The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography (23 page)

This fear of dying would haunt me for the next forty years. It was an anguish that drove me to travel the world studying religions, magic, esotericism, alchemy, and the Kabbalah. It drove me to frequent initiatory groups, to meditate in the style of numerous schools, to seek out teachers, and in short wherever I went to search without limits for something that might console me in light of my transient existence. If I did not conquer death how could I live, create, love, prosper? I felt separated not only from the world but also from life. Those who thought they knew me only knew the makeup on a corpse. During those excruciating years, all the works I accomplished, as well as all my love affairs, were anesthetics to help me bear the anguish that gnawed at my soul. But in the depths of my being, in a hazy kind of way, I knew that this state of permanent agony was a disease that I had to cure by becoming my own therapist. At its heart, this was not about finding a magic potion to keep me from dying, but above all about learning to die with happiness.

By a thousand ingenious methods (including selling myself for a couple of nights to an elderly millionairess), I earned the money to buy passage on an Italian ship, the
Andrea Doria
—fourth class, in a dormitory with twenty beds, living on dried scallops, wine made from water and powder, and flavorless tomatoes—bound for France. I gave away everything I had: books, puppets, drawings, notebooks full of poems, sets and costumes from the Teatro Mímico, a few pieces of furniture, and my clothes. With nothing but a suit, a coat, a pair of socks, a pair of underpants, and a nylon shirt that I washed every night; with no suitcase and a mere hundred dollars in my pocket; after throwing my address book into the sea I began a five-week journey up the Pacific coast to the Panama Canal, and from there to Cannes, where I landed in France without knowing a word of the language.

The act of throwing away my address book was a fundamental necessity for me. Those pages were my connection to the past; the connection was all the stronger for having been pleasant. I did not leave my country as a political exile, a failure in life, or someone hated by society. I was leaving a country that had accepted me as an artist. I was leaving a company of twenty mimes that already had a solid repertoire. I was leaving kind friends, many of whom were great poets, and impassioned young women, one of whom I could have married. I was also leaving my family for good; I never saw them again. Nor did I ever again see my friends: forty years later when I returned to Chile I found that they had all died, succumbing to tobacco, alcohol, or Pinochet.
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It was a form of suicide for me to disappear. To rid myself of emotional knots, to stop being someone born of painful roots, to change myself into someone else, a virgin ego, permitting me—by being my own mother and my own father—to eventually become what I wanted to be and not what family, society, and my country imposed on me. On that third day of March, 1953, at the age of twenty-four, as I threw my address book into the sea, I died. Forty-two years later, in 1995, also on the third of March, my beloved son Teo died suddenly, also at the age of twenty-four, in the midst of a party. With him, I died once again.

To arrive in Paris without speaking French, with barely enough money to survive for a month, without any friends, and wishing to be successful in the theater, was madness. The painter Roberto Matta once said with humor, “It’s very easy to succeed in Paris, only the first fifty years are difficult.” I believed with ingenuous self-confidence that I was coming to Europe as a savior. The first thing I did after I got off the train at two o’clock in the morning was to call André Breton, whose telephone number I knew by heart. (In Santiago, the fervent surrealist group La Mandrágora maintained relations with the poet, who was married to a Chilean pianist, Elisa; he had nailed down the lid of her piano out of hatred for music.) He replied thickly, “Yes?”

“Do you speak Spanish?”

“Yes.”

“Are you André Breton?”

“Yes. Who are you?”

“I’m Alejandro Jodorowsky and I come from Chile to save surrealism.”

“Ah, well. You want to see me?”

“Immediately!”

“Not now, it’s late, I’m in bed. Come to my apartment tomorrow at noon.”

“No, not tomorrow, now!”

“I repeat. This is not the time for visiting. Come tomorrow and I’ll gladly talk with you.”

“A true surrealist is not guided by the clock. Now!”

“Tomorrow!”

“Then never!”

He hung up. Only seven years later did I have the pleasure of meeting him, in the company of Fernando Arrabal and Topor, at one of the meetings held at the café La Promenade de Venus.

