Alejandro Jodorowsky - Where the Bird Sings Best

“I never thought about you in that way. You’re discreet. Don’t spoil things.”

“Now, are we or are we not revolutionaries, comrade? Why do you limit yourself so much? You should yield to noble experiments! You might not change, but you would certainly be enriched! Let me take you in my arms, and just see what you feel.”

“All right, but don’t get mad if I find you repugnant. I’ll be frank.”

“Exactly what I’d expect you to be.”

Jaime approached her bit by bit, with the slowness of a dream. He made his spirit neutral and did not embrace her the way a man embraces a woman but the way one person embraces another. He pressed his body to hers, taking the care of not applying any pressure that might be interpreted as overpowering or even as a sexual advance. He offered his physical company, nothing more.

“How strange, Lautaro! Contact with you doesn’t bother me. You’re the first man to have that effect on me.”

“Well then, Sofía. Let me suggest the following: with no commitment of any kind, I can free you of your hymen. You should take it as a simple surgical procedure. We won’t mix in desire or feelings. I assure you I will be objective. Nothing will upset you. After, you will be able to move with much more ease.”

“Where and when?”

“I have to prepare the ‘medical’ material. I’ll await you tomorrow night in Recabarren’s house. I have a separate room there, so no one will bother us.”

He bought prophylactics, rubber gloves, a surgical mask and cap. He put the bed up against the wall and the desk at the center of the room covered with a sheet. He placed the lamp at the foot of the bed so the “operating table” would be bathed in light. When Sofía whistled to him from the street, he first sprinkled a bit of ether and alcohol on the floor so the place would smell like a hospital. Then he let her in and ushered her into his room without saying a word. He washed his hands under her eye, making lots of foam with the soap. Then he dried them and powdered them with talcum powder. He put on the cap and gloves, then he covered his face with the mask.

“Get into bed here, naked.”

The girl stripped immediately, with no sensuality, and stretched out on her back, inert, on the desk. Jaime moistened her pubis with warm water, soaped it up, and began to shave the brownish stain. She did not complain. He disinfected the skin on her stomach and breasts.

“Spread your legs wide, I’m going to proceed to the operation.”

Sofía revealed her sex, a line like a doll’s. Jaime rubbed in some Vaseline, leaned over her and, taking her from below her knees, raised her thighs. Then with extreme care, he pushed his erect sex in and made it touch the hymen.

“The scalpel is in position. Now you’ll have to be brave and push. Don’t think that I’m penetrating you but that you are absorbing me.”

And she, pressing her heels on the sheet-covered surface, applied pressure with her hips toward the root of the phallus. The membrane resisted. Exasperated, she gave a violent push and swallowed the entire membrane. Jaime felt the sticky warmth of the blood running down his testicles. Sofía moaned, smiled, and with inexhaustible energy yielded herself to a series of slips and slides, rubbing her clitoris against my father’s curly pubic hair. The rhythm began to possess her. Subtly, slithering like a snake among rocks, Jaime began to synchronize with her, and then, suddenly, both were enmeshed in a furious series of hip-thrusts that ended when Sofía’s body contracted until it seemed made of stone and she emitted a hoarse howl. Jaime removed the prophylactic full of semen and, showing it to her, said with affected coldness, “The operation is over. You can get dressed, thank the surgeon, and go home.”

He sent her on her way without taking off the gloves and mask. The comrade walked to the Mapocho River, picked up a stone on the shore, and with all her strength threw it at the moon, shouting at it, “You old bitch!”

At the outset of 1923, Recabarren returned. A mob of fans went to greet him in Valparaíso. He responded to the applause with modest gestures of thankfulness. On the train, he requested a private compartment and locked himself in with Teresa and Jaime. His smile vanished, and a profound sorrow appeared on his face. He fixed his eyes on those of his companion and, mute, for the entire trip simply stared at her. Teresa, like a blotter, absorbed his sadness. The tears, slipping down her cheeks, fell onto her bosom. On her red organdy dress, a dark stain appeared. When they reached Santiago, she hid that moist tarantula with a package.

The master slept for two whole days. When he awoke, and without even having breakfast, he began to write a pamphlet to report the principle traits of the transformation taking place in Russia. A reddish scale fell onto his papers. He looked up at the ceiling. Because of the humidity, the portrait of Lenin was peeling.

Recabarren said to my father, “It may be that reality is not as we dream it, Lautaro. Nevertheless, sometimes our dreams are what creates reality. It is of vital importance that Russia continue being a socialist nation for the sake of the workers movement all over the world. What I saw, or what might have been able to see, you shall read in these lines: The Russia of Workers and Peasants. I ask that you always place your confidence in me. Take Teresa as an example. She realizes I don’t want to talk for a while, so she remains silent. Stop asking yourself why I’m sad and do the same thing.”

And silence entered the house, like a translucent ghost and filled the rooms with absence. Freed from the oppression of human voices, noises took control of the space. The act of eating — chewing food, the cracking of chicken bones, the bubbling of saliva, the snapping of tongues, the dense act of digestion, the intestinal rumbling — all of that became a symphony. That muteness threw light and shadow into high relief, opened the way to scents that came from the garden and the kitchen to flutter in the dining room like long-legged birds. It erased the bodies, encrusting them in their absence in the chairs.

One morning, when the rooster was crowing, Recabarren woke him by depositing on his legs a large package wrapped in shiny paper. In his left hand, he held a heavy suitcase.

“We’re going on a trip, comrade. I have to take advantage of my position as a member of Congress; they will not dare to kill me. We’re going on a tour of Tarapacá and Antofagasta. We’re going to distribute propaganda translated by you, along with my pamphlet on Russia. It is our political obligation to elevate the low ideological level of the Party directors and militants.”

Wearing trousers of ordinary cloth, a T-shirt, and an old vest, the representative of the people in the parliament took a third-class seat on the Longitudinal and, accompanied by Jaime and Sofía, who joined them as they left the house, he left for the north, subjecting himself to the discomforts of the trip, the heat, the flies, the dust, the anxieties. The lesbian had fallen in love with my father. Even though he rejected her saying, “That is not our contract, comrade. I was only your doctor. I don’t want you to flood me with filthy feelings,” she slept every night on a bench just outside the house, contenting herself with spying on Jaime’s venerated shadow moving behind the curtains.

In Zapiga, the police, alerted by some unknown informer, forced them off the train and made them sleep out in the open, next to the door of the station, all to keep them from visiting the office of the nitrate mine there. Down from the mountains blew a wind so freezing that Recabarren began to tremble as his fingers turned blue. To warm him, Jaime embraced him chest-to-chest, while Sofía warmed his back. That way they managed to withstand the cold for a few hours. But then they all began to tremble. A cavernous, convulsive cough shook the master’s body. His comrades, much younger and therefore much less affected, began to rub him down from head to foot, putting all their energy into the massage.