feel it to be a catastrophe.” He felt anguished for a moment, then he said to her, “Rub my back with it. My shoulder blades are covered with hairs. When they fall out, two wings will be able to grow there.”

My father awoke full of energy and came out of the grave like a newborn. The gravedigger was waiting to offer him two fried eggs, bread, and a cup of coffee.

“You won’t be able to carry your cross for two weeks, friend. What will you do? You can’t stay here; a multitude will come to see you to request miracles. In their fervor they will trample the graves and the plants. Maybe one of those believers will lend you a room. Meanwhile, I’ll take care of your Christ. When you’re better, you can get back on the road of penitence.”

“Don Eleodoro, I have other plans. I’ll take the train to visit my brother in Santiago.”

“Wearing that cassock and with no cross, you’ll look odd. I’ll undress a dead man. He’s fresh. I buried him yesterday. A traveling salesman with no relatives or friends.”

After half an hour he came back with a suit of a brilliant, exaggerated green, plus a shirt and shoes.

“I hope you don’t mind the color. The more you use the suit, the less noticeable it will be.”

“Never look a gift horse in the mouth. Thanks. The shoes I won’t take. I’d rather keep these boots. I thank you as well for all you’ve taught me.”

“It’s the all-knowing cemetery that’s the teacher, not me. I’ve got death so close to me that I see life everywhere. When you think you’re suffering, look at yourself in a mirror and remember where your suit comes from. That will give you spirit. Good-bye, friend. It was good to speak with a living man.”

In the train station, Jaime bought a newspaper; the two principal candidates both claimed victory. He looked for the details of the voting; in Valdivia, Luis Barros Borgoño received 2,500 votes, Arturo Alessandri Palma, also 2,500, and Recabarren 1. Jaime boarded the train proud to be the cause of that single vote.

The third-class car was packed with poor people traveling with packages, baskets, dogs, and chickens. The arrival of the gringo wearing the parrot-green suit produced a hum of laughter, but all it took was a defiant clearing of the throat by my father to shut them up. His black beard and short hair gave him a ferocious air. Fearful, they offered him a seat next to an old lady, and soon the rumble of the steel wheels put him to sleep:

Looking out the window of a building under construction, he observed the recreation area of a school where a teacher was showing his students how to manipulate invisible objects. He realized that the teacher’s technique was imperfect and that he masked his lack of precision with a confusing rapidity of gestures. Then the students raised their eyes to him, asking for help. From above — impassive, slow, and precise, with impeccable technique — he manipulated an invisible object in order to show them how to proceed properly in such cases.

The teacher abandoned his class and entered the building, climbing the precarious ladders that led to the seventh floor. Pursing his red lips, he pointed his index finger to his inside jacket pocket and asked him for a four-word motto he might embroider there.

He answered, “Permanent impermanence, nothing individual.”

Despite the teacher’s expression of admiration, he said to himself, “In any case, I have to teach you the technique for the perfect manipulation of invisible objects.”

A screech of brakes made him wake up. The train had stopped at a small station surrounded by vineyards. Through the door at one end of the car entered three drunken soldiers, each one with a full bottle under his left arm and an almost empty bottle in the right hand. Their swallows were as long as their guffaws. Through the door at the other end entered a short, hunchbacked man, carrying a white bag. When the train started moving, he sank his hands into the sack and pulled them out full of eggs. In a high voice, he began to shout, “Get your hardboiled eggs! For every rooster’s trick you buy, I’ll give you a packet of salt!”

The hairless face of the hunchback had something womanish to it, and his voice trembled like the clucking of hens. The soldiers, elbowing each other, pushed their way to him, snatched the white sack and began to eat the eggs so gluttonously that they swallowed them without removing the shell. In a few moments, they devoured three dozen, the man’s entire stock. They went back, emptying their second bottle, to the bench they used as bed and urinal. The hunchback followed them, demanding payment. The soldiers grabbed him by one leg and held him upside down shaking him: “Empty the gut you’ve got on your back. It must be full of eggs!”

Carried away with their game, they began to beat his head against the floor, clearly intending to smash it.

“Stop immediately!” shouted Jaime, without even having considered matters. His roar of indignation was involuntary, as were the gestures that followed: with a feline leap, he flew over the passengers’ heads, landed in the center aisle, leapt again, and found himself facing to the savages. Then, using his good arm, he punched them in the mouths. Teeth flew all over. Then he smacked their chest and sides, knocking them down between the seats. Finally he kicked them in their heads, leaving them unconscious and bloody. When he snapped out of his furor, he found himself carrying the hunchback, who was both sobbing and laughing triumphantly, thanking Jaime a thousand times.

“Listen, sir, you have nothing to thank me for. The fact is I don’t like bullying, that’s all. I didn’t attack them to defend you but to defend an idea.”

“Whatever you say, but the truth is you saved my life. You punched all three with only one fist. You can see from a mile away you’re a boxer, and a good one. It’s a shame God didn’t give me your body, that way I could work in peace. If you’ll forgive my curiosity, could you tell me where you’re going?”

“I’m going to Santiago, but I have to get off in Rancagua. I didn’t have enough money to go farther.”

“What a coincidence! I live in Rancagua, and if your pockets are empty, I can offer you a job, even though I appear poor.”

Going up a steep hill, they took advantage of the train’s slowness and jumped off to avoid reprisals from the army. Luckily they were only two day’s walk from the city, and the hunchback, whose name was Jesús de la Cruz, made the walk shorter by singing beautiful tunes in his tenor voice.

“Well, as my name says, I’m a victim nailed to the cross of my hunched back. A load like this is very hard to carry. When I pass through the taverns to sell my hardboiled eggs, the drunks always end up beating me. I understand them. They, workers, peasants, miners, are constant victims of the injustice of their bosses. They discharge their accumulated rage on me. I have a German hurdy-gurdy that contains pretty melodies. I can sing as I crank the handle and then sell bananas and eggs. You, strong as you are, disguised as a gorilla — I have a costume I found thrown in the garbage after carnival — could protect me. Many organ grinders are accompanied by little monkeys who collect money in a little can. Mine would be bigger. Admit it: the idea is good, my friend. Wearing the mask, no one will recognize you, and after a short time, we can split the profit between us. You’ll save up enough to buy a ticket to Santiago.”

Jaime was not surprised that fate would transform him into an ape-man. His mother had fallen in love with one, and perhaps for him it was good to identify himself with a simian form, which, indirectly, would give him the sensation of receiving the maternal love he lacked.

Meanwhile, the two presidential candidates, after each claimed the win, accused each other of fraud. Amid turbulence among the people, along with the threat of military intervention, the election was decided by an honor tribunal that gave the presidency to Alessandri.

My father lived a year submerged in the gorilla suit, visiting bars and restaurants every night of the week. At first he had to bloody a few drunks so that they’d learn to respect the hunchback, but later the job was easy. Everybody wanted to shake his hand or hug him, smiling like children. One night, out of pure boredom, he took a hanky out of the pocket of a customer and began to dance a cueca. A general clapping of hands ensued, and many wanted to accompany the gorilla, pounding their heels intensely. Jesús sold all his merchandise.

During the day, my father did not take off the disguise and, seated in the town’s main square, he amused the children. It did him good to live anonymously, within a hairy shell. He needed to lose himself, to discover the zero point. Deep down in the depth of his soul, he believed in nothing. He felt intensely separated. He’d been dropped in a world full of locked doors but given no keys. He looked for meaning to existence, always finding that nothing was worthwhile.

Hidden within the gorilla suit, as if in an alchemical crucible, he was dissolving, transforming into a formless spirit without personality or definition, with no values to affirm, free of models, of ties. He stopped being a gringo. A false monkey was accepted but a Russian immigrant was not. He challenged himself, dressed that way and without taking off his mask, to conquer a woman. Why just one? Many! His weapons of seduction were his eyes, his bare hands, his voice, and an interior force that pierced the animal skin and surrounded him with an erotic aura that married women, his preferred victims, perceived as blue-green waves.

Between three and five in the afternoon, when those ladies were preparing dinner and their husbands were far away at work, he easily managed to possess them in any old corner of the kitchen. It was best for them not to know his name or his face. They yielded to pure pleasure with no ties, free of all guilt. When the act was over, they slipped him a banknote or a packet of flowers and food. These impersonal relationships allowed my father to know the root of pleasure, a brutal enjoyment that was mysterious, devoid of modesty, where each female showed her basic heat. He didn’t exist, and the mask, granting him the quality of being a mask, transformed him into the ideal male all women bear within. Each one of them molded him to make him into an excrescence of their own flesh and that way they could possess themselves. Jaime knew he was walking through a space where there was no becoming.

One morning, Jesús de la Cruz, highly excited, woke him: “Jaime, today you can take off your monkey suit and put your parrot costume back on. I mean, you can dress like a normal citizen even though the color is loud. We’re going to a workers’ demonstration. The city is full of thugs. Recabarren is coming!”

“What? Recabarren?”

