The young man stayed in one of the upstairs bedrooms for nearly two months until he vomited up the last sick cell and recovered, sustained by prayer.
He was the first. From that point on, they started giving shelter to people with problems. It was a time of great changes. One day, Walter sat down with an architect on the terrace overlooking the garden, pointed to a space between two oaks, and said, I want you to build me a chapel there, look, I’ve already drawn it, this is what it looks like, and he took out that drawing that would later become famous, the first vision of the Chapel of Mercy and the Living God, a concrete dome and colored windows, with a cross on top of it, a cross that, according to him, should be in purple and yellow neon so that it could be seen from a long distance, so that the planes passing over the chapel should know that that distant heart shining in the darkness was the Heart of God, and remember that all those who’ve been baptized have to cross themselves and say a prayer and forgive somebody or ask for forgiveness, and of course, a cross that size, almost twenty feet high, ended up drawing the attention of the neighbors, who started asking questions like, what kind of church is it? what times do you hold services? As the staff didn’t know what to answer the mystery kept on growing until one day, I think it was a Saturday, Miss Jessica was coming back from the market when a woman asked her for the times of services and the name of the church and she replied, it’s the Ministry of Mercy, we’ll put up the schedule for the services next week.
When she got to the house she found Walter prostrate before a huge red plastic crucifix, with a Christ twice life-size and a green light flashing inside it, and she said, Father—because she already called him Father—Father, the faithful are already asking about the chapel and the times of services, and I told her that we’d put them up on the door next week, so you have to think about that, and he, still prostrate on the floor, listened to her without looking at her, surrounding her with a great silence, as if the church were his body, a temple where the priests officiated from silent cubicles.
Miss Jessica looked at him affectionately, recognizing in him a divine being: his bare chest with the rippling muscles, the trapezoid formed by his back and the back of his neck, his prominent vertebrae, and the long hair cascading over his shoulders like a waterfall; she waited reverently by his side, because she knew that when Walter was at prayer he often reached an extremely deep state, such was his devotion and closeness to God, who without doubt was his father; that was what Miss Jessica was thinking, my friends, she’d already gotten it into her hypothalamus and cerebellum that Walter was none other than the son of the Master, the Big Enchilada, the Man Himself, how does that grab you? and so, after all that silence, seeing him start to move, she said: you’re ready, Father, you have to begin and the people are waiting for you, and he replied, we’ll put up the schedule on Monday.
With the conviction that Miss Jessica gave him, Walter started holding services at the Ministry of Mercy, which in those early years created quite a stir, my dear brothers, because Walter dispensed with hosannas and had music videos in the background, playing rock and even rap, and invited dancers up on the stage behind the pulpit, because he said that in order to preach in today’s world you had to take your inspiration from today’s world, the world of the street, with its music and its harsh, sometimes violent but very real images, and he’d say that if his enemies were drugs and violence and promiscuity, which indeed they were, then he had to fight them with the same weapons, turn the lyrics around, you know, those modern urban songs don’t exactly inspire the noblest of feelings, they’re all about killing blacks and Jews and shooting up and sodomizing your sister and murdering your father, and those are just the gentler ones, but Walter was good at extracting other messages from them and using them to his advantage, because at the end of the day they were what he’d listened to since he was a boy on the streets and in children’s homes.
In addition, he’d appear at his services stripped to the waist, his upper body covered in tattoos that depicted Christ, not only in Nazareth but also in the back streets of an industrial slum, preaching to alcoholics and heroin addicts. His back was covered with an image of the crucifixion, but instead of Mount Golgotha, my brothers, the Redeemer was hanging in an old basketball court on Syracuse Drive, surrounded by potholed streets and smog-blackened buildings with God knows what dramas happening inside, young girls raped by their stepfathers, minors having sex for hard drugs, sweaty men in a drug-induced stupor on foul-smelling carpets, old men with prostate cancer groaning with pain, and women trading their anal virginity for doses for their husbands, anyway, my friends, all this could be sensed in those grim tenements surrounding the basketball court where the new Christ was crucified, the Jesus of the slums, the Redeemer of the people sent by the Man Himself to save us from our sins, and that was the central image that Walter had tattooed on his back: the mystery and paradox of evil.
From the pulpit, with rap music in the background, Walter would speak of God and the virtues of suffering and what a great thing it was to be one of Christ’s marines and that voice that says to us a second before we fall into the abyss, stop, dammit! what are you doing? be careful of that sharp edge, don’t jump into the void, boy, look, they took the net away yesterday, you’ll slam straight into a floor dirty with spit and condoms or the roof of some dusty old taxi, don’t let your children see that, make sure your blood stays inside your body, my friend, that’s the main thing, I know all about that, because if a hole opens everything comes out and doesn’t go back in, the body is like a blister and can burst, and the soul is the desire to look after that blister and its aspiration to the stars, so give your hand to the fallen, talk to the lonely, give up your food to the needy and weep for those who are about to sin because your word has not reached them, and for those who do not hear and close the door to your love and repent in sorrow for not having opened it, because that’s what handles are for, as was demonstrated by Syriacus the Abogalene in Nineveh, and weep for those who feel a humming in the brain inciting them to open fire in a classroom, and for those who are sweating with cocaine pellets in their stomachs, weep for all the people who long to die because they don’t know anything but the smell of poverty and fear, great is their number and great is their fear, all these things Walter said from his musical pulpit, with lighting effects and artificial smoke and shadow play and videos, while Miss Jessica sat like a queen by the side of the altar in religious contemplation, dressed very simply in T-shirt and jeans.
