Where the Bird Sings Best (25 page)

“I cleaned up the blood, and among his clothes, I found a suit, a shirt, shoes, and a hat. I put the rest of his things in two suitcases and buried them too. This way his bosses would think he’d left with me for some other country. I cut off my hair and, disguised as a man, with the little money I found, I bought a train ticket for Santiago. No one bothered me on the trip, because I pretended to sleep with an empty bottle in my hand—just another drunk. If I’d had anywhere else to go, I wouldn’t have come back to the tenement, to a past that was no longer mine. I got here when Alejandro was dying, the last person I might have been able to confide in. It didn’t matter to me that the world war broke out. Maybe it even made me happy, since I could take it as some kind of revenge. I knew I would be forever isolated, desolate, useless. Life? To be born for no reason, to suffer constantly, to die ignorant. God? Extant but unreachable. Blind, deaf, and mute for His creatures. Human society? A prison filled with lunatics, thieves, and drunks. Everything and everyone deserve only my curses.

“So now you see, Benjamín. You wanted to know the Truth; here you have it with the smell of rot. Stop sighing, untie me, bring more vodka, and let’s drink together. The best thing in this world is not to have been born.”

My uncle untied Teresa, brought another bottle, and they began to empty it. He’d felt himself depicted in my grandmother’s final words. He understood that much more than hating other people, he hated himself. He was a transparent angel fallen into a filthy sewer, his body. Before starting to snore with his nose stuck into his mother’s navel, he muttered:

The night comes with its she-wolf fury
Promising the birth of a sun in love
But shade can only give birth to shades
Nothing is born, nothing dies
And creation is oblivion.

The
thirty-five days of the voyage passed quickly. The powerful
Weser
cut the waves with the same ease the waiters in first class cut slices from their collection of French cheeses. Whenever meals were served, those mixed odors of milk and dung descended like oily waves along the metal ladders and reached steerage to make the 1,200 dried-out mouths of the Jewish emigrants water. But Alejandro Prullansky, without envying the luxury surrounding his ex-colleagues from the Imperial Ballet, enthusiastically went on with his daily exercises.

Poised on a rope strung between two enormous packing cases, he repeated hour after hour his entrechats, leaps, and cross-steps, following the rhythm Icho Melnik generously supplied with his harmonica. In his memory, the pimp retained innumerable melodies by Chopin, Liszt, Mozart, and others. When his lips began to hurt from blowing so much through his small instrument, he would begin to recite thoughts from Seneca rhythmically, revealing a level of culture that in a man of his profession seemed absurd, all so his friend could continue training: “Work is not a good in itself. Then what is a good in itself? Contempt for work.” Icho would laugh but immediately continue: “On the other hand, those who make an effort to obtain virtue without allowing themselves to become dejected deserve applause.” And when he pronounced the word “virtue,” he used his fingers to mimic the act of counting money.

Jashe joyfully observed her husband’s perfect body. The splendid functioning of those wise muscles, producing gestures of superhuman delicacy, aroused in her a pleasure that made her forget the corruption of the flesh, evil, and hunger. She did not fear the future and, knowing she was pregnant, gave herself over sweetly to the new life. Her Alejandro was a living temple, and his dancing would change the world. The six prostitutes lavished tender care on her, making the voyage as comfortable as possible because she read the Tarot for them, giving profound answers to their silly questions: “Will my business improve if I dye my pubic hair red? Will I find an old man who will give me jewels and furs? Will I know love?” She predicted that two of them would marry military men; Marla, the tallest and most powerfully built, she saw paired up with an important politician; she lied to the other three, covering up her sorrow with nervous laughter, promising them long lives, health, and riches. They believed her because the gigolo began to make them work during the crossing. At night, he sent them to the cabins of the ship officers or to the service staff. They would come back at dawn carrying fruit, cigarettes, caviar, champagne, and chocolates. They shared everything. Icho, his belly swollen and with a smile from ear to ear, would quote before falling deeply asleep: “Life is a play. What matters is not that it lasts a long time but that it be well-acted.”

The coast of Argentina came into sight, and the ship made for the Río de la Plata. It was then that Simón Radovitzky, a tall, long-nosed boy with protruding ears, as skinny as a string bean, appeared before the prostitutes. He was pursued by a party of matrons frantically supporting his mother, who was tearing her hair out. Because of Simón’s black, bulging, and fanatical eyes, the rest of his body became invisible after a few minutes. When he spoke, the words seemed to come from his pupils: “Gentlemen, your good wives shave you every morning. Please allow them to cut off my beard. I want to get this superstitious tradition off my back. The past is a cage.”

