One of those nights, in Cartagena de Indias, as we were talking on the balcony of his suite in the Hotel Santa Clara, he grabbed me very hard by the arm and said, José, you’re a good person and that’s why you have to understand that, basically, I’m human, I have human pains and frustrations, nothing makes me different than the others, than any of those that come to hear me; I’m a son of the streets like you, it just so happens that people listen to me. Then he went to the bar and grabbed a quart bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label, two glasses and a full ice tray, and said, I know you’ve distanced yourself from all this, but for tonight I want you to think of us as two friends who need to talk, two friends or partners or flesh and blood Latinos who have to level with each other, this won’t damage you, you’re strong, you have structure in your life; he poured the whiskey and I drank, and in my soul it was as if galleries were collapsing, and a kind of echo rose to the surface from deep inside; a taste of another life or an intense emotion, when you find something that can destroy you the more you long for it, whether love or just obsession. By the third glass, I was confessing my fears to him, saying: you’re bringing down what you yourself created with effort, and all for what? What you get from your shitty life in that tower isn’t much, compared with what you’re putting in danger, but he retorted, you’re wrong, José, if it wasn’t much I wouldn’t do it, I need it, period, I’m like you, I dream of pleasure and things hurt me, don’t be deceived about me; I said: be careful, you’re riding a tiger and if you dismount you’re going to break your legs, and he said, trust me, we’re having a downturn, but it’ll pass, it’ll pass, you have to believe me.
Then we talked about God and life and the distant stars that could be seen over the sea and what hard work it must have been for the Master to create this universal shithouse we live in is only seven days, thing by thing, trees and grains of sand and flies buzzing around shit and the blind fish at the bottom of the sea and the diseases of kangaroos and the flocks of birds, hats off, and we talked about that son of a bitch Satan, who was always interfering in our lives and twisting them around, and the worst thing was that he never tired, we talked about all that until I went to the bathroom and saw that Jessica had returned and was on her iMac chatting or watching videos on YouTube or something like that, because she was dancing with her headphones on: I noticed that beside her, next to a glass filled to the brim with gin, there was a mirror with a considerable quantity of coke, but I walked past and went back on the balcony, where Walter and I continued going over life and the future and the contradictions.
An hour later, with the second bottle of Johnnie Walker half-finished, Jessica came and brought us a tray of coke, and we took turns snorting it, and again something inside me opened my eyes; on top of that Jessica brought a pack of joints and so we smoked then too and inside me I could hear the grunting of an animal that was familiar to me, that had never abandoned me, and so it went on until the black of the night turned ocher and our brains or what remained of them were already bursting; Miss Jessica was jumping like a cricket, she was so high she was climbing the walls, and so, with the last neuron in my brain, I decided to go to my room, just as Jessica was bringing another tray of coke, but I said to myself, if we carry on like this we’re going to end up fucking, better if I go.
I went down to my room, put my head under the faucet and said to myself, what a piece of shit you are, José, how can you offend God like that; the grunting of the animal was becoming unbearable, so I said to myself, it’s over, there won’t be any more crap like that in your life; I grabbed a penknife and made a cut in my right wrist, and then the left, and I swear to you, my friends, it was like a liberation, I saw my blood coming out in the water like a pink ribbon and I felt clean, as if all the poison had gone out of me! I lay down and again saw the light-filled eyes I’d seen that first day, a drop of water glowing in the middle of the night, and I started praying, and I prayed until I was overcome with a great sense of calm and my eyes closed.
To those of you who think I’m going to tell you about my own death and are already making incredulous faces, let me tell you straight away that after what might have been a very long time I opened my eyes again. Mysteriously, instead of the hotel or the fire and brimstone of Hell and the servants of Satan, I saw a white, very white room; I was surrounded by nurses who were all hard at work over me, an injection here, a thermometer there. I was alive, ha ha, like in the movies, the hero is saved at the last moment because the water overflowed and went out under the door, so they called reception and bang! I hadn’t checked out after all, I was saved.
Soon afterwards Walter came and said: I understand why you did it, but you must resist. It doesn’t matter what you and I do, what matters is them, the thousands of people who believe in us, don’t you understand . . . ? Those eyes filled with questions, those people with broken lives who look trustingly to us. It’s them, damn it! They will save us and they will give us redemption, because they believe in us! You have to be strong and take care. Yes, I said, and closed my eyes. When I opened them again he was gone.
Two weeks later I left the hospital. Jessica drove me in silence to the airport and from there we flew with two nurses in another Falcon, hired specially for me. I was moved by that, my friends; we traveled in complete silence, with me looking at the clouds that seemed like whirlpools in the air and thinking about what had happened, and forgive me if I wax a little lyrical here, but it’s just that wanting your own death is something that calls everything into question, because if life is the most precious gift, how is it possible that a person can choose to throw it away? and so I asked myself the most difficult question of all, my friends, which is, what makes life worth living? Walter’s words lodged themselves in my tired brain and from there opened fire: it’s them, it’s their faith that’s going to save us.
