“But Grandmother, I didn’t mean to get anything dirty, I just wanted to make a nice elephant. It just needed a tusk, then it would have been finished.” This made her even more furious. She thought I was making fun of her. She grabbed a handful of my hair and began pulling, with the intention of yanking it out. Gandhi intervened, holding her back with gentle firmness. The odious joker Isidoro, behind Jashe, waved his insecticide bomb in my direction, agitating it back and forth like a violating phallus.
I was required to assist in removing the wallpaper, for which they used rubber gloves to protect their hands. Then they put the pieces in the middle of the courtyard shared by the group of small houses, sprayed them with alcohol, and made me throw matches on them until they were entirely burned. I saw my dear elephant consumed by flame. A lot of neighbors appeared at the windows. Jashe rubbed the ashes on my nose and fingers and brought me, thus dirtied, to the train. Once we were far away from Santiago, Moishe moistened his white handkerchief with spit and cleaned my face and hands. He was mystified. “You seem numb, my boy. You don’t cry or even complain.”
I boarded the Horacio for a three-day voyage and disembarked in Tocopilla without ever having said a word. When I saw my mother, I ran to her and began to cry convulsively, buried between her enormous breasts. “You jerk! Why did you make me go?” When I saw my father fifteen minutes later I held back my sobs, dried my eyes, and faked a smile.
“I was there, seeing the mental limitations of these people,” the old Alejandro said to me. “They saw the material world, the pieces of snot, but the art, the beauty, the magical elephant, those things were lost to them. And yet, rejoice in this suffering: thanks to it, you have met me. Ecclesiastes says, ‘The greater one’s wisdom, the greater one’s pain.’ But I tell you, only he who knows pain can approach wisdom. I cannot tell you that I have achieved wisdom; I am no more than a step along the path of this spirit who is traveling toward the end of time. Who will I be three centuries from now? Or what will I be? What forms will serve as my vessel? In ten million years, will my consciousness still need a body? Will I still have to use sensory organs? After hundreds of millions of years, will I continue dividing the unity of the world into sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile images? Will I be an individual? A collective being? Once I have known all of the universe, or universes, when I have arrived at the end of all time, when the expansion of matter stops and with it I begin the journey back toward the point of origin, will I dissolve in it? Will I become the mystery that surrounds time and space? Will I discover that the Creator is a memory with no present or future? You, a child, I, an old man, will we not have been merely memories, insubstantial images, without having had the least reality? For you, I do not exist yet, for me you do not exist anymore, and when our story is told, he who tells it will be nothing but a string of words escaping out of a pile of ashes.”
At night, when I awoke alone in the dark house, it became essential for me to imagine this double of myself from the future. Listening to him I calmed myself little by little, and a deep sleep came, gloriously allowing me to forget myself.
During the day I did not despair, despite the anguish of living unappreciated, a Robinson Crusoe on my inner island. In the library my friends the books, with their heroes and adventures, blocked out the silence for me.
There was someone else who used books to escape from silence: Morgan, the gringo. Like all the English, he worked for the electric company that provided energy to the nitrate company offices and the copper and silver mines. He liked to drink gin. When they forbade him to drink any alcohol, dying of boredom he buried himself in the “esotericism” section in the library. The Freemasons had provided shelves crammed with books in English that dealt with mysterious topics. Jaime claimed that The Secret Doctrine by Helena Blavatsky had disturbed Morgan’s brain. “He’s got bats in the belfry!” he would often say. The gringo believed in a group of invisible Cosmic Masters and began fervently believing in the reincarnation of the soul. In accordance with the author he idolized, he declared to anyone who would listen to him that the veneration and burial of cadavers was a barbaric custom because they infected the planet. They should be burned, as was done in India. He sold all his possessions and with the money thus obtained, plus his savings, opened a funeral parlor called River of Ganges Sacred Crematorium. The place of business was decorated with wreaths of artificial flowers, sweets made of almond paste in the shape of fruits, and plaster models of exotic gods, some of which had elephant heads. It opened onto a long courtyard covered with orange tiles, and at the center was an oven similar to those used for making bread with room enough for a Christian inside. The priest, launching diatribes against this sacrilegious monstrosity, was preaching to the choir. Who among the citizens of Tocopilla would permit their deceased loved ones to be burned in some big stove? No one, for sure, wished to see the carnal remains of their dear departed converted into a pile of gray ashes. Morgan, whom people called the Theosophist, shrugged his shoulders: “It’s nothing new, the same thing happened to Madam Blavatsky and her partner Olcott in New York; ancestral customs have deep roots.” He changed his strategy: if the priest contended that according to Christian theology animals did not have souls, then it was highly advisable to burn their remains. The oven began its function: first dogs, then, thanks to a discount, cats, followed by the odd white mouse or plucked parrot. The ashes were placed in milk bottles painted black with gilded stoppers. Drawn to the nauseating odor, a multitude of vultures came to land on the orange tiles, covering them with their white excrement. The Theosophist would shoo them away with a broom, but the stubborn birds would fly in circles, which eventually turned into spirals, finally returning to the tiles, squawking and defecating. The fetid odor became insufferable. The Theosophist closed the funeral parlor and began to spend most of his time reclining on a bench in the town square, promising reincarnation to anyone who would accept him as their master. It was there that I struck up a friendship with him, for I was saddened to see him become the laughingstock of the whole town.
To me, he did not seem to be a lunatic, as my father claimed. I liked his ideas. “My boy, all evidence suggests that we were something before being born and we will be something after dying. Can you tell me what?”
I rubbed my hands together, stammered, and then said nothing. He began to laugh. “Come to the beach with me!” I followed him, and when we got to the beach he showed me the towers joined by cables on which steel cars glided, full from the mines. They came from the mountains, ran along the beach, and disappeared between other mountains. I saw a pebble fall from one of them, half gray and half coppery.
“Where do they come from? Where are they going?”
“I don’t know, Theosophist.”
“There, you don’t know where they come from or where they are going, but you can pick up one of their stones and keep it like a treasure. You see, boy, I know what mine they come from and what mill they are going to, but what good would it do to tell you? The numbers of those sites will mean nothing to you because you have never seen them. It’s the same for the soul that is transported by the body: we do not know where it comes from or where it is going, but now, here, we want to keep it and do not want to lose it; it is a treasure. A mysterious consciousness, infinitely more vast than our own, knows the origin and the end but cannot reveal it to us because we do not have a sufficiently developed brain to comprehend it.”