During those first months in Paris, I saw my illusions crumble. I made a living doing all kinds of miserable work: collecting old newspapers from apartment buildings in order to sell them by the kilo to an Armenian man who ran a paper mill, selling my drawings on café terraces, sticking stamps on mountains of envelopes, packaging suppositories for a flu epidemic, and so on. Through hard work, I earned enough money to study for three months with Ettienne Decroux. Pantomime had become a religion for me. I was ready to devote my life to it. I believed that my collection of laudatory newspaper articles and photographs showing my creations would secure me the master’s admiration. After all, we were both struggling to establish the same art form, generally considered a decadent historical curiosity. I had never imagined that this legendary creator of modern mime, a man with a broad frame, large hands, and a nondescript face, would be so cruel, so bitter, and so envious of the success of others. I knew he had performed with his students in London that year at the same time as Marcel Marceau. Marceau’s show was declared the best of the year; Decroux’s was declared the worst. His implacable, inhuman technique, which required incredible effort to make each movement, bored the spectators. By contrast Marceau’s finesse, his ingenuity, his airy gestures that conveyed everything so effortlessly, were enchanting to the audience. Decroux shuffled through my photos with ostentatious contempt, asked me to undress, and calling his son Pepé to act as a witness, proceeded to examine my body, classifying its defects with medical coldness. “Early stage scoliosis, Semitic body type with protruding buttocks, atrophy of the abdominal muscles: in a few years he will have a pot belly.” He asked me to move. I tried to make some beautiful gestures. He concluded, “He pulls his elbows when he moves. Bad expressionist style.” Then, dismissing me to oblivion, he left the meager room where he received his students. Pepé, with a cruel smile, handed me a receipt for three months of lessons paid for in advance . . . As I was leaving, I picked up a program. There I read that the teacher, in the company of his wife and son, had been giving a performance in this small apartment every night for the last two years for an audience of only four people.

The first lesson with Decroux was a paradox, like a koan: “Pantomime is the art of not moving.” To explain this, he told us, “The turtle is a cat inside its shell,” “The greatest force is the force that is not used,” “If the mime is not weak, he is not a mime,” and “The essence of life is the struggle against gravity.” For endless hours, we studied the mechanism of marching, the expression of hunger, thirst, heat, cold, overly bright light, darkness, the various attitudes of a thinker, and finally, all the ranges of physical suffering: pain caused by diseases, broken bones, wounds (in the back, chest, side, extremities), burns, acid, asphyxiation, and so on.

We met in a large school gymnasium once a week. With an old man’s lewdness Decroux declared, “Men do not interest me,” and had us stand in the back. (I was reminded of the old pain of knowing that Jaime had eyes only for Raquel.) When he gave his demonstrations he rolled up his baggy trousers and, often, as if unaware of doing so, exposed his testicles. I hated his Chaplinesque imitations. He made mime into an art as strict as classical ballet. The only thing that was different was the awareness of weight: “Only idiots stand on their tiptoes.” We analyzed the laws of equilibrium, the mechanisms of loads, pulling and pushing, we studied the manipulation of imaginary objects, we learned to create different spaces with our flat hands . . . The knowledge he transmitted to us was conveyed slowly, drop by drop, as if he were reluctant. Despite charging a very high price for his classes, he gave us the feeling that we were robbing him. He quoted a phrase from Breton to justify this attitude: “‘A bad writer is like a water stain on paper; it spreads quickly but soon evaporates. A good writer is like a drop of oil: when it falls it makes a small spot, but as time goes on it extends to fill the entire sheet.’ The lessons I’m giving you now will last you ten years.” He was right. His surgical cruelty, which eliminated any sort of warm relationship, forced me to be the judge of myself without expecting any external confirmation. In order to resist contempt and deconstruction I had to seek and find my own values, like a fisherman who dives into the dark ocean and comes up carrying a pearl. I learned that creativity cannot be effective if it is not accompanied by good technique and also that technique, without art, destroys life.

