Where the Bird Sings Best (29 page)

Without hesitating, Jashe answered, “To whom do we give the money?”

“If we divide it, each recipient will get little. It would be better for a single person to get all. God tells me it should be poor Bettina. Our gift will console her for her mutilations.”

The workers in the meatpacking plants didn’t last more than five years. They would die or catch chronic illnesses. For that reason, getting work there was easy for Alejandro. He left Jashe and Sara Felicidad living in a room that was seven feet wide and nine deep, with a chamber pot for a bathroom and an electric grill for a kitchen, and went to carry out his penitence.

The frozen meat industry, controlled by foreign capital, was “untouchable” by the national authorities. Because there was no union, the working conditions could not be worse. Alejandro began in slaughtering. In the open areas where the animals were killed, he was permanently exposed—in winter to rain and cold, in summer to gaseous emanations and sickening smells. After the initial cut, the blood poured out onto men and tools and then ran, in part, through the floor, forming thick layers of a dark red color. Amid excrement and urine, he had to skin animals and then toss them onto tables, divide them up, and carve them.

The saws whined, tossing into the air the sawdust of bones. The mill, the carts, the pulleys, the chains, the grunts of the dying animals kept him from conversing with his fellow workers, those sad, bloody, and fetid men who wore all sorts of amulets around their necks to keep the animals from transferring their infections to them: skin tumors, mouth ulcers, trichinosis. In those early times, Alejandro had some very difficult moments. Not only was the work horrifying because of the huge number of murdered animals but also because of a hallucination that ceaselessly repeated itself: the ghosts of sheep transformed into furious bitches sank their teeth into him. Restraining his anguish, he let his body be devoured, never ceasing to cut, select, and put into separate piles the intestines, the livers, the kidneys, the hearts. He imagined that the thousands of snipped off tongues were his own, and he made them recite in chorus, “Now I live in a reality that is as atrocious as madness, but at least I can share it with the needy. I can no longer allow myself private nightmares. I am no longer an individual. The madness of the poor is work.”

Making titanic efforts, he managed to free himself from the demented images and, with the help of his interior God, went on with his repugnant labors. When he brought the pieces of meat to the cold room, everything instantly froze. Often he saw workers who entered there daubed with blood with frozen faces or with their hands stuck to their knives. To avoid that, Alejandro, like the others, wrapped his head and his extremities in rags and newspapers and put on old wool vests, one on top of the other. If his clothing was soaked with blood, it froze immediately. When he couldn’t take the cold any longer, he would go outside and warm himself by placing his legs, hands, and face inside the bodies of the steaming animals that had just been cut open.

In the sections where saltpeter was used in the preparation and conservation of meat, the chemicals ate away shoes and boots. In a short time, the workers’ feet acquired open wounds that never healed. My grandfather passed through all that. His powerful physical constitution allowed him to survive longer than the others, but his arms turned red, his joints swelled, and a mass began to grow under his chin. Fearlessly, he asked to work in the phosphate fertilizer section, the worst part of the industrial chain, the “human slaughterhouse.” Those who fought in that hell for two years went either to the hospital or the cemetery. It was there the remains were dried and the bones ground to extract the albumin.

All the workers had to cover their mouths and noses with huge handkerchiefs to avoid the stench, but the ammoniac composition of the fumes made their neutralization impossible. A smoke with the taste of acid penetrated and bit the throat. Amid coughing and gagging, the workers, to fight the cold, tried never to stand still and would run from one place to another as if insane. Alejandro, forgetting his pains, gave himself to that crazy tumult with profound piety, but at the same time feeling an aesthetic pleasure, because he saw it as a beautiful dance. He understood that authentic art appears only in a secret place that resides between life and death. As his blue shoes began turning white, the voice of God repeated to him: “
There is a precise instant when the world is marvelous: now.
”

Meanwhile, in the seven-by-nine-foot room, Jashe painted the walls white; constructed a folding bed; and invented, using boards and hinges, a table that could be hung on the wall after dinner and a box containing five more boxes, one inside the others, that could be used as chairs. Thus she began her struggle to dominate space: every single thing she allowed to enter that room was essential and had a preplanned shape so it would fit in with the others. Objects took on the existence of domestic animals. (My grandmother never forgot her tender blanket made from stray dog fur. She would call the dogs over, give them leftover food, and then shave them. Nor did she forget her humble wooden cup that each morning opened its mouth like an enchanted frog.) And that way, like someone who comes home and can’t find their cat and anxiously looks for it in all the neighborhood streets, if suddenly she did not have her electric stove, a solid and simple apparatus in which she cooked (using bones and vegetables picked out of the market garbage) the most complex stews, she would have suffered.

