Necropolis

by Santiago Gamboa

  Let me tell you how things were in a bit more detail. When at last everything was ready and Jessica pretended that sixteen thousand people had come in, he’d withdraw to a portable chapel he had and pray in silence for a minute, and then go out on stage in the middle of a cloud of smoke, with a spotlight following him and loud symphonic music, nothing less than Zarathustra by Richard Strauss, do you copy me? The people would rise from their seats and yell and the women would bite their purses and urinate and some would faint, it was completely crazy; the security people would have to contain the crowd, until Walter would turn on the microphone and cry, God is watching you tonight! God is looking at each one of you tonight! God sees what there is in each of your hearts and comes down, slowly, to kiss them! Then he would point to the audience with a powerful finger and cry:

  Ooooopen your hearts to Goooooooodddd!!!

  The applause would be deafening. His handling of the microphone was excellent, with crescendos and diminuendos that bent the audience to his will, and the rest was a real pop opera, my friends, suddenly he’d say, let’s tell sin what we think about it, let’s say it loud and clear, I hate you, I hate you! and the hall would be bursting with yells and stamping of feet. Then the lights would go out and there’d be a scary silence. Suddenly, a red light would fall on Walter, presenting himself now as a billy goat in the middle of a witches’ Sabbath. He’d take off his chasuble and reveal his tattooed, muscular body. More beams of light would show the illustrations on his tattoos and the people would cry out in admiration and fear, yes, ladies and gentlemen, fear was part of the story. The cripples would jump out of their wheelchairs and the lame would yell with pride, recovering some of their dignity, and later these same little people would go back home along the street, kicking tin cans, poor devils sitting in forgotten parks looking at the world with misty eyes, tangible human idiocy, my friends, but for a few hours these people were happy and that’s why Walter was a drug, a kind of crack or coke that was snorted through the ear and maddened the brain for a few days, or only a few hours, I don’t know, because it had stopped doing anything to me.

  We eventually had more than sixty thousand members, just imagine, and every one of them donated a monthly tithe that could vary between fifty and a thousand dollars, just imagine, and so there were no limits to anything anymore; the house in South Beach was turning into a resort, very different than it had been at the beginning, because Jefferson and the seven samurai, which was what I called that gang of athletic faggots, refurbished the place, knocking down walls, extending the rooms, and building a swanky gym with electronic apparatus and giant LCD screens so that Walter could watch recordings of his own services while he lifted weights or did Pilates. All this coincided with the purchase of the house that adjoined the rear of the property, and as both houses had extensive grounds, a path was laid to join the two gardens.

  At that time, my friends and listeners, God put in my devastated brain one of the best ideas I’ve ever had, which was to move to a cabin on the border between the two gardens, but closer to the newly-purchased house, a cabin that had been used by the children of the previous owners to throw wild parties with alcohol, drugs, and group sex, because during the cleaning I found mineralized condoms, black sanitary napkins, crack pipes and coke papers, colored G-strings with strange stains on them, and dozens of empty tequila bottles and half-empty jars of Vaseline. I even found a box of tampons, because it had been fashionable for girls to wet them in liquor and stick them in their asses so they could get drunk without getting fat or damaging their stomachs. I cleaned the cabin without spending a single dollar of the Ministry’s money. I opened the windows, let the air in, and installed some of the old furniture that was piled in the attic of the main house.

  Soon I’d constructed a lovely space, with wooden shelves for my books, a comfortable living room, a table, and a few kitchen utensils, very few to be honest, because the one thing Walter asked was that I should continue to have lunch and dinner with the group. From that cabin at the bottom of the garden I devoted myself to observing the life of Walter and the others: Miss Jessica, Jefferson, along with the samurai and other dissonant elements in the life of the Ministry that had become a necessary evil by this time. I also devoted myself to devouring books, poetry and novels, exemplary lives, world history, whatever there was, I was interested in everything because I wanted to make up for lost time, like the time I told you about. I’d read after my Bible-thumping visits to reformatories and crack dens and other places of ill repute in the city, the way Walter had taught me, and the first thing I realized was that real life was poor compared with the lives in books; in books there was harmony and complexity and the most fucked-up things had a sheen of beauty, I noticed that when I read Dostoevsky and Dickens and Böll, and I’m even going to confess something to you, dear friends, which is that with all this reading I found out a little about history and finally learned, at the age of almost forty, that in Europe there’d been an almighty mess called the Second World War, don’t laugh, just imagine what a crummy piece of shit I was, because before, whenever anybody mentioned Hitler, I thought he was a Mafia boss or a serial killer, and nothing more; when I read that he’d been chancellor of Germany, or president, or whatever they call it over there, I was completely stunned, and said to myself, I don’t understand, is that the same country where writers like Thomas Mann and Musil come from? no way, and I decided to ask Walter if we could hire a teacher of modern history for the young people.

