“I can’t do that. They hang me by my hair in the circus. It’s my job.”
“Change jobs. It is not good for any man to live hung by other men. The only one who has the right to pull us up is Amoihuen, the mask of the Supreme Being.”
Something took place in Jaime’s spirit. He abruptly abandoned the circus, just like that, without thinking it over, like something constructed over a long time in the darkness that suddenly emerges, complete, toward the light.
“I agree, Tralaf. Cut off my hair.”
The Indian rubbed his head with a tree bark that produced foam, and, using a sharpened stone, he shaved him. After that, he pinched the skin of his scalp and gave it two crossed cuts. Jaime shrieked in pain.
“You’ve got to take it, huinca. There’s a lot of daylight left, and the road you’re to follow is long, endless. I have to make eight more crosses.”
And around his cranium, like a crown, he made other cuts. The blood ran down his face, his ears, his nape. My father began to tremble.
“Be brave, huinca. Our eagle came from the sun. You are not alone. Within you is the soul of an ancestor. He sustains you. Stop whining like the horse who didn’t want to walk on a suspension bridge. Give yourself over to the control of the rider. Advance step by step, attentively, awake. If you become distracted, the abyss will devour you and you’ll fall into the river of death. There you will dissolve because you do not carry the flower of awareness. The one who is asleep knows nothing about you. Only awake can you open the door so the Supreme Being can enter.”
Tralaf took a bottle of water out of his jacket. It contained nine leeches, and he placed them over the wounds. They immediately began to suck blood. The Mapuche started a fire with branches of a reddish coffee color that gave off a smell like bread and began to sing following the rhythm of a drum. Time passed, the leeches, which were long and thin, now gorged, looked fat, enormous. They began to uncouple and fall into a clay platter the shaman placed before my father’s knees while making him lower his head. He squeezed the leeches so they would vomit the blood they’d sucked. Then he washed them and put them back in the bottle of water. He dug around in his bag and found some dry twigs covered with very smooth bark, as smooth as human skin. And with a small mallet, he pounded them in a mortar to mix them with the coagulated plasma. He kneaded it into gelatinous, blackish bread. Then, using a carved spatula, he gave it the form of a snake.
“If you’ve got good aim, the fox won’t get away from you. Overcome your disgust, eat the caicai: serpent of serpents, enemy of human kind, it brings the flood from the depths, erases everything; you cease to be flesh and are left pure spirit. It won’t give you health, because you already have it; it will dissolve only the sickness you invent.”
Jaime, with his mind clear for the first time in his life, thanks to the blood, discovered the essential trait of his character: curiosity. He loved nothing but wanted to know everything. Whichever way he went, he would find ignorance. Any idea seemed a violence, the description of a feeling never stopped seeming ridiculous, the content of a concept led to another concept, and so on until infinity. Thinking was merely believing; meanings changed as rapidly as clouds; reality was covered with mental constructions that, in complicity with one another, became a language. And he wanted to push aside the veil, know the meaning of life, the secret of the Universe, the structure of that which people called God.
“We always follow the trail of the good. Don’t miss this opportunity. Run and see, huinca!”
As the Mapuche pounded the drum made of wood and horsehide, Jaime, holding back his gagging, devoured the blood.
His entire body began to tremble; his temperature rose; he perspired; he became cold; he lost dimensions; he felt himself a giant, tiny; his tongue burned; flames shot out of his mouth; his left ear grew until it was five times larger than the other; he understood the forest animals; each roar, meow, trill, buzz, taught him something; even the belches of the toads transmitted profound thoughts. In the face of such wisdom, he felt himself to be a miserable being and giggled at his ignorance. Then his incredulity fought against the drug.
“They’re auditory hallucinations. Whatever the animals say I invent. I’ll have them sing an Italian song.”
And from the forest arose an animal chorus singing the melody of “Torna a Surriento.” Tralaf gave him a ferocious kick in the chest. A bloody wound opened. He felt that his heart was pouring out of that wound, but in its place arose a black feline, rolled up like a fetus.
“The cat can’t see the mouse without wanting to kill it. No matter what they say, the animals speak to you in any case. They provide the raw material; you make the message. Ditch the cat, let the mouse live.”
Jaime split in two. Everything he saw became a mirror. Then he was three and finally four. He realized he could multiply until infinity and be in innumerable places at the same time. Again he laughed. For so many years, an entire lifetime, he’d been one, a prisoner of an imagined body, like concrete, clinging to its exterior form purely out of fear. What cowardice, this being stuck to the Earth! Better to toss the burden overboard. He began to feel himself lighter, floating. Tralaf jumped and fell on his back transformed into a green puma. He drew his muzzle close to Jaime’s left ear and said in a hoarse voice, “Now you’ve got the gaze of the condor. You are going to fly to Tierra del Fuego to give life to the forgotten gods.”
They skimmed through winds and storms, above dismembered coasts lashed by waves, shaped like cathedrals; they crossed archipelagos, fjords, canals, and descended into a volcanic crater, right in front of an extensive field of lava. The cavity was dotted with burned human skeletons. Flames burst out of the green puma:
“Accept the purification of fire. Be able to imagine yourself calcified. Deliver the personality that limits you. Make yourself a receptor without edges.”
Jaime allowed his body to burn. From the depth of the cave, leaning on one another, like a group of sick men, advanced three painted-up Indians. Beneath the dots and the horizontal and vertical bars that decorated them, appeared their mummified flesh. They complained with every step.
“That’s the pain of oblivion. They are the creators of the world. Kosménk, the father; Xalpen, the mother; Keternen, the son. You, who have been able to turn your form into a fire, let Kosménk possess you. Give your awareness over, now!”
And Jaime ceased clinging to himself and became an invisible vulva the size of the sky in order to allow himself to be possessed by the father, an unlimited force that dragged him out of time and space. Kosménk entered absolute negation, falling as if down a black well, where everything that appeared was instantly erased; crossing levels of existence that vanished; rejecting so that at the end, the heart of the infinite No would be the greatest of affirmations. Out of unlimited goodness arose Xalpen, his wife. Jaime was fragmenting in a cloud of burning drops, and comprehension came; he circulated in all the currents of the firmament, of the earth, of the ocean, of sap, of blood. He expanded into a network of waves, like a disproportionate spider made of spirals. Life was an empty labyrinth twisted by a torrent of passion, Xalpen, the continuous orgasm. Kosménk, eternally immobile in the dark night, root of all suns and of all conscious light, father of Xalpen, becomes her lover in order to sink into matter, itself transformed into a song of happiness, and then to be born as her son: Keternen, the golden child, fragile and tender bread that feeds the one who destroys it. Keternen, born from the sacrifice of Kosménk, savior of the human race, creator of the new universe where no one eats anyone else and flesh is transparent, where all beings, transformed into conscious comets, trace a cathedral of fire in the sky. The pleasure of the Mother is so intense that it seems pain, because the explosion is vertiginous and never stops growing. Then it grants its greatest gift, Death, so that everything once again returns to Kosménk.