What kind of novels do you write?
What, in your opinion, is the greatest human tragedy of modern times?
Have you ever tried kibbeh, tabouleh, or hummus?
In what circumstances have you tried kibbeh, tabouleh, or hummus?
Have you had sexual relations with Arab men or women at any time in your life?
Have you ever tried to learn Arab cooking?
What is your opinion of the philosophy of Nietzsche?
How many Steven Spielberg films have you seen?
Do you like the music of Wagner?
If you were given the opportunity to have sexual relations with Arab men or women, would you take it?
Which Steven Spielberg films have you seen and why?
What do names like Adolf or Muhammad evoke for you?
Which countries, in your opinion, make up the Middle East?
What do you think of psychoanalysis?
What do words like “diaspora,” “ghetto” or “Shoah” evoke for you?
On reaching question number one hundred or perhaps one thousand, I heard the soldier say, why have you come to our country? to which I replied, I’ve been invited to a conference, and I handed him the letter from the ICBM.
Then something unexpected happened: the guard’s stony face underwent a transformation and he said, you should have told me that from the start, my friend, follow me. As we walked, he said, I’m sure you’ll understand that our situation forces us to be cautious, it must be the same in your country, I suppose? I know war is inconvenient, but you have to understand, there are idiots who think they’re arriving in Zurich or Monte Carlo and get upset by our methods, but you and I know that there are enemies lying in wait everywhere, there could be a terrorist hiding behind every friendly and apparently innocent face, don’t you agree? if you’d like to sit down for a moment while we find your case, would you like a drink?
An orderly approached with a tray. There was lemonade with ice and mint leaves, and there was also coffee. Then they brought my baggage and we went out through a side door and walked to a Mercedes Benz with air conditioning and a mini-bar, which within a few seconds was driving through a modern network of avenues and bridges, accelerating until it reached well over a hundred miles an hour. As we left Tel Aviv behind us, reality hit me. The dawn air was filled with ashes and the smell of fuel. A thick, low-lying fog restricted visibility.
On the road to Jerusalem, the limousine seemed completely out of place, because there was nothing else to be seen but military vehicles. Suddenly a loud noise made me jump. Four army jets had just broken the sound barrier above our heads.
Don’t worry, said the driver, they just reached Mach Two, they’re ours.
On a big sign pointing to Jerusalem, somebody had sprayed a strange word, Alqudsville, which others had tried desperately to erase. I copied the word into my notebook and sat looking at it for a while. It was a powerful, highly suggestive word. As we climbed, we passed military convoys, and I said to myself, this is much more serious than I thought. The years of illness had removed me from the world and its problems, that much was starting to be very clear.
We continued our ascent.
A sign indicated the famous Trappist monastery of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows at Latrun, but as I searched for it in the hills I saw another military convoy coming in the opposite direction. Dozens of young men with bandages and desperate expressions on their faces peered through the windows. Perhaps they had witnessed atrocities or perhaps they had committed atrocities themselves. I closed my eyes, dazzled by the bright light filtering through the mist and smoke, and fell asleep.
Soon afterwards, the limousine braked suddenly and woke me. I opened my eyes, and froze.
There in front of me was the city.
Dozens of columns of smoke, as black as funnels, rose toward the sky in the eastern area. They were fires. In the distance, sirens could be heard, and a great deal of activity was clearly going on in defense of the city. There were trenches and checkpoints on all sides, armed men, machine gun nests, barbed wire, sandbags on the balconies, walls with holes in them, structures of scorched steel, concrete blackened by the explosions.
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.
I remembered that prayer from the Psalms as I looked at the thin towers crowned with crescent moons, the gray buildings, the domes, the old walls. I saw the name of the street: Jaffa Road. The storekeepers had lowered their metal shutters and there was not a soul on the sidewalks. The fear was palpable, but that somehow made the sense of life seem even stronger.
At the checkpoint a soldier, clearly Slav in origin, checked my papers and gave the go-ahead with a whistle. A heavy metal bar, kept in balance by a concrete ball, was raised and we were able to enter. Facing us was a labyrinth of asymmetrical streets, pockmarked with holes and filled with steaming garbage. The houses, cubes of stone the color of sand, bore the marks of grenades and mortars on their walls.
