Return to the Dark Valley

by Santiago Gamboa

  “With you!!!” they cry.

  That’s how I usually start my meetings, and then, when that first ovation dies down, I fix my eyes on some spectator and address him. I regulate my breathing and begin my speech:

  “Because the time has come to take a stand, to take risks for intelligent and sacred life on Earth, not to be soft! We can’t be soft in today’s world!”

  And the audience repeats with me: “We can’t, we can’t!”

  At this point the people yell, there are whistles and snorts, and I know I already have them in my hand. Now I can take them where I like.

  And I say to them: “We have to look at the sky, the farthest and deepest part of the sky, behind the clouds, behind the silent storms and the dark spaces, behind the rings of the last and most solitary of planets, and repeat this simple human prayer:

  “‘I won’t be soft, Masters and Ancestors of the Earth, I won’t let your property be turned into a foul dungeon. I won’t allow it to become a dung heap filled with worms eating dead flesh. I won’t let your kingdom be an infected and sick house of whores, or of amnesiac drug addicts.

  I won’t allow your enemies to swarm in the pipes and continue destroying our one refuge.

  I will fight for the good, the children of the ancient ancestors of the world, we don’t have to hide in our own houses. The planet is ours, with all its rivers and waterfalls of pure water and green meadows, with its air and its hills, with its trees, which are its soft fingers; ours are the clean, fertile lands, the transparent waters, and the seas, the oceans filled with fish and plankton that this dark enemy, whoever he may be, wants to destroy and pollute; they don’t care about converting the sea into a liquid graveyard, into a repository for corpses, but I will fight because I want it to continue to be the origin of life and the water our second blood.

  Because I want clean air that goes into the lungs and gives us breath that feeds what is living and allows it to continue. We won’t let the enemies destroy our citadel.

  We’ve already lost Europe, we still have America. North and South America. Central America, too, and the Caribbean.

  America, America.

  The true and only city of the ancient Masters.

  Our Universal Republic.

  We have weapons and faith in the truth. We are willing to die. What an honor and a joy it is to fall protecting this republic.

  We are a group that defends itself from the virus infesting the earth. We are not political, but we have a policy. The world is suffering a grave immunological problem and we are its antibodies.

  We have to attack the infectious spirit. To confront this new wave of psychic and neuronal violence. We will protect this kingdom on behalf of our old Masters.’”

  This is what I say in my lectures, and just imagine, at first there were . . . how many? ten, fifteen of us? And today, you wouldn’t believe it! Thousands come to hear me, and of course, how can they not come? I am what I am, like the fellow in the Bible, but with something more. I am someone whom nobody expects to exist.

  There you have me, Consul. I’m Argentinian, as you’ve already realized. And something else that very few people know, a great secret that I’m going to tell you because I like you and you’re a friend of Juana’s. Close your eyes a moment and listen to what I’m going to tell you.

  That’s it, close them, are you ready? All right:

  I’m the son of the Pope.

  No, man, don’t laugh, I’m quite serious.

  You don’t know the things I know, and have no reason to know them. My name is Carlitos, I’m from Córdoba, Argentina, although many years in Spain have taken away that strange, rather dirty accent I had. The left-hand side of my brain, the one that controls language, hasn’t been much affected, even though I’ve received electric shocks and my spine was crushed several times by a heavy truck called “a passion for rugby.” I’ve had beatings, I have the scars to prove it. They’re my war wounds and that’s why I shave my skull. The passing of time is a violent thing. I embraced some people before they left this world and others I myself put in the rocket before they went off into the beyond. I have been in psychiatric detention and I don’t deny I’ve had problems. I had a propensity for alcohol and I survived by pure force of will. Today my addictions are children’s things: strawberry-flavored toothpaste, junk food, dulce de leche. One afternoon I ate fourteen packs of Oreos and two liters of kiwi-flavored yoghurt, and I’m still here. I’m sturdy but not hypertense. If only all the struggles in the world were so easy.

  You liked that, didn’t you?

