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

wimp, learn to be a macho revolutionary and stop clinging to your mop of hair like a bourgeois whore!” How wrong Jaime was: losing that mane of hair, the subject of so much mockery, was an enormous relief. But I cried because losing my curls also meant losing the love of my mother.
     
    Back at the shop I threw my coppery pebble into the toilet, pulled the chain, and ran proudly to the town square to make fun of the Theosophist, pressing my index finger to my temple as my sole response to his fervent words.
     
    One might think that during my childhood I was more influenced by Jaime than by Sara. However, this was not the case. She, dazzled by my father’s charisma, applauded and repeated everything he said. Severity was the basis of the education I was to receive in order to grow up a man and not a woman; after the Japanese barber cut my hair, my mother applied herself diligently to this process. Tied down to the store all day, she had little or no time to devote to me. My socks had holes, and a circle of flesh was visible on each heel. Because of their round shape and color, the children likened them to peeled potatoes. While playing, if I wanted to run in the yard, my cruel peers would point to my heels and call out snidely, “I can see his potatoes!” This humiliated me and obliged me to stay still, keeping my feet in the shadows. When I asked Sara to buy me new socks, she grumbled, “It’s a useless expense, you’ll tear them the first day you wear them.”
     
    “But mama, everyone in school is making fun of me. If you love me, mend them for me, please.”
     
    “All right, if you need me to prove I love you, I’ll do it.”
     
    She took her sewing box, threaded a needle, repaired the holes with great dedication, and showed me the socks, perfectly mended.
     
    “But mama, you used flesh colored thread! Look, I put them on and it looks like you can still see my potatoes! They’ll keep making fun of me!”
     
    “I mended them right away. I proved I love you by doing the useless work you asked me to do. Now you have to show me that you have a warrior spirit. Those children being mean shouldn’t affect you. Show off your heels proudly, and be thankful for the teasing because it makes your spirit stronger.”
     

     
Jaime, my father, and Sara Felicidad, my mother. He is seated to hide the fact that he is much shorter than her.
     

     
    It is amazing what cultural richness was present in that small city isolated in the arid north of Chile. Before the crash of 1929 and the invention of artificial saltpeter by the Germans, this region, including Antofagasta and Iquique, was considered the land of “white gold.” Inexhaustible supplies of potassium nitrate, excellent for making fertilizer but above all, explosives, attracted a multitude of immigrants. In Tocopilla there were Italians, English, North Americans, Chinese, Yugoslavians, Japanese, Greeks, Spaniards, Germans. Each ethnicity lived behind high mental walls. And yet, in bits and pieces, I was able to gain things from these diverse cultures. The Spanish brought little books of Calleja’s fairy tales to the library; the English brought Masonic and Rosicrucian treatises; Pampino Brontis, the Greek baker, invited children to come and listen to his verse translation of the Odyssey every Sunday morning in order to promote his rose jam–filled pastries. The Japanese practiced archery on the beach, instilling in us a love of the martial arts. From time to time, the American women would show their generosity by offering sausages and refreshments in the city hall to the children of the men whom their husbands plunged into misery. Thanks to them, I became conscious of social injustice.
     
    The day my father announced out of nowhere, “Tomorrow we’re leaving here. We’re going to live in Santiago,” I thought I was going to die. I woke up with a horrible rash. My skin was entirely covered with hives, I was delirious with fever, and the boat was leaving