Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

What had happened in Walter’s heart was something very strong, that’s why he stopped and looked up, and said, and this is very clear in his literature, he said that a cool rain bathed his cheeks and tired eyes, and they joined hands and began walking through the reeds, with an impressive dawn rising over the sea, and at this point, my friends, if you can’t see a clear, direct analogy with paradise and the birth of man, then you can’t see a damn thing, and I mean that in all sincerity, and they walked hand in hand to the house and once there the girl had a wash and then slept for three days, with young Walter at her side, listening to her pulse to make sure she was still alive and thinking that what was beating in that fragile heart was both their lives.

When she finally opened her eyes he witnessed, in his words, “the beginning of the world,” because he sensed that what she was seeing was newly created or that she was creating it. And this was how Walter de la Salle’s first acolyte appeared in his life. Her name turned out to be Jessica, Miss Jessica, a young woman who fell out of a strange sky, those skies that in spite of being divine are also, like ours, full of pain and terrible secrets, I don’t know if you follow me, my friends, and excuse me if I sometimes wax lyrical in this talk.

Walter installed Miss Jessica in one of the bedrooms on the second floor and from then on they lived together, with the staff, and so the house changed, of course, because the arrival of a woman, however young, always involves bringing good new things to any house, making it into more of a home than a hotel or a temporary stopover.

The young man’s court was beginning to form, my friends, do you see that? Jessica was called to be his Mary Magdalene, because according to Walter himself, and this was said in confidence, she was the first person to refer to him in divine terms, seeing him as someone anointed among men, and telling him, you aren’t human, there’s nothing human in what you do or say or in the way you eat or sleep, you’re a Christ even when you wash your hands, that was what Miss Jessica said to him, and God knows what hell she’d come from when he met her, because from this point she converted herself into a slave of the Lord, and I’m not talking about the Lord of the Rings or the Lord of the Flies, but the True Lord, the Boss, the Big Enchilada, the Man Himself, and as incredible as it may seem, her religious conviction set the standard for Walter, because when Miss Jessica revealed to him what he meant to her and how deeply he’d affected her, he himself understood his own path in the world and the task he had ahead of him, and more than that, my friends, and I’m not trying to make myself out to be a philosopher or anything like that, it’s just that it seems to me that when Miss Jessica revealed Walter’s destiny to him, through her devotion, she also carved out her own path, she found herself, which is the most difficult thing in this life, friends, just ask me, but anyway, having gotten to this point, imagine the scene, a mansion in South Beach with two young people living like brother and sister, like orphans or boarders, with her devoted to contemplating him and him letting himself be worshiped, going out to preach the word and tending to the sick at the hospital and at the same time filling his lungs with the dense air of reality, with the miasma of life, charging himself and charging himself, the way a battery is charged, I don’t know how else to put it, charging himself with that message that he then had to go out and convey through the world, and for him it was like an illness slowly taking over his body, whose substance had to be periodically evacuated, seeing as if he didn’t do that it would end up choking him, like those snakes you have to extract the venom from, I know the comparison may seem a bit extreme, but the extreme part is what comes now, my friends, because you can’t begin to imagine the demands there are on holiness, and I mean that, although compared to Walter I was no more than a go-between or, as he put it, a factotum, a word, by the way, that I’d never heard before, which means, “person trusted by another and who in the name of that other person handles his business,” and that was what I was, a real factotum, but we’ll come to that soon, my brothers, don’t rush me, anyway, the beginning of that newly acquired holiness was that Miss Jessica, once cured of her ills, started going with Walter to look after the elderly and preach the word of God among the terminally sick in the hospitals, the people with AIDS, the drug addicts, the patients with infectious diseases, and so, with their words and their gifts, because they took bottles of Fanta and ice cream with them, the two young people started building a name for themselves among the most disadvantaged people in Miami. I think this was a time when both Walter and Jessica were advancing by trial and error, looking for the path down which they were to go, always together, the definitive path, and so it was that one afternoon Miss Jessica showed up at the house with a young drug addict and said to Walter, he needs help, I picked him up from a garbage dump on Hopalong Avenue, his arms are full of holes, he has hematomas on his neck, his wrists and face are swollen because he’s retaining liquid, we have to give him shelter for a time, we have to start with him.

The young man stayed in one of the upstairs bedrooms for nearly two months until he vomited up the last sick cell and recovered, sustained by prayer.

He was the first. From that point on, they started giving shelter to people with problems. It was a time of great changes. One day, Walter sat down with an architect on the terrace overlooking the garden, pointed to a space between two oaks, and said, I want you to build me a chapel there, look, I’ve already drawn it, this is what it looks like, and he took out that drawing that would later become famous, the first vision of the Chapel of Mercy and the Living God, a concrete dome and colored windows, with a cross on top of it, a cross that, according to him, should be in purple and yellow neon so that it could be seen from a long distance, so that the planes passing over the chapel should know that that distant heart shining in the darkness was the Heart of God, and remember that all those who’ve been baptized have to cross themselves and say a prayer and forgive somebody or ask for forgiveness, and of course, a cross that size, almost twenty feet high, ended up drawing the attention of the neighbors, who started asking questions like, what kind of church is it? what times do you hold services? As the staff didn’t know what to answer the mystery kept on growing until one day, I think it was a Saturday, Miss Jessica was coming back from the market when a woman asked her for the times of services and the name of the church and she replied, it’s the Ministry of Mercy, we’ll put up the schedule for the services next week.

When she got to the house she found Walter prostrate before a huge red plastic crucifix, with a Christ twice life-size and a green light flashing inside it, and she said, Father — because she already called him Father — Father, the faithful are already asking about the chapel and the times of services, and I told her that we’d put them up on the door next week, so you have to think about that, and he, still prostrate on the floor, listened to her without looking at her, surrounding her with a great silence, as if the church were his body, a temple where the priests officiated from silent cubicles.

Miss Jessica looked at him affectionately, recognizing in him a divine being: his bare chest with the rippling muscles, the trapezoid formed by his back and the back of his neck, his prominent vertebrae, and the long hair cascading over his shoulders like a waterfall; she waited reverently by his side, because she knew that when Walter was at prayer he often reached an extremely deep state, such was his devotion and closeness to God, who without doubt was his father; that was what Miss Jessica was thinking, my friends, she’d already gotten it into her hypothalamus and cerebellum that Walter was none other than the son of the Master, the Big Enchilada, the Man Himself, how does that grab you? and so, after all that silence, seeing him start to move, she said: you’re ready, Father, you have to begin and the people are waiting for you, and he replied, we’ll put up the schedule on Monday.