Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

A whole lot of inmates were near me, crying: Dead man walking! Dead man walking!

I sat up and saw him.

I saw the impressive image of Christ tattooed on his back, because as I was recovering consciousness he’d started doing a series of silent exercises, like an animal gearing up for a fight in which it may lose its life. I got down off the table and looked for my fork, thinking to attack quickly, stick it in under his ribs and kill him stone dead, but when I was halfway he turned his eyes on me, my friends, and what can I tell you, they were like two streams of fire, like the swords the Jedi use in Star Wars , something you really can’t define, and I mean that. I couldn’t retreat because the whole cellblock was following the fight and placing bets. If I’d chickened out I’d have lost respect and the consequence, as everyone knows, would have been to suck cocks for the rest of the year in the toilets or be everyone’s bitch in the cells, which I don’t like because I’m not of that persuasion, apologies if that makes me sound homophobic, so I carried on toward him, forced my way through the lines of fire coming from his eyes and at last drew level with him, but once again he seemed to have about thirty arms and I fell to the floor again, so hard this time I heard a crack, as if I’d broken several bones, which was in fact what had happened, or so the male nurse said later, and there I lay, with my eyes open, conscious but with my brain a thousand miles away, my friends, or as they used to say, in the arms of Morpheus; then he bent down and picked me up by the neck, almost affectionately, and said, beg God for forgiveness right now or you’re on a one-way trip to the Land of Oblivion, and, being an animal brought up in the mud, I was about to say to him, you’ll be the one going to the Land of the Shit Eaters, I was just about to say that to him when I saw a powerful ray of light behind him, a fiery sunset, and in that sunset a shining city, like the eye of somebody waiting anxiously for something to end, and was dazzled, and said, I beg forgiveness, almighty God, this slave is falling to his knees and begs forgiveness from the bottom of his soul, and I said it not talking to him, in reality, but to that eye shining in the glow of the sunset, and as I said this the man’s eyes stopped throwing out fire and started crying, he prostrated himself on the ground, buried his head in my chest and said, forgive me and may God forgive both of us for everything we had to do this afternoon for you to come to Him.

From there, he took me to the infirmary and didn’t leave my side for the next three weeks, which was how long I was there, I’d been beaten up so bad, how does that grab you, my friends? it’s a miracle I’m alive, but something even worse was to follow, which was that in those same weeks Walter helped me cleanse not only my soul but also my cells, which had been completely colonized by smack, my narcotic love, the serpent of ice that had grabbed me by the balls or, to be more precise, by the inner lining of my balls, apologies to the purists, and what can I tell you about that cleansing, my friends, it was as if I was dead, cut up into pieces, labeled and frozen in the refrigerator of a factory ship, as if I was in flames and tied to a turning post, as if I was falling into the void and drowning in the ocean, I felt cold and lost my teeth from chattering, I saw monsters with hooks ripping my flesh, I saw Satan himself tempting me, disguised as a Puerto Rican transvestite dancing tropipop, but at the end of it, my brothers, when my blood cooled and I got back down to earth I realized that I was full of peace inside, as if the particles of the air had stopped damaging me, and I started prostrating myself and praying, and Walter, who came every morning to read me the Gospels, talked to me about the life of Jesus and made me realize why all of us who live in this filthy highway parking lot called the Earth have to be grateful to Him, and taught me that I could be like him, save others, win over to Him those who didn’t have the strength to do it alone.

When I left the infirmary, I said to him, Father Walter, I want to be in your Church, to be one of your people, and he said, you already are, José, it was the eye of God that looked at us and showed you the way, let us give thanks that we met and are both already in His militia, and then he shook my hand and looked at me intensely and I felt life stream into me through all the cavities in my face, as if shot through a powerful hose, as if I had done ten lines of coke in one go, and I think my body started healing at that moment, because I felt this enormous desire to jump up and down and climb the walls and even the ceiling, it was the greatest high I’d ever had and the beginning of my new life, my friends, because with Walter’s power and influence and lawyers, after six months I was out again, free and back at work, first in the mansion in Charleston and then in the Ministry of Mercy’s house in South Beach, because he said I had to help him in the alma mater, Miami, where heaven and hell lay in wait on the same corner, where Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Big Master, could meet Satan the Traitor in any bar or any grocery store, that was how things were in this city at the end of days, and when I got there and felt the heat of the sun and saw the shiny asphalt and smelled gasoline and frying oil I started crying, my eyes filled with big tears, remembering hard times, the abandonment and the fear, the wish that something happy would happen just once, hazy memories of that life filled with knives and syringes, and I cried because for the first time I felt that I’d be more useful alive than dead, and because I’d found a path I was ready to follow, by the side of Walter and Miss Jessica, by the side of the Everlasting Father, the Big Enchilada, and his son, who were both tattooed on my heart.

At night I would cry again for all the years I had wasted that wonderful thing called life, take note, my friends, especially the younger ones, and sometimes my tears were tears of anger and I would scratch my arms until they bled and bang my head on the floor, because I thought, José Maturana, what a piece of shit you are and what undeserved luck has fallen from the sky, damn it, and I swear to you that in those days I was so angry with myself that I came close to slashing my wrists, which was what I deserved for being scum and an opportunist, but I didn’t do it, I took a deep breath and let time pass, and stayed in my corner, in silence, praying and devoted to God.

After a few weeks’ training, Walter and I started in earnest, preaching the word in prisons, which was my natural modus vivendi , and there I started to realize that the world and each one of us, in reality, were the great stage where a struggle with knives and bullets was taking place between good and evil, because in more than ten years of visiting prisons I saw a bit of everything, the hosts of the Big Enchilada triumphant, of course, but also those of Satan, who seemed to be advancing the fastest, and that’s why it was so necessary to go and fight him in the yards and cellblocks, it was there that evil found its raw material, that wickedness was made flesh, Latino flesh, Irish flesh, black and mixed race and oriental flesh, every kind of flesh imbued with wickedness, everywhere distorting faces, turning them into threatening masks, expressions so common they became almost invisible, because disguised as surprise or boredom, but carrying inside them dark, thick water, ladies and gentlemen, have you ever wondered what the souls of the wicked look like? I’ll tell you, the souls of the wicked are black, it’s a shadow on the faces of those who are afraid.

Apart from the prisons, we opened another front in our campaign to recycle human garbage: the nightclubs, especially those of Little Havana, where everyone was hooked on drugs, liquid or solid, fucking up their brains, and offending God, and there, too, we saw a bit of everything, well, let me tell you a few anecdotes.