“Being a Jew is much more than a disguise and a mop of hair! You can’t spend your life believing in fairy tales and vengeful gods! We’re living in the twentieth century! We’re arriving at a young continent. We have to stop separating ourselves, stop living in an imaginary universe. Race, nationality, religion, customs — they’re all unlucky limitations. We belong to the world, and the world is ours, in the same way that all human beings belong to us. Let’s open our eyes, because the awakening of Awareness depends on Justice.”
Wearing white trousers and a yellow shirt with blue polka dots that Icho Melnik gave him, the new Simón Radovitzky, accompanied at a distance by my grandparents and the whores, ran to the deck to show himself to religious Jews, offering himself as an example. They all fled without looking at him as soon as he approached. He spread his arms, shouting at the top of his lungs, “Brothers, I’m not a wolf, and this is not a henhouse! Listen to me, I beg you! I too have tried to be a saint, but there is no saintliness to be gained by separating ourselves. With your noses buried in the Torah, you can only see yourselves, cut off from the world as you are by that ‘sacred’ text. For not wanting to give anything, for continuously washing your hands in a desire not to participate in sin, you have ceased to be useful to society. But since the universal law is that everything has a purpose, society uses you to make you into victims. You have constructed for yourselves a Destiny, to be clowns who receive blows from others. Enough! I will unite myself with the horrors of life. Whatever happens to others, happens to me. I shall denounce in all possible media — letters, newspapers, shouting in the street if it comes to that — the economic injustice that allows a few egoists to live in idleness, exploiting the labor of the workers. I shall ceaselessly demand the abolition of that authoritarian monster which is the State. I shall vomit on the lie of matrimony, a mercantile contract that legitimizes unions without love; I shall vomit on the patriotic lie that exaggerates natural affection for one’s native land to turn it into fanatical stupidity that keeps the proletariat from understanding that the social problem is cosmopolitan. And I’ll vomit on the religious lie that foments in the masses a servile attitude and enough resignation that they can bear the iniquities of earthly bandits with the hope of a celestial glory. I shall always denounce political necrophagy in favor of vital anarchy.”
The bearded religious Jews whispered to one another, touching their temples with their index finger: Mashugana! Then they erased him from their memory. Simón spit toward them and went back to the whores’ corner to brandish a knife he’d stolen from the kitchen. He swore, “From now on my life ceases to be at the service of death. Instead, I put death at the service of life. Tyrants become vulnerable when a decided individual appears.”
For my grandfather, those phrases shouted out by the young fanatic were a revelation. He, locked away from the age of five in the elegant prison of the Imperial Ballet, with no horizon other than dance, was unaware of the pain in the world. Life seemed to him a continuous party. All he had to do was move to experience the pleasure of the work of art. He saw everything as a dance where stars, landscapes, multitudes, animals, and machines mixed together in a harmonious coupling. But Simón’s inflammatory discourse brought him out of his naïve radiance and submerged him in the fog of madness.
The Weser began to skim along the banks of the river, entering the outskirts of the immense city of Buenos Aires, a hive of proletarian dwellings and unhealthy factories, a human worm nest. From those dark places poured garbage, chemical liquids, rotten hides, greasy cans, excrement, making the water into a pitch-colored magma. On the banks of pestilential streams, garbage and myriad rats splashed around on the ground turned into mud by flooding. The mists from the leather factories, the smoke, and the soot from chimneys darkened the sky. Arrows of green flies opened ditches in that dense, gray air, buzzing with murderous hunger.
The giant dancer, hiding his ears on the bosom of the small woman, fell to his knees. Immobile and white, he looked like a cadaver emptied of blood. It was not the flock of men, women, and children working in the tremendous labyrinth of sordid factories that affected him but the mooing of the steers they were sacrificing in the chilled meat plants to freeze their meat and send it abroad. There were thousands and thousands of sheep in mile-long lines, being led to death. Their anguished moans, their squeals of terror, their dying cries, the rivers of dark blood, the mountains of guts and skulls, the filthy piles of hides, the fetid stench all came together in the mind of my grandfather with the ghosts of even more millions of quadrupeds that had already been butchered, day after day for years. Pyramids of knives worn right down to the handle, torrents of yellow teeth, smashed eyes floating in lakes of pus, planets of meat dissolving into worms.
“Why this lack of awareness? They suffer, they are beings, part of myself. There they are before me, skinned animals, legs spread in a cross, an ocean of Christs with bleeding anuses, saints dismembered with mathematical slices. I know the pain of sheep; I’ve been raping them since I was in the sperm of Alejandro I, my demented grandfather writing a request for help with the guts of his victims. And then in the vital liquor of my degenerate father, murdering women and children like the owners of those factories. Forgiveness was already granted; my mother devoured the cadaver of my progenitor and purified it by immersing herself in white. White! White! I love you! My God, forgive the Argentines for they know not what they eat, because they do not realize that their country lives on the production of frozen cadavers!”
Suddenly my grandfather saw, galloping toward him over the waters of the Río de la Plata, myriad sheep metamorphosed into furious dogs. And when they began biting him until they’d devoured his body and there was nothing left but a voice arising from the void, he began to howclass="underline"
Because I walk in the valley of the shadow of death
I fear all evils if you are not with me!
Free my life from the power of the dog!
My God, hasten to help me!
Jashe, desperate seeing her husband immersed in madness, put one of her breasts in his mouth so he could suck as if he were her child. Then she put the red shoes on him. No sooner than he felt on his feet those ancient shoes did my grandfather smile in satisfaction and begin to snore. The swarm of flies scattered, shocked by the sirens in the port. The Weser was entering the capital of Argentina. The ships were all packed together like a nest of giant ants, dead ants drying out next to deserted sea walls. Not a soul walked among the mountains of merchandise piled up on the docks.
Under a murderous sun, five thousand freight cars loaded with agricultural products were waiting to be unloaded at the warehouses. A huge banner made of cloth fluttered weakly, caressed by the tiniest breeze: WORKERS YES! SLAVES NO!
When the Weser dropped anchor, it emitted a long blast of the foghorn, and without lowering the gangways, it seemed to pull back into itself like a sleeping turtle. The hours went by. Night fell. Dawn came. Marla, the captain’s favorite, carrying a Swiss cheese and some Italian nougat, brought the news: the Federation of Stevedores had begun a work stoppage supported by coachmen and other workers groups, that had degenerated into a general strike.
The conflict erupted because the stevedores, whose workday lasted fourteen hours, were forced to carry sacks that weighed more than two hundred pounds. The rationale behind this was that the importers from South Africa required large sacks because they had black laborers stronger than camels. The federation demanded a limit of one hundred and fifty pounds and workdays of ten hours, energetically demanding for its members the right to be considered human beings and not beasts of burden. The bosses were outraged and assumed an inflexible attitude, calling the strikers pernicious foreigners. Accordingly, they proposed to the government a bill of expulsion. Now the Congress was locked away in a special session to approve the law, declare a state of siege, obtain the right to sack citizens’ homes, dissolve riots and aggressive meetings, use troops for an armed defense of “the dearest thing the nation has: its grand harvest,” and above all, censor the majority of the newspapers.