Necropolis (3 page)

Then the lawyers came back to the hospital and told Walter that his new father had left him an inheritance of seven million dollars, plus a couple of properties: a house by the sea, in Coral Gables, and another one, a stately home, in the city of Charleston, which was where the de la Salle family came from, and so young Walter, thanks to his natural goodness, turned from being a spawn of the streets into a rich young man with a French surname, how does that grab you, eh? It's the carnival of life, my friends, some people start off with a lot and others gain as they go along, but what's really unusual is to go straight from the sewer to the tearoom with no stops in between. And that was what happened to him.

So begins Freddy's second life, or the appearance on earth of Walter de la Salle, which was the name he used most, as I forgot to say that before going to the hospital, when he was first preaching the Gospels to the underclass, they called him José de Arimatea, or he called himself José de Arimatea, but he'd long since left that name behind, and there aren't or weren't any witnesses, as far as I know. Walter was the name he used most, and how could it be any other way when he'd been so well provided for by old Ebenezer J.? An old man who, by the way and as far as Walter was able to establish some time later, had been the end of his line, the last member of a rich, industrious, and influential family, with important ancestors all painted in oils, and, as is typically the case with dissolute members of the idle classes, had also been a faggot and a cocksucker, which was why all he ever did was cultivate family hatreds and resentments, and also hatreds and resentments among his boyfriends, who did all they could to cheat him out of parts of his fortune, but old Ebenezer J. wasn't stupid and none of the pillow chewers who attacked him managed to get even a cent, quite the opposite, in some cases it was the old man who took them to court and screwed every last penny out of them, taking everything from them, even the dead cells in their foreskins, do you follow me?

Freddy's natural goodness was apparently the determining factor in the old man taking that transcendental decision, as well of course as the very human desire for his name to stay on earth—on the planet Earth, I mean, because obviously he was going to stay in the earth of the cemetery anyway, pushing up daisies—those were the reasons, although it can't be ruled out that Freddy was the old man's last great passion, all concealed behind that wrinkly face, of course, but passion all the same, and maybe even love. Old age loves youth, just as decay and ugliness love beauty. God knows, Freddy was young and beautiful enough.

What happened next, and was only to be expected, my dear friends, is a demonstration of the saying that there's no such thing as a free lunch, which is that one of Ebenezer J.'s gigolos suddenly showed up, an Irishman with straw-colored hair, ears and complexion as pink as a pig, and as big a faggot as you can imagine, and accused Walter of having drugged the old man and made him sign a new will, canceling the previous one that had favored him; to give his petition greater credibility he bribed a doctor to certify that Ebenezer J.'s death had been caused by a cocktail of morphine and stimulants, which was a terrible thing to say. What the Irishman asked in return for calling a halt to the legal proceedings was, of course, the annulment of the will, so that he would end up with everything, claiming that he'd lived with the old guy for more than five years, and so was entitled to seven million dollars and all the properties, he was no idiot, anyway, he threatened Walter with a lawsuit, but young as Walter was, he didn't break a sweat, plus he had a real piece of luck, which was that old Ebenezer J.'s two lawyers, the same ones who had signed the adoption papers, agreed to continue with him and defend him, and that was what saved him, because they were two Italians with thicker hides and colder blood than a regional boss of the Mara Salvatrucha, who could find shit under the cleanest toilet seat. They put their feelers out and discovered that the Irishman had not only had various run-ins with the IRS, but had also once been accused of having sex with underage Asian boys, an accusation that, by one of life's little ironies, had been put on ice thanks to old Ebenezer J.'s money and influence.