When Marcel Marceau arrived six months later, my theatrical destiny took off. The mime accepted me into his company after a minute examination, giving me a very minimal role to show me that even if I had been somebody in my country, I was still nobody in France. Little by little I gained his appreciation and eventually rose to the highest role he granted to a collaborator: holding the signs announcing his pantomimes. Thus I accompanied him on his tours through several countries. While my friend slept late, exhausted from the previous night’s performance, I would get up early and visit whatever teacher or sacred place I could find. Since I did not have the opportunity to realize my ideas, I decided to give them to Marceau. I wrote
The Mask Maker, The Cage, The Heart Eater, The Samurai’s Sword,
and
Bip the China Salesman
for him, pantomimes that would bring new energy to his career. Having decided that I did not want to grow old making mute gestures with makeup covering my wrinkles, I bade adieu to Marceau. Unemployed again and with a young wife to support, I had to take a job as a house painter.

In this dance of reality it happened that Julien, the head of the company, was a member of a group organized by Gurdjieff and his collaborator, the philosopher Amir Sufi. Painting an entire house with them on the outskirts of Paris became a mystical experience. The owner of the mansion, an obviously incapable pseudoaristocrat, claimed to be an abstract painter and sculptor. He made striking splotches on large canvases using a whip dipped in paint. As a sculptor, he made imprints of his buttocks in a mold and used them to manufacture plastic chairs. We dubbed him the Furious. His wife had beautiful green eyes, and Julien loved her. One night, as an exotic spectacle, the Furious invited us to dinner with him and his friends in a pavilion that was painted in gold, blue, and red—colors that, according to them, were worn by the kings of France. We drank a lot of wine. Possessed by a poetic furor, I improvised verses composed exclusively of insults. The guests were terrified and began to leave. When only we three painters remained, an out-of-control “workers’ trio,” our trembling hosts placed three bottles of wine in front of us and went upstairs to the mezzanine to sleep. After a while, filled with the euphoria of breaking down limits, I went into their bedroom and lay down between them, not even taking off my shoes. Before falling asleep, I penetrated the Furious’s wife, very briefly, as a way of saying good night.

Early in the morning, I left my snoring employers and went to work. The Furious arrived at noon, smiled at me, and set about painting his canvases with his whip as if nothing had happened. Julien, however, did not conceal his bad mood. He pointed to my abundant hair and growled, “With that artist’s mane, you’re not real to them. They take you for a fool. If you want to break down conventions, make yourself into a normal man, like us, so that you’ll learn to savor the consequences of your actions. These people are dangerous, the power is on their side; our lives are practically in their hands.” And straight away, brandishing a pair of scissors, he cut my hair almost down to the scalp. Then he sent me to clean up a ceiling covered with spider webs, knowing that I had a phobia of those creatures: “Neither the poor, nor any sentient beings, have the right to have phobias.” When I went to the bakery splattered with plaster and paint, my new look drew the attention of several well-dressed ladies. They desired me, taking me for a socially inferior man, while making a show of rejecting me. I realized that the world was composed not only of artists, who are a tiny minority, but also of millions of anonymous people, destined for oblivion. In those people beliefs, feelings, and desires took on strange forms. Something was wrong. My view of life was lamentable. I was not yet ready to accept life for what it was. I needed to take refuge in a theater, sleep and eat on stage, not read newspapers . . . and grow my hair back.

Just then, I was surprised to see a luxury car arrive, its seats covered in leopard skin. The chauffeur, wearing a blue Hollywood-style uniform, entered the house and inquired after me. I presented myself, covered in flecks of paint. “Monsieur Maurice Chevalier wants to speak with you.” I followed the chauffeur, stepped into the Rolls Royce, and found myself face-to-face with the famous singer, who at that time was already over seventy years old. “The impresario of your trio, Mr. Canetti, who is also my impresario, recommended you highly to me.” (While working with Marceau, I had made a foray into the music hall, directing a group of singers called the Three Horatios.) “I would like you to help me improve the gestures in my songs and put on a couple of comic pantomimes. I am returning to the stage after a long break, and I want to surprise the audience with new things. If you are a true artist and not a house painter, come with me.” I took a moment to say goodbye to Julien, Amir, and the owners of the house, who, open-mouthed, watched me depart for good.