Necropolis

1. THE INVITATION

The letter inviting me to that strange conference, the International Conference on Biography and Memory (ICBM), arrived along with a whole lot of unimportant mail, which is why I left it on my desk, without opening it, for more than a week, until the cleaning woman, who sometimes takes it upon herself to tidy my things, said, what should I do with this letter? throw it in the wastepaper? It was only then that I had a good look at the stamp, the Hebrew writing, and the ICBM logo. I opened it, thinking it would be something unremarkable, but as soon as I started reading it I was hooked:

Dear writer, in view of your work, we have the pleasure of inviting you to the International Congress on Biography and Memory (ICBM), to be held in the city of Jerusalem from 18 to 25 May. If you accept, we would ask you to participate in a round table on a topic still to be decided, and to give a talk or lecture either on the vicissitudes of your work and the way you approach it, or on your life or the life of any another person worthy, in your opinion, of being retold. The costs of transport and accommodation, plus your expenses during your stay, will be met by the ICBM, and you will, in addition, receive a fee of 4,000 euros. Please reply to the above address, enclosing as complete a résumé as you see fit, as well as a photograph.

Yours sincerely,

Secretary General of the ICBM.

I was not only surprised but also, to tell the truth, flattered and euphoric. Questions came flooding into my head: who had given them my name? what kind of conference was this? what was my connection with the world of biography? I’ve written a number of novels and short stories, a travel book and thousands of pages of journalism, none of which, as far as I know, could be called biographical in nature; what made them think of me? how did they find my address? By the time evening fell, I was still wrestling with the same questions, and not finding any answers.

I should point out that this happened at a time when my life had slowed down completely. The hands of the clock kept turning, but that meant absolutely nothing to me. I would spend hours staring at a photograph in a newspaper, or at the cover of a book without opening it, aware of the emptiness and my own inner sounds, the beating of what Poe calls the “tell-tale heart,” the bloodstream, the tension of certain muscles. I had just recovered from a long illness that had separated me from the life I had lived until then, the life of a working writer moderately well known in the small world of letters. What happened was that my lungs had been invaded by a malignant virus, something called a hantavirus, which filled the alveolar sacs with liquid and flooded the capillaries, generating pools of virulent infection, infested with white cells. The illness condemned me to a long stay in hospital, until somebody decided to move me to a sanatorium in the mountains that specialized in respiratory and pneumological diseases, and there I was to remain for just over two years, far from all that had been mine but that, in the end, turned out to be nobody’s, since it all faded away the higher up the mountain I climbed (like Hans Castorp).

Illness creates a vacuum, and with time this becomes our only relationship with the world, a relationship that never seems to end. The patient walks along the edge of a crater where there may once have been a lake or even a city, and asks himself questions like, what happened here? why is it so deserted? where did everybody go? Then we are filled with a great stillness, and the past, all that we were before, dissolves like sugar in hot coffee. It is a very strange feeling, but quite a pleasant one, and I really mean that. Some time later, when the pools in my cells dried up and stopped secreting pus, I felt enormously weary. I had invested all my strength into getting well. During that time, I had read a lot, but stopped writing, since it is easier to do without things that do not yet exist, that have not yet taken shape. That was what I had learned in those years of stillness and silent observation.

As we are on the subject — and observing the strict laws of narrative — it might be useful at this point to say something more about myself. I have worked in public radio, especially on nighttime news shows; I have been a newspaper correspondent, written half a dozen novels that have had a modest success in a number of countries; I have taken courses in literary studies and, above all, I have read the classics, not very systematically, as well as my contemporaries, some of whom, of course, should be severely censured, but then it is well known that literature is a barren terrain to which anybody can stake a claim. As I myself did.

As for my private life, there is not much to say. I have been living in Europe for more than twenty years. Currently, I live in Rome, on Via Germanico in the Prati district, not far from the Tiber and Vatican City, in a comfortable apartment that is unfortunately also somewhat noisy, absorbing as it does both the sounds of the street and those from inside the building, which are varied in nature, from the snoring of an elderly alcoholic with cancer of the trachea and six bypasses to his credit, to the moaning of my young upstairs neighbor having sex with her boyfriend, which can be quite maddening, especially when you are trying to read the great Stoic philosopher Epictetus.

But let me get back to the letter.

The next day, at about eleven in the morning, I switched on my computer with the intention of answering the ICBM and accepting their invitation. But first, I went to the window and looked out: that old itch had come back, the itch to put off writing and do all kinds of little tasks that suddenly seemed urgent. Finally, though, I sat down and said, solemnly: the first letter I type will be the first in twenty-seven months, which one shall I start with? I pressed the x three times, by way of a trial, and then the l. I stretched my fingers then contracted them, rubbed my forearms, bounced up and down on the armchair to test the springs, and kicked off my slippers. I was ready. There was nothing to do now but write.

Dear friends of the ICBM, it is both an honor and a surprise to receive this invitation, which I hasten to accept. I await further details on the logistics of the conference and on whatever procedures need to be followed. In the meantime, I have a small request to make. Perhaps you could clarify for me how it is that such a prestigious institution heard of me and why it has been so gracious as to invite me to its conference, given that I have never written any book that was openly biographical in nature, even though I am a passionate reader of the genre. As that is my one question for the moment, I should like to thank you again, and I look forward to hearing from you at the earliest opportunity.

PS: résumé enclosed.

I went back to the window, to clear my head before rereading the letter, and looked out to see what was happening on Via degli Scipioni. That is one of my main occupations: looking down at the street and watching the people who pass, wondering who they are, what they are doing here, what has driven them to leave their homes, what keeps them going. A pizza delivery boy parked his motorbike near the corner, talking all the while on his cell phone. A girl student crossed the street, went into a building opposite, and slammed the door. At the far end, the owner of the convenience store stood out on the sidewalk, waiting for customers and giving instructions to his son, who was piling crates of mineral water. Things were slowly coming back to life, so I went back to my desk and reread the letter. Then I printed it, put it in an envelope, and walked three blocks to the post office.

On the way back, I dropped by the Caffè Miró on Via Cola di Rienzo, one of the places in the neighborhood that I use as a kind of office, but by the time I was on my second cup of coffee I realized that I could not think of anything but the conference. It was the same on the days that followed. The thing kept growing inside me, like a cry echoing between the walls of a ravine. I started spying on the caretaker as he sorted the post, hoping against hope that I could see all the way from the fourth floor whether one of the envelopes was from the ICBM.

The days passed and I started to resign myself. They must have realized their mistake, I thought. After all, I had, in a way, dissuaded them myself. Well, I would just have to resume doing what I had been doing before, slowly getting my life back, even though I sensed that something surprising was about to happen, which was why I waited at the window or sat on benches in Roman squares, played solitaire on my laptop, or watched old football matches on TV.

But “everyone gets everything he wants” (it’s a line from Apocalypse Now that I quoted in one of my books), and so, one fine day, the long-awaited envelope arrived. I did actually recognize it from upstairs and rushed to the elevator, convinced that I had to open it before anyone else laid eyes on it: that damned caretaker, for example, whom I had long suspected, not only of being a Fascist, but also of opening the tenants’ mail. So I grabbed the bundle of envelopes and hid it under the flap of my jacket, a move to which the caretaker reacted with a disapproving scowl.

