The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography by Alejandro Jodorowsky Page A

economic problems went away the moment that Raquel returned home. When Saúl came looking for her my father kicked him out the door, using skills learned in his circus career.
     
    The marriage was annulled. Apparently, as I learned from our housekeeper, the new husband had turned out to be even more jealous than Jaime. Raquel had jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. Saúl’s jealousy was so great that he had forced my sister to wear ankle-length skirts, broad-brimmed hats that hid her face, and a corset that hid her breasts. She was allowed to go out into the street only for brief moments, measured by a stopwatch, and only to do the day’s shopping. Raquel, forbidden to have a social life, acquired a chick to keep her company. The bird followed her around the apartment, taking her for its mother. One morning, when she returned from the market, she found the chicken hanged with a shoelace. Another day, Saúl, thinking that his wife devoted herself too much to the piano, took advantage of a moment when she had gone out to buy aspirin at the chemist’s and sawed a leg off the noble instrument, making it fall on its side. He then explained to Raquel that ants had eaten away the leg. Four months after the wedding, my sister still had her hymen. Saúl’s excuse was that he could not attain an erection due to hemorrhoids, and he required his wife to anoint his anus with banana pulp every night.
     
    Jaime got out of his slump, paid his debts, bought delicious food, and resumed hiring criers to attract customers. Sara, for her part, began to degenerate, locking herself in the bathroom to smoke cigarettes in secret all day or spending hours making strawberry-filled pastries to send to her mother. Raquel, entrenched in her room, had decided to devote herself to poetry for evermore.
     
    With so much going on, who could care about me? For Raquel, Sara, and Jaime, I did not exist. I knew, through our maid, that Sara had gotten her tubes tied after my birth, declaring, “The tubes are traps!”
     
    With no photographs left to burn, I took a handful of ash, dissolved it into a glass of wine, and drank the grayish mixture. There was no doubt about it now. I had buried the past inside myself.
     
    Now I understood the abuses to which my family subjected me. I saw the precise structure of the trap. They accused me of being guilty of every wound that was dealt to me. The executioner unceasingly declared himself the victim. In an ingenious system of denial, by depriving me of information—by which I do not mean oral information, but rather life experiences that were largely nonverbal—they stripped me of all my rights and treated me like a beggar, with no possessions of my own, to whom their disdainful magnanimity had granted a fragment of life. Did my parents know what they were doing? Not in the least. Devoid of awareness, they did to me what had been done to them. Thus, as the emotional wrongs were handed down from one generation to the next, the family tree had accumulated a load of suffering that endured for centuries.
     
    I asked the Rebbe, “You, who seem to know everything, tell me what I can expect in this life, what is due to me, what my basic rights are.” I imagined the Rebbe answering me as follows:
     
    “First of all, you should have the right to be conceived by a father and mother who loved each other, through a sexual act crowned by mutual orgasm, so that your soul and flesh might have pleasure as their root. You should have the right to be neither an accident nor a burden, but an individual, hoped for and wished for with all the force of love, a fruit to give meaning to the couple, creating a family. You should have the right to be born with the sex that nature intended for you. (It is abusive to say, ‘We were hoping for a boy and you were a girl,’ or vice versa.) You should have the right to be acknowledged from the first month of gestation. At all times, the pregnant woman should accept that she is