Necropolis (48 page)

Before doing that, Wanda asked if she could go to the bathroom to wipe her tears and freshen up, but what we heard were two loud snorts. She came out looking a little better, and said, you two are special, you're the only people in all this mass of vanity who really care about José's death. She picked up the letter and read:

 

Wanda,

My purpose isn't to explain to you what happened to me, and notice that I'm speaking in the past tense, not in the future, even though as I write this nothing has happened yet. But it will happen. There are no reasons for certain things, and there doesn't exist the slightest possibility of transferring experiences that are untransferable. Within three hours at the most, I will leave this frozen planet for good, and unlike Jesus Christ, my master, I won't be coming back on the third day, because despite your admiration for me and the books I've written I've never been anything other than a total shit, a swindler. I'm not coming back after three days, among other things because nobody is waiting for me, with the possible exception of you. I am going to the world of the shadows, where I lived curled up before I was born, before somebody put their hand in that bag and pulled me out by the scruff of my neck and dumped me in the world, a hand that left me defenseless and in the most terrifying solitude, or, which amounts to the same thing, said, aha, my brother, I saw you, have a nice stay in this shithouse, you're going to spend a few decades here, you already know that, the rest depends on you, you will see whether after a while you will be the grain that appears in the shit or the paper that cleans it or the stream of water that pushes it through the pipe, I give you those three possibilities, I'm feeling generous today—the hand continues—because, my friend, we'll meet again during the race, and then the hand withdrew from the world with a nervous and rapid gesture, like someone pulling their hand out of a snake pit, and there I was lying on the street, bleeding and weeping, covered in entrails and shit, more alone than the first man on earth, without a trace of a past and without a history, my memories are the dirty walls of an orphanage, the concrete floor of a kitchen, the garbage piled up in the corners, a leaning lamppost filled with pigeons, anyway, I tried to do something in life and I don't know if I succeeded, but it's over now, what's going to happen to me, in fact what's already happening, can't be changed, and that's why I'm writing to you, let's hope by the time you read this letter the situation in the city hasn't gotten worse, because this is a farewell and a request, but let's take things one at a time; first I'll say goodbye and thank you for all the suffering and the deep faith you always had, accepting those silences and those abysses of mine, you were the strong one and I was the absent one, you were the island of air and clouds and me the nothingness; you knew how to respect my silences, which climbed all over yours and were harder to bear, and I say thank you, seriously, thank you, Wandita, my queen, what I am saying comes from the heart and there is something important: together with this letter there is a smaller blue envelope and a yellow one. Open the yellow one, you'll find the details of a bank account into which I've transferred all the money I have, which now belongs to you, because you will have to carry on without me.

The request has to do with the other envelope. Look for God in the deep, say the gospels and that is what you are going to do; you are a rock on a cliff, strong, tough, I never told you these things but today I am saying them and writing them, so that you know they were inside me, so that you remember them, I leave you these words; being so close to death leads me to say them to you, I don't know, in any case you deserve them and they are yours, in the end, I am leaving many things but not you or your company, my own life has finally caught up with me and now I can only escape by flying, like the birds or the souls, oh, the past never ends and is unpredictable; one of the first things I think I will ask the Big Enchilada, if he forgives me and I can see him even if only for a couple of minutes, is why he puts us to live on the tightrope of time, which brings us so much anguish and makes us act wickedly sometimes as long as we forget that sensation of emptiness, which is why we seek instant pleasures and put coke in our veins and look for ways to escape, but it doesn't work, time is relentless and is always there in the corner, that's what I want to ask the Big Boss, not even about my origin or about this shithouse where he made us live, but about the mystery of time; anyway, I'm finally getting to the point, because I don't even understand myself anymore and I don't want to write this letter again: in the blue envelope there is a map with an island marked on it and directions on how to get there, like in stories about treasures, except that in this case the treasure is the whole island, the one place on Earth where peace exists, a rock remote from the world where I would have liked to take you, I really had planned to take you there if this emergency had not come up, so the request is that you go and settle there; you can go whenever you like and move into our house, ask for the chaplain, his name is Talisker, he will help you because he knows about you and knows you'll arrive sooner or later. You have to go there to be pure and clean and then, when that day arrives, you will make the leap into the infinite where the Big Enchilada and I will be waiting for you; but in the meantime go there and stay, that island is how I was when I was born, something small and solitary, lost in the world; on it you will be protected by millions of tons of water and you will be happy, because it is an emanation of the soul of God; my last gift is more solitude, Wanda, but what can I do, I was born alone; when I look at the world it will be to imagine that you are there, on that solitary dot, and to tell me that that pure uncontaminated place is Wanda's island.

