Alejandro Jodorowsky - Where the Bird Sings Best

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: