Necropolis (12 page)

Marta replied: do you consider yourself a great writer? I'm not the one who thinks that, said Rashid, it's the press and my readers who consider me a great writer, at least that's what they say to my face. They may be lying but that's what they say, and I believe them, because nobody is forcing them; my books are successful in a dozen languages and that must mean something, mustn't it? He took a long slug of whiskey and said, I don't want to appear arrogant, I don't think my books are important, but I like them, that's why I write and publish them. Other people think they're important.

Again Marta looked at me, as if to say, it's your turn, do you have your answer yet?

I can think of a thousand reasons not to write, I said, in fact I haven't written for quite some time now; things like illness or boredom, irritation or fatalism, or remembering that all human enterprises are doomed to disappear, however long they last . . . Thinking that doesn't exactly inspire one to write.

And are you going to start writing again now? she asked, and I said, perhaps I'll try a new genre, biography for example, this conference may be a sign.

And why would you start writing again?

There are things we do without any reason or for the most trivial of reasons, I said: going out and walking along the road during the rush hour and looking at people in their cars; showing up in midafternoon at the box office of a movie theater or browsing in bookshops or sitting on a balcony watching people on their way home, and repeating to yourself in your mind, why am I doing all this? why today did I walk to a bookshop or go to a movie theater and just as I got to the door decide not to go in? We do things that have no meaning or only acquire meaning over time, perhaps because deep down we want to change our lives at the last moment, when everything appears fixed, like those roulette players who one second before the close of bets nervously shift a tower of chips, from one number to another, and then bite their fingers; because we're searching for some kind of intense experience, or because we want to be someone else, yes, to be someone else, there you have your answer: I write to be someone else.

Marta smiled and said, you see, we're making progress already, I told you we could still get a good article at this hour, the idea that alcohol and work are incompatible may be correct for dentists or people who perform circumcisions, but not for those of us who work with words. Of course, provided we stay a bit horizontal, or support ourselves with the other hand.

I took advantage of our eyes meeting—hers were two blue fishbowls—to ask her, how about you, Marta, why do you write?

The change of trajectory disconcerted her, but she seemed to enjoy the game, and said, I write because it's what I do for the arts pages, that's rather a stupid answer, I know, but it's the literal truth; if I were on the financial pages or the sports pages my life would be different, I'd write less, I'd be dictating results or commentaries by telephone, and that would be all; I should add that I feel proud when I see my texts printed and imagine they're going to be seen in railroad stations and tea rooms and hairdressing salons and the people who read them will approve or reject them and one in a hundred or a thousand will remember my article that night and make some comment over dinner, that, by and large, is what drives me to write, don't you feel the same way?

I said yes, I was pleased that what I wrote would be seen by readers unknown to me, but I didn't feel any pride, because to tell the truth the books we leave behind us drift away from us and we end up kind of mutually rejecting each other, as if after a while we did not recognize each other, and that's what's happening to me today, I'm miles from them, I'm not the same person who wrote them; I genuinely think those books are dead.

A loud explosion plunged the bar into silence and darkness.

There were a couple of grotesque screams and some laughter. Then somebody struck a light, and I saw that the people were all frozen in their places, even those who were on the dance floor. There was another explosion, and I grabbed Marta's hand and headed for the exit. Where the hell had Rashid gotten to? I found him in the corridor and I said, it's time we got back. The windy night carried the smell of gasoline and scorched tires.

When I got to the hotel I realized how much I had been drinking. The steps were moving like the keys of a pianola and I almost fell. As I walked toward the elevators I heard music on the second floor and decided to go have a look. In the main reception room a waiter was extinguishing the candles and collecting the candlesticks. Another was removing the tablecloths and the remains of food. On one side of the room a few delegates had appropriated a few bottles and gathered around the piano. The person playing turned out to be none other than Leonidas Kosztolányi. They were all singing out of tune and drinking.

When I got to my room, I left my clothes on the armchair and went to take a shower, the only way to clear my head before sleep. I switched out the light and stepped inside the jet of water, which felt really good. I do not know how much time I was in there, but I actually fell asleep and even dreamed. Then I turned off the water, grabbed one of the towels, and stepped out of the shower, shivering as I did so.

It was then that I heard the voices. A woman on the verge of tears and a man trying to console her. Being in the dark, I lost all sense of direction and was not sure where the voices were coming from. I even thought they might be coming from my own room. I did not have the strength to switch on the lamp, so I concentrated all my energies on listening. I love you, the man was saying, you've always known that, why should everything be different now? The words made the woman moan even louder and the man insisted, blaming her. You can't keep returning to that time, he said.

The fact that her moaning did not diminish in intensity made me think that she was hoping for more affection, and I tried to imagine the scene: the two of them on the couch, the man embracing her, the woman with her face in her hands; but his attempts at consoling her, perhaps because they had been repeated too often and had become old and tired, did not convince either of them anymore, and I wondered, what is it that she returns to and reproaches him with? how, out of the many ways you can hurt somebody, has he hurt her? After these questions came others: were they young? middle-aged? The fact that the man was whispering made it hard to determine his age.

He said: I love you and that's all that matters, forget everything else, what does the past matter? life is full of traps; but she continued sighing and crying, and he insisted: if I were lying I wouldn't have brought you here. That phrase produced a special effect, because at last she spoke: I prefer not to believe you, because if it turns out that you're lying I'll slash my wrists and this time I mean it, and it'll all be your fault, listen to me, your fault for making me heartless and false. Now it was the man who paused for a long time, a pause that made me assume they had embraced and the woman had stopped crying, but I was wrong, because the sighs started again: nobody's realized what I've done, but that doesn't mean that I'm ready to keep doing it, do you understand me? let alone for a bastard like you.

Her tone became threatening. Then there was a different sound, which, in my delirium, I associated with a kiss, a long kiss, profoundly desired by the two of them. Finally he spoke, and said, feel how much I love you, you can smell it, touch it, it's no lie. And again the kiss. Don't try to break my heart, she said, you won't succeed this time, I'm strong now, and he said, I don't deserve anything, I know that, what I deserve is for you to spit at me and humiliate me and even pee in my face, if you think it's necessary, I deserve that, you know, I'm not trying to convince you of anything, all I want is to clear the way so that the truth can come out without any shame.

There was a sigh from her, different this time. It wasn't a moan anymore but something more elaborate, and suddenly she said: you know what's going to happen if you keep sucking me there! That's what you want! But he said, I'm doing it because I can sense you want it, it's exactly what you want and I've always been your animal. Again there was a silence, a longer one this time, and a soft creaking sound that suggested a change of position on the couch. Suddenly she said: how can you touch me again after what you made me do? and he said, it was for you, only for you. That was the last thing I heard before falling fast asleep.

 

 

Here we are again, my friends, to conclude this story, which I hope you're finding both entertaining and instructive, because that's why we're here. A couple of years had passed since the start of the Ministry when one evening, coming back to the house from an evangelical trip to the penitentiary at Sundance Creek—where, by the way, I'd managed to get three black gorillas, each weighing about two hundred and sixty pounds, to go down on their knees before the Man Himself—I learned that Walter had hired some bodyguards, four guys of different races, their muscles developed at the neighborhood gym or in jail, with wires coming out of their ears, who followed him everywhere and kept everyone at bay, including me, because when I went to say hello to them they grabbed me and, as the police say, immobilized me, until he said to them, it's O.K., guys, cool it, this is my partner, he can come to me whenever he likes. All of which struck me as very strange.

The Ministry was doing better than ever. The safes were bursting with dollars, rotten with greenbacks, millions of them. People gave monthly tithes, and Walter's tours to spread the word, with services for up to twenty thousand people, were great for business. All we had to do was fart and we'd be showered with coins. That was how it went. But Walter wasn't the same anymore, for a reason I could well understand, even though I'm no great student of character or anything like that, which is that if you tell a person, from the moment he gets up in the morning until the moment he goes to bed at night, that he's mega, A-number-one, the boss; if everyone who works with him tells him every day that he's the goose that lays the golden egg, and the sun shines out of his ass, well, that person ends up believing it! I mean, that'd be enough to give anyone a swollen head, don't you think, my friends? It's something that's hard to keep in check, like blindness or one of those diseases people have in their blood today, because there comes a moment when that person starts to believe it's all true, that he really is the great Macho Man and all that, and that's where things turn sour, believe me, and I'm not trying to come off as some kind of philosopher or psychologist, but if someone believes something like that about himself it's because he already has one foot and half the other stuck in the shit, one ball and half the other in the wrong orifice, and I'm sorry, brothers and sisters, but this part of the story makes my blood boil, and here I have to make a confession that's very difficult for me, which is that this process of self-canonization that was starting up in Walter's consciousness ran parallel to another process in me, one that went in the opposite direction, which was that I stopped believing in anything, I let go of all those fairly tales and focused on my work on the streets, on the most down-to-earth things, on whatever shit was most recent and smelled the worst, I'm sorry, that turned out a bit scatological, which wasn't my intention; as Walter grew and grew like a balloon, I distanced myself from it all and went out on the street; I discovered that at the center of the world, in the world itself, was goodness, human generosity, what Walter had called in earlier days “the narrative of forgiveness and generosity,” which had been his great theme.

Of course I never stopped believing that Walter was somebody special, endowed with an enormous sense of life, with those eyes that seemed like a lighthouse beacon turning very high above our heads, and that's why he was ahead of our thoughts and of reality, because he knew what was coming and was able to adapt himself to it, but also because his voice, his innocence, and his message were a drug to be injected with his word, a verbal substance that made the weak man think he was strong and the cripple a light-footed Achilles, his word had that curious gift of being able to transform things, reality, life itself, to bend circumstances to his will, and that was the source of his success. That was why people went crazy when they heard him and many fainted and felt that the sun was warming their cheeks, that life had stopped being that terrible shithouse it usually is for most people and was transformed into something in Technicolor, like a song by Pedro Infante or Toña la Negra or the great Celia, that's understandable, but I don't think, dear friends, that all that necessarily made him a God, as everyone used to say, as I myself used to say, no sir, and do you know why I say that? it's very easy, because all that he had to give others were human attributes; a man is the best support for another man who's desperate, and to do that he uses human words, which are the only ones we have, and the best, that's the great secret, and now I turn especially to my younger friends here and ask them to listen to this lesson that comes from a distant time, from years already past that were different than today, you can't imagine how different! and not only because there were no cell phones or computers, or because movies were different and people were a bit fatter and women had hair on their vaginas, begging your pardon, I'm not referring only to that, I say it because it was a time when people were scared of life and that's why they felt their way, very slowly, testing everything before making a move, like a blind man who's lost his stick in an inhospitable side street, and that's how things were in those slow, gray years, my dear friends, almost nobody had that self-assurance and that confidence expressed by people today, which demonstrates a complete absence of fear; the fear went out of their lives, and now it's life itself that should take care, and so I tell myself, the story of Walter de la Salle may seem amazing today, it may seem barely credible that somebody could turn into a God like that, a guide to the blind, a beacon to those lost in the fog, but that's what life was like, my friends, and that's why, in those worlds that were hungry for the absolute and the metaphysical, somebody who looked above the clouds and saw beyond the horizon should become a prophet, and then it was only a step for him to become Jesus Christ reborn, and that was what Walter represented to thousands of people.

I would see him getting into his armor-plated limousine, surrounded by Jefferson, Miss Jessica, and the horde of tattooed young men who were always with him now, and I would believe less in him as a demigod, just think of the paradox: the more the world believed in him, the more I saw his human side, in other words, his fallible side, and of course I still loved him and was ready to sacrifice my own life if I thought it would make Walter more real, more magnificent, but life's a very troublesome and contradictory thing, fuck it, sometimes even a suicidal thing, yes, which may be why nobody gets out of it alive; the greater the man's word grew, the higher his image as a Redeemer rose from the ground, the more he seemed to me a false Messiah, full of weaknesses, very attached to trivial things, and increasingly self-centered, which was something that seemed to cover his brain like ivy; it's a complex thing, my friends, but an extremely human thing, and a well-known phenomenon, that people who become famous immediately go a bit crazy! Let me give you an example, when we held services in stadiums, and Jessica went to the dressing room and told him, it's time to make your entrance, there are fifteen thousand people out there, he'd reply, tell me when there are sixteen thousand, that's my number, God woke me with that number in my head. Then he'd sit back in his chair and let Jefferson massage his shoulders while Jessica changed the slices of cucumber he put around his eyes to moisten them. He only drank Vittel water, imported from France.

Let me tell you how things were in a bit more detail. When at last everything was ready and Jessica pretended that sixteen thousand people had come in, he'd withdraw to a portable chapel he had and pray in silence for a minute, and then go out on stage in the middle of a cloud of smoke, with a spotlight following him and loud symphonic music, nothing less than
Zarathustra
by Richard Strauss, do you copy me? The people would rise from their seats and yell and the women would bite their purses and urinate and some would faint, it was completely crazy; the security people would have to contain the crowd, until Walter would turn on the microphone and cry, God is watching you tonight! God is looking at each one of you tonight! God sees what there is in each of your hearts and comes down, slowly, to kiss them! Then he would point to the audience with a powerful finger and cry:

Ooooopen your hearts to Goooooooodddd!!!

The applause would be deafening. His handling of the microphone was excellent, with crescendos and diminuendos that bent the audience to his will, and the rest was a real pop opera, my friends, suddenly he'd say, let's tell sin what we think about it, let's say it loud and clear, I hate you, I hate you! and the hall would be bursting with yells and stamping of feet. Then the lights would go out and there'd be a scary silence. Suddenly, a red light would fall on Walter, presenting himself now as a billy goat in the middle of a witches' Sabbath. He'd take off his chasuble and reveal his tattooed, muscular body. More beams of light would show the illustrations on his tattoos and the people would cry out in admiration and fear, yes, ladies and gentlemen, fear was part of the story. The cripples would jump out of their wheelchairs and the lame would yell with pride, recovering some of their dignity, and later these same little people would go back home along the street, kicking tin cans, poor devils sitting in forgotten parks looking at the world with misty eyes, tangible human idiocy, my friends, but for a few hours these people were happy and that's why Walter was a drug, a kind of crack or coke that was snorted through the ear and maddened the brain for a few days, or only a few hours, I don't know, because it had stopped doing anything to me.