I heaved a sigh of relief when I got back inside my apartment, and settled down to look carefully through what had arrived. With a certain morbid curiosity, I put aside the envelope that interested me the most and opened my other mail, which turned out to be an advertisement for a gym and two letters from my agent enclosing royalty payments (one for 26.50 euros and the other for 157 euros). I needed the letter from the ICBM to restore my enthusiasm, even though I was sure they had withdrawn the invitation. I held the envelope up to the light. They’re going to apologize, I thought, and tell me they’ll send me something by way of consolation, the book with the proceedings of the conference or something like that, so imagine my surprise when I opened the envelope, saw the heading, and read the following:

Dear Mr. — , thank you for confirming that you are able to attend our conference, please fill in the enclosed forms and send them back to us, specifying if you wish to stay in Jerusalem for the duration of the conference (which we would greatly appreciate) or if you prefer to limit your stay. By return of post, you will receive a code for obtaining your airline tickets, the themes on which we will ask you to speak are in the enclosed booklet, once again we are grateful for your interest.

Yours sincerely,

Secretary General of the ICBM.

I felt a kind of primitive joy and my eyes filled with tears (since my illness I have found that I am easily moved to tears, which can be somewhat ridiculous). In gratitude for the letter, I looked out at the turbulent Roman sky. I do not believe in anything apart from the classics of literature, but I felt like shouting out: if anybody up there is listening, thank you! Inside the envelope was a form, with thirty-six questions, so I sat down to answer them. I needed to weigh each word carefully. As it was certain now that I would be going to the conference, I was no longer afraid of saying anything inappropriate, but I did want to give the best, or indeed the most impressive, answers I could.

Firstly, I made it clear that there were no subjects with which I thought I would have any problems or about which I was especially sensitive, from a political, religious, sexual, or moral point of view (questions 1 to 25); then I gave a brief account of my intellectual interests and aesthetic stance (questions 26 to 34), which I found quite useful, as it was something I had never done before; and, finally, I summarized my health problems and physical condition (questions 35 and 36), a subject I was pleased to see on the form, the way a student who knows the answer to a question is pleased when that question comes up, since it allowed me to mention my illness, the one thing that had dominated my life over the past few years. Then I looked at the booklet. I saw that there were going to be a number of round tables dealing with the relationship between language and the past, and that I was invited to take part in one of them, which would focus on “the many forms through which we remember, evaluate, understand, and convey a life.” I was also asked for a talk of a biographical nature “on any literary, sociological, human, or archetypal topic that has a connection with the main theme of the conference: The Soul of Words.” The wording was so vague that I was sure I could use one of my old lectures. That did not worry me, whereas the round table, I thought, might present more of a problem. In my experience, such discussions often throw up a variety of subjects that are not always easy to anticipate.

I started searching for books that dealt with the theme of memory and the life of words, and spent the afternoon looking through essays by Borges and Adorno and poems by Cavafy, even checking out some of Deleuze’s ideas, though I have never quite understood Deleuze, and adding a few ideas of my own, although not many: I have never been strong on theory or abstract thought. During those hours, I would not say I was happy, but I did feel quite content. I was occupied with intellectual labor, and I was making something happen. I had been given a second chance.

Some time later, reading by the light of an old lamp — it must have been three in the morning by now, the hour of the wolf, the hour when hospital patients are most in pain — I realized that there was something basic that I had not yet done, which was to look at the list of the other people invited to the conference. In the past, that had always been the first thing I had done, and it had often been the thing that had determined whether or not I would accept the invitation.

I remembered a fog-shrouded conference in the city of Gothenburg, in the middle of the northern winter, with the eye-catching name Current Narrative Tendencies, or the Dark Music of Cities. When I looked at the list and saw that Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Horacio Castellanos Moya, and Roberto Bolaño were among the speakers I immediately accepted, and set off in a Swedish plane that left behind the clear Italian sky to enter the gray atmosphere of the north and had to break through a layer of ice before setting down on a frozen runway. Then there was a hotel called the Osaka, with wooden stairs and striped carpets, and Rey Rosa and Castellanos Moya, their bodies stiff with cold and their faces glum, announcing that Roberto Bolaño had not arrived on the expected flight and that he would not be coming on any other, having cancelled at the last minute, which was very typical of him: he always gave the organizers of such events the jitters. A sense of disappointment settled over us. We felt alone, like three teenagers lost in the inhospitable streets of an industrial zone. The next day, when we had to discuss literature and cities in the fog in front of an audience shrouded in scarves, all we could come up with was a few vague ideas, and I do not know if I am saying this with hindsight because of what happened later, but when we said goodbye to each other in that desolate airport, which was more like a morgue or a gothic cathedral, Castellanos Moya, Rey Rosa, and I had red-rimmed eyes, as you do when you are trying desperately to avoid talking about something tragic, a feeling that, I am sure, was connected with Bolaño and his absence.

But let me return to the list of delegates.

Of course, as was only to be expected, I did not find any of my friends, but I did see a series of names that drew my attention, and I copied them into my notebook:

Leonidas Kosztolányi. Hungary, 62 years old, antiquarian, specialist in 17th-century rolled plate glass and marquetry. Lives in Budapest. His most recent works are The Life and Achievements of Baron Sarim Bupcka, The Calends of Ptolemy, Return from Tasmania, and a Dictionary of Brevity.

Edgar Miret Supervielle. France, 64 years old, bibliophile, specializing in Jewish religious texts. Has spent much time in Israel, Lithuania, and New York. A great lover of chess, he is the author of Life of Boris Alekhine and From Nabokov to Stefan Zweig: Writers and Chess. On other subjects, he has published The Essential Thought of Ben Yehuda and a three-volume biography of Herod Antipas.

All of them had sent extensive résumés, full of details of travels and stays abroad. Mine by comparison was fairly concise, just a list of books and the few jobs I had done.

The shortest was the following:

Kevin Lafayette O’Reilly. Island of Santa Lucia. Author of Memories of the Purple Ghost. I am black.

And the most eye-catching:

Sabina Vedovelli. Italy. Porn actress and founder of Eve Studios. Among her many films are The Graveyard of Lost Sex and the trilogy Screw Me, Screw Me, I Don’t Want This to End! (sketches for a “Pornography of the Left”). Author of Kevin McPhee: The Legend, Marcello Deckers or the Modern Priapus and Aaron Sigurd, the Twelve-and-a-Half-Inch King.

I looked her up on the internet and found 320,000 results. There was a website of her production company, which listed her movies, and another that seemed to be her official website, the name of which, translated from Italian, would be something like www.letmesuckit.com. It contained photographs, short videos, and a section for short stories, entitled Holocaust of the Hymen. I opened one from Mexico, which read as follows:

I was by the side of the swimming pool, wearing only a tiny G-string that plunged into my shaved cunt and no top because they leave ugly marks on the back. Frank was swimming, taking no notice of me until he came closer and said, what’s up, Mireyita? I turned without saying anything, just stuck my ass in his direction, I wanted him to see that I was still a virgin and get the message, the idiot. Frank emerged from the water, opened my legs and thrust it into me, all the way, or as they say in Sinaloa, all the way up to the glottis and back again. It didn’t hurt because I was wet, and I’m not referring to the turquoise water of the pool but my own fountain, because with his muscles and his pale skin and his mummy’s-boy face he made me sopping wet, and I would have given my life for his wretched cock to be ten or twenty inches longer and reach all the way up to my duodenum. Then, when he came, he shot so much spunk into me that I was dripping for the next three days.

Apart from the writings, there were photographs of Sabina Vedovelli. In one of them a man had his arm up her anus and she was smiling and biting on a white nurse’s cap. The man was wearing a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck. It was going to be strange, meeting her at the conference.