  Ask Jessica for whatever money you need and take care of it, said Walter, it’s a great idea, as always, so I hired, for a fair amount of money, a guy who wrote historical notes in the Miami Herald, a Cuban named Víctor Mendoza, and as it turned out, I wouldn’t have missed those classes for anything in the world because I was constantly being surprised, like with that great story of the Cuban revolution and the guys with beards coming to power, I could hardly believe it, or the story of Pinochet, my brothers, it was like being born again every day, discovering that this motherfucking planet was a very complicated place, full of angry people always fighting, shooting each other, throwing nuclear warheads, going in for ethnic cleansing, dissolving each other in acid, running each other through the ass with Belgian rifles and everything, that was the kind of thing Mendoza taught us and I carved them into my brain and then went and repeated them to the young men on my prison visits, guys who, as I’ve already explained, found it really difficult to concentrate on one complete sentence, by the time you got to the predicate they’d already forgotten the subject and then they didn’t remember the verb, but they were my children, what else could I do but love them? I was no different or better than they were, just as damaged by reality and the new psychotropic technologies; I’d tell them over and over: Columbus arrived, Bolívar died, Berlin fell, Tenochtitlan fell, Homer existed, Lenin died, Lindbergh arrived, Che was killed, Allende committed suicide, Trotsky was assassinated, anyway, the prosody of History, my friends, and my boys looked at me with red half-open eyes, their brains working extremely slowly, with smiles that had no connection with the situation, I don’t know if you can imagine it; that was my space, alone in the prisons or in the bars with Miss Jessica, almost always in the Flacuchenta.

  Walter gave up going out on the streets to spread the word, because he didn’t have the time. All those meetings and services and journeys to other cities monopolized his schedule, so he himself said to me, you’re going to take charge of the hardest part, you’ll be my shepherd of souls, you’ll have to bring them from the bottom of the well up to where I can save them, José, gather them together, be strong, it’s the greatest responsibility there is in this Ministry and I give it to you, comrade, you’re the oldest and most experienced of us, you believe in me and you’d be capable of giving your life blindly for Christ, that I know.

  The separation became even greater. I’d observe him from my cabin, and I saw many things.

  I saw that the lights in the tower, where Walter had moved his private rooms
since the last refurbishment, were on until late, and sometimes I’d see frenzied silhouettes projected on the window. If somebody opened a window you could hear music and laughter. I stayed there in silence by my own window, spying on the movements in the tower, although sometimes I didn’t even look; I only thought and thought about what Walter had come to do in the world and how little I understood of his mission, poor wretch that I was, so I said to myself, continue with your education and one day you’ll understand, and I went back to my books, the poetry and the religious writings and the biographies, and I started to devour them again, and that way life got back on an even keel.

  One evening, one of the Italian lawyers told him that the best way to spread his word nationwide was television, why had he never thought of it before? He ought to build a studio in his house, buy air space and hire a team of communicators to help him, and that was what he did, because Walter was extremely impressionable. He was won over by the idea of expanding, like everyone. Don’t you think so, my friends? Doesn’t a human being naturally prefer to have two of something rather than one? That was how Walter began his second stage as a businessman and The Ministry of Mercy in Your Home went on the air, for which he developed a different method. His advisers persuaded him that the style and esthetics of his concerts, with red lights and bulging muscles, wouldn’t work on TV, because all those action series had set the bar really high when it came to convincing the viewers, and what he was doing would look like a children’s game. That’s why he thought up a kind of spiritual call center, with a theoretical part presented by Walter and another part where he was joined by Miss Jessica and they’d answer questions from viewers, using Biblical passages and other religious examples to get across their points.

