Alejandro herded the children toward an iron bench, bolted into the ground. There, piled on top of one another, they waited for the earthquake to pass. My grandfather began to recite some words dictated to him by the Rabbi. The disembodied one knew a treatise on magic that could calm the fury of tremors: KADAKAT, ARAKADA, DARENAK, AKESERA, KAMERAD, ADAKARA, TAKADAK. All of them, spun around and trembling with terror, repeated the formula.
Teresa went mad with rage. She stood up on the bench and held her balance with the skill of a sailor. It didn’t matter to her that trees, chunks of cement, windows, pieces of glass, and pieces of pipe as sharp as swords were falling all around her. She raised her fists toward the sky, bellowing, “May all the curses your murderous mouth has poured out since you created this world fall on you! Look at how much you’re destroying just to get me to submit! But you will never make me give in! Make the entire planet explode if you like, it doesn’t matter to me! What can you do to a woman with a withered heart? Kill me once and for all, because not even earthquakes can make me open my soul to you!”
She was foaming at the mouth, her face was as white as a sheet, and she was trembling even harder than the ground. Alejandro grabbed her by the calves and pulled her down into his arms. With the strength of a madman he pushed her under the bench, silencing her with a desperate kiss.
A deafening screech announced that the peak was splitting open. The old man, squealing like a hog, was swallowed by a crack. The iron bench went downhill, still bolted to an enormous chunk of the hillside. The Jodorowsky family gave a strange scream: a mix of Alejandro’s religious fervor, Teresa’s rage, the terror of Lola and Benjamín (both too delicate for these quakes), and the euphoria of Fanny and Jaime. To these two, they were on a toboggan going faster and faster. Their only thought was to get as much fun as possible from the ride down, never considering that awaiting them at the bottom was a collision that would smash them to atoms or sink them in the sea.
They got out from between the feet of the others and stood up on top of the iron seat, balancing as if they were on the crest of a wave. Tons of falling stone destroyed street lamps, crushed dogs and people, and demolished houses, leaving in their wake a trail of ruins and blood. They were nearly spinning out of control as Teresa, under the bench with Benjamín and Lola, who were sheltered under the roof of her breasts, cursed even louder. Alejandro, making a superhuman effort, got up from the bench, took hold of Fanny, and protected her with his own body. Jaime would not allow himself to be caught. He leaped off the bench and ran to the far edge of the sliding peak, shouting triumphantly and dodging large bits of wall, pieces of glass, roof beams, and human body parts all being tossed into the air by his vehicle.
They smashed against a shoe factory. The building, a modest structure, made principally of concrete slabs held up by thin columns, yielded to the chunk of mountain on impact and acted as an elastic brake, capturing the mass as if it were held in a cradle. The bench finally stopped, still perfectly horizontal. During the entire slide downhill, it would have been possible to hold a glass of water without spilling a drop.
“A Miracle!” said the Rabbi. “Tohu va’Bohu, chaos is an egg from which order is born! The new life begins here!”
Without hearing him, Alejandro remained with his family under the bench for an eternity, the time of the aftershock. It might have been seconds, minutes, or hours. He never knew and never tried to find out. His people had known innumerable catastrophes, and an age-old instinct made him give himself over to true time, the time that cannot be measured, where twenty years pass like an hour and a second can last a thousand years. He knew that the pain and pleasure of an entire life didn’t last more than an instant, but that each step he took on always-foreign lands took an eternity.
When the ground stopped moving, there came a silence that wounded their eardrums and then began to rise, accompanied by the laughter of Jaime, who invited them to come down from the peak by throwing all kinds of shoes at them. There was a braid of sorrow, thousands of human voices in protest, all mixed up with the howls of dogs throughout the country, up mountains and down in valleys, and the presence of death, the invisible tarantula covering Valparaíso.
Alejandro checked on each of them, then came out from under the bench and gave Jaime a slap. It was the first and last in his life, but nevertheless, that slap marked a turn, inching towards a definitive separation. Alejandro dug into the ruins to see if anyone could be saved. He found crushed, deformed, ripped-open bodies. He overcame his intense fascination — something, his animal nature perhaps, impelled him to dig through the detritus and smell the blood, see the mystery of the body, the secret viscera revealing their forms in broad daylight — because he heeded the Superior Will and believed that what God placed within the dark interior of the organism, protected from prying eyes, should be respected.
Seeing what has been revealed is an obligation, but the other thing, which appears in the misery of catastrophe, should be avoided. We must be prudent with our senses. There are things we cannot observe or hear or smell or touch or eat. A great vigilance is asked of us with respect to our organs of perception and also with respect to our desire, our need, our feelings, and our ideas. We cannot think without limitations. “Concern yourself with what it is permitted to know and forget mysterious things.” Ah, the good Talmud!
A cry led Alejandro through the wreckage, and he found a man with a roof beam buried in his chest. His skin, getting whiter by the second, contrasted with the river of blood flowing out of him. The dying man held on tight to the handle of a leather suitcase. With the wise gaze of those who are entering the kingdom of death, he offered it to Alejandro, whispering words my grandfather couldn’t understand but could only feel. The man was giving him the most precious thing in his life, the tools of his work. Why? In the worker’s eyes there was a profound need and, at the same time, the intense happiness of making an offering of his conscience to death, like a wild flower, a sacrifice pure and simple, eternal disappearance, a debt repaid, serpent on the rock, bird in the sky, ship at sea, without leaving a trace, nothing to hang on to, only a small legacy, to everyone, to someone, his instruments, more valuable than existence, his true being. Knowing that hands as dutiful as his own would continue to work with those little angels of wood and metal — wise, useful, holy — would allow him to sink into the abyss with peace.
Alejandro opened the suitcase, took out the tools, kissed them and pressed them with respect to his heart, while the dying shoemaker, with only a tiny thread of voice left, gave him their names and uses in a Spanish so full of love that Alejandro understood it as if it were Russian. Hammer to flatten the leather, pincers to place the model over the last, small pliers for working the backstitch, curved awl to form the instep, spatula to spread the wax in the heels, chisel to cut the sole, stitching awl to perforate the leather, round pliers, gouge, a box of shoe polish, a small packet of pitch, and a bobbin of linen. Seeing my grandfather put the tools back into the suitcase and take possession of them, the man gave a long sigh and gave up his spirit with a smile.
The Rabbi said, “Do you see, Alejandro? God has given you a profession. You are a shoemaker.” My grandfather clasped the suitcase to his chest and burst into convulsive weeping.
Teresa and the children called him back at the top of their lungs. They were both curious and afraid. Alejandro, scrambling over beams as sharp as knives, reached the peak and climbed up to the iron bench. His family, sitting there as if in a theater, pointed to a figure that was approaching them, jumping along and shaking its backside to wag a hairy tail that hung from its clown costume. It spoke like a human being, but its face, with its narrow, prominent forehead, its sunken little eyes, its flat nose, its big mouth, and its pricked ears, was like a monkey’s. “Hurry up, come with me! There could be another tremor!” it was shouting in Spanish. Teresa shook her head and signaled that she did not understand. The simian repeated everything in Italian, French, German, English, Dutch, Portuguese, Polish, and finally in Russian. “Hurry up, come with me! There could be another tremor!”