Where the Bird Sings Best

303 Pages·2014·1.39 MB·English

by  Alejandro Jodorowsky [Jodorowsky

Where the Bird Sings Best
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Translated from the Spanish by Alfred MacAdam

Restless Books | Brooklyn, NY
Where the Bird Sings Best

“A bird sings best in its family tree.”
—Jean Cocteau
Prologue

While all the characters, places, and events in this book are real, the
chronological order has been altered. This reality was further transformed and
magnified until it achieved the status of myth. Our family tree is the trap that
limits our thoughts, emotions, desires, and material life, but it is also the treasure
that captures the greater part of our values. Aside from being a novel, this book
may, if it is successful, serve as an example that all readers can follow and, if
they exercise forgiveness, they too can transform family memory into heroic
legend.
—Alejandro Jodorowsky
My Father’s Roots

In 1903 Teresa, my paternal grandmother, got angry: first with God and then
with all the Jews of Ekaterinoslav (now Dnipropetrovsk, in Ukraine) who still
believed in Him despite the deadly flood of the Dnieper. Her beloved son José
perished in the flood. When the house began to fill up with water, the boy
pushed a chest out to the yard and climbed on top, but it didn’t float, because it
was stuffed with the thirty-seven tractates of the Talmud.
After the burial, carrying all the children she had left, four toddlers—Jaime and
Benjamín, Lola and Fanny—who were conceived more out of obligation than
passion, she ferociously invaded the synagogue with her husband hot on her
heels. She interrupted the reading of Leviticus 19: “Speak to the entire assembly
of Israel and say to them—”
“I’m the one who’s going to speak to them!” she bellowed.
She crossed over into the area forbidden to her as a woman and pushed aside
the men who, victims of an infantile terror, covered their bearded faces with
prayer shawls, silken tallises. She threw her wig to the floor, revealing a smooth
skull red with rage. Pressing her rough face against the Torah parchment, she
cursed at the Hebrew letters:
“Your books lie! They say that you saved the entire nation, that you parted the
Red Sea as easily as I slice my carrots, and yet you did nothing for my poor José.
That boy was innocent. What did you want to teach me? That your power is
limitless? That I already knew. That you are unfathomable? That I should test
my faith by simply accepting that crime? Never! That’s all well and good for
prophets like Abraham. They can raise the knife to their sons throats, but not a
poor woman like me. What right do you have to demand so much of me? I
respected your commandments, I thought of you constantly, I never hurt anyone,
I gave my family a holy home, and I prayed as I cleaned, I allowed my head to
be shaved in your name, I loved you more than I loved my parents—and you,
you ingrate, what did you do? Against the power of that death of yours, my boy
was like a worm, an ant, fly excrement. You have no pity! You are a monster!
You created a chosen people only to torture them! You’ve spent centuries
laughing, all at our expense! Enough! A mother who’s lost hope, and for that
reason doesn’t fear you, is talking to you: I curse you, I erase you, I sentence you
to boredom! Stay on in your Eternity, create and destroy universes, speak, and
thunder, I’m not listening any more! Once and for all: out of my house. You
deserve only contempt! Will you punish me? Cover me with leprosy, have me
chopped to pieces, have the dogs eat my flesh? It doesn’t matter to me. José’s
death has already killed me.”
No one said a word. José wasn’t the only victim. Others had just buried family
members and friends. My grandfather Alejandro, from whom I inherited part of
my name—because the other half came from my mother’s father, who’s name
was also Alejandro—dried with infinite care the tears that shone like transparent
scarabs on the Hebrew letters as he bowed again and again to the congregation;
his face crimson, he muttered apologies that no one understood and led Teresa
out, trying to help her with the four children. But she wouldn’t let go and hugged
them so tightly against her robust bosom that they began to howl. A hurricane
wind blew in, the windows opened, and a black cloud filled the temple. It was
every fly in the region fleeing a sudden downpour.
For Alejandro Levi (at that time our family name was Levi), his wife’s break
with Tradition was just one more nasty blow. Nasty blows were an insoluble part
of his being: he’d put up with them stoically throughout his life. They were like
an arm or an internal organ, a normal part of his reality. He wasn’t even three
when the Hungarian maid went mad. She walked into the bedroom where he
slept hugging his mother Lea and murdered her with an axe. The hot spurts dyed
his naked little body red. Five years later, in an outburst of hatred over the myth
that Christian children’s blood was used to make matzoh, a swarm of drunken
Cossacks poured into the streets of Ekaterinoslav: they burned the village, raped
