Necropolis

by Santiago Gamboa

  From there, he took me to the infirmary and didn’t leave my side for the next three weeks, which was how long I was there, I’d been beaten up so bad, how does that grab you, my friends? it’s a miracle I’m alive, but something even worse was to follow, which was that in those same weeks Walter helped me cleanse not only my soul but also my cells, which had been completely colonized by smack, my narcotic love, the serpent of ice that had grabbed me by the balls or, to be more precise, by the inner lining of my balls, apologies to the purists, and what can I tell you about that cleansing, my friends, it was as if I was dead, cut up into pieces, labeled and frozen in the refrigerator of a factory ship, as if I was in flames and tied to a turning post, as if I was falling into the void and drowning in the ocean, I felt cold and lost my teeth from chattering, I saw monsters with hooks ripping my flesh, I saw Satan himself tempting me, disguised as a Puerto Rican transvestite dancing tropipop, but at the end of it, my brothers, when my blood cooled and I got back down to earth I realized that I was full of peace inside, as if the particles of the air had stopped damaging me, and I started prostrating myself and praying, and Walter, who came every morning to read me the Gospels, talked to me about the life of Jesus and made me realize why all of us who live in this filthy highway parking lot called the Earth have to be grateful to Him, and taught me that I could be like him, save others, win over to Him those who didn’t have the strength to do it alone.

  When I left the infirmary, I said to him, Father Walter, I want to be in your Church, to be one of your people, and he said, you already are, José, it was the eye of God that looked at us and showed you the way, let us give thanks that we met and are both already in His militia, and then he shook my hand and looked at me intensely and I felt life stream into me through all the cavities in my face, as if shot through a powerful hose, as if I had done ten lines of coke in one go, and I think my body started healing at that moment, because I felt this enormous desire to jump up and down and climb the walls and even the ceiling, it was the greatest high I’d ever had and the beginning of my new life, my friends, because with Walter’s power and influence and lawyers, after six months I was out again, free and back at work, first in the mansion in Charleston and then in the Ministry of Mercy’s house in South Beach, because he said I had to help him in the alma mater, Miami, where heaven and hell lay in wait on the same corner, where Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Big Master, could meet Satan the Traitor in any bar or any grocery store, that was how things were in this city at the end of days, and when I got there and felt the heat of the sun and saw the shiny asphalt and smelled gasoline and frying oil I started crying, my eyes filled with big tears, remembering hard times, the abandonment and the fear, the wish that something happy would happen just once, hazy memories of that life filled with knives and syringes, and I cried because for the first time I felt that I’d be more useful alive than dead, and because I’d found a path I was ready to follow, by the side of Walter and Miss Jessica, by the side of the Everlasting Father, the Big Enchilada, and his son, who were both tattooed on my heart.

  At night I would cry again for all the years I had wasted that wonderful thing called life, take note, my friends, especially the younger ones, and sometimes my tears were tears of anger and I would scratch my arms until they bled and bang my head on the floor, because I thought, José Maturana, what a piece of shit you are and what undeserved luck has fallen from the sky, damn it, and I swear to you that in those days I was so angry with myself that I came close to slashing my wrists, which was what I deserved for being scum and an opportunist, but I didn’t do it, I took a deep breath and let time pass, and stayed in my corner, in silence, praying and devoted to God.

  After a few weeks’ training, Walter and I started in earnest, preaching the word in prisons, which was my natural modus vivendi, and there I started to realize that the world and each one of us, in reality, were the great stage where a struggle with knives and bullets was taking place between good and evil, because in more than ten years of visiting prisons I saw a bit of everything, the hosts of the Big Enchilada triumphant, of course, but also those of Satan, who seemed to be advancing the fastest, and that’s why it was so necessary to go and fight him in the yards and cellblocks, it was there that evil found its raw material, that wickedness was made flesh, Latino flesh, Irish flesh, black and mixed race and oriental flesh, every kind of flesh imbued with wickedness, everywhere distorting faces, turning them into threatening masks, expressions so common they became almost invisible, because disguised as surprise or boredom, but carrying inside them dark, thick water, ladies and gentlemen, have you ever wondered what the souls of the wicked look like? I’ll tell you, the souls of the wicked are black, it’s a shadow on the faces of those who are afraid.

