Albina and the Dog-Men

By Alejandro Jodorowsky and Alfred MacAdam

“Deeply psychological and mysterious, the book will stimulate the imagination of the reader's mind to the extreme.” —Marina Abramovic

“In his latest novel, Jodorowsky builds on his multi-decade long assault of the public imagination…. a fantastical and genre-defying parable of love and friendship…. At its core, Albina and the Dog-Men is a love story about two people committed to one another's survival and to discovering their potential. And, as with life, it is sometimes only through the weathering of a storm that our true capacities are made clear.” —NPR Books

When two women—an amnesiac goddess and her protector, a leather-tough woman called Crabby—arrive in a Chilean desert town, Albina’s otherworldly allure and unfettered sensuality turn men into wild beasts. Chased by a clubfooted corrupt cop, evil corporate overlords, giant-hare-riding narcos, and Himalayan cultists, Albina and Crabby must find a magical cactus that will cure Albina and the men’s monstrous affliction before the town consumes itself in an orgy of lust and violence.

Albina and the Dog-Men is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s darkly funny, shocking, and surreal hybrid of mystical folktale, road novel, horror story, and social parable, ultimately uniting in a universal story of love against the odds and what makes us human. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Restless Books
• Release date: May 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781632060693

Alejandro Jodorowsky

Alejandro Jodorowsky(Tocopilla, Chile 1929), artista múltiple, poeta, novelista, director de teatro y cine de culto (El Topo o La Montaña Sagrada), actor, creador de cómics (El Incal o Los Metabarones), tarólogo y terapeuta, ha creado dos técnicas que han revolucionado la psicoterapia en numerosos países. La primera de ellas, la Psicogenealogía, sirvió de base para su novela Donde mejor canta un pájaro, y la segunda, la Psicomagia, fue utilizada por Jodorowsky en El niño del jueves negro. Su autobiografía, La danza de la realidad, desarrolla y explica estas dos técnicas.

Book preview

Contents

Part One ∙ The Lady Returns

The Rain’s Gift

In Search of the Miraculous

The Visionary Hatter

The Town Without Death

Bees, Parrots, and Dogs

The Antidote

Part Two ∙ The Road of the Soul

The First Day

The Second Day

The Third Day

The Fourth Day

Part Three ∙ The Sparkling Morning Star

The Feathered Traitor

Road of Life, Road of Death

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Part One

The Lady Returns

Your lips and your breasts are a honeycomb of anguish

And your mature belly is a cluster of grapes hung

from the colossal arbor of death… Like a yellow dog,

autumns follow you and, wrapped in fluvial and astronomic

gods, you are eternity in a drop of horror.

Pablo de Rokha, Cosmogony

1

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The Rain’s Gift

Like all Chileans, Crabby spoke in a singsong way, her voice vibrating in her nose. She laughed at everything, even celebrity deaths, and made cruel jokes. She drank red wine until she collapsed in snores, only to wake up barefoot because someone had stolen her shoes. She ate empanadas and sea urchin tongues in green sauce seasoned with fresh, extra-hot chili. Whenever the cops beat a political agitator to death, she turned a blind eye, pretending not to notice. Actually, she wasn’t Chilean but Lithuanian.

She landed in Valparaíso when she was two, pulled along by her mother, a fat redhead who spoke only Yiddish, and her father a tall (almost seven-foot), skinny fellow as light on his feet as a bird. His profession was the most pedestrian imaginable: callus remover. Using prayer, he made the calluses on people’s feet fall off. Since his name was Abraham and his wife’s name was Sarah, he dreamed—for too many years—of having a son he could name Isaac, which in Hebrew means he laughs. After anguished efforts, ten months of gestation, anemia, forceps, a cesarean, a strangling umbilical chord, Sarah finally gave birth to a daughter. Abraham stubbornly insisted on naming her Isaac, but very early in life, even before she began to walk, the girl would burst into an angry fit of wailing the instant she heard that persistent Isaac. Only a teaspoon of honey would calm her down.

Intelligent, she could read by the age of four. She rejected the Ladino translation of the Torah, so her first book was Paul Féval’s The Hunchback. She so adored the character Henri de Lagardère that she began to walk hunched over, her legs spread, the tips of her shoes pointing in opposite directions, and her arms bent at right angles. No one bothered to correct her posture. The only thing they did manage to do was nickname her Crabby. She tossed out Isaac, which would have destined her to suffering the world’s laughter, and instead identified with her nickname, accepting the idea of being an aggressive crab separated from others by a hard shell.

By the time she was eleven, she’d broken a dozen classmates’ noses, so no school would accept her. Between his murderous chanting away of calluses and his davening in the synagogue, Abraham had no time to worry over his daughter’s education. Crabby’s school was the street. She learned a series of professions, among others: re-selling cheap watches for three times their original price under the pretext that they were stolen, painting the hooves of the horses used by funeral parlors black, washing and combing the dogs of high-class prostitutes, and manufacturing smuggled whiskey out of tea, crude sugar, and drugstore alcohol. When she was thirteen, she lost her father and menstruated for the first time. She mounted his unvarnished wood coffin as if it were a horse and rode along, staining it red. Sarah, seconded by her instantaneous new husband, kicked her out of the house.

