Where the Bird Sings Best (40 page)

It was December 1919. The heat was unbearable, but all the shops were decorated with snow, sleds, and Santa Clauses dressed for a polar cold. In that ridiculous festive setting imported from the European winter so it could be transplanted in the heart of summer, the evil surprises continued. Now it was Teresa’s turn. Simply put, she went insane.

Where did she get the rifle? No one ever found out. She stepped out onto the balcony and began shooting. Luckily, her rage was attenuated by a rejection of death; she only wanted to wound people in the legs, as she expressed it screaming amid the firing, in order to keep her victims from marching in repugnant flocks. The hatred that seized her was directed at all uniforms. She would shoot and shout, “Down with equality! Long live difference!”

She maimed one policeman, two soldiers, a café waiter, a lycée student, an ice cream man, three boys wearing soccer uniforms, a government official, a nurse, and a Santa Claus who passed by selling sugared peanuts. When Jaime arrived, the shooting had been going on for half an hour, and the victims were moaning where they fell in the street, trying to staunch the blood pouring out of thighs and calves. The Red Cross was slow in coming. Benjamín and Lola, on their knees amid the wounded, implored their mother to cease firing.

When the neighbors formed a chain to keep passersby from walking into danger, Teresa, with extraordinary marksmanship, began to kill pigeons, howling that those birds from hell were also in uniform. Then she shot at shadows because they were all the same color. When she decided that human bodies, because they were all the same—head, trunk, and extremities—were uniforms, chaos ensued. Benjamín and Lola fled, dodging bullets, and hid under a cart. Finally the police arrived along with an ambulance and a fire truck. They recommended waiting until she ran out of ammunition.

When they heard some clicks from her weapon, the ambulance personnel ran to pick up the wounded, and the firemen stretched out a ladder to block the window and keep the mad woman from diving down to the street. Had she really run out of bullets or was she crouched down with the reloaded rifle, waiting for someone to approach so she could open her vengeful fire again?

Jaime, without asking himself that question and forgetting his own pain, ran up the firemen’s ladder, slipped over the steps, and, making a huge leap, landed right in the dining room. On the table, with only her head protruding from the soapy, dark water, Teresa was lying naked in a metal tub. The rifle, empty now, was taking a bath with her. Her eyes were wide open, round, flashing, and the skin on her face was stretched, as if it were too small to hold in so much bitterness. Without recognizing her son, she spoke through him to address someone who was standing behind her back:

“Don’t ask yourself who you are, because you are no one. You’ve never existed. Like me. We are impostors in this world, which is not authentic, where there is nothing true and what is real is a mirage. Uniforms all over the place, copies of copies of copies, each suit, each body, each soul is a disguise. The surface is everywhere and the center nowhere. A piece of rock, a piece of flesh, a flood, a fire, a massacre, the void’s same old hypocritical game. We’ve been dead since the beginning of time. No one has ever been born. Strangle me, get me out of this lie!”

Teresa’s disillusionment was so great that Jaime stretched out his hands, wishing to obey her. She got on her knees, revealing her long, wide bosoms, large bananas that reached her navel.

“I’ve lost my strength. You, a good executioner, change the world. Make it finally be born.”

Jaime, retaining the compassion that was leading him to matricide, ran to open the door. The police came in scrambling like clowns from one place to another, shouting orders, pointing their carbines, shaking clubs, trembling as if the poor woman were a rabid gorilla. Behind them, whiter than a paraffin candle, came Benjamín and Lola. Teresa did not recognize them either. She sank completely into the water, trying to drown herself. The cops could find no other way to save her except tipping the tub over. The water splashed over the floor, giving off a pestilential stink. Aside from the grease and the soap, it contained leftover food, books dissolving into jelly, pieces of photographs, excrement, and little crystal balls.

They tied her hands, wrapped her in a blanket, and carried her away. As she passed by Jaime, she had a lucid instant: “My son, go see Recabarren. He was the only one who didn’t lie to us.”

