When they got out in Montevideo, Icho rubbed his enormous belly and said good-naturedly, “If the wise man thinks above all about poverty, even if he is amid wealth, we, amid poverty, will think above all about wisdom. Courage, girls! Every man is a possible client. Don’t ask God to give, but that he put you where they are.”
The Turtle, who had been set free because she was a pure German and an Argentine citizen, came to the study, passed through the rows of students, and with her strange, noseless voice urged Alejandro to run to the jail to get his wife and daughter before they were both shipped to Europe. The news of his friend’s death had shaken my grandfather and made him come down from the clouds. He suddenly felt alone and realized that he had a daughter and a wife who felt a great love for him, and it was thanks to their love he went on living. To lose Jashe and Sarita would mean becoming a tree without roots, floating aimlessly in a river of turbid water. He reached the prison waving press photographs, programs from the Imperial Ballet where his name appeared in large letters, his Russian passport, and his marriage license. In the room where he spoke to the police, he showed what he meant by giving the three highest leaps of his entire career, along with the most sublime suite of steps. His blond mane brightened the somber building. The guards admired him open-mouthed and released his small family.
Out on the street, Alejandro fell to his knees and kissed the feet of his wife and daughter, begging their forgiveness. The shoe that was still red turned blue. Jashe, her breath short from emotion, raised him up to offer him her mouth. He kissed it as never before, trying to press his lips to hers forever. Sara Felicidad began to sing the tango Simón Radovitzky had brought to the bordello. The melody began heartrendingly only to fill with triumphal tones. Alejandro felt his heart full of light. “You are my soul,” he said to the child and, putting her on his shoulders, began to leap along the street, trying to fly. After twenty blocks, he fell exhausted next to a garbage can. Sarita went on singing. The passersby gave them coins. They piled up before them. When Jashe reached them, she silenced her daughter and, her face burning with shame, picked up the coins.
Alejandro took her by the waist, looked at her with infinite tenderness, and said, “You gave me a daughter, you brought me out of madness. A great change has just taken place in my spirit.
Simón’s marvelous sacrifice and this charity have made me understand that as an artist I’ve been a parasite. My dancing is only entertainment for rich people who applaud as long as you don’t show them anything real. I mean, human misery and the industrial destruction of the planet. I’ve been training my entire life for an audience that requires beauty without truth. I’ve submerged myself in myself, becoming an island of form without mind, in an exhibitionist of naïve vanity. The Imperial Ballet separated me from the people, and Vladimir Monomaque separated me from human feelings. I grew up like someone mutilated, with no relationship with others, drunk on my own limitations. That dancing is a trap that makes us collaborate with exploiters and murderers. The money they gave me and the money I’ve earned giving classes to frivolous students is stained with blood. We should give it away. If I want to be a real artist, I have to know poverty, share life with my brother workers. I know, Jashe, that I’m asking both of you to make a great sacrifice, that you and Sara Felicidad put up with misery, I don’t know for how long. For that reason you have to decide immediately: either you leave with the child and you make a new union with a sleeping man who will give you comforts obtained by robbing the health of others or you come with me to the poor neighborhoods to redeem the injustice of this world with the sacrifice of your life, as Simón Radovitzky sacrificed his.”
Without hesitating, Jashe answered, “To whom do we give the money?”
“If we divide it, each recipient will get little. It would be better for a single person to get all. God tells me it should be poor Bettina. Our gift will console her for her mutilations.”
The workers in the meatpacking plants didn’t last more than five years. They would die or catch chronic illnesses. For that reason, getting work there was easy for Alejandro. He left Jashe and Sara Felicidad living in a room that was seven feet wide and nine deep, with a chamber pot for a bathroom and an electric grill for a kitchen, and went to carry out his penitence.
The frozen meat industry, controlled by foreign capital, was “untouchable” by the national authorities. Because there was no union, the working conditions could not be worse. Alejandro began in slaughtering. In the open areas where the animals were killed, he was permanently exposed — in winter to rain and cold, in summer to gaseous emanations and sickening smells. After the initial cut, the blood poured out onto men and tools and then ran, in part, through the floor, forming thick layers of a dark red color. Amid excrement and urine, he had to skin animals and then toss them onto tables, divide them up, and carve them.
The saws whined, tossing into the air the sawdust of bones. The mill, the carts, the pulleys, the chains, the grunts of the dying animals kept him from conversing with his fellow workers, those sad, bloody, and fetid men who wore all sorts of amulets around their necks to keep the animals from transferring their infections to them: skin tumors, mouth ulcers, trichinosis. In those early times, Alejandro had some very difficult moments. Not only was the work horrifying because of the huge number of murdered animals but also because of a hallucination that ceaselessly repeated itself: the ghosts of sheep transformed into furious bitches sank their teeth into him. Restraining his anguish, he let his body be devoured, never ceasing to cut, select, and put into separate piles the intestines, the livers, the kidneys, the hearts. He imagined that the thousands of snipped off tongues were his own, and he made them recite in chorus, “Now I live in a reality that is as atrocious as madness, but at least I can share it with the needy. I can no longer allow myself private nightmares. I am no longer an individual. The madness of the poor is work.”
Making titanic efforts, he managed to free himself from the demented images and, with the help of his interior God, went on with his repugnant labors. When he brought the pieces of meat to the cold room, everything instantly froze. Often he saw workers who entered there daubed with blood with frozen faces or with their hands stuck to their knives. To avoid that, Alejandro, like the others, wrapped his head and his extremities in rags and newspapers and put on old wool vests, one on top of the other. If his clothing was soaked with blood, it froze immediately. When he couldn’t take the cold any longer, he would go outside and warm himself by placing his legs, hands, and face inside the bodies of the steaming animals that had just been cut open.
In the sections where saltpeter was used in the preparation and conservation of meat, the chemicals ate away shoes and boots. In a short time, the workers’ feet acquired open wounds that never healed. My grandfather passed through all that. His powerful physical constitution allowed him to survive longer than the others, but his arms turned red, his joints swelled, and a mass began to grow under his chin. Fearlessly, he asked to work in the phosphate fertilizer section, the worst part of the industrial chain, the “human slaughterhouse.” Those who fought in that hell for two years went either to the hospital or the cemetery. It was there the remains were dried and the bones ground to extract the albumin.
All the workers had to cover their mouths and noses with huge handkerchiefs to avoid the stench, but the ammoniac composition of the fumes made their neutralization impossible. A smoke with the taste of acid penetrated and bit the throat. Amid coughing and gagging, the workers, to fight the cold, tried never to stand still and would run from one place to another as if insane. Alejandro, forgetting his pains, gave himself to that crazy tumult with profound piety, but at the same time feeling an aesthetic pleasure, because he saw it as a beautiful dance. He understood that authentic art appears only in a secret place that resides between life and death. As his blue shoes began turning white, the voice of God repeated to him: “There is a precise instant when the world is marvelous: now.”