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

piece with his tweezers, exactly as he did with his stamps. Of course, I held back from crying. Satisfied, he applied alcohol to the red, flayed living flesh. New scabs formed by the next morning. My allowing him to peel them away without complaint became a ritual that brought me closer to a distant God. When my knees began to feel better and the pink hue of new skin heralded the end of the treatment, I took Jaime’s hand, led him out to the courtyard, asked him to climb the wall with me, showed him the mad child, and pointed to my knees. He understood without any other gesture being necessary. In those days there was no hospital in Tocopilla. The only doctor was an affable, plump man called Ángel Romero. My father dismissed his current salesman—a boxer who was pummeling a mannequin decorated with a large dollar sign—and accompanied by Dr. Romero asked Mr. Omar’s permission to enter to visit the sick boy. Jaime paid for the consultation and made the 100-kilometer journey to Iquique to buy medicine with a prescription from the doctor. He returned to the Omars’ armed with disinfectants, tweezers, and the basin in which he soaked off his stamps. With infinite gentleness, he soaked and softened the scabs that covered the poor boy, and peeled them off one by one. After two months of such assiduous visits, the younger Turk regained his normal appearance.
     
    It should be understood that all these things took place over a period of ten years. My relating them all together may make it seem as if my childhood was full of bizarre events, but this was not the case. These were small oases in an infinite desert. The climate was hot and dry. During the day an implacable silence descended from the sky, gliding in from the wall of barren mountains that held us against the sea, rising from a terrain made up of small rocks without a speck of fertile soil. When the sun went down there were no birds to sing, no trees for the wind to blow through, no crickets to chirp. There was only the odd vulture, the braying of a distant burro, the howls of a dog sensing death approaching, the seagulls skirmishing, and the constant crashing of the ocean waves whose hypnotic repetition one would eventually cease to hear. And the cold nights were even more silent: a thick mist, the camanchaca, gathered on the tops of the mountains to form an impenetrable milky wall. Tocopilla seemed like a prison full of corpses.
     
    One night, when Jaime and Sara were out at the cinema, I awoke in a terrified sweat. The silence, an invisible reptile, had come in through the door and was licking the feet of my bed frame. I knew that I was in danger; the silence wanted to enter me through my nostrils, settle in my lungs, and drain the blood from my veins. To frighten it away, I began to scream. My cries were so intense the windowpanes began to vibrate, buzzing like wasps, which increased my terror. And then the Rebbe arrived. I knew that he was nothing but a simple image, and his apparition was not enough to prevent universal muteness. I needed the presence of friends, but what friends? Pinocchio—large-nosed, pale, circumcised—did not have friends. (In this torrid climate, sexuality came early. The firemen’s barracks was near our shop; on an old wall in their big courtyard, hanging like the strings of a gigantic harp, were ropes that served to hold up the hoses when they were cleaned and set out to dry after being used to put out fires. The watchman’s sons and their friends, a band of eight young rascals, invited me to climb twenty meters up to the top of the wall. Once there, out of sight of adult eyes, they formed a circle and began to masturbate at an age when the emission of sperm was still something legendary. Wishing to fit in, I did the same. Their immature phalli, covered by foreskins, rose up like brown missiles. Mine, which was pale, showed itself without hiding its wide head. They all noticed the difference and burst out laughing. “He’s got a