Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

For Jessica, the hardest part of her new life had been to give some kind of structure to her days, knowing that expanse of time wasn’t just a dead space but could be used doing useful, instructive, and even beautiful things, and where many people, for example, went out to work, something that hadn’t been part of her world, because her days, as I’ve already said, were all the same, waking up at two or three in the afternoon, doing the first line of coke and going down to the pool, ordering a burger or a Hawaiian pizza from Harvey’s, with a beer to lessen the hangover and a siesta on a floating mat while she called her lover to find out where they were going that night, and then, it being quite late by now, putting on perfume and nail polish and lipstick, doing a few lines of coke while she chose from the closet what she was going to wear that night, and, finally, waiting with a vodka and tonic in her hand for her lover’s Hummer, ready to go out and tame that wild tiger called night, and so it went on day after day.

It was hard to get used to a structured life. One night, after she’d been in the house six weeks, she ran away and got drunk in some club somewhere, but that longing gradually disappeared and after a while the prayers and the devotion and being so close to Walter made her strong, they were the armor that protected her from the other Jessica, the handmaiden of Satan. Being with Walter made her believe that life had a meaning, that after the night the sun would come up again and everything would continue in spite of the questions and that strange unreal feeling that things have when you see them in natural light, without alcohol or drugs; every now and again terrifying voices came from the bottom of the mine, the howls of the wolf, my friends, but she was able to contain them, and even ended up the strictest person in the house. It was she who made the Ministry rule that anyone caught high on drink or drugs had to leave, arguing that whoever was in the Ministry should be so close to God that such a thing would be intolerable, and even though Walter, who was very realistic, thought the rule a tad harsh, it was enforced to the letter.

And so, my dear friends and listeners, time passed, just like in a daytime soap, and over the next couple of years the Ministry of Mercy continued its unstoppable rise, becoming a really flourishing institution; the first chapel had become a model and now there were six more in Florida, where we went regularly, always the three of us, by the way, Walter, Jessica, and I. And we were still recruiting friends and followers of Christ in the prisons, which was my area of expertise, and in some counties in Florida we managed to open evangelical prayer rooms financed by us, or rather, by the neighbors in each county through us, which we called workshops, and in many of them I was the one who led prayers.

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.