While it is true that reality gives us cake, this does not mean that we should wait motionless with our mouths open. To bring ourselves to fruition, instead of just asking for opportunities to be given to us, we artists, though seemingly insignificant, can offer opportunities to powerful people. This is how I presented myself, carrying a basket full of my puppets, to the offices of the prosperous Teatro Experimental de la Universidad de Chile (TEUCH), the government agency that put on grand shows and ran a theater school. I was received by Domingo Piga and Agustín Siré, who were the general directors, and I said at once, “I want to direct the TEUCH Puppet Theatre!” They responded that TEUCH did not have a puppet theater. I opened my basket and I dumped the puppets out on the desk: “Now you have one!” They immediately gave me the abandoned room behind the clock that adorned the facade of the central building. The poets and their friends helped me to clean away the dust that had accumulated over half a century, and there we began to build the Bululú. This was an activity in which artistic pleasures were mixed with amorous pleasures. The administration provided us with an old bus, and we joined forces with the university chorus and together — the chorus numbering sixty people and we puppeteers consisting of six men and six women — toured throughout northern Chile giving performances. It was a very beautiful, essentially anonymous activity. Hidden, with our arms raised manipulating these heroes, we learned to sacrifice individual exhibitionism. We knew how to put ourselves at the service of the puppets and the audience. What difference was there between puppeteers who were hidden in the shadows, giving energy to the characters that evolved above us, and a congregation of monks concentrating their prayers on exalting God? After putting on a show for the children of miners one of the best puppeteers, Eduardo Mattei, told me, “I feel like a toad full of love, getting glimpses of the full moon.” I hid a wry smile, for his words seemed corny. But I realized how sincere he was when, at the end of the tour, he bade us adieu and became a Benedictine monk. The puppeteers all attended the ceremony at the monastery of Las Condes in which the abbot washed Eduardo’s feet and gave him his new name, Frater Maurus. Thanks to his work with the puppets, Eduardo had found his faith.
Some time later, I went to visit him. Frater Maurus, dressed in his beautiful Benedictine habit, looked happy. I told him that I was thinking of leaving Chile to study in Europe. He responded, “They will teach you a science of voids; they will show you where there is nothing. They are experts in this: like vultures, they detect cadavers perfectly, but are incapable of finding where the living bodies are. There is only one way to make a chalice, but a thousand ways of breaking it!” I respected his sentiments. It was a position opposite to mine: I wanted to cut my roots in order to span the entire world. He had decided to confine himself there at the monastery, at the foot of the mountains, and sing Gregorian chants for the rest of his life. It was all the more heroic a decision because, as I knew, he had been in love with one of our actresses. For his devotion to God, was it necessary to eliminate women and family from his life? Eduardo’s profound vocation revealed the sacred character of theater to me. How could I, who had been raised as an atheist, aspire to holiness? Every religion has its holy men, and Frater Maurus quickly became a Catholic holy man; there are also Muslim holy men, Jewish holy men known as the “righteous,” enlightened Buddhist holy men, and so on. Religions have appropriated holiness. To be holy means to respect dogmas. What remains for those of us who are not theological standard bearers, those of us whose animal nature makes us want to be united with a wife? It is impossible to believe that God created women as an evil, just to tempt good men. If women are as sacred as men, intercourse is also sacred, and if this act leads to orgasm, it should be accepted and enjoyed as a divine gift.
I decided that I could become a civil holy man: holiness did not necessarily have to be contingent on chastity or on the renunciation of sexual pleasure, the basis of the family. A civil holy man need not ever enter a church, nor does he need to worship a god with any defined name or image. Such a man, having risen above purely personal interests — not only socially and globally conscious but also cosmically conscious — is able to act for the benefit of the world. In knowing that he is united with others he understands that their suffering is his suffering, but their joy is also his joy. He is able to sympathize and help the needy, but also to applaud those who are triumphant, as long as they are not exploitative. The civil holy man makes himself the owner of the Earth: the air, the land, the animals, the water, the fundamental energies, are all his, and he acts as their possessor, taking great care not to damage this property. The civil holy man is capable of generous anonymous acts. Loving humanity, he has learned to love himself. He knows that the future of the human race depends on partners capable of achieving a relationship in equilibrium. The civil holy man struggles to ensure that not only children are well treated, but also fetuses, which must be protected from neurotic couples who have conceived them as well as from the toxic industry of childbirth. He also struggles to liberate the field of medicine from large industrial companies, makers of drugs that are more damaging than diseases. To achieve civil holiness — to be outside of any sect, sweetly impersonal, capable of accompanying a dying person whose name I did not know with the same devotion as if she had been my daughter, sister, wife, or mother — seemed impossible to me. But, inspired by some initiatory tales in which the heroes are apes, parrots, dogs, all animals capable of imitation, I decided to use this as my technique. By imitating civil holiness over and over, eventually I would authentically achieve it in my actions.
My intent to imitate civil holiness gave me justification for living. However, I committed some grave errors trying to apply what in those years were only theories. An example was the de-virginizing of Consuelo, a young woman I met at Café Iris who had been invited there by her sister, a painter. Consuelo had an ungainly physique but sensuous curves, a wide mouth, deep-set eyes, and protruding ears that gave her a sympathetic simian air. She was introduced to me, and we sat down to talk at a separate table. While combing her hair, which was cut short in a masculine style, she explained that she was a lesbian. Most of her sexual relationships had been with married women who had refused to leave their husbands to go and live with her. Since Consuelo was interested in literature, we began a friendship in which she behaved like a man. Everything was going well, we took great pleasure in getting together to explore bookstores or sit and drink coffee at various popular spots, but my desire to imitate civil holiness came into the mix. I asked if she still had her hymen. “Of course!” she told me proudly. Carried away by the desire to do good in a disinterested way, I replied, “My friend, I know that phallic penetration does not interest you at all, but it would be unfortunate for a future great poet like you to have to grow old as a virgin. As long as you keep this veil, you will never be an adult, nor will you know why you reject the male member: you will be afraid of it; you’ll feel it stalking you in the shadows like an implacable enemy. Prove to yourself that you are strong. I propose the following: let’s get together in my studio at a precise time. I will borrow an operating table, there’s one in the university theater that was used for a play. You will arrive wearing a coat, with hospital pajamas underneath. I will be dressed as surgeon. We will not touch each other at all beforehand, I’ll lay you down on the table, pretend to anesthetize you, take off your pants, open your legs, you will pretend to be asleep, and then, with precision and extreme delicacy, I will penetrate you as a purely medicinal act. Once the hymen is torn, I will retreat with the same delicacy with which I entered. There will not be any pleasure; any form of foreplay is excluded. It will be a surgical operation between friends, nothing more. Once this poetic act is finished, you can live your life free of this cumbersome hymen.”