They did not feel the passage of days. Once I proved to myself that my mother’s ovaries were fertile, I ordered them to couple. They lay down naked in the church. My father’s sex swelled with such force that it became purple, and my mother’s red-hot oval secreted a white torrent in which the two of them submerged, transformed into aquatic angels. Pleasure transformed their flesh into consciousness, the stars began to travel the heavens filling them with silver lines, the semen galloped through the canals and surged, bubbling, to fill the magic cavern with foam. I wasn’t mistaken. Those two beings, saturated with love, their breath braided together, were giving me the miraculous opportunity to once again possess a body.
During the months that followed, I grew in tranquility. Having successfully joined my selected progenitors, I yielded myself to the wisdom of the cells. They possessed the millennial knowledge to form me. Only one task was left to me: to have myself born in the exact geographic site, during the proper month and time of day so that my Destiny would be in accord with my ambitions.
Jaime was a man of normal height, five foot nine, but my mother’s extra twelve inches made him look like a dwarf when he walked at her side. Nevertheless, the strength that emanated from his spirit, granting his body a beast’s dignity, and the balanced sobriety of his gestures, complemented my mother’s supernatural beauty instead of contrasting with her. When the couple entered Iquique, traffic stopped dead, and the city quieted down as they passed. Normal people viewed them as beings from another world, and the beauty of that love became so enormous to them that they, who knew nothing of the delirious extremes of the soul, became terrified.
A nervous crowd, about to throw stones, saw them disappear into the Six W’s (Wonderful, Wholesome, Wise, Wholesale, Welcoming, White), the enormous store owned by Jashe, Shoske, Moisés Latt, and César Higuera, named in honor of the six points of the Jewish star. Everything there was white, from the food — cheese, milk, eggs, rice, chicken breasts, and fish fillets — to the clothing, kitchen articles, and even the children’s toys, transformed into a collection of ragged ghosts that represented all human activities — train conductors, deep-sea divers, pilots, doctors, etcetera.
Not one, not even her own mother, recognized Sara Felicidad. The image she had of her was of a mute, ragged, hunched-over child, who had died lost in the hills. She knew Sara Felicidad was her daughter when she picked up a pencil and rapidly drew, line for line, some of the greater arcana of the Tarot. Jashe suddenly recovered her memory and, whispering, “Alejandro, Alejandro,” sank her face into the blonde hair of my mother, who had fallen to her knees. She wept bitterly. The wound had not healed and would never heal. The Russian dancer was still burning in her heart like a sacred fire.
Shoske said to Moisés, “Your wife can’t stand seeing her. She reminds her of past suffering. If you don’t remove Sara Felicidad from her presence, my sister will die.”
They flew a rabbi in from Santiago and had my parents marry. At the same time, they took advantage of the fact to bless the betrothals of Jacobo the First with Raquel the First, Jacobo the Second with Raquel the Second, and Jacobo the Third with Raquel the Third. They gave the newlyweds a truckload of merchandise, a good amount of money, and the keys to the store they’d rented for them on the central street of Tocopilla, 140 miles away. A good excuse never to see them again.
The store was called Ukraine House, because Jaime and Sara Felicidad decided to pass themselves off as white Russians to avoid political problems. There, among porcelain dishes, cuckoo clocks, and ladies underwear, I developed until the precise moment I decided to be born: ten in the morning on October 24, 1929, a day known worldwide as “Black Thursday.”
At the same moment, the economic crisis in the United States exploded and extended all over the planet. Banks closed one after the other, and industry was paralyzed. Chile was the nation hardest hit by the catastrophe. Nitrate mines closed down, and a fourth of the population fell into indigence. The Six W’s shut down and Ukraine House, for lack of customers, did so as well. My parents, with me in their arms, suddenly found themselves penniless, sleeping on the beach and having to stand in line outside the municipal office along with miners and their families to get their free dish of soup.
“Great! We’ve touched bottom! Finally, we’ve found our land. Now we are citizens of misery. We lost hope and because of that we lost fear. All that’s left for us is to rise. We shall baptize our son with the name Alejandro, the name of my father and your father. He is the light we shall burn at the altar. Hoping that one day, forgetting himself and living for the sake of others, he will come to awareness in order to serve in an impersonal form, making known the first word, the one that is the origin of all languages: ‘Thanks.’ So that toward him converge the phosphorescent screams of the enchanted frogs awaiting the kiss that will transform them into Buddha. So that he will be the illuminated fruit that will transform our obscure tree into a cathedral lighthouse.”
While my mother sang a lullaby, feeding me at her breast, Jaime, blowing into my nose, transmitted the Rabbi to me. Happy to find himself in a brain that offered him no resistance, he began to enumerate his new commandments:
You will not kill death. You will not covet the wife of the widower, and you will be faithful to your ghost. You shall not steal that which belongs to you nor speak with the mouth of your fellow man. You will not take the name of God in vain because all names are He. You will sanctify your workdays and transform your parents into shoes. You will make of the Earth an altar where the sheep sing and where finally you will bless yourself.
About the Author and Translator
Alejandro Jodorowsky is a Chilean-French filmmaker, playwright, actor, author, musician, comics writer, and spiritual guru, best known for his avant-garde films including Fando and Lis (1968), El Topo (1970) — which became a cult hit and inaugurated the “midnight movie” phenomenon—The Holy Mountain (1973), and Santa Sangre (1989). As documented in the recent film Jodorowsky’s Dune, in 1975 he began to work a colossal adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune—which was to star Orson Welles and Salvador Dalí and to be scored by Pink Floyd — but was never made. (A version of Dune was later filmed by David Lynch, and the creative team Jodorowsky assembled influenced a generation of science-fiction filmmakers.) Recently, after 23 years away from the screen, Jodorowsky released his autobiographical film The Dance of Reality, about growing up in a Chilean mining town. Jodorowsky himself, his first wife Valerie, and his sons Brontis, Axel, and Adan have all appeared in his films.
A circus clown and a puppeteer in his youth, Alejandro Jodorowsky left for Paris at the age of 23 to study mime with Marcel Marceau. There, he befriended the surrealists Roland Topor and Fernando Arrabal, and in 1962 these three created the “Panic Movement” a performance art collective inspired by Luis Buñuel and Antonin Artaud and named in homage to the god Pan. Jodorowsky became an adept in the art of the Tarot and a prolific author of novels, poetry, short stories, essays, works on the Tarot and “psychomagic” healing, and more than thirty successful comic books, among them the Incal, Technopriests, and Metabarons series, working with such highly regarded artists as Moebius (Jean Giraud) and Georges Bess.