Alejandro Jodorowsky - Where the Bird Sings Best

Alejandro Prullansky, without knowing it, had been waiting for this Jewish woman his entire life. Even though he had no experience, even though he had known only the love of men, he knew how to possess her, leading her many times to a state of frenzy on the flower-patterned sofa. Exhausted, he fell asleep in her arms. Jashe, observing his handsome, white foreskin with a tenderness that swelled in her like a river, and knowing she was a prisoner of the Law, ran away without leaving her name or address.

Luckily for the lovebirds, the success of the Imperial Ballet extended the season for several more weeks. My grandfather — first dancer, gold-medal recipient in every competition — was still there, circles under his eyes, desperate, waiting for her. Then Salomón, Jashe’s father, deposited her, pregnant, without luggage or money, right in front of the Municipal Theater. The traitor had been expelled from the village and symbolically buried in the cemetery, for which they filled a coffin with her clothes and personal possessions. Now for a week her family would toss ash on their heads, sit on the floor, and, with torn clothing, drink chicken soup. She would be wept over as if she were really dead.

Alejandro thanked the icon of the Virgin for such a prodigious gift and married Jashe in an Orthodox church, the bride dressed in white and the groom in black, like any Christian couple. With one difference: the groom wore boots of a gaudy red. When my grandmother asked him why he was wearing such scandalous footwear, she learned that the union of their two souls, which seemed like pure chance, had been in preparation for centuries.

As her husband told her the family saga that led him to wear red boots, Jashe too sought out the roots of her love. Led by the memory of her mother, she traveled through time and journeyed all the way to Spain, before the fatal year 1492, when because of that evil, ambitious, thieving witch, Isabel the Catholic — may she lose all her teeth in hell, all but one so it will ache eternally — Jews who did not accept conversion were expelled. Sara Luz, in the middle of the nineteenth century, listened to her father, Salvador Arcavi, lament his fate and curse the kings of Castile and Aragon every single day for depriving them of paradise.

Yes, Spain, before the marriage of those two anti-Semitic monarchs, before the State Police, before the Inquisition, was a paradise for Jews. Muslims and Christians tolerated them. Within the secret zones of their ghettos, free as never before, they practiced their religion. They sought out new paths to satisfy their thirst for that unreachable God. They entered into the text like virulent lovers, and they made it explode, moving vowels around, going mad over numbers, giving an terrible meaning to every letter. They became visionaries, mad men, magicians. They opened interior doors and got lost in the labyrinths of Creation, making their contact with the Torah a personal adventure, assuming the right to interpret everything as they saw fit.

In those good old days, Salvador Arcavi, the first of a long series of Salvadors — traditionally all his descendants had the same name — though respectful of the Holy Book, decided he was not to going to be a prisoner to its letters. Following the prophecy, Jacob made to his son (“Your hand will be on the neck of your enemy. Your father’s sons will bow down to you. Judah is a young lion.”), he became a lion tamer. His way to draw nearer to God was to study those beasts and to live an itinerant life, giving performances in which his union with his animals surpassed the limits of reality and reached the miraculous. The lions jumped through flaming hoops, balanced on the tight rope, danced on their hind legs, climbed up on one another to form a pyramid, spelled out the name of a spectator by choosing wooden letters, and, the greatest test, accepted within their jaws without hurting it the head of the tamer, then dragged him through the sawdust to draw a six-pointed star.

My ancestor had a simple method for making the beasts love him: he never forced them to do anything, and he made their training into a game. Whenever they wanted to eat, he fed them, and if they decided not to eat, he did not insist. If they wanted to sleep, he let them, and if they were rutting, he let them fornicate without distraction. He adopted the rhythm of the animals with care and tenderness. He let his hair grow into a mane, he ate raw meat, and he slept naked in the cage embracing his lions.

One day he found a Spanish girl, Estrella, who, drunk on his beastly aroma, abandoned the Christian religion and followed him so she could give herself to him, lying supine, whenever the animals went into heat. Cubs were born at the same time as human babies. At times, the woman gave her bosom to the tiny carnivores, while her own children crawled toward the teats of the lioness to slake their thirst.

They forgot Hebrew and used a limited Spanish of only a hundred words. The great cats learned most of those words and in turn taught their trainers an extensive range of growls. When rehearsals or shows ended, after dinner, at midnight, in the intimacy of the great cage, humans and animals would sit face to face to stare fixedly into one another’s eyes. In those moments, the lion was the teacher. It was he who was there, present, concentrating, with no interest in the past or the future, united with totality. In his animal body, the divine essence became palpable. The lion taught the Arcavis about economy of gestures, strength in repose, the pleasure of being alive, authenticity of feeling, obedience of oneself. Finally, seeing the nobility of the beast, his majestic inner solitude, they understood why Jacob compared Judah to a lion.

The Kabbalist rabbis of Toledo understood that a new form of biblical interpretation had been born. In silence, with the greatest respect, they entered the cage protected by the miraculous touch of Salvador’s hands. They meditated, staring into the lion’s eyes. They asked permission to bring their brothers in study, and with them came handsome old Arabs dressed in white and pale Catholic monks with sunken, burning eyes. The Koran, the Torah, and the Gospels were eclipsed by those imposing beasts, capable of standing so still that fireflies fleeing from the cold dawn rested on their warm skin, transforming them into phosphorescent statues.

When the first Salvador Arcavi began to die, he asked not to be buried. Instead, his body should be cut into pieces and fed to his lions. Estrella wanted to do it by herself. After the last morsel of her husband disappeared into the animals’ jaws, she went to the river to wash her reddened hands, undressed, stepped into the water, and let herself be carried off by the current. Her son Salvador kept the show going and soon married a good woman. On their wedding day, he changed her name to Estrella, his mother’s name.

The mystics from the three religions continued meditating opposite the lions. The years passed. The political situation changed. Hordes of fanatics began to burn the ghettos. The mystics stopped visiting. The wagons of the lion tamers passed through cities where converted Jews, sentenced to death by the Inquisition, were burning. The thriving communities became sad streets walked by dark rabbis, as circumspect as shadows.

An inexplicable instinct made the Arcavis go to Valencia. As they drew closer to the city gates, they came upon hundreds of families, guarded by soldiers, marching along the road in file upon melancholy file. They could carry little, just a few packages wrapped in embroidered cloth, nothing more. Why more, in any case? They’d been expelled from the country because they refused to convert, and when they reached the gates, the state police stripped them of most of their treasure. Ah, what a terrible year 1492 was! God was punishing them for wanting to plant roots in a land that wasn’t their own — these people whose mission was to wander and to plant the holy Word in all nations — by giving them thieves as their king and queen.