“Well,” she said in an unexpectedly childlike voice, “let’s meet at midnight on the dot, in twenty-eight days, one lunar cycle, at Café Iris. But before you go, come with me to urinate on St. Ignatius of Loyola.”
For those twenty-eight days, under the pretext of nervous exhaustion I ate only fruits and chocolate and did not leave the room the Cereceda sisters were loaning me. I felt empty. I could not write, think, or feel. If someone had asked me who I was, my answer would have been, “I am a mirror broken into a thousand pieces.” Sleeping very little, I spent hours piecing together the fragments. At the end of this lunar cycle I felt reconstructed. However, I realized I had not rediscovered myself; once again, I was the mirror of that terrible woman.
Like a drug addict needing his fix, I went to Café Iris. I got there right at midnight, even though I knew she might be hours late. But it was not so. She was waiting, standing by a window wearing a sober military coat and no makeup. Without her mascara she was still beautiful, but now the expression on her unadorned face was that of a saint. In a voice so soft that she reminded me of my mother when she sang to me in my crib, she said, “I am a carrier pigeon in your hands. Let me go. The god who was waiting has come down from the mountains. I’m not a virgin. I’m sure that I am carrying in my belly the perfect child that destiny has promised me.” She showed me a needle threaded with one of her long hairs. I could not keep from shedding tears while she sewed up my pocket. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, Stella had disappeared. I saw her again fifty years later, a prisoner in another body, a sweet little grandmother with short gray hair.
The world fell away from me. I went back to the house in Matucana. My parents did not ask me any questions. Jaime handed me a few bills. “From now on I’ll give you a weekly salary. All you have to do is help in the shop on Saturdays; there are more thieves every day.” My mother got a hot bath ready for me then served me a hearty breakfast. I saw in her eyes the anguish of not understanding me. If I, being a part of them, was incomprehensible, then that meant the world they had built so strongly had a fault, an area populated by madness that did not match up with their scheme of “reality.” It was absolutely necessary for them to consider my behavior as delusional. To maintain their own equilibrium, they had to force the madman into the straitjacket of “normal life.” When they realized they could not break me down, they tried to persuade me by filling me with shame. And they succeeded. After several weeks I felt guilty; I lost my confidence in poetry and promised myself not to frustrate their hopes, to continue my studies at the university until I got a diploma. But one night, in a dream, I saw a high wall on which one sentence was written: “Let go your prey, lion, and take flight!” I packed a few books, my writings, the few clothes I owned, and returned to the Cereceda sisters.
I absorbed myself in making my puppets. Like a hermit, I spent the day locked in my room engaging in dialog with them. Only late at night, when my hosts and their friends were asleep, did I go to the kitchen to eat a piece of chocolate. One morning someone gave a few short, discrete, delicate knocks on my door. I decided to open it. I saw before me a woman of short stature with amber-colored hair and an ingenuous expression that touched me deeply. However, I asked her with false brusqueness what her name was.
“Luz.”
“What do you want?”
“They say you make some very nice puppets. Can I see them?” I showed them to her with great pleasure. There were fifty of them. She put them on her hands, made them speak, laughed, “I have a friend who is a painter who will love to see what you do. Please come with me to show him your characters.”
What I felt for Luz had nothing to do with love or desire. I knew that for me she was an angel, the polar opposite of the Luciferian Stella; rather than breaking the poisonous world into a thousand pieces, she saw a chaos of sacred fragments that it was her duty to put together in order to reconstruct a pyramid. Luz came to draw me out of my dark retreat, to lead me into the luminous world, and once there, to vanish. And so it was. Luz and Stella were two opposing views of the world. Although they both felt themselves to be foreign to the world, outsiders in it, one saw it as having heavenly ties while the other saw it as having roots in hell. One wanted to show the good things in the world by making herself its mirror, the other, in the same way, wanted to reflect its failures. The two were of a piece, consistent with each other: cobras charming men, one wanting to inoculate them with the venom of the infinite, the other with the elixir of eternity.