We eventually had more than sixty thousand members, just imagine, and every one of them donated a monthly tithe that could vary between fifty and a thousand dollars, just imagine, and so there were no limits to anything anymore; the house in South Beach was turning into a resort, very different than it had been at the beginning, because Jefferson and the seven samurai, which was what I called that gang of athletic faggots, refurbished the place, knocking down walls, extending the rooms, and building a swanky gym with electronic apparatus and giant LCD screens so that Walter could watch recordings of his own services while he lifted weights or did Pilates. All this coincided with the purchase of the house that adjoined the rear of the property, and as both houses had extensive grounds, a path was laid to join the two gardens.

At that time, my friends and listeners, God put in my devastated brain one of the best ideas I've ever had, which was to move to a cabin on the border between the two gardens, but closer to the newly-purchased house, a cabin that had been used by the children of the previous owners to throw wild parties with alcohol, drugs, and group sex, because during the cleaning I found mineralized condoms, black sanitary napkins, crack pipes and coke papers, colored G-strings with strange stains on them, and dozens of empty tequila bottles and half-empty jars of Vaseline. I even found a box of tampons, because it had been fashionable for girls to wet them in liquor and stick them in their asses so they could get drunk without getting fat or damaging their stomachs. I cleaned the cabin without spending a single dollar of the Ministry's money. I opened the windows, let the air in, and installed some of the old furniture that was piled in the attic of the main house.

Soon I'd constructed a lovely space, with wooden shelves for my books, a comfortable living room, a table, and a few kitchen utensils, very few to be honest, because the one thing Walter asked was that I should continue to have lunch and dinner with the group. From that cabin at the bottom of the garden I devoted myself to observing the life of Walter and the others: Miss Jessica, Jefferson, along with the samurai and other dissonant elements in the life of the Ministry that had become a necessary evil by this time. I also devoted myself to devouring books, poetry and novels, exemplary lives, world history, whatever there was, I was interested in everything because I wanted to make up for lost time, like the time I told you about. I'd read after my Bible-thumping visits to reformatories and crack dens and other places of ill repute in the city, the way Walter had taught me, and the first thing I realized was that real life was poor compared with the lives in books; in books there was harmony and complexity and the most fucked-up things had a sheen of beauty, I noticed that when I read Dostoevsky and Dickens and Böll, and I'm even going to confess something to you, dear friends, which is that with all this reading I found out a little about history and finally learned, at the age of almost forty, that in Europe there'd been an almighty mess called the Second World War, don't laugh, just imagine what a crummy piece of shit I was, because before, whenever anybody mentioned Hitler, I thought he was a Mafia boss or a serial killer, and nothing more; when I read that he'd been chancellor of Germany, or president, or whatever they call it over there, I was completely stunned, and said to myself, I don't understand, is that the same country where writers like Thomas Mann and Musil come from? no way, and I decided to ask Walter if we could hire a teacher of modern history for the young people.

Ask Jessica for whatever money you need and take care of it, said Walter, it's a great idea, as always, so I hired, for a fair amount of money, a guy who wrote historical notes in the
Miami Herald
, a Cuban named Víctor Mendoza, and as it turned out, I wouldn't have missed those classes for anything in the world because I was constantly being surprised, like with that great story of the Cuban revolution and the guys with beards coming to power, I could hardly believe it, or the story of Pinochet, my brothers, it was like being born again every day, discovering that this motherfucking planet was a very complicated place, full of angry people always fighting, shooting each other, throwing nuclear warheads, going in for ethnic cleansing, dissolving each other in acid, running each other through the ass with Belgian rifles and everything, that was the kind of thing Mendoza taught us and I carved them into my brain and then went and repeated them to the young men on my prison visits, guys who, as I've already explained, found it really difficult to concentrate on one complete sentence, by the time you got to the predicate they'd already forgotten the subject and then they didn't remember the verb, but they were my children, what else could I do but love them? I was no different or better than they were, just as damaged by reality and the new psychotropic technologies; I'd tell them over and over: Columbus arrived, Bolívar died, Berlin fell, Tenochtitlan fell, Homer existed, Lenin died, Lindbergh arrived, Che was killed, Allende committed suicide, Trotsky was assassinated, anyway, the prosody of History, my friends, and my boys looked at me with red half-open eyes, their brains working extremely slowly, with smiles that had no connection with the situation, I don't know if you can imagine it; that was my space, alone in the prisons or in the bars with Miss Jessica, almost always in the Flacuchenta.