Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

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.