  Apart from the prisons, we opened another front in our campaign to recycle human garbage: the nightclubs, especially those of Little Havana, where everyone was hooked on drugs, liquid or solid, fucking up their brains, and offending God, and there, too, we saw a bit of everything, well, let me tell you a few anecdotes.

  One night I went out on one of these field trips with Miss Jessica, who was good to take with me, seeing as how this had been her world, and we went to a club that was very hot at the time, called the Flacuchenta Bar, with good music, the kind that heats the blood of us Latinos and gets us leaping onto the dance floor, do you copy me? rap, tropipop, champeta, and techno-salsa, anyway, we sat down at a table and she asked for a Tom Collins and I ordered a non-alcoholic beer, because after that heavy detox I’d been through I couldn’t even look at a drink, and around eleven in the evening, which is the hour when wickedness starts to get in the body and Satan wakes up, Miss Jessica said, José, go take a look in the men’s bathrooms, so there I went, fearlessly, dear brothers and sisters, because with my natural authority, a result of my time in prison and these muscles you can see, I started looking in the stalls, and what can I tell you, it was enough to make a man weep, in the first there were two young guys doing lines of coke on the toilet bowl; in the second there were two more young guys and some leftover coke, but one of the two was giving the other a blowjob that could have given Monica Lewinsky a run for her money! it looked like mouth to mouth resuscitation, only through the cock; in the third a black man the size of a refrigerator was vigorously screwing one of the waitresses from the bar, who was kneeling over the toilet, with her back to the action; in the fourth a young guy was smoking freebase with his pants down, and as he inhaled the smoke he was jerking off and his cock was so huge it looked like an escalator, and in the fifth and last, ladies and gentlemen, you’ll never guess what I found, the rarest thing of all in a Miami disco, can you guess, my friends? I found a man taking a shit! just that, and as he was taking his shit he was reading an old edition of the Miami Herald, the political page, to be more precise. Of course he was the only one who protested, saying, hold on a second, you fucking junkie, I’m already leaving the place warm for you. The last words I didn’t hear because the people in the other stalls were already coming out, looking very upset, of course, so I cried, this is your lucky night, this is a police raid, but we’re looking for someone in particular, consider yourselves lucky and leave quietly, I said, but the man from the fifth stall said, oh yes? and since when is taking a crap a crime? and he added, don’t fuck us around, go back to your town and sell secondhand condoms, if you’re a cop then I’m Butch Cassidy’s gay grandfather! The guys in the third stall said, listen, you fucking Castro Nazi, what the fuck you got against homosexuality? eh? come out of the closet, homophobe, a good fricassee of cock is what you need, you fucking psycho! The only one who was really scared was the waitress, who came out and said, I’m sorry, officer, he’s my boyfriend and we almost never see each other, we’re going to get married, I swear we’re going to get married; right then and there I left the bathrooms before the black man, who was shaking his dick and wiping it with a Kleenex, could come out and add his opinion to the others.

  When I got back to the table I said
to Jessica, my friend, we’re going to have to do a lot more work in these places, there’s a bit of everything here, and she said, I know, José, I went to the women’s john and saw what you always see, cocaine, syringes, pills, vibrators with dinosaur tails, and then she said, I’ve never told you anything about my life, but I used to be on the edge myself and I know what happens in these toilets and what you find in these girls’ G-strings, and it isn’t only bodily fluids, no sir, but anyway, that’s woman’s talk, and she raised her glass and said, José, I’m going to tell you my story, so listen, this is how it was.

