Where the Bird Sings Best (35 page)

Since the death of her father, Sara Felicidad was accustomed to living hidden away. It was easy for her to nod her agreement. In any case, my spirit had already entered her ovaries, vectoring her inexorably to the meeting that would make me be born. For waiting ten years for the man who would inseminate her, nothing would be better than absolute solitude. Satisfied, the priest handed her the keys to the two locks, and, along with the carnations that immediately began to rot, he drove off in the station wagon, defending himself from the “Lolos” and caresses that Doña Pancha felt she had the right to rain on him.

In Santiago, the disunited Jodorowsky family reached the year 1919. They thought it catastrophic, but you just never know. Some painful slashes today can tomorrow bring fecundity to a tree that was drying out. In any case, they felt like doves kicked by a mule. And they weren’t alone. Every Chilean felt a monsoon falling on his straw roof. In an instant, with the end of World War I, the export of nitrates, raw material for explosives, collapsed, and even though the market recovered in the following years, the workers, who could not see the future clearly, bottled up as they were in mines and factories, felt they were on the edge of unemployment. A malaise spread among the poorer classes in the country.

The rich also suffered their punch to the kidneys: the Red Octopus, not content with sowing chaos in its own territories, dared to found a Third Communist International in order to stretch its tentacles around the entire world, intent on fomenting workers’ revolutions. Of course, the military had the bottom dogs under control, but in any case it was bothersome to dance the Charleston with stones in your patent leather shoes. Could it be that because of this atmosphere of disquiet, the devils were loose in an island country that had never concerned itself with what was going on beyond its borders? Who can guess? If every event, the summation of all causes, is produced by the entire Universe, why ask questions?

The first to take a beating or lesson provided by Destiny was Lola. My aunt had become so thin that the drunks at the bars where she went along with the blind lady from Room 28 called her “The Knife that Sings.” She had big deeply set eyes, an expression of perpetual terror, and the only thing that could have made her attractive was her thick mane of straight black hair. But she insisted on braiding it and wearing it rolled up on her head like a large cone. Her thick lips, like those of a black woman, also tried to proclaim her femininity, but she silenced them with a layer of flesh-colored lipstick. To disguise her womanhood even further, she flattened her bosoms and used round glasses to imitate nearsightedness. Doña Pair—that was the name the blind woman gave herself, “because des
-pair
comes from hoping too much”—got used to Lola’s company. She took pleasure in teaching her to play the guitar, and they shared her tiny room and the tips the customers gave them. Perhaps out of nostalgia for the songs or because they were the least sensual couple in the world, they always respected both women and never tried to make them drink.

“Tell me Doña Pair, please, how many songs do you know? I’m copying down the lyrics and melodies in this notebook. I calculate more than two thousand!”

“You’ve done a very bad thing, Lola, in writing down those songs. They’re free. That way you make them into prisoners.”

“But if something were to happen to you, God forbid, you’d take a treasure to the grave.”

“I’d be taking nothing, child. I have no memory. My head is empty. There are no melodies inside it. The songs are like invisible birds; they go all over the place, flying. You call one, and it comes to perch on your tongue. If you fix it in a notebook, you kill it. When our Father made the world, along with the animals and flowers, He created songs. Once upon a time, all human beings could receive them, but their ears have been closing up. I think mine opened when I went blind. Aside from music I have nothing. I’m like a hollow reed. The songs can come to me because nothing bothers them. Perhaps one day you too will receive them. There aren’t thousands or millions—there is no limit. Do you think I’m lying to you or mouthing idiocies like a senile old lady? You’re wrong. Even though I’m ninety-two, I’m still young inside. My teacher, who blessed this guitar, is one hundred and eleven. I always divide the money we get in three parts, two for us and one for Carmelita, whom I visit every Sunday.”

“Oh, Doña Pair, how I’d like to meet your teacher! Wouldn’t you introduce me? I could also write down what she knows. Maybe we could make a book some day.”

