Free Where the Bird Sings Best by Alejandro Jodorowsky

will it yield you.”
    Isaac closed his eyes and his mouth as he murmured with restrained euphoria, “He recited the last verses of the fourth chapter of the Book of Proverbs! This illiterate child died a saint! Hallelujah!” And with patient work, in short sentences and growls, he translated their son’s message to his desolate parents. “Do you understand, my friends? The child asked you to learn to read our sacred books. It’s time to leave off speaking like beasts. Recover your human intelligence.” After the lions ate the small body, Salvador and Estrella took their first Hebrew lesson. They stayed on for seven years, putting on shows in Verona, Bassano, Rovereto, etcetera. By the time they reached Venice, they knew how to read and write. Like them, the lions also spoke Hebrew correctly.
    “Yes, Jashe,” said her mother with severity. “The lions learned to speak Hebrew. If you want to draw some advantage from your history, you must accept not only this miracle but also many others. In memory, everything can become miraculous. All you have to do is wish it, and freezing winter turns into spring, miserable rooms fill up with golden tapestries, murderers turn good, and children who cry out of loneliness receive caring teachers who are really the children themselves moved back from adulthood to their early years. Yes, my daughter, the past is not fixed and unalterable. With faith and will we can change it, not erasing its darkness but adding light to it to make it more and more beautiful, the way a diamond is cut.
    The Venice ghetto, which could only be entered by way of a bridge with guarded doors at both ends, looked from the outside like a great fortress with all its exits blocked and its windows sealed. The Arcavis and Abravanel entered that tenebrous neighborhood. They found clean streets populated by tranquil Jews, their heads covered with the obligatory yellow yarmulkes. The luminous color emerging from their tallises made them look like a field of sunflowers.
    The arrival of the albino lions was taken as an announcement of the arrival of the Messiah. Isaac Abravanel suggested that they might hasten that arrival by adding the voices and magic of the beasts to their daily prayers. They were given lodging, and after midnight, when the doors at both ends of the bridge were locked so that no Israelite could leave the ghetto, in the secret space of the synagogue, the rabbis, in a trance, rocked back and forth more and more rapidly while the lions repeated in their cavernous and powerful voices the invocations and entreaties of the philosopher disguised as a clown. This ceremony was repeated for nine months.
    The fortress seemed to sleep, but in reality and without the guards realizing it, it escaped from Venice. Through the power of Kabbalistic words, its matter was frozen, and the astral substance arose out of the stones and human bodies. Invisible, the ghetto traversed the sky like a fleeing star and came to rest next to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.
    “Yes, Jashe, my daughter,” Sara Luz would say. “May that which we call God bless you. I beg you to believe this and tell it to your future husband, to your children, and to your grandchildren. Every night, for years, the Venice ghetto visited the Holy Land, demanding the arrival of the Messiah. At dawn, when the Marangona, the largest bell in San Marcos, rang, the spectral neighborhood rejoined its empty stones and its cataleptic inhabitants. When the two doors on the bridge were opened, life recovered its normal state.”
    Isaac never lost hope and communicated his enthusiasm to the men and the animals: “Tomorrow the world will be fixed.” The divine messenger would unite all religions, impart justice, give them peace, work, health, and felicity. He would lead them back to Israel.
    One night, he made so many efforts to hasten the great event, invoked it with such exaggerated fervor, demanded so much of the superior planes, employed such potent