He hired exotic propagandists to stand in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the door. There was a different one every week. Each one, in his or her own way, would loudly extol the quality and low price of the articles for sale, inviting curious passersby to step inside Casa Ukrania, under no obligation to buy anything. They included, among others, a dwarf in a Tyrolean costume, a skinny man dressed as a nymphomaniacal black woman, a Carmen Miranda on stilts, a wax automaton who beat at the shop windows from the inside with a cane, a ghastly mummy, and a stentorian whose voice was so loud that his shouts could be heard a kilometer away. Hunger created artists; the out-of-work miners invented all sorts of disguises. They would make Dracula or Zorro costumes out of flour sacks from the mill that they had dyed black; masks and warrior’s capes from debris found in garbage cans. One of them brought along a mangy dog dressed in Chilean peasant clothes that danced on its hind paws; another brought a baby that cried like a seagull.
In those days, with no television and the cinema open only on Saturdays and Sundays, people were drawn to any kind of novelty. Add to this the beauty of my mother, who was tall, pale-skinned, with enormous breasts, who always spoke in a lilting voice and dressed in Russian peasant clothes, and one can understand how Jaime robbed his snoozing competitors of their customers.
The shop next door, the Cedar of Lebanon, had rough wooden tables instead of glass display cases, there were no windows facing the street, and it was lit entirely by a single 60-watt bulb covered with dead insects. From the back room came a distinct odor of fried food. The owner, Mr. Omar, known to us as the Turk, was a short man; his wife was small like him but had elephantiasis in her legs, which were so swollen that although they were wrapped in black bandages they appeared ready to explode and cover the wood floor, gray from years of dust, with a layer of flesh. An invasion of spiders in their shop made up for the lack of customers.
One day, while sitting in a corner of our little courtyard reading Jules Verne’s In Search of the Castaways, I heard a heartrending wailing from the Turk’s yard, which was separated from ours by a brick wall. These cries, punctuated by long feminine “shhh” sounds, were so devastating that curiosity got the better of me and I climbed the wall. I saw the woman with the huge legs using a straw fan to shoo flies away from the scabs that almost entirely covered the body of a boy.
“What’s wrong with your son, señora?”
“Oh, it looks like an infection, little neighbor, but no. What’s happened is that he has lost his mind.”
“Lost his mind?”
“My husband is very sad because of bad business. My son confused this sadness with the wind. Covering himself with scabs to stop the bad air from touching his skin, he went mad. For him, time does not pass. He lives in seconds as long as the devil’s tail.”
It made me want to cry. I felt guilty on account of my father. With his Stalinist cruelty, he had ruined and devastated the Turk. And now his son was paying the painful price.
I returned to my room, opened the second floor window over the street, and jumped out. My bones held up under the impact, and I only scraped the skin off my knees. A commotion ensued. Blood ran down my legs. Jaime appeared, angrily pushed his way through the curious crowd, congratulated me for not crying, and carried me into Casa Ukrania to disinfect my wounds. Even though the alcohol burned me, I did not scream. In his role of Marxist warrior Jaime saw a sensitivity in me that he considered feminine, and he decided to teach me to be tough. “Men do not cry, and by their will they conquer pain. ”
The first exercises were not difficult. He began by tickling my feet with a vulture’s feather. “You have to be able to not laugh!” I managed to withstand tickling not only on the soles of my feet, but also on my armpits and, in a total triumph, to remain serious when he stuck a feather in my nostrils. Laughter thus subjugated, my father said to me, “Very good. I’m beginning to be proud of you. Mind you, I said ‘beginning to be,’ not that I am proud yet! To win my admiration, you must show that you are not a coward and that you know how to resist pain and humiliation. Now, I’m going to hit you. Turn your cheek toward me. I’ll start by hitting you very gently. You tell me to hit harder. I’ll do that, more and more, as much as you ask me. I want to see how far you get.”
I was thirsty for love. In order to gain Jaime’s approval, I asked him to hit me harder and harder each time. As his eyes shone with what I took for admiration, my spirit became more and more inebriated. My father’s affection was more important to me than pain. I held out. Finally, I spat out blood and a piece of a tooth. Jaime uttered an exclamation of admiring surprise, took me in his muscular arms, and led me, running, to the dentist.
The nerve of my premolar, coming in contact with saliva and air, was causing me atrocious suffering. Don Julio, the local dentist, prepared a calming injection. Jaime whispered in my ear (I had never heard him speak in such a delicate manner), “You have carried yourself like I do; you are brave, you are a man. You don’t have to do what I’m going to ask, but if you do it, I will consider you worthy of being my son. Refuse the injection. Let your tooth be fixed without anesthesia. Conquer pain with your will. You can do it, you are like me!”
Never again in my life have I felt such terrible pain. (On second thought, I have — when the shaman Pachita removed a tumor from my liver with a hunting knife.) Don Julio, persuaded by my father’s promise of a gift of half a dozen bottles of pisco, did not speak a word. He scraped around, used his little torture device, applied a mercury-based amalgam, and finally put a cap on the gap in my mouth. Grinning like a chimpanzee, he exclaimed, “Brilliant, young fellow, you are a hero!” Oh, what a catastrophe: I, who had endured this torture without a murmur, without budging, without shedding a tear, now interrupted the triumphant gesture of my father, who was spreading his arms out like the wings of a condor — and fainted! Yes, I fainted, just like a little girl!
Jaime, without so much as offering me a hand, led me back home. Humiliated, with swollen cheeks, I shut myself in my room and slept for twenty hours straight.
I do not know whether my father realized I had wanted to commit suicide when I threw myself out of the window. Nor do I know whether he realized that by “accidentally” falling on my knees in front of the Cedar of Lebanon (we lived on the second floor, just above) I had been begging the Turk’s forgiveness. All he said was, “You fell, you idiot. This is what comes of always having your nose in a book.” It is true. I was always absorbed by books, and with such concentration that when I was reading and someone spoke to me, I did not hear a word. Jaime, for his part, would bury himself in his stamp collection as soon as he got home, as deaf as I was with my books. He would soak the envelopes his clients gave him in lukewarm water, carefully remove the stamps with a pair of tweezers — if so much as a tooth was lost from the edge, the value would be reduced — dry them between sheets of blotting paper, then classify them and keep them in albums that nobody was allowed to open.
Two large, almost circular scabs formed on my knees; my father applied cotton wool soaked in hot water, and when they softened he peeled them away in one piece with his tweezers, exactly as he did with his stamps. Of course, I held back from crying. Satisfied, he applied alcohol to the red, flayed living flesh. New scabs formed by the next morning. My allowing him to peel them away without complaint became a ritual that brought me closer to a distant God. When my knees began to feel better and the pink hue of new skin heralded the end of the treatment, I took Jaime’s hand, led him out to the courtyard, asked him to climb the wall with me, showed him the mad child, and pointed to my knees. He understood without any other gesture being necessary. In those days there was no hospital in Tocopilla. The only doctor was an affable, plump man called Ángel Romero. My father dismissed his current salesman — a boxer who was pummeling a mannequin decorated with a large dollar sign — and accompanied by Dr. Romero asked Mr. Omar’s permission to enter to visit the sick boy. Jaime paid for the consultation and made the 100-kilometer journey to Iquique to buy medicine with a prescription from the doctor. He returned to the Omars’ armed with disinfectants, tweezers, and the basin in which he soaked off his stamps. With infinite gentleness, he soaked and softened the scabs that covered the poor boy, and peeled them off one by one. After two months of such assiduous visits, the younger Turk regained his normal appearance.