A strange place for a conference, I thought, still taken aback by the magnitude of the war.
We now came to a wide avenue, lined with magnificent buildings of the same sandstone color. There were touches of vegetation here, pines and dusty old olive trees. Sycamores. In stark contrast with the general appearance of the city, there were boxes with flowers at the windows. The limousine drove along the avenue and turned in toward a building that in its glory days must have been quite majestic. Over the main entrance was a sign saying King David Hotel.
A jovial man who seemed in something of a hurry greeted me at reception, and when I showed him my papers he handed me a folder with information on the conference, a rosette with my name and the word Writer, a T-shirt with the letters ICBM, a CD of Israeli music, and a glazed ceramic key ring in the shape of a fish. At seven this evening there will be a cocktail party to welcome the delegates, he said. The bellhop pushed the cart with my baggage to the elevator and I went in after him, but a second before the door closed I read on one of the pillars the following notice:
The King David Hotel apologizes to its guests for any inconvenience caused by the state of war.
When I got to my room I collapsed onto the bed and closed my eyes, which were smarting with fatigue after the uncomfortable journey. I do not know how long I slept, but when I woke up it was already starting to get dark, so I went to the window. The sight startled me. In the late afternoon sun, the walls of the Old City were like a cliff. The towers and minarets glinted like spurs amid the gathering darkness. The whole of Jerusalem might succumb, but the Old City was a pearl surrounded by mud, a melodious voice amid a tumult of inhuman cries, and perhaps that was why everyone respected it. What time was it? Eight minutes after seven. I was going to arrive late at the opening cocktail party.
4.
THE MINISTRY OF MERCY (II)
The Church went from strength to strength. Within a couple of years it had several thousand members. In other words, things were working out. Walter de la Salle, who was starting to think like a businessman, had the idea of going to Charleston and using the other house he’d inherited from old Ebenezer J., which was a spacious villa with extensive grounds. He started going there every week with Miss Jessica, to check out the lay of the land and see how they could extend the Ministry of Mercy to West Virginia. By doing this, my friends, Walter’s life and mine started moving closer together, like two planes on a collision course, and we did indeed collide in the end, ladies and gentlemen. That was in Moundsville Penitentiary, but let’s take things one at a time.
In Charleston, Walter and Jessica began with the same tactics as in Miami, visiting the wards for terminal patients at the Ancient Ghedare Hall and the Memorial; at the same time work started on a replica of the Chapel of Mercy and the Living God, to the same plan as the one in Miami but bigger, because by now Walter had great confidence in his word and the finances of the Ministry were growing, thanks to contribution
s from members, which in spite of being voluntary amounted to tons of greenbacks, and that’s putting it mildly, because the rich clean their consciences the way the rest of us clean our you-know-whats, if you get what I mean, my friends, especially if their dough is going toward comforting dangerous people and helps to calm social tensions, that electricity in the air of the streets that makes the lives of the rich so difficult and forces them to hire bodyguards so they can carry on being rich, rich in the middle of shit, which is the most ignoble way to be rich; rich amid the ulcers and pus of the saddest, most desperate cities.
Having started this work, he next began visiting the places favored by the local underclass, places awash with opiates, as you might imagine, until somebody told him about the prison in Moundsville, describing the horrors of the place and the kind of human flotsam it housed, and so he asked permission to pay a visit, which, it should be said in passing, cost him a fair amount, because the chaplain of that hellhole was very corrupt and, above all, fond of dark king-size bananas, applied rectally, in other words: he liked to be sodomized, and picked his boyfriends from among the prison population, because as I’m sure you know, prolonged confinement makes people become very versatile when they get the itch, and most aren’t too fussy about the kind of living creature they stick their dicks into; man, woman, or priest, it’s all the same, anyway, as I was saying, the chaplain was the master of that hell and of course he refused to allow anyone in who wasn’t from his Church, like Walter.