Let me continue with the most striking of the delegates. In some cases, this will serve as an introduction to future characters, insofar as time, as in the novels of Balzac, can be measured in pages.

Moisés Kaplan. Colombia, 64 years old. Historian, philatelist, and stamp collector. Divides his time between New York and Tel Aviv. His best known books are: From Palestine to the Aburrá Valley, Biography of Antón Ashverus, and a book on grammar entitled Against the Diphthong and the Hiatus.

José Maturana. Miami, 56 years old, former evangelical pastor, former convict, former drug addict. Served seven prison sentences for armed robbery in Florida and Charleston before finding the light with the help of Reverend Walter de la Salle, founder of the Ministry of Mercy, a church and advice center for drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, depressives, the suicidal, the violent, the antisocial, pedophiles, and other deviants who wish to find redemption through faith. Among his works are Miracle in Moundsville, Christ Stopped on Crack Drive, and The Redeemers of South Miami.

By that point, I had lost all sense of reality. The delegates and their bizarre lives seemed straight out of a play by Tennessee Williams, one of those waterfront dramas where everyone is drunk and desperate, women and men endlessly lust after each other, and everything is profoundly tragic, but I also thought: this is where I belong, when you come down to it, with my illness and my solitude and my novels, what will the former pastor think when he reads my biographical sketch? The ICBM was right to invite me, even though, and there was no doubt about it now, they had made a mistake, a big mistake.

Just before dawn — staring up at the wreaths of smoke from the cigarillo I was forbidden to smoke — I told myself that perhaps the people in the ICBM saw something in my work of which I was unaware, something that did have a connection with biography and exceptional lives and might be about to manifest itself, like so many things we ourselves are unaware of but are obvious to other people: the white whales or Moby Dicks we carry inside us and cannot see, and so I told myself, I will have to be very much on the alert. At that hour of the night, I came to the conclusion that I would not miss the conference for anything in the world, that I would be there from the first day to the last.

The next day I woke up very late, almost noon. On my desk table, next to the telltale ashtray, I found a bottle of gin with almost nothing left in it — I did not think to mention that before — and I realized that much of what I had been thinking (the reference to Moby Dick, for example) was due to that perverse analyst and futurologist to which Malcolm Lowry refers in one of his poems, when he says, “The only hope is the next drink,” good old Lowry, but anyway, it was time to continue thinking about the topics to be treated at the conference, so after a light snack I went back to work, and in the course of the next few hours I looked at books by Voltaire, Goethe, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which I have never read, but which other people have told me about and from which I remembered a quotation I could not find; plus, as always, the diaries of Julio Ramón Ribeyro and his extraordinary Prosas apátridas, as well as Cioran and Fernando González, the “philosopher from somewhere else.”

I read and read, jumping from one book to another, and as often happens to me I ended up rereading poetry by Gil de Biedma and paragraphs from Graham Greene, two or three maxims by Cortázar and verses by León de Greiff, the great León, who had the courage to write the following:

Lady Night, give me Sleep. May my Weariness sleep long

And I with it, (Oh, Night! Let us sleep forever:

Never wake us, tomorrow or ever!)

And so I went on, book by book, phrase by phrase, from Epictetus to Les Murray, from Musil to Panait Istrati, from Bufalino to Malraux, sometimes only a paragraph or a sentence, and then I thought again about the biographical genre and took from the shelf Primo Levi by Ian Thomson, and Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, by Howard Sounes, the life of poor lonely old Bukowski, with his monstrous acne — worse than mine, pitted with craters as my cheeks are — his alcoholism and his love of desperate people and the dark corners of bars. Time passed, and the sky of Rome was filling with dark, terrifying black holes, like something out of a painting by Caravaggio, and I started to wonder if those written lives were real or if their only reality was in the writing itself, the fact that they had been turned into words, into filled pages destined for people almost as desperate as themselves, sadly normal people who populate this world of illusions, clocks, and threatening sunsets like the one that now appeared outside my window, over Via degli Scipioni, and reminded me that it was time to go down and have dinner.

The Cola di Rienzo trattoria is a couple of blocks away, on the corner of Via Pompeo Magno and Via Lepanto. I usually order spaghetti a la amatriciana, with an artichoke salad and a bottle of white wine. With that on the table I continued thinking about what lay behind all those books, which were like a trunk containing the fears of so many solitary people who, like me that night, needed to understand something just so that they could tell others that they had no need of it and had never asked for it, or so that they could tell themselves and then find the strength to continue, their brains seething with images and premonitions. And so the days passed, filled with books, dinners at the trattoria, and fierce looks from the caretaker, who had suspected something ever since he had seen that envelope and the writing in Hebrew. The other day, for example, he stopped me at the front door and told me that in one of the booklets put out by his group there was an article on the physical characteristics of the Jews, which made them less potent sexually, or so the article said, but I took no notice of him, just told him that I was expecting a call from my doctor and walked away.

The blank pages were gradually filling up, and, just before I was due to set out in my journey, I finished the first draft of a lecture that I entitled Words Written in the Cave of Silence, in which I tried to explain that the literary concept of words is that of an underground stream that runs very deep, dictated by the distant, obscure howling of creation, with extracts from different authors and a Kafkaesque tone reminiscent of A Report to the Academy. In the same folder I put three old texts on related themes, knowing that they always come in useful at round tables.

2. THE MINISTRY OF MERCY (I) (AS TOLD BY JOSÉ MATURANA)

I’m a Venezuelan and was born in Santo Domingo, in a brothel full of crazy alcoholics hiding under the tables, licking their wounds clean with their tongues. I’m a Panamanian and first saw the light of day on a pile of corpses in Quintana Roo, or was it San Juan? I don’t remember. I’m a Cuban and resulted from the coupling of a junkie whore and a blind, mangy stray dog in Tegucigalpa. I was born Latino in Miami and when I opened my eyes three hit men were sodomizing the nurse, who was very drunk and putting powder in her nose. I wasn’t born of woman, I was shat out by an animal with three heads who then cleaned himself with a dirty sheet and staggered away between the palms, his three brains befuddled by crack. I’m a Nicaraguan, a Costa Rican, a Dominican, and a Puerto Rican. I’m from Bogotá and Caracas. I’m a punk and a Rasta and a vagrant and a gangbanger and a paramilitary and a drug dealer. I’m black and mixed race and mestizo and Indian and purebred white. I’m sick and I don’t know who the hell I am. I don’t know if I’m already dead. Maybe I am. I’m a Caribbean. I’m a Latin American.

This was what I told myself every time I opened my eyes and saw the bars of my cell in Moundsville Penitentiary, my dear friends and listeners, before the guard came and hit the bars with his baton and cried, José, wake up! get off the toilet, we’re going to change the water! and I’d rack my brains, but all I found was an empty screen, a concrete wall like the towers of the prison, my head was empty, and I’d tell myself, José, you must remember something, search deep down, search, or did you fall from a palm tree like a coconut? even the frogs matter in this world, as the Bible says, and I’d search and search, but it didn’t work, all I ever saw was a hill of stones and gravel in the distance, tin houses held up by ropes, a stretch of wasteland in the Latino district, near the Orange Bowl Stadium, with buzzards flying overhead and a wall full of holes. Plus a footbridge strewn with organic waste, empty or near-empty soda bottles, dried dog shit. That was what I had in my mind whenever I woke up and thought of my Latino origins, and the continent I didn’t have, the continent that was far from me, as if I was its leprosy. The continent that had abandoned me and expelled me and that I loved, my friends, more than anything I’ve ever had and loved.

