“Alejandro, our house burned down!”
“The Matucana house?”
“Yes, my house, your house, with the furniture, clothes, Raquel’s piano, everything!”
“Oh, my writing!”
“Fuck your writing! You’re thinking about some filthy sheets of paper and not my money that I kept in the shoe box in the closet, my stamp albums, twenty years’ worth of collecting, my cycling shoes, the porcelain your mother kept since we got married, you don’t have a heart, you don’t have anything, I don’t know who you are, we thought we’d come to sleep here, but this is a nest of drunks, we’ll go to a hotel!”
And he grunted in exasperation while the poets, elated with the news, danced around. We took up a collection to rent three victorias. We made the journey to Matucana. The weary steps of the horses gave a metallic voice to the dying night. We improvised elegies to the burned house over the rhythm of the horseshoes.
When we arrived, the fire was out. No one was there. Sandwiched between two ugly concrete buildings, my old home slept like a black bird. The poets got out of the carriages and danced in front of the remains, celebrating the end of one world and the rebirth of another. They dug through the rubble in search of the red worm into which the phoenix would have transformed itself. They found nothing but my mother’s blackened corset. Ah, poor Sara Felicidad! After all those years without exercise, spending ten hours a day behind the shop counter to the point that her elbows were covered with calluses from so much leaning on that hard surface, and also eating compulsively to compensate for the lack of love in her life, she had grown fat, lost her figure, and felt as if she was drowning beneath a magma of flesh, while my father, under the pretext of door-to-door sales, had become the “neighborhood Casanova,” riding his bicycle around, committing adultery left and right with female customers. In order to set herself limits that would reassure her that she was alive, that the world was governed by infallible laws, that she was not open like a river to the thirsty snout of any rapacious beast that might arrive, Sara had donned this corset, constructed of steel rods, which encased her from breasts to midthigh. The first thing she did when she awoke in the morning was to shout for the maid, who came grumbling as usual to help her to tie its laces. She exited her bedroom rigid but with form, her animal nature compressed, a self-confident lady feeling no shyness in front of the scrutinizing gaze of others. At night, returning from the shop with swollen feet and eyes reddened by the neon lights, she would again call the maid to help her out of this instrument of torture. This was done at a time when we should all have been in bed. I always knew that I would not be able to fall asleep immediately. My mother would begin scratching herself with her long fingernails, which were always painted red. Her skin, dry after so many hours of confinement because the canvas fabric of the corset prevented her from sweating, made an insidious, pervasive sound like paper ripping. The concert would last for half an hour. I knew from the maid’s gossiping that Sara soothed her itching from her neck to her knees by smearing herself with her own saliva. Her obesity, her elbow calluses, her swollen feet, her itching, were things that I always viewed with a kind of sarcasm, as if my mother were guilty of this ugliness, an ugliness that she had to hide in a corset. Now, watching the poets kicking around this blackened framework and giggling, I felt sad for her — poor woman, naively sacrificing her life simply due to lack of awareness. Her myopic husband, mother, stepfather, half-siblings, and cousins had been unable to see her glorious whiteness of body and soul. Punished as a child, considered an intruder even before her birth, given birth to apathetically, received into a cold cradle, she was a swan among proud ducks.
Dawn was breaking. Reality resumed its dance. A man passed by selling red heart-shaped balloons. With a harsh shout, I stopped the poets’ soccer game. With my remaining money I paid the three carriage drivers and bought all the man’s red balloons. I tied the corset to the volatile bunch and released it. It rose up until it was just a small black spot in the middle of the rosy dawn sky. I compared this ascent to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. I started coughing and had to take a long drink. Perhaps it was then that I understood the close union that the subconscious forms between people and their intimate objects. For me, releasing my mother’s corset, sending it high into the sky carried by heart-shaped balloons, was like setting her free from her daily imprisonment, her lackluster life as a shopkeeper’s wife, her sexual misery, the blinders of an unwanted fatherless child, and her absolute lack of love. I had spent all those years complaining about her lack of attention and tenderness to me, but I had been unable to give her the slightest bit of affection, blinded as I was by my own spite. As for her, a prisoner of her narrow consciousness, there was little I could give her. I offered my love to her corset, making it into an angel.
The burned house seemed to send us a message that one world was ending and another was about to be born from the ruins. This event coincided with the end of winter and the beginning of spring. Realizing that no carnival had been held in Chile for more than twenty years, we set out to revive the Spring Festival. There were three of us who had this idea: Enrique Lihn; José Donoso, later well known as a novelist (The Obscene Bird of Night); and I. Every day at six in the evening, the time at which people left work and filled the streets, we went out in costumes in order to create collective enthusiasm. Lihn dressed as a thin, electric devil, wiggling like a scarlet noodle, waving his hard arrow-tipped tail, questioning passersby about their intimate depravities with an underhanded canniness. Donoso, dressed as a nymphomaniac, wearing black with two soccer balls as breasts, went around sensually assaulting men who escaped from his attacks amidst collective laughter. And I, dressed as Pierrot, in white from head to toe, exuding a universal loving sadness, would nestle in the arms of women in order that they might cradle me like a wounded child. Other poets and a group of college students followed our example, and soon a euphoric costume show was there for passersby to see every day in the city center. Some astute shopkeepers made the most of the idea and organized a dance at the National Stadium. It was an unprecedented success. The seats all filled up, and also the stands, and then the exterior grounds and adjacent streets. One million people danced, got drunk, and loved one another that night. We, the initial performers, had to pay admission like everyone else. Nobody thanked us. We had turned into part of the general anonymity. Disgusted, knowing that a bunch of businessmen had robbed us blind, we went to drown our sorrows at a bar near the Mapocho station, where we drank under the spell of the strident noise of the trains. We no longer had the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita: “Think of the work and not of the fruit.” We were annoyed that we had not been recognized. I learned years later from certain bodhisattvas to secretly bless everything within my view. That night we wanted to be congratulated: “Thanks to you, a marvelous celebration has been reborn. You deserve an award, a cup, a diploma, or at least a hug or free entry to all the festivities.” We got nothing, not even a smile. We decided to celebrate in the Mapuche style: we put the chairs on the table and sat on the floor with our legs crossed, forming a circle. We stopped talking, and each one of us drank with a funereal rhythm from his own bottle of rum until it was finished: one liter of alcohol per head. My friends crumpled in silence. I felt like I was dying. I was drowning in the excess of alcohol. I ran out into the street, threw up next to a street lamp, walked with my arms open to the sky, and finally sat down in the ditch at a solitary corner. The sadness of Pierrot began to invade me. Who was I? What was my purpose in life?