“Where there is no heart, drought appears, and for that reason I sink my sex into the sand so that the rain may begin.”
His father Alejandro came with a golden halo over his mane of white hair, offering him a perfect pair of shoes that he, his disdained son, had given him one day:
“My son, the wounds on your feet acquire order in my bosom and form letters. They say: HOPE. What you gave me is restored to you. Don’t cut me off. Absorb me.”
He began to shrink until he turned into a gnome two inches tall. Jaime picked him up, placed him next to his left nipple, and, pushing him hard, inserted him into his heart, where he dissolved.
His mother’s body appeared, guillotined, spurting a fan of red gushes from her neck. She looked like a tree. She held out her hands, asking him for the head of Recabarren’s companion. Jaime hugged the corpse and, with painful rage, spit a ball of dry saliva into the bleeding wound. The headless woman twisted as if wounded by a bullet, her neck began to suck in air as if it were a mouth, and, moving its edges, spoke in a crusty voice:
“We mothers have an infinite comprehension. Within your forehead are hidden all the stars, lying in wait like lions, to leap aboard the ship of God, when I caress you with my brains.”
Jaime took her in his arms and kissed the oozing hole that was her neck. The wound whispered, “Enter into the deepest part. I want you to sink your tongue into my awareness like a blind fish so that once and for all that diamond star that is the child of our dissolution may appear.”
Jaime, his thirst satisfied forever, turned into a solitary eye past which events slid as if over a dead whale. After the day came the night, and after the night, another, and there were no more days. Carrying the head, on which a beard of worms was growing, he advanced in the darkness. He knew he was seeking not only a grave but also a woman.
He found himself wandering along the crests of a mountain chain parallel to the Andes. The horseflies, feeding on the rotten soma that dripped from Teresa, had grown to the size of cats, and, buzzing like airplanes, they pierced his body with their stingers, opening wounds out of which his reason poured in a gelatin of letters. His feet, so swollen that they couldn’t fit into his own footprints, forced him to stop. Jaime told the head that when he was a boy he had feet smaller than his footprints, which made him run all the time to fill them. Now, expelled from his steps, there was nothing left for him to do but become a statue of salt and die. He collapsed among the ovoid rocks like a marionette whose strings had been cut.
He was grabbed by his mane of hair, which now reached his waist, and with a powerful tug he was set on his feet. It was Isolda, the Lightning Bolt of Limache, the knife thrower.
“Don’t behave like a rube. You’re a circus man, uprooted and potent, not a formless mass. Give thanks to your skeleton and the muscles that mobilize you. Thanks to them you can oppose an authority you detest. Recover faith, your feet are the same size as your footprints. And those footprints were made before you were born. All you have to do is follow them. Have confidence in your bones. In any case, your hair grows straight to heaven.”
Lola and Fanny, slithering like snakes, led him to a path where a line of steps was shining. Benjamín, with wings of red cartilage, flew around him:
“On you converge the phosphorescent screams of the enchanted steps awaiting the kiss that will transform them into moon. Share with each one the inexhaustible skin of your tiger and the cerebral roots that make your feet flower. Go give the fish an idea of what water is!”
But Jaime still did not have the strength to advance. Tralaf came:
“Huinca, repeat after me: Amutan chengewe mapu mew, I am going to the land where the people become one. Leap toward the Future, put your feet on top of it to make it Present, flee from the borrowed sun, and live in your center.”
Eleodoro Astudillo, the gravedigger, also came:
“If you ask me, ‘What’s going on today?’ I’ll answer ‘Nothing is going on. It only goes.’ Let yourself be carried by them and become what takes place so that the poor, who neither see nor know and go around begging, take control of you and turn you into food.”
The hunchback, Jesús de la Cruz, joined the group:
“Why did you abandon me when I’m your golden goose?”
He began to honk, his hunchback opened like the roof of an observatory, and out came a big golden egg that, flying before him, led him to the land of “Always Always.” Jaime walked and walked along his footprints until he reached the abyss where the aurora is born. He descended from those high peaks, crossed the deep glen, and reached a dry plateau where there stood a church with stone buttresses and towers crowned by wooden belfries. He entered. In the solitary temple, the flames of the candles, transformed into calcareous tears, tore the shadow that came from the glass rose. The floor was flooded with liquid lead, and blind doves devoured the flesh-colored scarabs that nested in the plaster sculptures. Above the altar, a bleeding Christ, with His arms spread but with no cross, was looking at him. Jaime grabbed an iron candelabra, and with one blow, decapitated Him. The crown of thorns remained floating in the air, like an opaque halo. He raised Teresa’s head and placed it on the wooden neck. The wounds on the hands and side closed. The chest became transparent. A heart, burning like the sun, filled the church with light.
Having fulfilled his mission, Jaime fell into a chute and, sliding at dizzying speed, advanced toward death.
In the sanctuary of La Tirana, my mother awoke with a deep pain in her ovaries. From her sex ran a perfumed blood, so hot that when she held it in her hands it gave off steam. She put a drop on her tongue. It tasted sweeter than honey. She daubed the face of the Virgin with the red plasma and murmured a melody meaning:
“Today make the unknown man arrive who I’ve been awaiting for ten years.”
I rolled around within her womb and established an invisible bridge between her ovaries and my father’s testicles. He was stretched out, almost dead, shaken by fever, twenty miles away. Sara Felicidad immediately obeyed the call. Because of her speed, her steps lengthened, and in twenty strides, each a mile long, she reached the small church where all the horseflies of the region, eager for its interior light had landed, transforming it into an enormous cathedral.
Next to the altar, under the wooden Christ with the fleshy head, lay Jaime, dying of hunger, his skin hugging his bones, his swollen tongue sticking out of his mouth like a white horn. My mother, to keep him from dying of thirst and hunger, spread her legs, brought her sex to my father’s mouth, made his hard tongue penetrate her hymen, and absorbing it until her vulva stuck to his teeth, fed him with menstrual blood.
He began returning to life. On his knees before the gigantic woman (she now measured six foot nine), he realized the profound love that had made him travel for ten years on the trail of an unknown woman. There she was, born from his dreams. Her soul had made a tiger’s leap, piercing his skin, and fell before him. He remained there staring at her with inexhaustible pleasure.