I concentrated as never before. Rummaging in all my pornographic memories, I opened the doors to everything bestial in myself. After a short but agonizing moment, I had an erection. Fearing that it might be short-lived, I climbed immediately onto the statue and, with the aid of saliva, began to penetrate her indifferent vagina — but she stopped me. “Calm down, artist. You’ve proved that you can do it. Even more important, you’ve proved it to yourself. That’s enough. I don’t need your sperm. What I want is your talent. With this act, we’ve signed a contract. We’re going to work together. I have a big project, but now I want you to let me sleep. Leave quickly. The caliph could arrive at any moment, and what belongs to him. . never mind. Come to the theater tomorrow.”
She inserted earplugs, closed her eyes, turned over on her stomach, and fell into such a deep sleep that it seemed like an implosion.
The object of lust for thousands of Mexicans, not only because of her voluptuous curves (artificial or not) but also because of her legend as the presidential whore, the Tigress had attained a status of mythic femininity rivaled only by the Virgin of Guadalupe. In spite or because of this, she now occupied the summit of my mental pyramid. She was an authentic warrior, knowing how to survive and prevail in a world dominated by corrupt politicians. If she had to give her body, she managed to do it without dishonor, distancing herself from it and transforming herself into an invulnerable and implacable creature. The people had reason to elevate her to a popularity comparable to that of the dark Virgin — for this woman was able to maintain an impenetrable purity in her mind. To seduce her, to succeed in inflaming her real desire, to become the soul of her inward castle seemed like an impossibility to me. I knew that she regarded our relationship as a game of chess in which I was a simple pawn to be moved by her — and this fascinated me. I was curious to see how she would use me, and I wondered how I would be able to transform this humiliating situation into a victory. A true koan!
As I waited on the stage for her to finish her autographs, Chucho bustled up to me, whispering with a confidential air, “Hey, you — I don’t know why I should take a liking to you, but that’s how it is. I’m offering you a warning. That woman is a real witch. Her chauffeur, who knows quite a few things, told me (for a bribe) that he drove her to a sordid neighborhood where sorcerers live, and that they sold her a plant that had been germinated in the sperm of a hanged man. Who did they hang to get the sperm? We’ll never know. Did they also splatter the poor Christian with dog’s blood? We’ll never know. The Tigress paid a big wad of bills for that plant. Then she peeled the plant, sprinkled it with lemon juice, and ate it. Ugh—how dreadful! But that’s not all. A week ago, they brought her a live badger. She called me into her dressing room and made me hold the poor animal down while she slit its throat. That’s exactly what she did. Then she took a black knife and dug through the dead animal’s organs, looking for something. I was so horrified I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, she was holding a small bone, and she put it into a powerful blender with I don’t know what horrible liquid inside it, ground it all together, and drank the mixture. It’s obvious that woman is capable of doing anything to obtain power. You be careful or you’ll wind up like that little badger’s bone.”
Now Chucho was staring at the other side of the theater with a fearful expression. “What do you see up there, in that old disused balcony condemned by the theater authorities, to the left of the front row?”
“I think it’s a mannequin dressed in old-fashioned clothes. .”
“That’s right. But that dummy is possessed by the devil. No one is ever allowed up there. It’s crowded with old, useless debris. Yet every night, the dummy changes its place. Mireya, a dancer friend of mine, ridiculed our fear of it. One night, at midnight, she sneaked up onto the balcony, cleared her way to the dummy, threw it on the floor, and stomped it to pieces. The next night, it was sitting in an armchair, completely intact. From that time on, Mireya has been cursed by horrible luck. Her agent put a bullet through his head, her father was murdered, her fiancé left her for another woman, and now she has become obese and has had to quit dancing. She went on all sorts of diets but gained a hundred pounds. She finally went insane, dreaming every night of being devoured by a pack of dogs.”
Noticing my skeptical look, Chucho shrugged, turned away huffily, and left, dismissing me forever from his sphere of interest.
As I continued to wait for the Tigress, sitting on the same burlap sacks where Nana sang her swan song twice a day, I dismissed the perturbations in my mind caused by the dancer’s gossip and arch looks and tried to concentrate on my own reactions.
Mexico: a country where two old women organized a concentration camp for prostitutes, exploiting them and then murdering them by the dozens; a country where a schoolteacher strangled his mother, ate her entire body, bones and all — and then, in prison, having already experienced the supreme culinary delight, refused any other food and died of hunger; a country where a famous singer killed herself by swallowing a glass full of needles; a country that has an entire market specializing in sorcery materials right in the center of the capital; a country in which a male prostitute, just before servicing an aged tourist, makes the sign of the cross with his penis, waving it in the four directions and thereby transforming his sordid virility into a sacred act. Yes, I could well believe anecdotes about mandrake plants and badgers, but a lifeless mannequin animated by the devil was a bit much. Yet in Tepozotlán, in times of drought, prominent elder citizens speak to the mountain (which appears to them in a vision as a white-bearded man), offering candles, T-shirts, and house shoes to induce him to bring rain; and in the back room of an esoteric bookstore, a Huichol shaman comes once a week to cure patients by sucking out their sickness and then spitting it out in the form of pebbles; and the grandmother who eats sacred mushrooms leaves her body and enters other people’s dreams; and in the mountains live sorcerers who claim to transform themselves into crows or dogs.
How much truth is there in all this? Over the real world soars an imaginary world that is far more active. If the truth is that all is illusion, then I must learn to imitate life. I thought of the Tibetan holy man Marpa,*10 who grieved inconsolably over his dead son. His disciples asked him: “But Master, why do you weep when you have taught us that all is illusion?” The old man answered: “It is true, my son was an illusion — but he was the most beautiful of illusions!”
Reality is aggressive, murderous, unknown, and ugly. Only illusory beauty makes it bearable. If truth is a fathomless mystery, then we can only edify it with lies. As for myself, I seemed to be playing the role of an artist, sitting in this imitation Italian theater, watching an imitation French melodrama that’s played by a diva with an imitation body of Venus who owns an imitation castle with a tame ocelot that imitates a fierce tiger and sleeping in a bed with a huge seashell at its head in imitation of Botticelli. And what if the story about her being the mistress of the president of Mexico turned out be just another lie, a rumor she cultivated? Perhaps even the fat drunk whom she threatened with a revolver was a hired plant. How did I know she had even met Diego Rivera, with whom she claimed to have eaten tacos containing cooked human flesh? Even the story about selling her soul to the devil could be seen as self-promotion. A person could easily arrange for the porter to earn a bonus by moving the mannequin each night when the theater was locked and no one could see him. Even if all this was true, however, I realized I was still interested in her. Even if she used trickery, she was still a magician capable of organizing the imaginary world and living in it.