Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Creator of El Topo

Now Chucho was staring at the other side of the theater with a fearful expression. “What do you see up there, in that old disused balcony condemned by the theater authorities, to the left of the front row?”

“I think it’s a mannequin dressed in old-fashioned clothes. .”

“That’s right. But that dummy is possessed by the devil. No one is ever allowed up there. It’s crowded with old, useless debris. Yet every night, the dummy changes its place. Mireya, a dancer friend of mine, ridiculed our fear of it. One night, at midnight, she sneaked up onto the balcony, cleared her way to the dummy, threw it on the floor, and stomped it to pieces. The next night, it was sitting in an armchair, completely intact. From that time on, Mireya has been cursed by horrible luck. Her agent put a bullet through his head, her father was murdered, her fiancé left her for another woman, and now she has become obese and has had to quit dancing. She went on all sorts of diets but gained a hundred pounds. She finally went insane, dreaming every night of being devoured by a pack of dogs.”

Noticing my skeptical look, Chucho shrugged, turned away huffily, and left, dismissing me forever from his sphere of interest.

As I continued to wait for the Tigress, sitting on the same burlap sacks where Nana sang her swan song twice a day, I dismissed the perturbations in my mind caused by the dancer’s gossip and arch looks and tried to concentrate on my own reactions.

Mexico: a country where two old women organized a concentration camp for prostitutes, exploiting them and then murdering them by the dozens; a country where a schoolteacher strangled his mother, ate her entire body, bones and all — and then, in prison, having already experienced the supreme culinary delight, refused any other food and died of hunger; a country where a famous singer killed herself by swallowing a glass full of needles; a country that has an entire market specializing in sorcery materials right in the center of the capital; a country in which a male prostitute, just before servicing an aged tourist, makes the sign of the cross with his penis, waving it in the four directions and thereby transforming his sordid virility into a sacred act. Yes, I could well believe anecdotes about mandrake plants and badgers, but a lifeless mannequin animated by the devil was a bit much. Yet in Tepozotlán, in times of drought, prominent elder citizens speak to the mountain (which appears to them in a vision as a white-bearded man), offering candles, T-shirts, and house shoes to induce him to bring rain; and in the back room of an esoteric bookstore, a Huichol shaman comes once a week to cure patients by sucking out their sickness and then spitting it out in the form of pebbles; and the grandmother who eats sacred mushrooms leaves her body and enters other people’s dreams; and in the mountains live sorcerers who claim to transform themselves into crows or dogs.

How much truth is there in all this? Over the real world soars an imaginary world that is far more active. If the truth is that all is illusion, then I must learn to imitate life. I thought of the Tibetan holy man Marpa, *10who grieved inconsolably over his dead son. His disciples asked him: “But Master, why do you weep when you have taught us that all is illusion?” The old man answered: “It is true, my son was an illusion — but he was the most beautiful of illusions!”

Reality is aggressive, murderous, unknown, and ugly. Only illusory beauty makes it bearable. If truth is a fathomless mystery, then we can only edify it with lies. As for myself, I seemed to be playing the role of an artist, sitting in this imitation Italian theater, watching an imitation French melodrama that’s played by a diva with an imitation body of Venus who owns an imitation castle with a tame ocelot that imitates a fierce tiger and sleeping in a bed with a huge seashell at its head in imitation of Botticelli. And what if the story about her being the mistress of the president of Mexico turned out be just another lie, a rumor she cultivated? Perhaps even the fat drunk whom she threatened with a revolver was a hired plant. How did I know she had even met Diego Rivera, with whom she claimed to have eaten tacos containing cooked human flesh? Even the story about selling her soul to the devil could be seen as self-promotion. A person could easily arrange for the porter to earn a bonus by moving the mannequin each night when the theater was locked and no one could see him. Even if all this was true, however, I realized I was still interested in her. Even if she used trickery, she was still a magician capable of organizing the imaginary world and living in it.

With the exception of Ejo Takata, I had always lived among human beings who were incapable of being themselves, who always wanted to have what others had, who creating facades, copied values, schemed to obtain diplomas, danced for pay in a barbarous carnival. I’m not saying I felt superior to them, but I certainly felt like a foreigner — not in some other country, but in strangeness, the unreal zone of the unadapted: “to be in the world, but not of it.” This was of no help to me, for my soul, like an exhausted bird flying over the scene of a disastrous deluge, could find no place to land. If I learned to die as an intellectual, no place in the illusion could harbor me. Reality — that which is without beginning or end — seemed impalpable, indifferent, with no relation to my life, a life that was 99 percent antisocial. At that moment, sitting upon those absurd burlap sacks, I understood that the Tigress, queen of the world of imitation, could, through her poisonous machinations, become the guide who would give me the necessary maturity to build a temple in the dimension of mirages.

When I entered her dressing room, she was wearing only panties of minuscule size and was occupied with the task of putting black dye on the long hairs on her legs. “I want them to see that I’m not another Indian but the descendant of Spaniards!”

I sensed that in her feline mind I was conquered prey. Now I was so much hers that she didn’t bother to hide her tricks from me. It was not a female seductress that I saw before me, but a cold strategist.

“We’re going to bring down the house and give them the scoop of the year! You are an avant-garde director whose audience never amounts to more than a thousand people, but the critics praise you because they believe that everything European is worthy of admiration. For me, they have only derision. What I do seems contemptible to them. Yet my audience is never less than five hundred. I think we must unite our forces. Using all your talent, you shall direct me in a theater piece which will please the people. We’ll create a brilliant and lavish production of Lucretia Borgia . You’ll have a percentage of the profits. You’ve never made a peso with your obscure, incomprehensible films. With me, you’ll be rich. Is it a deal?”

The prospect of directing her fascinated me. “It’s a deal!”

“I knew you’d like the idea — but we must proceed carefully. We don’t want to rush our car down a slope that drops us off a cliff. If we offer this me-and-you cocktail too suddenly, it would be undrinkable, both for the pop audience and for the intellectuals. We must file and smooth the rough patches, creating a huge sense of expectation. I don’t mean an artistic one — that wouldn’t bring any audience at all; I mean a sexy one. Fame is nothing; notoriety is everything. Only scandal brings success. I’m going to propose something outrageous now. I’m telling you in advance not to worry, your life will be in no danger, because the caliph will know it’s all fake and will agree to the plan. What we shall do is announce that we have fallen in love and are going to get married!”

“Er, I regret to say that although the idea seems excellent, we can’t just do it like that. You see, I’m already married.”