Necropolis

by Santiago Gamboa

  Marta said to her: this is a surefire method for controlling anxiety attacks in enclosed spaces, I suffered the same way all through my adolescence and after a thousand psychiatric and hypnotic treatments I had myself treated with tantric reflexology, and well, there you see the results, I’ve forgotten what an anxiety attack is like.

  I’m very grateful, said Egiswanda, it did me a lot of good as far as being in an enclosed space goes; the problem is, my anxiety goes much farther, I could say it goes beyond this room, beyond the conference, out across the city . . . Anyway, there’s no point in my saying more, not that it matters if I tell you my secrets, it’s all over, nothing matters anymore.

  We looked at her curiously, what’s all over? Wanda seemed to realize something and said: nobody knows it, but I’m the wife of the man who killed himself; or rather: his widow. Shit, I’ll have to get used to that strange word; don’t look at me like that, surely you were both at my husband José Maturana’s talk, weren’t you? let me tell you.

  When she said that, my hands started shaking. Maturana’s wife? Once again the story had come to me, and I said, please, tell us, how can that be, we didn’t know José Maturana was married, did you meet him after he left the Ministry? Marta put a hand over her mouth and said, oh, Wanda, my sincere condolences, your story must be very, veeeery interesting. I nodded, as if to say the same, but Egiswanda appeared not to notice and started talking.

  I met him in Detroit seven years ago, she said, and the fact is, I didn’t know anything about his past until much later, when I’d already fallen into his arms, if I can put it that way, and even lived with him, on and off.

  Where did I see him for the first time?

  It was when he appeared at the Lampedusa Palace Hotel to sign one of his books. The book was called My Life with Jesus, and I’d bought it by chance only three days before at the Taylor Mall and had already finished reading it. That book came along at a very hard time in my life, I’d just lost custody of my daughter at a court hearing where I was accused of being irresponsible and all kinds of unpleasant things, and I was in the eighth month of detox. Among other things, I’m a passive alcoholic. It’s a monster I have inside me, constantly waking up and trying to devour me. José’s book said that the one way to defeat monsters like that is with the cloak and sword of Christ, because His words are stronger than muscles, vanquishing through faith that force that pushes us to the abyss, to the deepest abyss of all, which is our own conscientiousness, where there are spaces as terrifying as those there must be at the bottom of the ocean, with mountain ranges and silent valleys that are simply there, waiting, but whose presence disturbs us, anyway, José’s book, which describes all this with metaphors, was a rope to cling to, a last hope for somebody about to drown, do you understand?

  Saying this, Egiswanda leaped to her feet and said, this damned place must have bathrooms, don’t you think? I’m going to look for them, and she walked in the darkness to the door. A minute later she came back and said, my God, the bathrooms are lit with candles and they’re rationing the water. Somebody asked me not to go unless I was doing “number two.” Marta had been looking at Egiswanda curiously, now she bent toward her ear and said: you have traces of powder on your nose, best clean it. Egiswanda lifted a finger to her nostrils, then pulled it away and rubbed her gums with it. She gave a sly smile and said, seriously, I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Anyway, let me carry on telling my story.

