Necropolis

by Santiago Gamboa

  I looked her up on the internet and found 320,000 results. There was a website of her production company, which listed her movies, and another that seemed to be her official website, the name of which, translated from Italian, would be something like www.letmesuckit.com. It contained photographs, short videos, and a section for short stories, entitled Holocaust of the Hymen. I opened one from Mexico, which read as follows:

  I was by the side of the swimming pool, wearing only a tiny G-string that plunged into my shaved cunt and no top because they leave ugly marks on the back. Frank was swimming, taking no notice of me until he came closer and said, what’s up, Mireyita? I turned without saying anything, just stuck my ass in his direction, I wanted him to see that I was still a virgin and get the message, the idiot. Frank emerged from the water, opened my legs and thrust it into me, all the way, or as they say in Sinaloa, all the way up to the glottis and back again. It didn’t hurt because I was wet, and I’m not referring to the turquoise water of the pool but my own fountain, because with his muscles and his pale skin and his mummy’s-boy face he made me sopping wet, and I would have given my life for his wretched cock to be ten or twenty inches longer and reach all the way up to my duodenum. Then, when he came, he shot so much spunk into me that I was dripping for the next three days.

  Apart from the writings, there were photographs of Sabina Vedovelli. In one of them a man had his arm up her anus and she was smiling and biting on a white nurse’s cap. The man was wearing a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck. It was going to be strange, meeting her at the conference.

  Let me continue with the most striking of the delegates. In some cases, this will serve as an introduction to future characters, insofar as time, as in the novels of Balzac, can be measured in pages.

  Moisés Kaplan. Colombia, 64 years old. Historian, philatelist, and stamp collector. Divides his time between New York and Tel Aviv. His best known books are: From Palestine to the Aburrá Valley, Biography of Antón Ashverus, and a book on grammar entitled Against the Diphthong and the Hiatus.

  José Maturana. Miami, 56 years old, former evangelical pastor, former convict, former drug addict. Served seven prison sentences for armed robbery in Florida and Charleston before finding the light with the help of Reverend Walter de la Salle, founder of the Ministry of Mercy, a church and advice center for drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, depressives, the suicidal, the violent, the antisocial, pedophiles, and other deviants who wish to find redemption through faith. Among his works are Miracle in Moundsville, Christ Stopped on Crack Drive, and The Redeemers of South Miami.

  By that point, I had lost all sense of reality. The delegates and their bizarre lives seemed straight out of a play by Tennessee Williams, one of those waterfront dramas where everyone is drunk and desperate, women and men endlessly lust after each other, and everything is profoundly tragic, but I also thought: this is where I belong, when you come down to it, with my illness and my solitude and my novels, what will the former pastor think when he reads my biographical sketch? The ICBM was right to invite me, even though, and there was no doubt about it now, they had made a mistake, a big mistake.

  Just before dawn—staring up at the wreaths of smoke from the cigarillo I was forbidden to smoke—I told myself that perhaps the people in the ICBM saw something in my work of which I was unaware, something that did have a connection with biography and exceptional lives and might be about to manifest itself, like so many things we ourselves are unaware of but are obvious to other people: the white whales or Moby Dicks we carry inside us and cannot see, and so I told myself, I will have to be very much on the alert. At that hour of the night, I came to the conclusion that I would not miss the conference for anything in the world, that I would be there from the first day to the last.

  The next day I woke up very late, almost noon. On my desk table, next to the telltale ashtray, I found a bottle of gin with almost nothing left in it—I did not think to mention that before—and I realized that much of what I had been thinking (the reference to Moby Dick, for example) was due to that perverse analyst and futurologist to which Malcolm Lowry refers in one of his poems, when he says, “The only hope is the next drink,” good old Lowry, but anyway, it was time to continue thinking about the topics to be treated at the conference, so after a light snack I went back to work, and in the course of the next few hours I looked at books by Voltaire, Goethe, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which I have never read, but which other people have told me about and from which I remembered a quotation I could not find; plus, as always, the diaries of Julio Ramón Ribeyro and his extraordinary Prosas apátridas, as well as Cioran and Fernando González, the “philosopher from somewhere else.”