“That’s right, Recabarren, your idol! It’s the First Congress of the Communist Party of Chile. They are going to officially declare their allegiance to the Communist International whose seat is in Moscow. Being inside that gorilla suit and bouncing all over the place, you haven’t been aware of anything. The leader has come out of jail, been elected a deputy, and the doors of Congress are open to him. Now it’s going to be difficult to cut him off. Tonight, for certain, there will be no beatings, even though they’ve put up posters everywhere that say, With Body and Soul We’ll be Red!”

“But why are they meeting here, in Rancagua?”

“It must be because there are so many peasants and also because lots of workers can come down from the El Teniente copper mine. They’re already arriving, peaceful, wearing their Sunday best. They say it’s one of the most transcendent events in the history of Chile.”

“They say, they say. Who the fuck does all that saying? Pure publicity!”

Jaime, not knowing why, had awakened in a bad mood. There was something that deeply bothered him, a negative foreshadowing that arose from the foundations of that city, with its typically Spanish configuration formed of eight by eight blocks with a plaza at its center. The surrounding streets did not start at the corner of the tree-lined rectangle but from the center of each of its sides. It was there that 1,500 patriots, defeated and perhaps betrayed, had died. All that put Jaime in a bad mood. He walked to the church, sat in a pew, and, pretending to pray, summoned the Rabbi, who was not slow in coming. Jaime, treating him coldly but courteously, laid out the situation. He got the answer he feared:

“You’re right to be worried. Never disdain symbols. The Plaza of the Heroes is between four streets that form a cross. For a Catholic civilization that signifies martyrdom. In 1814, Bernardo O’Higgins (Christ) occupies the plaza to stop the Spanish army from advancing from the south toward the capital. Juan José Carrera (Judas), two leagues away, remains with a detachment of cavalry in order to support the bulk of the army when his help is requested. This, for reasons no one has been able to explain, he does not do.

“Attacked in four places, the infantry is decimated, without giving up. The hero does not allow himself to be crucified, and in a ferocious attack opens a path to escape the disaster. The motive for the cruel sacrifice: naïve confidence in a bad ally. You, who, like all Chileans, know this battle by heart, are upset seeing Recabarren reproduce the same disastrous configuration without realizing it. By founding the Communist Party in Rancagua, he is expressing that, deep down, he is preparing for betrayal and defeat. He, a just spirit, a redeemer, a human canal of the Supreme Father, Lenin, will be badly judged, understood by few for none, and will see the people massacred around him. His triumphs will be tactical retreats; he’ll have greater sufferings. He will be abandoned and alone in adversity, deserted even by his guide. Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”

“Fine. Now you’ve told me what I needed to hear: Recabarren should never have founded his party in this city of defeated heroes. Now go away. I’ve had enough hallucinations for one day!”

And with his bad mood transformed into fury, he returned to the tiny room he shared with the hunchback. He shaved, cut his hair, and put on his green suit. Jesús de la Cruz looked like a boy going to the circus. With an air of complicity, he showed Jaime a package of chocolates and mints. He showed off a T-shirt with a mountain peak embroidered on the back. He had dyed his eggs red.

A great multitude tried to enter the lecture hall of the municipality. Miners and peasants crowded around outside, orderly, knowing that the hall was filled to capacity. When they heard a round of applause, they too clapped and shouted support, not knowing for what and why. It took Jaime and the hunchback an hour to cross that tranquil and dense sea. They managed to get in using the pretext that they were carrying food for the members of the Congress. When they did get into the hall, Recabarren was speaking. There was nothing extraordinary in his looks. He was a serene man, clean-shaven, gray around the temples. His gestures were modest and friendly. His voice — devoid of oratorical tremolos — was plain, direct, and common, but it also possessed a conviction so deep that it electrified. His words went straight to the heart of his fellow believers with no need for shouting or gesturing.

“Comrades, without the blood of the thousands of worker martyrs cruelly spilled by the exploiter classes in the ferocious repressions that have taken place since 1900 right until today, 1922, without the anti-imperialist struggle kept up for years by patriotic elements, it would have been next to impossible for the conditions to be created in Chile for our dream to become reality. The Communist Party is born by assimilating the ideology that corresponds to the proletariat: Marxism-Leninism. The Party is born carrying high in the air the red banner, the emblem that synthesizes the most noble ideals, the purest aspirations, the most sublime visions of those who desire to construct a better humanity, a more perfect, more human society that will definitively liberate man from exploitation, that will eliminate need, that will extinguish the anxieties of insecurity, that will tear open all the veils of ignorance and inaugurate the kingdom of happiness.”

Despite the pain the purity of that man gave to him by fighting for ideals that manifested his immense love for humanity and which would lead him, when he collided with innate human perversity, to martyrdom, Jaime found himself applauding, galvanized like the rest. Recabarren, fearless, read a declaration of principles, attacking the juridical, political, and economic structure of society, appealing to the class struggle to inaugurate, by means of the proletarian revolution, a Communist government.

As an essential measure of that program, he announced the foundation of a newspaper that would be the organ of the National Executive Committee. Then a brass band, not quite in tune but energetic, played “The International,” which was sung by all present under waving red flags. Recabarren, not wanting to be the center of this fervor of the people, disappeared among the Congress members, but many workers began to shout “Recabarren!” so he came back with his arms outstretched (like Jesus, thought Jaime), in order to receive the vibrant ovations.

My father, dissolved in that enthusiastic mass, tried to approach the politician he admired and felt so sorry for, not with the hope of speaking to him — many rings of comrades surrounded him, making incessant commentaries, trying to hear from his lips a phrase that would be a personal memory — but to get the energetic contact of his invisible aura. He managed to get five yards from his goal and felt happy. He could see the chest of the historic man rising and falling. Perhaps he’d have the luck that his eyes, which already belonged to legend, would meet his own for an instant.

Surprised almost to paralysis, he heard the leader say to him, “You there, the young man in the green suit, come over here.”

The bodies immediately separated, opening a narrow path. As if submerged in a dream, with the intense palpitation of a heart witnessing a miracle, he walked toward Recabarren, who gave him a hearty handshake and invited him to follow along to a private office where he was going to rest.

Now Jaime began to think: “Could he see that I’m inhabited by a Jewish monster? Did he recognize Teresa’s face in mine? It isn’t possible that I, among thousands of enthusiasts, could interest him! Or maybe I do. He’s an extraordinary man; he must perceive things differently, see into our interior, know the quality of our souls. I’ve always known that I’m great, that my secret spirit is as pure as a diamond, and that I have the strength to move mountains. If he organizes a workers army and gives me command of it, I won’t lose a single battle. No Rancagua for this boy. I’ll even demolish the ruins of this sick capitalism and pitilessly cut all the heads off the dragon!”

Recabarren observed him calmly, offered him some tea in the cup from a thermos bottle, and asked him: “Tell me, young man, where did you buy that suit?”

Jaime fell from his delusions of grandeur to the size of a flyspeck. “To tell the truth, I didn’t buy it. A gravedigger gave it to me. It belonged to a dead man who had neither friends nor family.”

“Family he did have, at least one, me. Vicente was my uncle, a traveling salesman in the clothes business. He made that suit from the fabric on the mattress of his mom’s bed. He was always an old bachelor, very discreet. When my grandmother died, he poisoned the thirty cats that lived with them. He was the only son of that recalcitrant widow, and he buried her on a bed of cats. As you see, thanks to your glaring clothes, we’re almost members of the same family. Besides, you get an inheritance. Cut open the shoulder pads: Vicente always hides a few pesos there folded up in case of emergency.”

“Thanks a lot. I’ll do just that, Don Luis Emilio.”

“What’s your name?”

“Jaime Jodorowsky, at your service.”

“An odd name. Is it Polish?”

“It is, but my family is Russian. I’m lying. They’re Jews.”

“But do you know how to speak Russian?”

“I’m lucky enough not to have forgotten it.”

“Want to work with me?”

“Of course!”

“My obligations as a member of Congress oblige me to live in Santiago. Here on this card is my address. I have a pile of Russian books, all disorganized. You will be very useful to me. Not only to me but also to the entire working class. Your translations can be published in our newspapers. Come to see me as soon as you can. But remember: the trains leave on time and if you’re a second late, you’ll miss a long trip.”

In the cotton stuffing of the shoulder pads, Jaime found a lot of money. He gave half to his partner and with the other half bought a navy blue suit and a ticket to Santiago. The hunchback got drunk, burned the gorilla suit, and began to pelt him with hardboiled eggs dyed black. My father had to run to the train to escape his fury. He reached the capital one Sunday at 6:00 a.m. When he entered Benjamín’s apartment, he found him fully dressed, eating breakfast:

“What are you doing here? I’ve got no need for you. You spent almost two years without writing or worrying about my mother’s health. You should be ashamed. If it weren’t for the fact that I’ve gone back to divine Poetry, I’d be a goner by now. Thanks to poetry, in these immobile rivers, the crutches of long journeys have become baroque chargers. I gallop mounted on a violet blast between the ancient eyes of men who reflect the geometric formulas of this unbalanced world.”

“Stop, Benjamín. Stop reciting with that diva’s voice and tell me where Teresa is, since she’s also my mother.”