When I arrived, Walter held a private service in my honor; he never used the word “suicide” but “accident,” and kept repeating the expression “the fragility of life” and also that “life sometimes gets away from us.”
Time passed, and I continued to distance myself from the house and stayed in my cabin, and the really paradoxical thing was that Walter started to visit me at night. I can’t get to sleep, José, he’d say, tell me what you’re reading, and he’d sit down on the floor, and I’d read him poems by St John of the Cross, the greatest of all, and by St Teresa and Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz and of course by Abbot Marchena and Góngora, and he’d listen in complete silence, not saying a word, not breathing, not moving any part of his face, nothing, it was as if he wasn’t really there, which at the beginning sent a shiver down my spine but which I eventually got used to. At other times he’d cry, also in silence. The way somebody who’s understood something very profound cries, or somebody who’s moved by a beautiful or noble gesture, I don’t know what exactly Walter understood as he listened to me reading poems, I never asked him, although he must have found something important in it; at the crack of dawn he’d go back to his tower, but his spirit was still tormented, I’d see him pacing back and forth up there, going around and around in circles, as if he was writing a message with his body, the answer to a question I didn’t know and neither did he, my dear friends, I know this is all a bit obscure but that’s the way it was and that’s the only way I can tell it.
One day Walter decided to hire someone to write down his words and the ideas that cropped up in meetings with his parishioners. The idea had come to him one day in the Carruthers Bookstore on Hopalong Street and Quincy Drive downtown, where he saw a book with a blue cover entitled My Lives, by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. He looked through it and decided to buy it, not because he believed in Scientology but to see how it was put together, at least that was what he told me, because clearly an idea was going around in his head; then we went to the Big Kahuna on Atlantic Square to have a burger, and after leafing through the book for a while he said, don’t you think my ideas on life and salvation ought to be written down? that way
they’ll survive if the Father decides to take me, what do you think? My feet turned cold when I heard him. It was the first time I’d heard him talk about his own death.
The idea was a good one, so I made a few inquires and found an unemployed writer, a guy from the north of Colombia who wrote essays for the students at the Faculty of Letters at the university; his name was Estiven Jaramillo and his job would be to go with Walter when he met the people and write down what he said. Miss Jessica and Jefferson looked at him incredulously and didn’t seem at all pleased, among other things because this poor Estiven, I have to say, had a few problems, including one particularly bad one of a physical nature, a spectacular disproportion between the huge size of his head and the limbs of his body, like those human dolls you see at the entrance to toy shops with pumpkins or watermelons on their shoulders, but this was on the physical level, because on the intellectual level Estiven was tremendously tough and he demonstrated as much right from the start in the quality of the notes he made.
In this way, he was also helping himself, because from what he said he’d had to leave Colombia in a hurry. As a result of a series of articles on the laboratories maintained by the guerrillas in a number of areas of that long-suffering country, they put a bomb in his car, to be detonated when he started it, but as so often happens in movies, it was his wife and two children who were blown up.
The first day Walter brought Estiven’s notes to my cabin and we read them out loud, and they were really good! The next day we did the same and so on for several nights until Walter asked me to be the official editor, the one who would take a chisel or a fountain pen to Estiven’s notes, O.K.? That was the start, my friends, of what we might call “my vocation” for writing books; at the same time a kind of mystique about the affairs of the Ministry was reborn, something I’d almost completely lost. I threw myself into the work. The texts were good, they convincingly conveyed the greatness of the message in a few words; each section had a narrative thread that made it both easy to follow and educational. Imagine what that meant for me, I’d only recently tried to slit my wrists, and now I was writing a book. Christ must really be great, no kidding. It was like an award for my fascination with books, because after the Big Enchilada and His son books were what I loved the most, those parallelepipeds of paper that had given me a past and even a future. So I asked Walter, how much freedom do I have to rewrite and interpret? and he said, complete freedom, a hundred percent, you were my first disciple and you know what I do better than anyone, the only reason I didn’t ask you to make the notes was because I didn’t think I had the right to do so, and I think I made the correct decision, because this book has to be the work of at least three heads, Estiven’s and yours being more cultivated and mine the one that advances blindly, like a submarine without lights at the bottom of the sea, following the inspiration that the Big Boss whispers in my ear when I encounter a wretched soul, like a mystical Doppler effect, an impulse that comes and goes, indicating distance, but when it returns is enriched by the space it has traveled, the speed of whoever hears it, and, who knows, even by its own ideas; let’s make a great book that’ll be a summary of our work, the final achievement of the Ministry and both our lives, friend, that was what he said and again I sensed a cloud laden with dark premonitions. He clenched his fist, raised it and knocked it against mine, which is the way people greet each other in the Caribbean, fist to fist and fist to the heart, that was how Walter said goodbye before going to his tower, and outside it was raining, just like in a movie, and as he was happy he raised his arms into the lines of water and let them hit him for a while, maybe with the idea of purifying himself; it was very beautiful to see him there, with the water streaming down his armpits, falling from his jaw and his fingers. That night, my friends, I almost believed in him again.
