Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

Then the lawyers came back to the hospital and told Walter that his new father had left him an inheritance of seven million dollars, plus a couple of properties: a house by the sea, in Coral Gables, and another one, a stately home, in the city of Charleston, which was where the de la Salle family came from, and so young Walter, thanks to his natural goodness, turned from being a spawn of the streets into a rich young man with a French surname, how does that grab you, eh? It’s the carnival of life, my friends, some people start off with a lot and others gain as they go along, but what’s really unusual is to go straight from the sewer to the tearoom with no stops in between. And that was what happened to him.

So begins Freddy’s second life, or the appearance on earth of Walter de la Salle, which was the name he used most, as I forgot to say that before going to the hospital, when he was first preaching the Gospels to the underclass, they called him José de Arimatea, or he called himself José de Arimatea, but he’d long since left that name behind, and there aren’t or weren’t any witnesses, as far as I know. Walter was the name he used most, and how could it be any other way when he’d been so well provided for by old Ebenezer J.? An old man who, by the way and as far as Walter was able to establish some time later, had been the end of his line, the last member of a rich, industrious, and influential family, with important ancestors all painted in oils, and, as is typically the case with dissolute members of the idle classes, had also been a faggot and a cocksucker, which was why all he ever did was cultivate family hatreds and resentments, and also hatreds and resentments among his boyfriends, who did all they could to cheat him out of parts of his fortune, but old Ebenezer J. wasn’t stupid and none of the pillow chewers who attacked him managed to get even a cent, quite the opposite, in some cases it was the old man who took them to court and screwed every last penny out of them, taking everything from them, even the dead cells in their foreskins, do you follow me?

Freddy’s natural goodness was apparently the determining factor in the old man taking that transcendental decision, as well of course as the very human desire for his name to stay on earth — on the planet Earth, I mean, because obviously he was going to stay in the earth of the cemetery anyway, pushing up daisies — those were the reasons, although it can’t be ruled out that Freddy was the old man’s last great passion, all concealed behind that wrinkly face, of course, but passion all the same, and maybe even love. Old age loves youth, just as decay and ugliness love beauty. God knows, Freddy was young and beautiful enough.

What happened next, and was only to be expected, my dear friends, is a demonstration of the saying that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, which is that one of Ebenezer J.’s gigolos suddenly showed up, an Irishman with straw-colored hair, ears and complexion as pink as a pig, and as big a faggot as you can imagine, and accused Walter of having drugged the old man and made him sign a new will, canceling the previous one that had favored him; to give his petition greater credibility he bribed a doctor to certify that Ebenezer J.’s death had been caused by a cocktail of morphine and stimulants, which was a terrible thing to say. What the Irishman asked in return for calling a halt to the legal proceedings was, of course, the annulment of the will, so that he would end up with everything, claiming that he’d lived with the old guy for more than five years, and so was entitled to seven million dollars and all the properties, he was no idiot, anyway, he threatened Walter with a lawsuit, but young as Walter was, he didn’t break a sweat, plus he had a real piece of luck, which was that old Ebenezer J.’s two lawyers, the same ones who had signed the adoption papers, agreed to continue with him and defend him, and that was what saved him, because they were two Italians with thicker hides and colder blood than a regional boss of the Mara Salvatrucha, who could find shit under the cleanest toilet seat. They put their feelers out and discovered that the Irishman had not only had various run-ins with the IRS, but had also once been accused of having sex with underage Asian boys, an accusation that, by one of life’s little ironies, had been put on ice thanks to old Ebenezer J.’s money and influence.

