The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography Read Free

was fanning out like a ship’s wake. “He was playing on the slippery rocks. The rubber soles on his shoes made him slip. He fell into the sea and was battered against the rocks. That’s how the imprudent boy drowned.” Imprudent he may have been, but it was my generosity that killed him. The next day, everyone at the school went to lay flowers at the site of the accident. On those precipitous rocks, pious hands had built a miniature chapel out of cement. Inside it was a photograph of Carlitos and the red shoes. My classmate, having departed this world too early, without accomplishing the mission that God gives to every incarnated soul, had become an animita (little soul). Trapped in this state, he was now devoted to bringing about the miracles that believers requested of him. Many candles were lit behind the magical shoes that had once brought death but were now dispensers of health and prosperity.
     
    Suffering, consolation; consolation, suffering. The cycle has no end. When I brought the shoe shiner’s box to his parents they hastily placed it in the hands of Luciano, the youngest brother. That same afternoon, the boy began shining shoes in the town square.
     
    The fact is that during this era, when I was a child of an unknown race (Jaime did not call himself a Jew, but a Chilean son of Russians), no one ever spoke to me outside of books. My father and mother, at work in the shop from eight in the morning until ten at night, put their faith in my literary abilities and left me to educate myself. And what they saw I could not do for myself, they asked the Rebbe to do.
     
    Jaime knew very well that his father, my grandfather Alejandro, had been expelled from Russia by the Cossacks, arriving in Chile not by his own choice but only because a charitable society shipped him where there was room for him and his family. Completely uprooted, speaking only Yiddish and rudimentary Russian, he descended into madness. In his schizophrenia he invented the character of a Kabbalist sage whose body had been devoured by bears during one of his voyages to another dimension. Laboriously making shoes without the aid of machinery, he conversed constantly with his imaginary friend and master. When he died, Jaime inherited this master. Even though Jaime knew full well that the Rebbe was a hallucination, the effect was contagious. The specter began to visit him each night in his dreams. My father, a fanatical atheist, endured the invasion of this character as a form of torture and did his best to exorcise the phantom—by stuffing my head full of it as if it were real. I was not taken in by this ploy. I always knew that the Rebbe was imaginary but Jaime, perhaps thinking that by naming me Alejandro he had made me as crazy as my grandfather, would tell me, “I don’t have time to help you with that homework, go ask the Rebbe,” or more often still, “Go play with the Rebbe!” This was convenient for him because in his misinterpretation of Marxist ideas he had decided not to buy me any toys. “Those objects are the products of the evil consumer economy. They teach you to be a soldier, to turn life into a war, to believe that all manufactured things are a source of pleasure through having miniature versions of them. Toys turn a child into a future assassin, an exploiter, not to mention a compulsive buyer.” The other boys had toy swords, tanks, lead soldiers, train sets, stuffed animals, but I had nothing. I used the Rebbe as a toy, lending him my voice, imagining his advice, letting him guide my actions. Later, having developed my imagination, I expanded my animated conversations. I endowed the clouds with speech, as well as the rocks, the sea, some of the trees in the town square, the antique cannon outside the city hall, furniture, insects, hills, clocks, and the old people with nothing left to wait for who sat like wax sculptures on the benches in the town square. I could speak with all things, and everything had something to say to