Return to the Dark Valley

by Santiago Gamboa

  But let me carry on with my story.

  I don’t even know where I was going.

  One day, in Kreuzberg, at a meeting of the National Democratic Party of Germany, listening to a talk by Udo Voigt on the need to review the Nuremberg Laws, I again became aware of strange things happening. The platform on which Udo was speaking started to move, as if driven by powerful waves, everything was moving at a frantic rhythm. The wall of the stage started to fall in drops of acid onto the platform and the panelists, who didn’t seem to move and just kept listening to the talk. I clutched my chair with both hands, afraid of falling to the floor, and what I saw next was even more terrifying: the sky was turning lavender and making whirlpools that swirled around Udo’s words. I started to choke. I wasn’t aware of falling to the floor and the next image I had was a corridor with fluorescent lights following one after another on the ceiling, like that scene from Carlito’s Way.

  When I got to the hospital I had a panic attack.

  I saw flashes coming in through the windows and tried to take refuge in a surgical unit. Of course they stopped me, but it took six strong men. There was a bit of damage that, luckily, was covered by social security because I was known to be a psychiatric patient. They wired me up and started pumping drugs into my body intravenously, Chlorpromazine and other antipsychotics; I sank into something like a cauliflower heart, but made of jelly: a half-solid world where everything I touched stuck to my hand and tasted sweet.

  Then I saw a knife or perhaps a surgical instrument, God knows what it was, and felt a terrible desire to pass it across my abdomen. Not to plunge it in, but to cut the skin from side to side. I rushed at the knife. I wanted to expel the wave of poison I was carrying inside. The people in the hospital thought I was going to hit the other patients or the nurses, which hadn’t even crossed my mind. They grabbed hold of me and tied me to the bed with leather straps on my arms. I started to feel an itch in my nose, in my cheeks. I screamed, begging them to scratch my scalp and behind my ears, but nobody wanted to come near me. I felt a terrible rash, it was horrendous! I don’t know what the hell they put in the drip, but it knocked me out.

  The problem is that you can’t just open the body and go in to do repairs. Everything is in its place. And at the same time it isn’t, because it’s as if the candles are dripping inside you. It’s the worst thing there is, believe me.

  I slept, as I later found out, for three days on end.

  When I woke up I thought I was in the Hadamar psychiatric center on the outskirts of Koblenz, a hospital for mental patients in the Third Reich.

  I felt that I was crazy and that I was going around the world covered in a sheet, stopping the lightning and fighting the fires left by the bombing.

  I woke up again and realized they had moved me.

  Now I was in the psychiatric prison in Beelitz-Heilstätten, in a room with broken windows and a collapsed ceiling. The rain was coming in through a hole in the roof. The wall was starting to be covered over with clinging ivy. The paint was falling to the floor in strange flakes that looked like dirty flour. The tiled floor was covered in a patina of moss that was quite slippery, so that you’d have to move very slowly.

  My hallucinations all had to do with abandoned hospitals.

  Especially psychiatric hospitals, which were going to be mine all my life. I also dreamed about Cane Hill Hospital, with its sinister bathtubs for washing the mad by force, today full of rotten water, lichen, and frogs. Or about the ashes of the Hellingly Asylum, which at night was home to heroin addicts and other scum who lit fires to warm themselves until someone must have fallen asleep with a lit cigarette.

  I once copied out a quotation by the writer J. G. Ballard: “I’m never happier than when I can write about drained swimming pools and abandoned hotels.” Well, if I was a writer, like you, my subject would be ruined hospitals. How about something called Theory of Ruined Hospitals? It has a good ring to it.

  My sickness had no cure and I was far from my mother, though I didn’t want to tell her anything either. What for? To make her suffer and feel guilty? After three months I went home, I’d lost nearly thirty pounds, which rather suited me, since in those circles everything revolves around beer and würstel and before you realize it you’ve turned into a pig. It was at this period that I started my unfortunate addiction to junk food, which led me to eat mass-produced sausages and burgers whenever I was anxious, and wash them down with gallons of soft drinks, fruit-flavored yoghurts, and that kind of thing.

  I got through three or four large bottles a day.

  That period coincided with a slightly crazy episode, too crazy even, which is that, as if there wasn’t already enough going on, I developed an uncomfortable and fortunately passing addiction to sex that led me to the most violent and screwed-up experience of my life. Sorry to talk about something so personal, which has nothing to do with the origin of my project, but it’s important if you want to get an idea of who I am.

  My sex life in Argentina wasn’t very interesting. I got hardly anywhere with any of the girls I liked, and only once, at the age of eighteen, did I manage to fuck a local girl. It wasn’t especially memorable. Then I had a girlfriend who was a bit stupid, the cousin of one of my rugby teammates. A quiet girl who came to watch the training and who I invited to eat ice cream, and so I became her boyfriend, rather reluctantly, just to get the sex thing out of the way.

  When I got to Germany things spiraled out of control. The women looked like Valkyries, powerful but unattainable. I wasn’t bad-looking, I was strong and quite tall, but I had no money and that’s crucial if you want to take one of those cuties out, isn’t it? I barely had enough to study and attend meetings of the neo-Nazi groups, but paradoxically it was now that I had a kind of great revelation or sexual awakening.