  That I’m not from Buenos Aires, I mean. Outside Argentina it’s better not to be from Buenos Aires, because everyone thinks you’re an arrogant fool and maybe in some cases that’s true, but not always. The thing about being the son of the Pope, on the other hand, is one of the few certainties in my life and I can demonstrate it to you, although I don’t need to. It simply is that way.

  What’s particularly curious is that I’m not a Catholic. I only believe in the bones that can be extracted from the earth and in the fruits of those bones. They are my older brothers, my ancestors, my masters. I could call this Theory of the Origins.

  I’m going to tell you how it was.

  A long time ago, when he was the provincial superior of the Society of Jesus in Santa Fe and Buenos Aires, Bergoglio had to make a trip to Córdoba for a matter that was a little bit convoluted and secret. Wait! It was only a weekend, an insignificant weekend, but I think that in those three days he experienced the most profound moment of his life before he was elected Pope.

  I’ll tell you everything, let’s take it slowly.

  Do you remember the taking of La Calera by the Montoneros? Why should you remember, it’s Argentinian history! It was the first act by which the Montoneros, if I can put it like this, made their entrance into society. Bonjour tout le monde! Bang, bang, bang. They were riddled with bullets, and there were mistakes, but in the end it came out well. So the following year, 1974, they carried out a major kidnapping: two bigwigs of the cereal industry, the Born brothers. They were grabbed by a cell of about forty guys, disguised and well-armed, when they were driving along a road. Boys, shall we go for a walk in the woods? It was a crazy thing! The incredible thing is that it worked out well for them again, because six months later they let the first one go and nine months later the other one, after a modest payment of sixty million dollars, of course.

  Sixty million! It was huge.

  That kidnapping was the origin of my life, my modest life. I’m quite serious. Wait!

  My mother, who’s a crazy dreamer and of course quite irresponsible, was a left-wing militant in Córdoba in those years, the daughter of a steel worker and union leader, of German descent to be more precise, anyway, you get the picture. That’s how she ended up involved in a group supporting the Montoneros. She had military training, right? It was quite something. When the Born kidnapping took place, everyone was tearing their hair out and the people who were militant had to tread carefully, because there were informers everywhere and the police had a thousand eyes, don’t forget that López Rega and the Triple A were around in those days. Every day the Borns were kept was a victory for the guerillas, they really scared the people they captured!

  In the middle of all that, negotiations were continuing with the company, Bunge & Born, and of course there were tense moments, very difficult moments. That’s only natural, right? The boys got nervous over nothing and made themselves scarce, nobody trusted anybody.

  In the middle of all this mess, in this terrible climate of fear, the people from Bunge & Born asked Bergoglio to travel in secret to Córdoba and meet with a representative from the Montoneros. To take a message asking for a truce, in other words. Those were times of war, and everyone respected the Society of Jesus and its provincial superior!

  Bergoglio spoke with Bunge in his office in Mar del Plata and finally ac
cepted the assignment. He thought he could help to free those two people, and of course he did help! A few days later he traveled to Córdoba as a civilian, in camouflage, so to speak. No cassocks or dog collars, and he stayed at a hotel downtown, the Contemporáneo. There he had to wait for instructions, but when he went to reception he was surprised to find there was no message for him. So he decided to wait, to stay there without leaving his room, because where could he go? What would he gain by doing that? Time was passing and the poor man was still there, not knowing what was going on. Why did nobody call him? He had arrived at the hotel at noon and it was already seven in the evening, and I think Bergoglio must have had a moment of doubt, he must have thought, “I’m getting out of here,” but in the end he didn’t leave, he stayed where he was, calling reception every now and again to find out if there was any message or any news. I don’t know if he registered under his real name, though I doubt it. If he was on a secret mission he wouldn’t have been so stupid, but what do I know? The Hotel Contemporáneo disappeared at the end of the eighties and God knows what happened to its registers. They must have disappeared. This happened many decades ago!

  Anyway, to continue with the story.

  As Bergoglio looked out the window at the street, he imagined that he heard footsteps in the corridor, near his door, but there was nothing. Only silence. He wanted to leave, to get out of there, but something held him back and he waited a little longer. He felt that he couldn’t get away from that hotel until something happened, until someone showed himself, and so the night went by and the morning of the next day. Nor did he dare to call the people from Bunge & Born, because he thought the telephone might be tapped. When someone’s on a secret mission anything’s possible.