While his mother twisted her fingers and howled “oy” piteously, her huge tears soaking the wool shawl covering the heads of her fellow gossips, the young prostitutes, happily chirping, lathered up Simón’s head and face. His mother tried to stop him for the last time by reciting a few proverbs in Yiddish: “A man’s stupidity complicates his path. With a lie, you go far, but you can’t come back. If you give the devil a hair, he’ll soon want your whole beard.” But the girls, after taking off his black overcoat, his fringed vest, and his leather cap, began to shave him.

When his payot, his side curls, fell, his mother muttered: “You are lost!” and bent over clutching her abdomen as if she were having a miscarriage. Her women still held her up so she wouldn’t fall to the floor. Making a supreme effort, she recovered; “It’s annoying to carry a hunched back, but painful to separate yourself from it. This man is no longer my son. He’s a drunk, a
shikker
. May your mother be one of these six
kurvehs
! May your brain dry up, may the worms start eating you while you’re still alive, may you walk on your hands as many years as you’ve walked on your feet, and for the rest may you drag yourself along on your backside!”

The Jewish matrons left steerage without looking back, reciting magic verses to purify themselves from the sacrilegious air they’d breathed.

Simón Radovitzky was happy to see his bare face and bald head in the hand mirror with floral frame Marla handed him. He exclaimed:

“Being a Jew is much more than a disguise and a mop of hair! You can’t spend your life believing in fairy tales and vengeful gods! We’re living in the twentieth century! We’re arriving at a young continent. We have to stop separating ourselves, stop living in an imaginary universe. Race, nationality, religion, customs—they’re all unlucky limitations. We belong to the world, and the world is ours, in the same way that all human beings belong to us. Let’s open our eyes, because the awakening of Awareness depends on Justice.”

Wearing white trousers and a yellow shirt with blue polka dots that Icho Melnik gave him, the new Simón Radovitzky, accompanied at a distance by my grandparents and the whores, ran to the deck to show himself to religious Jews, offering himself as an example. They all fled without looking at him as soon as he approached. He spread his arms, shouting at the top of his lungs, “Brothers, I’m not a wolf, and this is not a henhouse! Listen to me, I beg you! I too have tried to be a saint, but there is no saintliness to be gained by separating ourselves. With your noses buried in the Torah, you can only see yourselves, cut off from the world as you are by that ‘sacred’ text. For not wanting to give anything, for continuously washing your hands in a desire not to participate in sin, you have ceased to be useful to society. But since the universal law is that everything has a purpose, society uses you to make you into victims. You have constructed for yourselves a Destiny, to be clowns who receive blows from others. Enough! I will unite myself with the horrors of life. Whatever happens to others, happens to me. I shall denounce in all possible media—letters, newspapers, shouting in the street if it comes to that—the economic injustice that allows a few egoists to live in idleness, exploiting the labor of the workers. I shall ceaselessly demand the abolition of that authoritarian monster which is the State. I shall vomit on the lie of matrimony, a mercantile contract that legitimizes unions without love; I shall vomit on the patriotic lie that exaggerates natural affection for one’s native land to turn it into fanatical stupidity that keeps the proletariat from understanding that the social problem is cosmopolitan. And I’ll vomit on the religious lie that foments in the masses a servile attitude and enough resignation that they can bear the iniquities of earthly bandits with the hope of a celestial glory. I shall always denounce political necrophagy in favor of vital anarchy.”

The bearded religious Jews whispered to one another, touching their temples with their index finger: Mashugana! Then they erased him from their memory. Simón spit toward them and went back to the whores’ corner to brandish a knife he’d stolen from the kitchen. He swore, “From now on my life ceases to be at the service of death. Instead, I put death at the service of life. Tyrants become vulnerable when a decided individual appears.”

For my grandfather, those phrases shouted out by the young fanatic were a revelation. He, locked away from the age of five in the elegant prison of the Imperial Ballet, with no horizon other than dance, was unaware of the pain in the world. Life seemed to him a continuous party. All he had to do was move to experience the pleasure of the work of art. He saw everything as a dance where stars, landscapes, multitudes, animals, and machines mixed together in a harmonious coupling. But Simón’s inflammatory discourse brought him out of his naïve radiance and submerged him in the fog of madness.