  This will be brief, because she was young when we met and she told me all this. This was what she said: she was born in Los Angeles of a single mother, a Guatemalan with Indian features, so God knows why she turned out blonde, although it’s easy to imagine; she had a brother who’d died of typhoid when he was thirteen and her mother, because of that, started hitting the bourbon and vodka, hard, and neglecting her, so she practically grew up alone and of course started hanging out with the neighborhood gang, which was her real school. She started going to discos when she was thirteen and that was when she got laid and did her first line of coke, both at the same time, and so she went from party to party every day of the week, hitting the pills and coke and acid and washing it all down with Four Roses bourbon, which was what the gang members stole, until after a while she became the girlfriend of a Colombian dealer who took her to Miami and kept her like a queen from the age of fifteen until they killed him, which was a really nasty business, apparently they nailed his tongue to a wooden table and left him there for a while, then they released him by slicing through his tongue with a scalpel, took out one eye with a salad spoon, cut off his balls and penis and threw them to his dog, right there in front of him, and when he was almost dead doused him in gasoline, set fire to him, and shot him seven times in the head, and Jessica actually saw the whole gruesome scene, hiding in a closet, and one of the things that most upset her was that the killer was her boyfriend’s cousin, the same one who had sprung him from prison in Colombia and brought him to Miami and made him his partner, paying his expenses, anyway, it was obviously Satan pulling the strings. She was alone again, but through her disco contacts she met another Mafioso, Brazilian this time, who took her to his mansion in Coral Gables, complete with a jetty, a yacht, six maids, three cooks (one of them specializing in Thai food, her favorite), and two bodyguards, and she lived there with him for more than a year, although she remembers almost nothing about it because she spent all day by the pool, high on pills and booze, drinking bourbon, gambling in the casinos until the morning, doing coke, and fucking her Brazilian, who was very affectionate. After a while, her boyfriend’s brother arrived, who was better looking and who she liked more because he wasn’t a drug dealer but an art student, my friends, in other words, he wasn’t dealing blow, and so Miss Jessica started seeing him, a fuck here and another there, in secret, but as she was always drugged, she forgot to cover her tracks and the Brazilian ended up catching them in flagrante, dancing the dance of Sensemayá the serpent, and then it was all slamming doors and slaps and out on the fucking street, although luckily the Mafioso didn’t shoot them or throw them in the sea with concrete balls on their feet, and he didn’t do it because it was his brother and he really loved Jessica, so she went off with the artist, who if I remember correctly was some kind of graffiti artist, a mixture of Keith Jarrett and Basquiat, for those who know about these things and apologies to everyone else, who thought he was a genius destined to change the perception of art forever and, of course, my friends, like all those who aspire to genius he was really smug and self-centered, convinced he had a key role to play in the contemporary world and crap like that, and spoiled by two rich, alcoholic old women, his patrons, who organized parties for him that inflated his ego, though what he gave them in return nobody was quite sure, because the old ladies already had everything, and so time passed and Jessica started to notice that her artist wasn’t the same anymore, the young man with a brain boiling over with dreams had turned into a pretentious drunk who wore eccentric clothes and ridiculous silk handkerchiefs and told anyone who would listen, with a glass of whiskey or a joint in his hand, how far he was destined to go in the history of art, even though he’d pretty much stopped painting by now, because he’d get up past noon, always with a hangover, and in the evening would go to parties and society dinners. One night, after they had a fight and Jessica told him he was a loser, he hit her and she ran away without taking anything with her, not even her jewelry, or her clothes, and that was when Walter found her, a raw soul exposed to wickedness but ready to be redeemed.

  For Jessica, the hardest part of her new life had been to give some kind of structure to her days, knowing that expanse of time wasn’t just a dead space but could be used doing useful, instructive, and even beautiful things, and where many people, for example, went out to work, something that hadn’t been part of her world, because her days, as I’ve already said, were all the same, waking up at two or three in the afternoon, doing the first line of coke and going down to the pool, ordering a burger or a Hawaiian pizza from Harvey’s, with a beer to lessen the hangover and a siesta on a floating mat while she called her lover to find out where they were going that night, and then, it being quite late by now, putting on perfume and nail polish and lipstick, doing a few lines of coke while she chose from the closet what she was going to wear that night, and, finally, waiting with a vodka and tonic in her hand for her lover’s Hummer, ready to go out and tame that wild tiger called night, and so it went on day after day.

  It was hard to get used to a structured life. One night, after she’d been in the house six weeks, she ran away and got drunk in some club somewhere, but that longing gradually disappeared and after a while the prayers and the devotion and being so close to Walter made her strong, they were the armor that protected her from the other Jessica, the handmaiden of Satan. Being with Walter made her believe that life had a meaning, that after the night the sun would come up again and everything would continue in spite of the questions and that strange unreal feeling that things have when you see them in natural light, without alcohol or drugs; every now and again terrifying voices came from the bottom of the mine, the howls of the wolf, my friends, but she was able to contain them, and even ended up the strictest person in the house. It was she who made the Ministry rule that anyone caught high on drink or drugs had to leave, arguing that whoever was in the Ministry should be so close to God that such a thing would be intolerable, and even though Walter, who was very realistic, thought the rule a tad harsh, it was enforced to the letter.

