I believe that my father blamed all this on the shoemaker. When people wanted to get rid of a pharaoh in ancient Egypt, instead of condemning him to death they would set about erasing his name from all the papyruses and seals. By thus extirpating his memory, they condemned him to the true death that is oblivion. When a man hates his father, he avoids reproducing in order to stop the name from being passed on or else changes his name.
I suppose that Jaime saw my sister as an only child. I arrived two years later as a surprise: no one had wanted me to come, I was a usurper in the world; my presence was an abuse. I brought with me the threat that the hated name might survive. A second hypothesis, which does not negate the first, is that I was the screen onto which Jaime projected the anger he held toward Benjamín, whose perversion, treachery, and appropriation of their mother were difficult things to accept. He had to regurgitate this resentment, to take it out on someone. He brought me up to be a coward, a weakling. By mocking my feminine side, he encouraged it to develop; from his violent example I learned to detest machismo. Just like his brother, who lived in a house full of books (mostly romance novels and books on topics related to forbidden sexuality), he taught me to love reading by signing me up at the city library and later, in place of toys, letting me buy whatever books I wanted. I ended up living surrounded by four walls of books, like my uncle. Jaime never liked to use my name, and when he decided not to call me Pinocchio he called me Benjamincito as if by mistake. Countless times he would declare, “You are the last Jodorowsky,” thus subtly inoculating me with sterility.
Another hypothesis is that he ignored me because of my curved nose. Being Russian bothered him (he had arrived in Chile at the age of five), and being Jewish even more so. He wanted roots. Anti-Semitism raged in Chile like a fire in a straw loft: the Guggenheims had taken over the saltpeter and copper mines, and later the banks, prospering from the workers’ destitution. In the slightest dispute over politics, business, or simply in the street, someone would shout at him, “Shit Jew! Outsider!” His nose was straight, and the prominent curve of mine caused him constant shame. Perhaps this is why I have no memories of going for walks with only him, going into a bakery or cinema alone with him. Whenever we all went out he would walk between my mother and sister, one of them on each arm, and I behind. I would sit in the darkest corner of the restaurant table. and in the circus gallery I would sit far from their box seat, near to the ring. In fact, my family was a triangle — father, mother, daughter — plus an intruder.
It is also possible that Jaime, having lost his father at the age of ten, remained a child due to the trauma, never growing up emotionally just as his penis never grew. No one had ever loved him. Teresa, the ideal mother to whom he aspired once he took over the place of his father, had betrayed him. He could not trust grown women. The proof: after his wedding night with Sara there were no bloodstains on the sheets. He had been duped; the bride was not a virgin. Without a penny in his pockets Jaime left his wife, whom he had gotten pregnant, and went to work as a miner for a nitrate company. A year later, in that stifling place where the salt devoured all color, Sara came to search for him with the keys to a shop in Tocopilla and a baby girl in her arms. Jaime, upon seeing his daughter, saw his own soul. For the first time, he felt loved: those large green eyes were a mirror that improved the depreciated image he had of himself. Raquelita, forever a virgin, only his, no one else’s, could see him as valiant, powerful, handsome, triumphant. Sara, with her dowry in the form of the shop keys, was accepted again although never pardoned: she was a traitor like Teresa, married to him by force but still in love with another, some imbecile whose large penis must surely be his only notable quality. My mother submissively accepted her relegation to second place, following Jashe’s orders to serve and obey her husband no matter how despicable he might be in order to avoid embarrassment among the Jewish community. On their first night back together Jaime possessed her with the same fury with which he desired to punish Teresa, with the same rancor, the same hatred. I was conceived by a sperm thrown like a gob of spit.
Poor Sara, so white skinned, so humiliated, felt like an intruder in life, just like me. Her father had burned himself alive. In Moisésville, the Argentine village where the immigrants arrived believing they had reached the new Palestine but which in fact was an inhospitable terrain, the people shut their doors and windows when they saw that torch of a man bounding along the street yelling for help. Jashe, six months pregnant, saw her blond husband becoming a black skeleton through a peephole in the side door. Three months later she married Moishe (a traveling necktie salesman), gave birth to Sara, and in the following two years to Fanny and Isidoro.
Fanny was born so dark skinned that they called her La Negra. With her kinky hair, large lower lip, and ears as big as her father’s she grew up myopic, ungraceful, and conceitedly ugly. She was cunning, drew attention to herself, and was attracted to power. Little by little she brandished the scepter of modesty, allowing a demure appearance, rabbinic morals, and unctuous reverence to preside in the face of gossip. She wore away at what little virility Isidoro had, making him into her bland lackey, and, occupying the center of the family, expelled Sara to the peripheral zone of derision, sarcasm, and criticism. Sara was unusual, an extreme case; pale as a corpse, she did not know how to handle herself, could not avoid attracting attention, projected an air of embarrassment, and was doomed to end up unhappy. The proof: while Fanny married her first cousin to prevent outsiders from entering the family, Sara fell in love with a communist, a pauper, an assimilated man who was practically a goy.