The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography (14 page)

The next day the hours slipped by without my noticing anything. Immobilized, I moved through flat, gray time as through an empty tunnel, at the end of which the anticipated midnight hour shone like a splendid jewel. I arrived at Café Iris at twelve o’clock sharp, with my Nicanor Parra puppet hidden, clutched to my chest. It was a gift for Stella . . . but my beloved had not yet arrived. I ordered a beer. At 12:30 I asked for another; at 1:00, yet another, and at 1:30 another; another at 2:00, and another at 2:30. Drunk and sad I finally saw her enter, looking smug, accompanied by a man shorter than her with a face like a boxer and wearing that sardonic expression common to those broken offspring of Spanish soldiers and raped Indian women. Glancing at me defiantly, she sat in front of me with, I assumed, her lover. They both smiled, looking satisfied. I was furious. I slipped my hand under my vest, took out the puppet, and threw it on the table. “Let this Nicanor Parra be your teacher! You deserve to be with a poet of this dimension, not to debase yourself with down-and-outs like the one you’re with right now. If you read his brilliant poem “The Viper” you will find your portrait. Goodbye forever.” And, stumbling, getting caught in the legs of the chairs, I headed for the exit. Stella chased me down and brought me back to the table. I thought the insulted boxer would punch me, but no. With a smile he held out his hand and said, “I appreciate what you said. I am Nicanor Parra and the woman who inspired me to write ‘The Viper’ is Stella.” While it is true that my creation bore no resemblance to the features of the great poet, I felt certain that I had my puppet to thank for my having met him. This miracle came from one of the threads from which the world is woven together. Parra graciously gave me his telephone number, informed me with a single glance he was not Stella’s lover and that I had a good chance of being that, and said goodbye to us.

Faced with this extravagant and beautiful woman, I was speechless. My drunkenness had dissipated as if by magic. She looked at me with the intensity of a tiger, inhaled the smoke from her pipe, and blew it in my face. I started coughing. She gave a hoarse cackle that drew the attention of everyone in the café, then turned serious and said in an accusing tone, “Don’t deny it; you have a knife. Give it to me!” Embarrassed, not wishing to deny it, I dug in a pocket and pulled out my modest knife. She took it, opened it, looked at the half-rusted blade, and asked what my name was. She spread out her open left hand on the table, and with the knife in her right hand made three cuts on the back of it, forming a bloody A. She licked the blood off the blade and returned it to me, wet with saliva. With dizzying speed, I thought, “The A is formed by three straight lines, which makes the cuts easier. If I cut an S I’ll have to make a long curvy wound; I might cut a vein, I don’t have oily skin like her. What should I do? I’m being tested. I’m going to look like a stupid coward. I have to find an elegant solution.” I took her hand and licked the wound, five, ten, endless minutes, until not a drop of blood was left. I offered her my red-stained mouth. She kissed me passionately.

“Come,” she said. “We will never separate again. We will sleep by day and live at night, like vampires. I’m still a virgin. We will do everything but penetration. My hymen is reserved for a god who will come down from the mountains.”

Nicanor Parra.

When we went outside, she asked me again for the knife. I handed it to her, trembling; surely my gallant act had not been enough to balance out the cuts on her hand. In a peremptory tone, she told me to put my hand into my left pants pocket and pull out the lining. So I did. She deftly cut the seams at the bottom of the pocket. Then she stuffed the lining back into my pants. She put her right hand inside and, with gentle firmness, gripped my testicles and penis.

“From now on, every time we walk together, I will hold your private parts.”

Thus we walked along the Alameda de las Delicias, heading to her room, without saying a word. Dawn began to break. The final cold of the night in its death throes became more intense. But the heat her hand imparted to me, the same hand that had written such wonderful verses, not only invaded my skin but also entered into my very depths, lighting up my soul. The birds began to sing as we reached the door of her boarding house.

“Take off your shoes. Retirees sleep late. When a noise awakens them, they moan like turtles in agony.”

The stairway creaked, the steps creaked, the ancient floorboards in the hallways creaked. The door of the room, upon being opened, gave forth a long funereal groan like a chorus of turtles. Then there was silence.

“We’re not going to turn on the light,” she said. “Orpheus must not see his beloved naked, lying in hell.”

I stripped off my clothes in three seconds. She did so slowly. I heard a sticky plop as her dog fur coat fell to the ground, then the whisper of her short skirt sliding down her legs. After that, the oily rubbing of her shirt and then, a marvelous memory, I saw her as if she were lit by a hundred-watt lamp. The whiteness of her skin was so intense that it overcame the dark. She was a marble statue with her red mane and, above all, the russet burst of her pubic hair. We embraced, we fell on the bed, and without caring that the mattress made noises like a sick accordion, we caressed each other for hours. As day arrived, the room filled first with red light, then orange. The noises of the street, footsteps, voices, trains, cars, plus the buzzing of flies, tried to dispel our enchantment. But our desire was stronger. Her vagina, anus, and mouth were off-limits. Only the god of the mountains could enter the Sibyl’s interior. We stuck with caresses, which grew longer and longer, without our remembering where we had started and without wanting to reach the end. Stella grew tense, and suddenly, instead of giving a cry of pleasure, she clenched her teeth so that they began to creak. This noise increased to the point that I thought every bone in her body would explode. Thus, as if emerging from a tempest of passion, coming forth from the bottom of an ocean of flesh, her bone structure emerged like an ancient shipwreck. Satisfied, she murmured in my ear, “A skeleton sits in my pupils, chewing my soul between its teeth.” Then, before falling asleep with her head on my chest, she whispered, “We have given an orgasm to my death.”