  Among the followers in Lichtenberg there was a very beautiful young woman, blonde and with a good body. She had an incredible propensity for raving it up, and one day, after a couple of beers, I made up my mind to talk to her in a noisy and very seedy bar. She already knew me, she had seen me at meetings. She told me something about her life. Her name was Saskia and she was the daughter of Russian immigrants, she was born after the fall of the wall, but her parents were still workers. One day her father let a wheelbarrow filled with bricks slip from his hands and the bricks fell down the stairwell. The problem is that it was on the eleventh floor! It was his bad luck that some workers were seriously injured: one died, another went into a coma, and a third suffered a severe head wound. Of course, Saskia’s father was covered by industrial accident law, only there was a little problem, which is that when he was given a medical test they found that he was drunk. Drunk at work at nine in the morning? He was charged with aggravated negligence and homicide. He lost his job and was reduced to state aid. Saskia’s mother worked in a discount supermarket and her brother was a heroin addict. Not a very stimulating family atmosphere for study, as you can see. In fact, she had tried heroin at the age of fifteen but didn’t get hooked.

  That same night we fucked.

  She had swastikas tattooed on her buttocks and the face of Stalin under her navel. What a cutie. She had a runic S on each side of her pussy, making the Nazi SS sign, and hangings and piercings in her nipples and nostrils. She looked like a walking tinsmith’s stand! We had a great fuck and she became an obsession with me. All day I wanted to fuck her and when I was with her, even before finishing I already felt I wanted to do it again. An amazing addiction. Saskia realized and since she was a bit crazy and I was Argentinian she was fine with it. All right, she’d say, let’s go fuck, and we’d fuck in the toilet of the bar, on the stairs of the S-Bahn, in subway cars . . . We fucked everywhere! I started falling in love, just imagine, although I knew it was impossible, how was I going to introduce a girl like that to my mother? But when I’d next see Saskia and we’d fuck I’d forget all about that.

  I was far from being the love of her life.
She soon saw that I had no money and that I wasn’t interested either in rising higher in the party, so one day she said to me, all right, darling, as of today it’s over, thank you, the amusement park is closed, be a gentleman, that’s what she said to me and I said goodbye with a cold, sad kiss and went home, first to drink a beer and then a bottle of cheap whiskey I’d bought. And so, as a kind of replacement I became a temporary alcoholic, while I was missing Saskia, or to be more honest and accurate, while I was dying to fuck Saskia. I thought I’d forget her by fucking other girls and went out looking for them, but it wasn’t the same; and every time I saw a swastika, can you imagine, I got a hard-on.

  One day I made a fatal mistake.

  Wait while I pour myself a little more gin, because what I’m going to tell you isn’t easy. The only way to take it in is to talk about what happened to me, although as you’ll see, there’s nothing natural about it.

  It’s a long, long way from being natural.

  One night I’d been drinking on my own at home, and you know, the worst thing for a person who’s lovesick is to have photographs. I grabbed my camera and started going back through them, and saw Saskia, with her white ass and her legs up, with her pussy open, holding up her tits, anyway, I went crazy, half metaphorically and half literally, because I left home like a shot to look for her; I went to Lichtenberg, to a bar called Odessa, a place that was very punk and very Nazi, but couldn’t find her. They told me she was at a party on the other side of the S-Bahn. I went out with the address in my hand, hailed a taxi, and went to the place. It was on the second floor of an old abandoned warehouse.

  I found a grille open on one side and went in. Then I went up a fire escape and got to the main room, and you have no idea what it was like: there they were, smoking crack and injecting heroin on a collapsed couch, listening to music at an impossible volume, in a daze, surrounded by empty vodka and schnapps bottles, it was disgusting.

  I couldn’t see Saskia anywhere, so I started to search for her.

  From the outside gangway I passed through a window into the old offices, and I saw three men lying on a rug with their pants down and syringes in their forearms; a young guy was sucking the cock of another guy of about forty who seemed to be the leader, and a third scumbag, who was about twenty, was fucking the same guy in the ass, which is a pretty horrifying image for someone who isn’t into that kind of thing, don’t you think?

  I continued on my way and saw that all kinds of things were happening in those half-ruined offices. It was Sodom and Gomorrah!

  In another even darker place I saw some figures dancing, very drunk or very drugged, and a shaven-headed woman of about fifty in a G-string sticking the mouth of a wine bottle into another woman’s ass. And all the while, a kind of emaciated faun with tattoos from head to foot was fucking her in the ass.

  The music was really loud in the whole of this area and nobody heard me walking along the corridor, in spite of the amount of broken glass and rusty old iron scattered on the floor. I felt a pang in my heart imagining Saskia fucking someone in one of these offices, and I went from one room to another, scared of what I might see.

  But you know how it is, if you search you find.

  I saw her and almost fell on the floor. They had her tied up on a table, on her back, with a blindfold over her eyes. A kind of albino orangutan, with a neck wider than his head, had his cock in her mouth while another was dripping melted wax from a candle onto her navel.

