Where the Bird Sings Best (37 page)

Fanny discovered she could meditate crossing her legs, just as her Buddhas did it. In that position, one day at dawn, resting after having scrupulously noted the earnings and expenditures of the day, she heard a telepathic message from the fetus: “Remember me? The last time we saw each other was in Russia, and you were a little girl. I introduced myself as a cobra trainer. I told you that in a previous life, where I had been your father, a king, you were named—”

“Rahula! That’s true. Now I realize I never forgot you.”

“We share a long history. In even more remote lives, you have been my father, my mother, my brother, my sister, my wife, my lover, my teacher. We have passed through almost all the forms of the realization of love. Now we have nothing more to do in this world. In the next transformation, we shall be one entity. Our souls, finally amalgamated, will help in the gestation of a new Universe, one more conscious than this one. The only thing I haven’t been for you is a stillborn child, present in your spirit all the days you have left of life. It will be the greater love, the love of the frustrated mother whose breasts drip milk without a precious mouth to suck them; with hands like the eye sockets of the blind, holding an absent body; a trunk grown old without seeing the branches grow; a heart weeping for a child with no name, no body, no age, no presence; pure promise; a never-sprouted seed; a mute road where known and beloved footsteps will never echo. That great love will unite us definitively. Later, the happiness of not having the limitations of flesh and the ecstasy of transparency. For having been faithful for so many centuries, we deserve to be the architects of new worlds.”

From that day forward, at every dawn, the fetus repeated the same words, and she listened to them each time with the same emotion, as if she’d never heard them before. She stopped smoking opium to see if the message was an auditory hallucination produced by the drug. Nothing changed. The spirit spoke to her for nine months. In March of 1919, the wind carried a dry leaf through the window. It settled on her lap. She made an emergency call for an ambulance. The birth was normal, easy. A beautiful child with open emerald-colored eyes. When it was placed at her bosom, it smiled, fixed its penetrating eyes on hers, took a deep breath, crossed its legs, joined its hands in the attitude of prayer, and died.

A black dot, like spilled oil, appeared on its forehead and spread rapidly until it covered the baby’s face, head, neck, and, finally, its entire body. The flesh fossilized. Fanny left the hospital, carrying a small ebony Buddha in her arms. Despite the fact that its fate had been revealed to her, an animal grief invaded her cells, pierced her like a red-hot dagger, surrounded her soul with a corset of thorns. It amputated her ambition to be Queen of Chile.

She went back to the camouflaged bordello, placed the idol at the head of her bed, spent her free time praying before it, and gave herself to the Minister, imitating torrential orgasms in order to convince him to build a secret tomb on San Cristóbal Hill. And one morning, in November of the same year, she walked down the marble steps of the newly finished chapel, got into the bronze coffin with her petrified child in her arms, closed the lid, and abandoned this plane of existence forever. Two days later, Don Manuel Garrázabal was murdered by unknown assailants, perhaps killers in the pay of the man who would be his successor. It is possible that accidents, sicknesses, and attacks are hidden forms of suicide. Since the politician had used prisoners that he himself ordered killed in jail, no one ever found out about the existence of the subterranean mausoleum. For her mother and siblings, Fanny disappeared without leaving a trace. The prostitutes claimed she’d run off to India to enter a monastery located on an island that had the same shape as the Sanskrit syllable “aum” or that she’d been carried off by a rajah who held her prisoner in the harem of his palace in Mysore, only feeding her French garlic sausages and pink champagne.

For Benjamín too those were evil times. He was eighteen and still conforming to his childhood desires. He had not a single hair on his body—not on his head, face, armpits, or even his pubis: he was as smooth as a tortoiseshell doll. Always disgusted by his animal parts, he would also have wanted to have no teeth or nails and to be translucent like a jellyfish. But he did not get what he wanted. His nails grew hard and long with wide half-moon marks; his teeth were amazingly white, well-rooted in pink gums. Even though he never wanted to brush them, they seemed intent on resisting a century of bacterial attacks. His skin was as smooth as a girl’s and shone with a flesh color that was so natural it looked artificial. To cover up those talonish nails, he covered them with polish the same color as the skin on his fingers.