Thus our relationship began, and thus it continued. We went to bed at six in the morning, caressed each other for at least three hours, then we slept soundly; I because of the stress that being with such a strong woman caused me, she from the effects of large quantities of beer. We rose at ten in the evening. Since money was an evil symbol that the poet was eliminating from her life, my job was to feed her. So I went out, took the train that went through Matucana, used my key to enter my parents’ house, and, reassured by the continuous rhythm of their tremendous snoring, stole food from their pantry, a little money from my mother’s purse, and a little more from my father’s pockets. Then I returned to her lodgings, where we devoured everything down to the crumbs. What little remained attracted an invasion of ants and cockroaches. Sometimes Stella would purposely leave dirty dishes on the floor, and they were soon visited by dozens of the black bugs. She impaled them with pins and stuck them to the wall. She made a compact field of cockroaches on the wall in the shape of the Virgin Mary. A winged phallus, also made of cockroaches, coming from the mountains, flew toward the saint. “It’s the annunciation of Mary,” she told me, proud of her work, adding eyes to the face in the form of two green beetles; I never knew where she had found them.

We would arrive at Café Iris around midnight, walking side by side, her hand constantly in my pocket. Our entrance would interrupt the chattering of the drunks there. Stella wore a different form of makeup every day, and it was always spectacular. There was always some impertinent man who would come over, not deigning to acknowledge that I existed, and try to seduce her by means of audacious groping. His mission would be curtailed by a punch to the chin. The waiters would pick up the unconscious fool and return him to his table. When he awoke, cured of his drunkenness, the man would order us a bottle of wine, making discrete apologetic gestures. Once they had learned the lesson of the beast, the men would stop feeling her up with their eyes and dive back into discussions that had nothing to do with reason. There was always someone standing up and reciting a poem, half-singing. Stella stuck cotton wool in my ears, required me to stay still like a model posing for a painter, and with her eyes fixed on mine wrote with dizzying speed, filling page after page without looking down at her notebook.

One night, tired of this immobility, I proposed a game: we would observe strangers and, without saying anything, each write on a sheet of paper what the person did, their characteristics, their social status, their economic status, their degree of intelligence, their sexual capacity, their emotional problems, their family structure, their possible diseases, and the corresponding death that would result. We played this game a great many times. We achieved such a spiritual amalgam that our answers started to be the same. This does not mean we were able to draw a correct portrait of the unknown person, which we would not have been able to verify, but at the very least we knew that there was telepathic communication between the two of us. Eventually, every time we were in someone else’s presence, a mere fleeting glance between us was enough for us to know how we should act.

Anything that is different attracts the attention of ordinary citizens and also attracts their aggression. A couple like us was unsettling, a magnet for destructive people who were envious of the happiness of others. The ambiance of Café Iris was becoming insupportable. The clientele were directing more and more jeers, aggressive praise, sarcastic comments, and stares imbued with crude sexuality toward us.

“Enough of Iris,” Stella said to me. “Let’s find a new place.”

“But where will we go? It’s the only all night café.”

“I’ve heard there’s a bar on San Diego Street, the Dumb Parrot, that stays open until dawn.”

“You’re crazy Stella, that’s an awful place, the worst people go there! They say there’s at least one knife fight there every night.”

I could not dissuade her. “If Orpheus seduced the beasts, we can make that Dumb Parrot sing a mass!”

After midnight, the wine had plunged the sinister patrons of that grisly, dark place into a bovine stupor. My arrival, with the poet on my arm, wearing her most extravagant makeup ever, caused no reaction. Stella was so different from the worn-out whores who beached themselves there, a being from another planet, that they were simply unable to see her. They kept on drinking as if nothing had happened. Offended in her exhibitionism, she decided to drink standing at the bar. I, in normal attire, gradually began to attract some notice. After half an hour, when Stella, having finished her first liter of beer was ordering a second, four men approached me. I did my best to hide the fear that came over me, forcing my face to become an expressionless mask. I tossed a crumpled bill on the counter and said, in a tone that was natural but loud enough for the four men to hear me, “I’ll settle the tab now. This is all I have left.” I left the change, a few small coins, on a saucer. The four curious men, all looking cynical, took the coins and dropped them in their pockets.

“And you, young man, where are you from?”

“I’m Chilean, like you. What happened is that my grandparents were immigrants, they came from Russia.”

“Russian? Comrade?” Sly muttering. “And where do you work?”

“Well, I don’t work. I’m an artist, a poet . . .”

“Ah, a poet, like that pot-bellied Neruda! Come on, have a drink with us and read us a poem!”

Stella still seemed to be invisible to them. Their lewd glances were directed at me. They exuded the sexuality of prison inmates. My youthful white skin turned them on. I drank from a glass of sour wine. I started to improvise a poem. The clientele turned their attention toward me . . .

Where there are ears but there is no song

in this world that dissipates

and in which existence is given to those who do not deserve it