  After I’d finished reading My Life with Jesus and was getting ready to start it again, pencil in hand, I saw by chance in the Telegraph Post that the author was introducing and signing the book that very afternoon. I went there and sat down in the front row. I don’t know if you know that at that time he wasn’t called José but Cyril Olivier, that was the name he used for the book, and the name they’d used to advertise the event. I listened to his words, which were eloquent, José was always a good speaker, and I felt a road opening up in front of me, not a road but a five-lane blacktop, with signposts and neon lights and side barriers, or something even bigger, a solar system with the heart of God throbbing in the center of it, I listened to it all and I was stunned, and that’s why when he finished I went and joined a short line with my copy of his book, there weren’t many of us there that night in the Lampedusa Palace, and I asked for his autograph, but something happened: when he was halfway through signing I was overcome with a terrible feeling of emptiness and I fainted, and when I opened my eyes again I was in a room in the hotel attended by a doctor who was saying, take a deep breath, Egiswanda, look at the light, do you remember the number of your cell phone? what drugs did you take today, Egiswanda? and so it went on for a while until José, or rather, Cyril, said, that’s enough questions, she’s fine, you can go; we were left alone, and he was looking at me with that disturbing, icy expression of his and I could feel my blood exploding in my veins and starting to flow through my body again, and I said–and I don’t know how I found the strength to tell him this–you changed my life, Mr. Olivier, I’m very alone, your book was a revelation and today I became a different person, and he asked, and who or what were you before? and I said, not very much, a student nurse having problems finding her place in the world, a frightened woman feeling small and scared in this universe of noisy meteorites, and he said, even frogs carry weight in the world, that’s in the Bible, come with me, let’s go eat something, you must be hungry, a burger and a Coke, and then you can tell me again that you’re nothing, O.K.?

  So that was how I met him. We spent the evening together and that night I slept by his side, and I mean, by his side, without touching, let alone screwing, and also the following night and so on all week, together with him, in silence most of the time or else telling him about my past, but he wouldn’t tell me about his, whenever I asked him a question he’d simply look up in the air, so I finally realized it was better if I kept quiet, but I was ready to do anything as long as he let me stay with him.

  At least five years had passed since the end of the Ministry, according to my calculations, because he never said anything. He was very silent. We had a very strange relationship, I don’t think a man and a woman have ever had a relationship like that before, at least not on this planet. I don’t know how to explain it, it was as if every day we started again from scratch; as if every day we had to spend hours and hours breaking a thick, grimy pane of glass that covered his heart. After that, slowly, the man he’d been the day before might emerge, though not always. Sometimes he didn’t surface for several days and you could wear yourself out looking for him, and when he appeared he never appeared completely. Life with José was a constant process of loss. There was always less there, nothing seemed to accumulate. We lived in anonymous hotels, changing every now and again; by the time I’d started getting used to one, we already had to leave. What are we escaping from? I would ask, and he would say, we aren’t escaping from anything, we simply have to go, come on now, hurry up. We took with us two small beat-up cases and some plastic bags from Dalmart. Sometimes, when they saw us walking by the side of the highway, police cars would slow down and they’d look at us very suspiciously. José didn’t care, he’d say: let them stop, we have nothing to hide. I don’t know why I decided to stay with him. I didn’t want to lose him, I longed to be by his side and get away from the dizziness, the cold, the solitude. I’m a typical Aquarius-Pisces cusp, the silent fish staring out from caves of coral. For me, José was like the sun he saw on Walter de la Salle’s tattooed back, one of those eyes of God that shine brightly and burn; I burned up in that fire, but I clung to the man, and I was his woman, although he never let us live together properly, he never even wanted me in the same room as him, never, he’d pay for my accommodation and food separately and leave me banknotes in the pages of the Bible; he never registered with me, as if being together was an offense to God or that young Christ he worshiped and was always talking about, night and day, so much so that I ended up drawing my own conclusions about their relationship, but anyway, that w
as my life during those years, although I must also tell you that I was happy and that there were many times he made me feel fulfilled as a woman. A woman pursuing a man who basically was never there or who never loved her, although now I’ll never know. I was never able to demand anything of him, except when I fell sick. Then, yes. Then he’d come and give me shelter and care, and I swear I managed to feel happy when my throat was overrun with platelets or ganglia, or when my ovaries hurt or I had infections. I’d get down on my knees to the doctor and beg him to diagnose horrible things and take a long time to cure me, because when I was sick I meant something to José, like the poor in my country, who only matter when they have epidemics or they die of nasty things.

  That’s how things were for me with José, who was still Cyril at the time.

