Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

If you were given the opportunity to have sexual relations with Arab men or women, would you take it?

Which Steven Spielberg films have you seen and why?

What do names like Adolf or Muhammad evoke for you?

Which countries, in your opinion, make up the Middle East?

What do you think of psychoanalysis?

What do words like “diaspora,” “ghetto” or “Shoah” evoke for you?

On reaching question number one hundred or perhaps one thousand, I heard the soldier say, why have you come to our country? to which I replied, I’ve been invited to a conference, and I handed him the letter from the ICBM.

Then something unexpected happened: the guard’s stony face underwent a transformation and he said, you should have told me that from the start, my friend, follow me. As we walked, he said, I’m sure you’ll understand that our situation forces us to be cautious, it must be the same in your country, I suppose? I know war is inconvenient, but you have to understand, there are idiots who think they’re arriving in Zurich or Monte Carlo and get upset by our methods, but you and I know that there are enemies lying in wait everywhere, there could be a terrorist hiding behind every friendly and apparently innocent face, don’t you agree? if you’d like to sit down for a moment while we find your case, would you like a drink?

An orderly approached with a tray. There was lemonade with ice and mint leaves, and there was also coffee. Then they brought my baggage and we went out through a side door and walked to a Mercedes Benz with air conditioning and a mini-bar, which within a few seconds was driving through a modern network of avenues and bridges, accelerating until it reached well over a hundred miles an hour. As we left Tel Aviv behind us, reality hit me. The dawn air was filled with ashes and the smell of fuel. A thick, low-lying fog restricted visibility.

On the road to Jerusalem, the limousine seemed completely out of place, because there was nothing else to be seen but military vehicles. Suddenly a loud noise made me jump. Four army jets had just broken the sound barrier above our heads.

Don’t worry, said the driver, they just reached Mach Two, they’re ours.

On a big sign pointing to Jerusalem, somebody had sprayed a strange word, Alqudsville , which others had tried desperately to erase. I copied the word into my notebook and sat looking at it for a while. It was a powerful, highly suggestive word. As we climbed, we passed military convoys, and I said to myself, this is much more serious than I thought. The years of illness had removed me from the world and its problems, that much was starting to be very clear.

We continued our ascent.

A sign indicated the famous Trappist monastery of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows at Latrun, but as I searched for it in the hills I saw another military convoy coming in the opposite direction. Dozens of young men with bandages and desperate expressions on their faces peered through the windows. Perhaps they had witnessed atrocities or perhaps they had committed atrocities themselves. I closed my eyes, dazzled by the bright light filtering through the mist and smoke, and fell asleep.

Soon afterwards, the limousine braked suddenly and woke me. I opened my eyes, and froze.

There in front of me was the city.

Dozens of columns of smoke, as black as funnels, rose toward the sky in the eastern area. They were fires. In the distance, sirens could be heard, and a great deal of activity was clearly going on in defense of the city. There were trenches and checkpoints on all sides, armed men, machine gun nests, barbed wire, sandbags on the balconies, walls with holes in them, structures of scorched steel, concrete blackened by the explosions.

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.

I remembered that prayer from the Psalms as I looked at the thin towers crowned with crescent moons, the gray buildings, the domes, the old walls. I saw the name of the street: Jaffa Road. The storekeepers had lowered their metal shutters and there was not a soul on the sidewalks. The fear was palpable, but that somehow made the sense of life seem even stronger.

At the checkpoint a soldier, clearly Slav in origin, checked my papers and gave the go-ahead with a whistle. A heavy metal bar, kept in balance by a concrete ball, was raised and we were able to enter. Facing us was a labyrinth of asymmetrical streets, pockmarked with holes and filled with steaming garbage. The houses, cubes of stone the color of sand, bore the marks of grenades and mortars on their walls.

A strange place for a conference, I thought, still taken aback by the magnitude of the war.

We now came to a wide avenue, lined with magnificent buildings of the same sandstone color. There were touches of vegetation here, pines and dusty old olive trees. Sycamores. In stark contrast with the general appearance of the city, there were boxes with flowers at the windows. The limousine drove along the avenue and turned in toward a building that in its glory days must have been quite majestic. Over the main entrance was a sign saying King David Hotel .

A jovial man who seemed in something of a hurry greeted me at reception, and when I showed him my papers he handed me a folder with information on the conference, a rosette with my name and the word Writer , a T-shirt with the letters ICBM, a CD of Israeli music, and a glazed ceramic key ring in the shape of a fish. At seven this evening there will be a cocktail party to welcome the delegates, he said. The bellhop pushed the cart with my baggage to the elevator and I went in after him, but a second before the door closed I read on one of the pillars the following notice:

The King David Hotel apologizes to its guests for any inconvenience caused by the state of war.

When I got to my room I collapsed onto the bed and closed my eyes, which were smarting with fatigue after the uncomfortable journey. I do not know how long I slept, but when I woke up it was already starting to get dark, so I went to the window. The sight startled me. In the late afternoon sun, the walls of the Old City were like a cliff. The towers and minarets glinted like spurs amid the gathering darkness. The whole of Jerusalem might succumb, but the Old City was a pearl surrounded by mud, a melodious voice amid a tumult of inhuman cries, and perhaps that was why everyone respected it. What time was it? Eight minutes after seven. I was going to arrive late at the opening cocktail party.

The Church went from strength to strength. Within a couple of years it had several thousand members. In other words, things were working out. Walter de la Salle, who was starting to think like a businessman, had the idea of going to Charleston and using the other house he’d inherited from old Ebenezer J., which was a spacious villa with extensive grounds. He started going there every week with Miss Jessica, to check out the lay of the land and see how they could extend the Ministry of Mercy to West Virginia. By doing this, my friends, Walter’s life and mine started moving closer together, like two planes on a collision course, and we did indeed collide in the end, ladies and gentlemen. That was in Moundsville Penitentiary, but let’s take things one at a time.

In Charleston, Walter and Jessica began with the same tactics as in Miami, visiting the wards for terminal patients at the Ancient Ghedare Hall and the Memorial; at the same time work started on a replica of the Chapel of Mercy and the Living God, to the same plan as the one in Miami but bigger, because by now Walter had great confidence in his word and the finances of the Ministry were growing, thanks to contributions from members, which in spite of being voluntary amounted to tons of greenbacks, and that’s putting it mildly, because the rich clean their consciences the way the rest of us clean our you-know-whats, if you get what I mean, my friends, especially if their dough is going toward comforting dangerous people and helps to calm social tensions, that electricity in the air of the streets that makes the lives of the rich so difficult and forces them to hire bodyguards so they can carry on being rich, rich in the middle of shit, which is the most ignoble way to be rich; rich amid the ulcers and pus of the saddest, most desperate cities.