Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

That was the kind of story that José told, but he also talked about private things, how he felt about other people, his love affairs. The first time he slept with a woman was with the mother of a neighbor of his, who was thirty-two and an alcoholic; he and his friend were eighteen and they smoked grass, drank, snorted cocaine, and occasionally gave themselves a fix. José had sex with her one day when he came looking for his friend but his friend had gone out; the woman was drunk, she invited him to have a few beers, then took him to bed and taught him what to do. Having sex with his friend’s mother made him feel like a big man, and very soon he was picking fights with everyone. He never saw the woman again. Then he was with a Colombian girl and got into more trouble with drugs, getting closer and closer to the edge, until he became a real addict and started his love affair with smack.

Are you sure José didn’t know anything about his origins? He didn’t talk much about that, said Jessica, and it may be true; maybe he did have somebody in his childhood but prefers not to remember, like many people do, if something traumatic happened it’s better to distance yourself from it and invent a different story. He told me all kinds of stories; about an orphanage, a reformatory, an old woman who sold him, a man who forced him to beg with a plaster on his arm so that it looked as if he had a burn, and a group of children he used to steal fruit with from the trees in the neighbors’ gardens. In fact, José remembered a lot of things, but anyway, that’s beside the point, let me go back to what I want to tell you, which is the real relationship between José and Walter.

It’s true that Walter took him out of prison and that he did it because he believed in him and realized that, with his physical strength and his experience in the lower depths, José would be his ideal companion in his crusade among prostitutes, drug addicts and murderers. He was his first companion, which explains why Walter was so loyal to him, why he was always prepared to indulge his demands, to support any of his ideas or whims, however crazy or even dangerous they were. In his talk, for example, José didn’t say anything about the Mobile Ministry, which was one of his brilliant ideas; it involved adapting a large RV, a very expensive one that cost a hundred and seventy thousand dollars, with a chapel inside, so that we could drive through the neighborhoods and spread the word more quickly. We bought it and had a prayer room, a little religious library, and a confessional built in it because José’s idea was to position ourselves on the corners in troubled neighborhoods and provide a service to the young people, instant confession and repentance.

But his methods were very violent and one day, in a red-light district, he hit a young man who had refused to get down on his knees, and forced him to ask forgiveness of Christ, which the boy finally did but only when he was already bruised and bleeding. The next day, when José arrived in the RV, he was met with stones and even a couple of gunshots; he had to run away and the RV was torched. The insurance company didn’t want to hear about it, what was he doing in such a dangerous place anyway?

The story about Jefferson and Walter being homosexuals is false, I really want to make that clear. I don’t have any proof, apart from my word, but I want you to understand that Walter was a creature from another world and sex didn’t interest him, either with women or with men, not that he had anything against it, on a number of occasions he said it was a healthy and necessary thing that should be practiced with joy, because God had given it to man precisely it order for him to be happy. But he was very ascetic. Denying himself pleasures was a form of holiness he aspired to, one that he wished for fervently, and that was his life; the parties in the tower and the way José described them, my God, I can’t imagine what José had in his head to imagine such things; there were young men around, yes, and they did meet in Walter’s rooms, not to have orgies but to talk and exchange experiences, Walter always wanted to know what real life was like, what happened beyond the walls of our chapel; those orgies happened only in José’s imagination, I can assure you; when I heard him I said to myself, why is he inventing all that? I have to admit it hurt me, not because of what he said about me, although that was quite disparaging, but I was never a saint and God knows that. It hurt me for another reason. We’d been very honest with each other those times when we’d talked at the Flacuchenta, I’d really opened up to him and told him a lot of things about my life, and he betrayed me. The “Miss Jessica” of his fantasies could only have been invented based on the things I’d confessed to him. As you know, the past is fragile, a very thin layer over the things that surround memory and sometimes give it meaning. But anyway, let’s go back to the beginning.

As I was saying, those first years in the house, I’d lock myself in my room at nights and tremble at the thought that he might be aware of my fear, that he might smell it and come and harm me. Then I started to see him as someone lost in the fog, just as fragile as I was, and I started to feel a kind of affection, and let him get close to me. You’ll say I’m defending myself, but all I want to do is contradict what he said. You can think what you like. This is the truth, although I repeat, not everything he said about me is false, because he knew me well. It’s true I’d been one of the gang, that I’d mixed with good-looking young men who didn’t have any feelings. They didn’t know anything about love, their hearts were like baseball gloves that supplied dirty blood to their bodies. I was with them and loved them, and then I ran away, though the path I took was just as twisted as before, what else could I do, that was my world, my little world. People who’ve never been there will never understand, it’d be like trying to imagine the taste of a fruit we’ve never eaten.

Miss Jessica was speaking slowly, and had stopped looking at me. It was hot and I thought to call to the waitress to bring us something cool, but I did nothing, I was afraid that any gesture from me would wake her from that hypnotic state. A number of questions were jostling in my head: had she spoken to José before his death? who did the plural refer to in that message, that mysterious we’ve found you? had she gone to the morgue to see the body? As I was thinking this, I noticed she was not wearing high heels but low shoes. Marta had mentioned the sound of high heels receding into the distance.

You’re probably assuming I loved Walter to distraction. That’s what people usually say, isn’t it? My love was twofold, I loved him as a woman and as someone devoted to God, which I still am. Through him, I loved the dispossessed, people shipwrecked by life, who had never known love or affection, like me, like José too. For people like that, the heart becomes dry until it’s as hard as a coyote’s tooth or ground baked by the sun. The heart turns into pure silence. Walter made life spring up where before there was only dust and old bones, damage, hatred. That was why I loved him, but not José. José had something dark and terrifying inside him, a stain on his soul that sometimes appeared in his eyes. And I saw it right from the first day.

That was why José betrayed him.

I shouldn’t tell you this, but both are dead and very soon you and I will also be dead. I’m a woman who believes in and loves God, even though she has never seen Him, and if there’s one thing I know it’s that José was Walter’s Judas. José threw him to the sharks, he was the one who invented the stories that led to the downfall of the Ministry. Only he could have gotten into his tower with those young men and taken those absurd photographs while Walter wasn’t there. The incriminating photographs that turned the Ministry into a heap of ashes. When the first accusations were made, the police investigated and didn’t find anything, but then, as if by miracle, evidence came pouring in, all from boys identical to the ones José dealt with when he was spreading the word, don’t you find that too much of a coincidence? He instructed them, told them what to say, bought their affections, I don’t know with what, maybe with the Ministry’s own money, which was a horrible, disgusting thing to do, I’m sorry, a religious woman shouldn’t talk like that.