  By the way, let me tell you how I found out about this whole name-change thing. He’d gone to Delaware, to a little place called Zinc Town, where they’d invited him to talk about his books and about God. Zinc Town is a stretch of earth and stones with nothing beautiful about it at all. It’s like hell. Most of the people worked in the mine, whole families. They’d set up a platform for him opposite the church, with chairs in front. I sat down in the front row and waited for Cyril to come out with the local bigwigs, but when I took a close look at the flyer they’d left on the chair it said:

  Presentation of the book A Star in the West, by its author, Silas Ebenezer Burnett.

  I thought Cyril would be coming later, but suddenly I saw him come out with the mayor and the priest and sit down at the centre of the table. The mayor blew on an old microphone and said: please give a warm welcome to the great religious authority Silas Ebenezer Burnett, who has been kind enough to travel to our humble town to talk to us and introduce his book, and imagine my surprise when I saw Cyril stand up and lift a hand to his heart, in a sign of gratitude, and then raise his clasped hands, like the black leaders did; I sat there petrified, watching him saying a prayer to Christ the Redeemer before beginning his talk, and I said to myself, this man is a real mystery, and then just laughed, but in time Silas Ebenezer Burnett, author of A Star in the West, turned into Uriah Tennyson, author of Builder of Hearts, and then into Sean Méndez, whose work Gods of Mud in the 18th analyzed violence from an evangelical point of view.

  José was so schizoid, he even had names for other genres. His poetry he published as Iván Arabi, and incredible as it may seem it was very successful, almost more than his religious and self-help books. His poetry book Bullets from the Night against the Last Man won a prize in San Francisco and was translated into Spanish and French. At a conference in Minneapolis somebody compared his poetry with Bukowski, and this wasn’t a young guy high on crack but a university professor. His poetry had depth because it came out of the filthiest, most foul-smelling parts of the city, out of the lines of coke laid out by pale women on lavatory seats, and out of newspaper pages smeared with shit, and out of the frenzied couplings of immigrants scared of being deported back to their grim cities, oh God, all that fed into José’s poetry, or rather, Iván Arabi’s, I don’t know where the hell he got that strange name from, and it also fed into his life, which was also mine because I was his guardian; I’d get down on my knees and beg him to let us spend a few days in a cabin by the sea, or in a little house in the mountains, or go fishing by the lake or go camping, but there was no point, it was impossible to get him away from those shabby motels with people having loud sex in the next rooms and breaking bottles against the walls; he never explained why he was so afraid of happiness, why he was so disturbed by light, or the centers of towns, or a settled life; maybe he thought he’d be betraying his origins, out of his old loyalty to Walter from all those years ago, which was a lot stronger than his ties to me.

  We’d spend the days in those motels, on the outskirts of towns, most of the time in silence because he’d be writing a lot, or reading one book after another, so I’d kill time listening to music on my iPod or going on Facebook and chatting day and night with invisible friends and even having steamy affairs on the internet, because I couldn’t spend one whole day without talking to somebody, without finding out about other people’s lives, without somebody asking me things, and while I was chatting I’d be making imaginary journeys, looking at photographs of countries, cities, lost towns. Once I looked up the motel where we were staying on the internet and when I couldn’t find it I had the feeling we were already dead and none of what I saw around me was real. After a time I became like him. I preferred to stay in the room, sitting on the carpet, with the laptop on my knees and my headphones on.