“She’s made notable progress. Even though she has serious cardiac problems, the wandering truths have returned to take refuge in the divine architecture of their demolition.”

“You’re busting my balls with your babble! Explain clearly to me!”

“She’s become a nice lady. On Sundays, they let her out of the madhouse in my custody. We have a puppet theater, and we put on shows in the hospital for children with tuberculosis. Will you come? Today we’re debuting ‘The Soldier Who Overcame Death.’ A traditional theme, but I’ve rewritten the dialogue. Art keeps cemeteries alive thanks to the play of its cadavers!”

The puppet theater stood in the somber patio filled with yellowish children, wearing old army jackets with gray blankets covering their shoulders. It was a blue screen emblazoned with the name of the company: The Booloolu. A cloth with a medieval castle painted on it was the only scenery. The small patients shouted, demanding the performance begin. Severe nurses handed out crepe paper balls filled with sawdust. A bullying doctor waved a Chilean flag, asking everybody to sing the national anthem. Jaime couldn’t see Teresa. Benjamín sat him with the mob, and said, “Now you’ll have to concentrate. You’ll see my mother when the show is over. I made the heads of the puppets and she the costumes. The one who acts is me, Teresa is my helper. We make a great couple.” Then he ran to hide himself behind the screen. A cardboard trumpet hooted. Death appeared carrying a young blonde woman with red cheeks, wearing a bridal gown. The girl, fighting to escape the skeleton’s embrace, bowed toward the children, asking for help:

“Don’t let him take me away. Before I die, I want to see my fiancé, a soldier. He promised me he would return from the war.”

The sick children bombarded Death with their sawdust balls. But Death, emitting lugubrious guffaws, held the girl even more tightly. With great stealth, the puppet master removed his hand from the sleeve. The bride hung empty in the embrace of Death. Inside the little theater, Benjamín extended his left hand toward Teresa so she could slip on the soldier. His uniform was filthy and torn. Meanwhile, my uncle began to act in three different voices.

He made a cavernous laugh as Death: “You are mine, forever!”

He exclaimed as a damsel in distress, “No! Help! Oh my love, come help me!”

He shouted in a romantic soldier’s voice, “Oh my bride, hang on! I’m on my way!”

Teresa began to stagger, about to fall in a faint. Benjamín whispered, “Quickly now, slip the soldier on tight. What’s wrong with you?”

“It’s nothing. A passing malaise. Go on. Don’t worry.”

Death opened the gates of the castle and locked the sagging bride inside. The soldier appeared.

“Old lady Death, open your eight invisible legs and give me back my bride!”

“Too late! Her soul will dissolve into white butterflies.”

“Never! If she disappears, you would erase me from all mirrors. Instead, I’ll kill you!”

“Kill me? Do you want to cut a sword with a thread? Ha, ha, ha!”

The ragged soldier engaged in a fierce fight with Death. Saber against scythe. Teresa, biting her lips, fell with an unbearable pain in her heart. Benjamín, never leaving off acting with his two puppets, who battled in silence, looked down to where his mother had fallen.

“I’m telling you not to worry, son. The show must go on.”

“But?”

“Whatever begins must end. Go on.”

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s this worn-out heart. My time has come.”

“No!”

“Go on, I’m ordering you!”

Amid the shouting with which the consumptive children cheered on their hero, the soldier, who dodged Death’s scythe by sinking down into the invisible floor only to pop up like a spring to surprise his adversary from the back. He pierced Death through and through with his saber, proudly exclaiming, “I’ve killed Death! Here I am, my bride! I got here in time!”

The hero, furiously applauded by the audience but worn out by the fight, made a supreme effort, opened the gate, and entered the castle. The stage was empty. The children asked their frowning nurses whether the soldier was going to find the girl dead or alive. Benjamín, with the soldier on one hand and the bride on the other, kneeled next to his mother.

“Don’t quit on me. I still need you.”

“Now you see you can’t finish the show on your own.”

The impatient children began to call to the hand puppets, “The bride and groom! We want the bride and groom!”

Benjamín made Teresa comfortable on the floor, shouted with the bride’s voice, “We’re on our way!” Then, with the voice of the soldier, “We’re enjoying a kiss!” He imitated the noise of a huge smack and sighed: “OOOOH!” General laughter broke out.

Teresa pressed her chest with her open hands. “I’ll hang on until the end. All you have left is the dance. Get up. Do it!”

Benjamín, his eyes filled with tears, raised the puppets. The soldier and his bride left the castle. The children received them with a warm ovation. He hugged her in his arms and said, passionately, “Tattoo my chest! Cover it with flames!”

And she answered, “Tiny needles grow on my lips, which for you spurt ink like little squids!”

And he: “Let me introduce the Universe between your lips!”

And she: “I have pieces of gods at the back of my tongue!”

The two papier mâché heads made a tremendous kiss. The children howled hysterically. The bride and groom separated and fell at the edge of the stage, worn out, panting. Then they jumped up and kissed again. The kiss made them spin around. More howls. Laughter. They began to dance a waltz: “We have conquered Death! Children, say it with us!”

The consumptive audience, like a single actor, exclaimed, “We have conquered Death!”

“Now together forever!”

The curtain fell. Jaime waited for the sick children to leave, not knowing that behind the screen, his mother, in his brother’s arms, was dying.

“Do not suffer, Benjamín. We aren’t born, and we don’t die. Life is eternal.”

“I know it. I’ll have to be the soldier who conquers Death.”

“You already are, and you have conquered it. We shall remain forever alive. Together forever. We shall go from transformation to transformation, never ending. We lose nothing because we are everything.”

My uncle could no longer hold back and began to sob.

“Don’t cry. My form is nothing more than an illusion.”

”Yes, an illusion but so beautiful.”

“Benjamín, I want you to bury my body next to your father’s. Under the same stone.”

“I promise I will.”

“Finally I know peace. How marvelous, how marvelous, how mar—”

And she expired sweetly. Jaime found her smiling in the arms of his brother, who kissed her with devotion. He attempted to come close, but Benjamín made a violent gesture of rejection.

“Get out of here. Her death is mine. I will bury her. You never did anything for her. You were born an orphan with no father or mother. You aren’t even my brother.”

Jaime said nothing. He’d tortured Benjamín when they were small by making fun of his weaknesses, so he understood that hatred. He felt compassion for Benjamín: until the end of his days, he would be married to Teresa’s ghost, with no wife, no children, making his language harder and harder to understand until he severed all communication with the world. Poetry would gag him. He left his brother there, clinging to the smiling body, and went to see Recabarren.

He crossed the Mapocho River, which flowed with chocolate-colored water, as if grumbling about the passage of time, stubborn, not wanting to leave the past, denying the city, showing with its mild current the difficulty of passing, going toward itself, dense in its fight not to move forward, trying to turn itself into a liquid lance, seeking immobility without ever finding it, and raging because it had to dissolve in the gluttonous ocean.

He shook his head to stop identifying himself with the river, using it as a mirror, and tried to find number 360 on Andrés Bello Street. It was a modest house with a well-tended garden. A bronze fist at the center of the blue door was the knocker. Jaime began to tremble. Something was telling him that when he stepped over the threshold his life would change. He needed to find a root to draw him out of madness, to drop the anchor in solid ground, to find beings without illusions, building on rock instead of sand, knowing someone honest on this planet full of crooks and vampires. He made only one knock, which tried to be discreet but sounded like a pistol shot.

An amiable woman with intelligent eyes opened the door: Her hair was cut short like a man’s, and her face was mature but without wrinkles. She wore no makeup. Her goodness was clearly the result of her tenacious, direct spirit, which had abandoned the mirages of seduction. Even though everything about her was feminine, the narrowness of her hips showed she’d never had a child.

“What do you want?”

“I’m Jaime Jodorowsky. Mr. Recabarren offered me a job.”

“Ah, the young man who speaks Russian! Luis Emilio has already told me about it. Come in. I’m his companion, Teresa.”

Teresa! This woman had the same name as his mother. He’d just lost one, and the magic of chance was giving him another, perhaps better, as if the first had been the rough stone uncarved and this one the geometric form, realized. He knew he was going to love her, without sex, without demands, with an unlimited admiration. All he needed was to see her this way, so complete, to take her as a model for all women. She hadn’t said she was the “wife” of the leader, but his “companion.” This woman could never accept anything other than love and political ideals to unite her to her man. Marriage for her had to be one more farce in the capitalist system. The house seemed as clean as a warship. The furniture was solid and in the strictly necessary quantity. There were no pictures on the walls, no adornments. Nor were there any crucifixes or other religious images. But covering the entire ceiling of the living room was a portrait of Lenin painted in tempera.

“You can move in here.”

She gave him a room with a narrow bed, a chair, a dresser, a bathroom, and a pitcher full of water.

“I’m going to serve bean soup, bread and butter, and coffee. After you eat, you can begin to put the books in order. They’re still in boxes. What with all these sad events, we haven’t had time to unpack them.”