With these spectacles, the Chapel of Mercy and the Living God was soon filled every Saturday evening and Sunday noon, dozens and then hundreds of worshipers grew fond of his direct, plainspoken style, his exalted rhetoric, my friends, which was something to be reckoned with, especially when he attacked the devil, and that was when he really got into his stride, because Walter really hated him, and he would point to the LCD screen at the side that projected a silhouette with horns, and say, go from this place, Satan! do not dare to enter this sacred ground, because we hate you! we will beat you to death, Satan! Then the faithful would rise from their seats and cry out, in fearsome unison, we will beat you to death! we hate you! come no closer, Satan, you scum! and Walter would continue urging them to be ever crueler and more ruthless with Satan, in his own language, which was that of curses, Satan the Foul, the Obscene, the Repugnant! and the people would raise their hands to the clear sky and answer, Satan the Bastard, the Son of a Bitch, the Faggot, God will leave you on some radioactive island with sharks all around, unable to climb to the top because of the snakes, the most poisonous in the oceanic regions, oh Satan, you’re done for, your glory days are over, yes sir, now begins the reign of the good, because Walter de la Salle is in town! and someone even cried out, Satan to Guantanamo!
That was Walter’s style, my friends, he’d say that you could only be truly yourself, find your own identity, if you talked your own language, the words you lived with every day, the words you used to buy tobacco or quarrel with other people or make love
, words of joy or despair, and these were the words he used, which is why the fevered crowd followed his message to the letter, shouting and jumping up and down in their seats, with the colored lights turning in the dimly-lit room, the rap in the background and the smoke and Walter in the middle with his microphone, swaying from side to side, sweat pouring out of him, the veins on his neck inflamed. The people would take up the rhythm in their clapping and echo him and then trip down the street to their houses, and later you would start to hear in the grocery stores some of the things he said like “Get thee behind me, Satan!”
3.
THE JOURNEY
On the day I was due to travel, I searched on the internet for some last-minute information about the ICBM, but, strangely, could not find a thing. Not that I was looking for anything very important, I only wanted to know what kind of clothes I should take to the conference, casual? smart? a couple of designer suits? it was a minor detail but these things can get complicated. I have always felt envious of colleagues like Paco Ignacio Taibo II, the great Mexican writer, who goes to talk to the Pen Club in London in a T-shirt and shabby jeans, and even says he will not attend if they forbid him to smoke, but that is all a question of personality, or extreme shyness in my case, so I try to deal with it as best I can, I hate hearing people clearing their throat and muttering, I like to pass unnoticed, wearing the same clothes as everyone else. I ended up packing a couple of linen jackets, six shirts with their ties, and some casual wear. Most of my clothes were large on me, as I had lost quite a bit of weight during my illness.
The other nightmare is always: which books to take? The first question was if I should take some of mine—those I had written, I mean—and here various hypotheses occurred to me. It might be appropriate to take a few for my hosts and some for any friends I might make there, and as people would be coming from all over the world it would be the ideal opportunity to get rid of a few copies in other languages, which I keep in boxes anyway. But then I thought about how much they would weigh, and it struck me that the best thing to do would be not to take any at all, since arriving with books that nobody has asked for is, when you come down to it, an act of vanity, and a touch unseemly, so I put them back on the shelves.