 

When she finished reading, Egiswanda brushed away a few tears, and said, thank you for listening to me, being with you has been a real consolation; José's death is slowly becoming part of my life, and that's how it must be, a grief that very, very slowly turns to resignation. Then she swallowed two pills out of a bottle, closed her eyes, and laid her head on one of the pillows, saying, let me sleep here, I beg you, I don't want to be alone.

Marta put on one of my T-shirts and lay down next to her. I sat down on the carpet, thinking about Maturana's words, José Maturana's life. I was slowly drifting off to sleep, but before sleeping I asked myself: what kind of island is that? is it true you can find peace and tranquility there? I had a strange dream. I dreamed I had woken up in a clinic in ruins. My room had a hole in the wall and part of the roof had blown away because of some kind of explosion. I opened my eyes and looked up at the sky. There was nothing in it apart from a faint tinge of color, but I felt calm. From the bed ran cables connecting me to machines to check my heartbeat, my blood pressure, my breathing. There was nobody around. I heard the sound of the wind blowing through the dusty, rubble-filled corridors. The medical staff had left and I was the last patient, but my bandages were clean. How quiet it is, I said to myself, is this what death is like? There was no way of knowing. Suddenly a bird came to rest on the back of my bed. It looked at me in surprise, moved its head rapidly from side to side, and flapped its wings, stirring the air, and again I felt alone. The sickness had disappeared and I breathed in the air with relish, I could feel its sweet taste, the joy of its clean, fresh taste. My temperature was fine, below 96 degrees. The coolness of my body was transmitted to my soul. I was alone but I had recovered.

The next day the city woke up to silence.

After the night's explosions the air seemed even thicker with mist and smoke. It was hard to see anything beyond a few yards. We were advised not to leave the hotel and to avoid the windows. Marta was asleep beside me and Egiswanda had gone, so I decided to go down and sit at one of the tables in the coffee shop, with my notebook. I drank two very black coffees. I put down in my notes what had happened the night before, the appointment with Sabina Vedovelli, her proposition, the air raid, and Egiswanda's long story, all these things seemed to be finally putting an end to my period as a writer who does not write, so I immersed myself in my notes with a concentration close to what I had before my illness.

An hour later, the explosions started again. Every now and again, you could hear the unmistakable whistle of a grenade crossing the sky and how it was intercepted by the defense system, creating an area of conflagration. But I carried on with my notes. One can get used to anything, believe me. As Hemingway might have said: outside they are fighting for a city or for a world, but at this moment I belong to this pen and this notebook.

Some time later, I went back up to my room. I had to get ready for the round table at noon, The Soul of Words: A Look Inside, for which I had brought a number of short texts I could read in case the muses of inspiration did not lend me a hand. It was my first contribution to the conference and I wanted to make a good impression, especially after that had happened with the first of my round tables. By the time I got to my room, Marta had gone. Her laptop was open at a page with the heading The Body of a Suicide, but the screen was blank. Instead of writing she had been chatting: I saw various windows open with answers sent twenty minutes earlier: are you still there? are you coming back? What to say in my talk? I would talk about literature and life, I thought; I felt the desire to compare it with other artistic disciplines and also to tell human stories. I wanted many things but only had twenty minutes. The texts I had prepared had been written for other conferences or for short story anthologies, so I had to find a way to adapt them to the debate.

