Where the Bird Sings Best (13 page)

“Have faith,” said the Rabbi. “Nothing is given to us, we have to earn it. God hides so we will search for Him. By learning to see Him in everything, we are born. The temple is a military barracks because obeying the law of God is the only freedom. And this modest shack that has summoned us with the smoke of its purifying oven is a holy place, the altar of sacrifice. Give me the half kopek of ransom so that, in the name of the Jodorowsky family, I can deposit it in consecrated hands.”

When Teresa saw Alejandro fall into a trance, adopting the refined gestures, the high-pitched voice, and the burning gaze of the Rabbi, she began to tear out her hair. “Once upon a time I would have said
My God
, but now what can I say? I’ll kill myself! It’s better to be a dead lioness than a mangy, living dog.”

The Rabbi, with the smile of one blessed, responded, “If God gave us thirst, he will give us water. If He gave us teeth, he will give us bread. Come to the altar.”

Teresa, overcome with fatigue, followed her husband. The old toothless man took a triangular patty out of each basket and said, “Cheese, meat.”

The Rabbi had no knowledge of empanadas, a Chilean dish made of baked dough stuffed with chopped meat or cheese, but he shouted in astonishment, “Praised be He!” God was speaking to him in symbols. The most sacred sign, the Shield of David, was there before them! He sniffed the meat empanada: “This is the Eternal One manifest in matter.” He sniffed the cheese empanada: “And this is the Eternal One manifest in spirit.” From the hands of the old man he took the two triangles, and placed one on top of the other to form a six-pointed star. The Magen David, the union of heaven and earth, fire and water, body and soul. “God is the food we will never lack. And he asked each member of the family to take a bite at each of the six points. Then he let them eat until the symbol disappeared.

The old priest then began to recite in Spanish a psalm of gratitude, incomprehensible to the others: “Who’s going to pay for the two empanadas?”

The Rabbi asked the family to repeat, in a chorus, the holy words. Their mouths, perfumed by cheese, onion, and meat, sang thankfully.

“Who’s going to pay for the two empanadas?”

The old man stretched out his open hand, shaking it urgently. The Rabbi began to leave. “I’ve completed my mission. Give him the obolus, and the Eternal One will manifest Himself.” The Rabbi disappeared. Alejandro, smiling happily, deposited the half-kopek in the old man’s dried out fingers. The old man stared at the tiny coin. His face turned into an ocean of wrinkles, his mouth transformed into a grimace like a fallen half moon, and he was about to hurl an insult. But before he could open his mouth, the ground began to shake.

The shack’s lantern, hanging on a dark wire covered with fly shit, bounced around furiously. A rain of dry leaves fell; the dogs barked so loudly they seemed to cough up their intestines; out of the ground emerged monsters of dust. Then came a gigantic howl, accompanied by much more intense aftershocks. A few houses collapsed. The human screaming began, a mix of horror and pain. The entire port began to waltz. Immense waves threw the ships against the sea walls. No one could keep his footing. The peaks split open like ripe fruit, showing dark red cracks. Horses fell down the hillsides.

Thousands of citizens blackened the streets, running from one place to another, keeping clear of the falling walls. Gas tanks split open. Explosions and huge flames magnified the hysteria. The shaking began again, even more ferocious this time. The entire harbor leaned to starboard and to port like a ship in a storm. No building was left undamaged. The military structure collapsed. The two soldiers stood at attention until a flying piece of sheet metal cut off their heads.

Alejandro herded the children toward an iron bench, bolted into the ground. There, piled on top of one another, they waited for the earthquake to pass. My grandfather began to recite some words dictated to him by the Rabbi. The disembodied one knew a treatise on magic that could calm the fury of tremors:
KADAKAT, ARAKADA, DARENAK, AKESERA, KAMERAD, ADAKARA, TAKADAK
. All of them, spun around and trembling with terror, repeated the formula.

