Where the Bird Sings Best (39 page)

“You want me to change my nature in a month? You’re batty, Horse. It can’t be done so quickly, and besides it’s impossible.”

“If you’re a man, we can give it a try.”

“You doubt my virility? I’m no fag.”

“Maybe a coward.”

“Me? Let’s see.”

“We will see. First, it will be easy. I’ll tickle you with a feather, and you’ll have to hold in your laughter. When you get past the tickles, I’ll move on to the second test, and that’s when you can begin to break down. To console you, I’ll tell you that my secret method has only four steps. Few but decisive.”

“Go get your feather. If I decide not to laugh, I won’t laugh. With will power you can achieve anything.”

Things weren’t that easy. The feather was hard, an eagle feather. Bearable in the armpits and the back but annoying on the soles of the feet and a torture in the nostrils and the interior of the ears. It took Jaime a day to dominate those feelings and make himself feel nothing. Only once did Horse catch him off guard and make him jump up—by scratching his anus. Finally, he could touch the feather to Jaime’s open eyes and he wouldn’t even blink.

Then the pricking began. He had to let himself be pricked with a needle without reacting. That took a week. His teacher showed no mercy. He sunk the tiny point in everywhere, including the genitals. Jaime put up with the pain, overcame his reflexes, and became as passive as a corpse.

Horse gave him four days of rest while he went north to find an important ingredient for the third test. He returned with a carefully sealed cigar box with tiny holes in the lid.

“What I’ve got here is a dozen tarantulas. I had to go all the way to the Andes to hunt them down. They’re big and very poisonous. Luckily they walk more slowly than turtles. Look.”

He opened the box. There were the hairy animals with their long legs and the orange stripe on their bulging bellies. Horse took a twig and flipped one over.

“Take a good look, my Russian friend. Here underneath the thorax they have two black teeth. Those they will use to bite and kill you. They aren’t aggressive, but they have a very bad character. The slightest unexpected movement makes them snuffle, trying to inject their venom. And just so you see I’m not lying...”

With some tweezers he picked up a tarantula and tossed it on a mangy dog that had wandered into the slum to sniff around the garbage. The dog jumped three times, howled, tossed the spider off, but after a few minutes began to wheeze, fell to the ground shaking, and died. Jaime swallowed hard.

“Go to bed early because tomorrow we’ll get up at dawn.”

Before sunup, they left with the cigar box and a cask for San Cristóbal Hill. Horse poured the tarantulas into the cask and turned it over next to Jaime, who was lying on the ground trying to turn himself into stone. They waited a couple of hours until the sun warmed the ground. The spiders lost their torpor and tried to get out of the cask. To do that, they had to walk along Jaime’s legs, stomach, sex, chest, and face. He was naked. His body temperature seemed agreeable to them, so they stayed on top of him for half an hour, which to my father seemed like an eternity. But it wasn’t disagreeable because, distanced from his body, he fell into a beatitude that united him to the entire Universe. He realized that beneath the terror of existence, that life threatened by hunger, catastrophes, illness, human beasts, there extended an infinite peace. A sentence came to his mind and for the time he had the tarantulas on top of him he repeated it again and again: “I without the world, no; the world without me, better.” Finally they left. González the Horse, pale, handed him a heavily sugared cup of coffee he poured from a thermos.

“You are an extraordinary boy. You’ll be the champ because you’re not afraid to die. Now all you have to do is learn to become invisible. You’ll move on to the final test, the hardest.”

When Horse explained what he wanted him to do, Jaime became furious and called him a mad man. Then that state of cosmic peace he’d acquired with the tarantulas invaded him, and he accepted with indifference.

At six o’clock in the afternoon, when the zoo was closing, they visited, with four bottles of red wine in hand, Don Gumercindo, the old watchman, a friend and former admirer of Horse. He received them with open arms. The business of spending nights alone amid roars, crowing, and erotic whistles, had made him thirsty, not only for wine but also for human company. The boxer had him swallow glass after glass until most of the four bottles was in his stomach. He collapsed onto his military cot, snoring so loudly that the three-year-old calendar on the wall went flying.

