Copybook of the Great Master
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© COPYRIGHT by Arturo Ruiz Ortega 2012 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DEDICATION To Leonor Bustamante, Leonor Calderón and Marco Antonio Bustamante, who somehow believed in me when nobody else did. THE COPYBOOK OF THE GREAT MASTER BY ARTURO RUIZ ORTEGA ABSTRACT During Pinochet’s Dictatorship in Chile, Osvaldo sneaks into a The Astrum Aureum Society, a secret group of adepts of the occult. As he learns the magic secrets, he begins to question the alleged wisdom, and also realizes that the immense network of the society is its real super power. Osvaldo is forced to keep the charade until he makes it to become the Great Master of the whole organization. However, when he achieves the ultimate leadership of the society, he is already completely skeptical about the secret arcana, and convinced of the iniquity of the Astrum Aureum Society. Therefore he writes a memoir on a copybook: the copybook of the Great Master. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To Elise Levine, Andrew Holleran, David Keplinger, Roberto Brodsky, Stephanie Grant, Kyle Dargan, Rachel Snyder, Despina Kakoudaki, Linda Voris (special mention for her patience), Jeffrey Middents, Michael Wenthe, for being my guidance in reading and writing in the English Language. To Leonor Calderón and Marco Antonio Bustamante, for their unconditional support, and last, but not least, to my wife Leonor, for whom I can do everything, even some house keeping. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................................................................................................................... iii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ........................................................................................................................................ v PRELIMINARY EXPLANATION ................................................................................................................... 1 1 ............................................................................................................................................................................. 36 2 ............................................................................................................................................................................. 71 3 ............................................................................................................................................................................. 89 4 .......................................................................................................................................................................... 184 5 .......................................................................................................................................................................... 208 FURTHER INQUIRIES ................................................................................................................................ 228 iv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Agrippa Pentacle……………………………………………………………………………………………...123 Devil’s Pentacle……………………………………………………………………………………………......123 v PRELIMINARY EXPLANATION Roberto Brodsky said my book didn’t respect the conventions of its genre. I didn’t think about it as a genre book. Los Pájaros Negros (The Black Birds) was based on an old Chilean myth about some wizards who had the ability to become birds at night. It was true that it had some supernatural elements, but for me the book presented a vision of life. I wanted to think about the birds as elaborated symbols and metaphors, like Kafka’s beetle – was it a beetle? That was the insect on the cover of the book I read. However, I didn’t argue with him. After all he was presenting my book in Washington DC and in the most important Hispanic bookstore of the District: Pórtico Bookstore. Besides, Roberto was a great writer and having him present my book was an honor. That was the beginning of a proper career at last. It isn’t that I had had no success in my own country and even my small part of fame, but that didn’t mean money and some people began to be more impatient than me. That moment at Pórtico was the end of my career as the eccentric cousin, the bad son, the freak relative, and the freak in general. Part of me could not avoid listening to the advice of the family in general. “Arturo, I think you should find a real job and use your spare time for writing.” I don’t know how many people told me this. Of course I did it: I owned a café and then a pub, but the pub finally went bankrupt and I was ruined. My therapist – yes I ended with a therapist – said that it was a self-sabotage because I didn’t want to do what I was doing. Maybe he was right, but what I believed is that I 1 was just useless as entrepreneur. That night I was at the end of a very long trip, long in years, miles, and languages. I arrived to the land of professional writers, and I was a proper citizen. I didn’t need to ignore what other people had to say anymore. I was ready to abandon the narcissistic cover that I had to believe as if it were the Catholic dogma, even though I never believed it. I didn’t need more dogmas. I understood my former state as a war against the whole world. The strategy in that war was methodical narcissism. This consisted in the absurd belief in myself as if I was better than everybody else. Of course that belief did not make any sense. However, I acted as if I really believed that, even though I didn’t buy it. I stole the idea from the methodical doubt of Descartes. He didn’t believe there was a malign genius deceiving him, but he thought as if the genius was real. I finally had two teaching jobs directing literary workshops, and my book was in the bookstores. I won. As the methodical narcissism was not necessary anymore, I decided it was the time to start listening to what people had to say. They were saying good things about me at last. Well, I don’t know if “genre writer” was a good thing, but it was not as bad as “writer wannabe,” or “freak.” The launch of the book in DC was a quite an event. The Hispanic community was very active and my presentation was a good excuse for the Hispanics of the city to meet again. Brodsky’s generosity is something for which I will be in debt my whole life. Pórtico Bookstore is on New York Avenue in downtown DC. The store is also a “joint adventure of IDB and Fondo de Cultura de México.” That means that the owners of the bookstore are an international organization and the Government of Mexico. Therefore, the event had also diplomatic status. My embassy promised to 2 send a representative. Of course they didn’t, but I was authorized to put the emblem of the embassy on the invitations and some of the other embassies did send their representatives. That night, the streets were deserted as always after six thirty; the capital of the United States looked like a ghost town, and very proper for the presentation of a genre book: a book of horror. They served Chilean wine, of course, and also Argentinean in an act of Latin American unity and a Chilean act of treason: as proud wine producers, Chileans are not supposed to drink any foreign wine. However, that night most of the people drank without any political or patriotic concern. Yes, the war against the whole world was over: I had found my place in the world; therefore I thought that ignoring national loyalties was the proper way of drinking. Everything else we do is always full of political meaning. The ideas of a man can be judged by the way he dresses, and the ideas of a woman by the type of man she chooses. Only drinking can be sometimes apolitical. There was never any writer who didn’t like his own book’s launch. There was someone important – like Roberto Brodsky – talking only marvels about one’s work. I know some guys who suffer because they are naturally shy or afraid to talk in public, but that was definitively not my case. I have to admit that I really love being in the spot light for a while. Besides, after the whole thing was over, I would be back to my comfortable anonymity if I really needed it. Roberto continued talking about his impressions and my disrespect of the conventions of the genre. I thought that was good. Nobody wants to be a 3 conventional writer. I could accept genre writer, but not conventional. He also said that he enjoyed the book and that was the bottom line: nobody wants to be boring. After we both talked, people began to ask questions. As the war against the world was over, this time I listened. People happened to ask the strangest things of writers: “What is the difference between your poetry and your fiction?” somebody asked, a woman in her fifties. I was surprised because the only thing I was doing with my poetry was putting it on a blog. Nobody bought poetry in Chile and the same group of guys normally won the contests. I don’t want to suggest that poetry contests are fixed in Chile; I want to say it clearly. Besides, poets didn’t like me because I was also a scriptwriter and a novelist, so I wasn’t pure enough for them. I used to be also a ghostwriter, but they didn’t know that; if they knew, they would think I was the equivalent of a whore. Well, I was. This, however, wasn’t my answer. I don’t remember what I told her. I hope I was clever enough. “Are you always inspired by real life?” asked a young man who was barely old enough to be a man and not a boy. He was annoyingly young. He spoke Spanish, but his accent