Where the Bird Sings Best (42 page)

“Follow this path for one mile. When you find a rock painted black, make three long whistles. A Mapuche Indian named Tralaf will come for you. He will cure you. A lady in the audience told me.”

Shaken by chills, Jaime marched through the trees. A frozen wind made the rain fall from the leaves. As he moved forward, he broke through the frost that covered the ground. He reached a clearing of red earth. There, in the center of that sterile space, surrounded by exuberant vegetation, there was a huge black stone. It looked like an eagle rolled up in itself, in the style of an armadillo that rolls itself into a ball whenever it feels threatened. To Jaime it seemed that it was sinking its beak into its chest to drink the blood from its own heart.

Dense clouds began to cover the sky. The light changed, and the eagle slowly vanished so that, thanks to the absence of contrast created by lights and shadows, it transformed into a smiling human cranium. My father, nervous, felt his forehead to see if he still had the fever. It was frozen. He shook his head and whistled three times. It began to rain and lightning began to flash. The thunder made the ground shake. The sun came out again. Jaime, soaked to the skin, was going to whistle again, but some footsteps interrupted him. They were so soft and agile that Jaime climbed up on the rock, fearing the arrival of a puma. A Mapuche, old but vigorous, appeared carrying a full sack.

He said, mockingly, “Hey there,
huinca
, what are you doing there on top of Amoihuen? It can’t be you’re afraid of a poor old man like me, can it? Come down, this place is protected. No puma, wildcat, big fox, or peccary, not even llamas or mice dare to pass through here. Greet with me my
huecufe
.
Mari, Mari
... If you’ve come to see me, it’s because you’re suffering. Say nothing: I see with my hands.”

He knelt before Jaime, and beginning at his feet and working his way up, he palpated his body. When he reached Jaime’s head, he emitted a cough of comprehension.

“Here the apparent evil reveals itself. But it’s good. With children, their jaw hurts if they get new teeth. Your cranium hurts because your spirit is growing. Many centuries ago, you lost the landscape, and without roots there is no health. You are trying to open the cocoon to start flying. Your hair has been pulled so much that below it you have a lot of accumulated blood. If you want the pain to go away, you must allow your hair to be cut.”

“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.

Jaime awoke naked in the forest clearing. Tralaf, next to the black rock, was playing something that looked like a violin: a bow of bone held by a single string of woven hair that he leaned against his upper incisors to play with another identical bow, making arise from the instrument a wail that was between human and divine. Jaime had never known that enormous feeling. His thoracic cage was beating as if his trunk had become a single heart. He felt he had no head, decapitated. He was viscera with arms and feet, nothing more. All his life he thought that he lacked sensitivity, that he was emotionally dead, but now he realized that he’d been asleep. Now he expanded, ceaselessly giving.

His spirit belonged to another world, outside of forms. He perceived everything as presences, energies, entities that had no relation to the size of the bodies in which they manifested themselves. An immense
raulí
tree mattered less to him than a baby eagle that landed on his shaved head. That was because the ancient tree bent over, transformed into a thin hair of violet light, while the bird gave off golden rays in all directions of space. He began to vomit coagulated blood. The Mapuche held his head.

“Like the tiger, you looked, opening your eyes halfway but choosing the fattest llamas. He who decides to live never again breathes the breath of Death. Since the war is over, you shall dance as long as you have heart. Good work,
huinca
. Cheer up: you returned from the zone of the ancient gods; you will no longer be the same. You will go on fighting, acquiring, but you will be from far off, because you know that everything is changing, fading, and that any tie is a trick.”

The gagging ceased, and Jaime, his stomach empty, without pain in his head, felt rested, tranquil, in peace.

“Thank you, Tralaf. Your drug has cleansed and enriched me. I’ll never go back to the circus. Something mysterious is asking me to go north. That there, at the far end of the nation, my realization awaits me.”

Obviously, it was I who, taking advantage of that magnificent occasion when my future father delivered himself to lunar reception, incited him to embark on that pilgrimage so he would again give me the possibility of being incarnate. Jaime dressed, bade a thankful farewell to the Indian, and set out on the return road. As he advanced along the narrow path, the virgin forest did not seem dark, dangerous, or strange. For the first time, he felt he owned the earth, with roots as deep as those trees that caressed him with a thousand different vibrations. He was going along like that, enjoying the openness of his senses, when a tremendous roar made him stop short. Right before him stood a puma showing him his teeth. Abandoning prudence, he turned on his heel to try a vain run. He collided with Tralaf.

“So the
huinca
thought he was leaving without paying me!”

“I’m sorry my friend, I had no idea. I came without money.”

“That I know. When you were out of your head, I checked your pockets. Zero! Nor did I find a bottle or two of pisco, which is the custom. You’re the kind that always thinks they deserve everything free. That the knowledge you give them, you get just like that without lifting a finger.”