Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Dance of Reality - A Psychomagical Autobiography

I had finished the school year. Standing in the schoolyard in a compact mass, the students waited for the gate to open so that they could run out to the street in a chaotic stampede into summer. I, who had been relegated to the bottom of the heap, felt that before leaving I should thank the president for the favor he had granted me, so I began to make my way among the students. I had to pass through the entire crowd to get to his office. They moved closer and closer together, forming a human wall. I tried to push them apart. No one cried out or made any violent gesture. It all took place in hypocritical silence, because the teachers were watching from the loggias. Arriving at the center of the schoolyard, raising my left arm to part the shoulders of two opponents, I felt a blow to my bicep. I voiced no complaint. Blood began to drip between my fingers. The sleeve of my white shirt was turning crimson, a tear in the fabric showed where I had been cut by a knife.

The gate opened. The crowd ran shrieking out to the street, and in a couple of minutes I was left standing alone in the middle of the yard. Pale, but not crying or yelling, I showed the wound. “There was an accident. Two boys were playing with a penknife, and I got between them just when one of them was making a quick swipe. Luckily I lifted my arm; if I hadn’t the blade would have gone into my heart.”

The Red Cross was summoned. The ambulance took me to the clinic. The teachers were anxious to leave for the holidays, so no one accompanied me. The doors of the empty school were shut behind me. A rough nurse disinfected the wound and sewed it up with three stitches. “It’s nothing, kid. Go home, swallow these pills, and take a nap.” I was used to enduring pain and equally used to others showing little interest in what happened to me. Apart from the imaginary Rebbe and the no less imaginary old Alejandro, no one had ever kept me company. Solitude oppressed my body like the bandages of a mummy. I was in agony inside this cocoon of rotten fabric, a sterile caterpillar. And what if I had not lifted my arm and the knife had pierced my heart? Would someone have died? Who? Someone who was not me! My true being still had not germinated. Only a shadow would have fallen dead in the sandy yard. However, chance had ordained that my dead soul would not yet die. If that mysterious pattern called destiny wanted me to live, then first I had to be born in order to live.

I shut myself in the room they had given me, in the interior of the dark apartment. As there were few very cold days in the winter there were no electric or gas heaters, and we heated with braziers. I gathered all my photographs and watched them turn to ashes on those pieces of carbon lit up like rubies. Now no one would ever be able to identify me with the images of what I had ceased to be. I, a sad boy dressed as Pierrot on a bench in the square in Tocopilla, wearing an old black sock for a cap when Sara had promised to make me a white pointed hat with gauze pompoms. In another photo where rather than my usual mussed hair, rope sandals, and long pants I was dressed in the English style with short gray pants, a salt-and-pepper jacket, black and white shoes, and greased hair, I posed stiffly with a sulky expression with bare legs (no one could make me wear cotton socks) in order to send an image to my grandmother that was not my true self: “What a disgrace. Jashe will despise us!” Later, there I was in a high school group, amidst those cruel boys. Even today I remember the names of two of them with shivers of anger, Squella and Úbeda, large bullies who invented a degrading game: when other boys were distracted they would approach them from behind and assault them in the backside with a pelvic thrust, proclaiming, “Nailed!” I had to keep my buttocks against the wall for my first three years there. Finally, given away by my screams, they were caught trying to rape me in the latrine and expelled from the school. Rather than thanking me for this, my classmates broke the silence they maintained toward me with a single injurious word: “Snitch!”

I kept on burning photographs, believing I had destroyed them all, but no, one remained at the bottom of the shoebox where I kept my collection. In it I was posing next to a girl with full lips and large, light eyes, with an expression of arrogant melancholy. I threw it in the brazier. As I watched it burn, I suddenly realized that I had a sister.

It may seem unreal that from birth someone could live with a sister two years his senior, grow up in the same house, eat at the same table, and still feel like an only child. The dense reality that is constructed by the presence of bodies can become invisible if it is not accompanied by a psychic reality. I did not take the place of my sister; she was not a sacrificial dove. I did not become the center of attention by virtue of being a boy. Very much to the contrary, I was the one who was erased, though I did not realize it until that moment. Generally speaking, the much anticipated son who will ensure the continuation of the paternal name is the favorite child. The daughter is relegated to the world of seduction and service. In my case, the exact inverse was true. When she was born, she was the top priority. I, starting with my first newborn cry, was an intruder. Why? Even today I cannot explain it with certainty. I have various hypotheses, all convincing but none that I find thoroughly satisfactory. I never saw my father use his surname. He signed checks with a succinct Jaime. On his Communist Party card, he was identified as Juan Araucano. Now and then he would say to me, “You read a lot; perhaps one day you’ll be stupid enough to want to be a writer. If you use the name Jodorowsky you will never succeed. Use a Chilean pseudonym.” It seems that my grandfather Alejandro had disappointed him. Holding a secret grudge, he hardly ever mentioned his name or told any stories about him, only letting on that he had been a shoemaker with delusions of holiness. Following the advice of his Rebbe, he donated most of the money he earned — which was minimal, since he did not put a price on his shoes or repairs, allowing customers to pay what their meager good will dictated — as alms to the poor. Having suffered so much on their account, he died relatively young, his heart giving out. “What kind of holy man snatches bread away from his family to put it in strangers’ mouths?” He left his widow and four children in poverty when he died. The Jewish community, immigrants preoccupied with their own survival, shut them out. My father sacrificed ambitions of studying in order to become an even better theorist than Marx, then devoted himself to whatever work he could find: selling coal, mining, circuses, trying to give a decent life to his sisters (who, according to him, became prostitutes) and helping Benjamín, the youngest, to become qualified as a dentist. He got no thanks from anyone: his brother, rather than giving him a job as a dental technician — as had been agreed upon, since Jaime, having inherited his father’s manual dexterity, could make excellent false teeth — fell in love with a dark-skinned young man and entered into a relationship with him. Teresa, my grandmother, sanctioned Benjamín’s love affair and acquiesced to living with him and his disgraceful (from Jaime’s point of view) lover.

I believe that my father blamed all this on the shoemaker. When people wanted to get rid of a pharaoh in ancient Egypt, instead of condemning him to death they would set about erasing his name from all the papyruses and seals. By thus extirpating his memory, they condemned him to the true death that is oblivion. When a man hates his father, he avoids reproducing in order to stop the name from being passed on or else changes his name.

I suppose that Jaime saw my sister as an only child. I arrived two years later as a surprise: no one had wanted me to come, I was a usurper in the world; my presence was an abuse. I brought with me the threat that the hated name might survive. A second hypothesis, which does not negate the first, is that I was the screen onto which Jaime projected the anger he held toward Benjamín, whose perversion, treachery, and appropriation of their mother were difficult things to accept. He had to regurgitate this resentment, to take it out on someone. He brought me up to be a coward, a weakling. By mocking my feminine side, he encouraged it to develop; from his violent example I learned to detest machismo. Just like his brother, who lived in a house full of books (mostly romance novels and books on topics related to forbidden sexuality), he taught me to love reading by signing me up at the city library and later, in place of toys, letting me buy whatever books I wanted. I ended up living surrounded by four walls of books, like my uncle. Jaime never liked to use my name, and when he decided not to call me Pinocchio he called me Benjamincito as if by mistake. Countless times he would declare, “You are the last Jodorowsky,” thus subtly inoculating me with sterility.