Because the tenderness she had for her small helpers was corresponded, and they, she was sure, were worried about completing a labor impossible to obtain outside of an atmosphere like that one, Jashe wrote one afternoon to her sister Shoske:

“A plant the doorman gave me because I begged him not to throw it in the garbage had apparently died. With its dead stems and all, I put it next to the window and stopped worrying about it for a long time. But every day I watered it, distractedly, thinking about other things. Suddenly, just yesterday, I don’t know through what miracle, it produced a leaf. It surprised me so much I began to cry. I understood that love is a grand thank you to the other for existing.”

Two months before Sara Felicidad turned four, Alejandro arrived with a bouquet of daisies and his minimal weekly pay:

“Jashe, this morning God said to me: My son, today you must stop working. You’ve grown thin, you’re losing your hair, your teeth are beginning to rot, your cartilage is inflamed, you have a tumor, your lungs have become weak, and you can no longer move with your former grace. But your soul has been forged in suffering and shines like a great firefly. Go back to dancing: those physical limitations are your honor and make you a man instead of a machine. Show the world what Art is. Yes, Jashe, I wasted my time teaching the children of the rich. Now I will dance by myself, but once. Sincere works should not be repeated; they have to be unique. The performance will be short, ten minutes, but it will have such intensity that anyone who sees it will never forget it. I don’t want to present myself in a theater but out in the open, at night in the kiosk of a poor plaza.

“I won’t need spotlights, because I will be light. Even if there is no moon or stars, everyone will see me. And I don’t need an orchestra: the voice of my daughter is enough. Don’t worry about costumes; God tells me that only a naked body can reach the sacred. The press will take an interest. It will be an historic event. After my performance, dance will change. I want rich and poor to come, to mix around me. The wealthy, at the end of the act, will toss banknotes, which will be distributed to the poor. I was first dancer at the Imperial Russian Ballet; Argentina has to respect me. While I’m visiting newspaper offices, you, Jashe, will have to work.”

My grandmother was hired as a worker in a felt hat factory. The site was watery and humid. The fumes from the mercury used in the preparation of the hair formed a thick mist that poisoned the place. With her hair and clothes always wet, breathing in that vapor, Jashe began to tremble, a tremor that spread to her lips, her tongue, her head, until it took over her whole body. She put up with those symptoms with a smile, and then rheumatic pains soon followed. Because visibility was so poor, several of her fellow workers lost fingers, and one child laborer, nine years of age, dropped dead, poisoned.

Not many articles announcing the show appeared in the newspapers. The journalists saw a filthy giant limping toward them wearing a tattered suit, his eyes opened far too wide, speaking an incomprehensible Spanish, and took him for a drug addict. The few lines that did appear were written with contempt and mockery. My grandfather did not lose courage:

“Only a few spectators will come, but if they are high-quality spectators, they will be enough. Only twelve witnesses saw Christ, and all humanity learned of Him. My dance will be engraved in the collective memory.”

The great day came. That morning they celebrated Sara Felicidad’s birthday. They gave her a can of peaches in syrup and a dancer made of rags whose hair was made of wool dyed yellow. That afternoon, Alejandro gave her the final instructions:

“You will sing without stopping, no matter what happens, until I stop dancing. You will forget all the songs you know to allow your voice to take the paths it wishes. Make yourself into a channel open to the passage of two rivers: the dark and the celestial. What your will tries to do is of no interest to you, only what you receive will be good.”

