Alejandro Jodorowsky - Where the Bird Sings Best

“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?”