Where the Bird Sings Best (21 page)

“Come here, my son.”

He’s going to give me a farewell kiss, but what good is it to me now when he never did it before. I would have preferred kisses that began something, not kisses that end things. “I’m coming, father.”

He pressed his lips together and brought his face close to that of the dying man. Alejandro, with his resuscitated hand, took hold of Jaime’s nape and immobilized his head. Following the Rabbi’s instructions, he fastened his mouth around Jaime’s nose and breathed, a final, long, interminable breath. The Rabbi entered through Jaime’s nostrils into his spirit. Alejandro died. Jaime fell to the floor, writhing in rage and screaming: “I don’t want your madness! No! I don’t want it! Get out of me, you shitty ghost!”

A pale old woman, waving a newspaper, came to announce that war had broken out in Europe.

Teresa no longer wanted to think about her children. Never again did she bathe or leave the small apartment Shorty Fremberg had given her in exchange for the percentage of Warsaw that belonged to her husband. She spent her time staring out the window at the nothingness. If she spoke, it was only to curse, keeping secret the name of the person she was cursing. Fanny, Lola, and Jaime, tired of her incessant bad humor, looked, each on his or her own, for some way to earn a living. Soon they stopped visiting. Benjamín could put up with being mistreated and worked as a salesman in a bookstore so he could feed his mother. They began to sleep together in the same bed.

Lola began to study guitar with the blind woman in Room 28. The old woman knew myriad songs and went from bar to bar offering her broken-down voice. The drunken patrons, overwhelmed with sorrows of the heart, requested melodies that would remind them of the woman who betrayed them, and she always knew them. An astonishing memory. Lola, late at night, transformed into a guide-dog, accompanied the old woman from bar to bar, singing duets with her.

Jaime became violent, rejecting the appearances of the Rabbi with epileptic fits. González the Horse, mentally retarded, with a long face, thick lips, and enormous teeth, formerly a champion boxer, accepted him as a student. The boy’s aggressive energy enabled him to win good money in that sport. He took part in clandestine bouts: before dog fights, the organizers would present two or three fights between boys because they were popular with homosexual bettors.

Horse had very personal training methods. He would go with Jaime to the potter’s field at the General Cemetery to steal skulls. Then, in Room 35, completely painted white with posters and trophies covering the walls, now transformed into a gym, he would have his student demolish skulls with his fists. “Remember: your punches must pass through flesh, which is illusion, to break the real bones.” Every feint or duck provoked reflections that, despite being said in an alcohol-soaked voice with a cross-eyed diction, taught Jaime how to fight against that fierce enemy, life.

Fanny accepted that Ruby of the Street, the tenement prostitute, should educate her. The sensual dwarf informed her: “With that red hair, that body, and that face, your future is secure. You’ve got long legs, full lips, a tangled pubis, firm breasts, and a round ass, which is to say, you’ve got everything! All you need is to learn to know men. By knowing them you’ll be able to dominate them. Understanding what they’re made of, you become their mother. You’ll appear docile, and they’ll think that they’re the boss, but in fact they’ll obey orders. And the best way to drag them around by the nose is to give them sexual pleasure. I’m going to teach you all the techniques. You’re just a girl, but you’ll memorize everything I tell you, and later it will be precious to you, pure gold. Each penis is different and has a special way of getting satisfaction. You will become ductile, malleable, changing. You won’t be just one woman but thousands, and your muscles and orifices will be proficient in giving the maximum pleasure. And you won’t disdain using certain objects. From this moment on, I’ll hide you in my armoire, and looking through a little hole you’ll see what I do with my clients. If you clean off the soot, every man is a diamond.”

Fanny was so interested in this apprenticeship that she decided to become the best whore in Chile.

Teresa never told why she came back until, many years later, Benjamín punched her in the face, desperate because of her ill treatment and her attacks of absurd rage. Then he tied her to the bed, and using a pail he forced her to swallow half a liter of vodka. The alcohol finally loosened her tongue.