“But what a stubborn fool you are, Lola! Whatever I tell you goes in one ear and comes out the other. Songs are born, they die, and if they want to come back, they come back. It’s they who decide, not you. And that way, without forcing things, everything works well. Things, when they are as they are, are perfect. There’s no reason to interfere. Look at that puddle. You think it’s filthy, but it’s tranquil. If you put your hand in it, the germs that live there go mad and many bite your fingers. Don’t break the balance, because you can bring us bad luck. Have faith. The world is like a record: everything is being recorded. To recover something all you need is the right needle. Give me the notebook. I’m going to tear it up. All right? Good. That’s how it is. You’ve understood. Tomorrow I’ll take you to Carmelita’s.”

Near Mapocho Station, they took a tram that went along San Pablo to Matucana Avenue. There they got off and continued walking until they turned left onto Andes. Beyond was Manzana de Altos. A square block of two-story houses (they could have been taller, but because of the earthquakes structures had to be smaller), all linked together. There was a legend that the police didn’t go in there because the few who dared enter never came out. Their bodies disappeared. Well, 98 percent of their bodies disappeared, to be precise. The remaining 2 percent, the testicles, were tossed from a window onto the street in a tin can.

The block was a refuge for cardsharps; worn-out whores; pickpockets; drunks with rotten peaches instead of noses; crazy children; unemployed workers; and blurry, perpetually pregnant women. At the center of the block was a patio with an opening like a pit, where everyone threw their garbage and emptied their chamber pots. Right below ran the powerful San Carlos canal. More than one child had fallen in. The current never asked questions and just carried everything away.

Lola, behind Doña Pair, made her way through the labyrinth of passageways, dodging from time to time a rat. The stench of wine came from every room, along with frying, rancid sweat, and excrement. If a ray of sunshine came in, it filled with dust, and its golden stain on the leaden ground was usurped by a mangy cat. No one bothered them. Carmelita lived in a room that opened onto the central patio. Her white door was framed with flowerpots filled with lilies and carnations. She’d glued a blazing heart of Jesus onto her windowpane. From within came an agreeable chirping of canaries mixed with the aroma of toasted flour.

Doña Pair opened the door, which was not locked, and without announcing herself, had Lola enter too. There, in that clean cubicle, with only a bed, a table, and a gas burner where a pot was warming, was a tiny old lady, almost a dwarf, wearing a chocolate-colored bathrobe and some high men’s boots. She had one incisor in her mouth, her eyes had lost almost all color and were a faded gray, on her head a net of fine white hairs did not hide her freckled baldness, and her hands looked like two small seas of wrinkles.

With the voice of a child, the mummy said, “Come on in, girls. I’ve got hot milk and corn porridge. Would you like some?”

She got off the bed where she’d been sitting and, caressing her guitar as if it were a spoiled cat, walked slowly toward the table, whistling like three canaries, and prepared two little plates of the sugary corn porridge. Meanwhile, the blind woman pulled out a roll of banknotes tied up with a pink thread and put it into a plaster figurine of a little man squatting down, who seemed to be defecating a peach pit.

“Thanks, Pair, for feeding my shitass there. God will give it back tripled. Oh, I see your little friend also brought her guitar! Let’s sing. After all, that’s why we came into this world.”

Lola began to play along with the old ladies, but after a few chords, she felt alone. Doña Pair and Carmelita strummed with such delicacy that almost imperceptible musical phrases arose from their instruments. She made a huge effort and managed to distinguish the beauty of the melody, a lullaby so tender, so saturated with maternal love that her eyelids became heavy, and she was about to fall asleep like a baby full of milk. She was distracted by something like a cool breeze making its way through the sunbaked grass of summer.

