Alejandro Jodorowsky - Where the Bird Sings Best

“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.”