Horse checked through some drawers and found a ring of keys. They walked to the big cage of the Bengal tigers. There were four adult tigers, one male and three female, along with half a dozen pups, each no larger than a cat. Night was falling. The tigers, emerging from their daytime torpor, suffocated in that space—which, even if it was big, was limited by bars—paced back and forth with a regularity that seemed insane.

Jaime’s task was to enter the cage, walk to the center, and remain there, seated, until dawn without being eaten. My father put the key into the lock, turned it slowly, opened the door inch by inch, slipped in, shut the door, and, oblivious to himself, an empty vehicle, walked to the indicated spot, passing among the tigers without their noticing his presence. He sat down with his legs crossed and remained mixed with the air, the darkness, the cold, with no divisions, without a single word coming to his mind, without a single feeling occupying his heart, without wanting or needing anything, beyond all possession.

The beasts did not see him. Moreover, a female came to him to sniff, scratched the ground, and peed a hot spurt on his back. When, with the first rays of sunshine, the bars produced long black tongues that cut the floor into brilliant rectangles, Jaime, walking with normal steps, not trying to hide, zigzagged among the supine tigers getting ready to sleep and left the cage. Unable to move his mouth to smile, he emptied a little bottle of rum the euphoric Horse handed him. Together, proud, they jogged six miles back to the tenement.

“Now you’re ready, my Russian friend. The man who can beat you hasn’t been born. Baby Face will leave this bout with an old face. You will be National Champion.”

The fight was widely publicized in the newspapers, and the basketball court where the ring had been constructed was full. Everyone was a fan of the Baby, and they all came intent on seeing how he would break my father’s neck. Jaime walked toward the ring accompanied by Horse amid hisses and tossed bottles that burst scattering beer or urine. After the customary introduction, the fighters took off their robes, and the audience burst into laughter. Opposite that tall mastodon, wide, heavy, full of muscles, my father looked like a weak dwarf.

One fanatic shouted out, “I bet Baby knocks him cold in under two minutes!”

No one argued the point; they all applauded. Jaime, little by little, began to disappear. When the bell sounded to call him for the first round, he was invisible. He was a body with no one, a demolition machine, nothing more. The giant had no idea where to begin. Every punch he made landed in the void. His enemy was an agile, cold shadow that ducked and stepped back without ever showing himself. When the rest period came, the Baby, sweating in the heat, his breath short, felt alone. He was fighting against a waft of air that stared at him with the eyes of a dead man.

The bell sounded. Baby again found himself transformed into the center of a comet that spun around him counterclockwise. How the hell was he going to land a punch? Upset, he dropped his guard for a second and felt an explosion in his liver followed by a hook to the jaw that made him stagger. The audience was silenced. The shadow struck again, and the left eyelid of the favorite opened like a ripe pomegranate. Before he could react, he was hit with three more smacks of the glove. The blood poured out, leaving him only one good eye. Jaime used that advantage to break Baby’s nose.

The round ended. The three members of the official champion’s team closed his cut with Vaseline, stuffed cotton into one nostril, and passed him the pail so he could spit out two broken teeth. Explaining that these contusions were a mere accident, a normal mistake, we all get distracted for a second, they predicted that in the next round he would make the poor contender into mortadella.

The bell rang. Jaime, tranquil, observing at a distance of two thousand years, advanced toward his rival with his arms hanging at his sides. Baby lurched forward, transformed into a bull at his judgment day, and began to throw a series of punches that were lost in a space that had become immense. The enemy offered no resistance, and suddenly he clenched with Baby, and boxing became dance. He wasn’t a man but a snake. Disconcerted, he stopped in the center of the ring, emptied of aggression, waiting for a response.

Jaime began a kind of dance, jumping forward and backward, cutting at times to one side then the other without throwing a punch. The audience began to protest. They no longer knew which one they were against. The Russian lost that nationality along with his face and silhouette, his person. No one could judge him; he was someone being no one. Baby, tired, perhaps hypnotized, dropped his gloves, and then the lightning bolt struck. He received an incessant beating, in the stomach, the ribs, the chin, the nose, the eyes, the temples. He looked like a house being torn down.