  The only thing we shared was prayer, and the hours in church, with him on his knees, in an attitude of supplication and penitence, and me behind, pressing my hands together, and asking God, or rather, imploring Him to explain why He had given me such a strange destiny, why, Lord? why, when you know that I’m a woman like any other, with human desires and rages? That was what I asked God, over and over again, without any hope, because my prayers were never answered, I don’t know why, maybe because of the sins I’d committed or the things I’d neglected, there were certainly plenty of those. A few years passed and one day he said: I’m going on a journey, Wanda, I’ll be back in six months, I have to go alone, wait for me in the Comfort Inn on Sausalito Drive, I’ll be there the first week in September. When he said this, he already had his things on his back, and he just walked out without looking back. I couldn’t ask anything, only listen and obey. I saw him getting smaller in the distance. I’d never before felt so unhappy to be his companion, so I begged God: make him turn around and come back, let him be by my side when I open my eyes, let me see him sitting on the balcony when I wake up. But it didn’t happen. What I did find was a book he’d wrapped for me. On every page there was a hundred-dollar bill and a note saying: Wait for me on Sausalito Drive.

  I collected my things and went to a hotel in the center, near the bay and with a view of the sea. From there I called my daughter, but when they wouldn’t put her on to speak to me I went out and bought her a whole lot of gifts and asked for them to be delivered to her. Then I had dinner in a nice restaurant, and had Mexican tacos, and without thinking twice ordered a margarita with a double shot of tequila. The first led to a second and then a third, and then five more; then I went to a bar I’d often been to when I was a teenager and drank three more, one after the other. In the bathroom, I bought two grams of coke. I started taking it right there, and drank some more. It was like I was seeing my life coming back in the opposite direction. I fell into the darkness like a body falling in water and sinking, hearing reality in the distance as if it was a bus I’d missed that had left with all my bags on it.

  When I opened my eyes I was in a bed next to an unknown man who was snoring. My legs hurt. I slipped out without making a noise, and that was when I saw that my money had been stolen. Fortunately, the book was still in the hotel and there were still lots of pages, so I went back to tequila and cocaine, a long party that never ended, I’d go from one bar to another, from one mirror to another, mirror, mirror on the wall, until one day I looked at the calendar on my cell phone and saw that it was September 3, six months had already passed! I drank a million coffees, swam in the pool and took a little more coke until I could remember what José had told me, the Comfort Inn, and that was where I went. When I’d paid the taxi, all I had left was three ten-dollar bills, one of five, and a few coins, but it was enough. I rented a room and sat down on the carpet to wait. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I screamed.

  He arrived two days later, as if everything was normal. Hello, Wanda, are you sick? He looked after me for about a month, stopped me drinking and taking drugs again, but then our life resumed its old rhythm: silence and motels, journeys on Greyhound buses, walks on obscure back roads, long mornings in local churches, and the occasional book signing. One night I found a snake in the shower and fainted. Thanks to that, José agreed to go up a category and we started staying in slightly better places; he also got in the
habit of inspecting my room before he went to his just in case.

  One year later, one morning before breakfast, he again said the same thing: I’m going on a journey, I’ll be back in six months, the book is in your case. This time, though, I managed to say, why don’t you take me? but he replied, I can’t, not yet, wait for me at the Comfort Inn, first week of March, and again he disappeared into the crowd; as I watched him getting smaller and smaller I felt my legs go weak and my brain was like a railroad station in New Mexico, filled with confused immigrants. I opened the minibar and drank all the little bottles one after the other. Then I went to a 7-Eleven and bought three bottles of JB, as green as emeralds, and drank them over the next two days without leaving my room, eating nothing but yogurt.

  In the book there was a large amount, twenty thousand dollars, so I made another attempt to contact my daughter. The result was the same and again I jumped into the void, submerged myself in an ocean of alcohol, but when I came up again I felt disappointed. Only three weeks had passed. What was I going to do with the rest of the time? I’m sorry to be telling you all these sordid details, but I decided to add something to the drugs and the alcohol and hired two male prostitutes, two Spanish guys who were really depraved and did things to me like the things you see in Sabina Vedovelli’s movies. I have only vague images of that, because to tell the truth I was so out of it I can barely remember. Better that way. José kept his promise and came back on the date he had told me, stayed with me for another year and then left again. His journeys were becoming a ritual, and I was also starting to get used to that plunge into dark waters that left me exhausted, ready for his return.