Free The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography by Alejandro Jodorowsky

my grandmother, sanctioned Benjamín’s love affair and acquiesced to living with him and his disgraceful (from Jaime’s point of view) lover.
     
    I believe that my father blamed all this on the shoemaker. When people wanted to get rid of a pharaoh in ancient Egypt, instead of condemning him to death they would set about erasing his name from all the papyruses and seals. By thus extirpating his memory, they condemned him to the true death that is oblivion. When a man hates his father, he avoids reproducing in order to stop the name from being passed on or else changes his name.
     
    I suppose that Jaime saw my sister as an only child. I arrived two years later as a surprise: no one had wanted me to come, I was a usurper in the world; my presence was an abuse. I brought with me the threat that the hated name might survive. A second hypothesis, which does not negate the first, is that I was the screen onto which Jaime projected the anger he held toward Benjamín, whose perversion, treachery, and appropriation of their mother were difficult things to accept. He had to regurgitate this resentment, to take it out on someone. He brought me up to be a coward, a weakling. By mocking my feminine side, he encouraged it to develop; from his violent example I learned to detest machismo. Just like his brother, who lived in a house full of books (mostly romance novels and books on topics related to forbidden sexuality), he taught me to love reading by signing me up at the city library and later, in place of toys, letting me buy whatever books I wanted. I ended up living surrounded by four walls of books, like my uncle. Jaime never liked to use my name, and when he decided not to call me Pinocchio he called me Benjamincito as if by mistake . Countless times he would declare, “You are the last Jodorowsky,” thus subtly inoculating me with sterility.
     
    Another hypothesis is that he ignored me because of my curved nose. Being Russian bothered him (he had arrived in Chile at the age of five), and being Jewish even more so. He wanted roots. Anti-Semitism raged in Chile like a fire in a straw loft: the Guggenheims had taken over the saltpeter and copper mines, and later the banks, prospering from the workers’ destitution. In the slightest dispute over politics, business, or simply in the street, someone would shout at him, “Shit Jew! Outsider!” His nose was straight, and the prominent curve of mine caused him constant shame. Perhaps this is why I have no memories of going for walks with only him, going into a bakery or cinema alone with him. Whenever we all went out he would walk between my mother and sister, one of them on each arm, and I behind . . . I would sit in the darkest corner of the restaurant table . . . and in the circus gallery I would sit far from their box seat, near to the ring. In fact, my family was a triangle—father, mother, daughter—plus an intruder.
     
    It is also possible that Jaime, having lost his father at the age of ten, remained a child due to the trauma, never growing up emotionally just as his penis never grew. No one had ever loved him. Teresa, the ideal mother to whom he aspired once he took over the place of his father, had betrayed him. He could not trust grown women. The proof: after his wedding night with Sara there were no bloodstains on the sheets. He had been duped; the bride was not a virgin. Without a penny in his pockets Jaime left his wife, whom he had gotten pregnant, and went to work as a miner for a nitrate company. A year later, in that stifling place where the salt devoured all color, Sara came to search for him with the keys to a shop in Tocopilla and a baby girl in her arms. Jaime, upon seeing his daughter, saw his own soul. For the first time, he felt loved: those large green eyes were a mirror that improved the depreciated image he had of himself. Raquelita, forever a virgin, only his, no one else’s, could see him as valiant, powerful, handsome, triumphant. Sara, with her