Jessica and Jefferson still regarded Estiven with suspicion. To them he was an intruder who had Walter’s full attention with something they were excluded from, and in addition, I insist on this, there was the whole physical thing, not only that big head due to water on the brain, but also a lack of carburation in one of his digestive organs, because every time he opened his mouth his breath absolutely reeked, it was like lifting the lid off a container of organic waste, which was why Jefferson, who was sensitive to men’s smells, him being a faggot and all that, and Jessica, who in spite of her religious dedication had already given signs that she was still a hundred per-cent woman when it came to sex, despised him and found him disgusting and made passing comments to win over the others against him, which must have been quite hard to bear, but Estiven must have been really needy because he stood all the joking in spite of the fact that nobody ever offered him a glass of Coke or a meat pie or a piece of the cake made by Felicity, the black cook. He seemed used to all that kind of thing, as if he’d seen it all before. On one occasion he went into a drugstore at night and as he approached the cash desk the owner was waiting for him with a sawn-off shotgun, aiming it at his chest and saying, get out of here, you fucking thief, and don’t come back! and other people shouted, can’t you read? no pets allowed, out! But I liked him and admired his work, and apart from that, as he was from Magangué he talked like us, the friends of the immortal Caribbean, a man from the land of reggaeton and champeta and vallenato, a man who, like me, had been overtaken by life but was still pedaling, with the wind and everything else against him, the wind and life and the world in general, and there he was, floating like a turd or a log in this Babylon of the Caribbean.
As I’ve already said, he had a good ear for getting convincing phrases out of Walter’s words. He was able to put in prose what he said in his dialogues; at the end of the afternoon he’d tell me what he’d done and then I’d take over and make a fair copy, correcting and adding, intensifying this effect or polishing that idea so that the whole thing was harmonious and the basic message shone through even more, which really opened my eyes, until one day, going over the text, I had the brilliant idea of turning it back into dialogues, a traditional way of conveying knowledge; when that idea came to me my eyes filled with tears and I said to myself, José, you son of a bitch, you’ve just given birth, for the first time in your damned life, to a good idea, a fucking brilliant idea! you’re going to be the Plato to the new Socrates! What an opportunity!
With Walter’s approval, I set to work. I gave each section a separate heading, like Conversation with an Angel on 47th Street, or Answers to a Disciple with AIDS, a kind of mixture of the classical and the contemporary; and I organized everything by theme: drugs, poverty, violence, abuse, prostitution . . . My head started flying like a falcon that’s been let loose: a dialogue with three Caribbean girls selling their bodies I entitled The Open Legs of Latin America, and a conversation with a black neighborhood leader Sad Song for the Great-Grandchildren of Kunta Kinte. I was overcome with lyricism, my friends, and as I worked I became aware of how technically complex the whole process was, and so one evening, after getting the go-ahead from our financial controller, in other words, Miss Jessica, I set off with a couple thousand dollars to buy a computer, an Apple Mac that I installed in my cabin, a big screen, and as a screensaver I of course chose a sunset over the Caribbean, and I began to pound the keyboard, convinced that I was dealing with something really big.
I soon came to one of the greatest dilemmas: the title. I thought and thought for several days until it came to me: Encounters with Amazingly Normal People, and so I put it on the draft. As was to be expected, Walter approved it, and I continued with the process. Later I had to deal with the question of what I call “hot and cold writing,” in other words, the way you perceive the writing as you’re doing it and the way you see it after being away from it for a few hours, when the words get cold and you can look calmly at what you did, and think about the distance between that result and the impression you had as you were doing it in the heat of the moment. It’s like the casting of the metal in the making of bells, as you see in the film Andrei Rublev, by old Tarkovsky: the tone and app
earance of a cast when you put the molten steel in the mold is very different than its final form, when it’s cooled down, and the same goes for words: when they’re a flow of lava descending from the cerebral cortex to the fingers they have an shiny appearance that blinds and flatters, but their true face is the one they acquire hours later, when the smoke clears and you can see them by the light of day; they’re never as radiant as they were before, and you dither and feel lost and go back to the beginning, you stand back and redo it or give it all up and are left with the empty space that’s the silence of writing and which, as in music, has its own value, that’s the way it is, my brothers, but anyway, let’s carry on with the story.
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