I longed to see a face or remember a voice, because I’d say to myself, somebody must have been pleased to see me some time, even if only for a few minutes, but nothing came, only cold distant images, newspapers blown about on the air raised by trucks passing on the avenue, flies and rotting food, used syringes, sanitary napkins with dried and blackened blood, and when I heard the guard shouting again, “José, thirty seconds!” I would think that somebody must have given birth to me for me to be in this shithole — what did the woman look like? — otherwise, I’d be a stone or a seashell, and so I went out into the corridor and breathed in the fetid air of the cellblock, one, two, three, and then I’d throw myself on the floor and do press-ups, because I had to be strong, and as I did that I’d feel a ball of fire in my guts, the moaning from the cells reminding me of something urgent, the voice of a sick girl saying in my ear, where’s today’s smack, friend? and I’d reply, when they open the door to the yard, sweetheart, I’ll go fetch it, it’s in my hiding place though I can’t tell you where that is, I have today’s supply there and maybe tomorrow’s, if the monster trapped in my chest that won’t let me breathe doesn’t get too upset in the afternoon.

We prisoners would leave the cells and go to the showers and then to the dining hall for breakfast, but by now I was already outside, my friends, I’d swung by my hiding place and had transported myself to the sky, or as they used to say, I was riding the dragon, with the heat of the smack in my veins, which was even nicer than having your cock in the ass of a black female dancer in the province of Oriente, Cuba, or in Maracay or on the island of Guadalupe or in Cartagena de Indias, oh what joy, my friends, and forgive the coarse language, but the fact is, if I don’t use that language I won’t be able to convey the main gist of my story, which is, and no more beating about the bush now, the piece of lowlife shit I was before the Word of the Lord, of the Man Himself, the Supreme Brother, came into my life in the voice of his missionary on earth, Reverend Walter de la Salle, who was also called Freddy Angel or José de Arimatea, depending on the period or which year his driving license was issued, because without that, and with all the changes of personality, even he himself didn’t remember where or how he’d started, and I really mean that, my friends and listeners, and I tell you here and now, Freddy Angel, the original name of that Caribbean Jesus Christ, had the same beginnings as me, in other words, the fucking street, which is what I’m talking about, born like me at the mercy of the elements, under a car fender, and brought up by an angel who was his protector, a cone of light that enveloped him and kept him out of trouble and stood between him and knives and even bullets, and that was why he was called Freddy Angel, because the person who protects us is the one who gives us our name.

The first person in Walter’s life was that angel, so that was what he was called, and that was how he explained his origins: that an angel had left him on a bench in Echo Park, under an oak tree, and that only after a few hours did he start to wake up, ah-ha, and open his eyes, and when both of them were wide open he realized what it meant to be a human and not a stellar android, a piece of the sky or a particle of light, so he said, and then Walter or Freddy got up from the bench and started going around the world doing good, because apparently the angel had brought him already fully grown; but doing good isn’t the easiest thing, especially if the people who need it don’t realize it or don’t want it, because anyone who hasn’t seen God, my friends, when he does see him he gets a bit scared, and so the young man started to talk to whores and young drug addicts about the Redeemer, to see what they said, and of course, the first person he addressed, a fat black man with eyes as red and bulging as those of a wife-killer, said, God? what’s that? and added, I haven’t had the pleasure, son, who is he? is he from the block? isn’t he the guy in the gray Dodge Polara? and so Walter thought, forgive them, Lord, and talked to them about the origin of life and the origin of love and sadness and problems and how to solve them.

He also started going to the Old Havana Memorial Hospital, the ward for the terminally sick, to be with, and give relief to, people with sunken eyes and pale skin, who were already sitting on the lap of the Grim Reaper, and there he saw a bit of everything, emphysemas, sarcomas, exhausted livers and pancreases, rotten bladders, prostates inflated like blood sausages, he saw the violence of the incurable and the hatred they felt for those left behind, and he talked to them about love and God and tried to bring them relief.

There he was, Freddy Angel, pushing wheelchairs through the gardens so that the old people could breathe the salty, smog-filled air of the parking lot, helping hopeless cases out of their beds, taking them to the washroom and cleaning their asses and groins, he was a true saint, that young man, and gradually the staff of the Old Havana started saying to each other, who is this guy? but they also got used to him, until one day they called him and said, hey, you. . yes, you, are you somebody’s relative? is that why you come here every day? and he replied, yes, I am the father of all these pale-faced men, or the son who takes on their sins and cleans their shit, what does it matter who I am, I come for them, because they’re alone and nobody looks them in the eyes or talks to them about God.

They took him to see the director, who said, well, now, young man, what is it you’re looking for? a job? do you want to train as a nurse? but he said, no, sir, I don’t need any training to care for my children, I come to keep them company, to be with them before they go, that’s all.

They continued to let him come, saying to him, you can stay if that’s what you like, but. . you’re not one of those damn perverts? to which Freddy said, no sir, let me prove to you that I only want to help, and he kept coming every day; as he was poor he ate what little the patients left on the plates, without thinking about infection, he ate leftover rice and sauce, meat fat, slices of sour tomato, cold dregs of chicken soup, pieces of hardened bread, fruit that had gone soft, he’d collect the old people’s trays and take them out in the corridor and there he’d lick the plates and keep little bags of cookies and crusts of bread in his pocket to eat them afterwards, until one day, a few weeks later, they called him again and said, hey, you, come here, would you be interested in working as a night companion for the incurables? and he said, yes, whatever, if it means being with them; the doctors looked at each other in surprise but ended up giving him a paper and telling him he’d be paid a hundred twenty dollars per week.

Reverend Walter de la Salle used to say that contract had been his baptism: the first time his name was printed on a piece of paper, and with that he stopped being a piece of planet that had fallen from God alone knew what skies and started to be human, he now had a name and an employment contract, my friends, and on taking that name it became still clearer that he was like me, a Caribbean and a Latino, a Barranquillan from Barquisimeto, a Jamaican from Trinidad, and God knows what else, anyway, I think you get my meaning by now, he was the same as me, a Latino adrift in the steel and concrete jungle of Miami, and maybe that’s why destiny or the Master, the Big Enchilada, the Man Himself, decided to throw us in the same cesspit so that we could meet and tend each other’s wounds, which in the end, my friends, were the festering wounds of life, because the hole where I saw the light was none other than Moundsville Penitentiary, West Virginia, the cruelest factory of human imprisonment in the United States, which today, luckily for humanity and especially for all those guys trying to get by on the streets, is closed and quiet and has even been turned into a tourist attraction, no kidding, the thing just keeps getting more and more ironic, doesn’t it? that operating room without anesthetics that they called Moundsville now receives tourists who arrive by bus from Charleston and stroll through the yards and cellblocks eating ice cream and shooting videos, taking photographs of the electric chair or the yard where sometime in the past, in the early years of that hellhole, they hanged eighty-nine inmates, what a contradictory thing, don’t you think so, my friends?

