Where the Bird Sings Best (38 page)

“Quite right, Birdie, but we can save ourselves from the materialist world living like the ‘Group of Ten’ in a tower facing the sea.”

“I’m sorry, Baldy, but those writers froze in the winter because the tower’s windows had no glass in them. Then it filled up with bats. Finally—remember, they wanted to live only from fishing so they wouldn’t exploit the people—some sea urchins they pulled off the rocks near the beach (none of them knew how to dive) gave them such bad hives they all ended up in the hospital, covered with rashes and swollen so much they looked Chinese.”

“Why is your name ‘Birdie’ when you put so many obstacles to taking flight? “Could it be because your last name, Baquedano, ends with a ‘no’? Change it to a ‘
sí
!’”

“Baquedasi? I’m Chilean, not Italian.” So let’s stop beating around the bush. What we want is to sleep together. At the printing house, they’ve lent me a room (for obvious reasons) out on the upstairs terrace, where no one ever goes. It isn’t a tower, but it’s just as isolated, and from the window you can see the ocean; it’s on the building across the street, which has a seafood restaurant in it, so it’s all painted blue. Shall we go?”

Benjamín, with a broken voice, answered in verse:

Like transparent vessels
Sailing immortal
Along the river of death.

Then he lowered his eyes, blushing, only to raise them again immediately, because they fixed on an indiscreet bulge growing in his friend’s fly. They walked along the banks of the river, holding hands. Benjamín’s mind filled with words, but he didn’t dare speak them. (
I only want to breathe the air that comes from your mouth; kiss you with ten thousand lips; cover your body with my saliva, that of a revived dead man; run my tongue over your brains with the thirst of an Arab dog; place you on the pedestal of the goddess. I also want you to murder me with kisses, like someone who enters the darkness of a millennial temple seeking the luminous frog in order to cook it nailed to a cross. I want you to pierce me surrounded by a black aura so that nothing more transpires and everything becomes eternal
.) This mixture of high-pitched lyricism and volcanic desires aroused a curious feeling in him where felicity galloped riding on anguish. The fight transformed into rabid hunger. When they reached the fire escape ladder, he didn’t dare climb it and suggested to his friend that they go into the seafood restaurant.

“What are you talking about? I’m broke. Besides, you’re a vegetarian.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve got my week’s pay on me. I should go to the market to do my mom’s shopping, but we have to celebrate finding each other. Let’s have a banquet.”

“And then what will your mother eat?”

“Parrot food: banana and rice for seven days. It will do her good because she’s getting very fat.”

“In that case, let’s have the banquet!”

Benjamín went in first and asked for an isolated table at the rear of the garden. Birdie Baquedano followed, crossed the main room so he’d leave just a whiff of himself, and sat down shouting out an order for two bottles of chichi, or corn whiskey, and the menu. They chose fried silverside, mussel soup, conger eel with tomato, meat and vegetable stew with algae, stuffed crabs, meat with tomato and onion, and fish stew. For dessert, two more liters of chicha and crullers in syrup. Alternating between hilarity and high seriousness, they devoured everything, satisfying simultaneously their hunger and the sadness of many years. Before leaving, Benjamín, in the style of an Oriental prince, emptied his pay envelope into the waiter’s hand.

“Keep it all. Whatever’s left is your tip.”

The old waiter, after counting the money, ran after them: they were eighty cents short on the bill. The typographer dug around in his pockets, but found only some type: the word “hope.” Benjamín luckily discovered a peso in the hem of his trousers.

“You keep the twenty cents left. They don’t mean much in monetary terms, but they do if you accept that the person giving them to you is a future celebrated poet of important historical value.”

