“One day, after he drank a dozen beers, he fell asleep in my arms. Suddenly I recovered my identity along with my anger and fury, and with one snap of my teeth, I severed his jugular vein. He got up and ran along the beach with a red line trailing behind him. He fell in the sand, transformed into a white rock. Even though I knew he was dead, I fired his pistol into his head. His skull split open, and a gray mass flowed out, which the crabs immediately devoured. I let them eat until they had enough. Then I dragged his remains to the hills, dug a deep grave, and buried him. When I’d tossed on the last shovel of dirt, I realized I had no idea what his real name was.
“I cleaned up the blood, and among his clothes, I found a suit, a shirt, shoes, and a hat. I put the rest of his things in two suitcases and buried them too. This way his bosses would think he’d left with me for some other country. I cut off my hair and, disguised as a man, with the little money I found, I bought a train ticket for Santiago. No one bothered me on the trip, because I pretended to sleep with an empty bottle in my hand — just another drunk. If I’d had anywhere else to go, I wouldn’t have come back to the tenement, to a past that was no longer mine. I got here when Alejandro was dying, the last person I might have been able to confide in. It didn’t matter to me that the world war broke out. Maybe it even made me happy, since I could take it as some kind of revenge. I knew I would be forever isolated, desolate, useless. Life? To be born for no reason, to suffer constantly, to die ignorant. God? Extant but unreachable. Blind, deaf, and mute for His creatures. Human society? A prison filled with lunatics, thieves, and drunks. Everything and everyone deserve only my curses.
“So now you see, Benjamín. You wanted to know the Truth; here you have it with the smell of rot. Stop sighing, untie me, bring more vodka, and let’s drink together. The best thing in this world is not to have been born.”
My uncle untied Teresa, brought another bottle, and they began to empty it. He’d felt himself depicted in my grandmother’s final words. He understood that much more than hating other people, he hated himself. He was a transparent angel fallen into a filthy sewer, his body. Before starting to snore with his nose stuck into his mother’s navel, he muttered:
The night comes with its she-wolf fury
Promising the birth of a sun in love
But shade can only give birth to shades
Nothing is born, nothing dies
And creation is oblivion.
The Promised Pampa
The thirty-five days of the voyage passed quickly. The powerful Weser cut the waves with the same ease the waiters in first class cut slices from their collection of French cheeses. Whenever meals were served, those mixed odors of milk and dung descended like oily waves along the metal ladders and reached steerage to make the 1,200 dried-out mouths of the Jewish emigrants water. But Alejandro Prullansky, without envying the luxury surrounding his ex-colleagues from the Imperial Ballet, enthusiastically went on with his daily exercises.
Poised on a rope strung between two enormous packing cases, he repeated hour after hour his entrechats, leaps, and cross-steps, following the rhythm Icho Melnik generously supplied with his harmonica. In his memory, the pimp retained innumerable melodies by Chopin, Liszt, Mozart, and others. When his lips began to hurt from blowing so much through his small instrument, he would begin to recite thoughts from Seneca rhythmically, revealing a level of culture that in a man of his profession seemed absurd, all so his friend could continue training: “Work is not a good in itself. Then what is a good in itself? Contempt for work.” Icho would laugh but immediately continue: “On the other hand, those who make an effort to obtain virtue without allowing themselves to become dejected deserve applause.” And when he pronounced the word “virtue,” he used his fingers to mimic the act of counting money.
Jashe joyfully observed her husband’s perfect body. The splendid functioning of those wise muscles, producing gestures of superhuman delicacy, aroused in her a pleasure that made her forget the corruption of the flesh, evil, and hunger. She did not fear the future and, knowing she was pregnant, gave herself over sweetly to the new life. Her Alejandro was a living temple, and his dancing would change the world. The six prostitutes lavished tender care on her, making the voyage as comfortable as possible because she read the Tarot for them, giving profound answers to their silly questions: “Will my business improve if I dye my pubic hair red? Will I find an old man who will give me jewels and furs? Will I know love?” She predicted that two of them would marry military men; Marla, the tallest and most powerfully built, she saw paired up with an important politician; she lied to the other three, covering up her sorrow with nervous laughter, promising them long lives, health, and riches. They believed her because the gigolo began to make them work during the crossing. At night, he sent them to the cabins of the ship officers or to the service staff. They would come back at dawn carrying fruit, cigarettes, caviar, champagne, and chocolates. They shared everything. Icho, his belly swollen and with a smile from ear to ear, would quote before falling deeply asleep: “Life is a play. What matters is not that it lasts a long time but that it be well-acted.”
The coast of Argentina came into sight, and the ship made for the Río de la Plata. It was then that Simón Radovitzky, a tall, long-nosed boy with protruding ears, as skinny as a string bean, appeared before the prostitutes. He was pursued by a party of matrons frantically supporting his mother, who was tearing her hair out. Because of Simón’s black, bulging, and fanatical eyes, the rest of his body became invisible after a few minutes. When he spoke, the words seemed to come from his pupils: “Gentlemen, your good wives shave you every morning. Please allow them to cut off my beard. I want to get this superstitious tradition off my back. The past is a cage.”
While his mother twisted her fingers and howled “oy” piteously, her huge tears soaking the wool shawl covering the heads of her fellow gossips, the young prostitutes, happily chirping, lathered up Simón’s head and face. His mother tried to stop him for the last time by reciting a few proverbs in Yiddish: “A man’s stupidity complicates his path. With a lie, you go far, but you can’t come back. If you give the devil a hair, he’ll soon want your whole beard.” But the girls, after taking off his black overcoat, his fringed vest, and his leather cap, began to shave him.
When his payot, his side curls, fell, his mother muttered: “You are lost!” and bent over clutching her abdomen as if she were having a miscarriage. Her women still held her up so she wouldn’t fall to the floor. Making a supreme effort, she recovered; “It’s annoying to carry a hunched back, but painful to separate yourself from it. This man is no longer my son. He’s a drunk, a shikker. May your mother be one of these six kurvehs! May your brain dry up, may the worms start eating you while you’re still alive, may you walk on your hands as many years as you’ve walked on your feet, and for the rest may you drag yourself along on your backside!”
The Jewish matrons left steerage without looking back, reciting magic verses to purify themselves from the sacrilegious air they’d breathed.
Simón Radovitzky was happy to see his bare face and bald head in the hand mirror with floral frame Marla handed him. He exclaimed: