The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography (22 page)

We were all affected by Emilfork’s departure to France. Some of us, more than others, felt asphyxiated living in Santiago de Chile. Television was not yet fully commercialized, and one had the sensation that nothing new could happen in this city so far from Europe that was surrounded by a ring of mountains that felt like prison walls. There were always the same people, always the same streets. I knew that there were great mimes in France: Ettienne Decroux, Jean Louis Barrault, and above all, Marcel Marceau. If I wanted to improve my art I should do as Emilfork, drop everything and leave. But I had some very close ties that kept me there. First of all, there were my friends, girlfriends, and my commitments to the Teatro Mímico, which had already held some successful performances. Then there was my ambition to test the effectiveness of the poetic act on a large scale. Finally, deep down in the shadows, there was my desire to take revenge on my parents, to rub their faces in the suffering they had caused me through their lack of understanding. I discovered that rancor can be as constraining as love and entered into a foggy period during which I was unable to make decisions; a deep inertia had taken possession of my soul. I spent the days locked in my studio, reading. I excused this manner of killing time by telling myself that in order to know an author, one had to read all his works. At a forced pace I read everything by Kafka, Dostoyevsky, García Lorca, André Breton, H. G. Wells, Jack London, and oddly enough, Bernard Shaw.

First reunion. From left to right: Daniel Emilfork, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jacques Sternberg, the incendiary anarchist Fedorov, Fernando Arrabal, Topor, Lis (Arrabal’s wife), and Toyen (surrealist painter).

One night my poet friends showed up, almost too drunk to stand, dressed in black and carrying a funeral wreath with my name on it. They lit candles and sat around me, pretending to cry while drinking even more wine. Reality was dancing again: at two in the morning, someone knocked frantically on the door. We opened it. My father walked in barefoot, waving a lamp.

“Alejandro, our house burned down!”

“The Matucana house?”

“Yes, my house, your house, with the furniture, clothes, Raquel’s piano, everything!”

“Oh, my writing!”

“Fuck your writing! You’re thinking about some filthy sheets of paper and not my money that I kept in the shoe box in the closet, my stamp albums, twenty years’ worth of collecting, my cycling shoes, the porcelain your mother kept since we got married, you don’t have a heart, you don’t have anything, I don’t know who you are, we thought we’d come to sleep here, but this is a nest of drunks, we’ll go to a hotel!”

And he grunted in exasperation while the poets, elated with the news, danced around. We took up a collection to rent three victorias
.
We made the journey to Matucana. The weary steps of the horses gave a metallic voice to the dying night. We improvised elegies to the burned house over the rhythm of the horseshoes.

When we arrived, the fire was out. No one was there. Sandwiched between two ugly concrete buildings, my old home slept like a black bird. The poets got out of the carriages and danced in front of the remains, celebrating the end of one world and the rebirth of another. They dug through the rubble in search of the red worm into which the phoenix would have transformed itself. They found nothing but my mother’s blackened corset. Ah, poor Sara Felicidad! After all those years without exercise, spending ten hours a day behind the shop counter to the point that her elbows were covered with calluses from so much leaning on that hard surface, and also eating compulsively to compensate for the lack of love in her life, she had grown fat, lost her figure, and felt as if she was drowning beneath a magma of flesh, while my father, under the pretext of door-to-door sales, had become the “neighborhood Casanova,” riding his bicycle around, committing adultery left and right with female customers. In order to set herself limits that would reassure her that she was alive, that the world was governed by infallible laws, that she was not open like a river to the thirsty snout of any rapacious beast that might arrive, Sara had donned this corset, constructed of steel rods, which encased her from breasts to midthigh. The first thing she did when she awoke in the morning was to shout for the maid, who came grumbling as usual to help her to tie its laces. She exited her bedroom rigid but with form, her animal nature compressed, a self-confident lady feeling no shyness in front of the scrutinizing gaze of others. At night, returning from the shop with swollen feet and eyes reddened by the neon lights, she would again call the maid to help her out of this instrument of torture. This was done at a time when we should all have been in bed. I always knew that I would not be able to fall asleep immediately. My mother would begin scratching herself with her long fingernails, which were always painted red. Her skin, dry after so many hours of confinement because the canvas fabric of the corset prevented her from sweating, made an insidious, pervasive sound like paper ripping. The concert would last for half an hour. I knew from the maid’s gossiping that Sara soothed her itching from her neck to her knees by smearing herself with her own saliva. Her obesity, her elbow calluses, her swollen feet, her itching, were things that I always viewed with a kind of sarcasm, as if my mother were guilty of this ugliness, an ugliness that she had to hide in a corset. Now, watching the poets kicking around this blackened framework and giggling, I felt sad for her—poor woman, naively sacrificing her life simply due to lack of awareness. Her myopic husband, mother, stepfather, half-siblings, and cousins had been unable to see her glorious whiteness of body and soul. Punished as a child, considered an intruder even before her birth, given birth to apathetically, received into a cold cradle, she was a swan among proud ducks . . .