You see boys with cell phones immortalizing the punishment cells, those damp terrifying underground places where they gave us only a bit of food a day, in the mornings, but in complete darkness, and you had to eat without knowing what you were putting in your mouth and sometimes you found dead cockroaches or worms still moving about, oh God, my friends, you don’t know what’s it’s like to eat something in the darkness when it’s actually moving, and I swear to you by the Big Enchilada, the Man Himself, that yours truly once found a human tooth on his plate, you heard me correctly, a human tooth, how does that grab you? but I tell you this, the law of life and the animal factory kicks in and protects you, the body defends itself and the mind defends itself and instead of vomiting I made a pendant out of it and put it around my neck and wore it there for several years, always looking at the people working in the kitchens, as if saying, which filthy cocksucker’s mouth did my pearl come from? because that was what I called that yellow tooth, my “pearl,” and I have to tell you that the day somebody tore it off my neck I wanted to kill that person and eat him, but that’s another story.

Anyway, my dear brothers and listeners, I’m telling you all this not so that you can feel pity for this soul from the sewers but so that you can imagine what that place was like and how incredible it was that being there, in the middle of all that suffering and all those rough specimens of humanity, I didn’t come to Christ by myself and that it had to be someone else, my brother in Light, who made me see him with a flick of his wrist, I’ll tell you all about it if you’re patient, but for now let’s continue with the story, because at this point Walter de la Salle or Freddy Angel is eighteen and is in Little Havana and in South Beach, a long way from West Virginia where I met him, because, as I was saying, he devoted himself to the care of the sick, yes sir.

The story goes that Freddy Angel, or the young saint, as they had started calling him, became friends with an old man who had a French surname, de la Salle, a man with skin the color of paper, as if he’d already bought all the tickets for a one-way trip in the arms of the Grim Reaper, as if his death certificate was already written and signed and the only thing missing was the date, I assume you get the picture by now, anyway, the old man, after one of his frequent attacks of hyperventilation, said to Freddy, listen, boy, I’d like to ask you a question, and the young man approached and said, how can I help you, Mr. de la Salle? are you in pain? and the old man, whose wrinkled face was like a railroad map of the United States, said, come closer, I’m not in any pain, I’d just like to ask you a question, come, and he said, who are your parents? to which Freddy replied, I don’t have any, sir, apart from the Eternal Father I don’t have anybody, I wasn’t fortunate enough to know them, and the old man asked, why don’t you know them? and Freddy said, because they must have abandoned me, sir, that’s the likeliest thing given the circumstances, and the old man continued, and do you have any brothers or sisters? to which Freddy replied, no, sir, no brothers or sisters or anybody, I’m alone, there’s only me.

The old man didn’t ask any more questions, but the next day the director of the hospital called the young man to his office and on going up there he discovered to his surprise that the old man, Ebenezer J. de la Salle, who was 87, wanted to adopt him as a son, and that he was being asked to sign a series of documents the old man’s lawyers had prepared. The one condition was that he had to change his surname immediately, and Freddy agreed without any hesitation. The lawyers and an attorney-at-law held a simple ceremony, with Freddy and the old man sitting side by side. Then old Ebenezer Jeremiah de la Salle asked, now that you’re going to change your surname, would you also like a new first name? and Freddy replied, you choose one, Father, I assume that if you wanted to have a son you must also have thought of a name, and the old man said, yes, you’re right, I want your name to be Walter, Walter de la Salle, which was my father’s name, and there and then they recorded that and so in that office the young man was baptized for the second time, with the name Walter de la Salle. As those among you more accustomed to stories may already have guessed, three weeks later they put a date on Ebenezer Jeremiah’s death certificate, the old man checked out in his sleep, gave up his ID and passport and handed over his soul to the Boss, the Big Enchilada, the Man Himself.

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.

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.

With the conviction that Miss Jessica gave him, Walter started holding services at the Ministry of Mercy, which in those early years created quite a stir, my dear brothers, because Walter dispensed with hosannas and had music videos in the background, playing rock and even rap, and invited dancers up on the stage behind the pulpit, because he said that in order to preach in today’s world you had to take your inspiration from today’s world, the world of the street, with its music and its harsh, sometimes violent but very real images, and he’d say that if his enemies were drugs and violence and promiscuity, which indeed they were, then he had to fight them with the same weapons, turn the lyrics around, you know, those modern urban songs don’t exactly inspire the noblest of feelings, they’re all about killing blacks and Jews and shooting up and sodomizing your sister and murdering your father, and those are just the gentler ones, but Walter was good at extracting other messages from them and using them to his advantage, because at the end of the day they were what he’d listened to since he was a boy on the streets and in children’s homes.

In addition, he’d appear at his services stripped to the waist, his upper body covered in tattoos that depicted Christ, not only in Nazareth but also in the back streets of an industrial slum, preaching to alcoholics and heroin addicts. His back was covered with an image of the crucifixion, but instead of Mount Golgotha, my brothers, the Redeemer was hanging in an old basketball court on Syracuse Drive, surrounded by potholed streets and smog-blackened buildings with God knows what dramas happening inside, young girls raped by their stepfathers, minors having sex for hard drugs, sweaty men in a drug-induced stupor on foul-smelling carpets, old men with prostate cancer groaning with pain, and women trading their anal virginity for doses for their husbands, anyway, my friends, all this could be sensed in those grim tenements surrounding the basketball court where the new Christ was crucified, the Jesus of the slums, the Redeemer of the people sent by the Man Himself to save us from our sins, and that was the central image that Walter had tattooed on his back: the mystery and paradox of evil.

From the pulpit, with rap music in the background, Walter would speak of God and the virtues of suffering and what a great thing it was to be one of Christ’s marines and that voice that says to us a second before we fall into the abyss, stop, dammit! what are you doing? be careful of that sharp edge, don’t jump into the void, boy, look, they took the net away yesterday, you’ll slam straight into a floor dirty with spit and condoms or the roof of some dusty old taxi, don’t let your children see that, make sure your blood stays inside your body, my friend, that’s the main thing, I know all about that, because if a hole opens everything comes out and doesn’t go back in, the body is like a blister and can burst, and the soul is the desire to look after that blister and its aspiration to the stars, so give your hand to the fallen, talk to the lonely, give up your food to the needy and weep for those who are about to sin because your word has not reached them, and for those who do not hear and close the door to your love and repent in sorrow for not having opened it, because that’s what handles are for, as was demonstrated by Syriacus the Abogalene in Nineveh, and weep for those who feel a humming in the brain inciting them to open fire in a classroom, and for those who are sweating with cocaine pellets in their stomachs, weep for all the people who long to die because they don’t know anything but the smell of poverty and fear, great is their number and great is their fear, all these things Walter said from his musical pulpit, with lighting effects and artificial smoke and shadow play and videos, while Miss Jessica sat like a queen by the side of the altar in religious contemplation, dressed very simply in T-shirt and jeans.

With these spectacles, the Chapel of Mercy and the Living God was soon filled every Saturday evening and Sunday noon, dozens and then hundreds of worshipers grew fond of his direct, plainspoken style, his exalted rhetoric, my friends, which was something to be reckoned with, especially when he attacked the devil, and that was when he really got into his stride, because Walter really hated him, and he would point to the LCD screen at the side that projected a silhouette with horns, and say, go from this place, Satan! do not dare to enter this sacred ground, because we hate you! we will beat you to death, Satan! Then the faithful would rise from their seats and cry out, in fearsome unison, we will beat you to death! we hate you! come no closer, Satan, you scum! and Walter would continue urging them to be ever crueler and more ruthless with Satan, in his own language, which was that of curses, Satan the Foul, the Obscene, the Repugnant! and the people would raise their hands to the clear sky and answer, Satan the Bastard, the Son of a Bitch, the Faggot, God will leave you on some radioactive island with sharks all around, unable to climb to the top because of the snakes, the most poisonous in the oceanic regions, oh Satan, you’re done for, your glory days are over, yes sir, now begins the reign of the good, because Walter de la Salle is in town! and someone even cried out, Satan to Guantanamo!

That was Walter’s style, my friends, he’d say that you could only be truly yourself, find your own identity, if you talked your own language, the words you lived with every day, the words you used to buy tobacco or quarrel with other people or make love, words of joy or despair, and these were the words he used, which is why the fevered crowd followed his message to the letter, shouting and jumping up and down in their seats, with the colored lights turning in the dimly-lit room, the rap in the background and the smoke and Walter in the middle with his microphone, swaying from side to side, sweat pouring out of him, the veins on his neck inflamed. The people would take up the rhythm in their clapping and echo him and then trip down the street to their houses, and later you would start to hear in the grocery stores some of the things he said like “Get thee behind me, Satan!”

3. THE JOURNEY

On the day I was due to travel, I searched on the internet for some last-minute information about the ICBM, but, strangely, could not find a thing. Not that I was looking for anything very important, I only wanted to know what kind of clothes I should take to the conference, casual? smart? a couple of designer suits? it was a minor detail but these things can get complicated. I have always felt envious of colleagues like Paco Ignacio Taibo II, the great Mexican writer, who goes to talk to the Pen Club in London in a T-shirt and shabby jeans, and even says he will not attend if they forbid him to smoke, but that is all a question of personality, or extreme shyness in my case, so I try to deal with it as best I can, I hate hearing people clearing their throat and muttering, I like to pass unnoticed, wearing the same clothes as everyone else. I ended up packing a couple of linen jackets, six shirts with their ties, and some casual wear. Most of my clothes were large on me, as I had lost quite a bit of weight during my illness.

The other nightmare is always: which books to take? The first question was if I should take some of mine — those I had written, I mean — and here various hypotheses occurred to me. It might be appropriate to take a few for my hosts and some for any friends I might make there, and as people would be coming from all over the world it would be the ideal opportunity to get rid of a few copies in other languages, which I keep in boxes anyway. But then I thought about how much they would weigh, and it struck me that the best thing to do would be not to take any at all, since arriving with books that nobody has asked for is, when you come down to it, an act of vanity, and a touch unseemly, so I put them back on the shelves.

As for reading matter, now that is another story. To tell the truth, that caused a lot of last-minute problems when I was already ready to go out, with the taxi at the front door and the elevator waiting at my floor. As if, instead of a conference, I was going to a desert island for the rest of my life. Novels by Wiener and Walser, to start with. Three masterpieces of the novella — Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Twenty-Four Hours in a Woman’s Life by Stefan Zweig, and Hotel Savoy by Joseph Roth — and a good book of short stories to read on the plane, The Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz, a book with Jewish themes, which I have been reading very slowly for years in a 1972 edition by Barral Editores, and the wonderful Closely Observed Trains by Hrabal, and something by Philip K. Dick, perhaps The Man in the High Castle, and another SF book, a rare pearl, We, by Yevgeny Zamiatin, and The Elephanta Suite, the latest by Paul Theroux, the best storyteller of his kind in the United States, and the latest by Thomas Pynchon, the best storyteller of his kind in the United States, there are many “best storytellers,” and of course, A Tale of Love and Darkness, the memoirs of Amos Oz, the best contemporary Israeli storyteller, and the work of St John of the Cross, the father of all poets, and Lost Illusions by Balzac, the father of all novelists, and something light, my God, a travel book, yes, that little book by Pierre Loti on the Middle East, where is it? and again the entry phone rang, and the Fascist caretaker cried, signore, if you don’t come down now the taxi will leave, hurry up, do you want me to come up for the bags? and I said, no! wait a minute, just a minute, I would never have agreed to that horrendous caretaker coming into my apartment, I know he would like nothing better than to spy on me, to sit down and ask me where I am going and for how long and then tell everybody, exercising his panoptic control over the lives of his tenants, so I took a last glance at my library and still found room in my baggage for a book of interviews with famous writers first published in The Paris Review, and at last I left, double-locking the door, and ran down to the street, regretting that I had not taken anything by Stifter, which would have been ideal for a journey, although I consoled myself with the thought that you never get time to read at conferences anyway. Apart from the heaps of novels you are given by colleagues, you never get to the hotel early enough or sober enough to read.

Fortunately, my flight left at midnight, which had given me the whole day to solve all these problems. I hate planes that leave at dawn, when you have to set the alarm for four in the morning and leave your bags packed the day before, next to the door, with all the dangers that lie in wait for the man who has slept badly and is not used to going to bed before midnight; in cases like that, it is better to cancel the whole thing, and remember the motto of that castle on the banks of the Danube that Magris talks about, “It is better for the happy to stay at home,” and even if you are not happy, or not completely happy, what does happiness matter anyway, it is always better to stay at home.

When I got to the airport, instead of checking in my case and going to the bar for a gin, I found myself trapped in an uncomfortably long line of travelers. The security checks were endless, there were dozens of questions to be answered and I had to subject my baggage to sophisticated detection with liquids and damp cotton. The atmosphere was distinctly hostile, and the nervous-looking soldiers with their submachine guns clearly took the whole thing very seriously.

What can I say about the flight?

Of course, the seat next to me was not filled by any of the pretty young girls of Slav origin or the Italian Jewish women I had seen in the waiting room, oh, no, they all walked past. The person who did sit down beside me was a fat rabbi who had been visiting his family in Italy, or so he said when he saw me looking at him with a certain interest, which I did, of course, not because I was anxious to talk but because I was startled by the foul smell given off by his coat.

Everything was fine until the meal arrived and the rabbi saw normal, that is, non-kosher, food on my plate. Excuse me, he said, aren’t you Jewish? I did not know if I had to answer that, but I did anyway, as there were still three hours of the flight left. No, I said. I’m not.

The rabbi insisted: are you Christian, Muslim, Methodist…? I’m an agnostic, I said, but the rabbi ignored my words. You shouldn’t eat that, he said, come, I’ll give you my tray, leave that garbage alone. He pushed his plate toward my fold-down table, but I stopped him. You’re very kind, but I can’t accept, I’m an agnostic, this food is fine for me. The man looked at me through his side locks and said, it’s been proved that food like that is garbage, take my word, you should think about it.

His attitude was starting to get on my nerves. I’ve been eating it since I was a child, I said, and here I am, alive and kicking, or don’t you think I’m alive? The rabbi turned and looked me in the eyes. Now that you mention it, you are a little pale, have you looked in a mirror lately? it’s obvious you’ve lost weight, you have bags under your eyes and chin, and your clothes are too big on you. It’s also obvious that you’ve been sleeping badly, and that’s definitely down to food, believe me, so please accept mine.

I refused again. The rabbi gave a groan and said: if you reject our customs, why are you coming to our country? I was about to ask you the same thing, I said, why do you travel to other countries if you don’t accept their customs? There are Jews all over the world, he said. Good for you, I said, and good for me too, there are non-Jewish people in Israel. Don’t remind me. . he said.

If I had had bubonic plague or Ebola, the rabbi would have felt more comfortable beside me. He expressed his displeasure by turning in his seat, which given his size was quite a feat, and every now and again casting withering glances at my plate, as if instead of meat and vegetables it contained the raw, bleeding organs of a pig. I was getting desperate. How much longer before we arrive? I asked a flight attendant who was passing along the aisle, but the answer was the same as always, two and a half hours, sir, we recommend you try and sleep, the DVD system in your seat is out of order but you have your headphones and there’s a varied program of great music to help you relax.

