“But what will the other Jewish settlers say?”
“When there’s no more meat, it’s time to gnaw the bones. If what you want in this world doesn’t exist, you have to want what there is. Our compatriots can say whatever they like because we’ll stop seeing them. We don’t need them for anything. If they hold us in contempt, we’ll marry our children among ourselves, even if they are cousins. The Law does not forbid it. Do you want to get out of this hell someday? Then let God take care of tomorrow, and let the pigs take care of us today. Decide! Moisés and I are going to roast a piglet. Eat with us. All roads, even the smoothest, have stones in them. Harden your feet!”
One hour later, Jashe and Shoske came over to the fire and sat next to their husbands who cut big, juicy slices off the piglet and offered them. With sighs of resignation and their eyes raised to heaven, they chewed, slowly at first, overcoming their repugnance, only to devour pork later with an irrepressible appetite. When the banquet was over, the two women announced they were pregnant. Eight months later, they gave birth, as usual on the same day, one boy, Jacobo the Third, and one girl, Raquel the Third.
Time galloped on. The emblem of the Flying Hog ham factory, a pig with swan wings flying over a landscape painted in the colors of the Argentine flag, became famous all over the nation. When World War I broke out, they had to bring in workers from Buenos Aires, all goys apparently, to keep up with the numerous orders that came from abroad, especially from England. The exploitation of flesh forbidden by the Prophet allowed them to get through the crisis, amassing a huge fortune.
Since they did not want to live the rest of their lives isolated out on the pampa in the nauseating stink of their thousands of pigs, they decided to move to Chile. Iquique was a port visited by ships of all nationalities; with schools appropriate for the children, all kinds of businesses, enormous hotels, theaters, libraries; and boulevards where tourists, mine administrators, sailors, and workers who came down from the mines to spend the money they’d made over months could provide an inexhaustible source of income. They would open a huge store where there would be everything: food, clothing, furniture, kitchenware, toys for children, clocks, watches, jewels, and — why not? — a booth for buying and selling gold and silver.
While all that was being discussed, my mother turned thirteen without her family realizing it. Still faithful to the order to dye her hair, wear dark glasses, never bathe — her skin was covered with a dark, greasy coating that stank like the pigs — and walk bent over, she had created a situation in which no one wanted to be anywhere near her, not even the workers who butchered the animals. If by accident during the day she wandered near the house, her half-brothers and half-cousins would start howling with terror, and she would have to run off.
But Sara Felicidad did not suffer. For her, this shabby aspect of things belonged to the world of forms. Beneath that was the world of essences, which only she could perceive. There she could sing as loud as she wished and show herself with her white skin, golden hair, blue eyes, her six-foot-three height. There, the Earth was an amorous being granting long caresses lasting millions of years, where atmospheric changes were the jolly games of a God at play, and where human beings were angels riding on pigs that really did have wings.
Late on nights when there was a full moon, Sara Felicidad would climb the ombu tree and from there see emerge from the sleeping men and animals a second, transparent body that allowed them to travel, without their being able to remember it when awake, throughout the Universe, until they sank into the final abyss, where they would find the consciousness that was the origin of life, and then emerge covered with luminous scales, larger than the planet Jupiter, and spin and dance, emitting the music of a whirling top, with the spirits of the dead, who are always happy.
For Jashe, Shoske, Moisés Latt, and César Higuera, bringing Sara Felicidad along was a problem. Secretly, they all wanted to leave the pigs and her. No one would dare propose it, so when the time came to leave, they gave her a third-class ticket while they and the six children traveled in first class. They hoped the wind of the train would carry off her fetid stench. When they got to Iquique, they would replace the barrel with an annual allowance and a room in a boarding house, as far away as possible, so they could once again forget about her existence.
Jaime and Sara Felicidad
It was extremely difficult for me to bring Jaime and Sara Felicidad together. When incarnating myself again in this world became a necessity, the man I chose to be my father was in a circus, way down in southern Chile, being hung by the hair. And the woman who was supposed to be my mother was locked away in a desert sanctuary way up north. Separated by more than two thousand miles, they never would have found each other if, in 1919, I didn’t decide to take those two people of such differing character — which is as much as saying they were opposites — to be the founding elements of my future body.
I don’t know if my memories of the time before my birth correspond to reality or if they are mere dreams. That doesn’t matter. In any case, reality is the progressive transformation of dreams; there is no world but the world of dreams. I am convinced that I chose and united the sperm and the ovaries that allowed me to be born again for the — who knows how many times I was born? Thanks to my iron will, when the chosen moment came and in the proper spot, an oasis in the middle of the pampa, I exacerbated the magnetic suffering that forced the paternal penis to penetrate the maternal vagina so that, in a cataclysmic joy that overwhelmed all its cells, it would let fly the radiant arrow that went to bury itself in the avid depth of her magic blackness.
I slid through that crack opened in space and time, intent on conserving my memory intact because I would need it to carry out the plan I’d been elaborating from life to life. But as almost always happens, the disturbance suffered by the subtle body when it penetrated the dense levels of this existence caused me to lose a large number of memories. Little remains of that incessant development of a spirit knowing itself. It’s a fragmented magma, shadowy sensations, colossal spaces, eternal times, births and collapses of universes, savage rivers of swept-away souls crossing infinite splendors in vertiginous orbits.
During some periods, there was total silence, as if God had never created ears, and after, the racket of galactic cars, carnival trucks showing off the spangles of their suns, advancing with no goal, pushed along by the goodness of an inexhaustible emanation, a unique principle that feeds myriad beings who only receive. With no fear of the ridiculous, I accept the fact that I was a metallic crag wandering through dark immensities with an impassioned thirst for light. Within my extreme density lived an exclusive desire: to create language, song, the Word itself, which had drawn me out of the nothingness. That ideal must have inflamed me. Perhaps I exploded into stars and planets and became crystal, amoeba, plant, animal, and then lost myself in an incessant line of men and women being born and dying in murderous religions, labyrinths of legends and symbols until I learned to open the eyes of my senses and learn to see that pure light that arises from the original fountain with my soul, without intermediaries.
Then the language of thought resounds, the silent voice that speaks to Being, perpetuating itself through time in order to create the true Tradition, “That which is received.” It seems that I was an initiate born in Germany in 1378. It’s clear that the year, composed of 13 and of 78, which is 13 x 6, transports a message. Those who have received a Masonic education will understand what that mans. In that life, because of misery, my parents abandoned me at the doors of a convent. The monks — who, lacking a sexual life, develop their intellect until it becomes a tumor — taught me to speak and read Greek and Latin before I was six.