“As my belly grew larger, I felt the child’s spirit more and more. He communicated with me, and the bones of my pelvis responded by separating in order to prepare a perfect exit. An immense joy invaded my body. My lungs took in polluted air and exhaled pure oxygen: through them, my son was cleansing the planet. As he was becoming incarnate, the heart of the world was forming.
“The seven trained fleas made me enough money to survive. During those nine months, Seraphim neither drank nor ate, sleeping next to me, wrapped up like another fetus. I gave myself over in such a way to that marvelous symphony of sensations that is gestation that I did not feel the passage of time. It began to rain with ferocity. The huge drops crashing against the clay made the gelatinous noise of frogs exploding. The sun came out. A white crow brought me a branch of cinnamon.
“The moment to give birth had arrived. ‘These are the last instants when you are within me. We shall have to separate. Bless me.’ Yes, I asked the fetus to bless me because, since he was infinitely superior to me, it did not fall to me to do it. Grabbing onto a rope that hung from the ceiling, I hunkered down to give birth. I said to him, ‘From now on, you are you, and I am me. Let’s work together. Between the two of us we’re going to carry out a perfect birthing.’
“‘Make that three!’ exclaimed Seraphim, who woke up at that moment. He got down right in front of my spread thighs and held out his hands to keep the child from falling to the floor. Trembling, he tried not to close his eyes, not to escape again into sleep, heroically facing up to his fear of seeing a monster emerge.
“The baby intelligently adapted itself to my bent body and began to effect a slow movement of rotation, which became a spiral as it developed. My vagina caressed every inch of his body with infinite love.
“In the moment when the cranium appeared within the oval of the vulva, forming an eye with it, Seraphim stepped back a bit in order not to be directly opposite the baby. He whispered with veneration: ‘I’m receiving you from the side so that you see the world, because you belong to it and not me.’ The baby revolved, got out first its left arm, then the right, and finished the rotation offering himself like someone crucified. Seraphim delicately pulled him by the nape and extracted him from my lips, which kissed his heels with adoration.
“Breathing with difficulty, so proud was he, he held the baby up like a trophy: the boy — he was in fact male, as we had always supposed — possessed great beauty. His skin was dark, almost green; his eyes were yellow like sunflowers; his features were fine, Oriental. His elongated skull and his serene expression made him seem like a pre-Colombian sculpture. Shedding tears, Seraphim, along with me, pronounced the name that suddenly occurred to us without our thinking about it: Almo.
“I received Almo on my bosom, and there he stayed, so calm that his heart was drawing mine to slowness, and when we awoke in the same beatific rhythm, I cut the umbilical cord with my teeth, because I never, out of respect, would have dared to terminate our sacred union with a knife.
“Seraphim, on his knees, prayed to him: ‘Son, you are my master. Teach me to be, teach me to live, teach me to create, open my soul so that I can love even more.’ Just then, Almo spread his legs. Below his testicles and before his anus, he had a perfect female sex.
“‘A hermaphrodite!’ Seraphim shouted in consternation. ‘I knew it. Before, you gave birth to normal children. I’m the one with poisoned semen. What could come from me but an aberration? We have to kill it!’ He was so desperate and I so worn out that I felt unable to convince him that his son-daughter was more beautiful than any normal human, than an androgyne achieved the maximum dream of any individuaclass="underline" to possess both sexes at the same time like God. I gave myself over to Fate. Without protesting, I lifted the child and offered him to the murderous fury of his father. Seraphim took him, intent on throwing him to the floor and then kicking his skull in. But Almo fixed his eyes on those of his father, and instantly Seraphim’s face became transfigured, passing from bestial hatred to a balmy peace, because those tiny golden pupils reached his essence and transported him to a mental level he’d never known before.
“Death disappeared forever. His soul recognized itself as invulnerable, and suffering dissolved into a sweet ocean, which was unceasing. Time offering its eternal present, Life. Seraphim thought he could guess the thoughts of the newborn and repeated them aloud: ‘With this gaze I seal my alliance with you. I accept you as my father. I give you all the rights because you deserve my confidence, so that you educate the child in whom I am.’
“Smiling, Seraphim placed Almo next to my left breast and saw him suck for the first time. A cloud of melancholy darkened his happiness. I offered my right breast. Seraphim sat down whining and accepted the nipple to receive, finally, the milk he’d been denied as a baby.
“We decided for the moment to forget our child was a hermaphrodite: we would figure out how to deal with the problem later. Perhaps Almo himself, our Master, would guide us. We began to travel north, fleeing the rains and exuberance of the south. We needed a dry climate. We were so full of spirit that we could only stand a desert landscape. We performed all along the coast, passing through Coquimbo, La Serena, Copiapó, Taltal, Antofagasta, and Tocopilla, until finally we reached Huantojaya, a silver-mining town near Iquique. There they let us use the great gymnasium of the Coeducational School No. 28. That was the school used by the children of workers from the region’s mines: The Discoverer, The Saint John, The Laura, The Saint Peter, The Disdained — names of prostitutes or saints, as if digging a mine shaft were for them a search for vice and sacred things at the same time. Seraphim, exploring the area, noted that the miners were not our usual audience. The dust, the sun, the hostility of the excavation, the blast of the exploding dynamite, the exhausting workdays had hardened them, giving their faces the consistency of stones.
“On Saturdays, they would go into the bordellos to play cards; lose the money they’d earned during the week; drink a minimum of two dozen beers, lining up the empty bottles to show how much they could drink; and fall asleep next to the urinals without saying a word. Making them laugh seemed impossible. Seraphim begged me to participate in his act this time. He had to offer them a strong program, low-down, one that would pull laughs out of them by main force, like pulling teeth.
“I was supposed to be the lazy guard of a bunch of bananas. I would ask a monkey to help me move the fruit from one place to another on the improvised stage. While he worked, I would have a nice siesta. The monkey would take advantage of the siesta to steal a banana and try to hide it without finding a place on the empty stage. He would try to hide it in his clothes but would realize he had no pockets. Finally, in a crisis of anxiety, he would drop his trousers and put it in his anus. (Seraphim had invented, using a rubber tube, a special holder hidden under his false tail that would allow him, with great realism, to imitate that penetration.) When he was finished with his chore, I would check him over to see if he was hiding a stolen banana. Satisfied with my employee’s honesty, I would shake hands and send him on his way paying him a tiny coin. The monkey, alone now, with a triumphal air, would try to eject the banana, but it would refuse to leave. After huge efforts, pushes, shrieks, he would manage to excrete it with tremendous pain. Jumping for joy, despite his broken anus, he would peel the banana and try to eat it. But with expressions of disgust, he would throw it far away because now it would have an unbearable stench of excrement.