Necropolis

by Santiago Gamboa

  But this was not to last, my friends and listeners, and it’s here that the story begins to reach its climax, because a few months later, on one of those nights when I took an after-dinner stroll to walk off the meal and think over the events of the day, I came across a dog that must have been a stray and seemed to be dying of starvation, because it was lying under a bush, howling as if it was injured. Of course I went to it and picked it up, because I don’t think there’s anything more moving in the world than the look in the eyes of a sick dog, so I lifted it in my arms and walked home, but as I reached the garden I remembered a conversation with Walter in which he’d said how immoral he thought it was that people were always in such a hurry to help animals when the world was filled with desperate human beings, and remembering that, I hesitated, and didn’t know what to do, so I took the dog to the kitchen and asked Felicity, our Haitian cook, to give it a plate with some leftover meat and rice, and then went to tell Walter, because I didn’t want him bothered the next day, after all he was the owner of the house and the founder of the Ministry.

  I went up to his private area and Jessica told me he was in the gym, so I headed there, but when I opened the door I saw a scene that left me horrified, though those of you more accustomed to the plots of novels may already have seen it coming. Walter was lying on one of the weight machines, moving as if he was dancing reggeaton, which was the music they’d put on, as it happens, while Jefferson, his fitness trainer, was supporting his legs or something, but on looking closer I realized that what they were doing was fucking, I didn’t look too closely because I didn’t want to see it properly, but it seemed obvious to me that they were on the verge of an orgasm, and just at that moment the song finished, imagine the shock, my friends, so I held my breath, closed my eyes and kept quiet until another song started and I was able to get out without them hearing me, as silent as a ninja, calm in the midst of danger and dangerous in the midst of calm, because something deep down, that instinct for self-preservation that doctors say is located in the cerebellum, but for me is somewhere between the prostate and the balls, told me, if they see you, you’re in danger.

  By the time I got out of there, my heart was pounding irregularly, like an out of order washing machine, and I thought, that’s it, it’s all up for me, my heart’s going to stop, time to check out, goodbye to all this, and I don’t know how I managed to get to my bedroom, but I lay down on the bed and cried for a long time, in that harsh, bitter way that grown men cry, and you may wonder if deep down there wasn’t a little bit of jealousy involved, but I hasten to say, no, what there was fear, was a fear that chilled me to the bone and made my hair stand on end, that made me think I was at the bottom of a dark abyss, at the bottom of a well, covered with ice-cold water, in other words, I was already dead, because, to me, seeing Walter with Jefferson was irrefutable proof that he wasn’t the son of God at all, just a piece of shit like me and everyone else, a man with his human passions and mistakes, and that made me scared, I felt defenseless, I didn’t have the voice of something great by my side anymore, just a traveling companion, and so life started going downhill again.

  And what if it was a hallucination? could it be that Satan had played a dirty trick on me to confuse me? it was possible, that damn struggle between good and evil was always unpredictable, except that you knew good would win out in the end, but, yes, it must have been that, I said to myself, Jefferson was helping him to train and Satan made me see it as sex in order to create a rift between us, the best thing to do was go to sleep and forget about it.