  And so, my dear friends and listeners, time passed, just like in a daytime soap, and over the next couple of years the Ministry of Mercy continued its unstoppable rise, becoming a really flourishing institution; the first chapel had become a model and now there were six more in Florida, where we went regularly, always the three of us, by the way, Walter, Jessica, and I. And we were still recruiting friends and followers of Christ in the prisons, which was my area of expertise, and in some counties in Florida we managed to open evangelical prayer rooms financed by us, or rather, by the neighbors in each county through us, which we called workshops, and in many of them I was the one who led prayers.

  During a visit to the prison in Sarasota, Walter met a black man from Ohio named Jefferson who struck him as a serious, devout man; after putting him in charge of the workshop there, which he ran for seven months, dealing with the inmates himself, he decided to bring him to the house. The crimes he’d been imprisoned for were minor ones, he wasn’t a murderer or a pedophile or anything like that, so it was relatively easy to pay a bond and get him out, and I have to be honest, my friends, when I saw him I almost fell down: he was the ugliest man I’d ever seen in my life, uglier than a farting she-donkey with colitis, I swear, but then the house wasn’t a catwalk for male models, so he was accepted, with a rank similar to mine, insofar as our situation vis-à-vis Walter could be compared, or meas
ured in ranks.

  I was suspicious of him from the start, and I say that in all honesty, because it was obvious that with the success and growth of the Ministry we were all starting to be possessive of Walter, fearing that his unpredictable passions might remove us from the limelight of his love, and that was why we kept watch on each other, and especially newcomers, seeing as how Miss Jessica and I were, in a way, complementary; we weren’t in competition with each other, but Jefferson worried her, too, and I noticed this because from one day to the next she decided to say her afternoon prayers in her room and not in the communal prayer room on the second mezzanine of the house.

  Things got more serious when Walter decided that Jefferson was also going to be his physical trainer, and they started to do exercises. They went out jogging in the mornings, lifted weights, did Pilates, and worked out according to the instructions in a book on bodybuilding that Jefferson had bought the first time he got out. To Walter, the obsession with physical strength was the necessary balance between intellect, faith, and reality, the three anchors of life, but for Jefferson it was pure animal vanity, that prison image of the man with thick arms and a chest of steel, anyway, they started talking about exercise all the time, at breakfast, lunch and dinner, and it started to disgust me; it didn’t seem to me much of a philosophical topic, but Walter would say that Jesus Christ must have been physically strong, how else could he have held out for forty days and forty nights in the Judean desert, which is close to here, and he’d also say that the struggle between good and evil could start any day and that was why we had to be prepared, not only with a clean, agile soul, but also with the body, because it would be a human confrontation, a human battle, like any of those that man has been waging since his beginnings, and that’s why it was necessary to be very well prepared, and in saying this, Walter would take off his T-shirt and show us his splendid muscles, his perfectly toned body, it was incredible, he wasn’t a boy anymore but a man, there were those tattooed worlds that narrated his story and his devotion and that light that emanated from him and filled all our hearts with joy and pride, my brothers, and so the disgust and even the suspicion passed and I gave even more thanks to Our Lord, the Big Enchilada, the Master, for having led me by the hand to that house, for taking me out of those foul waters and putting me in the middle of that group of saints, and my eyes would fill with tears, my friends, believe it or not, you have to have lived through something like that to understand it. At such moments, Miss Jessica would always stand up and say, Father, you are the principal proof of the existence of God, you are His son, and she would touch him with devotion, slide to the floor, get on her knees, and say, Father, show us the way to life and salvation, I’ll follow it with my eyes closed and I’ll tell others, and then Walter would look at her with affection and say, Jessica, rise, finish your food, I need you to be strong and robust at morning prayers. Having said that, he’d stand and say to his new apostle, Jefferson, let’s go train for a while in the gym, and I’d go out and walk along those dark streets winding between the mansions and think that Walter must indeed be the son of a God, because until now I hadn’t seen anything human in him, no human reactions or passions, let alone vices.