When night came, Alejandro stood in the center of the kiosk of a rundown plaza, and his daughter began to sing. The only spectator was Jashe. No one, poor or rich, came. No reporters either. Some dogs tried to howl, but the girl’s voice enchanted them, and soon they listened to her in silence, wagging their tails. Rising from the half-light like long crystal knives, my mother’s voice reached every window. Strange sounds that were not interrupted by silences, thanks to the fact that her vocal chords vibrated both when she breathed in and when she breathed out. Those superhuman notes woke exhausted families of workers and little by little the plaza filled with men, women, and children who came up to the kiosk with the same respect with which they entered church every Sunday.

Alejandro Prullansky, very slowly, as if he had a thousand years to do it, took off his clothes. It took him half an hour to remove his trousers and his shirt, the only clothes he was wearing. He kept his white shoes on. With the same slowness, he crouched to open the cardboard suitcase and remove from it an apple. With a serious, rhythmic voice, impregnated with an immense goodness he said, “The artist defines the world and transforms it into his work. If a poet eats this apple, that act is a poem. If a musician does it, it’s a symphony. And a sculptor, on eating it, will be making a sculpture. I dance.”

And, slowing the velocity of his movements even more, he bit the fruit. Sara Felicidad and he, in the darkness of that cloudy night, looked like two black statues. Despite the intensity of the singing, which was so fine it cut the leaves of the few trees there like a scalpel, dropping a dark green rain on the heads of the workers, the noise of the chewing arose intact and gave the steely tones of the girl a watery bed. No one blinked. Aside from the sound, nothing was happening, but the shadows of the kiosk promised that something important was going to take place.

Alejandro opened his spirit in two wings of great length and absorbed the taste of the apple. From the center of his brain came an iridescent ray that pierced the sky. The clouds were swept away by his breath, and stars appeared, which began to spin around the seeds he kept in a triangle on his extended tongue. There he placed his awareness and showed it to the public as if it were a consecrated host. Following the silvery roads the voice of his daughter showed him when she was bathed in the light of the stars, he launched the crown of his thoughts into space. The sacrificial animal appeared, a man of pure flesh, headless, pouring out his redeeming blood to quench the thirst of so many people in misery. That was the mission of Art. Now he had to overcome his swollen joints, give power to his wasted lungs, recover the elegance of his footwork, and gesture toward the point where limits disappear.

He removed six bottles from his suitcase; removed the corks; emptied the gasoline they contained over his entire body; lit a match; set fire to himself; and, transformed into a bonfire, showed human beings what true dance was: a body making sublime movements in full ecstasy as it was being consumed.

Jashe made a shout of horror, then she covered her mouth with her hands, ashamed of herself, of her egoism. The beloved was giving himself to the world, dying for it, and for that very reason, causing an immortal Art to be born. By including Death in the creation of beauty, he ended death.

Sara Felicidad, obeying her father’s order—“You will sing without stopping no matter what happens”—saw him run, leap, laugh, and combine marvelous steps, all with his flesh spurting flames like a sun. That image remained engraved in her mind, and she transmitted it to me, her son, every night during my childhood. So that as I would fall asleep, she would sing me a lullaby where her father, transformed into a star, crossed the firmament, granting men a Destiny:

“Making tracks in the sky is like opening their soul. That torch Alejandro lit, you, who bear the same name, must in turn transmit it so his sacrifice won’t be in vain. Someday, thanks to you, humanity will become aware of this ephemeral spectacle, eternal monument of the art of dancing, and millions of hand will applaud your grandfather with thanks.”

Prullansky, the giant, without realizing he was dying, almost burned to a crisp, made an enormous leap and, like a bird with long red and yellow feathers, fell in the center of the plaza. The people who had witnessed the act, respectful, immobile, fascinated, were suddenly possessed by panic. The beauty seemed to them terrible, and they ran screaming to their houses to close doors and windows, afraid the monster would enter in order to burn up the little they owned. The noise of shutters and wooden frames slamming on sills was interpreted by Jashe as the announcement of future applause. Her husband gave up his soul dancing and, in full flight, fell to the cement pavement to become a pile of smoking bones.