Where the Bird Sings Best (27 page)

The months passed. Alejandro, never weakening, like a shepherd of wild goats, buried himself in his academy, making his inconstant students rehearse a ballet titled
Life
about a thousand times. He only returned to the bordello to kiss his wife—who was showing a belly that was more and more prominent—spread her legs, visit the secret temple, rapidly deposit his offering, and then sleep like a stone. From time to time, Icho Melnik and his brother Yumo would visit the attic Jashe had transformed into an enchanted palace by decorating it with paper flowers and pieces of bottles. There they would drink boiling, highly sugared tea with lemon and complain about the cruel manias of their clients and consult the Tarot.

The good life was making Icho fatter day by day. In the kitchen he had a personal refrigerator full of prize beef, two hundred pounds, and at every meal he would eat six steaks along with the other dishes on the menu. He justified his gluttony quoting Seneca: “If you do not take control of time, time will run away from you.”

Yumo preferred moderation. Despite his hair, which was red but tending toward carrot in color, his face marked with freckles, and his muscular torso resting on thin legs, he tried to dress with elegance. For him, prostitution was a respectable business, and he had visiting cards printed up with his name and below that “Supplier of Feminine Beauty. Imported.” He was not ashamed to visit the synagogue, even though the congregation refused to say hello to him, thinking he was a
temeim
, an impure person.

He argued, “I do not understand your disdain. My girls are as sacred as the Torah. We Jews are a chosen people, and our mission is to lead the goys to holiness. God is hidden in the depths of the Hebrew female sex. Every vagina is a sacred place. When the member enters there, it receives its baptism of fire about which so many speak without knowing what it’s all about. In a certain sense, the clients die when they possess my hetaeras. And when they withdraw, they are in reality born. A new life awaits them. To ejaculate into Jewish whores is, dear friends, doing it in the open emptiness of God.”

No one bothered to listen.

Simón Radovitzky also came to visit Jashe, but only on the odd afternoon. Always busy, he did his work with the same fanatical concentration with which he defended anarchism. Every bed he made was a work of art: well-beaten mattresses, geometric folds, total absence of wrinkles. He would hand his clients perfumed towels and then stand before them with impeccable dignity, making himself invisible, only allowing his ardent eyes to float about. When they gave him his tip, he thanked them with an elegant nod of his head. That elegance was actually comic, because the shame of being reduced to beggar status made his protruding ears bright red. During his tiny bit of free time, especially during the early hours—the whores slept from seven until three in the afternoon—he dedicated himself, not earning a cent, to writing for clandestine anarchist publications and then selling them, risking his life in the process. Aside from attacking the tyranny of the government and its “barbarous thugs with sabers and whistles,” the mass arrests and the expulsion of “pernicious foreigners,” which were all grist for his mill, he attacked the socialists, those “traitors and cowards who took advantage of the persecution to accuse the anarchists of being violent and move into leadership roles in the trade unions.”

One May, there was a strike by restaurant waiters protesting a municipal ordinance that forced them to shave off their moustaches. Simón, even though he no longer wore that virile ornament because he’d decided not only to live outside of religious customs but also outside of seduction (
Never adorn. The free man does not sell himself, does not produce effects, does not solicit; he creates connections because severing them in order to produce archipelagos of island beasts makes no sense. The free man’s encounter with a woman should be magic, instantaneous, without calculations, definitive, and total. Why seek her when all the powers of the Universe have her reserved for you anyway?
), accepted the idea that the strikers considered the new rule a grievance and opposed the cutting of that bit of hair with energetic resistance: the oligarchy needed eunuchs to serve them, and in this instance testicles and moustaches had the same meaning.

Writing in the pages of
The Sun
—the only workers newspaper which hadn’t been closed, as its editor was a well-known native Argentine poet—Simón, who wrote his articles in Russian and saw them translated not only into Spanish but also into Italian, German, English, and French because most of the workers were immigrants, ripped into the authorities:

The climate of cowardice engenders tyrannies. If everyone says ‘let’s give in,’ they become accomplices in the raising of the machete, in thought control. This infamous attempt to castrate the workers originates in the upper classes who, in order to erase the spiritual power of the individual, make all uniform. Everything uniform—be it religious, military, or unionized—is an assault on the always-different nature of each being. Protest, brothers! Protest out of self-defense, out of pure self-interest, because tomorrow all will be measured by the same yardstick, because the abuse committed against any member of a collectivity, even the most insignificant, becomes the shame and insult of those who tolerate it.

Radovitzky’s words affected his readers like a lit match dropped into a lake of alcohol. The coachmen’s boys joined the strike along with the leather cutters from the shoe factories. Then the port workers, sailors, stokers, and stevedores. They all asked for human respect and a ten-percent salary increase. With the good wishes of the police, the large companies, taking an intransigent attitude, began to employ strikebreakers. To stop the unloading of ships, the strikers attacked the traitors. The disturbance extended along the docks. Simón Radovitzky, part of the tumult, took out a revolver and fired. Other workers carrying weapons followed his lead. But the timidity of the workers, accustomed to bowing their heads, caused the bullets to fly over the heads of the police and land in the mountains of rotten melons waiting to be loaded. The soldiers’ ferocious cruelty, their lack of imagination, and their intelligence cut in uniform patterns caused all their bullets to land in the heart of Paolo Zapoletti, an Italian emigrant, who fell backward with his chest turned into a strainer. An enormous red stain began to surround the body until it became a halo like those that surround the Virgin.