Just before we landed, the rabbi expressed his joy with a little dance that probably endangered the safety of the plane. Then the light of dawn appeared, and the sheen of Tel Aviv, the white Mediterranean city founded by immigrants at the beginning of the past century.

In immigration, I was subjected to more questions. They seemed to be applying, very strictly, an interrogatory method that may perhaps have occasionally given good results, designed as it seemed to be for tired, confused people who have been traveling all night.

Do you know any Arabs?

Do you speak Arabic?

Have you had sexual relations with Arab men or women in the past twelve months?

What kind of novels do you write?

What, in your opinion, is the greatest human tragedy of modern times?

Have you ever tried kibbeh, tabouleh, or hummus?

In what circumstances have you tried kibbeh, tabouleh, or hummus?

Have you had sexual relations with Arab men or women at any time in your life?

Have you ever tried to learn Arab cooking?

What is your opinion of the philosophy of Nietzsche?

How many Steven Spielberg films have you seen?

Do you like the music of Wagner?

If you were given the opportunity to have sexual relations with Arab men or women, would you take it?

Which Steven Spielberg films have you seen and why?

What do names like Adolf or Muhammad evoke for you?

Which countries, in your opinion, make up the Middle East?

What do you think of psychoanalysis?

What do words like “diaspora,” “ghetto” or “Shoah” evoke for you?

On reaching question number one hundred or perhaps one thousand, I heard the soldier say, why have you come to our country? to which I replied, I’ve been invited to a conference, and I handed him the letter from the ICBM.

Then something unexpected happened: the guard’s stony face underwent a transformation and he said, you should have told me that from the start, my friend, follow me. As we walked, he said, I’m sure you’ll understand that our situation forces us to be cautious, it must be the same in your country, I suppose? I know war is inconvenient, but you have to understand, there are idiots who think they’re arriving in Zurich or Monte Carlo and get upset by our methods, but you and I know that there are enemies lying in wait everywhere, there could be a terrorist hiding behind every friendly and apparently innocent face, don’t you agree? if you’d like to sit down for a moment while we find your case, would you like a drink?

An orderly approached with a tray. There was lemonade with ice and mint leaves, and there was also coffee. Then they brought my baggage and we went out through a side door and walked to a Mercedes Benz with air conditioning and a mini-bar, which within a few seconds was driving through a modern network of avenues and bridges, accelerating until it reached well over a hundred miles an hour. As we left Tel Aviv behind us, reality hit me. The dawn air was filled with ashes and the smell of fuel. A thick, low-lying fog restricted visibility.

On the road to Jerusalem, the limousine seemed completely out of place, because there was nothing else to be seen but military vehicles. Suddenly a loud noise made me jump. Four army jets had just broken the sound barrier above our heads.

Don’t worry, said the driver, they just reached Mach Two, they’re ours.

On a big sign pointing to Jerusalem, somebody had sprayed a strange word, Alqudsville, which others had tried desperately to erase. I copied the word into my notebook and sat looking at it for a while. It was a powerful, highly suggestive word. As we climbed, we passed military convoys, and I said to myself, this is much more serious than I thought. The years of illness had removed me from the world and its problems, that much was starting to be very clear.

We continued our ascent.

A sign indicated the famous Trappist monastery of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows at Latrun, but as I searched for it in the hills I saw another military convoy coming in the opposite direction. Dozens of young men with bandages and desperate expressions on their faces peered through the windows. Perhaps they had witnessed atrocities or perhaps they had committed atrocities themselves. I closed my eyes, dazzled by the bright light filtering through the mist and smoke, and fell asleep.

Soon afterwards, the limousine braked suddenly and woke me. I opened my eyes, and froze.

There in front of me was the city.

Dozens of columns of smoke, as black as funnels, rose toward the sky in the eastern area. They were fires. In the distance, sirens could be heard, and a great deal of activity was clearly going on in defense of the city. There were trenches and checkpoints on all sides, armed men, machine gun nests, barbed wire, sandbags on the balconies, walls with holes in them, structures of scorched steel, concrete blackened by the explosions.

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.

I remembered that prayer from the Psalms as I looked at the thin towers crowned with crescent moons, the gray buildings, the domes, the old walls. I saw the name of the street: Jaffa Road. The storekeepers had lowered their metal shutters and there was not a soul on the sidewalks. The fear was palpable, but that somehow made the sense of life seem even stronger.

At the checkpoint a soldier, clearly Slav in origin, checked my papers and gave the go-ahead with a whistle. A heavy metal bar, kept in balance by a concrete ball, was raised and we were able to enter. Facing us was a labyrinth of asymmetrical streets, pockmarked with holes and filled with steaming garbage. The houses, cubes of stone the color of sand, bore the marks of grenades and mortars on their walls.

A strange place for a conference, I thought, still taken aback by the magnitude of the war.

We now came to a wide avenue, lined with magnificent buildings of the same sandstone color. There were touches of vegetation here, pines and dusty old olive trees. Sycamores. In stark contrast with the general appearance of the city, there were boxes with flowers at the windows. The limousine drove along the avenue and turned in toward a building that in its glory days must have been quite majestic. Over the main entrance was a sign saying King David Hotel.

A jovial man who seemed in something of a hurry greeted me at reception, and when I showed him my papers he handed me a folder with information on the conference, a rosette with my name and the word Writer, a T-shirt with the letters ICBM, a CD of Israeli music, and a glazed ceramic key ring in the shape of a fish. At seven this evening there will be a cocktail party to welcome the delegates, he said. The bellhop pushed the cart with my baggage to the elevator and I went in after him, but a second before the door closed I read on one of the pillars the following notice:

The King David Hotel apologizes to its guests for any inconvenience caused by the state of war.

When I got to my room I collapsed onto the bed and closed my eyes, which were smarting with fatigue after the uncomfortable journey. I do not know how long I slept, but when I woke up it was already starting to get dark, so I went to the window. The sight startled me. In the late afternoon sun, the walls of the Old City were like a cliff. The towers and minarets glinted like spurs amid the gathering darkness. The whole of Jerusalem might succumb, but the Old City was a pearl surrounded by mud, a melodious voice amid a tumult of inhuman cries, and perhaps that was why everyone respected it. What time was it? Eight minutes after seven. I was going to arrive late at the opening cocktail party.

4. THE MINISTRY OF MERCY (II)

The Church went from strength to strength. Within a couple of years it had several thousand members. In other words, things were working out. Walter de la Salle, who was starting to think like a businessman, had the idea of going to Charleston and using the other house he’d inherited from old Ebenezer J., which was a spacious villa with extensive grounds. He started going there every week with Miss Jessica, to check out the lay of the land and see how they could extend the Ministry of Mercy to West Virginia. By doing this, my friends, Walter’s life and mine started moving closer together, like two planes on a collision course, and we did indeed collide in the end, ladies and gentlemen. That was in Moundsville Penitentiary, but let’s take things one at a time.