The Italians also went to work on the doctor who’d signed the statement about the supposed poisoning, which was the basis of the accusation. To soften him up, they mounted a really spectacular operation and finally managed to photograph him banging a black girl from the Dominican Republic in a highway motel, and then, once the film had been developed and they saw the pictures, which were really artistic to look at, they went to see him in the cafeteria of the hospital, gave him the envelope and said, dear doctor, help us to clarify a few things, does your blonde white wife know that you like it African-style? what do you think your respectable Peggy Sue will say when she sees this photograph, take a good look, where a version of Harry Belafonte, only with tits and cunt, is swallowing your reddened cock to the root? and that little bag of white powder next to the condoms and the Jamaican rum, what is that? such interesting photographs, don’t you think? and very successful, really, this one where she’s massaging your prostate with a gherkin is my favorite, my God, just like a pre-Raphaelite painting, the photographer’s quite a promising talent, don’t you think so, doctor? The Italians said all this to the doctor, and although the poor man insulted them and told them their methods were illegal and amounted to entrapment, and threatened to fight back in the courts, in the end he gave in and Walter was able to take possession of his inheritance.

The house in South Beach, Miami, turned out to be a mansion overlooking the sea, with seven bedrooms, its own jetty, and an extensive wooded garden, a real tropical paradise, a miniature Caribbean, if you don’t mind me saying so, the kind of house that people look at from the outside and wonder what kind of bastard can afford to live in a mansion like that, and can’t even conceive that all that could belong to one person.

And there, in the middle of that luxury and all that space, young Walter de la Salle, who now owned everything, also started receiving an income of two hundred thousand dollars a month, just for pocket money. But he continued working at the hospital, although he’d arrive there in the old man’s Cadillac, driven by his Cuban chauffeur, because Walter didn’t want to dismiss any of Ebenezer J.’s staff. And that’s why they themselves taught him how to give orders and how best to use their services. In those early days, Walter was just like another member of the staff, having coffee and chatting with the cook or the gardener, or with the Filipino maids, and as he didn’t know what to do with the money he’d take five-dollar bills and leave the house and hand them out to the people most in need, especially the fraternity of the needle and the rubber knot, if you follow my meaning.

In order not to be alone, he settled on the first floor of the mansion, in the servants’ area, but gradually the staff convinced him that he ought to use the upstairs rooms and they taught him how to use the bathrooms with their Italian tiles and the jacuzzi and the best hour of the day to have one of those delicious liqueurs that were kept in the cellar.

Some time later came what he himself described as “the day God showed me the future, showed me what was hidden and beautiful, but above all showed me how to communicate with humanity,” and it happened more or less like this, let’s see if I can tell it properly: imagine Walter de la Salle waking up very early one Sunday because he thinks he can hear a kind of moaning sound, like the crying of a cat in danger, and goes out to look for it in order to help it. Day has only just broken and the sky is still gray as the young man advances between the bushes toward the jetty. He walks through the reed bed to the sea, and then, in the middle of the reeds, he again hears the moaning but louder this time and he can hear his own heart pounding in his chest, he’s breathing with difficulty at each sob he hears and he knows that if he doesn’t find the source of that pain he’s going to explode, until he sees it, or rather, sees her, because it isn’t a cat but a girl of seventeen, with cuts on her arms, and blood around her mouth and nose, covered in grime and mud, with scabs all over her body thanks to untold nights exposed to the elements, and at first the girl bristled like a cat as Walter approached, ready to defend herself, then her eyes met his and it seemed to him that an intense fire was blazing out of those wild ovals, that’s what he said, my friends, I’m not exaggerating, real fire, the kind that burns, not the poetic kind, and that’s why Walter thought that it was old Satan, Satan the Traitor, Satan the Tempter. His veins turned to tubes of shattered glass and his eyes to the bottoms of Sprite bottles, and he said to himself, this is what you’ve brought me to, God, this serpent will burn me, but the girl started to come closer without taking her eyes off him and he started to feel something different, not fire now, not streams of frozen light, but a warm air, and he realized that the fire wasn’t down to wickedness but fear, or rather, the fear that precedes wickedness, and so he let her come closer with her hand held out and a few seconds later they touched one another, with the fingers outstretched, and ran their hands over each other’s bodies as if they were blind, oh yes, my friends, blind with so much fire, but when their cells made contact, his good cells and her tired, sick ones, the good won out, ladies and gentlemen, by a country mile. She stopped spitting out sparks, and in a second her expression was again that of a fragile young girl.