  I pressed my eyelids shut, hoping that by the next day everything would have been blotted out, but it was no use, because when it was time for prayers I saw them arrive at the chapel together, and at breakfast, from the things they were saying, I realized they had been jogging together, early in the morning, so I didn’t open my mouth, I just ate my food, my friends, and when I left it was as if I’d been expelled, or maybe I should say, repelled, and I went for a walk by the sea, because there’s a kind of conversation with yourself that you can only have in spaces like that, facing the sea or in demolished aircraft hangars, anyway, I tried to calm down, saying, well, you have to understand, José, the man is flesh and blood and he likes to dip his wick like anyone else, surely the Big Enchilada also stops to think from time to time, if He made us in His own image and likeness then it must happen to Him too, because it’s one of the things that most troubles the human race down here, and well, my friends, like with the ancient Greeks, there are men who are that way inclined and prefer cock, as you know, we have to accept it because we can’t all be the same, just think, the Big Enchilada created things that nobody understands, like mosquitoes or cholesterol, I mean, can you tell me what they’re good for, eh? and yet the Man Upstairs invented them so they must be there for some reason, we just have to be patient, and so I said to myself, let’s see, when was the last time you fucked a woman? I couldn’t even remember, I must have been out of my head on smack at the time, locked inside myself with the key on the outside, but what I did remember was some old affairs, like Susy, for example, a black girl with hair so hard it was like a copper brush, and banging her was like dancing with a porcupine, oh man, I mean it’s something you can do but you have to be very careful, and there was another, Serena, who before she gave the green light would put in spermicide capsules so strong she started producing foam that smelled of DDT, anyway, my friends, forgive this very personal digression but it’s just that that morning, facing the swelling sea, I had to use everything I could to try to understand what was going on, until I said to myself, that’s it, brother, end of story, go on to something else because you’re already losing it, and that was what I did, although with tremendous difficulty, because since my arrival at the Ministry I’d gotten used to a collective life, do you get me? we were like a family, like the Waltons, does anyone remember them? we did everything as a community, we commented on each other’s work, and everybody was interested in what everybody else did and said and even thought or dreamed, we didn’t have secrets and everything was fine, because we were all in it together and we supported each other in doing good in the middle of all that shit, but that image, the way Walter had been moving, Jefferson’s proximity to him, broke something, one of the longest and strongest branches, so I started to isolate myself, stopped making comments when we were together, even though I didn’t neglect my work, of course not, I threw myself headfirst into what I myself called “pastoral resistance” in prisons and bars, still confronting Satan and fighting vice in his alma mater, the city’s nightclubs, the discos where they played tropipop, techno-cumbia and salsa, because there’s nothing more beautiful for those hooked on smack to shoot up and then go to hear Caribbean music, “our Latin thing,” as sung by Héctor or Ramón or Willie, any of those mega guys, the masters of the dance hall and the stadium, and I’d go there quite early, my dear friends and listeners, and work away at it all day, with enthusiasm, but at night, when I got off the 137 bus on the corner of Sausalito Road and Richmond Street, it was as if a buzzard had come to rest in my heart and was pecking at it, and I was bleeding and bleeding, in the most terrifying solitude, as if the rest of the world was a wasteland laid bare by some catastrophe, a nuclear warhead or something like that, and I was the only son of a bitch still alive on the face of the Earth, the only person in the middle of the ashes and the rubble and the skeletons of smoldering cities in which there was nothing left, not a soul, not even a human sound, nothing to recall this fragile, capricious, crazy species, only the crackling of the hot coals and the twisted girders, wet from a recent shower, and in that fantasy, I suddenly saw a group of hooded men climbing a staircase of rubble and ash to a kind of temple that had survived the conflagration. The group was led by a hooded man who supported himself on a staff, but when they were almost at the top there was a sound of explosions and out of the blackest part of the night came projectiles and warheads that killed all the hooded men, and again I was alone, because the fantasy was over
, and I saw the beach again.

  It’s a well known fact, my friends, that God may grab us by the throat but doesn’t choke us, so as a result of that solitude I decided to do something with my life. When you come off hard drugs the first thing you notice is that the days are very long, they’re full of unbearably slow hours and minutes and you think the Earth has stopped turning and you’re already dead because a nervous calm has invaded your brain, but I’d said to myself, no, go back, and I’d found the Big Enchilada and His son Walter, and devoted myself to filling those capsules of time with evangelical resistance, but now it was different: I had to use my head, but not only the outer part, the one you use for wearing a hat or for head butting someone in a fight, but the other part, and I said to myself, the time has come to explore what’s inside that sphere you have on your shoulders, and that, my dear friends, is how I started reading, beginning with books about Jesus Christ, my boss, my immediate superior, picture books for children first, because my mind was still undeveloped, but then I moved on to a study of the Gospels and another of Mary and the apostles, and I realized I was becoming engrossed, and when night came it was great to know that I could immerse myself in those reams of paper, and greater still to confirm that the next day I remembered everything, or almost everything, and so time passed and I continued working hard and reading everything I could, while Walter continued with his bodybuilding and his muscles grew ever more perfect, a sculpture in marble, my friends, and as I was becoming less of an idiot than I’d been before I said to Walter one day that we ought to make a library, which he immediately approved, so I brought up from the cellar the boxes of books that had belonged to old Ebenezer, who being a faggot had been sensitive to literature, and let me tell you this, my brothers and sisters, I didn’t have to go back to the library at Kennington school anymore, which was where I used to borrow books from, because now I had all these books to start on, and it was all top quality material, pure dynamite, as the drug dealers say.

  In all that ocean of words, I discovered poetry, and set out with enthusiasm to learn its meaning and enjoy the rhymed phrases, something that before then, to tell the truth, had always seemed to me a bit faggoty, and note this, my friends, it was through poetry that I started seriously giving a meaning to my life, in spite of the fact that, obviously, the question of the hairy orifice through which I had come into the world was still a mystery, let me make that clear, but at least I already felt a brotherhood of meaning and solitude through those rhymed words, and that was something I saw in William Carlos Williams or Whitman or Milton, the last of these on a religious theme, which was especially beautiful.