The Italians also went to work on the doctor who'd signed the statement about the supposed poisoning, which was the basis of the accusation. To soften him up, they mounted a really spectacular operation and finally managed to photograph him banging a black girl from the Dominican Republic in a highway motel, and then, once the film had been developed and they saw the pictures, which were really artistic to look at, they went to see him in the cafeteria of the hospital, gave him the envelope and said, dear doctor, help us to clarify a few things, does your blonde white wife know that you like it African-style? what do you think your respectable Peggy Sue will say when she sees this photograph, take a good look, where a version of Harry Belafonte, only with tits and cunt, is swallowing your reddened cock to the root? and that little bag of white powder next to the condoms and the Jamaican rum, what is that? such interesting photographs, don't you think? and very successful, really, this one where she's massaging your prostate with a gherkin is my favorite, my God, just like a pre-Raphaelite painting, the photographer's quite a promising talent, don't you think so, doctor? The Italians said all this to the doctor, and although the poor man insulted them and told them their methods were illegal and amounted to entrapment, and threatened to fight back in the courts, in the end he gave in and Walter was able to take possession of his inheritance.

The house in South Beach, Miami, turned out to be a mansion overlooking the sea, with seven bedrooms, its own jetty, and an extensive wooded garden, a real tropical paradise, a miniature Caribbean, if you don't mind me saying so, the kind of house that people look at from the outside and wonder what kind of bastard can afford to live in a mansion like that, and can't even conceive that all that could belong to one person.

And there, in the middle of that luxury and all that space, young Walter de la Salle, who now owned everything, also started receiving an income of two hundred thousand dollars a month, just for pocket money. But he continued working at the hospital, although he'd arrive there in the old man's Cadillac, driven by his Cuban chauffeur, because Walter didn't want to dismiss any of Ebenezer J.'s staff. And that's why they themselves taught him how to give orders and how best to use their services. In those early days, Walter was just like another member of the staff, having coffee and chatting with the cook or the gardener, or with the Filipino maids, and as he didn't know what to do with the money he'd take five-dollar bills and leave the house and hand them out to the people most in need, especially the fraternity of the needle and the rubber knot, if you follow my meaning.

In order not to be alone, he settled on the first floor of the mansion, in the servants' area, but gradually the staff convinced him that he ought to use the upstairs rooms and they taught him how to use the bathrooms with their Italian tiles and the jacuzzi and the best hour of the day to have one of those delicious liqueurs that were kept in the cellar.

Some time later came what he himself described as “the day God showed me the future, showed me what was hidden and beautiful, but above all showed me how to communicate with humanity,” and it happened more or less like this, let's see if I can tell it properly: imagine Walter de la Salle waking up very early one Sunday because he thinks he can hear a kind of moaning sound, like the crying of a cat in danger, and goes out to look for it in order to help it. Day has only just broken and the sky is still gray as the young man advances between the bushes toward the jetty. He walks through the reed bed to the sea, and then, in the middle of the reeds, he again hears the moaning but louder this time and he can hear his own heart pounding in his chest, he's breathing with difficulty at each sob he hears and he knows that if he doesn't find the source of that pain he's going to explode, until he sees it, or rather, sees her, because it isn't a cat but a girl of seventeen, with cuts on her arms, and blood around her mouth and nose, covered in grime and mud, with scabs all over her body thanks to untold nights exposed to the elements, and at first the girl bristled like a cat as Walter approached, ready to defend herself, then her eyes met his and it seemed to him that an intense fire was blazing out of those wild ovals, that's what he said, my friends, I'm not exaggerating, real fire, the kind that burns, not the poetic kind, and that's why Walter thought that it was old Satan, Satan the Traitor, Satan the Tempter. His veins turned to tubes of shattered glass and his eyes to the bottoms of Sprite bottles, and he said to himself, this is what you've brought me to, God, this serpent will burn me, but the girl started to come closer without taking her eyes off him and he started to feel something different, not fire now, not streams of frozen light, but a warm air, and he realized that the fire wasn't down to wickedness but fear, or rather, the fear that precedes wickedness, and so he let her come closer with her hand held out and a few seconds later they touched one another, with the fingers outstretched, and ran their hands over each other's bodies as if they were blind, oh yes, my friends, blind with so much fire, but when their cells made contact, his good cells and her tired, sick ones, the good won out, ladies and gentlemen, by a country mile. She stopped spitting out sparks, and in a second her expression was again that of a fragile young girl.