  Within six months the show was generating more money for the Ministry than all those exhausting national tours, and again there were changes. He didn’t entirely stop going out on the streets, because, as he always said, nothing could replace direct contact with reality, grappling at first hand with a person desperate to find a direction in life, and I’d think, oh Walter, you haven’t been in touch with reality for a long time now, but I only thought it, I didn’t say it. At that time there were a lot of things I didn’t dare say.

  One night I was alone in my cabin, drinking tonic water and reading Pindar, when I heard heavy breathing in the garden, the noise of footsteps, dead leaves being crushed underfoot, what was it? I went to have a look and was stunned to see that a group of women had climbed over the railings and was heading for the house. I followed them at a distance to see what they were going to do . . . They wanted to see Walter, so they tried to force open a couple of doors, and, when they didn’t succeed, they broke a window and got into the house that way. That worried me, so I said to them, hey, ladies, cool it, but they didn’t listen to me, they seemed possessed; there was blood on the glass, so now I was really worried, but I didn’t know what else to do except follow them, and I said to myself, where the fuck are the bodyguards? now that we need them they’re nowhere to be seen, although I also thought, it’s better this way, those savages might hurt one of the old ladies and then it’d be goodbye Ministry, big scandal, so we had to be careful. The women realized that Walter might be in the tower, because they saw lights, and looked for the staircase. I ran up the service stairs and got there before they did, to warn Walter. I saw that his apartment was open. I nervously approached the door and half-opened it, and light spilled out into the corridor.

  The scene I saw gave me goose bumps

  The young athletes and Walter were stark naked on the couches, having sex in a variety of incredible positions, sucking cocks and balls, the whole thing kept afloat with whiskey and gin, and with a smell of grass that knocked you back; as I was trying to recover my composure I heard a loud nasal snort, and looking to the side of the room saw Miss Jessica lifting her face from a mirror covered in coke, and I don’t know if I dreamed it, but I had the impression that somebody was fucking her in the ass, because what I do remember is that she was in a G-string and her tits were bobbing up and down. I couldn’t speak. I was petrified, I walked to the opposite wall and heard the intruders coming up the main stairs. By a miracle there were already two guards struggling with them, hitting them in the ribs with stun batons, but the women kept coming up. I saw it all unfolding in front of me like someone seeing death, my friends and listeners.

  When they heard the women screaming, the guys in the orgy froze and Miss Jessica came to the door, naked. She must have been so zonked out she didn’t know what was going on; the guards looked at her in surprise, because in addition to everything else she was smiling and moving her head in time to a tune. My God, I thought, seeing her with her G-string around her ankles, her mound of Venus shaved, a blood-red circle on her buttocks, as if she’d been sitting on the edge of a wall, and completely out of it. I just wanted to jump out the window onto the ground below to blot out those images. My world had shattered into a thousand pieces and, like a shell floating in a whirlpool, I didn’t know what to do, how to stop it, I wasn’t even sure that all this wasn’t one of Satan’s dirty tricks, but no, it was quite real; I didn’t have the courage to face it, so I went back down the service stairs, without anyone noticing me.

  I had to stay away from the house. When, the next day, Walter and Jessica ordered increased security, including electrified fences, I realized that the days of the Ministry were numbered. God would destroy us soon and the only question was, how would he do it? Would He use nuclear warheads, which was the modern way, or would He throw a few thunderbolts? You could smell it in the air. Walter asked me if I’d heard anything the previous night and I said, no, I hadn’t, I’d only woken up at the end, after the guards had intervened and the police had arrived. During lunch, he said that love sometimes took on a destructive form and had to be channeled somewhere; that was what had happened in the house, and we had to remember that. I said yes, shrugged, and went back to my cabin.

  For Walter it was a hard blow, something that should have started his brain ticking over, because it threw a beam of light on his great contradiction. I would have liked it if he’d come and talked with me honestly about what was happening, because I could have helped him, but he didn’t. He became reserved and false. His smile was false, and so were his words of optimism. The falsity of words is obvious from listening to them, my friends, prick up your ears and you’ll see, it’s like hitting a wooden surface when there’s nothing behind, the sound bounces and echoes, that’s how hollow words sound. That’s what falsity is. And people must have noticed it, not only me, because things started to go downhill, the ratings dropped, went sharply up and down for a while, then flatlined. At this point, Walter took a couple of decisions that seemed lucid enough, but actually made matters worse, like giving a gold casket to a drowning man. In other words, the things might have been good in themselves, but they didn’t do anything to stop the rot. One of them was the project to spread the word outside the country, going to meet my people on the brother continent, the Land of Delight, Latin America.