women and children, and beat Jaime, Alejandro’s father, to a bloody pulp
because he refused to spit on the Book. The Jewish community of Zlatopol took
him in. They gave him a bed in the yeshiva. There they taught him two things: to
milk cows (at dawn) and to pray (for the rest of the day). That milk was the only
maternal scent he knew in his childhood, and to feel a feminine caress, he taught
the ruminants to lick his naked body with their huge, hot tongues.
Reciting the Hebrew verses was torture until he met the Rabbi in the
Interworld. It happened like this: Alejandro davened so much, chanting passages
he didn’t understand, that his feet were numb, his forehead boiling, and his
stomach filled with an acidity. He was afraid he would gasp like a fish out of
water and faint right there in front of his classmates, who understood the texts
(unless their fervent expression of faith was nothing more than an act to earn
them a good supper). He made a supreme effort, and, leaving his body to its
davening, he moved outside himself and found himself in a time that didn’t
elapse, in a space that didn’t extend. What a discovery that refuge was! There he
could languish in peace, doing nothing, only living. He felt intensely what it was
like to think without the constant burden of the flesh, without its needs, without
its various fears and fatigues, without the contempt or pity of others. He never
wanted to go back, he only wanted to remain in eternal ecstasy.
Piercing the wall of light, a man dressed in black like the rabbis, but with
Oriental eyes, yellow skin, and a beard with long, slack whiskers floated next to
him.
“You’re lucky, little man,” he said. “What happened to me won’t happen to
you. When I discovered the Interworld, there was no one there to advise me. I
felt as fine as you do and decided not to go back. A grave error. Abandoned in a
forest, my body was devoured by bears. And then, when I needed human beings
again, it was impossible to return. I was condemned to wander through the ten
planes of Creation without stopping. A sad bird of passage. If you let me plant
roots in your spirit, I’ll return with you. And to show my thanks, I’ll be able to
advise you—I know the Torah and the Talmud by heart—and you’ll never be
alone again. What do you say?”
What do you think this orphan boy was going to say? Thirsty for love, he
adopted the Rabbi, who was from the Caucasus and steeped in Kabbalah. And
seeking out the wise saints who, according to the Zohar, live in the other world,
he got lost in the labyrinths of Time. In those infinite solitudes, he, a
contumacious hermit, learned the value of human companionship, understood
why dogs always long for their masters. He discovered that others are a kind of
sustenance, that men without other men perish from spiritual hunger.
When he regained consciousness, he was stretched out on one of the school
benches. The teacher and his classmates were gathered around him, all pale,
because they thought he was dead. It seems his heart had stopped. They gave
him some sweet tea with lemon and sang to celebrate the miracle of his
resurrection.
Meanwhile, the Rabbi was dancing around the room. No one but my
grandfather could see or hear him. The joy of the disincarnated man to be once
again among Jews was so great that, for the first time, he took control of
Alejandro’s body and recited (in hoarse Hebrew) a psalm of thankfulness to the
Lord:
Thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.
Everyone panicked. The boy was possessed by a dybbuk! That devil would
have to be flushed from his gut! The Rabbi saw his error and leapt out of my
grandfather’s body. And no matter how hard Alejandro protested, trying to
explain that his friend promised never again to enter his body, they went ahead
with the exorcism. They rubbed him down with seven different herbs; they made
him swallow an infusion of cow manure; they bathed him in the Dnieper, whose
waters were many degrees below zero; and then, to warm him up, they gave him
a steam bath and thrashed him with nettles.
Even though they considered him cured, they still felt a superstitious mistrust
for a while. But as my grandfather grew they got used to his invisible
companion. They began to consult him: first about Talmudic interpretations,
then about animal illnesses, and then, seeing the positive results in the first two
instances, they moved on to human maladies. Finally, they made him a judge in
all their disputes. The entire village praised the Rabbi’s intelligence and
knowledge, but they had no regard whatsoever for Alejandro. Timid by nature
and essentially humble, he had no idea how to capitalize on his position as an
intermediary. People invited the Rabbi, not him. Whenever he came into the
synagogue, they’d ask for the Rabbi, because from time to time the man from the
Caucasus would disappear to visit other dimensions, where he’d converse with
the holy spirits.
If the Rabbi accompanied him, they’d seat him in the first row. If not, no one
bothered to speak to him or offer him a chair. The man from the Caucasus had