Laughing their heads off, they reached the “fire escape ladder,” which was not a ladder but an ascending row of rusty iron bars stuck into the wall. They would have to climb four stories, clinging like lice to those precarious steps to keep from smashing into the sidewalk. Birdie, used to risking his neck climbing up and down at least once a day, suggested that my uncle go first so that he, right behind, could keep him safe, pushing him along on the buttocks. Confessing he suffered vertigo, he accepted this rather undignified help and began to climb up. That hot hand on his backside produced a disquiet that had so little to do with his spirit that, with a shake of his head, he forced his spirit to immerse itself in an interior monologue:

“(This matter of having half a soul is a serious thing. You make your way along the river of illusions with a thirst for something enormous, which is nothing more than the other piece of the lyre. And that thirst, understood as solitude, is satiety. Because both parts, no matter how far apart they are, have never stopped being, from the start of History, united. Yes, beloved, it seems we’ve been walking together forever. But it’s one thing desiring it, imagining it, and another finding it. What a cataclysm, what pleasure, what uneasiness, what doubt, and also what a marvelous blooming of enthusiasm! Your paradisaical gardens sprouting in my earth, which before you seemed a desert. Your painful caresses that fill my... my shoulders with happiness. And this shameful desire that you spit into my nine doors. It seems that in the dream I’ve lived in, you are the first reality. Sometimes I believe it, sometimes I don’t. What does it matter! Our love will be as long as God’s tongue.)”

Finally they reached the terrace. In one corner lurked a small whitewashed room, with a thin door and a window not even a cat could slip through. Before he entered, Benjamín became tense: he’d glimpsed a bed. He rubbed his chest, trying to calm the chaotic beating of his heart.

Baquedano shouted, “If we want to make a necklace, we have to pass the string through the first bead!” and with a push he forced Benjamín to enter. Since the room was dark, the typographer tried to light a candle. Benjamín blew out the match. Transforming the half-light into an accomplice, they fell, embracing, onto the bed. My uncle, on the verge of a heart attack, allowed himself to be undressed by his friend’s avid hands.

“You don’t have the smallest hair on your body! Your skin is like that of those women who don’t want to come near me.”

“Friend, let’s not think about the flesh but about the spirit. Let’s join our voices, allow our phrases to caress each other until they fill with words in flames. Let each of us be the perfect mirror of each other...”

Birdie Baquedano, deafened, interrupted him by letting all the desires he’d held in for so long loose. He flipped my uncle over and awkwardly—he had no experience—penetrated him with his sex, dilated and about to explode. That rude contact cut off the poet’s breathing, erased language, and made him gasp like a fish out of water. He had a touch of lyricism left to compare himself to a feathered galaxy and then he yielded himself to the energy of his friend, now transformed into a beast. He took him in completely, flew over a golden ocean, crossed forests of petrified trees that creaked deafeningly and produced green branches, rose toward a space studded with distant stars; he went, he went, he went, and suddenly he fell, vertiginously, through atmospheres that became thicker and thicker, sulphurous, rotten, only to incarnate once again. Animal pleasure, rejected until now, flooded his flesh like a tidal wave, giving life to what seemed sterile: he recovered his sense of smell. The abominable stench of his lover—atrocious, nauseating—assaulted him. Without realizing this change had taken place, Birdie Baquedano galloped with tremendous vigor, his saliva, the opposite of perfumed, all over my uncle’s neck. The poet held in his gagging, then his stomach ached, and later, with dizzying rapidity, came the grandest of diarrheas.

A spurt of hot, fetid water bathed the typographer’s stomach. He jumped back only to receive another, uncontainable blast right in the face. The liters of chicha, plus the soups and seafood, along with other material and fecal juices, stained the bed, the floor, the walls a coffee hue. Even the ceiling was spattered. When that storm ceased, the two lovers, covered with shit from head to toe, stared at each other in consternation.

Birdie Baquedano, assuming the tone of a man of the world, tried to say something, but Benjamín, crying out in pain, ran along the terrace in search of a non-existent latrine. A new attack had begun. He spent several hours squatting over a pail until his guts emptied along with his heart. He washed himself off as best he could in a tub of disgusting water, got dressed, climbed rapidly down the vertical stairway, and walked toward his apartment followed by a pack of stray dogs who sniffed at him, wagging their tails. He took a shower, soaping himself seven consecutive times, and never saw his friend again. Nor did he want to meet any other men. He abandoned poetry and, aside from taking care of his mother and selling books, began to wait for a blessed illness to get him out of this world. His apathy reached such a point that even the absurd ending of his first and last friendship left him indifferent.

