Alejandro Jodorowsky - Where the Bird Sings Best

“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.