Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

He also started going to the Old Havana Memorial Hospital, the ward for the terminally sick, to be with, and give relief to, people with sunken eyes and pale skin, who were already sitting on the lap of the Grim Reaper, and there he saw a bit of everything, emphysemas, sarcomas, exhausted livers and pancreases, rotten bladders, prostates inflated like blood sausages, he saw the violence of the incurable and the hatred they felt for those left behind, and he talked to them about love and God and tried to bring them relief.

There he was, Freddy Angel, pushing wheelchairs through the gardens so that the old people could breathe the salty, smog-filled air of the parking lot, helping hopeless cases out of their beds, taking them to the washroom and cleaning their asses and groins, he was a true saint, that young man, and gradually the staff of the Old Havana started saying to each other, who is this guy? but they also got used to him, until one day they called him and said, hey, you. . yes, you, are you somebody’s relative? is that why you come here every day? and he replied, yes, I am the father of all these pale-faced men, or the son who takes on their sins and cleans their shit, what does it matter who I am, I come for them, because they’re alone and nobody looks them in the eyes or talks to them about God.

They took him to see the director, who said, well, now, young man, what is it you’re looking for? a job? do you want to train as a nurse? but he said, no, sir, I don’t need any training to care for my children, I come to keep them company, to be with them before they go, that’s all.

They continued to let him come, saying to him, you can stay if that’s what you like, but. . you’re not one of those damn perverts? to which Freddy said, no sir, let me prove to you that I only want to help, and he kept coming every day; as he was poor he ate what little the patients left on the plates, without thinking about infection, he ate leftover rice and sauce, meat fat, slices of sour tomato, cold dregs of chicken soup, pieces of hardened bread, fruit that had gone soft, he’d collect the old people’s trays and take them out in the corridor and there he’d lick the plates and keep little bags of cookies and crusts of bread in his pocket to eat them afterwards, until one day, a few weeks later, they called him again and said, hey, you, come here, would you be interested in working as a night companion for the incurables? and he said, yes, whatever, if it means being with them; the doctors looked at each other in surprise but ended up giving him a paper and telling him he’d be paid a hundred twenty dollars per week.

Reverend Walter de la Salle used to say that contract had been his baptism: the first time his name was printed on a piece of paper, and with that he stopped being a piece of planet that had fallen from God alone knew what skies and started to be human, he now had a name and an employment contract, my friends, and on taking that name it became still clearer that he was like me, a Caribbean and a Latino, a Barranquillan from Barquisimeto, a Jamaican from Trinidad, and God knows what else, anyway, I think you get my meaning by now, he was the same as me, a Latino adrift in the steel and concrete jungle of Miami, and maybe that’s why destiny or the Master, the Big Enchilada, the Man Himself, decided to throw us in the same cesspit so that we could meet and tend each other’s wounds, which in the end, my friends, were the festering wounds of life, because the hole where I saw the light was none other than Moundsville Penitentiary, West Virginia, the cruelest factory of human imprisonment in the United States, which today, luckily for humanity and especially for all those guys trying to get by on the streets, is closed and quiet and has even been turned into a tourist attraction, no kidding, the thing just keeps getting more and more ironic, doesn’t it? that operating room without anesthetics that they called Moundsville now receives tourists who arrive by bus from Charleston and stroll through the yards and cellblocks eating ice cream and shooting videos, taking photographs of the electric chair or the yard where sometime in the past, in the early years of that hellhole, they hanged eighty-nine inmates, what a contradictory thing, don’t you think so, my friends?

You see boys with cell phones immortalizing the punishment cells, those damp terrifying underground places where they gave us only a bit of food a day, in the mornings, but in complete darkness, and you had to eat without knowing what you were putting in your mouth and sometimes you found dead cockroaches or worms still moving about, oh God, my friends, you don’t know what’s it’s like to eat something in the darkness when it’s actually moving, and I swear to you by the Big Enchilada, the Man Himself, that yours truly once found a human tooth on his plate, you heard me correctly, a human tooth , how does that grab you? but I tell you this, the law of life and the animal factory kicks in and protects you, the body defends itself and the mind defends itself and instead of vomiting I made a pendant out of it and put it around my neck and wore it there for several years, always looking at the people working in the kitchens, as if saying, which filthy cocksucker’s mouth did my pearl come from? because that was what I called that yellow tooth, my “pearl,” and I have to tell you that the day somebody tore it off my neck I wanted to kill that person and eat him, but that’s another story.

Anyway, my dear brothers and listeners, I’m telling you all this not so that you can feel pity for this soul from the sewers but so that you can imagine what that place was like and how incredible it was that being there, in the middle of all that suffering and all those rough specimens of humanity, I didn’t come to Christ by myself and that it had to be someone else, my brother in Light, who made me see him with a flick of his wrist, I’ll tell you all about it if you’re patient, but for now let’s continue with the story, because at this point Walter de la Salle or Freddy Angel is eighteen and is in Little Havana and in South Beach, a long way from West Virginia where I met him, because, as I was saying, he devoted himself to the care of the sick, yes sir.

The story goes that Freddy Angel, or the young saint, as they had started calling him, became friends with an old man who had a French surname, de la Salle, a man with skin the color of paper, as if he’d already bought all the tickets for a one-way trip in the arms of the Grim Reaper, as if his death certificate was already written and signed and the only thing missing was the date, I assume you get the picture by now, anyway, the old man, after one of his frequent attacks of hyperventilation, said to Freddy, listen, boy, I’d like to ask you a question, and the young man approached and said, how can I help you, Mr. de la Salle? are you in pain? and the old man, whose wrinkled face was like a railroad map of the United States, said, come closer, I’m not in any pain, I’d just like to ask you a question, come, and he said, who are your parents? to which Freddy replied, I don’t have any, sir, apart from the Eternal Father I don’t have anybody, I wasn’t fortunate enough to know them, and the old man asked, why don’t you know them? and Freddy said, because they must have abandoned me, sir, that’s the likeliest thing given the circumstances, and the old man continued, and do you have any brothers or sisters? to which Freddy replied, no, sir, no brothers or sisters or anybody, I’m alone, there’s only me.

The old man didn’t ask any more questions, but the next day the director of the hospital called the young man to his office and on going up there he discovered to his surprise that the old man, Ebenezer J. de la Salle, who was 87, wanted to adopt him as a son, and that he was being asked to sign a series of documents the old man’s lawyers had prepared. The one condition was that he had to change his surname immediately, and Freddy agreed without any hesitation. The lawyers and an attorney-at-law held a simple ceremony, with Freddy and the old man sitting side by side. Then old Ebenezer Jeremiah de la Salle asked, now that you’re going to change your surname, would you also like a new first name? and Freddy replied, you choose one, Father, I assume that if you wanted to have a son you must also have thought of a name, and the old man said, yes, you’re right, I want your name to be Walter, Walter de la Salle, which was my father’s name, and there and then they recorded that and so in that office the young man was baptized for the second time, with the name Walter de la Salle. As those among you more accustomed to stories may already have guessed, three weeks later they put a date on Ebenezer Jeremiah’s death certificate, the old man checked out in his sleep, gave up his ID and passport and handed over his soul to the Boss, the Big Enchilada, the Man Himself.