Was she referring to the betrayal involved in the way the government of Alessandri thanked the people for the support they’d given him? Five hundred miners murdered in the San Gregorio nitrate mine, coal miners shot by the police in Curanilahue, demonstrations broken up by beatings, massacres of workers in El Zanjón de la Aguada, women fired for holding a meeting in Santiago at the site of the O’Higgins monument, peasants from the La Tranquilla ranch in Petorca murdered? The denial of the right to gather, jailings, deportations, torture… Or was she talking about the internal squabbles that broke out immediately after the founding of the Communist Party?

Jaime ate with a good appetite, washed his dishes and silverware in the kitchen sink, and opened the boxes. He was so excited to touch the books that formed Recabarren’s spirit that he forgot his internal vigilance, which the Rabbi took advantage of by appropriating his personality. What the Rabbi loved above all things was books. Under Teresa’s astonished eyes, he organized the books, capturing the essence of their contents in two or three pages, while emitting exclamations of pleasure in Yiddish.

He separated literature from pure philosophy and gave a preferential place to political texts. He put poetry on the highest shelf. He did not order the books alphabetically but by theme, not concerned in the slightest about which language they were written in. He understood everything. He read paragraphs in Russian, Italian, German, and French. Also in Spanish.

Each new idea filled his mouth with saliva, as if he were sampling an exquisite dish. For the pleasure of feeling the miraculous structure of a sentence, he recited it, giving musical intonations. He sang the books, or rather, he stored them in his mind, whistling their rhythms. He fluttered about with the open books in his hands, looking like a bird.

“The songs of my language have eyes and feet, eyes and feet, muscles, soul, sensations, the grandeur of heroes, and small, modest customs. Mmm… Touch her body, touch her body, and your miserable fingers will bleed! Great poet! Oy vey! The signs by which the gods revealed themselves were often very simple: the noise of the sacred oak’s leaves, the whisper of a fountain, the sound of a bronze cup caressed by the wind. This aesthetic isn’t bad. God appears, man is nullified: and the greater divinity becomes, the more miserable humanity becomes. Ase méne dermante zir in toite! When you think about death, it’s because you aren’t sure about life. These anarchists who grind up God so much make holy sausages.”

Making an effort so intense that it used up his energy and he had to lie down for a few hours in bed, Jaime recovered control of his mind. Teresa, making no comments, brought him a glass of hot milk and covered him with a wool poncho.

“Sleep in peace. My companion Recabarren will be here at ten tonight. We’ll dine together.”

The crowing of a rooster woke him. A soft, reddish light entered through the window. The glass that was on the floor next to the bed projected a long shadow that reached the shoes of Luis Emilio Recabarren.

“Last night you were sleeping so soundly that we didn’t want to interrupt. Around here, we get up early. Come have breakfast with us.”

Teresa served café con leche, highly sugared, and a little basket of sweet rolls. She offered them fried eggs and ham with slices of fresh tomato. Jaime, timid, ashamed at the Rabbi’s invasion, could say nothing. Recabarren calmly read his workers paper. He folded it carefully, put it in his pocket, and brusquely said, “Well, Don Jaime, what are you waiting for in order to join the Party?”

My father choked up, spit out some crumbs, and answered without thinking, “If you accept me, it will be a great honor to do so right now.”

Recabarren’s face opened into a glowing smile. He dug around in a drawer in his desk and pulled out a small red identification book. “We’ll have to find you a name. Because of all the persecution, every comrade signs in with a pseudonym. How about a Mapuche name like Lautaro Quinchahual?”

This time the nation was indeed opening a door for him, not through a hook from which he’d be hung by the hair, not through the hallucinations of a plant, not through the implacable womb of a grave, not through a stolen cross or the anonymous darkness of a gorilla suit. He was being baptized a second time, causing him to be born in a homeland accepting him as a native son, granting him a brotherly people. An official membership card for the Communist Party, signed and sealed by an admirable being, someone who saw the splendorous reality beneath obscure dreams!

“Comrade Quinchahual, I want you to know that the red on this membership card is not the red of violence but of the blood spilled by our martyrs. Today we are few, barely two thousand militants, a small figure if you take into account the total number of people in the working class, but the political importance of a party is not only measured by numbers of members but also by the efficacy with which it is able to broadcast its influence and weigh over society. For that reason, you are going to be very useful to me. Teresa’s told me how you go into a trance and speak myriad languages. I know some Russian and more than a little German. We’ll have to translate Marx, Lenin, and Engels. The degree of illiteracy among the workers is enormous. For centuries, the exploiters have had them buried in ignorance. Better than buying rifles is founding newspapers. Come with me to the press.”

That’s how the new life began. Jaime had finally found the perfect father, almost the antithesis of Alejandro the shoemaker, the mystic, the madman, the universal victim. Recabarren was an atheist saint whose loyalty to the people was solid, so honest that, in this society of thieves, he seemed a fanatical idealist.

To achieve his objective — a happy, free humanity — he’d limited his imagination, his loves, the development of his personality. Dry, austere, focused, more than a man, he was a sword. Every night, after his meager dinner (he didn’t like to eat meat much and didn’t smoke), he reviewed his day out loud, as if it were someone else’s life, and criticized even the slightest weakness, incisively seeking the errors in order to discover a lesson. “Let’s see now, Lautaro. Let’s study what Luis Emilio’s day was worth. He got up fifteen minutes late. Careful! The comrade must not let discipline slip. The mattress is the worst enemy of action!” He recalled every sentence spoken during meetings, the details of the international news, the intimate problems of hundreds of militants. My father saw two aspects in him: one, the impetuous, spontaneous, intense horse; the other, the implacable rider, capable of sacrificing everything, even his own life, to get a just world. Being alongside that man was to be with all workers: “If you look inside me, all you’ll find are other people.”

Two years of intense activity went by. Arturo Alessandri did not carry out his program. For Recabarren, the president was a puppet of the oligarchy, playing at being an impotent revolutionary in order to trick the proletariat and slow its social evolution.

“This is a very well-organized comedy. The opposition Congress keeps the reforms proposed by the government from materializing. The workers think their scarecrow president will get them better days. Meanwhile, there are repressions, firings, and massacres. Today the president and the parliament accuse each other of being responsible. The conservatives sing arias charged with noisy words: ‘dictatorial intentions,’ ‘administrative corruption,’ ‘incompetence.’ Tomorrow, instead of resolving the crisis, his Offended Excellency will resign. A drumroll and a triumphant march, please: the military will arrive. Applause from the ignorant public. The oligarchy will accept superficial changes and will pretend to be docile in the face of what’s going on because the warrior heroes, students of Mussolini, will be nothing more than their lackeys. Militarism, Comrade Quinchahual, is the implacable enemy of the independent and revolutionary workers movement.”

Jaime translated articles, printed and sold newspapers, helped foment strikes, was persecuted and beaten. He observed how Recabarren faced up to a myriad forms of violence, insidious calumnies, and attacks of all kinds, suffering defeats, winning victories, passing through betrayals and desertions, feeling his efforts were compensated for by the loyalty and affection conferred on him by the workers.

He always tried to coordinate his actions with the teaching of Lenin, “the genius of theory.” At the end of the year, Recabarren announced he was going to make a trip to Russia, where he would stay for several months. Teresa and Jaime saw him off in Valparaíso. The man was very excited. Finally he would see with his own eyes a nation that had completely rooted out the exploiting regime. And possibly, in the meeting of the Congress of the Third International, he might speak to Comrade Lenin and shake his hand.

“You know, Quinchahual, that we love you as if you were our own son. Protect my companion. The enemy can always deliver tricky blows, and it’s better to prevent than to cure.”

Teresa was so discreet she seemed a shadow. She never made even the slightest noise. She was the only person my father ever knew whose footsteps made no sound. She slipped around like a ship in a tranquil lake. Around her, beings and things put themselves in order. She would step out into the garden and, very quietly, would stretch out her hand to offer a slice of pound cake that only she knew how to bake. Soon flocks of sparrows would come to flutter around her body, pecking at the spongy mass and sometimes perching on her shoulders and head.

If another person approached, they would flee in nervous confusion. My father stood still for two hours in the garden with a slice of Teresa’s pound cake in his hand, but not a single bird came near. But no sooner did the woman come out and put her hand on his arm, than a cloud of tiny birds surrounded him. If she released his elbow, they flew away.

During those long days when he missed the presence of his master, Jaime decided to find a lover to kill his nostalgia. The only female member of his cell supplied with sufficient breasts and backside, Sofía Lam, was a lesbian and long-suffering. She had three or four scars on each wrist, the result of failed suicides caused by married women, who when push came to shove decided not to abandon their husbands. Her long, plump, and flexible body excited him, but her face, with its large mouth and tiny nose, round eyes and sagging ears, seemed as ugly to him as a Pekingese pup.

Nevertheless, he thought, “It doesn’t matter; I can have sex with her in the dark, or on my back, or with her skirt pushed up to cover her face. The bad thing is she always wears trousers.”

One night, when the meeting was over, he invited her to have coffee, to see what possibilities there might be to found a new newspaper. They chatted for a few minutes, and then suddenly he asked her out of the blue, “You’re a virgin, correct?”