The fighting stopped. That single casualty grew in the minds of the spectators until it became a giant. Many hands lifted the fallen man. They put him on a cot to carry him in a slow, silent march, interrupted from time to time by hoarse he-man voices singing revolutionary songs with such heartrending force they seemed like arrows. In that way, they marched for hours through the poor neighborhoods. More than ten thousand new strikers joined the funeral march. Simón began to shout, “An eye for an eye, death for death!” The crowd imitated him, repeating his motto, louder and louder. The police, fearful that the public outcry would increase and that the workers would attack the police stations, used a detachment of cavalry to stop the procession, disperse it with sabers, and take away the body. Once the scare passed, a wave of rage was unleashed among the workers. Even though they outnumbered their enemies, they panicked at the presence of a small group of horses and a few whistles.

Simón howled, “Comrades, to break bones you’ve got to sacrifice some meat! Let a few of us die willingly to exterminate all of them! Let’s be daring! Let’s continue the strike until we finish off the State!”

More modest spirits requested that the meeting be dissolved to allow time for the various associations to meet and publish a protest statement supported by organized elements of the worker mass: Socialist Party, Federation of Dependents, unions, anarchist groups, etcetera. The workers of Buenos Aires, setting aside their ideological differences, would march united, as a colossal body, denouncing the abuses of the stinking cops so the exploiting classes would understand that social issues could not be resolved with prisons, persecutions, or deportations.

Two days later, with government authorization, the demonstration began. Having received an order from Roberto Falcón, the workers did not wave red flags and accepted to suppress the violent criticism against the measures adopted by the police during the state of siege, all in order to avoid provocations that might bring about bloody reprisals. More than forty thousand workers marched in severe calmness from Constitution Plaza to Plaza Lavalle. All along the path of the march police were standing guard, and many agents on horseback closely followed the demonstrators. When they reached Plaza Lavalle, the speakers began to take their places on an improvised stage.

Simón Radovitzky pulled out a red flag he’d hidden under his leather overcoat and waved it in the face of one of the thugs on horseback. The soldier charged toward Simón, intending to crush his skull under the horse’s hooves. Several demonstrators interposed themselves, trying to prevent the incident. The man with the big ears would not let up. He waved his rag as if he were facing a bull and in precarious Spanish shouted to him, “If you strike me, you strike yourself, you savage on a horse! Let your murderous blows fall on me, cover my skin with red splotches where you’ll be able to read your Destiny!”

Those words were incomprehensible to the uniformed laborer. He took them to be a string of insults, so he unsheathed his saber and, making threats, swung it around wildly. Simón, shrieking euphorically, fired five shots into the air. Roberto Falcón, on his motorcycle, sitting behind his helper with the Greek profile, whispered into his ear. The driver honked his horn three times. Instantly the police opened fire on the workers. A single fusillade was all it took to bring down many victims. Amid an enormous confusion, a general retreat began, but the situation worsened when companies of firemen arrived and used their powerful hoses to decimate the demonstrators. The motorcycle horn honked again. Silence. Colonel Falcón smiled in satisfaction.

Scores of wounded and dead were pouring out blood, whose stains seemed to write out a melody on the five parallel lines painted on the asphalt. The only person who could see that was Radovitzky, who observed the massacre hidden in a cart loaded with artichokes. He copied out the musical phrase in his notebook and watched the police chief pass by on his ridiculous motorcycle, probably on his way to a press conference where he’d communicate the official version of events to calm public opinion. Then he slipped off the cart, and staying close to the shadowed walls, lightly made his way, satisfied, toward the bordello.

By provoking this loss of workers blood, he’d created martyrs, who in turn would create hatred and the desire for revenge. For him, the most powerful weapons in a revolt were innocent victims: “The lives of many are won with the death of a few.” He did not feel guilty, because he himself was ready to sacrifice himself at any time. He’d donated his existence to humanity a long time ago.

As soon as he reached the mansion with the red light, he asked Icho Melnik to play (never mentioning its source) the musical phrase created by the workers’ blood on his harmonica. Out came a proud lament which, in tango rhythm and arranged for accordion and a string trio, became the house anthem and made the sensual orgies of the clients more pleasing.

Jashe, on the eve of giving birth, all dressed in white, wrapped her arms around her enormous belly and danced that stabbing tango, which came from the floor below, with her unborn daughter for a partner.

In the absence of Alejandro, who would come home after midnight, give her a kiss on the forehead, and collapse into bed to (for the first time since they met) snore like a locomotive, she conversed with the fetus, communicating her hopes. For her, there was neither past nor
present, only future. Nothing existed here and now, neither there nor before. Everything was nowhere and
later… Yes, someday things would come to be. The money they’d saved would be enough to buy a property with mansion, gardens, and private cemetery. The cypresses would grow around that transparent house, and their children and grandchildren, playing trombones, tubas, and cornets, would put their bodies inside a grandfather clock in order to throw them, their limbs interlaced, into the well-mausoleum, which would reach the enormous heart of fresh water that was the center of the planet.

The indefatigable giant dancer, with his blond beard and mane of golden hair that caressed his waist, persevered in trying to stage his ballet
Life
. It was like trying to trace a star on the surface of a lake with one finger and forever. His inconstant students did not like rehearsals or philosophic messages, but they did spend whole hours before the mirror admiring themselves in their tights, tutus, wool stockings, wide belts, and slippers with steel toes. Alejandro would pull them out of their self-amazement by striking the floor with his long walking stick to make them repeat, once, a thousand times, the four parts of the choreography.

First, “The Great Yes” would express the struggle against doubt through the unconditional acceptance of existence. Second, “The Unlimited Gratefulness” would show the end of asking and the ecstasy of constant gratitude. Third, “The Rapid Farewell” would describe the abandonment of all possessions and the tranquil acceptance of death, making it the most beautiful moment of life. Finally, “The Instantaneous Return” would show the rapid reincarnation of souls, not as punishment but as a means of progress. But the Argentine dancers thought that dance was a circus show and were only interested in competing to raise a leg higher or complete more spins on the tip of a toe.