Necropolis

by Santiago Gamboa

  Rashid came to the table with more whiskey, and said, what do you think of this bazaar of disturbed lives? It’s like a warehouse of humanity, the equivalent of the Museum of Mankind, only with living species that aren’t yet completely extinct, don’t you find it interesting? I noticed a woman bobbing up and down on the edge of the dance floor. Her head was shaved, and she was wearing an Indian skirt and military boots. I found it strange to see thick hair under her armpits and on her legs, it had been ages since I had last seen a hairy woman. No woman had hair now on any part of her body and I had almost forgotten they had any.

  Suddenly Marta cried, hey, I’ve just had a brilliant idea, how about doing the interview right now? I looked at her and said, my God, you work late, to tell the truth I’m tired, but she insisted, I won’t tape anything or make notes, it’s just a first approach, I’ll use my memory.

  And she began: why do you write? The question fell like a stone into water and I was not sure what to say, why do I write? or rather, why did I write before, when I wrote? To tell the truth, I do not have any very clear idea of why I do it, so I said, I don’t know, but she insisted, there must be some reason, it may be that you don’t see it immediately but there must be one, think and you’ll find it, it’ll come, we’re in no hurry. She asked Rashid the same question, how about you, why do you write? And, although he seemed more distracted than I was, he replied without hesitation: because it would be much worse if I didn’t. I was impressed and said to myself, damn it, now that’s a convincing answer.

  Marta smiled and looked down, a sign that she was pleased with the sentence and wanted to remember it, then continued: and what would be much worse? Rashid, who must have thought he had already won the game, looked surprised, but said, my life would be much worse, and the lives of the people around me, and probably literature.

  Marta replied: do you consider yourself a great writer? I’m not the one who thinks that, said Rashid, it’s the press and my readers who consider me a great writer, at least that’s what they say to my face. They may be lying but that’s what they say, and I believe them, because nobody is forcing them; my books are successful in a dozen languages and that must mean something, mustn’t it? He took a long slug of whiskey and said, I don’t want to appear arrogant, I don’t think my books are important, but I like them, that’s why I write and publish them. Other people think they’re important.

  Again Marta looked at me, as if to say, it’s your turn, do you have your answer yet?

  I can think of a thousand reasons not to write, I said, in fact I haven’t written for quite some time now; things like illness or boredom, irritation or fatalism, or remembering that all human enterprises are doomed to disappear, however long they last . . . Thinking that doesn’t exactly inspire one to write.

  And are you going to start writing again now? she asked, and I said, perhaps I’ll try a new genre, biography for example, this conference may be a sign.

  And why would you start writing again?

  There are things we do without any reason or for the most trivial of reasons, I said: going out and walking along the road during the rush hour and looking at people in their cars; showing up in midafternoon at the box office of a movie theater or browsing in bookshops or sitting on a balcony watching people on their way home, and repeating to yourself in your mind, why am I doing all this? why today did I walk to a bookshop or go to a movie theater and just as I got to the door decide not to go in? We do things that have no meaning or only acquire meaning over time, perhaps because deep down we want to change our lives at the last moment, when everything appears fixed, like those roulette players who one second before the close of bets nervously shift a tower of chips, from one number to another, and then bite their fingers; because we’re searching for some kind of intense experience, or because we want to be someone else, yes, to be someone else, there you have your answer: I write to be someone else.

  Marta smiled and said, you see, we’re making progress already, I told you we could still get a good article at this hour, the idea that alcohol and work are incompatible may be correct for dentists or people who perform circumcisions, but not for those of us who work with words. Of course, provided we stay a bit horizontal, or support ourselves with the other hand.

  I took advantage of our eyes meeting—hers were two blue fishbowls—to ask her, how about you, Marta, why do you write?

  The change of trajectory disconcerted her, but she seemed to enjoy the game, and said, I write because it’s what I do for the arts pages, that’s rather a stupid answer, I know, but it’s the literal truth; if I were on the financial pages or the sports pages my life would be different, I’d write less, I’d be dictating results or commentaries by telephone, and that would be all; I should add that I feel proud when I see my texts printed and imagine they’re going to be seen in railroad stations and tea rooms and hairdressing salons and the people who read them will approve or reject them and one in a hundred or a thousand will remember my article that night and make some comment over dinner, that, by and large, is what drives me to write, don’t you feel the same way?

  I said yes, I was pleased that what I wrote would be seen by readers unknown to me, but I didn’t feel any pride, because to tell the truth the books we leave behind us drift away from us and we end up kind of mutually rejecting each other, as if after a while we did not recognize each other, and that’s what’s happening to me today, I’m miles from them, I’m not the same person who wrote them; I genuinely think those books are dead.

  A loud explosion plunged the bar into silence and darkness.