“Not a virgin, though my hymen is intact.”

“Would you like to have it broken?”

“With a man? Men disgust me.”

“How do you know, if you’ve never tried a man?”

“Men are sticky. Full of vanity. When they penetrate, they insult.”

“Do I? Do I make you vomit?”

“I never thought about you in that way. You’re discreet. Don’t spoil things.”

“Now, are we or are we not revolutionaries, comrade? Why do you limit yourself so much? You should yield to noble experiments! You might not change, but you would certainly be enriched! Let me take you in my arms, and just see what you feel.”

“All right, but don’t get mad if I find you repugnant. I’ll be frank.”

“Exactly what I’d expect you to be.”

Jaime approached her bit by bit, with the slowness of a dream. He made his spirit neutral and did not embrace her the way a man embraces a woman but the way one person embraces another. He pressed his body to hers, taking the care of not applying any pressure that might be interpreted as overpowering or even as a sexual advance. He offered his physical company, nothing more.

“How strange, Lautaro! Contact with you doesn’t bother me. You’re the first man to have that effect on me.”

“Well then, Sofía. Let me suggest the following: with no commitment of any kind, I can free you of your hymen. You should take it as a simple surgical procedure. We won’t mix in desire or feelings. I assure you I will be objective. Nothing will upset you. After, you will be able to move with much more ease.”

“Where and when?”

“I have to prepare the ‘medical’ material. I’ll await you tomorrow night in Recabarren’s house. I have a separate room there, so no one will bother us.”

He bought prophylactics, rubber gloves, a surgical mask and cap. He put the bed up against the wall and the desk at the center of the room covered with a sheet. He placed the lamp at the foot of the bed so the “operating table” would be bathed in light. When Sofía whistled to him from the street, he first sprinkled a bit of ether and alcohol on the floor so the place would smell like a hospital. Then he let her in and ushered her into his room without saying a word. He washed his hands under her eye, making lots of foam with the soap. Then he dried them and powdered them with talcum powder. He put on the cap and gloves, then he covered his face with the mask.

“Get into bed here, naked.”

The girl stripped immediately, with no sensuality, and stretched out on her back, inert, on the desk. Jaime moistened her pubis with warm water, soaped it up, and began to shave the brownish stain. She did not complain. He disinfected the skin on her stomach and breasts.

“Spread your legs wide, I’m going to proceed to the operation.”

Sofía revealed her sex, a line like a doll’s. Jaime rubbed in some Vaseline, leaned over her and, taking her from below her knees, raised her thighs. Then with extreme care, he pushed his erect sex in and made it touch the hymen.

“The scalpel is in position. Now you’ll have to be brave and push. Don’t think that I’m penetrating you but that you are absorbing me.”

And she, pressing her heels on the sheet-covered surface, applied pressure with her hips toward the root of the phallus. The membrane resisted. Exasperated, she gave a violent push and swallowed the entire membrane. Jaime felt the sticky warmth of the blood running down his testicles. Sofía moaned, smiled, and with inexhaustible energy yielded herself to a series of slips and slides, rubbing her clitoris against my father’s curly pubic hair. The rhythm began to possess her. Subtly, slithering like a snake among rocks, Jaime began to synchronize with her, and then, suddenly, both were enmeshed in a furious series of hip-thrusts that ended when Sofía’s body contracted until it seemed made of stone and she emitted a hoarse howl. Jaime removed the prophylactic full of semen and, showing it to her, said with affected coldness, “The operation is over. You can get dressed, thank the surgeon, and go home.”

He sent her on her way without taking off the gloves and mask. The comrade walked to the Mapocho River, picked up a stone on the shore, and with all her strength threw it at the moon, shouting at it, “You old bitch!”

At the outset of 1923, Recabarren returned. A mob of fans went to greet him in Valparaíso. He responded to the applause with modest gestures of thankfulness. On the train, he requested a private compartment and locked himself in with Teresa and Jaime. His smile vanished, and a profound sorrow appeared on his face. He fixed his eyes on those of his companion and, mute, for the entire trip simply stared at her. Teresa, like a blotter, absorbed his sadness. The tears, slipping down her cheeks, fell onto her bosom. On her red organdy dress, a dark stain appeared. When they reached Santiago, she hid that moist tarantula with a package.

The master slept for two whole days. When he awoke, and without even having breakfast, he began to write a pamphlet to report the principle traits of the transformation taking place in Russia. A reddish scale fell onto his papers. He looked up at the ceiling. Because of the humidity, the portrait of Lenin was peeling.

Recabarren said to my father, “It may be that reality is not as we dream it, Lautaro. Nevertheless, sometimes our dreams are what creates reality. It is of vital importance that Russia continue being a socialist nation for the sake of the workers movement all over the world. What I saw, or what might have been able to see, you shall read in these lines: The Russia of Workers and Peasants. I ask that you always place your confidence in me. Take Teresa as an example. She realizes I don’t want to talk for a while, so she remains silent. Stop asking yourself why I’m sad and do the same thing.”

And silence entered the house, like a translucent ghost and filled the rooms with absence. Freed from the oppression of human voices, noises took control of the space. The act of eating — chewing food, the cracking of chicken bones, the bubbling of saliva, the snapping of tongues, the dense act of digestion, the intestinal rumbling — all of that became a symphony. That muteness threw light and shadow into high relief, opened the way to scents that came from the garden and the kitchen to flutter in the dining room like long-legged birds. It erased the bodies, encrusting them in their absence in the chairs.

One morning, when the rooster was crowing, Recabarren woke him by depositing on his legs a large package wrapped in shiny paper. In his left hand, he held a heavy suitcase.

“We’re going on a trip, comrade. I have to take advantage of my position as a member of Congress; they will not dare to kill me. We’re going on a tour of Tarapacá and Antofagasta. We’re going to distribute propaganda translated by you, along with my pamphlet on Russia. It is our political obligation to elevate the low ideological level of the Party directors and militants.”

Wearing trousers of ordinary cloth, a T-shirt, and an old vest, the representative of the people in the parliament took a third-class seat on the Longitudinal and, accompanied by Jaime and Sofía, who joined them as they left the house, he left for the north, subjecting himself to the discomforts of the trip, the heat, the flies, the dust, the anxieties. The lesbian had fallen in love with my father. Even though he rejected her saying, “That is not our contract, comrade. I was only your doctor. I don’t want you to flood me with filthy feelings,” she slept every night on a bench just outside the house, contenting herself with spying on Jaime’s venerated shadow moving behind the curtains.

In Zapiga, the police, alerted by some unknown informer, forced them off the train and made them sleep out in the open, next to the door of the station, all to keep them from visiting the office of the nitrate mine there. Down from the mountains blew a wind so freezing that Recabarren began to tremble as his fingers turned blue. To warm him, Jaime embraced him chest-to-chest, while Sofía warmed his back. That way they managed to withstand the cold for a few hours. But then they all began to tremble. A cavernous, convulsive cough shook the master’s body. His comrades, much younger and therefore much less affected, began to rub him down from head to foot, putting all their energy into the massage.

When the attack passed, Recabarren said to them, “Don’t worry so much, children. I’ve withstood worse things — beatings, torture, forced marches, and hunger. No physical ill can bring me down. And it won’t be my age that conquers me. Let’s walk to the mine. We’ll sleep on foot.”

They divided up the heavy propaganda and advanced like sleepwalkers pursued by an enormous moon. Recabarren was muttering a speech to the dunes, taking them for Party militants:

“It’s insane to use capital with no other goal than increasing your amount of capital, comrades. It only leads to the poisoning of the planet and the death of humanity. The solutions offered within society as it is are transitory and fictitious. We should… ”

The miners received them with profound emotion; seeing them walk toward them, a National Deputy on the point of death, covered by the dust of the road, almost unable to speak because his throat was so swollen, his tongue dry, and his lips split, was something like a miracle. Forgetting Marxist atheism, they fell to their knees and began to pray before him as if he were a saint. Furious, Jaime interrupted them:

“Leave off these superstitions, comrades. Don Luis Emilio is a man just like you. Instead of prayers, give us a mattress to sleep on.”

Recabarren protested, “None of that. There is no time to lose. First we’ll do our duty, then we’ll rest. Gather the militants and fellow travelers in the gymnasium during their lunch break. We have pamphlets of the highest importance that must be distributed.”

Even though he’d walked so far without sleeping, Recabarren spoke with overflowing enthusiasm on the subject “Something of What I’ve Seen in Moscow.” When the siren sounded, calling the workers back, he rushed to finish his speech:

“Workers in Russia have in their hands the strength of political and economic power. There is no one in the world who can strip the people of that power they’ve already conquered. The expropriation of the exploiters is complete. Never again will a thieving, tyrannical regime of the kind we put up with in Chile return to that society.”

The workers were able to lend them a school where they slept a siesta that lasted until the next morning. Recabarren used the principal’s office, while Jaime and Sofía slept in a classroom.

