Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

Seeing her distress I said, don’t worry, the generator will start up again any moment now, in no time at all we’ll be back in our rooms. She looked at me angrily and said, this is a cold, inhospitable place, without windows or ventilation, ugh, I hate enclosed spaces, look how my muscles are tightening, look at my pulse, don’t you see I’m shaking like a jelly? I suffer from claustrophobia, I don’t know why the hell I’m here, so I said, come, let’s chat a little, are you a delegate at the conference? She shook her head and said, no, I came on my own account, do you think I can smoke here? oh hell, I’ll make an effort not to smoke, pleased to meet you, my name’s Egiswanda but everyone calls me Wanda, it’s easier to remember, the truth is, I’ve been very alone in the last few hours, so alone, you can’t imagine how much. . So I said to her, you have a lovely accent, you’re not by any chance. .? Yes, she said, I’m Brazilian, I was born in Sao Paulo but I grew up partly in New York and partly in Miami, my parents emigrated when I was a girl, I’ve been many things, but mainly a nurse at the Marieldorf Memorial Hospital in Detroit, anyway, I’m sorry, I don’t want to bother you.

Marta, who had been silent so far, said, don’t worry, what we have to do while we’re in this hole is tell each other things, rather like the conference but on a lower level, that way the time will pass and the light will come back, then Wanda said, you’re very kind, and she started crying bitterly, as if all the sadness in the world were in her eyes. Marta hugged her and said, concentrate, imagine you’re a stone at the bottom of a river: the water passes over your sides, the fish brush past you, the vegetation on the river bed caresses you from below; gather those sensations in a single pleasant image, put it in the center of your mind, now you’re fine, your face is already calmer and your eyes aren’t darting about, breathe from your stomach, one, two, breathe out, think of your talisman and. . once again, one, two, again fill your stomach with air, deep breath, press the plexus when you breathe out, do you feel a little better? Wanda opened her eyes and said, yes, I need professional treatment, you can see that a mile away.

Marta said to her: this is a surefire method for controlling anxiety attacks in enclosed spaces, I suffered the same way all through my adolescence and after a thousand psychiatric and hypnotic treatments I had myself treated with tantric reflexology, and well, there you see the results, I’ve forgotten what an anxiety attack is like.

I’m very grateful, said Egiswanda, it did me a lot of good as far as being in an enclosed space goes; the problem is, my anxiety goes much farther, I could say it goes beyond this room, beyond the conference, out across the city. . Anyway, there’s no point in my saying more, not that it matters if I tell you my secrets, it’s all over, nothing matters anymore.

We looked at her curiously, what’s all over? Wanda seemed to realize something and said: nobody knows it, but I’m the wife of the man who killed himself; or rather: his widow. Shit, I’ll have to get used to that strange word; don’t look at me like that, surely you were both at my husband José Maturana’s talk, weren’t you? let me tell you.

When she said that, my hands started shaking. Maturana’s wife? Once again the story had come to me, and I said, please, tell us, how can that be, we didn’t know José Maturana was married, did you meet him after he left the Ministry? Marta put a hand over her mouth and said, oh, Wanda, my sincere condolences, your story must be very, veeeery interesting. I nodded, as if to say the same, but Egiswanda appeared not to notice and started talking.

I met him in Detroit seven years ago, she said, and the fact is, I didn’t know anything about his past until much later, when I’d already fallen into his arms, if I can put it that way, and even lived with him, on and off.

Where did I see him for the first time?

It was when he appeared at the Lampedusa Palace Hotel to sign one of his books. The book was called My Life with Jesus, and I’d bought it by chance only three days before at the Taylor Mall and had already finished reading it. That book came along at a very hard time in my life, I’d just lost custody of my daughter at a court hearing where I was accused of being irresponsible and all kinds of unpleasant things, and I was in the eighth month of detox. Among other things, I’m a passive alcoholic. It’s a monster I have inside me, constantly waking up and trying to devour me. José’s book said that the one way to defeat monsters like that is with the cloak and sword of Christ, because His words are stronger than muscles, vanquishing through faith that force that pushes us to the abyss, to the deepest abyss of all, which is our own conscientiousness, where there are spaces as terrifying as those there must be at the bottom of the ocean, with mountain ranges and silent valleys that are simply there, waiting, but whose presence disturbs us, anyway, José’s book, which describes all this with metaphors, was a rope to cling to, a last hope for somebody about to drown, do you understand?

Saying this, Egiswanda leaped to her feet and said, this damned place must have bathrooms, don’t you think? I’m going to look for them, and she walked in the darkness to the door. A minute later she came back and said, my God, the bathrooms are lit with candles and they’re rationing the water. Somebody asked me not to go unless I was doing “number two.” Marta had been looking at Egiswanda curiously, now she bent toward her ear and said: you have traces of powder on your nose, best clean it. Egiswanda lifted a finger to her nostrils, then pulled it away and rubbed her gums with it. She gave a sly smile and said, seriously, I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Anyway, let me carry on telling my story.

After I’d finished reading My Life with Jesus and was getting ready to start it again, pencil in hand, I saw by chance in the Telegraph Post that the author was introducing and signing the book that very afternoon. I went there and sat down in the front row. I don’t know if you know that at that time he wasn’t called José but Cyril Olivier, that was the name he used for the book, and the name they’d used to advertise the event. I listened to his words, which were eloquent, José was always a good speaker, and I felt a road opening up in front of me, not a road but a five-lane blacktop, with signposts and neon lights and side barriers, or something even bigger, a solar system with the heart of God throbbing in the center of it, I listened to it all and I was stunned, and that’s why when he finished I went and joined a short line with my copy of his book, there weren’t many of us there that night in the Lampedusa Palace, and I asked for his autograph, but something happened: when he was halfway through signing I was overcome with a terrible feeling of emptiness and I fainted, and when I opened my eyes again I was in a room in the hotel attended by a doctor who was saying, take a deep breath, Egiswanda, look at the light, do you remember the number of your cell phone? what drugs did you take today, Egiswanda? and so it went on for a while until José, or rather, Cyril, said, that’s enough questions, she’s fine, you can go; we were left alone, and he was looking at me with that disturbing, icy expression of his and I could feel my blood exploding in my veins and starting to flow through my body again, and I said — and I don’t know how I found the strength to tell him this — you changed my life, Mr. Olivier, I’m very alone, your book was a revelation and today I became a different person, and he asked, and who or what were you before? and I said, not very much, a student nurse having problems finding her place in the world, a frightened woman feeling small and scared in this universe of noisy meteorites, and he said, even frogs carry weight in the world, that’s in the Bible, come with me, let’s go eat something, you must be hungry, a burger and a Coke, and then you can tell me again that you’re nothing, O.K.?