Where the Bird Sings Best (18 page)

—Teresa Seraphim

During the reading of the letter, which the Anarchist translated in a compassionate voice, three of my grandfather’s ribs, seized by pain, snapped. They sounded like rifle shots. Bloody saliva mixed with his silent tears. The bar, filled with comrades jammed around the Russian to hold him up when his knees went weak, seemed silent despite the heavy breathing, like that of a wounded bull, of my grandfather and of the soft murmur of the wise man’s voice. Those poor folk understood pain and, with pitying respect, witnessed the demolition of his heart. Wine ran down their throats, gurgling like a spring. The Freckle Trainer, to sweeten the mood, began to whistle, imitating a canary. So he could withstand these huge revelations, they gave the Professor of Shoeology large glasses of pisco. The floor began to spin, the walls became porous and let in the noise of the world, the laughter of children, the gossip of women, the clatter of broken-down vehicles, the cries of hucksters. Inside, a husband was dying; outside, the city continued on its indifferent march. Someone began to sing; another began to drum on the wine barrel; the entire block began to dance; the party exploded. From embrace to embrace, the victim, brutalized by drink, was passed around, kissing men as if they were his relatives, kissing hands that shoved him so he wouldn’t dissolve in a bitter river that would empty into death. He poured out vomit, blood, and pisco, and he finally fell down in a faint. They opened his mouth with a spoon and emptied half a bottle more down his throat. He was drunk for seven days. He visited, one by one, all the rooms in the tenement and embraced every single family—the old, the young, men, women, cats. Smiling, they allowed him to do it because a lovesick drunk was sacred there. He destroyed his clothes and, naked, insulted the moon. He ran around on all fours with the stray dogs. He threw all his shoes into a ditch and wept, wept, wept.

When he finally recovered from his drunkenness, he found himself in his room, with all the furniture Teresa had built reduced to a pile of broken boards. His mouth was bitter, not from alcohol but from sadness. A sadness that fastened itself to the inside of his chest like a somber crab. The images from the letter haunted him, buzzed in his brain: his wife’s sex receiving the phallus of a goy, all moist; her shrieking with joy, swallowing semen; her legs spread, offering herself, shaking her hips, forgetting him in the pleasure of being penetrated totally by another man, younger, handsomer, more intelligent, more skillful. She, Teresa, so good, capable of giving tenderness honestly, a pure caresses, giving her life to a monster, giving to the monster what she never gave to him. Oh, what a stab! What a savage blow! He considered her guilty, then innocent, then he pounded his head: “It’s my fault; I didn’t even know how to kiss her, giving myself to the liquor of her lips; not giving her my entire soul, choosing to grant it instead to God; not caressing her; not offering her the place of a total queen; never fastening my mouth to her sex as if I were dying of thirst; making her revolve around me; drowning her in obligations; boring her; giving her an iceberg for a home; possessing her with the thrusts of a billy goat; spitting my sperm into her belly; never trembling with excitement while staring at the landscape; never sacrificing sleep so we could spend the night together just talking nonsense, smelling each other’s skin, staring into each other’s eyes. I’ve lost her. And now that she’s not here, I finally know how much I loved her. I’ll feel her absence for the rest of my life. I love the empty space she’s left, where she is missing is now my place. The light is gone.”

He lost his appetite. Every day, he only ate a piece of cheese and some lettuce. His shoulders slumped, he began to swim in his clothes. He tried to hate her, but he couldn’t. Then he tried to hate Monkey Face. He couldn’t do that either. That innocent, an orphan like that, was not guilty. In burning love, no one is guilty: it is a gift of God. He tried to be happy, thinking about Teresa’s good fortune, copulating every day with a being she found so beautiful, finally enjoying her life. But the somber crab crushed his chest with its claws. He fell down amid the wreckage of the room, intent on not moving until he died. The anarchists pounded at his door. They shouted. “Nothing!” He refused to open the door. The shoe workers came. “Nothing!” His four children came. “Nothing!” That sorrow, that humiliation—because humiliation is what it was, so great that his penis hurt, as if he’d cut it with a knife—would never diminish. Nothing tied him to life. “Nothing!”

