The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography (15 page)

I am much more my footprints than my steps.

In the midst of reciting I saw that all eyes were now on Stella, and no one was listening to me. Determined to steal my audience, my friend was impaling her arm with a large hairpin that she had taken from her sequin-covered purse. Without any sign of pain, she slowly pushed the pin through until it emerged on the other side of her arm. I was fascinated as well. I had not known that the poet had the skills of a fakir. Once she was sure she had captured the patrons’ attention, she began to recite a poem in an insulting tone while lifting up her shirt, millimeter by millimeter.

I am the guardian, you are the punished men
the farmhands with oblique gestures
from whom, as you engender false furrows,
the seed flees in terror!

She now showed her perfect breasts, accusing the offended drunks with her erect nipples, which she moved in a provocative semicircular motion. If I have ever in my life thought that I was going to defecate out of fear, it was on that occasion. Like a volcano beginning a devastating eruption, these dark men were beginning to stand up, reaching into their pockets for the knives they carried at all times. Their hatred was mixed with bestial desire. We were about to be raped and eviscerated. Stella, who had a deep, masculine voice, took in a deep breath and let out a deafening yell that froze them all for an instant: “Stop, macaques, respect the avenging vagina!” I took advantage of their bewilderment to grab her by the arm and make her jump with me through the open window. We ran toward the well-lit streets of the city center like hares being pursued by a pack of raging predators.

We reached the Alameda de las Delicias. At that hour of the night there was not a soul around. We leaned our backs against the trunk of one of the great trees that lined the avenue, catching our breath. Stella, reeling with laughter, pulled the pin out of her arm. Her laughter was contagious, and I started laughing as well, until I shook. Suddenly, our joy vanished. We realized that a strange shadow was covering us. We looked up. Above our heads, a woman was hanging from a branch. The light of a neon sign tinged the suicide’s hair with red. In this I saw a sign . . . There was nothing we could do for the dead woman, and we left quickly so as not to have to deal with the police. At the door of the boarding house, I said goodbye to Stella.

“I need to be alone for a while. I feel like I’m drowning without a lifejacket in your immense ocean. I do not know who I am. I’ve become a mirror that only reflects your image. I can’t keep living in the chaos you create. The woman hanging from the tree, you invented that. Every night you kill yourself because you know that you will be reborn the same as you were. But maybe someday you will wake up as someone else, in a body that you don’t deserve. I beg you, let me recover; give me a few days of solitude.”

“Well,” she said in an unexpectedly childlike voice, “let’s meet at midnight on the dot, in twenty-eight days, one lunar cycle, at Café Iris . . . But before you go, come with me to urinate on St. Ignatius of Loyola.”

For those twenty-eight days, under the pretext of nervous exhaustion I ate only fruits and chocolate and did not leave the room the Cereceda sisters were loaning me. I felt empty. I could not write, think, or feel. If someone had asked me who I was, my answer would have been, “I am a mirror broken into a thousand pieces.” Sleeping very little, I spent hours piecing together the fragments. At the end of this lunar cycle I felt reconstructed. However, I realized I had not rediscovered myself; once again, I was the mirror of that terrible woman.

Like a drug addict needing his fix, I went to Café Iris. I got there right at midnight, even though I knew she might be hours late. But it was not so. She was waiting, standing by a window wearing a sober military coat and no makeup. Without her mascara she was still beautiful, but now the expression on her unadorned face was that of a saint. In a voice so soft that she reminded me of my mother when she sang to me in my crib, she said, “I am a carrier pigeon in your hands. Let me go. The god who was waiting has come down from the mountains. I’m not a virgin. I’m sure that I am carrying in my belly the perfect child that destiny has promised me.” She showed me a needle threaded with one of her long hairs. I could not keep from shedding tears while she sewed up my pocket. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, Stella had disappeared. I saw her again fifty years later, a prisoner in another body, a sweet little grandmother with short gray hair.