The
Weser
began to skim along the banks of the river, entering the outskirts of the immense city of Buenos Aires, a hive of proletarian dwellings and unhealthy factories, a human worm nest. From those dark places poured garbage, chemical liquids, rotten hides, greasy cans, excrement, making the water into a pitch-colored magma. On the banks of pestilential streams, garbage and myriad rats splashed around on the ground turned into mud by flooding. The mists from the leather factories, the smoke, and the soot from chimneys darkened the sky. Arrows of green flies opened ditches in that dense, gray air, buzzing with murderous hunger.

The giant dancer, hiding his ears on the bosom of the small woman, fell to his knees. Immobile and white, he looked like a cadaver emptied of blood. It was not the flock of men, women, and children working in the tremendous labyrinth of sordid factories that affected him but the mooing of the steers they were sacrificing in the chilled meat plants to freeze their meat and send it abroad. There were thousands and thousands of sheep in mile-long lines, being led to death. Their anguished moans, their squeals of terror, their dying cries, the rivers of dark blood, the mountains of guts and skulls, the filthy piles of hides, the fetid stench all came together in the mind of my grandfather with the ghosts of even more millions of quadrupeds that had already been butchered, day after day for years. Pyramids of knives worn right down to the handle, torrents of yellow teeth, smashed eyes floating in lakes of pus, planets of meat dissolving into worms.

“Why this lack of awareness? They suffer, they are beings, part of myself. There they are before me, skinned animals, legs spread in a cross, an ocean of Christs with bleeding anuses, saints dismembered with mathematical slices. I know the pain of sheep; I’ve been raping them since I was in the sperm of Alejandro I, my demented grandfather writing a request for help with the guts of his victims. And then in the vital liquor of my degenerate father, murdering women and children like the owners of those factories. Forgiveness was already granted; my mother devoured the cadaver of my progenitor and purified it by immersing herself in white. White! White! I love you! My God, forgive the Argentines for they know not what they eat, because they do not realize that their country lives on the production of frozen cadavers!”

Suddenly my grandfather saw, galloping toward him over the waters of the Río de la Plata, myriad sheep metamorphosed into furious dogs. And when they began biting him until they’d devoured his body and there was nothing left but a voice arising from the void, he began to howl:

Because I walk in the valley of the shadow of death
I fear all evils if you are not with me!
Free my life from the power of the dog!
My God, hasten to help me!

Jashe, desperate seeing her husband immersed in madness, put one of her breasts in his mouth so he could suck as if he were her child. Then she put the red shoes on him. No sooner than he felt on his feet those ancient shoes did my grandfather smile in satisfaction and begin to snore. The swarm of flies scattered, shocked by the sirens in the port. The
Weser
was entering the capital of Argentina. The ships were all packed together like a nest of giant ants, dead ants drying out next to deserted sea walls. Not a soul walked among the mountains of merchandise piled up on the docks.

Under a murderous sun, five thousand freight cars loaded with agricultural products were waiting to be unloaded at the warehouses. A huge banner made of cloth fluttered weakly, caressed by the tiniest breeze:
WORKERS YES! SLAVES NO!

When the
Weser
dropped anchor, it emitted a long blast of the foghorn, and without lowering the gangways, it seemed to pull back into itself like a sleeping turtle. The hours went by. Night fell. Dawn came. Marla, the captain’s favorite, carrying a Swiss cheese and some Italian nougat, brought the news: the Federation of Stevedores had begun a work stoppage supported by coachmen and other workers groups, that had degenerated into a general strike.

The conflict erupted because the stevedores, whose workday lasted fourteen hours, were forced to carry sacks that weighed more than two hundred pounds. The rationale behind this was that the importers from South Africa required large sacks because they had black laborers stronger than camels. The federation demanded a limit of one hundred and fifty pounds and workdays of ten hours, energetically demanding for its members the right to be considered human beings and not beasts of burden. The bosses were outraged and assumed an inflexible attitude, calling the strikers pernicious foreigners. Accordingly, they proposed to the government a bill of expulsion. Now the Congress was locked away in a special session to approve the law, declare a state of siege, obtain the right to sack citizens’ homes, dissolve riots and aggressive meetings, use troops for an armed defense of “the dearest thing the nation has: its grand harvest,” and above all, censor the majority of the newspapers.