Anyway, a sizeable wad of dollars appeased the faggot, and Walter had access to the cellblocks, introduced and in some cases even assisted by the chaplain, because Walter, with his long hair and his tattoos and his muscles, which were already pretty impressive—he’d had a gym installed in the basement and worked out every day—became very popular among the inmates and there wasn’t enough of him to go around, even though most of the time they listened to him in silence and with very deep understanding, as if “downloading files” to use computer language, something the chaplain hadn’t managed in twenty years of preaching and holding services and being fucked in the ass. That’s how Walter managed after a while to get permission to see the inmates individually, listen to them, forgive them, pray with them, and get them to beg forgiveness of God, the Big Master, so that then they’d go off to reflect on what they’d done and on how life was a beautiful creation that shouldn’t be tainted by violence and other evil ways. And it worked, like everything he did, because starting with a dozen people he ended up seeing three hundred a week, that is, almost one whole cellblock.
I hadn’t been in Moundsville long when I first heard about him. I was there because of a badly planned drugstore holdup that had ended in lots of shooting and people lying flat on the asphalt. My partner in crime, Teddy, born in Oregon but into a family from Puerto Rico, caught a bullet through one of his nostrils, which were more accustomed to receiving coke or crack or smack. The bullet went through the nasal septum and lodged in his brain, causing what I’d have to call irreparable damage, not that there was anything very much in Teddy’s brain to start with, and what there was wasn’t worth much, it was more like a room without any furniture, but anyway, there he was, lying on the ground in a pretty unnatural position, with more than half the contents of his cranium spattered on the sidewalk, as if his head had turned into a ketchup dispenser, and I got away with a few bills, but that same night, when I went back to the flea-ridden motel on Cedar Creek where we had our headquarters—in other words, where we kept the drugs and the syringes—hoping I could just get in and out again scot-free, I ran unexpectedly into six police officers who, judging by the way they hit me in the ribs with their batons, had little or no talent for conversation, at least with me, and then they bundled me into a patrol car, saying, your partner had the key to your room with the address and the phone number in his pocket, oh brother, what a bunch of beginners, and that, my friends, is how I ended up in Moundsville.
Once inside, I focused on surviving, which, in that sinister sausage factory with no retail outlet, meant above all avoiding the punishment cells, the so-called Sugar Shack, the cellar of ghosts, which was so dark that if you closed your eyes you could see the insides of your skull, the kind of extreme experience nobody should have to remember, that’s how that place was, like being stuffed in the ass of a rhino, because it was hot and smelled like hell, thanks to the pipe that carried filthy water from the bathroom in the third cellblock to the septic tank, and I won’t go into details about the animals crawling around on the floor, but they didn’t all have four legs, some had a hundred, and feelers too; I was put in that cell twice, because if you’re moving about on the edge of the toilet all day you’re bound to fall in sometimes, right? but anyway, my friends, my dear listeners, all that suffering also makes a person strong and I survived, of course you turn into an animal, yes sir, but being an animal wasn’t the worst of it, and neither was the fear, because, with apologies to the more sensitive, you had to protect yourself from everything, keep a tight hold of your ass, because as I already said there were groups there who grabbed you in the toilets and used you like a woman or a whore, and if you didn’t open your mouth to suck their cocks they opened it with a screwdriver and pulled your teeth out; you had to be really good not to be endlessly cauterized with wax in the infirmary.