  After lunch, which just like dinner the night before he had ordered to his room—nothing special, just a chicken sandwich and a regular Coke, remember in those years they didn’t yet have diet drinks—at about three in the afternoon, he finally heard someone knocking at the door, and then a voice:

  “Laundry service.”

  Bergoglio got up from the couch and went to look through the peephole in the door. Outside there was a chambermaid, but he said to her without opening the door that he hadn’t asked for any service. The woman crossed herself and pointed to the door, so he opened it and she came in very quickly. That chambermaid, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, was my mother! They greeted one another shyly and exchanged a few words in low voices: he gave her the message she had to transmit to the organization and she gave him hers for the people from Bunge & Born. That was it. Mission accomplished.

  Before leaving the room, my mother looked Bergoglio in the eyes and asked permission to ask him a question, and he said yes, of course, and so she asked if it was true about eternal life, if it was known for certain that after death you were moved into another dimension and continued being yourself, then how did they know, how they had been able to find out without actually being dead. She asked this with absolute simplicity and a certain urgency in the way she looked at him. Of course, my mother was an atheist and a communist, as you can imagine, but she had never had a religious authority so close to her, which is why she dared to ask this, it was obviously something that had been bothering her for a long time, but according to what she told me, Bergoglio didn’t answer her directly, saying yes or no, but began a story that she later passed on to me and which, of course, I’ve used a lot in my meetings.

  It’s a story about a procession of hooded men going through the center of a ruined city, in silence and single file, all following a leader along a road that goes up to the top of the mountain, a long way up, where a cross can be seen, and it’s as if on that mountain was the last temple and the last cross in the world, and that’s why that group of men was going there, in the middle of collapsed and ruined buildings, burned-out buses, and decomposed bodies, cutting though the fetid air, avoiding bodies of men and animals already stiff on the asphalt.

  It was strange, in the middle of that weird apocalypse, to see a column of hooded men walking in silence, but there they were, going strong, there couldn’t have been more than twenty of them and, as they went up the road, their pace grew slower, God knows where these poor devils had come from, abandoned by all gods and all creative words, but they continued believing against all hope in that symbol there, that cross that was still standing, maybe the last intact temple remaining on the face of the earth. When the procession entered a kind of trench one of the walkers fell to the ground, simply fell, nothing more than that, making the noise that a package makes on hitting a solid surface, plop, nothing more, but none of the walkers stopped, lives come to an end and others continue is what they seemed to say with their silence, and so, little by little, they faced the final slope up a flight of steps, a very hard climb, but the hooded men managed not to decrease the pace, one, two, one, two, there was something military in their rhythm, or as if in that marching there was a kind of balance, something more fragile and precarious than themselves, something that surpassed them in time and in memory, and so they went on, one, two, one, two. Soon afterwards the same noise sounded again of someone passing out and falling, plop, and then plop, plop, two more bodies, one of them rolled down the steps and ended up with his head in the ditch of a garden where there were already other corpses and the skeleton of a horse, and there he stayed, in a strange posture, and the others, as happened with the first, continued on their way, it’s possible they didn’t even turn to see who it was, who had fallen by the wayside, not at all, just kept advancing. The man who was leading them held in his right hand a long staff, not like the jeweled staffs of the popes, like the one my father must have today, but a very simple staff of unpolished wood, almost a tree branch, that’s what it looked like from a distance, anyway, this man was marking the rhythm and continued moving forward without turning, and seeing him from the back, it was obvious that he was blind, because of the way he walked and the way he gripped the staff, it seemed obvious to everyone that he was blind, but he knew the way better than the others, he had spent his life climbing to the temple, he had to take that path every day to sit on the steps, maybe to ask for alms or receive some food, what’s certain is that the man was blind and was leading the others upwards, and maybe the fact that he was blind explained his frenetic rhythm, it’s a known fact that few things distract the blind: not the images of corpses nor the bloodstained asphalt nor the imploring or surprised poses of the lifeless bodies, and so he went on, step after step, one, two, one, two, until there was another plop and then another, and when they realized they were already halfway up the final slope there were only half a dozen walkers left, who suddenly increased their pace, walked more quickly, as if the fallen were the ballast of a globe that was now receiving a sudden impetus, they were already close, almost there, half of the temple building could already be seen, a soaking wet wall of a resplendent white that was starting to turn gray because of the late hour, and on top the beautiful cross, the sign that they all bore in their hearts, presumably, and toward which, naturally, they had come, because the ruined and burning city down below was for them the world outside, a cold, lawless place, and at last they reached the top and hurried to the building, and then something weird happens which is that the story has two possible endings, it’s a bit strange, Bergoglio tells my mother, strange but that’s how it is, there are two endings and you have to choose one, and he told her them . . .

