Alejandro Jodorowsky - Where the Bird Sings Best

Teresa, a smile on her face, answered, “Your price is our price.” And she placed the leather coffer on the table. The Rabbi fled out the window. Alejandro’s face took on a greenish tinge. With great pride, my grandmother raised the lid.

The Count peered into the interior and said, “A Bible? Perhaps, madam, you’re confusing earthly goods with cultural treasure?” Teresa, completely wild, clutched the book in her tremulous hands, threw it to the floor, observed the filthy banknotes and copper coins, and emptied the contents of the box onto the table.

She separated the few gold coins from the miserable rest. She bellowed, staring at my grandfather, “Who did it? You or the ghost? Or was it the two of you together? What did you do with the bulk of the gold? Don’t tell me! I can guess for myself. You gave it away to that pack of mangy beggars! Oh dear, oh dear! Why did I ever marry a righteous man? A lunatic, an idiot! He protects strangers before his own family! But he’s innocent. It’s the fault of that damn book!” She picked up the Bible, ripped its pages, spit on it, threw it toward the street, and began to cry in her husband’s arms. Unable to say a word, he covered her face with kisses.

The Count, pushing around the gold coins with the corner of his monocle, counted them. “Well, we have enough for your passage and something more for the hotel. And if we pick one of the lowest quality, we might even have a little bit left over for a gift to my friend. The secretary general owes me a few favors. I’ll try to convince him to be charitable this time and to help a family with a father of such saintly generosity.” The Count dried his eyes with his silk handkerchief. “Let’s not waste time. It’s still early. We’ll go straight to the American Consulate.”

A streetcar dropped them opposite a luxurious building, where the venerable flag waved its stars and stripes. The aristocrat asked them to sit in the waiting room while he went to the offices on the second floor to speak with his friend. He went toward the stairway and stopped. He came back. “Madame Teresa, a good idea just occurred to me. I’ll tell my friend the marvelous story of your husband’s saintly generosity. Let me borrow the coffer for a minute, so I can show the secretary general the gold coins and the worthless money of the emigrants. That more than anything else will convince him. I’m sure he’ll reward Alejandro’s open-handedness with his poor racial brothers and give us the visas for nothing.” Teresa ceremoniously put the jewel box in the Count’s hands. He clicked his heels as a soldier would and, with all dignity, entered the elevator.

They waited and waited. The Count never returned. When the buzzer sounded announcing the imminent closing of the consulate, they ran up the stairs to the second floor. There were no offices, only a huge, empty salon for cocktail parties. They did see an emergency exit. They understood.

There they were, on the street, desperate, without a penny. My grandmother’s world collapsed. She kicked the luggage, sat down on the ground, closed her eyes, and said, “Take care of yourselves the best you can. I’m no longer here.”

“In that case,” observed Alejandro, “if you’re no longer present, then I’ve recovered my right to summon the Rabbi. He’ll get us out of this fix.”

“Bah! More stupidity. I’ve already told you the Rabbi doesn’t exist. It’s only your imagination.”

“Imagination or whatever it is, the Rabbi is the Rabbi. If he doesn’t come, there’s nothing I can do.”

“All right then, call that thing. I’d be surprised if he could do anything for us.”

She must have been shocked, because the Rabbi gave them the only reasonable solution: “Look for a commercial street. Examine the stores. If any one of them belongs to a Jew, you’ll certainly find some sign of our religion. Speak to them in Yiddish.” And that is exactly what they did.

Walking aimlessly along, they found a street lined with shops. On a shelf in a jewelry store, they saw a seven-armed candelabra. They walked in. Moishe Rosenthal clearly spoke Yiddish. Since Teresa hated being Jewish again, she pretended to be mute. Alejandro only told part of his miseries and, ashamed, finished the tale with lies. Disguised as goyim, they’d fled a pogrom, and now they were lost in Paris, with no money, with no idea what to do, and hungry, especially the children.

The first thing Moishe did was feed them in the kitchen behind the shop. Then he left his wife in charge of the jewelry store and accompanied them to the Jewish neighborhood. After offering them a little money, which Alejandro accepted, kissing Moishe’s hands, he presented them in the offices of the Comité de Bienfaisance Israélite, founded in 1809. There they were treated with maternal care. They were housed for two days in a modest but clean and Kosher boarding house. From there they were sent on to Marseille, where they were put, along with other refugees, on a ship sailing for South America. They were given the only visas anyone could get — Chilean. Teresa knew nothing about Chile, but she was sure that in such a country, located at the end of the world, the citizens did not live in palaces and did not have gold-plated teeth.

If Teresa got mad at God, it was God who got angry with Jashe, my mother’s mother. And along with God, all the Jews in Lodetz, in Lithuania. Her periods began — with mathematical precision — on the same day as those of Sara Luz, her mother, and of Shoske, her sister, revealing immediately the power to hold back such a sacred phenomenon, the pride of Hasidic women because it confirmed that their bodies were regulated by the same laws as the stars. Far away from the men, they would dance without underwear under the moon to allow the plasma to run down their legs and fertilize the land. Jashe confessed, amid tears and wails of joy, her love for the goy.

While her mother, breaking the law, sold plum brandy to the Jewish bankers, Jashe would stroll the streets of Vilna. For her, the smell of the city was like the most exciting of perfumes. Purely by chance, she ended up in front of the Municipal Theater, where Swan Lake was about to be put on by the Imperial Russian Ballet. She’d never seen any theater. Something irresistible made her buy a ticket, the cheapest. Feeling the lecherous stares of beardless Lithuanians with curled side-whiskers, she took her numbered seat in the last row without daring to raise her eyes from the floor. The music exploded, she heard the curtain go up, and then the pattering of steel taps like a confused rain. Little by little, among those uniform tapping feet, she distinguished different ones, coarse and at the same time delicate, in some strange way familiar to her.

A heatwave overwhelmed her belly and forced her to look toward the stage. She did not see the sets, the lights, the dance troupe, or the audience in their seats. All she saw was a gigantic male dancer with skin whiter than marble, with long golden curls, and blue eyes so potent that she could feel them near her face even though he was so far away — thousands of miles from the last row in the balcony, but nearer, much nearer than her own father.

Her sex palpitated with such intensity that, obeying its demands, she got up from her seat and, somewhere between a sleep-walking angel and a burning tree, whipped by an invisible tempest, she looked for the dressing rooms, entered the one that had a crippled Christ nailed to the door, caught the giant naked, and fixed on his member the miraculous gaze that comes only with total surrender. The Russian, himself enraptured, undressed her slowly. That small (Jashe was under five foot four), perfect body, that sex without labia — a docile line crowned by a triangle of savage shadow — engulfed him in such vertigo that for a few seconds the room turned upside-down, and he found himself hung like a chandelier on a floor transformed into a ceiling.