The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography Read Online Free PDF Page A

sky-blue wallpaper. During that month, little by little, I drew an elephant with my boogers. No one knew, for they never entered to clean or make my bed. At the end of the month, my pachyderm was just about finished. At the time of my departure, as Moishe was about to go back to Tocopilla with me, my grandmother came into the room to retrieve the sheets she had lent me. She did not see a beautiful elephant floating in the infinite sky; she saw a horrible collection of boogers stuck to her precious wallpaper. Her wrinkles turned a shade of violet, her hunched back straightened up, her amiable voice changed into the roar of a lion, her glassy eyes turned into balls of lightning. “Disgusting boy, pig, ingrate! We’ll have to paper the whole room again! You ought to die of shame! I do not want such a grandson as you!”
     
    “But Grandmother, I didn’t mean to get anything dirty, I just wanted to make a nice elephant. It just needed a tusk, then it would have been finished.” This made her even more furious. She thought I was making fun of her. She grabbed a handful of my hair and began pulling, with the intention of yanking it out. Gandhi intervened, holding her back with gentle firmness. The odious joker Isidoro, behind Jashe, waved his insecticide bomb in my direction, agitating it back and forth like a violating phallus.
     
    I was required to assist in removing the wallpaper, for which they used rubber gloves to protect their hands. Then they put the pieces in the middle of the courtyard shared by the group of small houses, sprayed them with alcohol, and made me throw matches on them until they were entirely burned. I saw my dear elephant consumed by flame. A lot of neighbors appeared at the windows. Jashe rubbed the ashes on my nose and fingers and brought me, thus dirtied, to the train. Once we were far away from Santiago, Moishe moistened his white handkerchief with spit and cleaned my face and hands. He was mystified. “You seem numb, my boy. You don’t cry or even complain.”
     
    I boarded the Horacio for a three-day voyage and disembarked in Tocopilla without ever having said a word. When I saw my mother, I ran to her and began to cry convulsively, buried between her enormous breasts. “You jerk! Why did you make me go?” When I saw my father fifteen minutes later I held back my sobs, dried my eyes, and faked a smile.
     
    “I was there, seeing the mental limitations of these people,” the old Alejandro said to me. “They saw the material world, the pieces of snot, but the art, the beauty, the magical elephant, those things were lost to them. And yet, rejoice in this suffering: thanks to it, you have met me. Ecclesiastes says, ‘The greater one’s wisdom, the greater one’s pain.’ But I tell you, only he who knows pain can approach wisdom. I cannot tell you that I have achieved wisdom; I am no more than a step along the path of this spirit who is traveling toward the end of time. Who will I be three centuries from now? Or what will I be? What forms will serve as my vessel? In ten million years, will my consciousness still need a body? Will I still have to use sensory organs? After hundreds of millions of years, will I continue dividing the unity of the world into sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile images? Will I be an individual? A collective being? Once I have known all of the universe, or universes, when I have arrived at the end of all time, when the expansion of matter stops and with it I begin the journey back toward the point of origin, will I dissolve in it? Will I become the mystery that surrounds time and space? Will I discover that the Creator is a memory with no present or future? You, a child, I, an old man, will we not have been merely memories, insubstantial images, without having had the least reality? For you, I do not exist yet, for me you do not exist anymore, and when our story is told, he who tells it will be nothing but a string of words escaping out of a pile of