Meanwhile, in the seven-by-nine-foot room, Jashe painted the walls white; constructed a folding bed; and invented, using boards and hinges, a table that could be hung on the wall after dinner and a box containing five more boxes, one inside the others, that could be used as chairs. Thus she began her struggle to dominate space: every single thing she allowed to enter that room was essential and had a preplanned shape so it would fit in with the others. Objects took on the existence of domestic animals. (My grandmother never forgot her tender blanket made from stray dog fur. She would call the dogs over, give them leftover food, and then shave them. Nor did she forget her humble wooden cup that each morning opened its mouth like an enchanted frog.) And that way, like someone who comes home and can’t find their cat and anxiously looks for it in all the neighborhood streets, if suddenly she did not have her electric stove, a solid and simple apparatus in which she cooked (using bones and vegetables picked out of the market garbage) the most complex stews, she would have suffered.
Because the tenderness she had for her small helpers was corresponded, and they, she was sure, were worried about completing a labor impossible to obtain outside of an atmosphere like that one, Jashe wrote one afternoon to her sister Shoske:
“A plant the doorman gave me because I begged him not to throw it in the garbage had apparently died. With its dead stems and all, I put it next to the window and stopped worrying about it for a long time. But every day I watered it, distractedly, thinking about other things. Suddenly, just yesterday, I don’t know through what miracle, it produced a leaf. It surprised me so much I began to cry. I understood that love is a grand thank you to the other for existing.”
Two months before Sara Felicidad turned four, Alejandro arrived with a bouquet of daisies and his minimal weekly pay:
“Jashe, this morning God said to me: My son, today you must stop working. You’ve grown thin, you’re losing your hair, your teeth are beginning to rot, your cartilage is inflamed, you have a tumor, your lungs have become weak, and you can no longer move with your former grace. But your soul has been forged in suffering and shines like a great firefly. Go back to dancing: those physical limitations are your honor and make you a man instead of a machine. Show the world what Art is. Yes, Jashe, I wasted my time teaching the children of the rich. Now I will dance by myself, but once. Sincere works should not be repeated; they have to be unique. The performance will be short, ten minutes, but it will have such intensity that anyone who sees it will never forget it. I don’t want to present myself in a theater but out in the open, at night in the kiosk of a poor plaza.
“I won’t need spotlights, because I will be light. Even if there is no moon or stars, everyone will see me. And I don’t need an orchestra: the voice of my daughter is enough. Don’t worry about costumes; God tells me that only a naked body can reach the sacred. The press will take an interest. It will be an historic event. After my performance, dance will change. I want rich and poor to come, to mix around me. The wealthy, at the end of the act, will toss banknotes, which will be distributed to the poor. I was first dancer at the Imperial Russian Ballet; Argentina has to respect me. While I’m visiting newspaper offices, you, Jashe, will have to work.”
My grandmother was hired as a worker in a felt hat factory. The site was watery and humid. The fumes from the mercury used in the preparation of the hair formed a thick mist that poisoned the place. With her hair and clothes always wet, breathing in that vapor, Jashe began to tremble, a tremor that spread to her lips, her tongue, her head, until it took over her whole body. She put up with those symptoms with a smile, and then rheumatic pains soon followed. Because visibility was so poor, several of her fellow workers lost fingers, and one child laborer, nine years of age, dropped dead, poisoned.
Not many articles announcing the show appeared in the newspapers. The journalists saw a filthy giant limping toward them wearing a tattered suit, his eyes opened far too wide, speaking an incomprehensible Spanish, and took him for a drug addict. The few lines that did appear were written with contempt and mockery. My grandfather did not lose courage:
“Only a few spectators will come, but if they are high-quality spectators, they will be enough. Only twelve witnesses saw Christ, and all humanity learned of Him. My dance will be engraved in the collective memory.”
The great day came. That morning they celebrated Sara Felicidad’s birthday. They gave her a can of peaches in syrup and a dancer made of rags whose hair was made of wool dyed yellow. That afternoon, Alejandro gave her the final instructions:
“You will sing without stopping, no matter what happens, until I stop dancing. You will forget all the songs you know to allow your voice to take the paths it wishes. Make yourself into a channel open to the passage of two rivers: the dark and the celestial. What your will tries to do is of no interest to you, only what you receive will be good.”
When night came, Alejandro stood in the center of the kiosk of a rundown plaza, and his daughter began to sing. The only spectator was Jashe. No one, poor or rich, came. No reporters either. Some dogs tried to howl, but the girl’s voice enchanted them, and soon they listened to her in silence, wagging their tails. Rising from the half-light like long crystal knives, my mother’s voice reached every window. Strange sounds that were not interrupted by silences, thanks to the fact that her vocal chords vibrated both when she breathed in and when she breathed out. Those superhuman notes woke exhausted families of workers and little by little the plaza filled with men, women, and children who came up to the kiosk with the same respect with which they entered church every Sunday.
Alejandro Prullansky, very slowly, as if he had a thousand years to do it, took off his clothes. It took him half an hour to remove his trousers and his shirt, the only clothes he was wearing. He kept his white shoes on. With the same slowness, he crouched to open the cardboard suitcase and remove from it an apple. With a serious, rhythmic voice, impregnated with an immense goodness he said, “The artist defines the world and transforms it into his work. If a poet eats this apple, that act is a poem. If a musician does it, it’s a symphony. And a sculptor, on eating it, will be making a sculpture. I dance.”
And, slowing the velocity of his movements even more, he bit the fruit. Sara Felicidad and he, in the darkness of that cloudy night, looked like two black statues. Despite the intensity of the singing, which was so fine it cut the leaves of the few trees there like a scalpel, dropping a dark green rain on the heads of the workers, the noise of the chewing arose intact and gave the steely tones of the girl a watery bed. No one blinked. Aside from the sound, nothing was happening, but the shadows of the kiosk promised that something important was going to take place.
Alejandro opened his spirit in two wings of great length and absorbed the taste of the apple. From the center of his brain came an iridescent ray that pierced the sky. The clouds were swept away by his breath, and stars appeared, which began to spin around the seeds he kept in a triangle on his extended tongue. There he placed his awareness and showed it to the public as if it were a consecrated host. Following the silvery roads the voice of his daughter showed him when she was bathed in the light of the stars, he launched the crown of his thoughts into space. The sacrificial animal appeared, a man of pure flesh, headless, pouring out his redeeming blood to quench the thirst of so many people in misery. That was the mission of Art. Now he had to overcome his swollen joints, give power to his wasted lungs, recover the elegance of his footwork, and gesture toward the point where limits disappear.