One of the iron bars in the ladder gave way, and Birdie Baquedano fell, striking his head. Since he was unconscious, he was taken to the Red Cross. A male nurse, unaware of Birdie’s nature, seeing him on the stretcher, assumed by the smell that he was a cadaver in an advanced state of decomposition and put him in the morgue’s refrigerator. There, locked away, the typographer died, frozen to death.

Jaime too in 1919 suffered a collapse of his plans, to the point that he found himself tossed toward cloudy paths without knowing exactly why he was walking them. González the Horse had made a good boxer of him, but it wasn’t the technique he’d learned nor the strength he’d developed breaking skulls with his fists, which gave him wins by knockout in the seventy-five bouts he fought: it was rage.

All the Chileans he fought had roots, grandfathers, homeland. In their blood circulated beloved drinks and dishes cooked with nostalgia. They talked about “my” land, “my” mountain range, “my” sea. They felt they were the owners of the air they breathed and were convinced that the very ground loved the caress of their footsteps.

On the other hand, he—“Jaime the Russian,” ferocious champion from the steppes, raised by bears and a bicephalic eagle, also known as “The Bonebreaker” or “The Ring Murderer” or “The Damned Gringo”—had no one who would grant him a gram of tenderness. His father? A saint drowned in the glow of goodness. His mother? A crazy renegade with hands so full of hate that they burned rather than caressed. His brothers and sisters? Martyred emigrants from the Kingdom of Never Ever, with their souls enclosed in a diver’s suit into which no air was ever pumped, islands without bridges, relating to one another by smacks, like billiard balls.

The fury of not belonging made him deliver outsized punches, real “Here I am!” punches that broke ribs. He was eager to enter the country by breaking the bodies of its neighbors, winning recognition by destruction. He loved to challenge the audience. When their favorites fell with broken jaws or with their kidneys or liver smashed, or knocked cold and on the verge of death, he received the jeers holding his testicles with one glove while he made the gestures of a phallus penetrating them with the other. That hatred was his food. Money aside, he fought not for the pleasure of winning but to exacerbate rejection and to turn that into his homeland. To be a negative hero was a thousand times better than living anonymously and separately.

The illegal bouts, which always came after dogfights, were bloodier than those of the animals. There was no boxing; the fighters simply beat each other without stopping until one fell over. The matches were held in improvised rings in bars, slaughter yards, garages, vacant lots. The high betting made people thirsty, and barrels of wine, beer, and brandy were consumed. Jaime did not win easily. Since no one bothered to make sure the boxers were of equal weight, sometimes he was up against tanks. In those difficult cases, he would use the tricks of the trade the Horse had taught him: elbowing, low blows, head butts to the cheeks, scratches with the inside of the gloves, blows to the nape, suffocating clinches, foot stomping, sarcastic remarks that made the adversary lose control. No matter what, he always came out with a swollen eye, his ribs bruised, and his nerves a wreck. The aftereffects would last two weeks; he would sleep badly, dreaming about cats eating his penis, and wake up screaming. In June of this dark year, González the Horse came to see him and say in his nasal voice:

“Enough with these illegal bouts. We’ve been offered a nice contract for the National Championship, in a real ring. You’ll have your picture in the newspaper. If you win, they’ll pay us very well, and the good life will begin. If you accept—you’d be nuts to play hard to get and turn down the opportunity—I’d have to prepare you using my methods, because there’s no time to perfect your technique. You’ve got more than enough strength, your hooks are like mule kicks, and you’ve got winning in your heart, but you’re missing something. Maybe it’s something you’ve got too much of: rage. You put too much into it, then you lose control, waste energy, drop your guard, and have the bad habit of charging with your head exposed, risking a split eyebrow and being blinded by blood. All that is from an excess of hatred. I want you to be capable of reaching indifference. In a month, you’ll face the Baby, a colossus who weighs 265 pounds. Before turning professional, he killed three in the illegal bouts. If you learn to control yourself, you’ll win.”