  There were a couple of grotesque screams and some laughter. Then somebody struck a light, and I saw that the people were all frozen in their places, even those who were on the dance floor. There was another explosion, and I grabbed Marta’s hand and headed for the exit. Where the hell had Rashid gotten to? I found him in the corridor and I said, it’s time we got back. The windy night carried the smell of gasoline and scorched tires.

  When I got to the hotel I realized how much I had been drinking. The steps were moving like the keys of a pianola and I almost fell. As I walked toward the elevators I heard music on the second floor and decided to go have a look. In the main reception room a waiter was extinguishing the candles and collecting the candlesticks. Another was removing the tablecloths and the remains of food. On one side of the room a few delegates had appropriated a few bottles and gathered around the piano. The person playing turned out to be none other than Leonidas Kosztolányi. They were all singing out of tune and drinking.

  When I got to my room, I left my clothes on the armchair and went to take a shower, the only way to clear my head before sleep. I switched out the light and stepped inside the jet of water, which felt really good. I do not know how much time I was in there, but I actually fell asleep and even dreamed. Then I turned off the water, grabbed one of the towels, and stepped out of the shower, shivering as I did so.

  It was then that I heard the voices. A woman on the verge of tears and a man trying to console her. Being in the dark, I lost all sense of direction and was not sure where the voices were coming from. I even thought they might be coming from my own room. I did not have the strength to switch on the lamp, so I concentrated all my energies on listening. I love you, the man was saying, you’ve always known that, why should everything be different now? The words made the woman moan even louder and the man insisted, blaming her. You can’t keep returning to that time, he said.

  The fact that her moaning did not diminish in intensity made me think that she was hoping for more affection, and I tried to imagine the scene: the two of them on the couch, the man embracing her, the woman with her face in her hands; but his attempts at consoling her, perhaps because they had been repeated too often and had become old and tired, did not convince either of them anymore, and I wondered, what is it that she returns to and reproaches him with? how, out of the many ways you can hurt somebody, has he hurt her? After these questions came others: were the
y young? middle-aged? The fact that the man was whispering made it hard to determine his age.

  He said: I love you and that’s all that matters, forget everything else, what does the past matter? life is full of traps; but she continued sighing and crying, and he insisted: if I were lying I wouldn’t have brought you here. That phrase produced a special effect, because at last she spoke: I prefer not to believe you, because if it turns out that you’re lying I’ll slash my wrists and this time I mean it, and it’ll all be your fault, listen to me, your fault for making me heartless and false. Now it was the man who paused for a long time, a pause that made me assume they had embraced and the woman had stopped crying, but I was wrong, because the sighs started again: nobody’s realized what I’ve done, but that doesn’t mean that I’m ready to keep doing it, do you understand me? let alone for a bastard like you.

  Her tone became threatening. Then there was a different sound, which, in my delirium, I associated with a kiss, a long kiss, profoundly desired by the two of them. Finally he spoke, and said, feel how much I love you, you can smell it, touch it, it’s no lie. And again the kiss. Don’t try to break my heart, she said, you won’t succeed this time, I’m strong now, and he said, I don’t deserve anything, I know that, what I deserve is for you to spit at me and humiliate me and even pee in my face, if you think it’s necessary, I deserve that, you know, I’m not trying to convince you of anything, all I want is to clear the way so that the truth can come out without any shame.

  There was a sigh from her, different this time. It wasn’t a moan anymore but something more elaborate, and suddenly she said: you know what’s going to happen if you keep sucking me there! That’s what you want! But he said, I’m doing it because I can sense you want it, it’s exactly what you want and I’ve always been your animal. Again there was a silence, a longer one this time, and a soft creaking sound that suggested a change of position on the couch. Suddenly she said: how can you touch me again after what you made me do? and he said, it was for you, only for you. That was the last thing I heard before falling fast asleep.

  6.

  THE MINISTRY OF MERCY (III)

  Here we are again, my friends, to conclude this story, which I hope you’re finding both entertaining and instructive, because that’s why we’re here. A couple of years had passed since the start of the Ministry when one evening, coming back to the house from an evangelical trip to the penitentiary at Sundance Creek—where, by the way, I’d managed to get three black gorillas, each weighing about two hundred and sixty pounds, to go down on their knees before the Man Himself—I learned that Walter had hired some bodyguards, four guys of different races, their muscles developed at the neighborhood gym or in jail, with wires coming out of their ears, who followed him everywhere and kept everyone at bay, including me, because when I went to say hello to them they grabbed me and, as the police say, immobilized me, until he said to them, it’s O.K., guys, cool it, this is my partner, he can come to me whenever he likes. All of which struck me as very strange.