Jaime was dreaming that a panther was biting his skull without hurting him, in the way cats play with mice, when Sofía woke him, naked, straddling him and trying to swallow his penis in her sex.

“You are raping me, Comrade Lam. That’s not right.”

“Things belong to the person who needs them. Go back to sleep, Comrade Lautaro. I’ll do all the work. Your instrument has been expropriated.”

“But… ”

“Shut up. Don’t distract me. I have almost no feeling, and it takes a lot of work to have an orgasm. Let me concentrate.”

And she began to move with deep and regular moist kisses that captured him to the root. Jaime opened his eyes wide and looked at her face, hoping that her resemblance to a Pekingese would deflate his erection. But her hard breasts and abundant backside added to the woman’s energy as she pumped up and down on the axis, giving tail switches like a hungry shark, passing from moans to roars, and ending by vomiting out a string of obscenities that would make a saloon drunk blush. It all kept him erect. Amid all this brawling, he tried to say, “Remember, comrade, you are a lesbian.”

But a sucking kiss covered his mouth and absorbed his entire tongue, obviating such an important revelation. His will began to weaken, and the vital liquid began to boil. He was chilled by a strange object that began to work its way into his anus. The comrade was trying to give a humility lesson to his manly pride by introducing a rubber phallus to his sanctum sanctorum.

“Here, there is neither masculine nor feminine, my dear. Let’s be like snails; let’s penetrate each other and simultaneously allow ourselves to be possessed. Equality is born from love.”

In a rage, Jaime tried to push her off, but it was then he realized his wrists were tied with a length of chain. Sofia, with insane strength, immobilized his legs and, despite his groaning, begging, and protesting, penetrated his anus with the thick object. To his shame, all that promiscuity brought him closer to explosion.

“That’s it, that’s it, my androgyne! Come on, give me your syrup! We’re going to make a champion child!”

Desperate, Jaime broke his chains, gave a leap backward, shook off the vampire, fell on top of the propaganda, and ejaculated onto “The Left Wing, an Infantile Sickness of Communism,” translated from the selected works of Lenin. He pulled out the rubber phallus and in disgust threw it at Sofía’s head. He hit her right in the center of her forehead, raising a lump that looked like a bite from a mountain flea.

“The flies have flooded your head, comrade. Too much of a good thing is no good. Your motto ought to be ‘Praise Marx but pass the Lautaro.’ I’ll be a father some day. I feel in my balls a spirit asking me to engender it, but I’ll deposit my seed in the uterus of a woman who shines like the planet Venus, not in a dyke like you.”

Sofía Lam roared out, slamming the door so hard that three tiles fell off the roof. Then, muttering insults, while at the same time slicing the air with a long, sharp stone, cutting off invisible penises, she headed for the coast, entering the immense pampa. I can’t say that I breathed a sigh of relief, because at that time I had no lungs, but I did swing around in joy because there was no way I wanted that woman as a mother.

But I didn’t view her as severely as Jaime did, and I thought his way of cutting her off was exaggerated, this sticking the label “dyke” on her. It was denigrating. She was no hypocrite and had obeyed her instincts without opposing them with prejudices or fears. Her authenticity deserved a more courteous separation, but— and this is what horrified me — when I was on the point of landing in her ovaries, I saw that they were already inhabited by three spirits ready to pass through the frustration of miscarriage. They need to be engendered, to accumulate a few months of hope and only then receive the lesson of failure. They were three prophets wanting to view the promised land from a distance without entering it. Souls that in previous, egoistic lives did not know how to sacrifice themselves to themselves.

Without Sofía, my father and Recabarren continued their travels to Iquique. The people received Recabarren like a hero, and a public event was organized in Plaza Condell. When the leader, standing in the kiosk, was giving his speech, the shout Long Live Chile! Death to Communism! rang out and several shots came from the public. One bullet left a red line on the speaker’s cheek. The workers dove to the ground to avoid the shots.

Recabarren, unperturbed, remained standing and speaking. Five young fascists wearing military shirts, boots, and riding trousers tried to scare the audience. Jaime detached the sickle from the red screen used for decoration and, scrambling around the flattened bodies, went up to the aggressors. One of them, fired up with the power his pistol gave him, tried to empty it at Recabarren’s head. Jaime jumped like a cat and, still in the air, cut off the man’s hand. A steaming spurt poured out of the stump all over those on the ground. Never fearing the bullets, my father ran toward the other fascists, but they, scared out of their wits, fled, carrying their mutilated comrade who never stopped screaming.

Jaime picked up the hand that still held the pistol and placed it on the table behind which Recabarren was standing. He interrupted his speech, removed the pistol from the stiffened fingers, and pointed it at the workers. They ducked their heads in shame.

“Comrades, you have to learn to give your lives so you can make a living as you should. No one is separated. We are a group, not individuals. Individuals are mortal, groups are eternal. When we stop fearing death, the gods fall off their pedestals. They tried to stop me from speaking with bullets, and all they achieved is that their shots turned into my words. Each one said Freedom!”

An ovation exploded, and in one voice they sang “The International” at the top of their lungs. Then Sofía Lam appeared, falling down drunk, hugging a prostitute dressed in red:

“Bastards! This long-suffering woman has more balls than all of you, poor he-men who know how to sing silly songs with the voice of a hot burro, but you abandon your leader when a rich boy starts shooting!”

She tore her Communist Party membership card to pieces.

“I’m leaving the Revolution for prostitution, that’s my song!” And she fell into the arms of her lover, who picked her up like a baby and carried her off to the bars at the port. Paying no attention, the demonstrators finished singing the anthem, and to keep Recabarren and Jaime from being beaten by the police, who most certainly would be waiting for them at the train station, they gave them two mules and a guide who led them through the hills to Antofagasta. They took the Longitudinal and returned to Santiago. Before they went in, the master passed the revolver wrapped in a handkerchief to Jaime, saying, “Lautaro, you keep it so Teresa doesn’t see it. Always keep it clean and loaded. You never know.”

The portrait of Lenin went on peeling. By now it no longer had a face. During their silent meals, from time to time they heard the small sounds of the paint hitting the oilcloth table cover. When, in January 1924, the news came from Russia of the death of the great revolutionary, all that was left of the portrait was a white stain, rather like a ghost. Recabarren, without showing his emotions, went to the chamber, delivered a verbal portrait of Lenin, and asked that a condolence telegram be sent to Moscow. His proposal was rejected.

That night, back at home, Recabarren did not eat. He was sitting in the garden until 3:00 a.m. Teresa, always like a ship slicing through water, brought him hot tea every half hour. When the eighth cup came, the man broke his silence:

“Don’t sacrifice yourself, Teresa, go to bed. You listen to my silences as if they were screams. Do I have to explain what’s wrong with me? You know that ever since I was a boy I’ve given my life to the people. I’m not even fifty, but people call me ‘the old man.’ I’m no dreamer; I’ve only asked for what is right. It’s not crazy to demand an end to war and the exploitation of man by man. Those who deny that are the ones who live outside reality, giving the orders, massacring innocents to preserve their power, making themselves owners of the Earth’s riches, exacerbating consumption, leaving the workers hungry. It’s insane! I never should have gone to Russia. I saw things. Errors I don’t want to remember. Lenin died because he could not go on living that way. Now, Comrade Stalin… terrible… Well… Don’t make me speak, woman. I no longer know what man is.”

“We don’t know what man is when he’s asleep, Luis Emilio. The man who is awake is sublime. If you don’t believe me, just look at yourself.”

They embraced tenderly. He rested his head on Teresa’s strict bosom and, without making a sound and with his jaws clenched, dominated the weeping that shook his shoulders. Jaime, hidden by the curtain, heard everything from his window, listening avidly to his master’s words, and felt ashamed to be spying on such an intimate scene. He stepped away, went to look at himself in the mirror, and gave himself a couple of good slaps.

In March, the master’s term as deputy was up. He presented himself for reelection but did not make serious efforts. He didn’t get enough votes. In September, a contingent of military men invaded the Senate to express their annoyance, demanding a political and administrative purification. Parliament approved the petitions presented to it. Arturo Alessandri, alleging he’d lost control of power, resigned and left the country. Exactly as Recabarren had predicted! That same month, a military junta met intent on dissolving Congress and convoking an assembly to draft a new constitution. Public opinion applauded enthusiastically, and the conservatives were obsequious and docile as events unfolded. Exactly as Recabarren had predicted!

The master was tired when he came home from the Party meeting. He handed Jaime some money and asked him to buy some pisco. My father returned with three bottles. It was the first time Recabarren expressed a desire to drink. Taciturn, they sat down under the huge white ghost. There was a liter for each of them. Gulping it down, the master began to empty his bottle. My father and Teresa copied him. Little by little they lost equilibrium and began to sweat.

The leader drank the last drops and began to guffaw. Teresa tried to smile, but her face was petrified. She put her head under her arm, imitating a hen, and began to snore, sitting in that odd position.

“The Lion of Tarapacá turned out to be sterile, Lautaro. His reactionary, anti-labor government has been replaced by a junta of generals who are even more reactionary. What a charade! They make promises to the people that go from the human to the divine only so the workers will bend their backs and keep on wearing the yoke. We’re on our way to a criminal dictatorship, here and in Russia. All demagogues. Shut up! There’s no more pisco?”