  I read and read, jumping from one book to another, and as often happens to me I ended up rereading poetry by Gil de Biedma and paragraphs from Graham Greene, two or three maxims by Cortázar and verses by León de Greiff, the great León, who had the courage to write the following:

  Lady Night, give me Sleep. May my Weariness sleep long

  And I with it, (Oh, Night! Let us sleep forever:

  Never wake us, tomorrow or ever!)

  And so I went on, book by book, phrase by phrase, from Epictetus to Les Murray, from Musil to Panait Istrati, from Bufalino to Malraux, sometimes only a paragraph or a sentence, and then I thought again about the biographical genre and took from the shelf Primo Levi by Ian Thomson, and Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, by Howard Sounes, the life of poor lonely old Bukowski, with his monstrous acne—worse than mine, pitted with craters as my cheeks are—his alcoholism and his love of desperate people and the dark corners of bars. Time passed, and the sky of Rome was filling with dark, terrifying black holes, like something out of a painting by Caravaggio, and I started to wonder if those written lives were real or if their only reality was in the writing itself, the fact that they had been turned into words, into filled pages destined for people almost as desperate as themselves, sadly normal people who populate this world of illusions, clocks, and threatening sunsets like the one that now appeared outside my window, over Via degli Scipioni, and reminded me that it was time to go down and have dinner.

  The Cola di Rienzo trattoria is a couple of blocks away, on the corner of Via Pompeo Magno and Via Lepanto. I usually order spaghetti a la amatriciana, with an artichoke salad and a bottle of white wine. With that on the table I continued thinking about what lay behind all those books, which were like a trunk containing the fears of so many solitary people who, like me that night, needed to understand something just so that they could tell others that they had no need of it and had never asked for it, or so that they could tell themselves and then find the strength to continue, their brains seething with images and premonitions. And so the days passed, filled with books, dinners at the trattoria, and fierce looks from the caretaker, who had suspected something ever since he had seen that envelope and the writing in Hebrew. The other day, for example, he stopped me at the front door and told me that in one of the booklets put out by his group there was an article on the physical characteristics of the Jews, which made them less potent sexually, or so the article said, but I took no notice of him, just told him that I was expecting a call from my doctor and walked away.

  The blank pages were gradually filling up, and, just before I was due to set out in my journey, I finished the first draft of a lecture that I entitled Words Written in the Cave of Silence, in which I tried to explain that the literary concept of words is that of an underground stream that runs very deep, dictated by the distant, obscure howling of creation, with extracts from different authors and a Kafkaesque tone reminiscent of A Report to the Academy. In the same folder I put three old texts on related themes, knowing that they always come in useful at round tables.

  2.

  THE MINISTRY OF MERCY (I)

  (AS TOLD BY JOSÉ MATURANA)

  I’m a Venezuelan and was born in Santo Domingo, in a brothel full of crazy alcoholics hiding under the tables,
licking their wounds clean with their tongues. I’m a Panamanian and first saw the light of day on a pile of corpses in Quintana Roo, or was it San Juan? I don’t remember. I’m a Cuban and resulted from the coupling of a junkie whore and a blind, mangy stray dog in Tegucigalpa. I was born Latino in Miami and when I opened my eyes three hit men were sodomizing the nurse, who was very drunk and putting powder in her nose. I wasn’t born of woman, I was shat out by an animal with three heads who then cleaned himself with a dirty sheet and staggered away between the palms, his three brains befuddled by crack. I’m a Nicaraguan, a Costa Rican, a Dominican, and a Puerto Rican. I’m from Bogotá and Caracas. I’m a punk and a Rasta and a vagrant and a gangbanger and a paramilitary and a drug dealer. I’m black and mixed race and mestizo and Indian and purebred white. I’m sick and I don’t know who the hell I am. I don’t know if I’m already dead. Maybe I am. I’m a Caribbean. I’m a Latin American.