Jaime’s punches, implacable, accurate, echoed like shots, penetrating the innumerable holes allowed by the stupefied defense. The colossus, bent on knee, groaning, almost suffocated. The referee counted to eight. Baby came staggering back into the fight. One of Jaime’s punches seemed to break his ribs. Another bloodied his mouth. His swollen lower lip hung like a dead oyster. A jab seemed to burst his eye. The huge man, reaching desperation, terrified, stretched out an arm to ask for help from his trainers, wanting them to throw in the towel. Since it was a useless movement in terms of the fight, it surprised Jaime, and purely by chance, it caught him right in the forehead. His head shot back, scattering a halo of sweat. The impact wasn’t strong enough to knock him out, but because it was such a surprise, it produced a mental short circuit; a space the Rabbi used to introduce himself into his spirit and take control.

For many years, since the death of Alejandro the shoemaker, the Rabbi had not manifested himself. Jaime defended himself from him with his attacks of epilepsy. But now, with all his accumulated desires to exist, he turned Jaime into his mount. Jaime seemed to grow thin, his shoulder hunched, his gestures became refined, his voice became shrill, and his eyes burned. With infinite pity, he observed the bloodied Baby, who was so beaten up he was completely idiotized. He embraced him, kissed his cheeks, and said, “Brother goy, I can’t go on hitting you. Commandment 216: ‘We should love our fellow man.’ Commandment 251: ‘It is forbidden to hurt another with wounding words.’ If bad words are forbidden, then the prohibition logically extends to punches. Commandment 300: ‘It is forbidden to hit anyone without authorization.’ God, blessed be He, has not authorized boxing. Neither you nor I is a criminal to deserve flagellation. Commandment 302: ‘It is forbidden to feel hatred for our fellow man or humiliate him in public.’ Forgive me, Baby, for what my ignorant guest has done to you. Commandment 319: ‘It is forbidden to strike one’s parents.’ All human beings in one moment of history have been or will be our parents. For having damaged your body, Jaime deserves strangulation. Forgive him. From the depth of my being, I implore you, oh Lord!”

Baby, during that monologue, had enough time to recover, and seeing his enemy with his flaccid arms extended toward him, took advantage and hit him with a left hook to the abdomen that terminated the speech. An enthusiastic shouting arose from the audience: “The kitchen!” The fans were begging the champion to splatter the traitor’s stomach. He went on punching. The Rabbi did not defend himself. He even offered his face for punishment:

“If that’s the way you want it, come on, brother. Punch until you’re tired. I shall convert your hatred into caresses.”

Baby smashed his face. The Rabbi asked for more punches. Baby smashed his ribs. Jaime raised his arms as if in the shower to offer a better target. A molar went flying. The Rabbi smiled, spitting red with a saintly face. He began to look for punches, and he found them. He charged forward, threw himself into the arms of the ferocious monster to allow himself to be broken, eaten. The murderous crowd asked for more. The Rabbi, miraculously still on his feet under a demolishing rain, began to recite a psalm:
Truly my soul finds rest in God; my salvation comes from Him
.

González the Horse threw in the towel and immediately jumped over the ropes to pull Jaime out of Baby’s arms. Baby, desperate because he couldn’t knock him out, was squeezing his throat to strangle him. Horse dragged Jaime to his corner and emptied a pail of ice water on his head. The sudden chill made Jaime react and frightened the Rabbi away. No sooner had the spirit fled than the pain began. My father fell, writhing, to the floor with four broken ribs. He had to be carried out of the ring on a stretcher. His boxing career ended that night.

Horse got drunk so he could tell him, with great sadness, “My boy, you could have been number one, but you’re crazy. We missed the train, and there won’t be another. I’m old now. I’m going to Chañaral to the house where I was born. I’m going to plant tomatoes, because they’ll remind me of boxing gloves. Good-bye.”

It took Jaime three months to recover from the beating. When he left the hospital, he found out that Horse had given up the room in the tenement, so he’d have to find a new one. He went to the apartment of Teresa and Benjamín to see if they’d let him stay there for a while.