“After sending your father that letter in which I announced our break, I forgot, I must confess, the whole family. I felt as if a dry skin had fallen off my body, allowing me to be born again. For forty days, I stopped having sexual relations with my lover, and I stretched out in the darkness of the wagon to wait for a new hymen to grow within me. I got up free, perfectly sealed. At that moment, we were passing through a tiny village called Las Ventanas. From the street came the smells of bread and wine. Everything in me, now, was virgin, even my sense of smell. Those perfumes of wheat and grape, transformed by baking and fermentation into sacred food and elixir, moved me profoundly. I wanted with the totality of my being to receive Seraphim’s sperm in order to engender a perfect son, the fruit of love, not like you and Benjamín, the fruit of obligation.

“Seraphim did not behave the way I saw him—an angel sent by God, who to reach the stable where I awaited him naked, offering him my thirsty chalice, had to cross the entire Universe, slip through the whine of galaxies being born, gallop over careening comets, and fall into the dense matter of the Earth, attracted by a center more brilliant than the sun, my interior light. Instead, he insisted on being a monkey, hanging by his feet from a tree, his head hanging down, and he squealed with rage: ‘You’re mocking me, Teresa. No woman can desire to have a child with me, ever. Another monster would be born.’

“‘I do want to have your child! To shine, I have eliminated pain. Now, in this place, I am what I am, nameless, without problems, a flower open in the present, saturated with love down to the last particle of flesh, and for that very reason nonexistent when it’s alone. Have faith in my open sex: enter entirely into it to give content to my empty form.’

“‘That love of yours, immense as it is, is not enough to convince me that deformity is beauty.’

“‘Who will you believe, those who despise you, or me? If you let yourself be guided by what they think, you are your own worst enemy. Stop hating yourself and accept the miracle! We are two candles on the shrine. Our son will be a god. I want him to look like you.’

“I took a branch and broke it from the tree like a ripe fruit. He fell on me, biting, scratching, expelling his insides, sucked by the black ocean heaving in my ovaries to emit his ardent liquor with a squeal of pain-pleasure, collapsing exhausted next to my bosom to sleep for nine months. I desired to conceive with such intensity that I clearly felt the moment when his sperm fertilized me. In the depth of my womb, a point of immense energy vibrated. It opened like a door toward another dimension, receiving a river formed of millions of universes. All my flesh, in the presence of that potent flash, felt the drowning of death, the anguish of having lived in the shadows, separated. That new energy flooded my bones, my guts, my blood, purifying and fortifying each cell, eliminated the impurities and pain. My movements became delicate, prudent: I was the coffer that held within itself a diamond. I believed I saw a sheaf of fine rays emerge from my womb to illuminate the sordid wagon. I was overwhelmed by a millennial peace. Like a bird that begins its migration, my spirit emerged from the rot.

“Soon that divine being would nourish itself from my flesh: I had to reach total extinction in order to offer it a matter produced in the light of forgiveness. To forgive, I had to understand, and understanding meant recognizing essential love. I recovered God as never before and stopped seeing him as a murderer. Being Everything, He cannot end. And if we abandon solitude to submerge ourselves in Him, we shall not die. I separated from José, my poor drowned son. For many years I had not let him depart, turning him into my accomplice in my hatred of the Father.

“I allowed him to dissolve in the Divine Beginning, and as such I felt him participate in the creation of the new being. With invulnerable faith, absolute confidence, sovereign calm, I opened myself in a total listening. That child was not the confirmation of my existence. He was himself and for himself. He directed, he knew. In complete ignorance, I was there only to obey. My vagina, my uterus, my tubes, my ovaries, full of God, were engendering the savior of the world. Meanwhile, Seraphim went on sleeping. In his dreams, he told me later, there appeared someone like a wise carpenter, of kind and noble aspect, making a cradle out of wood from trees that came flying from the four corners of the Earth.

“As my belly grew larger, I felt the child’s spirit more and more. He communicated with me, and the bones of my pelvis responded by separating in order to prepare a perfect exit. An immense joy invaded my body. My lungs took in polluted air and exhaled pure oxygen: through them, my son was cleansing the planet. As he was becoming incarnate, the heart of the world was forming.