The world fell away from me. I went back to the house in Matucana. My parents did not ask me any questions. Jaime handed me a few bills. “From now on I’ll give you a weekly salary. All you have to do is help in the shop on Saturdays; there are more thieves every day.” My mother got a hot bath ready for me then served me a hearty breakfast. I saw in her eyes the anguish of not understanding me. If I, being a part of them, was incomprehensible, then that meant the world they had built so strongly had a fault, an area populated by madness that did not match up with their scheme of “reality.” It was absolutely necessary for them to consider my behavior as delusional. To maintain their own equilibrium, they had to force the madman into the straitjacket of “normal life.” When they realized they could not break me down, they tried to persuade me by filling me with shame. And they succeeded. After several weeks I felt guilty; I lost my confidence in poetry and promised myself not to frustrate their hopes, to continue my studies at the university until I got a diploma. But one night, in a dream, I saw a high wall on which one sentence was written: “Let go your prey, lion, and take flight!” I packed a few books, my writings, the few clothes I owned, and returned to the Cereceda sisters.

I absorbed myself in making my puppets. Like a hermit, I spent the day locked in my room engaging in dialog with them. Only late at night, when my hosts and their friends were asleep, did I go to the kitchen to eat a piece of chocolate. One morning someone gave a few short, discrete, delicate knocks on my door. I decided to open it. I saw before me a woman of short stature with amber-colored hair and an ingenuous expression that touched me deeply. However, I asked her with false brusqueness what her name was.

“Luz.”

“What do you want?”

“They say you make some very nice puppets. Can I see them?” I showed them to her with great pleasure. There were fifty of them. She put them on her hands, made them speak, laughed, “I have a friend who is a painter who will love to see what you do. Please come with me to show him your characters.”

What I felt for Luz had nothing to do with love or desire. I knew that for me she was an angel, the polar opposite of the Luciferian Stella; rather than breaking the poisonous world into a thousand pieces, she saw a chaos of sacred fragments that it was her duty to put together in order to reconstruct a pyramid. Luz came to draw me out of my dark retreat, to lead me into the luminous world, and once there, to vanish. And so it was. Luz and Stella were two opposing views of the world. Although they both felt themselves to be foreign to the world, outsiders in it, one saw it as having heavenly ties while the other saw it as having roots in hell. One wanted to show the good things in the world by making herself its mirror, the other, in the same way, wanted to reflect its failures. The two were of a piece, consistent with each other: cobras charming men, one wanting to inoculate them with the venom of the infinite, the other with the elixir of eternity.

Luz’s boyfriend, obviously madly in love with her, was an older painter by the name of André Racz, who had a prophet-like appearance, wearing long hair and a beard halfway down his chest. He lived in an old studio, much longer than it was wide, at least three hundred square meters. It was reached via a long, dark passageway with a cement floor with rusty rails in it, giving the place the appearance of an abandoned mine. Racz’s paintings and engravings were based on the Gospels. Christ, who bore the artist’s face, was shown preaching, performing miracles, and being crucified in the contemporary era amidst cars and trains. The soldiers who tortured him wore German-style uniforms. One of them shot him in his side with a pistol. The Virgin Mary was always a portrait of Luz.

I was pulling my puppets out of my suitcase, one by one. Racz, his attention consumed by the beauty of his girlfriend, was barely looking at them. Luz, without seeming to notice this embarrassing situation, smiled as if waiting for a miracle. And a miracle occurred! One puppet to which I had given the supporting role of a drunken bum, wearing a patched coat, long hair, and abundant beard, revealed his true personality upon emerging in this environment full of religious paintings: he was Christ. And the most surprising thing of all was that his features were very similar to those of André Racz. The painter moved the puppet with the enthusiasm of a child, engaging in dialogue with it. Luz took the puppet’s hands and began to waltz with it. Racz followed her like a shadow all around the studio. I saw in his dog-like glances that he wanted my puppet to be his own so that he could give it to her. I immediately told him, “It’s a gift. Take it.” He answered me with great emotion. “Young man, you are a divine messenger. You did not arrive here by chance. Without knowing me, you made my portrait. I have just bought a plane ticket to go to Europe. I need to put an abysmal distance between Luz and myself. I’m old enough to be her grandfather. I’m chaining her to an old man. I know she will sleep with the puppet as she is remembering me. It will make the breakup easier. This is my studio; we have spent unforgettable moments together in it. I will give it to you. I do not want to abandon it to vulgar hands. Now go, I want to say goodbye alone to my Virgin.”