The old women, without moving their lips, their eyes fixed on the same infinity point, were singing. When Lola got used to that almost total absence of volume, she could listen to the words, verses as perfect as a pearl necklace, intense, revealing a sacred respect for life. Like clouds driven by the wind, the words sometimes changed rhythm and the song would acquire such force that its phrases seemed like rays of light. Then the immense calm would return, along with the oceanic sway of the rhymes. Lola began to suffer; those two ancients, luminous worms in the heart of a rotten apple, were creating an art that would not be transmitted for lack of witnesses. She did not deserve to be the only public for that marvel. That music was a national patrimony. All Chileans should know it. What a crime to allow such a heritage to be lost! Trying not to be noticed, she took a slip of paper out of her purse and tried to write down the music and the words that floated like a gold thread above the daily noise. Carmelita instantly stopped playing, as did the blind woman.

“That scratching of pencil over paper is so ugly! You’re offending the angels, my girl. If you wanted to write all they sing, there wouldn’t be enough forests to produce enough paper. You want to give others the songs you yourself don’t know how to receive. That’s laxity. You interrupted a holy rhythm. It may be that without wanting to you’ve provoked something terrible. Let’s pray that the Holy Spirit forgives the wound your pencil made in Him.”

The two old women made my aunt kneel and began to pray for her. Loud knocks shook the door.

“Open up, granny, your throat cutters are here.”

Six men, neither old nor young, in shirtsleeves, wearing muddy white sneakers and jeans whose right hand pocket was inflated by a knife, entered. They were smiling drunken smiles, and each one carried four bottles of pisco. Since there were no chairs, some sat on the edge of the bed and others on the table, their legs dangling.

“We were lucky, Doña Carmelita. We mugged a rich guy, and we’re celebrating. You’ll have to forgive us. We still have some pisco left, and we want to down it with a musical accompaniment. So, play. You know that nobody denies a poor man a song. And your friends can accompany you. To your health!”

The blind woman, used to dealing with drunken oafs, calmly adapted to the situation and, strumming her guitar, cackled out a jolly tune. The mummy accompanied her and invited Lola to throw off her stupor, whispering in her ear, “Don’t even think of putting up any resistance, girl. Sing without stopping until the wolves turn into groundhogs.”

Following the galloping rhythm of the three women, each bandit emptied a bottle of pisco with one swallow. The effect was instantaneous. Their gestures became soft. They sweated, and with swollen lips babbled incoherent phrases at the same time they made the floor shake with their heels. The jiggling went on for more than an hour. They demanded song after song, their favorite Chilean cuecas. Then, worn out, they drank half of the second bottle to get back into form. Then they demanded sailor songs, which they accompanied in their harsh voices. They went on drinking.

When they finished the other half, they began to get sad. The trio interpreted
tonadas
, songs from southern Chile, that talked about rain hanging from the sky like rags; about forests without owners, dying of sadness during the month of August; about swallows with clay masks. The third liter went down their throats like a funeral procession. Each swallow was a flaming coffin, and suddenly their sorrow burned off, and with their hearts turned into wounds, they began to laugh so hard it seemed they were vomiting. They rolled around on the floor, covering the tiles with spit and tears.

The most powerful took out his knife and sliced the air. They stopped laughing. Suddenly they found themselves there, crouching down, not knowing who they were or in what world they were sitting. Everything lost meaning. It was strange to be “that,” a body with head, trunk, arms, and legs. An infinitely empty instant. Ugly women playing at being scarabs and singing, far away, incomprehensible. Horrified at themselves, to be a man or a spider is equally odd. Someone made a voice that didn’t belong to him resound in order to mumble words he half understood: “Stop playing, ladies.”

The singers instantly obeyed. The satisfied killer farted. Then he smiled, compressing his lip and stretching his mouth in a grimace that seemed to split his face in two: “My fellow muggers, I think this ruin, Carmelita, has lived enough. God’s going to kill her soon, don’t you think?”

“We do!”

“Well then, why should we let that asshole have all the fun. Let’s kill her ourselves! Agreed?”

“Agreed!”

“And you, Grandma, do you agree too?”

The old lady, with her usual calm, answered, “If God decides that you are the one to finish me off, I agree.”

“Forget all that resignation, Grandma. Before I kill you, I’m going to rape you. What do you think of that?”

“I’d say I was sorry for you. I’m so ugly you’re going to suffer.”