The dogs scattered, jumping over the ridges, and my grandfather sat down on the stony path and buried his bearded face in his hands, ashamed of his hatred for the Maker. When his breathing returned to normal and the silence of the mountains showed him the bitterness of his infinite solitude, something rubbed against his legs. It was the dogs, returning to accept him as their master. They wagged their tails, they licked him, they frolicked around him, humbly awaiting a pet.
“A miracle!” shouted the jubilant Rabbi. “We’ll call them Kether, Hokhmah, and Binah, like the three first sephiroth of the Tree of Life!”
Alejandro growled. The Rabbi, hanging his head, returned to his astral hideaway. “I’ll call them Joy, Sadness, and Indifference,” said my grandfather. Worn out, he could barely pat their backs. He slept deeply, as he hadn’t slept for weeks. When he awoke, there were the dogs, looking as if they were smiling. And at his feet, a huge, dead hare. With a sharp knife, he skinned it, divided it into four parts, and shared it with his new friends. After they devoured even the bones, they went to lick snow from a peak.
Alejandro continued his march. Joy, Sadness, and Indifference took charge of feeding him, and after a great deal of whining, they forced him to rest, protecting him with the heat of their bodies while he remained awake and they slept. To banish the images of Teresa — who he saw more and more in love with Monkey Face, sniffing his armpits, swallowing liters of semen, allowing herself to be sodomized, staring at the reflection of the stars in his eyes — he began to pray, using the rhythm of his heartbeats. “I-am-yours-Have mer-cy-u-pon-me.” From that moment on, he never stopped repeating these words twenty-four hours a day. The pain remained, curled up behind his ribs, but now it didn’t bother him as much.
One night he met a group of men mounted on mules. They had machetes hanging at their waists and rifles hanging from their saddles. One got down to touch him. He wanted to take Alejandro’s coat and boots, but the smell they gave off made him grimace with disgust.
The man asked the one who seemed to be the chief, “Should I cut his throat?”
The robber answered, “Better leave him alone. He’s a madman. Jesus protects madmen because he too was mad. Ask him to bless us.”
“Hear that, you holy bastard? Bless us!”
Alejandro, who did not understand what they were saying to him, spread his arms with his hands held out to show he understood nothing. The thieves took his gesture as a sacred sign, crossed themselves, and went their way. Alejandro realized he would have preferred to be murdered. He was no longer himself. He’d lost himself. The wound was eating him up. He tried to see himself and found in his place a complete stranger.
Bit by bit, he forgot Russian and Yiddish. Actually, he simply stripped himself of those languages as if they were dead skin. He no longer thought, simply letting his heartbeats pray. He barked. So, a dog among dogs, he scavenged for eagle eggs, ate lizards and snakes, drank in muddy puddles. Finally, he reached the end of the mountains and the beginning of the Argentine pampa. Joy, Sadness, and Indifference stood on the last rock, raised their muzzles to the sky, and howled as if someone had died. They were mountain animals and could not survive on the flat lands. The peasants would shoot them dead. My grandfather also howled to express his sorrow at saying good-bye. Then he pulled three pieces of skin out of the inside of his overcoat, from the sweatiest parts, and tossed them to his comrades. Each one caught his in the air, and carrying it in his teeth, went back to the mountains.
Once again, Alejandro was alone. He prayed with more intensity, adding “I-put-my-faith-in-you” to his cardiac rhythm. From there to Mendoza and from Mendoza to Buenos Aires he did not feel the road. He traversed it sleeping awake. He passed through cornfields, vineyards, apple orchards, rivers, creeks. Some peasants, seeing him pass by making the bubbling sounds of a mute or a moron gave him pieces of bread, dry meat, and also yerba maté. People regarded him with superstitious respect. They let him pass, crossed themselves, and from time to time a rider would gallop to catch up to him and toss a bottle of milk or wine. He reached Buenos Aires not knowing if he’d been walking for days, weeks, or months. A cloud of flies, like a black mist, surrounded him, endlessly biting him. Tired of brushing them off, he let them settle on his face, so his eyelids were covered with them. That way, asking from a distance because the people held their noses, he reached the Israelite Club, site of the synagogue.
At first, confusing him for one of the many vagrants who came from the hinterlands to beg in the capital, they tried to throw him out, drenching him with a garden hose. But when, possessed by the Rabbi, who was trying to help him out of trouble, he began to recite from memory, word for word, the first tome of the Talmud, they understood he was a compatriot. That caused a commotion. The Jewish colony, concerned about showing the Argentines a good face, was ashamed of this pariah. They bought him clothing and offered him towels, soap, scissors for his hair, and free access to the baths. He rejected all of it. He remained at the door of the synagogue, reciting now the second tome of the Talmud.
A young rabbi opened a window and asked him directly, “What’s your name? Where do you come from? What do you want?”
My grandfather could not answer the first two questions, because he’d forgotten his name and his past. The third glowed like a point of fire in his awareness: “I want one of the two Torahs you possess for the synagogue in Santiago de Chile.”
The young rabbi laughed. “Is that all? It is true we have two. I suppose you want to buy it. It’s expensive. Very old. It was brought here from Poland.”
“I’ll pay with my labor.”
“You could work twelve hours a day for the rest of your life, and you still wouldn’t make enough.”
“I’ll work twenty-four hours a day.”
“No more jokes. I can do nothing. The Rebbe is locked away studying the commentaries of Rashi to the Holy Book and won’t appear in public for two months.”
“I’ll wait here.”
The decision was final. How would the dignified members of the Club react to seeing a lunatic like this one stretched out on the synagogue stairs? Expelling him by force was impossible: he was a Jew, and a wise Jew, because, intermixed with his conversation, he was now reciting the third book of the Talmud. He consulted with two other young rabbis. They offered him a room and three meals a day. He didn’t accept, but, making a titanic effort, spoke to them in Yiddish: “Do you have guard dogs?”