I left the room as if emerging from a dream. It seemed impossible that someone would so suddenly give me a studio in which I could live as I pleased. But it was true. The next day Luz came to get me, accompanied me to the studio, and said rather sadly, “André gave me all his paintings but didn’t want to give me his new address.” She handed me the keys to the studio and left. I never saw her again.

Thus, overnight I found myself the proprietor of a huge space at 340 Villavicencio Street, perhaps the site of an old factory, which, being at the end of a hundred-meter-long tunnel, was isolated from the neighbors. There I could freely make all the noise I wanted. I believed that the ultimate achievement of an artist was to become a creator of parties. If everyday life seemed like hell, if everything boiled down to two words,
permanent impermanence,
if the future that was promised us was the victory of the persecutors, if God had become a dollar bill, then I had to abide by the words of Ecclesiastes: “There is nothing better for man than to eat, drink, and make his soul merry.” My weekly “studio parties” became very well known. People from all walks of life attended. A phrase from Hesse’s
Steppenwolf
was written on the door: “Magic Theater. Price of Admission: Your Mind.” By the door a former mendicant, Patas de Humo (“Smokey Paws”), who normally slept in the tunnel and whom I had taken on as my assistant, gave out a quarter-liter glass full of vodka to each guest. For those who did not gulp it down, there was no getting in. Those who accepted this hefty drink, which would get them drunk immediately, were admitted by Smokey Paws with an affectionate kick in the rear, whether man or woman, young or old, laborer or legislator. Once inside there was no more drinking, just conversation and dancing, but no popular music, only classical. The biggest hit was
Swan Lake.
In that space, as full as a rush-hour bus, groups of people improvised, imitating the mechanical gestures of the Russian ballet with tremendous grace. The mingling of artists with university professors, boxers, salesmen, produced an explosive mixture. As the drink was limited to that initial quarter liter, there was no violence and the party became a paradisiacal game. Naturally now and then, almost without intending to, someone would climb up on a chair and become the center. These interventions were short, but their intensity made them unforgettable. A young law student once loudly declared that his father, a famous lawyer who lived secluded in his immense library, had never permitted his son to read a single one of his precious volumes, always keeping his library locked.

“Well, before coming to this party, I saw my father asleep at his desk, face down on some papers. I entered into this sacred enclosure for the first time ever, with intense emotion I picked up one of his books, and then . . . look at this!” And the young man produced the spine of a book out of the backpack he wore. “All volumes were false: a collection of spines, nothing more, hiding cabinets filled with bottles of whiskey!” Then he started screaming, “Who are we? Where are we?” and let himself fall, arms outstretched, amidst his audience.

Another time, an older man got a seductive young lady to get up on the chair with him. He said, with tears in his eyes, “I waited all my life. Finally I found her. I would cover her with caresses, but . . .” With his left hand he removed his right hand, which was artificial, and shook it: “I lost it as a child. I got so used to my false hand that I grew up without thinking about how it was missing. Until the day that Margarita offered her body to me. And I, only half-caressing her, wished that I had two, three, four, eight, infinite hands to slide over her skin for eternity.”

Twenty men raised their hands and, standing in a compact group behind the man with the missing hand, became one with him. The woman let the two hundred and five fingers run over her body . . .