Dawn was breaking. Reality resumed its dance. A man passed by selling red heart-shaped balloons. With a harsh shout, I stopped the poets’ soccer game. With my remaining money I paid the three carriage drivers and bought all the man’s red balloons. I tied the corset to the volatile bunch and released it. It rose up until it was just a small black spot in the middle of the rosy dawn sky. I compared this ascent to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. I started coughing and had to take a long drink. Perhaps it was then that I understood the close union that the subconscious forms between people and their intimate objects. For me, releasing my mother’s corset, sending it high into the sky carried by heart-shaped balloons, was like setting her free from her daily imprisonment, her lackluster life as a shopkeeper’s wife, her sexual misery, the blinders of an unwanted fatherless child, and her absolute lack of love. I had spent all those years complaining about her lack of attention and tenderness to me, but I had been unable to give her the slightest bit of affection, blinded as I was by my own spite. As for her, a prisoner of her narrow consciousness, there was little I could give her. I offered my love to her corset, making it into an angel.

The burned house seemed to send us a message that one world was ending and another was about to be born from the ruins. This event coincided with the end of winter and the beginning of spring. Realizing that no carnival had been held in Chile for more than twenty years, we set out to revive the Spring Festival. There were three of us who had this idea: Enrique Lihn; José Donoso, later well known as a novelist (
The Obscene Bird of Night
); and I. Every day at six in the evening, the time at which people left work and filled the streets, we went out in costumes in order to create collective enthusiasm. Lihn dressed as a thin, electric devil, wiggling like a scarlet noodle, waving his hard arrow-tipped tail, questioning passersby about their intimate depravities with an underhanded canniness. Donoso, dressed as a nymphomaniac, wearing black with two soccer balls as breasts, went around sensually assaulting men who escaped from his attacks amidst collective laughter. And I, dressed as Pierrot, in white from head to toe, exuding a universal loving sadness, would nestle in the arms of women in order that they might cradle me like a wounded child . . . Other poets and a group of college students followed our example, and soon a euphoric costume show was there for passersby to see every day in the city center. Some astute shopkeepers made the most of the idea and organized a dance at the National Stadium. It was an unprecedented success. The seats all filled up, and also the stands, and then the exterior grounds and adjacent streets. One million people danced, got drunk, and loved one another that night. We, the initial performers, had to pay admission like everyone else. Nobody thanked us. We had turned into part of the general anonymity. Disgusted, knowing that a bunch of businessmen had robbed us blind, we went to drown our sorrows at a bar near the Mapocho station, where we drank under the spell of the strident noise of the trains. We no longer had the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita: “Think of the work and not of the fruit.” We were annoyed that we had not been recognized. I learned years later from certain bodhisattvas to secretly bless everything within my view. That night we wanted to be congratulated: “Thanks to you, a marvelous celebration has been reborn. You deserve an award, a cup, a diploma, or at least a hug or free entry to all the festivities.” We got nothing, not even a smile. We decided to celebrate in the Mapuche style: we put the chairs on the table and sat on the floor with our legs crossed, forming a circle. We stopped talking, and each one of us drank with a funereal rhythm from his own bottle of rum until it was finished: one liter of alcohol per head. My friends crumpled in silence. I felt like I was dying. I was drowning in the excess of alcohol. I ran out into the street, threw up next to a street lamp, walked with my arms open to the sky, and finally sat down in the ditch at a solitary corner. The sadness of Pierrot began to invade me. Who was I? What was my purpose in life?

Thus I sat, ruminating on my ideas, pierced by the cold of dawn, when I heard the tapping of velvety paws. I raised my head, which I had buried in my chest, and saw the dog approaching. I do not say simply
a
dog, I say
the
dog for I have seen this dog again and again in my memory so many times that it has become an archetypal example of something marked by the divine. He was of medium size, with a shaggy coat that might have been white had not the vicissitudes of life turned it gray and crusty. He had a limp in his right front leg. In short, a miserable dog, with that look of doleful pride mixed with humility that is common to dogs without masters. He approached me with an intense need for companionship. His heart was beating so hard that I could hear it pounding. His tail, scarred from bites, was wagging happily. When he came up to me, he let a white stone fall from his mouth with great delicacy. His eyes revealed a love so profound, I had never before received such a sign of affection, and it made me suddenly see how little I had been loved in my life. Aided by drunkenness, which brought down the walls of my shame, I began to cry. The animal gave a couple of feeble jumps, ran a few yards away, stopped, came back, and licked the stone. I understood. He wanted to play. He was asking me to throw the stone so he could chase it, pick it up in his mouth, and bring it back to me. I did so, many times, at least twenty. A cyclist passed by. The dog ran off after him. Both disappeared around a corner. They did not return. I was alone with the white stone. That stone was my ancestor. Millions of years old, it had dreamed of speaking, and there I was, Pierrot, as white as the stone, becoming its voice. What did it want to say? I waited to receive the most beautiful of poems, dictated by this stone dropped from the muzzle of a dog. In my mind I received something that I can only compare to a blow from a hammer! This stone was going to last longer than me! I understood with a hallucinatory lucidity that I was a mortal being. My body, with which I so deeply identified, was going to age, rot, and disintegrate. My memory was going to dissolve into nothing. My words, my consciousness, everything, would fall into the black well of oblivion. The houses and streets would also disappear, and all living beings—the planet, the sun, the moon, the stars, the entire universe.

I flung the white stone away, as if it were a witch: it had injected an anguish that would last for all of the short life that indifferent fate had granted me. I had not received any metaphysical bromides from my father. He had never inculcated any idea of an afterlife in my youthful mind: reincarnation, the hope of a merciful God, an eternal soul, or all those myths that the religions so effectively proclaim in order to comfort the mortals . . . I set off running through the streets, howling. No one was surprised to see this clown, thinking I was a last remnant of the carnival ball. I arrived at my studio, fell on the floor, and slept like a piece of inanimate matter.