Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Dance of Reality - A Psychomagical Autobiography

“Let me go, Papa, the house could fall down! We’ll be safer outside!”

He slapped me. “Quiet, you’re staying here with me! You’ve got to trust me! I’ll never let you be a coward like the rest of them! Don’t take the earthquake’s side. Fear makes the damage worse. If you pay attention to the Earth, she’ll take your confidence away. Ignore it. Nothing’s happening. Your mind is more powerful than a stupid earthquake.”

The tremors stopped growing. Then, little by little, the ground returned to its habitual calm. Jaime let me go. Smiling like a hero, he looked at me as if from the top of an inaccessible tower. “What did you want to tell me, Pinocchio?”

“Oh, Papa, it can’t have been important; the earthquake made me forget it!”

He sat back down at his desk, plugged his ears, and returned — cursing as usual — to counting the laborers’ sullied bills as if I had ceased to exist.

I went to my room feeling like my soul had been run over by a steamroller. My father’s bravery was invincible, his authority absolute. He was the master, I the slave. Unable to rebel, all I could do was to remain obedient, cease my creative activities, and not exist except as a guided being: the unavoidable meaning of life was to worship my omnipotent father.

Again I had the urge to jump out of the window, this time to be flattened by one of the trains that passed by at all hours of the night, their whistling penetrating my dreams like a pin impaling a dragonfly. One thought held me back from jumping: “I do not want to die without knowing my father’s sex. He must have a penis as large as a donkey’s.”

I waited until four in the morning when my parents’ snores, as powerful as locomotives, filled the house. I walked on tiptoe trying not to think for fear that the vibration of a word in my mind might escape through my skull and cause the walls, floor, or furniture to creak. The minute that I spent opening the door to the bedroom felt like an hour. I was hemmed in by rancid darkness. Fearing that I might trip over a shoe or the chamber pot full of urine that my mother emptied every morning while Jaime and I were eating breakfast, I froze like a statue until my eyes adjusted to the blackness. I was getting close to the bed. I dared to light my torch. Taking care not to let any ray of light fall on their faces, I looked over their bodies.

It was the hottest time of the year. They were both sleeping naked. A few flies, drunk on the penetrating odor, buzzed around their armpits. My mother’s white skin still had red marks from the corset she wore from morning to night. Her breasts, like two enormous fruits, lay serenely on her chest. A Rubenesque goddess of abundance, she was sleeping with one small ivory hand lying on the thick mat of my father’s pubic hair. My surprise was so great that my swollen tongue began to palpitate as if it had turned into a heart. I wanted to laugh. Not from joy, but from nervousness. What I saw dealt a demolishing blow to the mental tower in which Jaime’s authority had imprisoned me. The warmth of Sara’s nearby fingers had given him an erection. For sure, the circumcised member was shaped like a mushroom, but — incredible! — it was much smaller than mine. It looked more like a little finger than a phallus.

In a flash I understood Jaime’s aggressiveness, his vindictive pride, his constant anger at the world. He had precipitated me into weakness, slyly forming me into a character of cowardice, an impotent victim, in order to make himself feel powerful. He made fun of my long nose because he had something short between his legs. He had to prove his own power to himself by enticing customers, dominating my large mother, bloodying shoplifters. His powerful will compensated for his barely adequate penis.

The giant collapsed before me — and with him, the whole world. None of the beliefs that had been inculcated in me were true. All the powers were artificial. The great theater of the world was an empty shell. God had fallen from his throne. The only true strength I could count on was my own, meager as it was. I felt like someone with no skeleton whose crutches had been taken away. However, a miniscule truth was more valuable than an immense lie.

I was enrolled in the Applied School, a magnificent building with capable teachers and an optimal program of studies, but with an unexpected difficulty: the alumni were Nazi sympathizers. Perhaps due to the influx of German immigrants or the influence of Carlos Ibáñez, the dictator who had emerged from an army trained by Teutonic instructors, during the war more than 50 percent of Chileans were Germanophiles and anti-Semites. The obligatory collective shower after gym class was enough for my mushroom to betray me. With shouts of “Wandering Jew!” I was ejected from all the games that the students organized during breaks. I had the privilege of a whole bench to myself during classes: no one wanted to share the double seat with me. I did not understand this exclusion at first. Jaime had never told me that we belonged to the Jewish race. According to him, my grandparents were of pure Russian stock, communists who had fled the irate Tsarists; and the Jews, just like the Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, and other religious people, were a bunch of madmen who believed in fairy tales. Little by little, receiving one insult after another, I understood that my body was formed of a despised material, different from that of my classmates. During the first trimester I took my revenge by becoming the top student. This was not difficult; my parents did not talk with me — one sentence too many would convert their weariness into exasperation — and, submerged in the silence to which my peers had condemned me, the only entertainment left was to study for hours and hours, day and night, not for pleasure or out of duty but as a drug that stopped me from confronting my anguish. In this bottomless swamp, like the flowers on a lotus, a few short poems blossomed.

This feeling rational to the point of boredom

watching the mad carnivals pass

waving obscene banners in the streets

as if all were dead clad in gold

while I make my corner into an empty temple.

Tired of living as a victim, I tried to participate in the high jump competition. In the middle of the schoolyard was a rectangular pit filled with sand. A horizontal rod between two pillars measured the height of the jumps. As soon as the bell announcing recess sounded, the boys ran there and formed a long queue. One by one, they tried to outdo each other at high jumping. They did quite well. Sometimes the bar was raised to 170 centimeters. When I tried to join the line they pushed me out, muttering “fat stinker” without even looking at me.

I had accepted humiliation from a young age, viewed my being different as a kind of castration, but now that I knew I was equipped with a larger penis than my father I decided to show my enemies that they could not conquer me. I went to the office of the school president, a sacrosanct place that no student dared enter, explained my problem to him, and asked him to help me survive the endeavor I wanted to undertake. He agreed!

When the bell sounded the students in each grade got into formation in the first and second floor loggias, in front of the classroom doors, awaiting the president’s arrival. The square yard, with its sandy jumping area, was at the center of the crowd. For five minutes, the president allowed me to try jumping. Given my excess weight, I was far from being an athlete. I decided to start at a meter and a half. At first, it was impossible for me to jump it. I ran toward the bar amid general mockery — there were at least five hundred students watching — put all my energy into a leap as if my life depended on it, rose into the air, knocked down the bar, and fell sprawling in the sand. Laughter rang out. Paying no attention to the deafening hilarity, I tried again. And so, six times a day for five minutes straight without stopping, again and again, failure after failure, I continued for four months. Little by little I lost weight, from a hundred kilos down to eighty; although I was still obese, my new muscularity enabled me to jump over 160 centimeters. In the last two months I lost another ten kilos, and like the best of the jumpers I passed over the bar at a height of 170 centimeters. My success was crowned by furious silence.