Necropolis (7 page)

During a visit to the prison in Sarasota, Walter met a black man from Ohio named Jefferson who struck him as a serious, devout man; after putting him in charge of the workshop there, which he ran for seven months, dealing with the inmates himself, he decided to bring him to the house. The crimes he'd been imprisoned for were minor ones, he wasn't a murderer or a pedophile or anything like that, so it was relatively easy to pay a bond and get him out, and I have to be honest, my friends, when I saw him I almost fell down: he was the ugliest man I'd ever seen in my life, uglier than a farting she-donkey with colitis, I swear, but then the house wasn't a catwalk for male models, so he was accepted, with a rank similar to mine, insofar as our situation vis-à-vis Walter could be compared, or measured in ranks.

I was suspicious of him from the start, and I say that in all honesty, because it was obvious that with the success and growth of the Ministry we were all starting to be possessive of Walter, fearing that his unpredictable passions might remove us from the limelight of his love, and that was why we kept watch on each other, and especially newcomers, seeing as how Miss Jessica and I were, in a way, complementary; we weren't in competition with each other, but Jefferson worried her, too, and I noticed this because from one day to the next she decided to say her afternoon prayers in her room and not in the communal prayer room on the second mezzanine of the house.

Things got more serious when Walter decided that Jefferson was also going to be his physical trainer, and they started to do exercises. They went out jogging in the mornings, lifted weights, did Pilates, and worked out according to the instructions in a book on bodybuilding that Jefferson had bought the first time he got out. To Walter, the obsession with physical strength was the necessary balance between intellect, faith, and reality, the three anchors of life, but for Jefferson it was pure animal vanity, that prison image of the man with thick arms and a chest of steel, anyway, they started talking about exercise all the time, at breakfast, lunch and dinner, and it started to disgust me; it didn't seem to me much of a philosophical topic, but Walter would say that Jesus Christ must have been physically strong, how else could he have held out for forty days and forty nights in the Judean desert, which is close to here, and he'd also say that the struggle between good and evil could start any day and that was why we had to be prepared, not only with a clean, agile soul, but also with the body, because it would be a human confrontation, a human battle, like any of those that man has been waging since his beginnings, and that's why it was necessary to be very well prepared, and in saying this, Walter would take off his T-shirt and show us his splendid muscles, his perfectly toned body, it was incredible, he wasn't a boy anymore but a man, there were those tattooed worlds that narrated his story and his devotion and that light that emanated from him and filled all our hearts with joy and pride, my brothers, and so the disgust and even the suspicion passed and I gave even more thanks to Our Lord, the Big Enchilada, the Master, for having led me by the hand to that house, for taking me out of those foul waters and putting me in the middle of that group of saints, and my eyes would fill with tears, my friends, believe it or not, you have to have lived through something like that to understand it. At such moments, Miss Jessica would always stand up and say, Father, you are the principal proof of the existence of God, you are His son, and she would touch him with devotion, slide to the floor, get on her knees, and say, Father, show us the way to life and salvation, I'll follow it with my eyes closed and I'll tell others, and then Walter would look at her with affection and say, Jessica, rise, finish your food, I need you to be strong and robust at morning prayers. Having said that, he'd stand and say to his new apostle, Jefferson, let's go train for a while in the gym, and I'd go out and walk along those dark streets winding between the mansions and think that Walter must indeed be the son of a God, because until now I hadn't seen anything human in him, no human reactions or passions, let alone vices.

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.