Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

But days that are too wonderful scare me, because after them there comes a little voice announcing that a tragedy is on its way. I can hear that voice. It’s a metallic tone beneath the wind or behind the light, which suddenly manifests itself, and when it does you have to hide or flee. We didn’t flee in time, and two days later our Volkswagen was attacked by snipers. The driver was shot three times in the head and died instantaneously. A cameraman had a lung perforated by a bullet and had to stay in hospital for nearly six months. Kay’s right shoulder and shoulder blade and the bones of his arm were shattered in the gunfire. Fortunately for me, I had stayed behind in the hotel. The bullets went in one side and out the other of the car and its occupants. That night we flew back to Zagreb, where everyone was hospitalized.

After three weeks, and six operations, I brought Kay back to Paris, where they did more tests. There was nothing to be done: he had lost his arm, by which I mean, not that it was amputated, but that it had lost all mobility. A dead appendage. He had to reeducate himself and his whole body changed, like a boat with a broken mast. Now he walked bent over, which he tried to hide out of vanity. We spent hundreds of thousands of euros on miracle operations and mechanical arms, but it was impossible. The nerves and tendons had been destroyed. The arm was dead.

One day we were introduced to an expert in occult cures, related to old legends of the blacksmith’s trade in central Europe. It was the one card we hadn’t yet played, so Kay said to me, I’m going to try. The man, whose name was Ebenezer Selle Trimegisto, had an office in the elegant Parisian district of École Militaire. According to Doctor Ebenezer, Kay could recover his strength by invoking the old medieval blacksmiths, and putting his arm in a splint with various qualities of metal. As he explained it, the earth was the great midwife and every metal was in transition between carbon and gold. Then he said that the bones were the carbonic and solid structure of the body and that the proximity of certain metals could revive the shattered pieces of the inert appendage. We believed him because we wanted to believe him and a few days later Dr. Ebenezer Trimegisto presented Kay with a long leather glove that went from the fist to the armpit and had to be filled with iron and other metals. A Brazilian storekeeper adjusted it for us and that was why Kay started walking around with that strange prosthesis. He looked like a medieval falconer with his arm covered to receive a falcon or a goshawk. Of course, it wasn’t long before Kim — who hadn’t come with us to Sarajevo, which might have been why he was still alive, because given his size he wouldn’t have escaped the bullets — used the idea in one of his screenplays, which he entitled The Flight of the Vagina Falcon, and which reaches its climax when, in a tower at the top of a castle, as I’m on my knees giving a blowjob to one man while two others are penetrating my available orifices, a goshawk descends from the sky and comes to rest on his gloved hand at the very same moment when the man’s penis shoots its load over my cheeks. It was a very vivid scene that greatly impressed the critics, and again there were hundreds of thousands of euros and a brace of excellent articles.

One day I was walking through the Marais, looking in fashion shops and making unnecessary purchases, when I saw a hideous-looking woman, filthy and haggard. Her eyes looked familiar and her name emerged from my mouth in a cry: Giorgetta! Her skin was all cut and raw, as if she had been sleeping for many years under the sun of the Sahara. I looked at her and it took her a while to focus, but finally she opened her horrible, almost toothless mouth, said, Sabina, and fainted at my feet. A thousand images hit me like a storm of meteorites: playing in the swimming pool at the Circeo, near Rome, when we were very young, or going to parties thrown by our uncles, when she would swig all the dregs left in the glasses to get drunk. She was always precocious, the poor thing. I felt responsible, so I called my driver, a black Dominican named Jenofonte, who had been waiting for me in a nearby square, drinking beer and watching the girls swinging their hips as they passed. Seeing me with Giorgetta, he jumped out and said, Madame Sabina, is anything wrong? Help her into the car, I said, she’s my cousin.

When we got to our apartment, which by now was a penthouse on Rue Bonaparte, near Place Saint-Sulpice and the Jardin du Luxembourg, Giorgetta was incapable of stringing a sentence together. The only thing I understood was when she said: I went to a party with you years ago and I never saw you leave, when did you leave? I didn’t remember anything, but I didn’t think it was necessary to tell her that. The circuits in her brain had snapped and she couldn’t catch my words. I gave her something to eat, and during the night, when she asked me for money to buy heroin, I didn’t know what to do. Kay was in Los Angeles and wasn’t answering his cell phone, so I decided to give Jenofonte a two-hundred-euro bill to go out and buy some and come back as soon as possible. My cousin gave herself two fixes one after the other, sticking the syringe first in her foot and then in her neck, because she had no veins left. When she fell into the abyss, I told Jenofonte to pick her up and help me take her to a private hospital just outside Paris, and there I left her, with a check for twenty-five thousand euros to pay for the best possible treatment.

Two days later, I went to visit her and was told they had been doing tests. Not surprisingly, she had tested HIV positive, and also had the beginnings of hepatitis B and a heart murmur. I contacted my aunt Gerarda, her mother, in Rome and persuaded her to come to Paris. She was a nice, gentle old lady, who burst into tears when she saw me. On the way to the hospital she whispered in my ear, have you seen Beatrice? It hit me like a bombshell, because as I’m sure you remember, Beatrice was my mother. I told my aunt I’d lost touch with her years ago, because we led very different lives. But she said, call her, she’s been wanting to see you for years, and she slipped a folded piece of paper into my pocket. I felt a knot in my throat and didn’t reply, only looked through the window at the French countryside and gripped my cell phone, longing to call Kay. If Aunt Gerarda had said that, it was because she had talked to Mamma, and Mamma was somehow waiting for me.

We spent the afternoon with Giorgetta, who didn’t look as corpse-like as she had on the first day but still left her mother speechless and crying for a good couple of hours. She spent three months in the hospital, and I paid for it all, even for Aunt Gerarda to stay a few times. When the program was over she came out in a fairly decent state, so I went with them to Charles de Gaulle airport and we hugged and agreed to meet again soon. All three of us cried.

That night, while I was sleeping beside Kay, I heard him say: how odd, I feel a strange tingling in my arm. I woke up and said, wait, I’ll scratch you, but he said, no, not that one, the other one. We were both stunned. Can you feel your arm? I asked, rubbing my hand against him. Yes, he said, I feel your hand, the pressure of three of your fingers. He tried to move it and couldn’t, but it was an omen. Something was telling me that the loose or badly sewed threads of my life could be put back together again.

The next day I looked for the piece of paper my aunt had given me and dialed the number. It was a Miami number. When the phone started ringing at the other end I found I couldn’t breathe, so I hung up and waited a little. I poured myself two glasses of gin and the alcohol cleared my head. Then I gave the number to Jenofonte and told him to call from the next room, ask for Beatrice, then tell me. I had quickly downed another gin when Jenofonte said, Madame Beatrice on the telephone. I was unable to speak, but she heard my breathing and started speaking, daughter, I knew you were going to call so I’m ready, Gerarda told me you’re living in Paris and you’re rich, I know the kind of work you do and you mustn’t feel ashamed, what matters is that you had the courage to call, so speak now, tell me something. . I said hello in a thin voice and we both cried for a while then we started chatting and didn’t stop for three hours. At one point I said, Mamma, wait a second. I put my hand over the mouthpiece and told Jenofonte to call the travel agency and book a ticket on the next flight to Miami, and I said, Mamma, tell me your address, I’m coming straight away.