Teresa went mad with rage. She stood up on the bench and held her balance with the skill of a sailor. It didn’t matter to her that trees, chunks of cement, windows, pieces of glass, and pieces of pipe as sharp as swords were falling all around her. She raised her fists toward the sky, bellowing, “May all the curses your murderous mouth has poured out since you created this world fall on you! Look at how much you’re destroying just to get me to submit! But you will never make me give in! Make the entire planet explode if you like, it doesn’t matter to me! What can you do to a woman with a withered heart? Kill me once and for all, because not even earthquakes can make me open my soul to you!”

She was foaming at the mouth, her face was as white as a sheet, and she was trembling even harder than the ground. Alejandro grabbed her by the calves and pulled her down into his arms. With the strength of a madman he pushed her under the bench, silencing her with a desperate kiss.

A deafening screech announced that the peak was splitting open. The old man, squealing like a hog, was swallowed by a crack. The iron bench went downhill, still bolted to an enormous chunk of the hillside. The Jodorowsky family gave a strange scream: a mix of Alejandro’s religious fervor, Teresa’s rage, the terror of Lola and Benjamín (both too delicate for these quakes), and the euphoria of Fanny and Jaime. To these two, they were on a toboggan going faster and faster. Their only thought was to get as much fun as possible from the ride down, never considering that awaiting them at the bottom was a collision that would smash them to atoms or sink them in the sea.

They got out from between the feet of the others and stood up on top of the iron seat, balancing as if they were on the crest of a wave. Tons of falling stone destroyed street lamps, crushed dogs and people, and demolished houses, leaving in their wake a trail of ruins and blood. They were nearly spinning out of control as Teresa, under the bench with Benjamín and Lola, who were sheltered under the roof of her breasts, cursed even louder. Alejandro, making a superhuman effort, got up from the bench, took hold of Fanny, and protected her with his own body. Jaime would not allow himself to be caught. He leaped off the bench and ran to the far edge of the sliding peak, shouting triumphantly and dodging large bits of wall, pieces of glass, roof beams, and human body parts all being tossed into the air by his vehicle.

They smashed against a shoe factory. The building, a modest structure, made principally of concrete slabs held up by thin columns, yielded to the chunk of mountain on impact and acted as an elastic brake, capturing the mass as if it were held in a cradle. The bench finally stopped, still perfectly horizontal. During the entire slide downhill, it would have been possible to hold a glass of water without spilling a drop.

“A Miracle!” said the Rabbi. “
Tohu va’Bohu
, chaos is an egg from which order is born! The new life begins here!”

Without hearing him, Alejandro remained with his family under the bench for an eternity, the time of the aftershock. It might have been seconds, minutes, or hours. He never knew and never tried to find out. His people had known innumerable catastrophes, and an age-old instinct made him give himself over to true time, the time that cannot be measured, where twenty years pass like an hour and a second can last a thousand years. He knew that the pain and pleasure of an entire life didn’t last more than an instant, but that each step he took on always-foreign lands took an eternity.

When the ground stopped moving, there came a silence that wounded their eardrums and then began to rise, accompanied by the laughter of Jaime, who invited them to come down from the peak by throwing all kinds of shoes at them. There was a braid of sorrow, thousands of human voices in protest, all mixed up with the howls of dogs throughout the country, up mountains and down in valleys, and the presence of death, the invisible tarantula covering Valparaíso.

Alejandro checked on each of them, then came out from under the bench and gave Jaime a slap. It was the first and last in his life, but nevertheless, that slap marked a turn, inching towards a definitive separation. Alejandro dug into the ruins to see if anyone could be saved. He found crushed, deformed, ripped-open bodies. He overcame his intense fascination—something, his animal nature perhaps, impelled him to dig through the detritus and smell the blood, see the mystery of the body, the secret viscera revealing their forms in broad daylight—because he heeded the Superior Will and believed that what God placed within the dark interior of the organism, protected from prying eyes, should be respected.

Seeing what has been revealed is an obligation, but the other thing, which appears in the misery of catastrophe, should be avoided. We must be prudent with our senses. There are things we cannot observe or hear or smell or touch or eat. A great vigilance is asked of us with respect to our organs of perception and also with respect to our desire, our need, our feelings, and our ideas. We cannot think without limitations. “Concern yourself with what it is permitted to know and forget mysterious things.” Ah, the good Talmud!