And so the days passed in Moundsville, getting by as best I could, putting smack in my veins and inventing tricks to stay in my corner, without doing anything, which is the best way to be in a place like that, blotting out everyone else, blotting out the prison, with its guards and its bosses, and there I was, off on one of these trips, when I ran into him; almost on top of me, I saw his athletic figure and those eyes of his, like a lost child’s, which was misleading, because they made you think he was just a kid, and I remember saying to myself, what heaven did this angel fall from? I must have said it out loud because he immediately replied, my name isn’t Angel, I’m Walter now and I’ve come to save you, and I replied, no kidding, pleased to hear it, it’s about time things started moving upstairs, I’ve been waiting for years, how long have you had my details, but then I guess the Eternal Commander, the Big Enchilada, sometimes takes his time, right? but well, better late than never, so let’s take it one step at a time, if you’ve really come to save me the first thing you have to do is transfer fifty dollars into my account, and my account is right here in my pocket, the number is zero one, you could make the transfer by telepathy but the machine’s out of order, so it’ll be better if you do it by hand, which is the most efficient method, and then, when the money’s gone in, we’ll be able to sit down like two civilized people and talk about God or Muhammad or Madonna’s lesbian cousin, whatever you like, and he said, no, my friend, that’s not the way it goes, that’s not the kind of salvation I came to bring you, we’re going to have to understand each other, but I interrupted him irritably and said, is there any other kind? don’t come here and get my hopes up, get out of here, you huckster, the Grim Reaper prowls these frozen cellblocks, get out now and don’t come back, but he insisted, you don’t understand, my friend, the Big Man won’t help you if you don’t beg forgiveness first, you need Him more than He needs you, remember that, it’s your life that’s in the mud, or rather, in the shit, but you possess something wonderful, and that’s free will, my friend, what did you do with that? and I said, get out of here with your spiel, and I’ll pass on this information, the cellblock you want is number nine, plenty of faggots there, all races, put some oil in your ass first, just in case, now leave me alone, goodbye, I don’t have time for faggots, and he said, of course you do, and he gave me a punch in the face that by some miracle didn’t knock my nose upside down, and I fell to the ground.
My first reaction was to take out my weapon, a fork that I’d sharpened on a stone, but before I could lift it even an inch he hit me three more times, making my head whirl, and smashing me against the wall so that I fell again, unconscious this time. A moment later I opened my eyes and saw his foot, with
his huge body attached to it. From down there on the ground, he looked like a giant. I tried to get up but he put his boot on my neck and said, beg God for forgiveness or I’ll break your neck right now, you insulted Him, count to ten, and he began, one, two, three, and he pressed down on me with his foot. I felt a sour taste in my mouth, I could hardly breathe, and I fainted, gently drifted away God knows where, and I didn’t know anything more until I opened my eyes and found I was lying on a table.
A whole lot of inmates were near me, crying: Dead man walking! Dead man walking!
I sat up and saw him.
I saw the impressive image of Christ tattooed on his back, because as I was recovering consciousness he’d started doing a series of silent exercises, like an animal gearing up for a fight in which it may lose its life. I got down off the table and looked for my fork, thinking to attack quickly, stick it in under his ribs and kill him stone dead, but when I was halfway he turned his eyes on me, my friends, and what can I tell you, they were like two streams of fire, like the swords the Jedi use in Star Wars, something you really can’t define, and I mean that. I couldn’t retreat because the whole cellblock was following the fight and placing bets. If I’d chickened out I’d have lost respect and the consequence, as everyone knows, would have been to suck cocks for the rest of the year in the toilets or be everyone’s bitch in the cells, which I don’t like because I’m not of that persuasion, apologies if that makes me sound homophobic, so I carried on toward him, forced my way through the lines of fire coming from his eyes and at last drew level with him, but once again he seemed to have about thirty arms and I fell to the floor again, so hard this time I heard a crack, as if I’d broken several bones, which was in fact what had happened, or so the male nurse said later, and there I lay, with my eyes open, conscious but with my brain a thousand miles away, my friends, or as they used to say, in the arms of Morpheus; then he bent down and picked me up by the neck, almost affectionately, and said, beg God for forgiveness right now or you’re on a one-way trip to the Land of Oblivion, and, being an animal brought up in the mud, I was about to say to him, you’ll be the one going to the Land of the Shit Eaters, I was just about to say that to him when I saw a powerful ray of light behind him, a fiery sunset, and in that sunset a shining city, like the eye of somebody waiting anxiously for something to end, and was dazzled, and said, I beg forgiveness, almighty God, this slave is falling to his knees and begs forgiveness from the bottom of his soul, and I said it not talking to him, in reality, but to that eye shining in the glow of the sunset, and as I said this the man’s eyes stopped throwing out fire and started crying, he prostrated himself on the ground, buried his head in my chest and said, forgive me and may God forgive both of us for everything we had to do this afternoon for you to come to Him.
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