Free Where the Bird Sings Best by Alejandro Jodorowsky Page B

and import textiles, salt, wine, rice, honey, sheep, horses, pickled fish, perfumes—just about anything. The years went by, as did the births and deaths of Salvadors and Estrellas, but they could never free themselves from nostalgia for their lions. The red shoes, which the men never stopped using, aroused mistrust in their business associates. That outlandish footwear showed them the Arcavis were not normal Jews, and little by little they stopped dealing with them.
    The Arcavis found themselves obliged to transport a cargo of prostitutes to China. They sailed from Constantinople intending to cross the Black Sea, disembark on the Caucasus coast, and march across the continent to Shanghai. Unfortunately a storm wrecked them. Salvador did not know how to swim, but since Estrella was a strapping lass of 280 pounds, he simply floated on his back and let her swim, pulling him along by the hair.
    To keep despair at bay, Estrella mentally reviewed the seventy-eight cards, which she knew by heart. She swam for two days without stopping. Finally, they washed up on a Crimean beach. Salvador left the water with a thirst for God. He went down on his knees in the sand and tried to pray, only to realize he knew no prayers, that money was occupying Adonai’s space. There was nothing Jewish left in him. He had no definition, no race, and the world was fading away around him to such an extent that his penis was nothing more than a useless bit of skin: he’d been with his wife for more than ten years without a child resembling him being born. Recognizing his sterility, he wept so passionately that he seemed to vomit his liver.
    Estrella, tossed among some rocks after her monumental effort, almost dying of fatigue, saw her husband drowned in himself, scrutinizing himself with the anguish of a castrato, not even bothering to find out if she was alive. She used a remnant of energy to extract the violet leather bag from between her bosoms and throw the Tarot, with perfect accuracy, at Salvador’s head. The jolt restored him to reality. He compassionately ran to his wife, his homeland, his identity. He took her in his arms, licked the sand off her face, kissed her hands, caressed her icy body. She did not try to react. She let herself slip, sighing with relief, toward death.
    “Now that you have been saved, Salvador, understand that I have to die. God made me enter your life with the sole purpose of showing you how deeply you’d sunk. You were an absurd repetition, a bone without marrow, a man without traditions. Study, seek the Truth, and when you find it, you will see next to it the woman who befits you, the mother of your children.”
    He buried the voluminous dead woman right there and with her what little money he had left. Without knowing why, he traveled on foot, to Lithuania, as if pulled by a magnet, begging for food in Jewish communities. One dark night, covered with dust after having walked hundreds of miles, he knocked on the door of Gaon Elijah of Vilna, a great teacher of the Talmud and of Kabbalah.
    No one opened the door. He waited five minutes and knocked again. No answer. For half an hour more he knocked. A strong wind was blowing, rustling the leaves of the trees with a metallic whisper. Salvador could hear through all that noise another murmur, also continuous, coming from within the school. It was the sound of human voices lamenting. He pushed the door, which opened easily, and made his way along a frozen corridor. The lamentations grew louder. He passed through several rooms with clean hearths, as if no one, despite it being winter, wanted to use them. The collective sobbing became intense. He went up a staircase and entered a vast salon with pews arranged in synagogue style, where a hundred or so rabbis, seated with their bare feet submerged in pails of icy water, were praying, weeping, tearing their black vestments. In the center of the classroom, so cold that vapor clouds came out of every mouth, on top of a pedestal