After a good shower, I dressed in a newly ironed suit, although without a tie; I combed my hair as best I could and went down scented and ready for my performance, which was in the Heroes of Masada room.

My companions at the table were all intellectuals specializing in the subject. Elsa Goudinho, from Mozambique; Dionisio Bumenguele, from Kenya; Itamar Machado, from the University of Oporto; Shé Kwan Mo, from Singapore; and, much to my surprise, Rashid! Rashid Salman. Seeing him at the door, I said, what a surprise! I didn't know you were here, I didn't see you on the program, but he replied, I asked them not to announce me for security reasons, as you know, these days there are a lot of weird people on the streets, the smell of gunpowder makes everyone go crazy, but here I am and you'll see, I'm the best, the audience will take me in their arms and the most beautiful women will ask for my cell phone number and e-mail address, others will say with sly expressions on their faces that they're waiting for me in the bathroom, get ready, I'm a tornado.

The debate was being chaired by Professor Emma Olivier Dickinson of Cornell University, and the first question she threw out was, “Can we get to the bottom of a life through the word?” As Professor Elsa Goudinho replied, skillfully improvising, I looked around the hall, which was quite full in spite of the bombardment. I saw the publisher Lottmann in the fourth row and a little farther back the inseparable Kosztolányi and Supervielle, watching him, obsessed as they were–especially Supervielle–by the Tiberias publishing house; they were craning their necks in their desire to see what he was writing in his notebook, but as I was close to him it was obvious to me that he was drawing circles or sunsets or sailboats, not taking notes on anything connected with the words of Professor Goudinho. Farther back I saw Kaplan, who on seeing me looking at him raised his hand and waved.

I continued looking for a face that would tell me something concrete. A face that would say: I'm Walter, you found me, let's have a talk after the event. Even after my conversation with Jessica, I still believed–at least that was what I wrote in my notes–that Walter could not have died in the shoot-out at the Ministry; to escape, he must have used a ploy similar to that used by the guerrillas of the Polisario Front, which consisted in burying yourself alive in the sand with a straw sticking out just above the surface to breathe through, and in that way tricking the enemy. Then Walter must have gone looking for José and Miss Jessica in order to recover his money and move to another country, clandestinely, to begin a new life, but for some reason José must have betrayed him, taking part–or all–of those funds; all this was possible, and I was hoping that it was, because, to tell the truth, my mind was already on what I was going to write about José Maturana, and that seemed like the most convincing and dramatic ending.

After reading the letter to Egiswanda, I had completely ruled out the idea of a murder, but I kept thinking about the unknown person in Room 1209. The guest was a man and had some kind of relationship with Jessica, but I did not know who he was or, rather, I had been unable to confirm whether or not he was Walter under a new identity. The idea that he might simply be a lover of Jessica's, without anything to do with the story, refused to lodge in my brain. As I thought about this, I realized that Jessica and Egiswanda had very similar voices: a slightly accented Spanish, an underlying sense of nervousness, which of the two had been the woman waging that terrible battle of love the first night? The voice was the same, but whose voice was it?

I was still scrutinizing the audience, row by row, when the door at the top opened and a slim female figure entered the room. The light was dim but I recognized her immediately: it was Jessica. She was alone and I assumed she would look for her companion and sit down beside him, but that did not happen. She simply looked for a free seat at the back of the hall. As she sat down I noted something incredible: the person beside her was none other than Egiswanda. The two women had never met, and Jessica could not possibly know that Egiswanda even existed. It was strange. There they were, sitting side by side, not knowing how much they had in common. They were linked to one another by men who were now dead, and I, who had not even lived through those events, was the only person who could have revealed that fact to them. I vowed to do so after my talk. Each woman had a piece of José; their descriptions and experiences revealed different, contrasting men.