“The seven trained fleas made me enough money to survive. During those nine months, Seraphim neither drank nor ate, sleeping next to me, wrapped up like another fetus. I gave myself over in such a way to that marvelous symphony of sensations that is gestation that I did not feel the passage of time. It began to rain with ferocity. The huge drops crashing against the clay made the gelatinous noise of frogs exploding. The sun came out. A white crow brought me a branch of cinnamon.

“The moment to give birth had arrived. ‘These are the last instants when you are within me. We shall have to separate. Bless me.’ Yes, I asked the fetus to bless me because, since he was infinitely superior to me, it did not fall to me to do it. Grabbing onto a rope that hung from the ceiling, I hunkered down to give birth. I said to him, ‘From now on, you are you, and I am me. Let’s work together. Between the two of us we’re going to carry out a perfect birthing.’

“‘Make that three!’ exclaimed Seraphim, who woke up at that moment. He got down right in front of my spread thighs and held out his hands to keep the child from falling to the floor. Trembling, he tried not to close his eyes, not to escape again into sleep, heroically facing up to his fear of seeing a monster emerge.

“The baby intelligently adapted itself to my bent body and began to effect a slow movement of rotation, which became a spiral as it developed. My vagina caressed every inch of his body with infinite love.

“In the moment when the cranium appeared within the oval of the vulva, forming an eye with it, Seraphim stepped back a bit in order not to be directly opposite the baby. He whispered with veneration: ‘I’m receiving you from the side so that you see the world, because you belong to it and not me.’ The baby revolved, got out first its left arm, then the right, and finished the rotation offering himself like someone crucified. Seraphim delicately pulled him by the nape and extracted him from my lips, which kissed his heels with adoration.

“Breathing with difficulty, so proud was he, he held the baby up like a trophy: the boy—he was in fact male, as we had always supposed—possessed great beauty. His skin was dark, almost green; his eyes were yellow like sunflowers; his features were fine, Oriental. His elongated skull and his serene expression made him seem like a pre-Colombian sculpture. Shedding tears, Seraphim, along with me, pronounced the name that suddenly occurred to us without our thinking about it: Almo.

“I received Almo on my bosom, and there he stayed, so calm that his heart was drawing mine to slowness, and when we awoke in the same beatific rhythm, I cut the umbilical cord with my teeth, because I never, out of respect, would have dared to terminate our sacred union with a knife.

“Seraphim, on his knees, prayed to him: ‘Son, you are my master. Teach me to be, teach me to live, teach me to create, open my soul so that I can love even more.’ Just then, Almo spread his legs. Below his testicles and before his anus, he had a perfect female sex.

“‘A hermaphrodite!’ Seraphim shouted in consternation. ‘I knew it. Before, you gave birth to normal children. I’m the one with poisoned semen. What could come from me but an aberration? We have to kill it!’ He was so desperate and I so worn out that I felt unable to convince him that his son-daughter was more beautiful than any normal human, than an androgyne achieved the maximum dream of any individual: to possess both sexes at the same time like God. I gave myself over to Fate. Without protesting, I lifted the child and offered him to the murderous fury of his father. Seraphim took him, intent on throwing him to the floor and then kicking his skull in. But Almo fixed his eyes on those of his father, and instantly Seraphim’s face became transfigured, passing from bestial hatred to a balmy peace, because those tiny golden pupils reached his essence and transported him to a mental level he’d never known before.

“Death disappeared forever. His soul recognized itself as invulnerable, and suffering dissolved into a sweet ocean, which was unceasing. Time offering its eternal present, Life. Seraphim thought he could guess the thoughts of the newborn and repeated them aloud: ‘With this gaze I seal my alliance with you. I accept you as my father. I give you all the rights because you deserve my confidence, so that you educate the child in whom I am.’

“Smiling, Seraphim placed Almo next to my left breast and saw him suck for the first time. A cloud of melancholy darkened his happiness. I offered my right breast. Seraphim sat down whining and accepted the nipple to receive, finally, the milk he’d been denied as a baby.