The house in which I lived during my childhood in Tocopilla.
I, six months old, when actor and spectator were not yet separate.
I struggled free from her grip and shouted scornfully at her from the height of my imagined throne. “Let go of me, you old stinker! Leave me alone or I’ll throw stones at you too!” She recoiled, startled. I was about to return to my attacks when the Queen of Cups, uttering a catlike yowl, pointed toward the sea. An enormous silvery cloud was moving toward the beach, and following above it was a thick dark cloud! In no way do I pretend to claim that my childish actions were the cause of what happened next, and yet it is strange that all these events occurred at the same time, bringing with them a lesson that would never fade from my mind. For some mysterious reason, thousands of sardines began to wash up on the beach. The waves threw them, already dying, onto the dark sand, which gradually became covered by the silver of their scales. This brilliance quickly vanished, for the sky began to turn black, full of voracious seagulls. The drunken mendicant, fleeing toward her shelter, yelled at me. “Murderous child! Torturing the ocean like that, you killed all the fish!”
I felt as if every fish was staring at me accusingly in the agony of its death throes. I filled my arms with sardines and threw them back into the water. The ocean responded by throwing an army of dead fish back at me. I kept throwing them back in. The seagulls snatched them from me, uttering deafening shrieks. I sat down on the sand. The world was offering me two options: I could suffer with the anguish of the sardines or rejoice at the good fortune of the seagulls. The balance tilted toward joy when I saw a crowd of poor people — men, women, children — chasing away the birds and gathering up every last fish with frenetic enthusiasm. The balance tilted toward sadness when I saw the seagulls, deprived of their banquet, pecking dejectedly at the few morsels that remained on the beach.
Naively, I told myself that in this reality — in which I, Pinocchio, felt like an outsider — all things were interconnected in a dense web of suffering and pleasure. There were no small causes; every action produced effects that extended beyond the confines of space and time.
I was so affected by this carpet of beached fish that I began to view the crowd of poor people (who lived in a slum of shacks called La Manchurria, built from rusty corrugated iron, scraps of cardboard, and potato sacks) as the stranded sardines and the upper class of merchants and electric company workers to which I belonged as the greedy seagulls. Thus I discovered charity.
There was a short pole by the door of Casa Ukrania with a handle embedded in it, used for raising and lowering the shop’s metal shutters. Sometimes, Gadfly would come and scratch his back on it. He was thus named because he had two stumps in place of arms that, according to those who mocked him, wiggled like the wings of an insect. The poor man was one of the many nitrate miners who had been the victim of a dynamite explosion. The white bosses threw out the injured miners without pity, with empty pockets. One could count by dozens the mutilated men who drank themselves into insanity on methylated spirits in a squalid warehouse by the harbor. I said to Gadfly, “Would you like me to scratch your back?” He looked at me with the eyes of a thrashed angel. “Well. if I don’t disgust you, young sir.” I began scratching with both hands. He let forth hoarse sighs similar to the purrs of a cat. A smile of pleasure and gratitude dawned on his face, which was weathered by the implacable desert sands. I felt liberated from the guilt of having murdered the sardines. Suddenly, my father emerged from the shop and chased off the armless man. “You degenerate roto!*1 Don’t come back here again or I’ll have you thrown in jail!”
I wanted to explain to Jaime that it was I who had suggested this much-needed remedy for the unfortunate man, but he would not let me speak. “Be quiet, and don’t let those abusive bums take advantage of you! Don’t ever get near them; they’re covered with lice that spread typhus!”
Indeed, the world is a fabric of suffering and pleasure; in every action, good and evil dance together like a pair of lovers.
Today, I still have no idea why I embarked on this folly: one day I got out of bed saying that I would not go out in the street unless I had red shoes. My parents, accustomed to having an unusual son, urged me to be patient. Such footwear was not to be found in the small shoe shop in Tocopilla. They were more likely to be found in Iquique, a hundred kilometers away. A traveling salesman agreed to take my mother, Sara Felicidad, to that large port city in his automobile. She returned smiling, bringing with her a cardboard box containing a fine pair of red boots with rubber soles.
Putting them on, I felt as if wings were sprouting from my heels. I ran to school, taking agile leaps along the way. I did not mind the torrent of mockery from my classmates, I was used to that. The only one who applauded my taste was the good Mr. Toro. (Did my desire for red shoes come directly from the Tarot? In it, the Fool, the Emperor, the Hanged Man, and the Lovers all wear red shoes.) Carlitos, my desk mate, was the poorest of all the children. After school he would sit on benches in the town square, equipped with a little box, and offer shoe-shining services. It embarrassed me to have Carlitos kneel at my feet, brushing my shoes, applying color and polish to make the dirty leather shine again. But I had him do it every day in order to give him the opportunity to earn a little money. When I placed my red shoes on his box, he gave a cry of joy and admiration. “Oh, those are so nice! It’s lucky I have red dye and neutral polish. I’ll make them shine like they’re varnished.” And for almost an hour he slowly, carefully, profoundly, caressed what for him were two sacred objects. When I offered him money, he did not want to accept it. “I’ve made them so shiny you’ll be able to walk in the night without needing a lantern!” Enthused, I began to admire my splendid boots while running around the square. Carlitos furtively wiped away a tear or two, murmuring, “You’re lucky, Pinocchio, I’ll never be able to have a pair like that.”
I felt a pain inside my chest, and I could not take another step. I took the shoes off and gave them to him. The boy, forgetting my presence, hastily put them on and took off running toward the beach. He forgot not only me, but also his box. I kept it, intending to give it to him the next day at school.
When my father saw me return home barefoot, he was furious. “You say you gave them to a shoe shiner? Are you crazy? Your mother went a hundred kilometers out and a hundred kilometers back to buy them for you! That brat’s going to come back to the square looking for his box. Go there, wait for him as long as it takes, and when he shows up, take your shoes back, by force if you need to.”
Jaime used intimidation as a method of education. The fear of being clobbered by his trapeze artist’s muscles made me break out in a cold sweat. I obeyed. I went to the square and sat down on a bench. Five interminable hours passed. As night was falling, a group of people came running along, surrounding a bicyclist. The man was pedaling slowly, leaning down as if an enormous weight was breaking his back. Bent double over the handlebars, like a marionette with cut strings, was the dead body of Carlitos. Through the rips in his clothing I could see his skin, formerly brown, now as pale as my own. His limp legs swung with each pedal stroke, drawing red arcs in the air with my boots. Behind the bicycle and the curious group of mourners, a rumor was fanning out like a ship’s wake. “He was playing on the slippery rocks. The rubber soles on his shoes made him slip. He fell into the sea and was battered against the rocks. That’s how the imprudent boy drowned.” Imprudent he may have been, but it was my generosity that killed him. The next day, everyone at the school went to lay flowers at the site of the accident. On those precipitous rocks, pious hands had built a miniature chapel out of cement. Inside it was a photograph of Carlitos and the red shoes. My classmate, having departed this world too early, without accomplishing the mission that God gives to every incarnated soul, had become an animita (little soul). Trapped in this state, he was now devoted to bringing about the miracles that believers requested of him. Many candles were lit behind the magical shoes that had once brought death but were now dispensers of health and prosperity.