The only person who managed to penetrate that room, now turned into a fortress, was the Rabbi. He took up a position inside Alejandro’s mind, and no matter how much the man twisted around, spit insults, he would not move from there, waiting for Alejandro to wear himself out so he could make himself heard.

“Friend, I know your body. This disaster has deteriorated your heart, and soon you shall die, which is what you desire. But first you must straighten matters out with God. Your pain offends Him because He, Blessed be He, knows what He is doing, and his ways are mysterious to us. You have forgotten you are a Jew. Before you die, you must return to the bosom of the community, which rejected you because of your wife. You became a goy, and just look at what’s happened. As penitence, you must leave your name inscribed among the benefactors of our race. While you were drunk, I went to take a look at the synagogue. Just imagine: in this city, they pray without an authentic Torah, on parchment, copied by hand, enclosed in a luxurious ark. What a tragedy, a Jewish colony without its Holy Book! Forget your pain. Go to Argentina and bring back a true Bible. Later you can die if you wish. Your life will have served a useful purpose.”

Argentina? He would have to cross the enormous mountains of the Andes on a mule, to and fro, carrying the Torah. He stood up. His entire body, his being, was looking for an excuse to go on living, to fill the universal void left by Teresa. The Rabbi was right. He would show everyone he did serve a useful purpose. By carrying out this huge task, he would regain his dignity. Perhaps Teresa would learn of his heroic act and admire him, just a little.

“No! Enough! I must not give myself hope, because it simply worsens my pain. I have to return to reality, accept the break, and carry out this act, only for myself and for God.”

He left the room, sat down at his shoemaker’s bench, and ignoring the joy of his workers, began to work. He would make a pair of boots lined in sheepskin for cold nights. He would never sleep again. The sadness of being abandoned, the sorrow of imagining his wife in someone else’s arms, eliminated that ability. Sleep disappeared forever, and being perpetually awake made him fuzzy, as if he were living asleep. When he finished the boots, after thirty hours of ceaseless work, he had purple shadows under his sunken, veiled eyes, both present and absent, locked in themselves by the pain of existing; the merest glimpse of Teresa pierced his pupils, walking jail cells which burned like wounds.

He called Shorty Fremberg and signed with him a contract written in a Spanish, not one word of which he understood. Shorty assured him that everything was proper. Jews among themselves could be trusted. He would take charge of the organization, of charging fees and distributing the money, as usual. Alejandro would leave him a collection of shoe models, along with the addresses of his clients. About the children, he didn’t have to concern himself. A friend of his would care for them.

My grandfather asked an empanada maker to give him the dog skins he’d been hiding. He used them to make a long overcoat. With only a walking stick and without a penny to his name—his meager savings had been entrusted to Fremberg for the twins in case of a fatal accident—he started out for Viña del Mar with the intention of moving on to Quillota, Llay-Llay, Río Blanco, Portillo, Paso del Bermejo, crossing the Andes, and continuing on along the vast Argentine valley to Mendoza. From there he would make his way to Buenos Aires. Would that be about twelve hundred miles on foot? He didn’t know and it didn’t matter to him. How long would it take? He no longer had time; it had escaped him. He lived outside of time.

He covered long distances, eating the blackberries that grew alongside the road. He also found pomegranates, figs, and apples. Some carts carried him over short stretches, but his bizarre figure inspired fear, and the peasants preferred to avoid contact. Children hounded him, pelting him with stones, while others gave him water and fresh eggs. He walked by day, he walked by night, hearing his heart beat with more and more clarity. How it pained him! He tried not to think about her, but like a cruel wasp she pursued him to show him unbearable images and sting him. Another man’s saliva in her mouth. God help me. White sperm, thick with passion, flowing over her vulva. God help me. Comparing the beauty of the other man’s teeth with his, which were yellow and chipped. God help me. She sleeping, extenuated, satisfied, with her lover’s testicles in her hand. God help me. She, completely given over to him, running behind him like a lamb following its mother. God help me. Walk, walk. Try to forget.