  In the first, the group is already a few yards from the main door, shrouded in shadow, when out of the darkness there emerges a terrible din and the air fills with tracer bullets that light up the gloom and cut them down one by one, amid choked cries; the bullets come from out of the pitch dark, nobody knows who’s firing them, but they hit everyone, including the blind man who, although wounded, supports himself on his staff and manages to take a series of steps in a circle, like a spinning top, until a second volley goes off and the air again fills with smoke; two projectiles hit him in the head and
adorn the wall with fragments of his cranium. The destruction has come from the darkest part of the night and that brave group, perhaps the last men on earth to believe or bear a word, do not reach their objective: they are cut down a few yards from the temple.

  That’s the first ending, Bergoglio told my mother, and she made a distressed face and asked, with a touch of melancholy, what about the second? is it just as sad? and then Bergoglio said to her, it’s for you to decide which of the two is sadder, I’m going to tell it to you, the second one is this:

  The group reaches the summit and approaches the door of the temple, night falls, the first shadows arrive; one of the walkers turns and thinks about the long walk and the many plops made by his companions’ bodies, and then the blind man says to them, go in, all of you, I can only come as far as this, I have guided you; he sits down on the steps, and although it’s illogical and doesn’t correspond to reality he takes out a plastic plate and puts it in front of himself to receive alms, a gesture so devoid of meaning as to be useless, since who can give him anything in a dead city, in an abandoned and lonely world? But there he sat, just like every day, and the others, pulling down the hoods of their tunics, entered an enormous nave in which there was nothing other than pure emptiness, a vault in which the steps of these tired and hungry men echoed; the echo sent back to them the noise of their breathing, the throbbing of their chests, and as it did so their fragile condition of men on their own, creatures lost or abandoned in a world of shadows, seemed more intense, and suddenly one of them, perhaps the youngest or the strongest, stepped forward and went to the apse, where the altar should have been, but on arriving there, amid the shadows of night, he realized that there was nothing there, absolutely nothing, just a strange mirror embedded in a stone, there was no altar, no image of any god, only his own image reflected in the mirror, so they went one by one through that strange sanctum that was nothing but an empty space that made them think of themselves, of course, but also of an abyss and of all the solitude that man has felt, from the first man who stood up on his two feet and walked; an altar where the only thing they could worship, the only thing they could bow down to, was their own image, because in some way their solitude and their terrible effort had converted them into gods, the gods of themselves, and at that moment Bergoglio said, this is the end of the second ending, and when he finished speaking he noticed that my mother, who at that time was a young woman, was crying, her face was bathed in tears even though she was a hardened militant, and then she said to Bergoglio, and what does it mean, in your opinion? why is there so much solitude and so much sadness in this story? and he said, I don’t know, you asked me if I believed in life after death and I tell you this, I myself don’t understand it perfectly but this is how it should be told, and they both felt very alone and they embraced, because with all the talking they had done time had passed and night had fallen, they hadn’t realized and they were wrapped in darkness themselves, in that solitary hotel room into which the weight of night had suddenly fallen, and the embrace they gave each other was many things: two strangers who keep each other company and encourage one another in the midst of secrecy, the beginning of a response to the story of the hooded men climbing to the temple, of course, or perhaps the story of all men, or a particular man who finds himself alone and naked, without chants or rituals, metaphors or protective words, and my mother wanted to stay like that, embracing that priest forever, trying not to arouse the demons of the night.