Luz’s boyfriend, obviously madly in love with her, was an older painter by the name of André Racz, who had a prophet-like appearance, wearing long hair and a beard halfway down his chest. He lived in an old studio, much longer than it was wide, at least three hundred square meters. It was reached via a long, dark passageway with a cement floor with rusty rails in it, giving the place the appearance of an abandoned mine. Racz’s paintings and engravings were based on the Gospels. Christ, who bore the artist’s face, was shown preaching, performing miracles, and being crucified in the contemporary era amidst cars and trains. The soldiers who tortured him wore German-style uniforms. One of them shot him in his side with a pistol. The Virgin Mary was always a portrait of Luz.
I was pulling my puppets out of my suitcase, one by one. Racz, his attention consumed by the beauty of his girlfriend, was barely looking at them. Luz, without seeming to notice this embarrassing situation, smiled as if waiting for a miracle. And a miracle occurred! One puppet to which I had given the supporting role of a drunken bum, wearing a patched coat, long hair, and abundant beard, revealed his true personality upon emerging in this environment full of religious paintings: he was Christ. And the most surprising thing of all was that his features were very similar to those of André Racz. The painter moved the puppet with the enthusiasm of a child, engaging in dialogue with it. Luz took the puppet’s hands and began to waltz with it. Racz followed her like a shadow all around the studio. I saw in his dog-like glances that he wanted my puppet to be his own so that he could give it to her. I immediately told him, “It’s a gift. Take it.” He answered me with great emotion. “Young man, you are a divine messenger. You did not arrive here by chance. Without knowing me, you made my portrait. I have just bought a plane ticket to go to Europe. I need to put an abysmal distance between Luz and myself. I’m old enough to be her grandfather. I’m chaining her to an old man. I know she will sleep with the puppet as she is remembering me. It will make the breakup easier. This is my studio; we have spent unforgettable moments together in it. I will give it to you. I do not want to abandon it to vulgar hands. Now go, I want to say goodbye alone to my Virgin.”
I left the room as if emerging from a dream. It seemed impossible that someone would so suddenly give me a studio in which I could live as I pleased. But it was true. The next day Luz came to get me, accompanied me to the studio, and said rather sadly, “André gave me all his paintings but didn’t want to give me his new address.” She handed me the keys to the studio and left. I never saw her again.
Thus, overnight I found myself the proprietor of a huge space at 340 Villavicencio Street, perhaps the site of an old factory, which, being at the end of a hundred-meter-long tunnel, was isolated from the neighbors. There I could freely make all the noise I wanted. I believed that the ultimate achievement of an artist was to become a creator of parties. If everyday life seemed like hell, if everything boiled down to two words, permanent impermanence, if the future that was promised us was the victory of the persecutors, if God had become a dollar bill, then I had to abide by the words of Ecclesiastes: “There is nothing better for man than to eat, drink, and make his soul merry.” My weekly “studio parties” became very well known. People from all walks of life attended. A phrase from Hesse’s Steppenwolf was written on the door: “Magic Theater. Price of Admission: Your Mind.” By the door a former mendicant, Patas de Humo (“Smokey Paws”), who normally slept in the tunnel and whom I had taken on as my assistant, gave out a quarter-liter glass full of vodka to each guest. For those who did not gulp it down, there was no getting in. Those who accepted this hefty drink, which would get them drunk immediately, were admitted by Smokey Paws with an affectionate kick in the rear, whether man or woman, young or old, laborer or legislator. Once inside there was no more drinking, just conversation and dancing, but no popular music, only classical. The biggest hit was Swan Lake. In that space, as full as a rush-hour bus, groups of people improvised, imitating the mechanical gestures of the Russian ballet with tremendous grace. The mingling of artists with university professors, boxers, salesmen, produced an explosive mixture. As the drink was limited to that initial quarter liter, there was no violence and the party became a paradisiacal game. Naturally now and then, almost without intending to, someone would climb up on a chair and become the center. These interventions were short, but their intensity made them unforgettable. A young law student once loudly declared that his father, a famous lawyer who lived secluded in his immense library, had never permitted his son to read a single one of his precious volumes, always keeping his library locked.