Filthy, bearded, covered with dust, he was becoming a ghost. So the authorities wouldn’t arrest him, he walked in shadows, hunched over, febrile. Finally, he took the road to the mountain range. Unable to find wild fruit to calm his pangs of hunger, he ate butterflies, flies, ants, worms, scarabs, and spiders. The sky covered over with clouds, and the night grew dark. Seeing practically nothing, he felt his way along, looking for the paths upward. When the moon became full, he found himself surrounded by snowcapped peaks. The insidious wind blew. Stones and more stones. Nothing seemed to live there, aside from the cold. His lined boots and the dogskin coat were not enough to keep him alive. He might have frozen to death, but the bonfire of jealousy burning in his gut saved him. Even though it was impossible for him to hate her—she was right—there was fury and sorrow in his heart, an incessant flow of affliction that became a fever. He kept moving forward, against the frost, the wind, the snow, the frozen downpours of dawn, against the intense pain in his legs, which, in any case, was smaller than the pain in his soul. He got lost. Days later, his stomach empty and his throat dry, he fell between some rocks, dying of inanition. He summoned the Rabbi.

“You got me into this. I want to finish what I started, so make a miracle.”

“There is only one miracle, Alejandro. The miracle of faith! Don’t give in. Believe until the very last. As long as you have even a thread of life, there is hope. Keep at it. If you are breathing, it is because God is helping you.”

Alejandro smiled bitterly. “Of course, God is helping me.” Then he heard the footfalls of animals and barking. Three enormous wild dogs lunged toward him, leaping over the rocks, their fangs bared, ready to destroy him. The Rabbi let out a nervous laugh, embarrassed by the situation. But he repeated, “Have faith!” and fled to the Interworld. My grandfather was furious. The attack of the beasts was the last straw. He was being persecuted too much: he’d had everything taken away from him, rejected, castrated, sunk into the grave, and now, to finish things off, the dogs were going to eat him. Well, why not? Did he perhaps deserve a dignified death? He, a contemptible nothing, incapable of making himself loved by the mother of his children? He wasn’t worth more than a dog, so he would behave like a dog. By now the wild dogs, snapping at him, were getting close. He suddenly went down on all fours, showed his teeth, and, shaking himself, bellowed out deafening howls with such rage that the echo, multiplying them, caused a far-off avalanche. Surprised, the three dogs stopped, and with their fur standing on end, stared at him, growling. The crazed shoemaker barked again and charged toward them, thirsty for blood. He wanted to rip open their bellies with his teeth and pull out guts—not theirs, but through them, God’s. The three dogs retreated. He called them, sobbing, chased them for a mile, wanted to die taking their lives, wanted to show the Supreme Being what His cruelty had made of him.

The dogs scattered, jumping over the ridges, and my grandfather sat down on the stony path and buried his bearded face in his hands, ashamed of his hatred for the Maker. When his breathing returned to normal and the silence of the mountains showed him the bitterness of his infinite solitude, something rubbed against his legs. It was the dogs, returning to accept him as their master. They wagged their tails, they licked him, they frolicked around him, humbly awaiting a pet.

“A miracle!” shouted the jubilant Rabbi. “We’ll call them Kether, Hokhmah, and Binah, like the three first sephiroth of the Tree of Life!”

Alejandro growled. The Rabbi, hanging his head, returned to his astral hideaway. “I’ll call them Joy, Sadness, and Indifference,” said my grandfather. Worn out, he could barely pat their backs. He slept deeply, as he hadn’t slept for weeks. When he awoke, there were the dogs, looking as if they were smiling. And at his feet, a huge, dead hare. With a sharp knife, he skinned it, divided it into four parts, and shared it with his new friends. After they devoured even the bones, they went to lick snow from a peak.

Alejandro continued his march. Joy, Sadness, and Indifference took charge of feeding him, and after a great deal of whining, they forced him to rest, protecting him with the heat of their bodies while he remained awake and they slept. To banish the images of Teresa—who he saw more and more in love with Monkey Face, sniffing his armpits, swallowing liters of semen, allowing herself to be sodomized, staring at the reflection of the stars in his eyes—he began to pray, using the rhythm of his heartbeats. “I-am-yours-Have mer-cy-u-pon-me.” From that moment on, he never stopped repeating these words twenty-four hours a day. The pain remained, curled up behind his ribs, but now it didn’t bother him as much.