Jaime passed him the quarter liter he had left. The master finished in one swallow.

“Would you like to know, Quinchahual, how some young comrades responded because I suggested that believing that the proletariat alone, through its own efforts and a great struggle, could establish a Workers Government was an infantile idea? They shouted that I was foolish to think myself owner and master of the Party, that I behaved like an absolute monarch fencing in his servants. I was treated like a rat, and one militant dared to spit in my face! Can you believe it, Lautaro? Within the bosom of the Party there are fights and internecine struggles provoked by those sleeping men. Someday someone has to wake up! Go get the gun.”

“But… ”

“Obey your father!”

Overwhelmed by Recabarren’s will — he seemed to have aged a century — Jaime fetched the pistol.

“Let no one say that what I am going to do is the result of alcohol. Let’s wait until we’re sober.”

The master took a notebook out of a drawer and leafed through it. It was covered with his tiny, tortured handwriting.

“These are the memories of my life. Here is what I really saw in Russia, what I think of Lenin and of the future that awaits us if things don’t change.”

He put the notebook in a metal tray and set fire to it. The rooster began to crow. Teresa awoke and saw the pistol. She dug through the ashes trying to find a legible fragment. The ashes flew around the dining room like a flock of nocturnal butterflies. She said, with infinite dignity, “Good-bye, Luis Emilio. You know what I feel for you. I’ll never forget you.”

Recabarren brought the pistol to his head and squeezed the trigger. He fell over with a red rose on his temple.

The government didn’t dare forbid the funeral procession that would pass on Sunday through the center of the city to the General Cemetery. The coffin, covered with a red flag, was followed by a multitude of workers who filled the streets like a slow, silent, incredibly long river. The union banners paraded with a black ribbon on top of the letters embroidered in the velvet. Delegations of miners, maritime workers, men from the copper and coal mines, peasants, students, railroad men, bricklayers, bakers, and, at the head of the parade, guiding the coffin with a firm step, Teresa. Dressed in workers clothes, she glanced with pride toward the windows of the elegant houses where groups of people gathered to look out.

A barricade of one hundred policemen, armed with rifles and wearing metal helmets, stopped the procession. The human river paused. The master’s companion, standing next to the coffin, sang with such intensity that her voice could be heard blocks away:

Without fear of sanctions

I bid farewell to the subversive man

Who has known a thousand prisons

Without committing any crime.

Thousands of voices united in the melody and, repeating the refrain, the marchers once again moved forward. The soldiers didn’t dare fire and disappeared as if by magic. In the cemetery plaza, every worker became an orator. Thousands of inflammatory speeches launched in spurts, joined in a chaotic chorus, like the sound of a waterfall, to bid good-bye to Recabarren’s remains. As those who were hungry and tired gave up, others took their place. At 6:00 p.m., the ceremony was finished, and the body was left in the hands of the cemetery staff so that on Monday, the gravediggers could place the coffin in the family crypt.

The next morning, very early, the sun barely giving a yellowish tinge to the cloudy sky, the gravediggers, asleep on their feet, dissimulating with grumbles the ill effects of alcohol, opened the gates to let Teresa, Jaime, and Sofía Lam (who turned up riding a man’s bicycle and wearing a sailor suit) enter. The three marched silently behind the four drunken gravediggers who carried the coffin on their shoulders, zigzagging and tripping amid muttered curses. The iron crypt that belonged to Recabarren’s grandfather was open. A dark-skinned boy, about twenty-five years old, with short, thick legs; a wide, hairy chest; calloused hands; big teeth; and straight black hair, was waiting for them, leaning on the aluminum cross.

“Yesterday I hid here, Doña Teresa. I forced open the doors and spent the night here, trying to join my family. I am Elías Recabarren.”

Surprised, Teresa set aside her painful silence. “You are Elías? Luis Emilio’s son?”

“Yes, ma’am. I came because… ”

“Let’s get on with the ceremony. Later you can tell us everything.”

The gravediggers tossed the coffin into a niche as if it were a sack of potatoes. The jolt produced a bell-like sound in the metal crypt. They screwed the cover back on, whispering obscene jokes, and stretched out their right hands in hopes of a tip. Teresa gave each one money. Grumbling, even though the amount was correct, they demanded more. Jaime kicked them out. They went off to sit on a tomb emblazoned with a winged woman playing a trumpet, where they passed around a bottle of wine as they took turns caressing the statue’s marble hips.

At the coffee shop, The Last Good-bye, across the street from the cemetery, Teresa, Jaime, Sofía, and Recabarren’s son drank their sodas in silence, not knowing how to begin the conversation. Sofía slapped the table, trying to kill a fly. The others emerged from their immobility to keep the glasses from spilling over, and attention focused on the girl.

“I came today to pay intimate homage to the master and to express my repentance. For obscure sexual motives, I betrayed the most sacred thing, the Party. My vagina and clitoris weighed more heavily than the pain of the exploited working class. Shame made me discover my vocation: I am an atheist monk. Count on me for anything. Are we friends, Lautaro?”

“Friends, Sofía!”

“Now it’s time for me to talk, and I’ll be sincere. About Communism I know nothing. I’ve lived far away from politics, no fault of my own but of my father. As you well know, Doña Teresa, he was married to Fresia Godoy, a maid, my mother, an uneducated woman from the south. Recabarren learned to read quickly, developed his intelligence, found the ideal that would guide his life, went north, and never came near us again. His love for the people made him forget his son. He worried about everyone but me. I grew up humiliated, with no education, in the basement of our bosses. My mother died when I was thirteen. I had no money to bury her decently. She disappeared into a potter’s field. I hated politics, the struggles of the workers, that world that had stolen away my father. I also detested him. He should have come to find me, to teach me what he knew, to give me the chance to prepare the Revolution at his side. He shouldn’t have left me cast aside like a contemptible orphan. I was working for a few days here in Santiago, in a furniture factory. I’m a carpenter. I read the news of his death. I shed not a single tear. To the contrary, I smiled and felt avenged. I asked permission to take a day off, saying I wasn’t well, and I walked downtown intent on getting drunk. It was there the demonstration caught me. That human river following the body of the man who engendered me was pressing against my body, clinging to my skin, to my bones, in order to add me to its flow. I dissolved in the mass, and then, without personality, anonymous, one more cell in the gigantic animal of the people, I felt what everyone else felt, the greatest sadness coupled with an immense gratitude. I admired the honor of a solitary and valiant man who gave everything he had trying to get his compatriots out of poverty. I understood that my hatred was egoistic, and I felt proud to be the son of such a father. When the crowd left the cemetery, I hid so I could sleep in the crypt. Last night I felt no cold even though the walls and floor are iron. Recabarren’s arms were around me. Also, those of my grandfather and great-grandfather. This metal place is a grave for men. In our family, hearts detach from women and immerse themselves in the struggle. That’s the tradition I wish to continue.”

“Elías, what you’re saying is very beautiful, and I’m sure that if there were such a thing as heaven, your father would be happy to hear you. Luis Emilio often asked himself about your fate. We made inquiries, but we never managed to find your whereabouts. Finally, we reached the conclusion that you were dead. From this moment on, our house is your house.”

“Let’s not forget Comrade Lautaro Quinchahual. I too want to continue the work of my master and adoptive father. Give us advice, Teresa.”

“Often, Luis Emilio talked to me about the importance of developing political awareness among the workers. Despite the fact that in the past few months he was crippled by a sadness impossible to explain, he was also very concerned about art. He thought that the best medium to awaken the workers was the theater. He thought about the possibility of forming theater groups of four persons each to travel the country and go to the mines, putting on shows. He wrote several one-act plays. He finished the last one a day before his death. It’s a comic drama for clowns, quite symbolic. If you want to be faithful to the ideal of my companion, I suggest the following: I’ll sell the house, and with that money buy a truck. There are four of us, and we can travel the country putting on his posthumous works!”

A spontaneous and enthusiastic “Agreed!” turned them into traveling actors for several years.

In January of 1925, a movement led by young army officers staged a coup d’état against the junta of conservative generals and brought Arturo Alessandri back to finish his term in office. But it wasn’t really the president who controlled things. All power was concentrated in the minister of war. Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, who on the one hand tried to attract the workers and on the other tried to destroy the workers movement. The new constitution had been approved and left almost all power in the hands of the executive. On June 4, at the La Coruña mine, the police and army massacred more than two thousand miners, women, and children. Discontent grew to such a point that Alessandri had to resign a second time before finishing out his term.

After two years of tug of war with the judiciary, Colonel Ibáñez was elected president, initiating a dictatorial government that brought with it detentions, exiles, disappearances, executions, and the limitation of civil liberties. Luis Emilio Recabarren’s theatrical work began acquiring more and more meaning as these things took place. Teresa, Sofía, Elías, and Jaime slept in the truck, which, chugging and bucking like an angry mule, carried them from one mine to another. The workers to whom the companies gave no entertainment other than the wine from their company stores, filled, with infantile eagerness, the soccer fields transformed into theaters thanks to the stages constructed from tables in the collective dining rooms.

