If I wanted to develop my sensory imagination, before anything else I had to liberate it from the tyranny of weight. The planet, always present in my body through its force of attraction, was telling me, “You are mine, from me you came and to me you will return.” I felt that what was heaviest was darkness. I filled myself with it, a dense material, painful, overwhelming. I filled my feet with its blackness, then my legs, and the rest of my body. Having become a skin that was filled with tar, I breathed in as deeply as I could and exhaled the magma from my feet, replacing it with light. I emptied my legs, my arms, my torso, my head; I was a hide filled with glowing energy. I felt lighter and lighter. It seemed to me as if I would jump twenty meters when I took a step. The absence of the sensation of weight filled me with joy, with a desire to live, and made me breathe in deeply. My spirit was no longer invaded by psychological garbage, by gloomy serpents of shadow. I wanted to get dressed and go out for a walk. So I did. It was four in the morning. This working class neighborhood, with its dark streetlights (thieves had stolen the bulbs), was almost completely obscured in darkness. I walked along feeling as luminous as the moon, occasionally taking little jumps. Suddenly I saw three evil-looking men approaching. Prudently, I changed my course. Seeing my defensive movement, they fanned out. One pulled a club, the other a knife, and the third a pistol. I set out running toward San Pablo Street, the central artery of the neighborhood, where trains passed and a bar might still be open. “Stop, dickhead!” they shouted. I let out a cry of distress, sounding like a pig squealing in the slaughterhouse. Not a single window opened! Not a door! There was I, who had just recently been weightless, galloping along, feeling heavier than an elephant under the indifferent sky, the fecal footprint of fear growing in my pants. Feeling the pain of shattered dignity, I set all my hopes on getting to the main street. But it was dark! They were ten meters behind me. Giving up, vanquished, trembling, I stopped and waited for the bandits. They came at me and knocked me to the ground with a punch in the stomach. With agonized calm, I begged them not to kill me, to take everything from me, because I was a poet. They searched my pockets, finding a crumpled banknote and my school papers. After examining the papers meticulously, they returned them to me, along with the money, then saluted and explained that they were police and had mistaken me for a thief. “Young man, next time don’t run away, because that makes you look suspicious!” With my body and soul aching, I walked on to San Pablo. There, just around the corner at a café a group of people were playing cards under the light of a gas lamp. A few more steps and I would have been safe! If they really had been muggers, they could have slit my throat like a cow’s and left me there, a few steps from salvation. At that moment, I swore that I would always sustain my efforts until I had no drop of energy left and that I would never abandon a task I began until I finished it.
I continued my work after I returned to my room. I had met terror face-to-face, a paralyzing sensation of oppression that turned me into an animal. In that realm, where beings devour each other, fear is the essential element of survival. To ascend from animal to human is to escape fear. Fear of what? Animals have no concept of death because they perceive themselves only as matter. Their essential fear is that of losing the corporeal form. I felt the threats to my body that were present like never before. Flesh was bound to age, sicken, die; it had to be nourished and protected. Along with the fear of losing my body came the need to have a lair. Being descended from the Jews, who had been nomads for centuries, I had no homeland, no roots, no burrow. How could I rid myself of this anguish? Should I imitate Buddha, renouncing earthly life, disassociating myself from my body as well as my “ego,” returning to the impersonality of the original energy, liberating myself from the chain of reincarnation? Thanks to the atheism that Jaime had inculcated in me this seemed like a fairytale, a coward’s way out. “The sword that cuts everything will not cut you when you become the sword.” Thinking thus, I decided to become that which caused my terror.
In my preceding exercises I had begun by imagining myself filled with black magma, which was then expelled so that light could inhabit me. But the mythological dragon, being immortal, cannot be conquered by killing but only by seduction. Thus one must accept being its food. I returned to imagining my feet full of that nefarious tar. Then, instead of identifying with my feet, I made myself one with the black stuff. I was the threat; I was the bringer of death; I was the nothing with its carnivorous cravings. I moved up through my legs, filled my pelvis, my trunk, my arms, my head, and erased all traces of morality, becoming a thick evil. With a phenomenal effort, I abandoned my attachment to my human form and turned loose. Leaving the carnal vessel I grew out in all directions like a voracious mass and began to overtake the building, the city, the country, the planet, the galaxy, finally filling the universe and continuing my infinite expansion. Stars lived within me, space monsters, demons, ambiguous entities, insidious ghosts, demented murderers, rats, vipers, venomous insects. Then I imagined the inverse: the infinite menace, the mortal shadow, began to invade space from all points and inundated the cosmos, advancing toward me. It swallowed galaxies, our solar system, the planet, the South American continent, Chile, Santiago, the neighborhood of Matucana, my house, my room, and finally concentrated itself on my body. While I occupied the universe, the universe also accumulated beneath my skin. I felt invincible, I was the evil, and there was nothing that could frighten me, least of all my father.
At that late hour of the night, naked as I was, I began slowly walking around the apartment. I walked crouching forward like a hungry beast. My eyes adjusted to the darkness very quickly, and my sense of hearing became sharper, I could hear the slightest creak, and from far off I could hear the deep breathing of Jaime, Sara, and Raquel. Also, my olfactory sense perceived the different smells that filled the house like never before: the sweet scent of damp sheets, the rancid floorboards, the sulfur in the air, the salty smell of the walls. I went into my sister’s room. Because the windows were kept closed for fear of thieves, the heat made it necessary for her to sleep naked, with her legs spread. I put my nose a few inches from her crotch and smelled it. Both my pleasure and my disgust were such that the blackness of my heart seemed to transform itself into a tarantula. I imagined myself violating her, then ripping open her belly with my fangs to devour her guts. I savored the sight of this forbidden orifice for a long moment, then slipped into the master bedroom. There was my mother, leaning against my father’s back. They were sleeping so deeply that they seemed like wax statues. I was invaded by a gigantic anger. I felt sure that I could rip open their jugulars with a single bite. Sara deserved my hatred because her foolish passivity made her complicit with Jaime. Without lifting a finger, she allowed my father to enjoy terrifying me. It was he who had taken pains to make me into a coward because he felt obliged to assert his dubious manhood and needed to overcome his problems with his gay brother. He who had taken me to the beach and made me stick my legs into pools where he knew octopuses lived, distracting me and keeping me there until one of those viscous animals wrapped its tentacles around my ankle. He who let me scream for a little while, then came to me laughing, pulled the suckers off my skin, bashed the animal against the rocks, then stuck his hand under the root of the tentacles and lifted the monster’s hood under my nose, turning it inside out. “They’re harmless. Don’t scream like a little girl; learn to be brave!” But how can a five-year-old child be brave when an adult forces him to hold onto his back, arms around his neck, as he runs into the raging ocean waves? There, clinging to my father like a limpet, I shut my eyes, wrinkled my nose, clenched my jaw, and endured the ordeal as he, roaring like a lion, threw himself under the giant waves again and again, riding them just as they broke. Despite my young age, I knew that if I let go I would die by drowning. The cold water of the Pacific Ocean seemed to turn my body into ice. My fingers were getting stiff. The force of the waves would tear me off Jaime’s powerful back. I began to scream. Jaime, furious, deposited me back on the beach while spitting the word “coward!” over and over again, not noticing that my lips were blue with cold. “Stop shaking, sissy! You have to learn to overcome fear!”