  The Ministry was doing better than ever. The safes were bursting with dollars, rotten with greenbacks, millions of them. People gave monthly tithes, and Walter’s tours to spread the word, with services for up to twenty thousand people, were great for business. All we had to do was fart and we’d be showered with coins. That was how it went. But Walter wasn’t the same anymore, for a reason I could well understand, even though I’m no great student of character or anything like that, which is that if you tell a person, from the moment he gets up in the morning until the moment he goes to bed at night, that he’s mega, A-number-one, the boss; if everyone who works with him tells him every day that he’s the goose that lays the golden egg, and the sun shines out of his ass, well, that person ends up believing it! I mean, that’d be enough to give anyone a swollen head, don’t you think, my friends? It’s something that’s hard to keep in check, like blindness or one of those diseases people have in their blood today, because there comes a moment when that person starts to believe it’s all true, that he really is the great Macho Man and all that, and that’s where things turn sour, believe me, and I’m not trying to come off as some kind of philosopher or psychologist, but if someone believes something like that about himself it’s because he already has one foot and half the other stuck in the shit, one ball and half the other in the wrong orifice, and I’m sorry, brothers and sisters, but this part of the story makes my blood boil, and here I have to make a confession that’s very difficult for me, which is that this process of self-canonization that was starting up in Walter’s consciousness ran parallel to another process in me, one that went in the opposite direction, which was that I stopped believing in anything, I let go of all those fairly tales and focused on my work on the streets, on the most down-to-earth things, on whatever shit was most recent and smelled the worst, I’m sorry, that turned out a bit scatological, which wasn’t my intention; as Walter grew and grew like a balloon, I distanced myself from it all and went out on the street; I discovered that at the center of the world, in the world itself, was goodness, human generosity, what Walter had called in earlier days “the narrative of forgiveness and generosity,” which had been his great theme.

  Of course I never stopped believing that Walter was somebody special, endowed with an enormous sense of life, with those eyes that seemed like a lighthouse beacon turning very high above our heads, and that’s why he was ahead of our thoughts and of reality, because he knew what was coming and was able to adapt himself to it, but also because his voice, his innocence, and his message were a drug to be injected with his word, a verbal substance that made the weak man think he was strong and the cripple a light-footed Achilles, his word had that curious gift of being able to transform things, reality, life itself, to bend circumstances to his will, and that was the source of his success. That was why people went crazy when they heard him and many fainted and felt that the sun was warming their cheeks, that life had stopped being that terrible shithouse it usually is for most people and was transformed into something in Technicolor, like a song by Pedro Infante or Toña la Negra or the great Celia, that’s understandable, but I don’t think, dear friends, that all that necessarily made him a God, as everyone used to say, as I myself used to say, no sir, and do you know why I say that? it’s very easy, because all that he had to give others were human attributes; a man is the best support for another man who’s desperate, and to do that he uses human words, which are the only ones we have, and the best, that’s the great secret, and now I turn especially to my younger friends here and ask them to listen to this lesson that comes from a distant time, from years already past that were different than today, you can’t imagine how different! and not only because there were no cell phones or computers, or because movies were different and people were a bit fatter and women had hair on their vaginas, begging your pardon, I’m not referring only to that, I say it because it was a time when people were scared of life and that’s why they felt their way, very slowly, testing everything before making a move, like a blind man who’s lost his stick in an inhospitable side street, and that’s how things were in those slow, gray years, my dear friends, almost nobody had that self-assurance and that confidence expressed by people today, which demonstrates a complete absence of fear; the fear went out of their lives, and now it’s life itself that should take care, and so I tell myself, the story of Walter de la Salle may seem amazing today, it may seem barely credible that somebody could turn into a God like that, a guide to the blind, a beacon to those lost in the fog, but that’s what life was like, my friends, and that’s why, in those worlds that were hungry for the absolute and the metaphysical, somebody who looked above the clouds and saw beyond the horizon should become a prophet, and then it was only a step for him to become Jesus Christ reborn, and that was what Walter represented to thousands of people.

  I would see him getting into his armor-plated limousine, surrounded by Jefferson, Miss Jessica, and the horde of tattooed young men who were always with him now,
and I would believe less in him as a demigod, just think of the paradox: the more the world believed in him, the more I saw his human side, in other words, his fallible side, and of course I still loved him and was ready to sacrifice my own life if I thought it would make Walter more real, more magnificent, but life’s a very troublesome and contradictory thing, fuck it, sometimes even a suicidal thing, yes, which may be why nobody gets out of it alive; the greater the man’s word grew, the higher his image as a Redeemer rose from the ground, the more he seemed to me a false Messiah, full of weaknesses, very attached to trivial things, and increasingly self-centered, which was something that seemed to cover his brain like ivy; it’s a complex thing, my friends, but an extremely human thing, and a well-known phenomenon, that people who become famous immediately go a bit crazy! Let me give you an example, when we held services in stadiums, and Jessica went to the dressing room and told him, it’s time to make your entrance, there are fifteen thousand people out there, he’d reply, tell me when there are sixteen thousand, that’s my number, God woke me with that number in my head. Then he’d sit back in his chair and let Jefferson massage his shoulders while Jessica changed the slices of cucumber he put around his eyes to moisten them. He only drank Vittel water, imported from France.