  In those words I saw the same stream of light that had blinded me that first day. The same voice coming from on high, but in another format, and sometimes, I confess, a rhyme made me cry because of its perfection, the cleanness and purity it concealed; ever since then, beautiful things have moved me and made me want to cry, beauty touches me deeply, takes my breath away, as if I hadn’t expected anything of the world but trash and gruesomeness; the beautiful turns mystical and allows us to regain our belief in appearances, in the possibility of goodness and tranquility, in other words, peace. Beauty, in those days, was synonymous with peace, that space where the spirit, or at least mine, grows wings, launches itself into the air, and sees everything from a long way up. And so I felt grateful to those blocks of printed paper, that black ink, those numbered pages. It was the great revelation of my life after the Eye of the Big Enchilada, and I really mean that, my friends.

  A year passed and on my side things improved a lot, because the library in the house had more and more books, so I was able to shut myself in with them and read until late at night in my room. By the way, we called our rooms “cells,” just like in a seminary, even though ours had television and Wi-Fi and radio and a thousand things more, including shelves and en-suite bathrooms. For her part, Miss Jessica worshiped Walter more and more every day, and of course he himself was increasingly handsome and conceited, his body so perfect now it was like a sculpture by Bernini, so perfect it seemed untouchable; he still had Jefferson at his side, although with one novelty, which was that at least once a month he brought Walter groups of young men for “evangelical gatherings”; it sounded strange to me, because these young guys weren’t thieves or dealers, but did look like faggots.

  I could imagine what those gatherings must be like, and from the start I told Walter that I preferred not to take part, no, thanks, I’m teaching myself with Ebenezer’s books, ever since I discovered reading I’ve realized I can become a better person and I think it’ll benefit my pastoral work, so please excuse me, I’ll join you later, for now I prefer to be alone, and, very theatrically, because he was already wearing made to measure red and yellow tunics, he gave me a kiss on the forehead, closed his eyes and said, José, José de Arimatea, you were my first disciple, you must grow spiritually so that you can bring even greater honor to our Church, follow the path you’ve found, but don’t become a stranger.

  So he excused me and, in a way, blessed our separation, with him on one side and me on the other, close but taking different paths, and it’s something I really have to thank him for today, yes really, because I studied and read and thought and became, mutatis mutandi, an enlightened animal, I joined the world of civilized people, my friends, I’m sure you understand, and I read the poetry of Góngora and Quevedo and Juan Ramón Jiménez and Pedro Salinas and especially León Felipe, and I read studies on the moral evolution of Jesus by Harold Iridier, S. J. and the three volumes of his monumental work, Distant Christ, and I studied the works of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas and also Tertullian, father of the Church, who talks about the truth of the impossible, which I think is really beautiful, and in this way my brain started to put forth shoots and show me that the world was something greater than that city of vacant lots and highways and grocery stores with fronts eroded by the wind from the sea; I also discovered history and learned that what we are today is connected with what we were, that we’re in a tunnel and can see the end of it but not the beginning, and there in that dark corridor is the philosophy of Hegel and the Punic Wars and that fat man Balzac writing Old Goriot and drinking coffee through the night, anyone would think he was Colombian, and you also see the martyrdom of St Lawrence on the grill and old Michelangelo painting his fresco, and even Muhammad’s ascent to heaven, which happened quite close to here, and the birth of Jesus and his crucifixion, which is the most painful event of all, and Abraham raising his knife to kill Isaac before the Big Boss stayed his hand, and who knows how many things more that we don’t know, my brothers, like the story of the birth of yours truly, your servant and God’s, or the birth of Walter de la Salle, which was also a mystery, and remains one, and that’s why it seemed that his destiny had to be so elevated, but anyway, let’s take our time, let’s fly slowly down to the property in South Beach, but take a little pause first, my friends, just two or three minutes before we return for the final part of the story, which is the best part from the spiritual point of view.

  5.

  THE DELEGATES

  When I entered the reception room, which was lit by seven-branched candlesticks, a man in a dark suit was talking from a pulpit. I tried to make sure that nobody saw me, but no sooner had I taken a few steps than the speaker looked up, uttered my name, and bade me welcome. A few of the guests turned, so I said, good evening, I’m sorry I’m late, I’m a bit tired and I lost all sense of time, but nobody said a word or smiled or even nodded, so I added, I’ve been sick…