Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

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.

Walter gave up going out on the streets to spread the word, because he didn’t have the time. All those meetings and services and journeys to other cities monopolized his schedule, so he himself said to me, you’re going to take charge of the hardest part, you’ll be my shepherd of souls, you’ll have to bring them from the bottom of the well up to where I can save them, José, gather them together, be strong, it’s the greatest responsibility there is in this Ministry and I give it to you, comrade, you’re the oldest and most experienced of us, you believe in me and you’d be capable of giving your life blindly for Christ, that I know.

The separation became even greater. I’d observe him from my cabin, and I saw many things.

I saw that the lights in the tower, where Walter had moved his private rooms since the last refurbishment, were on until late, and sometimes I’d see frenzied silhouettes projected on the window. If somebody opened a window you could hear music and laughter. I stayed there in silence by my own window, spying on the movements in the tower, although sometimes I didn’t even look; I only thought and thought about what Walter had come to do in the world and how little I understood of his mission, poor wretch that I was, so I said to myself, continue with your education and one day you’ll understand, and I went back to my books, the poetry and the religious writings and the biographies, and I started to devour them again, and that way life got back on an even keel.

One evening, one of the Italian lawyers told him that the best way to spread his word nationwide was television, why had he never thought of it before? He ought to build a studio in his house, buy air space and hire a team of communicators to help him, and that was what he did, because Walter was extremely impressionable. He was won over by the idea of expanding, like everyone. Don’t you think so, my friends? Doesn’t a human being naturally prefer to have two of something rather than one? That was how Walter began his second stage as a businessman and The Ministry of Mercy in Your Home went on the air, for which he developed a different method. His advisers persuaded him that the style and esthetics of his concerts, with red lights and bulging muscles, wouldn’t work on TV, because all those action series had set the bar really high when it came to convincing the viewers, and what he was doing would look like a children’s game. That’s why he thought up a kind of spiritual call center, with a theoretical part presented by Walter and another part where he was joined by Miss Jessica and they’d answer questions from viewers, using Biblical passages and other religious examples to get across their points.

Within six months the show was generating more money for the Ministry than all those exhausting national tours, and again there were changes. He didn’t entirely stop going out on the streets, because, as he always said, nothing could replace direct contact with reality, grappling at first hand with a person desperate to find a direction in life, and I’d think, oh Walter, you haven’t been in touch with reality for a long time now, but I only thought it, I didn’t say it. At that time there were a lot of things I didn’t dare say.

One night I was alone in my cabin, drinking tonic water and reading Pindar, when I heard heavy breathing in the garden, the noise of footsteps, dead leaves being crushed underfoot, what was it? I went to have a look and was stunned to see that a group of women had climbed over the railings and was heading for the house. I followed them at a distance to see what they were going to do. . They wanted to see Walter, so they tried to force open a couple of doors, and, when they didn’t succeed, they broke a window and got into the house that way. That worried me, so I said to them, hey, ladies, cool it, but they didn’t listen to me, they seemed possessed; there was blood on the glass, so now I was really worried, but I didn’t know what else to do except follow them, and I said to myself, where the fuck are the bodyguards? now that we need them they’re nowhere to be seen, although I also thought, it’s better this way, those savages might hurt one of the old ladies and then it’d be goodbye Ministry, big scandal, so we had to be careful. The women realized that Walter might be in the tower, because they saw lights, and looked for the staircase. I ran up the service stairs and got there before they did, to warn Walter. I saw that his apartment was open. I nervously approached the door and half-opened it, and light spilled out into the corridor.