  This was what I told myself every time I opened my eyes and saw the bars of my cell in Moundsville Penitentiary, my dear friends and listeners, before the guard came and hit the bars with his baton and cried, José, wake up! get off the toilet, we’re going to change the water! and I’d rack my brains, but all I found was an empty screen, a concrete wall like the towers of the prison, my head was empty, and I’d tell myself, José, you must remember something, search deep down, search, or did you fall from a palm tree like a coconut? even the frogs matter in this world, as the Bible says, and I’d search and search, but it didn’t work, all I ever saw was a hill of stones and gravel in the distance, tin houses held up by ropes, a stretch of wasteland in the Latino district, near the Orange Bowl Stadium, with buzzards flying overhead and a wall full of holes. Plus a footbridge strewn with organic waste, empty or near-empty soda bottles, dried dog shit. That was what I had in my mind whenever I woke up and thought of my Latino origins, and the continent I didn’t have, the continent that was far from me, as if I was its leprosy. The continent that had abandoned me and expelled me and that I loved, my friends, more than anything I’ve ever had and loved.

  I longed to see a face or remember a voice, because I’d say to myself, somebody must have been pleased to see me some time, even if only for a few minutes, but nothing came, only cold distant images, newspapers blown about on the air raised by trucks passing on the avenue, flies and rotting food, used syringes, sanitary napkins with dried and blackened blood, and when I heard the guard shouting again, “José, thirty seconds!” I would think that somebody must have given birth to me for me to be in this shithole–what did the woman look like?–otherwise, I’d be a stone or a seashell, and so I went out into the corridor and breathed in the fetid air of the cellblock, one, two, three, and then I’d throw myself on the floor and do press-ups, because I had to be strong, and as I did that I’d feel a ball of fire in my guts, the moaning from the cells reminding me of something urgent, the voice of a sick girl saying in my ear, where’s today’s smack, friend? and I’d reply, when they open the door to the yard, sweetheart, I’ll go fetch it, it’s in my hiding place though I can’t tell you where that is, I have today’s supply there and maybe tomorrow’s, if the monster trapped in my chest that won’t let me breathe doesn’t get too upset in the afternoon.

  We prisoners would leave the cells and go to the showers and then to the dining hall for breakfast, but by now I was already outside, my friends, I’d swung by my hiding place and had transported myself to the sky, or as they used to say, I was riding the dragon, with the heat of the smack in my veins, which was even nicer than having your cock in the ass of a black female dancer in the province of Oriente, Cuba, or in Maracay or on the island of Guadalupe or in Cartagena de Indias, oh what joy, my friends, and forgive the coarse language, but the fact is, if I don’t use that language I won’t be able to convey the main gist of my story, which is, and no more beating about the bush now, the piece of lowlife shit I was before the Word of the Lord, of the Man Himself, the Supreme Brother, came into my life in the voice of his missionary on earth, Reverend Walter de la Salle, who was also called Freddy Angel or José de Arimatea, depending on the period or which year his driving license was issued, because without that, and with all the changes of personality, even he himself didn’t remember where or how he’d started, and I really mean that, my friends and listeners, and I tell you here and now, Freddy Angel, the original name of that Caribbean Jesus Christ, had the same beginnings as me, in other words, the fucking street, which is what I’m talking about, born like me at the mercy of the elements, under a car fender, and brought up by an angel who was his protector, a cone of light that enveloped him and kept him out of trouble and stood between him and knives and even bullets, and that was why he was called Freddy Angel, because the person who protects us is the one who gives us our name.

  The first person in Walter’s life was that angel, so that was what he was called, and that was how he explained his origins: that an angel had left him on a bench in Echo Park, under an oak tree, and that only after a few hours did he start to wake up, ah-ha, and open his eyes, and when both of them were wide open he realized what it meant to be a human and not a stellar android, a piece of the sky or a particle of light, so he said, and then Walter or Freddy got up from the bench and started going around the world doing good, because apparently the angel had brought him already fully grown; but doing good isn’t the easiest thing, especially if the people who need it don’t realize it or don’t want it, because anyone who hasn’t seen God, my friends, when he does see him he gets a bit scared, and so the young man started to talk to whores and young drug addicts about the Redeemer, to see what they said, and of course, the first person he addressed, a fat black man with eyes as red and bulging as those of a wife-killer, said, God? what’s that? and added, I haven’t had the pleasure, son, who is he? is he from the block? isn’t he the guy in the gray Dodge Polara? and so Walter thought, forgive them, Lord, and talked to them about the origin of life and the origin of love and sadness and problems and how to solve them.