Crabby, her face transformed into a bitter mask, set out on a tour of Chile, a country as long, thin, and foreign as her father. She ended up in the north, in Iquique, a bone-dry port, where the workers in the nitrate and copper mines would come down from the mountains to spend their weekly salary without noticing the rotten dog stench that poured out of the fishmeal plants and infected the streets. Crabby began to work as a maid in the Spanish Club, an Arabian-style building designed by an architect whose only knowledge of Islam came from the illustrations in the expurgated nineteenth-century French translation of The Thousand and One Nights. Since her hunchback gait upset the members’ stomachs, the management dispatched her to the lavatories. After a year, she began to sprout a beard. Unwilling to obey the requests of the Aragonese manager, she refused to shave. When the requests were accompanied by grimaces of disgust and insults, Crabby presented her resignation in the form of a punch that sent the brash Aragonese rolling down the stairs. She also beat up two waiters who had the misguided idea of avenging the manager, who lay on the Churrigueresque tile floor howling in pain from some broken ribs. While working in the lavatory, she had made and saved money selling the honorable members cocaine cut with talcum powder. She used her capital to set up a shop for buying and selling gold. She also became the local dentist. After the drunken miners had spent all they’d earned in six months on a weekend orgy, they would line up outside her little shop insisting on selling her the gold crowns that adorned their teeth so that they could go on drinking.

Two years went by, two years of drought. Then, suddenly, the mountains awakened wearing clouds for hats. The sky turned black, thunder roared, lightning flashed, and a deluge commenced with raindrops the size of pigeon eggs. The tempest went on for three days without stopping. No one could go out because the drops were so forceful they punched holes in umbrellas. Locked away in her shop, in the semidarkness, with no more beer to drink, Crabby suddenly, and for the first time in her life, realized she was alone.

The skeleton of her solitude appeared before her: impersonal, heavy, and cold. And then she saw flesh gather around those bones, forming a body for which she felt not the slightest tenderness. It reacted to her disdain by tightening itself around her from her stomach to her throat to deliver her a dull, constant pain. It was like having her soul pierced by a nail, in the depths of a world transformed into jelly, where she was sentenced to drown for all eternity. Who am I? Can someone tell me? How could they, since no one has ever seen me? It hurts, it hurts! I am a wound awaiting the gaze of another in order to heal. A frog who will never turn into a princess. A freak, who when she wants to give, only gives the gift of disgust. The world’s indifference is my punishment! She clung to the wall, sliding left and right, absorbing the darkness of the place through every pore until she felt she was black, a shadow that wanted to cry like a dog in the absence of a body to master it.

The drops exploded noisily on the tin roof. Nevertheless, a scream, so high-pitched that it became a long needle, pierced the rain’s atrocious drumming. Only a completely feminine throat could howl like that. Crabby, not knowing why, felt herself the mother of that female under threat of death and, waving the iron bar she used to frighten off hostile drunks, ran out onto the street.

A mantle of gray mist hid the sky, forming thick folds. In the distance, a pale phantom began to take shape. It came toward her, running, a woman with extremely white skin, as white as flour, salt, marble, a shroud, or milk. It passed through the wall of water and fell into Crabby’s arms, shaking like a wounded albatross. It was as tall as her father, with powerful legs and buttocks and enormous breasts; she was very young, but her mad blinking revealed, beneath white eyelids, the pink irises of an old woman. The howling wind tangled her long white hair, baring a shoulder that had received a deep bite. Sniffing excitedly, foaming at the mouth, growling, three Asiatic monks wearing saffron robes ran toward them. The white woman hid behind Crabby’s back, using her as a shield.

Crabby whirled the iron bar. Hold it right there, you fucking Chinamen! One more step, and I’ll smash your skulls. The monks stopped for an instant, never taking their eyes off the marmoreal flesh the skinny body of her defender could not hide. Then they revealed the hands they’d been hiding in their sleeves. Thirty long fingernails, as sharp as knives, whistled menacingly. Crabby, unable to stop the attack, smacked her bar on the street: May the devil swallow them! With a colossal roar, the earth obeyed. A crack opened, and the mad creatures fell howling into the abyss. The enormous maw, now satisfied, closed. The rain stopped, the sun came out, ready to reign for another couple of years, and to celebrate the return of light, thousands of small parrots, forming a multicolored cloud, chorusing syllables Crabby interpreted as Albina, Albina, Albina…

The enormous woman, expressing her gratitude in infantile sobs, gave no sign of leaving. There seemed to be no other place in the world for her but Crabby’s arms and bosom. Crabby led her into the shop, sat her down in the armchair, and, with a tenderness never before seen in her, began to clean out the bite.

2

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In Search of the Miraculous

Albina (that’s what Crabby named her, obeying the parrots’ message) had lost her memory. Quite often she’d utter sentences in a strange language that sounded like "Om badzra puspe ah hum svaha or Byhams dan sñin rje btan." At the beginning, Crabby had to bathe her, feed her, teach her to walk and use the bathroom. She learned quickly, and by the end of six months, she could speak Spanish and take care of her needs properly. Nevertheless, there was still an innocent look in her pink eyes that suggested she was seeing everything, absolutely everything, for the first time.

Crabby asked around, but no one recalled having seen any Asian ships docked in the port. Was it possible one could have entered the port at the start of the deluge, while the workers took refuge, and left just when the rain was letting up? Who knows? Crabby was destined never to unravel the mystery. The only trace of the past on her protégée was a tattoo emblazoned at the beginning of the deep crevice separating her buttocks: an asp held in place on the letter T by three nails.

During work hours, Crabby dressed her pearly friend as a nurse. By waving two silver paper fans, she could waft a breeze onto the sweaty miners. Stunned, their eyes fixed on the mountains bulging from the linen uniform, they allowed not only their gold crowns to be pulled but also their teeth along with them. A woman as pale as Albina had never been seen before in those regions where the sun turned even the toughest skin into leather in a few hours. At the end of the afternoon, Crabby would emit her mandrill shrieks and wave her iron bar around to expel the drunken gluttons who wanted to go on in the ecstasy produced by Albina’s protuberances. She would

Reviews for Albina and the Dog-Men

[signoraedie_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

While not an easy read, I appreciated the glimpse of growing up in the Filipino Culture. Reading about her sexual abuse was difficult.