Teresa was no longer the discreet woman who had remained silent for twenty-five years next to her idol. Dressed in trousers and a blue work shirt, she drove the truck through the pampa, overcoming the obstacles along the way by means of her ironclad will. Without her, the truck would have collapsed like an old house. She learned how to change tires and fix flats, to repair the motor, take it apart, put it back together, change parts, and, her face stained with grease, to curse at the mist to make it fade and clear the road. At the end of every performance, it was she who took up the collection. In addition to a bit of money, they were also given some food and a tank of gas. With every change in the government, with every important political event, they reexamined their act. And merely by changing their tones of voice, leaving the text intact, they managed to keep it up to date.

Teresa would announce: “Ladies and gentlemen and children: you are going to witness the grand performance of the International Failure Circus! We shall present on this stage a beast… ”

(And here Elías, dressed as a bureaucrat, would enter and sit on the floor.)

“and an implacable lion tamer… ”

(And here Jaime, dressed as a colonel, would enter dragging a chair and snapping a whip.)

“Let the action begin!”

Lion Tamer: “Come along! Get up on that chair!”

Beast: “Grrr!”

Lion Tamer: “It’s your property!”

Beast: “Yes, it is mine! I sit on it. Few beasts manage to own their own chair. I’m happy!”

Lion Tamer: “Take a look at this chair.”

Beast: “It’s the same as the other.”

Lion Tamer: “Apparently it is, but actually it’s very different. Generations of noble beasts have sat on it. It’s an honor to own it!”

Beast: “I want it for myself!”

Lion Tamer: “Impossible. It belongs to the director of the circus!”

Beast: “I’ll trade the one I have for that one!”

Lion Tamer: “Yours is vulgar.”

Beast: “I’ll give you all my money too!”

Lion Tamer: “You don’t have enough money.”

Beast: “What can I do? I’m ashamed of living on an ordinary chair.”

Lion Tamer: “If you kill the director of the circus, I can get it for you.”

Beast: “I’ll get the chair, but what will you earn?”

Lion Tamer: “I’ll get to direct the circus!”

Beast: “Perfect! I’ll rip his guts out! Let’s go!”

The bureaucrat Elías and Jaime, the colonel, went over to a corner where Sofía, the circus director, dressed as the president of the republic, was standing. Jaime would give her a shove and throw her to the floor. Elías threw himself on her, biting her stomach, pulling out of the vest a long intestine made of rags. With a tricky sleight-of-hand it looked as if he’d eaten it. Teresa, sitting in the audience, would applaud and shout, “Bravo! Great, magnificent, they killed him! Now the circus will work really well!”

Lion Tamer: “Take the second chair. You’ve earned it.”

Beast: “Grrr. It’s delightful to sit in it.”

Lion Tamer: “Even so, your first chair, despite being ordinary, had a warmth the other does not possess.”

Beast: “That’s true. My new chair is cold.”

Lion Tamer: “The first is so agreeable that other beasts have decided to buy it.”

Beast: “Never! It must be mine again!”

Lion Tamer: “But you already have a chair.”

Beast: “I want both of them!”

Lion Tamer: “I can get it for you.”

Beast: “How?”

Lion Tamer: “First, obey me blindly.”

Beast: “Give me orders!”

Lion Tamer: “Fight, shoot cannon, gas them, invade, destroy, massacre!”

Beast: “Grrr! Ready! What next?”

Lion Tamer: “Take the chair you want by force!”

Elías would then leap toward the chair, imitating the attack of a ferocious soldier, and, after liquidating his invisible enemies, would take control of the chair, place it next to the other, and lie down on both with his hands under the nape of his neck.

Beast: “Now I’ve got both! Now I’m happy!”

Lion Tamer: “This place is full of people in chairs. What are your two chairs next to all these? You’ve got to expel the audience so that the entire circus is ours!”

Elías would then leap toward Teresa and hustle her around to drag her off the floor. Then he would return and stand on top of his chairs.

Beast: “We’ve expelled the audience! The circus is ours!”

Lion Tamer: “Stupid beast! You deserve a thousand lashes! Who do you think you are? The circus belongs to me!”

Beast: “Oh dear! Forgive me! You keep the circus. I’ll be happy with my two chairs.”

Lion Tamer: “Why? Have you got two backsides? This chair where generations of noble beasts have sat belongs to the person who gives the orders. I’m taking it back.”

Beast: “Oh, first chair of mine, I’ll find you again. I never should have abandoned you.”

Lion Tamer: “Delusional beast: not even this chair belongs to you. I’ve decided to appropriate it. Animals don’t need to sit down. Stretch out on the ground.”

Beast: “So what are you leaving me?”

Lion Tamer: “Freedom!”

Beast: “Freedom to do what?”

Lion Tamer: “Freedom to eat just enough to stay alive. Freedom to obey me without arguing. Freedom to move around within a square yard. Freedom to receive the blows I might want to give you. Freedom to die for me!”

And Jaime would then take out a rifle and fire at Elías. He would fall down dead with red ink pouring from his mouth. Then my father, in anguish, would lament:

“And now what do I do alone in this enormous circus?”

Teresa would pass around the hat, whispering into the ears of the spectators, “Without a beast, there is no lion tamer.”

Dressed as miners, Elías, Jaime, and Sofía would appear with guitars to sing a cueca. The public would abandon their chairs and start dancing.

At dawn, March 15, 1927, the Communist Party was declared illegal. Radio Mercury transmitted the high-pitched, incisive voice of Carlos Ibáñez:

The definitive moment for settling accounts has come. The malevolent and socially corrosive propaganda of a few professional agitators along with a handful of daring outsiders is no longer acceptable. We must cauterize society above and below. The time has come to break completely the red ties to Moscow. The Communist press will be shut down. All the organs of the Party, beginning with the Central Committee, will be under strong and constant siege by the police. We shall jail hundreds of their militants and leaders, relegate them to the most inhospitable places, submit them to severe torture, and assassinate some of them. After this operation, the nation will be at peace: happy within, and respected abroad.

Teresa removed the hammer and sickle that adorned the hood of the truck and began to paint it black. They went on giving performances without changing a thing, but with other costumes, more innocent in appearance. Elías would wear a tiger suit. Jaime would exchange his colonel’s uniform for a blue lion tamer’s costume, and Sofía, the circus director, would wear a tuxedo. Teresa would introduce the show dressed as a clown.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eleodoro Astudillo, the gravedigger, also came:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shoske said to Moisés, “Your wife can’t stand seeing her. She reminds her of past suffering. If you don’t remove Sara Felicidad from her presence, my sister will die.”

They flew a rabbi in from Santiago and had my parents marry. At the same time, they took advantage of the fact to bless the betrothals of Jacobo the First with Raquel the First, Jacobo the Second with Raquel the Second, and Jacobo the Third with Raquel the Third. They gave the newlyweds a truckload of merchandise, a good amount of money, and the keys to the store they’d rented for them on the central street of Tocopilla, 140 miles away. A good excuse never to see them again.

The store was called Ukraine House, because Jaime and Sara Felicidad decided to pass themselves off as white Russians to avoid political problems. There, among porcelain dishes, cuckoo clocks, and ladies underwear, I developed until the precise moment I decided to be born: ten in the morning on October 24, 1929, a day known worldwide as “Black Thursday.”

At the same moment, the economic crisis in the United States exploded and extended all over the planet. Banks closed one after the other, and industry was paralyzed. Chile was the nation hardest hit by the catastrophe. Nitrate mines closed down, and a fourth of the population fell into indigence. The Six W’s shut down and Ukraine House, for lack of customers, did so as well. My parents, with me in their arms, suddenly found themselves penniless, sleeping on the beach and having to stand in line outside the municipal office along with miners and their families to get their free dish of soup.

“Great! We’ve touched bottom! Finally, we’ve found our land. Now we are citizens of misery. We lost hope and because of that we lost fear. All that’s left for us is to rise. We shall baptize our son with the name Alejandro, the name of my father and your father. He is the light we shall burn at the altar. Hoping that one day, forgetting himself and living for the sake of others, he will come to awareness in order to serve in an impersonal form, making known the first word, the one that is the origin of all languages: ‘Thanks.’ So that toward him converge the phosphorescent screams of the enchanted frogs awaiting the kiss that will transform them into Buddha. So that he will be the illuminated fruit that will transform our obscure tree into a cathedral lighthouse.”

While my mother sang a lullaby, feeding me at her breast, Jaime, blowing into my nose, transmitted the Rabbi to me. Happy to find himself in a brain that offered him no resistance, he began to enumerate his new commandments:

You will not kill death. You will not covet the wife of the widower, and you will be faithful to your ghost. You shall not steal that which belongs to you nor speak with the mouth of your fellow man. You will not take the name of God in vain because all names are He. You will sanctify your workdays and transform your parents into shoes. You will make of the Earth an altar where the sheep sing and where finally you will bless yourself.