Then she howled like an animal and began to fight against the uniformed ambulance people, foaming at the mouth. Her screeching could be heard until, finally, the ambulance that carried her to the insane asylum became a white dot far down Independence Avenue. Lola left, following the police and firemen without saying a word. Benjamín, holding back his sobs and his nausea, put on one of his mother’s aprons and began to wash the floor. He too said nothing. Jaime felt like a stranger. He knew his brother would see to it Teresa was moved to a decent clinic. After all, the old girl belonged to him. She was almost his wife. Offering him help would only arouse his jealousy. It seemed far better to lock oneself in a cheap hotel until this damned year ended.

He spent seven days in Room 13, without turning on the light, without talking to himself, without reading newspapers, stretched out like a corpse. When the sirens announced the New Year, he paid his bill with the last money he had and walked out to hug people in the street. The first person to fall into his arms was a muscular dark-skinned woman, beautiful and virile. Their embrace grew closer and closer, each one advancing with no modesty toward the intimacy of the other, charging like two warships, giving each other kisses like cannonades, and there, standing up, they fornicated for hours.

After ejaculating four times, Jaime asked what her name was. It turned out to be Isolda, the Lightning Bolt from Limache, a knife thrower. My father showed her the empty lining of his pockets and proposed that she take him on as her assistant. From her knapsack, the girl removed seven wide knives, placed Jaime next to a wooden entryway door, stepped back a few paces, and with glacial severity challenged him: “Will you take the dare?”

Jaime felt his knees grow weak, but his hunger advised him to risk his skin, despite the alcohol on the woman’s breath.

“I won’t even blink!”

She threw the knives at him. The first almost caught his ear. The second threateningly missed his ribs. The third caressed his calf. That took care of the left side. Three more tosses balanced the right.

“Spread your legs a bit. Still going to take the dare?”

Jaime separated his legs and said nothing, not out of bravery but because he’d lost his voice. The seventh knife struck so close to his perineum that if it weren’t that his scrotum had contracted like a cotton vest washed in hot water, she would have castrated him. The year 1920 offered him his first opportunity: he would be the target of dark-skinned Isolda in Toni Carrot’s circus.

The tent, formerly white but now gray because of being handled so often, spotted with patches and stains like purulent wounds, was small. For seating, the spectator was offered a gallery of splintered planks, and the performance space, marked by gasoline cans painted the red, white, and blue of the Chilean flag, since it lacked good mats, was covered by a carpet of potato sacks. In one truck traveled the baggage and the trained burro and in the other, the entire company, composed exclusively of family members. Toni Carrot, whose real name was Don Hernán Cañas, dressed completely in orange. He said he was a descendant of José Joaquín Cañas Aldunate, the priest of Carahue, who in the high spirits of the days of Independence committed the indiscretion of founding a discreet family. He was the artist’s grandfather.

His wife, Emilia Cañas, a.k.a. Toni Lettuce, was completely dressed in green. For her part, she claimed to be the granddaughter of Blas Cañas Calvo, the priest who organized the Congregation of the House of Mary, who, on the day the convent was inaugurated, imbibed too much punch and sinned with a nun. As soon as her belly began to protrude, she was expelled and had to give birth on the watermelon truck giving her a lift to the Talcahuano whorehouses. She managed the business affairs of the group, distributing the pesos and the food with a severity worthy of King Solomon.

The two trapeze artists, jugglers, tightrope walkers, trainers of the donkey who knew how to bray the national anthem, were the parents of Isolda and her three brothers. The three remaining women were the mobile wives of those same brothers. Each night, they drew lots to decide who would sleep with whom. The children, an indeterminate number, called all the women mom and all the men dad.

The most tedious aspect of the performances was the continuous change of costumes. Toni Carrot and Toni Lettuce retained their identity, but the others, dressed as musicians, began playing a polka next to the ticket stand improvised on the bed of the passenger truck to summon the audience. Then they would run to put on the jackets of an usher, sweeper, assembler of trapezes, seller of balloons, chocolates, or lollipops. Then the changes would multiply, because it was the turn of the contortionists and acrobats, those who mounted a bicycle, eight at a time, those who danced a rumba on the tightrope, those who tossed the burro up in the air to catch him on the soles of their feet and make him spin around along with two huge wooden balls.

