Alejandro Jodorowsky - Where the Bird Sings Best

My father choked up, spit out some crumbs, and answered without thinking, “If you accept me, it will be a great honor to do so right now.”

Recabarren’s face opened into a glowing smile. He dug around in a drawer in his desk and pulled out a small red identification book. “We’ll have to find you a name. Because of all the persecution, every comrade signs in with a pseudonym. How about a Mapuche name like Lautaro Quinchahual?”

This time the nation was indeed opening a door for him, not through a hook from which he’d be hung by the hair, not through the hallucinations of a plant, not through the implacable womb of a grave, not through a stolen cross or the anonymous darkness of a gorilla suit. He was being baptized a second time, causing him to be born in a homeland accepting him as a native son, granting him a brotherly people. An official membership card for the Communist Party, signed and sealed by an admirable being, someone who saw the splendorous reality beneath obscure dreams!

“Comrade Quinchahual, I want you to know that the red on this membership card is not the red of violence but of the blood spilled by our martyrs. Today we are few, barely two thousand militants, a small figure if you take into account the total number of people in the working class, but the political importance of a party is not only measured by numbers of members but also by the efficacy with which it is able to broadcast its influence and weigh over society. For that reason, you are going to be very useful to me. Teresa’s told me how you go into a trance and speak myriad languages. I know some Russian and more than a little German. We’ll have to translate Marx, Lenin, and Engels. The degree of illiteracy among the workers is enormous. For centuries, the exploiters have had them buried in ignorance. Better than buying rifles is founding newspapers. Come with me to the press.”

That’s how the new life began. Jaime had finally found the perfect father, almost the antithesis of Alejandro the shoemaker, the mystic, the madman, the universal victim. Recabarren was an atheist saint whose loyalty to the people was solid, so honest that, in this society of thieves, he seemed a fanatical idealist.

To achieve his objective — a happy, free humanity — he’d limited his imagination, his loves, the development of his personality. Dry, austere, focused, more than a man, he was a sword. Every night, after his meager dinner (he didn’t like to eat meat much and didn’t smoke), he reviewed his day out loud, as if it were someone else’s life, and criticized even the slightest weakness, incisively seeking the errors in order to discover a lesson. “Let’s see now, Lautaro. Let’s study what Luis Emilio’s day was worth. He got up fifteen minutes late. Careful! The comrade must not let discipline slip. The mattress is the worst enemy of action!” He recalled every sentence spoken during meetings, the details of the international news, the intimate problems of hundreds of militants. My father saw two aspects in him: one, the impetuous, spontaneous, intense horse; the other, the implacable rider, capable of sacrificing everything, even his own life, to get a just world. Being alongside that man was to be with all workers: “If you look inside me, all you’ll find are other people.”

Two years of intense activity went by. Arturo Alessandri did not carry out his program. For Recabarren, the president was a puppet of the oligarchy, playing at being an impotent revolutionary in order to trick the proletariat and slow its social evolution.

“This is a very well-organized comedy. The opposition Congress keeps the reforms proposed by the government from materializing. The workers think their scarecrow president will get them better days. Meanwhile, there are repressions, firings, and massacres. Today the president and the parliament accuse each other of being responsible. The conservatives sing arias charged with noisy words: ‘dictatorial intentions,’ ‘administrative corruption,’ ‘incompetence.’ Tomorrow, instead of resolving the crisis, his Offended Excellency will resign. A drumroll and a triumphant march, please: the military will arrive. Applause from the ignorant public. The oligarchy will accept superficial changes and will pretend to be docile in the face of what’s going on because the warrior heroes, students of Mussolini, will be nothing more than their lackeys. Militarism, Comrade Quinchahual, is the implacable enemy of the independent and revolutionary workers movement.”

Jaime translated articles, printed and sold newspapers, helped foment strikes, was persecuted and beaten. He observed how Recabarren faced up to a myriad forms of violence, insidious calumnies, and attacks of all kinds, suffering defeats, winning victories, passing through betrayals and desertions, feeling his efforts were compensated for by the loyalty and affection conferred on him by the workers.

He always tried to coordinate his actions with the teaching of Lenin, “the genius of theory.” At the end of the year, Recabarren announced he was going to make a trip to Russia, where he would stay for several months. Teresa and Jaime saw him off in Valparaíso. The man was very excited. Finally he would see with his own eyes a nation that had completely rooted out the exploiting regime. And possibly, in the meeting of the Congress of the Third International, he might speak to Comrade Lenin and shake his hand.

“You know, Quinchahual, that we love you as if you were our own son. Protect my companion. The enemy can always deliver tricky blows, and it’s better to prevent than to cure.”

Teresa was so discreet she seemed a shadow. She never made even the slightest noise. She was the only person my father ever knew whose footsteps made no sound. She slipped around like a ship in a tranquil lake. Around her, beings and things put themselves in order. She would step out into the garden and, very quietly, would stretch out her hand to offer a slice of pound cake that only she knew how to bake. Soon flocks of sparrows would come to flutter around her body, pecking at the spongy mass and sometimes perching on her shoulders and head.

If another person approached, they would flee in nervous confusion. My father stood still for two hours in the garden with a slice of Teresa’s pound cake in his hand, but not a single bird came near. But no sooner did the woman come out and put her hand on his arm, than a cloud of tiny birds surrounded him. If she released his elbow, they flew away.

During those long days when he missed the presence of his master, Jaime decided to find a lover to kill his nostalgia. The only female member of his cell supplied with sufficient breasts and backside, Sofía Lam, was a lesbian and long-suffering. She had three or four scars on each wrist, the result of failed suicides caused by married women, who when push came to shove decided not to abandon their husbands. Her long, plump, and flexible body excited him, but her face, with its large mouth and tiny nose, round eyes and sagging ears, seemed as ugly to him as a Pekingese pup.

Nevertheless, he thought, “It doesn’t matter; I can have sex with her in the dark, or on my back, or with her skirt pushed up to cover her face. The bad thing is she always wears trousers.”

One night, when the meeting was over, he invited her to have coffee, to see what possibilities there might be to found a new newspaper. They chatted for a few minutes, and then suddenly he asked her out of the blue, “You’re a virgin, correct?”

“Not a virgin, though my hymen is intact.”

“Would you like to have it broken?”

“With a man? Men disgust me.”

“How do you know, if you’ve never tried a man?”

“Men are sticky. Full of vanity. When they penetrate, they insult.”

“Do I? Do I make you vomit?”