  Saskia was screaming.

  It was too much for me, I went crazy.

  I went in and punched the guy with his cock in her mouth, and he fell to one side and hit his head on a desk. The other one, the one with the candle, I kicked in the balls and he fell to the floor, choking. I threw the hot wax in his face and he doubled up in pain. It took Saskia a while to recognize me, but instead of being happy she started screaming hysterically, telling me to get out of there and leave them alone.

  “They’re my friends!” she said.

  They didn’t look very friendly, I thought, but on seeing what I’d done to them she slapped me across the face. She ran out into the corridor naked and a second later came back with three guys who looked like giants. One had a handkerchief tied around his head, like a Pirate of the Caribbean. The other two could have been miners or railroad workers. When I saw them, I polished up my modest German and said to them: it’s all right, guys, it’s all a misunderstanding, I’m going now, Auf Wiedersehen!, but the guys came forward and however hard I tried to punch them to the ground the only thing I managed to do was dislocate my shoulder and get my nose smashed.

  “Did you come here looking for action?” said one of the chimpanzees.

  They tied me to a gymnasium horse. A thin toothless guy, with the sour crack breath of onions in vinegar, approached my ear and said:

  “If that’s what you were looking for, princess, you’ve come to the right place; get ready for an unforgettable night!”

  What followed was disgusting, Consul. They pulled down my pants and put half a jar of cream between my buttocks. Then they all took turns, even those I’d seen fucking each other in the first office. They took turns buggering me, begging your pardon. How many were there? More than a dozen. A chorus of ageing punk women, cadaverous and addicted, laughed and shouted. Then they opened bags of coke and stuck it in in their noses or smoked it in pipes.

  They broke my ass, Consul.

  Saskia turned into a devil, a kind of female Satan who took the lead in this sinister ritual and urged them to continue: come on, next one! She invited those who hadn’t yet had a turn to take it, and again put cream on me.

  Come for this beautiful Argentinian ass!

  Today it’s free!

  They were all laughing shrilly, revealing gums rotted by heroin and black molars. I thought: if they don’t kill me now, I’ll be dead of AIDS by tomorrow afternoon. Those sons of bitches were like bags of germs.

  I didn’t grant them a single complaint, a single tear. Nothing. Just a resentful silence. Every time someone withdrew his cock and cleaned it with a Kleenex, I said to myself: pray for me to die, you son of a bitch, because if I get out alive my revenge will be terrible.

  My masters were putting me to the test, showing me the violence of the world. All the things I had to combat. Then an idea started taking shape in my mind: don’t forget them, get a good idea of who they are.

  Because there will be revenge.

  And so, while the guys continued laughing, I observed them out of the corner of my eye. I managed to find something in each of them that I could recognize: a tattoo, a wristwatch, a small chain, a ring. Most were Russians or Russian speakers from the former East Germany. When they got bored they forced me to take a pill that finished me off, leaving me seeing visions and unable to stand. Two of them dumped me in the back of a beat-up Opel and drove me to a truck stop on the freeway. There they left me, lying in a ditch.

  What a big mistake leaving me alive, what a mistake.

  I left the hospital two weeks later and didn’t report them to the police. I had already understood the message loud and clear: be violent with the violent and affectionate with the affectionate. In this case, my masters demanded an exemplary revenge and I already had the profiles of seven of the attackers in a notebook. They had shown me a specific area of corruption and it was up to me to cauterize it. It was just a question of hygiene. I decided to turn into a nocturnal avenger, the immunological agent who has to attack and destroy whatever acts in a destructive manner inside the system. That had been the message. I classified it in my brain as “part of a steep learning curve leading to change.”

  I’d already made up my mind to leave Germany. I gave up the room I’d been renting, gave away my belongings, and said goodbye to the few friends I had. I announced that I was going back to Argentina, sent my things to Madrid, and stayed in Berlin a few days more. I took a room in a modest boarding h
ouse in Charlottensburg with the idea of passing unnoticed among tourists with backpacks. I tried not to stand out. It was very likely I was being watched.

  At night, I started my search. I had images of the seven guys, so started to comb the Lichtenberg area. I had changed my appearance as much as I could, of course. I wore black clothes, hoods. I let my beard grow and lost weight. It wasn’t very hard to find them. I just had to keep my eye on Saskia’s brother to get to the others. I drew a series of circles on a map of the area and considered the best way to attack them. They didn’t know what was in store for them! The first thing I did was go into a bar and steal the wallet of one of them when he wasn’t looking. It was child’s play.

  The ID said Rudolf Oleg Handke, born in Innsbruck, October 21, 1981. He had a fifty-euro bill and another of ten. Another of a thousand dinars, something like a collector’s item, from the Bank of Serbia. A sachet of a brown substance I assumed was heroin. An old membership card from the Association of Friends of the Tyrol in Aachen. A student card from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, enrolled in educational science. Old papers with telephone numbers, which I noted down.

  Once I’d finished the phase of studying my targets, which took me about a month, I went on to the second phase: the attack.