What had happened in Walter's heart was something very strong, that's why he stopped and looked up, and said, and this is very clear in his literature, he said that a cool rain bathed his cheeks and tired eyes, and they joined hands and began walking through the reeds, with an impressive dawn rising over the sea, and at this point, my friends, if you can't see a clear, direct analogy with paradise and the birth of man, then you can't see a damn thing, and I mean that in all sincerity, and they walked hand in hand to the house and once there the girl had a wash and then slept for three days, with young Walter at her side, listening to her pulse to make sure she was still alive and thinking that what was beating in that fragile heart was both their lives.

When she finally opened her eyes he witnessed, in his words, “the beginning of the world,” because he sensed that what she was seeing was newly created or that she was creating it. And this was how Walter de la Salle's first acolyte appeared in his life. Her name turned out to be Jessica, Miss Jessica, a young woman who fell out of a strange sky, those skies that in spite of being divine are also, like ours, full of pain and terrible secrets, I don't know if you follow me, my friends, and excuse me if I sometimes wax lyrical in this talk.

Walter installed Miss Jessica in one of the bedrooms on the second floor and from then on they lived together, with the staff, and so the house changed, of course, because the arrival of a woman, however young, always involves bringing good new things to any house, making it into more of a home than a hotel or a temporary stopover.

The young man's court was beginning to form, my friends, do you see that? Jessica was called to be his Mary Magdalene, because according to Walter himself, and this was said in confidence, she was the first person to refer to him in divine terms, seeing him as someone anointed among men, and telling him, you aren't human, there's nothing human in what you do or say or in the way you eat or sleep, you're a Christ even when you wash your hands, that was what Miss Jessica said to him, and God knows what hell she'd come from when he met her, because from this point she converted herself into a slave of the Lord, and I'm not talking about the Lord of the Rings or the Lord of the Flies, but the True Lord, the Boss, the Big Enchilada, the Man Himself, and as incredible as it may seem, her religious conviction set the standard for Walter, because when Miss Jessica revealed to him what he meant to her and how deeply he'd affected her, he himself understood his own path in the world and the task he had ahead of him, and more than that, my friends, and I'm not trying to make myself out to be a philosopher or anything like that, it's just that it seems to me that when Miss Jessica revealed Walter's destiny to him, through her devotion, she also carved out her own path, she found herself, which is the most difficult thing in this life, friends, just ask me, but anyway, having gotten to this point, imagine the scene, a mansion in South Beach with two young people living like brother and sister, like orphans or boarders, with her devoted to contemplating him and him letting himself be worshiped, going out to preach the word and tending to the sick at the hospital and at the same time filling his lungs with the dense air of reality, with the miasma of life, charging himself and charging himself, the way a battery is charged, I don't know how else to put it, charging himself with that message that he then had to go out and convey through the world, and for him it was like an illness slowly taking over his body, whose substance had to be periodically evacuated, seeing as if he didn't do that it would end up choking him, like those snakes you have to extract the venom from, I know the comparison may seem a bit extreme, but the extreme part is what comes now, my friends, because you can't begin to imagine the demands there are on holiness, and I mean that, although compared to Walter I was no more than a go-between or, as he put it, a factotum, a word, by the way, that I'd never heard before, which means, “person trusted by another and who in the name of that other person handles his business,” and that was what I was, a real factotum, but we'll come to that soon, my brothers, don't rush me, anyway, the beginning of that newly acquired holiness was that Miss Jessica, once cured of her ills, started going with Walter to look after the elderly and preach the word of God among the terminally sick in the hospitals, the people with AIDS, the drug addicts, the patients with infectious diseases, and so, with their words and their gifts, because they took bottles of Fanta and ice cream with them, the two young people started building a name for themselves among the most disadvantaged people in Miami. I think this was a time when both Walter and Jessica were advancing by trial and error, looking for the path down which they were to go, always together, the definitive path, and so it was that one afternoon Miss Jessica showed up at the house with a young drug addict and said to Walter, he needs help, I picked him up from a garbage dump on Hopalong Avenue, his arms are full of holes, he has hematomas on his neck, his wrists and face are swollen because he's retaining liquid, we have to give him shelter for a time, we have to start with him.