His way of speaking was so complex and his gestures so exquisite that no boy wanted to become his friend. Aside from his mother, whom he dined with every night and slept with in the same bed (taking advantage of the fact that the lady slept like a log, he sucked her breasts passionately), he knew no one. He worked like a sleepwalker in the Rubén Darío bookshop, desiring only one thing: to be a poet. How was that vocation born in him? Benjamín explained it enthusiastically to the first person who did him the honor of accepting him as a comrade, Birdie Baquedano (a boy typographer with a wire-shaped body and the black eyes of a Spanish gypsy, which he inherited from his father, an immigrant who never wanted to work a single day and who, abusing his charm as a singer, his heron-like silhouette, and a member more robust than those of ordinary mortals, lived off Birdie’s mother, a long-suffering, hard-working laundress).

“Benjamín, explain to me just what it was that made you decide to write poems.”

“Oh, it was the void, a dominion where light supplants the forms. It appeared in my heart, which in turn began to imitate an opening in the heavens. Life swelled and confused the lines; illusion beat regularity. I had to remake reality according to other combinations. What was known was nothing more than a preamble to the imagining of the unknown. My coarse impulses leapt beyond thought, giving voice to Art amid the deformed silence of the world. And my temple was swept away by the emboldened elements.”

“Hmm… I understand what you mean. What is your goal?”

“With just one more step, I’ll be a mirage of potential forms, discovering another dawn at the end of this night where men-boys wander around not knowing their brothers, in a false absence that progressively corrodes them.”

“Quite clear. What do you see?”

“Beyond death, whose simulacrum I feel, I half-see, knocked down by ecstasy, an eternal reality. All that remains in the empty world is the palpitation of our two souls.”

Answering that final question as if in a trance, Benjamín, who emerged from the depths of his abyss, bit his lips, because he realized he was making a declaration of love to his first friend. Birdie Baquedano, subtle thing that he was, instantly caught the insinuation. He smiled mockingly but did not reject it. He was made for solitary types. Even in the cradle he’d been rejected by everybody, even though he was a pretty, charming, and intelligent baby. He was born with only one defect, a big one: stench. He reached our planet with a mysterious glandular disorder, secreting a stink so horrible that not even his own mother wanted to put her nipples in his mouth.

The acidic stink, bitter, irritating, and sticky as well—it impregnated everything his skin touched: clothing, books, food, furniture, family members—was unbearable. After a few minutes, it would pass through the handkerchief of the person who gave him his bottle or changed his diapers, causing retching and vomiting. He grew up isolated, without friends, caresses, or toys. Even those who had to see him didn’t dare come closer than three yards.

The only job allowed him was goalkeeper in soccer matches, though he had to wear thick rubber gloves to touch the ball. He never would have found work if it weren’t for a socialist who—nauseated but still applying his humanitarian theories—taught him from a distance to use the machine that made letters from lead. He made him a typographer.

On Mondays, his only day off, he would visit bookstores, since women were out of the question. Seeing as the other customers and the staff ran away when they smelled him, he would simply pocket with impunity whichever books he wanted, and if he didn’t do that, the owner would run after him to beg him never to come back and that, by the way, he might take with him this “gift of the house” since the paper stank so strongly after his hands touched it.

The first person not to retreat from his presence was Benjamín. The bald man stared at him with his angelic eyes and smiled warmly. He invited him to look over a collection of poets translated from the French and had a long conversation with him, inviting him to lunch the next day on his free time. In reality, my uncle, in his immense desire to eliminate animal traits, only ate rice and dried fruit and lived with an anesthetized sense of smell. He did not need olfactory perceptions. As he put it, it was a good sense for dogs or cats, but for no one else.

