Where the Bird Sings Best (52 page)

The store was called Ukraine House, because Jaime and Sara Felicidad decided to pass themselves off as white Russians to avoid political problems. There, among porcelain dishes, cuckoo clocks, and ladies underwear, I developed until the precise moment I decided to be born: ten in the morning on October 24, 1929, a day known worldwide as “Black Thursday.”

At the same moment, the economic crisis in the United States exploded and extended all over the planet. Banks closed one after the other, and industry was paralyzed. Chile was the nation hardest hit by the catastrophe. Nitrate mines closed down, and a fourth of the population fell into indigence. The Six W’s shut down and Ukraine House, for lack of customers, did so as well. My parents, with me in their arms, suddenly found themselves penniless, sleeping on the beach and having to stand in line outside the municipal office along with miners and their families to get their free dish of soup.

“Great! We’ve touched bottom! Finally, we’ve found our land. Now we are citizens of misery. We lost hope and because of that we lost fear. All that’s left for us is to rise. We shall baptize our son with the name Alejandro, the name of my father and your father. He is the light we shall burn at the altar. Hoping that one day, forgetting himself and living for the sake of others, he will come to awareness in order to serve in an impersonal form, making known the first word, the one that is the origin of all languages: ‘Thanks.’ So that toward him converge the phosphorescent screams of the enchanted frogs awaiting the kiss that will transform them into Buddha. So that he will be the illuminated fruit that will transform our obscure tree into a cathedral lighthouse.”

While my mother sang a lullaby, feeding me at her breast, Jaime, blowing into my nose, transmitted the Rabbi to me. Happy to find himself in a brain that offered him no resistance, he began to enumerate his new commandments:

You will not kill death. You will not covet the wife of the widower, and you will be faithful to your ghost. You shall not steal that which belongs to you nor speak with the mouth of your fellow man. You will not take the name of God in vain because all names are He. You will sanctify your workdays and transform your parents into shoes. You will make of the Earth an altar where the sheep sing and where finally you will bless yourself.

Alejandro
Jodorowsky
is a Chilean-French filmmaker, playwright, actor, author, musician, comics writer, and spiritual guru, best known for his avant-garde films including
Fando and Lis
(1968),
El Topo
(1970)—which became a cult hit and inaugurated the “midnight movie” phenomenon—
The Holy Mountain
(1973), and
Santa Sangre
(1989). As documented in the recent film
Jodorowsky’s Dune
, in 1975 he began to work a colossal adaptation of Frank Herbert’s
Dune
—which was to star Orson Welles and Salvador Dalí and to be scored by Pink Floyd—but was never made. (A version of
Dune
was later filmed by David Lynch, and the creative team Jodorowsky assembled influenced a generation of science-fiction filmmakers.) Recently, after 23 years away from the screen, Jodorowsky released his autobiographical film
The Dance of Reality
, about growing up in a Chilean mining town. Jodorowsky himself, his first wife Valerie, and his sons Brontis, Axel, and Adan have all appeared in his films.

A circus clown and a puppeteer in his youth, Alejandro Jodorowsky left for Paris at the age of 23 to study mime with Marcel Marceau. There, he befriended the surrealists Roland Topor and Fernando Arrabal, and in 1962 these three created the “Panic Movement” a performance art collective inspired by Luis Buñuel and Antonin Artaud and named in homage to the god Pan. Jodorowsky became an adept in the art of the Tarot and a prolific author of novels, poetry, short stories, essays, works on the Tarot and “psychomagic” healing, and more than thirty successful comic books, among them the
Incal
,
Technopriests
, and
Metabarons
series, working with such highly regarded artists as Moebius (Jean Giraud) and Georges Bess.

Alfred
MacAdam
is professor of Latin American literature at Barnard College-Columbia University. He has translated works by Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Carlos Onetti, José Donoso, and Jorge Volpi among others. He recently published an essay on the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa included in the
Cambridge Companion to Autobiography
.

Copyright 2014 Alejandro Jodorowsky

Translation copyright 2014 Alfred MacAdam

Published in Spanish by Grijalbo, 1992; 2nd edition Ediciones Siruela, 2002

Digital edition published by Restless Books, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-63206-007-5

Cover design by Jonathan Yamakami

All rights reserved.

Ellison, Stavans, and Hochstein LP

232 3rd Street, Suite A111

Brooklyn, NY 11215

[email protected]

www.restlessbooks.com