For Jaime, who wasn’t born in a circus tent, who hadn’t grown up on a truck, and who, for those very reasons, found it difficult to learn all these tricks, they found an easy but spectacular act. Aside from having to risk his life allowing his lover to outline him in knives, he was hung by his hair. Since he hadn’t had a haircut since his last match, he had a black mane of hair that was thick and straight. The acrobats coated it with pitch, inserted a wire as an axis, and transformed it into a ponytail that ended in an arc of steel. All he had to do when they hoisted him ten feet from the floor was to show off his muscles, eat the empanada that was his dinner, and then read the sheet of newsprint in which the empanada had been wrapped.

This new life, within its magic, was a matter of routine. Monday: break down the tent. Tuesday: travel to another town. Wednesday: set up the tent. Thursday: march through the town in a publicity parade. Friday and Saturday: endure two performances. Sunday: add a “children’s matinee,” and then at night, get drunk, and make love under the grandstand. Sometimes the circus drew a crowd; most of the time, it was almost empty. Sometimes they performed for three or four people. No one grew sad. They didn’t want to get rich but rather to earn a living. In the spirit of those artists, there was no future. They had the mentality of birds. They got up at dawn, penniless, and worked all day to fill their bellies. They were all possessed of a strange happiness that soon spread to Jaime.

To travel that way, free, with the family, enjoying the pure air of the open road, was a gift. Without haste, with the calm of migratory birds, they traveled the nation, village by village, always heading south. They knew how to take a simple chicken, season it with herbs they found in the forests, and transform it into a princely banquet. They filled the monotony of travel with songs and jokes. Isolda was a lover with such a wide range of orgasms, from a girlish squeal to a mammoth’s roar, that Jaime never felt the weeks go by. Toni Carrot, always arm-in-arm with Toni Lettuce—between them their ages added up to almost 190 years—came over to say to him:

“Little friend, you have made our only granddaughter so happy that we want to give you a gift; we’re going to tell you a joke we’ve invented for you and you alone. Keep it like a jewel and don’t tell it to anyone so that when your first granddaughter has a lover who makes her happy, you can give it to him intact. Listen carefully, because we won’t repeat it:

A man sees a frog. The frog says to him, “Kiss me, please.”

The man thinks, “A frog that speaks must be an enchanted princess. I’ll kiss her, she’ll turn back into what she was, she will marry me, and I’ll be a millionaire.” The man kisses the frog, feels an explosion, and finds he’s been turned into a frog.

The first frog says, “How wonderful. You were enchanted for ever so long, and, finally, I was able to save you!”

Jaime never knew what effect the story had on him but instead of laughing, he began to cry.

The two aged clowns applauded in satisfaction: “We were not wrong. You’re a sensitive man. Good jokes, like happiness, should provoke tears.”

When they reached Puerto Montt, they were caught by winter, and the rains became torrential. There they remained for three weeks, hoping the deluge would cease. Water fell, fell, and fell some more. It was impossible to raise the tent on mud. They killed time playing cards secluded in the truck. The women went out to look for work so they would have something to eat. Jaime offered to accompany them, but the men simply put his cards in his hand and placed before him a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a huge glass of wine, insinuating that in the family, by tradition, the men never worked among the rubes, by which they meant all human beings who did not belong to the circus world.

“We are pure and they false, like slips of paper stacked to look like money.”

The grandmother was the only woman who stayed behind, taking advantage of that forced rest to try to train a toad. According to what Jaime was told, she’d begun with this one about ten years earlier, managing to make it say ”mama,” but that wasn’t enough for a public show.

“Do toads live that long?”

“Like turtles, they live more than a century. Maybe one day Toni Lettuce will get this one to take a mouthful of gasoline and spit it into a candle to produce huge flames.”