Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

One day Walter decided to hire someone to write down his words and the ideas that cropped up in meetings with his parishioners. The idea had come to him one day in the Carruthers Bookstore on Hopalong Street and Quincy Drive downtown, where he saw a book with a blue cover entitled My Lives , by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. He looked through it and decided to buy it, not because he believed in Scientology but to see how it was put together, at least that was what he told me, because clearly an idea was going around in his head; then we went to the Big Kahuna on Atlantic Square to have a burger, and after leafing through the book for a while he said, don’t you think my ideas on life and salvation ought to be written down? that way they’ll survive if the Father decides to take me, what do you think? My feet turned cold when I heard him. It was the first time I’d heard him talk about his own death.

The idea was a good one, so I made a few inquires and found an unemployed writer, a guy from the north of Colombia who wrote essays for the students at the Faculty of Letters at the university; his name was Estiven Jaramillo and his job would be to go with Walter when he met the people and write down what he said. Miss Jessica and Jefferson looked at him incredulously and didn’t seem at all pleased, among other things because this poor Estiven, I have to say, had a few problems, including one particularly bad one of a physical nature, a spectacular disproportion between the huge size of his head and the limbs of his body, like those human dolls you see at the entrance to toy shops with pumpkins or watermelons on their shoulders, but this was on the physical level, because on the intellectual level Estiven was tremendously tough and he demonstrated as much right from the start in the quality of the notes he made.

In this way, he was also helping himself, because from what he said he’d had to leave Colombia in a hurry. As a result of a series of articles on the laboratories maintained by the guerrillas in a number of areas of that long-suffering country, they put a bomb in his car, to be detonated when he started it, but as so often happens in movies, it was his wife and two children who were blown up.

The first day Walter brought Estiven’s notes to my cabin and we read them out loud, and they were really good! The next day we did the same and so on for several nights until Walter asked me to be the official editor, the one who would take a chisel or a fountain pen to Estiven’s notes, O.K.? That was the start, my friends, of what we might call “my vocation” for writing books; at the same time a kind of mystique about the affairs of the Ministry was reborn, something I’d almost completely lost. I threw myself into the work. The texts were good, they convincingly conveyed the greatness of the message in a few words; each section had a narrative thread that made it both easy to follow and educational. Imagine what that meant for me, I’d only recently tried to slit my wrists, and now I was writing a book. Christ must really be great, no kidding. It was like an award for my fascination with books, because after the Big Enchilada and His son books were what I loved the most, those parallelepipeds of paper that had given me a past and even a future. So I asked Walter, how much freedom do I have to rewrite and interpret? and he said, complete freedom, a hundred percent, you were my first disciple and you know what I do better than anyone, the only reason I didn’t ask you to make the notes was because I didn’t think I had the right to do so, and I think I made the correct decision, because this book has to be the work of at least three heads, Estiven’s and yours being more cultivated and mine the one that advances blindly, like a submarine without lights at the bottom of the sea, following the inspiration that the Big Boss whispers in my ear when I encounter a wretched soul, like a mystical Doppler effect, an impulse that comes and goes, indicating distance, but when it returns is enriched by the space it has traveled, the speed of whoever hears it, and, who knows, even by its own ideas; let’s make a great book that’ll be a summary of our work, the final achievement of the Ministry and both our lives, friend, that was what he said and again I sensed a cloud laden with dark premonitions. He clenched his fist, raised it and knocked it against mine, which is the way people greet each other in the Caribbean, fist to fist and fist to the heart, that was how Walter said goodbye before going to his tower, and outside it was raining, just like in a movie, and as he was happy he raised his arms into the lines of water and let them hit him for a while, maybe with the idea of purifying himself; it was very beautiful to see him there, with the water streaming down his armpits, falling from his jaw and his fingers. That night, my friends, I almost believed in him again.

Jessica and Jefferson still regarded Estiven with suspicion. To them he was an intruder who had Walter’s full attention with something they were excluded from, and in addition, I insist on this, there was the whole physical thing, not only that big head due to water on the brain, but also a lack of carburation in one of his digestive organs, because every time he opened his mouth his breath absolutely reeked, it was like lifting the lid off a container of organic waste, which was why Jefferson, who was sensitive to men’s smells, him being a faggot and all that, and Jessica, who in spite of her religious dedication had already given signs that she was still a hundred per-cent woman when it came to sex, despised him and found him disgusting and made passing comments to win over the others against him, which must have been quite hard to bear, but Estiven must have been really needy because he stood all the joking in spite of the fact that nobody ever offered him a glass of Coke or a meat pie or a piece of the cake made by Felicity, the black cook. He seemed used to all that kind of thing, as if he’d seen it all before. On one occasion he went into a drugstore at night and as he approached the cash desk the owner was waiting for him with a sawn-off shotgun, aiming it at his chest and saying, get out of here, you fucking thief, and don’t come back! and other people shouted, can’t you read? no pets allowed, out! But I liked him and admired his work, and apart from that, as he was from Magangué he talked like us, the friends of the immortal Caribbean, a man from the land of reggaeton and champeta and vallenato, a man who, like me, had been overtaken by life but was still pedaling, with the wind and everything else against him, the wind and life and the world in general, and there he was, floating like a turd or a log in this Babylon of the Caribbean.

As I’ve already said, he had a good ear for getting convincing phrases out of Walter’s words. He was able to put in prose what he said in his dialogues; at the end of the afternoon he’d tell me what he’d done and then I’d take over and make a fair copy, correcting and adding, intensifying this effect or polishing that idea so that the whole thing was harmonious and the basic message shone through even more, which really opened my eyes, until one day, going over the text, I had the brilliant idea of turning it back into dialogues, a traditional way of conveying knowledge; when that idea came to me my eyes filled with tears and I said to myself, José, you son of a bitch, you’ve just given birth, for the first time in your damned life, to a good idea, a fucking brilliant idea! you’re going to be the Plato to the new Socrates! What an opportunity!

With Walter’s approval, I set to work. I gave each section a separate heading, like Conversation with an Angel on 47th Street , or Answers to a Disciple with AIDS , a kind of mixture of the classical and the contemporary; and I organized everything by theme: drugs, poverty, violence, abuse, prostitution. . My head started flying like a falcon that’s been let loose: a dialogue with three Caribbean girls selling their bodies I entitled The Open Legs of Latin America , and a conversation with a black neighborhood leader Sad Song for the Great-Grandchildren of Kunta Kinte . I was overcome with lyricism, my friends, and as I worked I became aware of how technically complex the whole process was, and so one evening, after getting the go-ahead from our financial controller, in other words, Miss Jessica, I set off with a couple thousand dollars to buy a computer, an Apple Mac that I installed in my cabin, a big screen, and as a screensaver I of course chose a sunset over the Caribbean, and I began to pound the keyboard, convinced that I was dealing with something really big.