A cry led Alejandro through the wreckage, and he found a man with a roof beam buried in his chest. His skin, getting whiter by the second, contrasted with the river of blood flowing out of him. The dying man held on tight to the handle of a leather suitcase. With the wise gaze of those who are entering the kingdom of death, he offered it to Alejandro, whispering words my grandfather couldn’t understand but could only feel. The man was giving him the most precious thing in his life, the tools of his work. Why? In the worker’s eyes there was a profound need and, at the same time, the intense happiness of making an offering of his conscience to death, like a wild flower, a sacrifice pure and simple, eternal disappearance, a debt repaid, serpent on the rock, bird in the sky, ship at sea, without leaving a trace, nothing to hang on to, only a small legacy, to everyone, to someone, his instruments, more valuable than existence, his true being. Knowing that hands as dutiful as his own would continue to work with those little angels of wood and metal—wise, useful, holy—would allow him to sink into the abyss with peace.

Alejandro opened the suitcase, took out the tools, kissed them and pressed them with respect to his heart, while the dying shoemaker, with only a tiny thread of voice left, gave him their names and uses in a Spanish so full of love that Alejandro understood it as if it were Russian. Hammer to flatten the leather, pincers to place the model over the last, small pliers for working the backstitch, curved awl to form the instep, spatula to spread the wax in the heels, chisel to cut the sole, stitching awl to perforate the leather, round pliers, gouge, a box of shoe polish, a small packet of pitch, and a bobbin of linen. Seeing my grandfather put the tools back into the suitcase and take possession of them, the man gave a long sigh and gave up his spirit with a smile.

The Rabbi said, “Do you see, Alejandro? God has given you a profession. You are a shoemaker.” My grandfather clasped the suitcase to his chest and burst into convulsive weeping.

Teresa and the children called him back at the top of their lungs. They were both curious and afraid. Alejandro, scrambling over beams as sharp as knives, reached the peak and climbed up to the iron bench. His family, sitting there as if in a theater, pointed to a figure that was approaching them, jumping along and shaking its backside to wag a hairy tail that hung from its clown costume. It spoke like a human being, but its face, with its narrow, prominent forehead, its sunken little eyes, its flat nose, its big mouth, and its pricked ears, was like a monkey’s. “Hurry up, come with me! There could be another tremor!” it was shouting in Spanish. Teresa shook her head and signaled that she did not understand. The simian repeated everything in Italian, French, German, English, Dutch, Portuguese, Polish, and finally in Russian. “Hurry up, come with me! There could be another tremor!”

They all ran toward this strange polyglot. He had them board a covered wagon decorated with trees made of sheet metal, resembling a tropical forest where a monkey-like clown seemed to fly over the green treetops. He translated the large red letters that covered the rear door: “Monkey Face. Individual Circus.” Then he gave a sigh of relief.

“Whew! How lucky we were! On this street they all died. But my wagon and the horses were left untouched. But we’ve got to get out of here right away. After the first quake, there always comes another. Without a first, there can’t be a second, as the flea said. You two sit next to me and put the four kids on the sacks of straw—excellent food for horses. Now, hooves: do your duty! Giddy up, Whitey! Giddy up, Blacky.”

The horse named Whitey was black, and Blacky was white. The beasts, thanks to the minimal energy they got from the “excellent food,” moved their bones as quickly as they could, a weary trot, and huffing and puffing they left Valparaíso. As they reached a valley of dark, almost red, earth, where the trees had hard leaves that glittered like kitchen knives, the second tremor erupted. There was a terrifying roar from the belly of the earth, dense clouds of dust, cracks that opened in long mordant grins, and they heard the howl of the victims being crushed in the port.

“That’s how the damned must howl in hell,” said the simian. And since both his hands were busy keeping the wagon from turning over, he crossed himself with his right foot. He was so flexible that his big toe could reach his forehead. Finally the tremors ceased. The crickets and birds sang. Whitey and Blacky, busy with their difficult digestion, went trotting along.