The lunch began badly because the owner of the restaurant, between bows and smiles, covering his nose with a napkin soaked in mentholated alcohol, begged them to leave immediately, hoping they’d have the goodness never to return. Birdie Baquedano, pale, walked out to the street, hopped on a streetcar, and tried to get lost in the city. Benjamín, insane, ran after him for about two hundred yards, chasing him on foot between the rails until, exhausted, he fell on his knees, touching his forehead without eyebrows to the indifferent cobblestones. Four blocks ahead, Birdie was kicked off the tram, which continued its journey with windows wide open despite the cold.

Benjamín bought two apples, some cornstarch pudding, and a bottle of wine. He happily invited the typographer to a picnic in the garbage dump next to the Mapocho River. There, surrounded by a pestilence that for them was non-existent but which scattered passersby, they could develop their friendship. My uncle, searching for a language that would be worthy of his friend’s beauty, dedicated himself to getting him out of his depression:

“Everything you fought for and seemed a defeat, a mire of dry leaves, dense emotions, plans that smashed into walls, and, even more, nightmares, desires suffocated by enormous shame, now burst out transformed into fertile land, like a fire of such living green. It comes from below, from the clear root of sex, which feeds on the great hidden coal, and its growth—if you don’t fight it; if you learn the language of what is pure, conscious power; and if you give it blindness as a goal—will drag you toward all that you thought you desired, but which after all was the desire for Life seeking itself.”

Birdie Baquedano, without realizing it, drunk on those words and the wine, ate the two apples and the cornstarch pudding. Benjamín became lyrical:

“Open doors toward the south, the north, to the right, to the left; that’s right, open yourself as if you were a flower, from the center extending your invisible petals. Make yourself a wheel of hands that give, bless, and receive. Transform yourself into a long bridge along which pass unthinkable energies, which are impossible to define but in which you feel that distant immensity that soaks you to the bones. Let the entire Earth come to you so you push it toward the sky. Let spaces without depth come to you so you can submerge them in the earth. Make yourself a point where all roads cross.”

A small stray dog clutched Benjamín’s calf with his front paws and began to hump him. The poet refused to take any notice of such lowly stuff and, without bothering to scare him away, left him in his rapid hip work, continuing with his fiery speech:

“The angel of flesh, the angel transformed into earth, there, within the dark skull, pure from the beginning of time, accumulating virgin energy, he, with his cosmic trumpet voice, speaks to you, singing from the flower of the instant. His belly, like an oven hotter than a thousand moons, spurts out tongues of cold fire that dissolve the frontiers of our two languages. Your body swimming in its own soul, thanks to that grace, will always have something new to offer me. Open your mouth so the cataclysm may enter!”

At that moment, perhaps hypnotized by the last sentence, Birdie Baquedano kicked the dog aside and kissed my uncle Benjamín on the mouth, a kiss that lasted at least five minutes. When their lips separated, they didn’t know what to do. The poet stood there with the muse caught in his throat. They were staring into each other’s eyes as if a mountain had fallen on their heads. The first to speak was the typographer:

“Let’s not be ashamed. The greater suffering is being separated. Let’s accept the freedom of tying ourselves to those we love. What we give, we shall give it to ourselves. We are recalling the existence of the bridges because everything that seemed cut has been united for all eternity. Let’s submerge into each other’s dreams, and let’s find the road without limits.”

My uncle was left agape, in blessed admiration. Birdie too was a poet! They kissed again. Benjamín felt a desire to dance. He tried a few steps in the garbage, but he came back chased by a furious rat. Birdie smashed it with a brick. Feeling himself protected, Benjamín dreamed aloud:

“Let’s imitate the poet Augusto D’Halmar and Tolstoy, Gorky, Zola, and Maupassant by going to live in the virgin territories of southern Chile to plant roses and fruit trees, to teach literature to the peasants.

“Look, Baldy (please let me call you by that pet name), it’s my duty to remind you that when D’Halmar, supplied only with a wide-brimmed black hat and a Spanish cape, reached Concepción in his search for Arauco, he couldn’t even find anything to eat, he found nowhere to sleep, and he got lost out in the country. He was almost raped by a group of horsemen. He quickly came back to the capital and with three friends founded, just outside the city, an agrarian colony that failed because they planted out of season, their neighbors stole their water, and their oxen ran away.”