  The idea was to start in Puerto Rico and travel to the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Panama, Venezuela, and Colombia, sadly skipping over the supreme island, the summit of greatness and enjoyment, my beautiful Cuba, because my cousin the Supreme Bearded One wouldn’t let anyone preaching the word of Christ come anywhere close, oh, what a pity! Walter threw himself into the plans for the journey, advised once again by the Italians, who told him, you have to have a commercial vision, you have to be managerial, efficient, you have to set targets, identify strategic objectives and base your operations on results, you have to optimize and find reliable indicators; Walter’s eyes were opened, and he started to say, let’s decide on objectives, let’s lay down strategies, let’s find reliable indicators. Another important question, according to the Italians, was the question of IMAGE! That was why they hired a small private jet, a Falcon, I think, and put the name of the Ministry on both sides, because one of the consultants said, th
e Church mustn’t convey the idea of poverty, when did you ever see the Pope traveling economy class? the less you convey the idea of poverty, the more you’ll be listened to, and if anybody criticizes you or talks about ostentation, remember, the word that lights a fire in people’s hearts and cleanses their souls has an obligation to be universal and efficient, and that’s the main thing, the objective; and Walter said: yes, let’s go in the Falcon, let’s be universal, we’re going to cleanse souls. They contacted showbiz promoters in every country and hired sports stadiums, bought advertising space on radio and TV and in national newspapers. I helped write the advertising copy and select the photographs, my brothers, which was more amusing than useful.

  The advertising read:

  He is coming, He is coming . . .

  Open your heart to the Supreme Mystery . . .

  Become part of the Great Ministry.

  For peace, the conjunction of souls, and harmony . . .

  Join the Ministry of Mercy.

  If you are lost and cannot see the world,

  if your eyes do not help you . . .

  close them and hear the word

  of Reverend Walter de la Salle.

  They also had T-shirts, pencils, pamphlets, pennants, posters, and commemorative coins produced, and hired the best lighting, sound, and technical teams that specialized in concerts. Apart from the Italians, Walter invited Jessica and me to travel with him in the Falcon, and sent the samurai in a regular scheduled plane, which they didn’t like one bit. To be honest, I’d have preferred to stay in Miami because I could see the Master’s punishment coming, but I let myself be persuaded because of my desire to see my Land of Delight, which I couldn’t even do in the end because I was too busy organizing the services. The whole thing, as I’ve already hinted, went badly. In Puerto Rico it wasn’t too bad, but in Costa Rica there were three hundred and eight people at the first service and ninety-six at the second. In Panama we didn’t even sell six hundred tickets, and as we’d hired a stadium that seated seven thousand Walter preferred to cancel. There was a scandal in the press and we had to refund the money. As you can imagine, my friends, things went from bad to worse, and Walter was once again a soul suffering in the shadows; if the souls of evil people are black, those of fragile people are gray. Jessica and I would say to him: it’s normal, nobody knows you here yet, your word will reach them but it’s going to take time, and he’d say, where are the management indicators? what did we do wrong? According to the Italians, our calculations for the tour had overestimated the role of the passive element, and he told himself that maybe we should have targeted those strata of society that were more developed from the spiritual point of view. But this was no consolation to Walter, who kept asking himself the same question: why does no one come to me here, whereas they do in the United States, if they’re the same people? what accounted for the difference? why did the people up there never speak to the people down here? He was blinding himself, and would have sudden fits of anger; then he’d lock himself away in the suites rented for him for the tour, without anyone coming to the hotel to look for him or to take photographs or even give him their hand or touch him. The security guys spent their time drinking beer in the lobbies and eating peanuts, because there were never any fans to hold back, no screaming, let alone fainting, and that hurt Walter. God, he would say imploringly, where did they all go? why did you take them? what are you trying to tell me? And I’d say, he isn’t trying to tell you anything we don’t already know, Walter, it’s a problem of space and voice, your voice should win people over, we’ve made a start, more will come, now let’s talk about something else.