  He also started going to the Old Havana Memorial Hospital, the ward for the terminally sick, to be with, and give relief to, people with sunken eyes and pale skin, who were already sitting on the lap of the Grim Reaper, and there he saw a bit of everything, emphysemas, sarcomas, exhausted livers and pancreases, rotten bladders, prostates inflated like blood sausages, he saw the violence of the incurable and the hatred they felt for those left behind, and he talked to them about love and God and tried to bring them relief.

  There he was, Freddy Angel, pushing wheelchairs through the gardens so that the old people could breathe the salty, smog-filled air of the parking lot, helping hopeless cases out of their beds, taking them to the washroom and cleaning their asses and groins, he was a true saint, that young man, and gradually the staff of the Old Havana started saying to each other, who is this guy? but they also got used to him, until one day they called him and said, hey, you . . . yes, you, are you somebody’s relative? is that why you come here every day? and he replied, yes, I am the father of all these pale-faced men, or the son who takes on their sins and cleans their shit, what does it matter who I am, I come for them, because they’re alone and nobody looks them in the eyes or talks to them about God.

  They took him to see the director, who said, well, now, young man, what is it you’re looking for? a job? do you want to train as a nurse? but he said, no, sir, I don’t need any training to care for my children, I come to keep them company, to be with them before they go, that’s all.

  They continued to let him come, saying to him, you can stay if that’s what you like, but . . . you’re not one of those damn perverts? to which Freddy said, no sir, let me prove to you that I only want to help, and he kept coming every day; as he was poor he ate what little the patients left on the plates, without thinking about infection, he ate leftover rice and sauce, meat fat, slices of sour tomato, cold dregs of chicken soup, pieces of hardened bread, fruit that had gone soft, he’d collect the old people’s trays and take them out
in the corridor and there he’d lick the plates and keep little bags of cookies and crusts of bread in his pocket to eat them afterwards, until one day, a few weeks later, they called him again and said, hey, you, come here, would you be interested in working as a night companion for the incurables? and he said, yes, whatever, if it means being with them; the doctors looked at each other in surprise but ended up giving him a paper and telling him he’d be paid a hundred twenty dollars per week.

  Reverend Walter de la Salle used to say that contract had been his baptism: the first time his name was printed on a piece of paper, and with that he stopped being a piece of planet that had fallen from God alone knew what skies and started to be human, he now had a name and an employment contract, my friends, and on taking that name it became still clearer that he was like me, a Caribbean and a Latino, a Barranquillan from Barquisimeto, a Jamaican from Trinidad, and God knows what else, anyway, I think you get my meaning by now, he was the same as me, a Latino adrift in the steel and concrete jungle of Miami, and maybe that’s why destiny or the Master, the Big Enchilada, the Man Himself, decided to throw us in the same cesspit so that we could meet and tend each other’s wounds, which in the end, my friends, were the festering wounds of life, because the hole where I saw the light was none other than Moundsville Penitentiary, West Virginia, the cruelest factory of human imprisonment in the United States, which today, luckily for humanity and especially for all those guys trying to get by on the streets, is closed and quiet and has even been turned into a tourist attraction, no kidding, the thing just keeps getting more and more ironic, doesn’t it? that operating room without anesthetics that they called Moundsville now receives tourists who arrive by bus from Charleston and stroll through the yards and cellblocks eating ice cream and shooting videos, taking photographs of the electric chair or the yard where sometime in the past, in the early years of that hellhole, they hanged eighty-nine inmates, what a contradictory thing, don’t you think so, my friends?