Mario Bellatin - Jacob the Mutant

I remember that he even mixed up the gender of his Spanish, uttering “ la Yiddish,” “ los casitas,” or “ los welt completa,” trying to say “the whole world.”

Between songs, he said that on a certain occasion he disobeyed the order not to speak Yiddish beyond the confines of his family, making him the subject of ridicule by some of the children in his village.

I remember that he fled, and he walked, disconcerted, for some miles.

Finally he threw himself down in the middle of a wheat field and begged God to grant him death.

From then on (and it seems that he fulfilled this denial up until the moment when I saw him dancing at the zoo) he never uttered another word in his native tongue.

Until this moment, in which I find myself repeating the names of God almost without pause, it never occurred to me that something similar might have happened to Macaque.

That is, that she never used Yiddish except to recall the prohibition that weighed against that language.

I then saw Macaque living in an RV camper, which is where my grandfather said she had set herself up after the assassination of her martial arts fighter.

According to my grandfather, the camper was painted light blue, and time had eaten away at the tires.

It lay hidden in the foliage surrounding a park that, curiously, my grandfather told me was close to the zoo where we would visit the camels.

I’m not sure whether or not I asked him on any occasion if we could walk over there to meet that person that I had heard named so often face to face.

Macaque.

I would have liked to see not only Macaque, but also the blue camper she lived in.

I’m not sure if I ever asked my grandfather anything of that nature.

But I know that it would have been useful to do so, because my grandfather had knowledge that since the martial arts fighter’s death, Macaque had become submersed in a deep state of melancholy.

If I had gone to visit Macaque, I would have also met another of the people who lived with her in the camper: Master Porcupine.

At this point things really start to get confusing.

Not even in my prayer cell, repeating the names entrusted to me by my order’s sheikha, can I find any logical explanation for these occurrences.

Besides Macaque, my grandfather mentioned a few other characters.

The first that I remember is Master Porcupine.

My grandfather told me that Macaque had offered — in spite of the state of grief she found herself inundated in — to help Master Porcupine develop a theory that he called “Mariotic.”

It had first occurred to him while giving math classes to students at a public school.

What is the Mariotic Theory?

It’s precisely what I’ve come to ask myself now that I am in a state of prayer.

I remember that my grandfather partially explained it to me.

He explained that this theory was named after a writer.

Mario Bellatin.

Master Porcupine didn’t try so much to understand the texts that this author had produced, but rather the mechanisms that he used to create them.

It was a situation for which the words written by that author would give rise to facts that indeed lay beyond the logic of things, but not beyond their nature.

Macaque had hung, on the inner wall of her camper, an old movie poster advertisement for a Bruce Lee film.

I find it incredibly curious that my grandfather would have referred — the version of the story that I offer here is completely faithful to that which my grandfather told me — to Bruce Lee during his never-ending descriptions of Macaque.

I find it impossible, because the image of my grandfather, standing before the camels at the zoo, is chronologically situated in the early years of the sixties, and everybody knows that the martial arts film genre didn’t become popular until years later.

Nevertheless, the voice of my grandfather insisting that there was a Bruce Lee poster hanging on the wall of Macaque’s camper only gets clearer with time.

The mention of a film of that nature makes me recall the success this movie had, primarily in those regions of the world where Yiddish was spoken fluently.

This fact is one that I am certain my grandfather told me.

There’s no other way I could have obtained a fact of that nature: that the martial arts film genre had great success in those regions of the world where Yiddish was spoken fluently.

What places could that entail?

Where in the world could Yiddish still have been spoken as a native tongue?

I now know that the existence of such places is false.

In this cell where I find myself repeating the ninety-nine sacred names of God in a seemingly endless way, I know there are no regions in the world where that language is spoken fluently.

Therefore I also know that it is impossible that those alleged speakers of Yiddish could have been incommensurately enthused by martial arts films.

The affinity felt in the projection halls between those who used the prohibited language of my ancestors and the films that were in Chinese was impressive.

Some attendees even adopted certain Asian inflections that sounded like they came from their native language.

I think that having attended one of these functions would have given my grandfather great enjoyment.

Although I am sure that, given his manner of being, he wouldn’t have given in to the catharsis into which many of his linguistic brothers fell.

As I’ve said, the sea was nearby.

It was even possible at certain times to clearly hear the breaking of the waves from the zoo.

On one of the occasions when we were together, my grandfather told me about the night that one of the seals had escaped from its pool and tried to make it back to the sea.

Bruce Lee’s face presiding over the main wall of the camper stood out to Master Porcupine.

He asked a few questions.

Macaque clarified that the poster was an homage to her deceased lover.

That actor had been the fighter-turned-shoemaker’s favorite.

Macaque thought that her lover had even had something to do with the film advertised on that poster hanging from the wall.

That fighter that she found in a roadside restaurant never confirmed whether or not he had been a personal friend of Bruce Lee.

Only sometimes he let signs of it slip.

On more than one occasion he shared details of the actor’s life.

Of the relationships that Bruce Lee had with the mafia and how he had been sentenced to death, not just him but also his descendants for three generations.

The fighter-turned-shoemaker had lived for some years in the United States.

He had a habit of telling Macaque that he had come to control, of his own free will, a few million dollars.

It all ended when, from one moment to the next, he had to flee the country carrying only what he was wearing.

At the end of his stories the fighter always said the same thing: that Bruce Lee’s perdition had come about because he was too committed to the material objects surrounding him.

Macaque purchased the poster — the one she had hanging from the main wall of her camper house — the very morning that they told her that the police had assassinated her lover.

She found it on her way back from the morgue she was required to visit.

As she walked down the street she suddenly saw, there on the sidewalk, Bruce Lee’s face.

A street vendor had laid out a series of movie posters from every era of film on the floor.

What Master Porcupine was doing in the camper is a question I never dared to ask my grandfather.

I also know that he never would have answered me.

Mainly because my grandfather was a man of few words.

Jacob the Mutant (the book that precedes this text) was written by Joseph Roth in moments of inebriation.