As for reading matter, now that is another story. To tell the truth, that caused a lot of last-minute problems when I was already ready to go out, with the taxi at the front door and the elevator waiting at my floor. As if, instead of a conference, I was going to a desert island for the rest of my life. Novels by Wiener and Walser, to start with. Three masterpieces of the novella—Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Twenty-Four Hours in a Woman’s Life by Stefan Zweig, and Hotel Savoy by Joseph Roth—and a good book of short stories to read on the plane, The Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz, a book with Jewish themes, which I have been reading very slowly for years in a 1972 edition by Barral Editores, and the wonderful Closely Observed Trains by Hrabal, and something by Philip K. Dick, perhaps The Man in the High Castle, and another SF book, a rare pearl, We, by Yevgeny Zamiatin, and The Elephanta Suite, the latest by Paul Theroux, the best storyteller of his kind in the United States, and the latest by Thomas Pynchon, the best storyteller of his kind in the United States, there are many “best storytellers,” and of course, A Tale of Love and Darkness, the memoirs of Amos Oz, the best contemporary Israeli storyteller, and the work of St John of the Cross, the father of all poets, and Lost Illusions by Balzac, the father of all novelists, and something light, my God, a travel book, yes, that little book by Pierre Loti on the Middle East, where is it? and again the entry phone rang, and the Fascist caretaker cried, signore, if you don’t come down now the taxi will leave, hurry up, do you want me to come up for the bags? and I said, no! wait a minute, just a minute, I would never have agreed to that horrendous caretaker coming into my apartment, I know he would like nothing better than to spy on me, to sit down and ask me where I am going and for how long and then tell everybody, exercising his panoptic control over the lives of his tenants, so I took a last glance at my library and still found room in my baggage for a book of interviews with famous writers first published in The Paris Review, and at last I left, double-locking the door, and ran down to the street, regretting that I had not taken anything by Stifter, which would have been ideal for a journey, although I consoled myself with the thought that you never get time to read at conferences anyway. Apart from the heaps of novels you are given by colleagues, you never get to the hotel early enough or sober enough to read.
Fortunately, my flight left at midnight, which had given me the whole day to solve all these problems. I hate planes that leave at dawn, when you have to set the alarm for four in the morning and leave your bags packed the day before, next to the door, with all the dangers that lie in wait for the man who has slept badly and is not used to going to bed before midnight; in cases like that, it is better to cancel the whole thing, and remember the motto of that castle on the banks of the Danube that Magris talks about, “It is better for the happy to stay at home,” and even if you are not happy, or not completely happy, what does happiness matter anyway, it is always better to stay at home.
When I got to the airport, instead of checking in my case and going to the bar for a gin, I found myself trapped in an uncomfortably long line of travelers. The security checks were endless, there were dozens of questions to be answered and I had to subject my baggage to sophisticated detection with liquids and damp cotton. The atmosphere was distinctly hostile, and the nervous-looking soldiers with their submachine guns clearly took the whole thing very seriously.
What can I say about the flight?
Of course, the seat next to me was not filled by any of the pretty young girls of Slav origin or the Italian Jewish women I had seen in the waiting room, oh, no, they all walked past. The person who did sit down beside me was a fat rabbi who had been visiting his family in Italy, or so he said when he saw me looking at him with a certain interest, which I did, of course, not because I was anxious to talk but because I was startled by the foul smell given off by his coat.
Everything was fine until the meal arrived and the rabbi saw normal, that is, non-kosher, food on my plate. Excuse me, he said, aren’t you Jewish? I did not know if I had to answer that, but I did anyway, as there were still three hours of the flight left. No, I said. I’m not.
The rabbi insisted: are you Christian, Muslim, Methodist…? I’m an agnostic, I said, but the rabbi ignored my words. You shouldn’t eat that, he said, come, I’ll give you my tray, leave that garbage alone. He pushed his plate toward my fold-down table, but I stopped him. You’re very kind, but I can’t accept, I’m an agnostic, this food is fine for me. The man looked at me through his side locks and said, it’s been proved that food like that is garbage, take my word, you should think about it.
His attitude was starting to get on my nerves. I’ve been eating it since I was a child, I said, and here I am, alive and kicking, or don’t you think I’m alive? The rabbi turned and looked me in the eyes. Now that you mention it, you are a little pale, have you looked in a mirror lately? it’s obvious you’ve lost weight, you have bags under your eyes and chin, and your clothes are too big on you. It’s also obvious that you’ve been sleeping badly, and that’s definitely down to food, believe me, so please accept mine.
I refused again. The rabbi gave a groan and said: if you reject our customs, why are you coming to our country? I was about to ask you the same thing, I said, why do you travel to other countries if you don’t accept their customs? There are Jews all over the world, he said. Good for you, I said, and good for me too, there are non-Jewish people in Israel. Don’t remind me . . . he said.
If I had had bubonic plague or Ebola, the rabbi would have felt more comfortable beside me. He expressed his displeasure by turning in his seat, which given his size was quite a feat, and every now and again casting withering glances at my plate, as if instead of meat and vegetables it contained the raw, bleeding organs of a pig. I was getting desperate. How much longe
r before we arrive? I asked a flight attendant who was passing along the aisle, but the answer was the same as always, two and a half hours, sir, we recommend you try and sleep, the DVD system in your seat is out of order but you have your headphones and there’s a varied program of great music to help you relax.
Just before we landed, the rabbi expressed his joy with a little dance that probably endangered the safety of the plane. Then the light of dawn appeared, and the sheen of Tel Aviv, the white Mediterranean city founded by immigrants at the beginning of the past century.
In immigration, I was subjected to more questions. They seemed to be applying, very strictly, an interrogatory method that may perhaps have occasionally given good results, designed as it seemed to be for tired, confused people who have been traveling all night.
Do you know any Arabs?
Do you speak Arabic?
Have you had sexual relations with Arab men or women in the past twelve months?
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