In Charleston, Walter and Jessica began with the same tactics as in Miami, visiting the wards for terminal patients at the Ancient Ghedare Hall and the Memorial; at the same time work started on a replica of the Chapel of Mercy and the Living God, to the same plan as the one in Miami but bigger, because by now Walter had great confidence in his word and the finances of the Ministry were growing, thanks to contributions from members, which in spite of being voluntary amounted to tons of greenbacks, and that’s putting it mildly, because the rich clean their consciences the way the rest of us clean our you-know-whats, if you get what I mean, my friends, especially if their dough is going toward comforting dangerous people and helps to calm social tensions, that electricity in the air of the streets that makes the lives of the rich so difficult and forces them to hire bodyguards so they can carry on being rich, rich in the middle of shit, which is the most ignoble way to be rich; rich amid the ulcers and pus of the saddest, most desperate cities.

Having started this work, he next began visiting the places favored by the local underclass, places awash with opiates, as you might imagine, until somebody told him about the prison in Moundsville, describing the horrors of the place and the kind of human flotsam it housed, and so he asked permission to pay a visit, which, it should be said in passing, cost him a fair amount, because the chaplain of that hellhole was very corrupt and, above all, fond of dark king-size bananas, applied rectally, in other words: he liked to be sodomized, and picked his boyfriends from among the prison population, because as I’m sure you know, prolonged confinement makes people become very versatile when they get the itch, and most aren’t too fussy about the kind of living creature they stick their dicks into; man, woman, or priest, it’s all the same, anyway, as I was saying, the chaplain was the master of that hell and of course he refused to allow anyone in who wasn’t from his Church, like Walter.

Anyway, a sizeable wad of dollars appeased the faggot, and Walter had access to the cellblocks, introduced and in some cases even assisted by the chaplain, because Walter, with his long hair and his tattoos and his muscles, which were already pretty impressive — he’d had a gym installed in the basement and worked out every day — became very popular among the inmates and there wasn’t enough of him to go around, even though most of the time they listened to him in silence and with very deep understanding, as if “downloading files” to use computer language, something the chaplain hadn’t managed in twenty years of preaching and holding services and being fucked in the ass. That’s how Walter managed after a while to get permission to see the inmates individually, listen to them, forgive them, pray with them, and get them to beg forgiveness of God, the Big Master, so that then they’d go off to reflect on what they’d done and on how life was a beautiful creation that shouldn’t be tainted by violence and other evil ways. And it worked, like everything he did, because starting with a dozen people he ended up seeing three hundred a week, that is, almost one whole cellblock.

I hadn’t been in Moundsville long when I first heard about him. I was there because of a badly planned drugstore holdup that had ended in lots of shooting and people lying flat on the asphalt. My partner in crime, Teddy, born in Oregon but into a family from Puerto Rico, caught a bullet through one of his nostrils, which were more accustomed to receiving coke or crack or smack. The bullet went through the nasal septum and lodged in his brain, causing what I’d have to call irreparable damage, not that there was anything very much in Teddy’s brain to start with, and what there was wasn’t worth much, it was more like a room without any furniture, but anyway, there he was, lying on the ground in a pretty unnatural position, with more than half the contents of his cranium spattered on the sidewalk, as if his head had turned into a ketchup dispenser, and I got away with a few bills, but that same night, when I went back to the flea-ridden motel on Cedar Creek where we had our headquarters — in other words, where we kept the drugs and the syringes — hoping I could just get in and out again scot-free, I ran unexpectedly into six police officers who, judging by the way they hit me in the ribs with their batons, had little or no talent for conversation, at least with me, and then they bundled me into a patrol car, saying, your partner had the key to your room with the address and the phone number in his pocket, oh brother, what a bunch of beginners, and that, my friends, is how I ended up in Moundsville.

Once inside, I focused on surviving, which, in that sinister sausage factory with no retail outlet, meant above all avoiding the punishment cells, the so-called Sugar Shack, the cellar of ghosts, which was so dark that if you closed your eyes you could see the insides of your skull, the kind of extreme experience nobody should have to remember, that’s how that place was, like being stuffed in the ass of a rhino, because it was hot and smelled like hell, thanks to the pipe that carried filthy water from the bathroom in the third cellblock to the septic tank, and I won’t go into details about the animals crawling around on the floor, but they didn’t all have four legs, some had a hundred, and feelers too; I was put in that cell twice, because if you’re moving about on the edge of the toilet all day you’re bound to fall in sometimes, right? but anyway, my friends, my dear listeners, all that suffering also makes a person strong and I survived, of course you turn into an animal, yes sir, but being an animal wasn’t the worst of it, and neither was the fear, because, with apologies to the more sensitive, you had to protect yourself from everything, keep a tight hold of your ass, because as I already said there were groups there who grabbed you in the toilets and used you like a woman or a whore, and if you didn’t open your mouth to suck their cocks they opened it with a screwdriver and pulled your teeth out; you had to be really good not to be endlessly cauterized with wax in the infirmary.

And so the days passed in Moundsville, getting by as best I could, putting smack in my veins and inventing tricks to stay in my corner, without doing anything, which is the best way to be in a place like that, blotting out everyone else, blotting out the prison, with its guards and its bosses, and there I was, off on one of these trips, when I ran into him; almost on top of me, I saw his athletic figure and those eyes of his, like a lost child’s, which was misleading, because they made you think he was just a kid, and I remember saying to myself, what heaven did this angel fall from? I must have said it out loud because he immediately replied, my name isn’t Angel, I’m Walter now and I’ve come to save you, and I replied, no kidding, pleased to hear it, it’s about time things started moving upstairs, I’ve been waiting for years, how long have you had my details, but then I guess the Eternal Commander, the Big Enchilada, sometimes takes his time, right? but well, better late than never, so let’s take it one step at a time, if you’ve really come to save me the first thing you have to do is transfer fifty dollars into my account, and my account is right here in my pocket, the number is zero one, you could make the transfer by telepathy but the machine’s out of order, so it’ll be better if you do it by hand, which is the most efficient method, and then, when the money’s gone in, we’ll be able to sit down like two civilized people and talk about God or Muhammad or Madonna’s lesbian cousin, whatever you like, and he said, no, my friend, that’s not the way it goes, that’s not the kind of salvation I came to bring you, we’re going to have to understand each other, but I interrupted him irritably and said, is there any other kind? don’t come here and get my hopes up, get out of here, you huckster, the Grim Reaper prowls these frozen cellblocks, get out now and don’t come back, but he insisted, you don’t understand, my friend, the Big Man won’t help you if you don’t beg forgiveness first, you need Him more than He needs you, remember that, it’s your life that’s in the mud, or rather, in the shit, but you possess something wonderful, and that’s free will, my friend, what did you do with that? and I said, get out of here with your spiel, and I’ll pass on this information, the cellblock you want is number nine, plenty of faggots there, all races, put some oil in your ass first, just in case, now leave me alone, goodbye, I don’t have time for faggots, and he said, of course you do, and he gave me a punch in the face that by some miracle didn’t knock my nose upside down, and I fell to the ground.

My first reaction was to take out my weapon, a fork that I’d sharpened on a stone, but before I could lift it even an inch he hit me three more times, making my head whirl, and smashing me against the wall so that I fell again, unconscious this time. A moment later I opened my eyes and saw his foot, with his huge body attached to it. From down there on the ground, he looked like a giant. I tried to get up but he put his boot on my neck and said, beg God for forgiveness or I’ll break your neck right now, you insulted Him, count to ten, and he began, one, two, three, and he pressed down on me with his foot. I felt a sour taste in my mouth, I could hardly breathe, and I fainted, gently drifted away God knows where, and I didn’t know anything more until I opened my eyes and found I was lying on a table.

A whole lot of inmates were near me, crying: Dead man walking! Dead man walking!

I sat up and saw him.

I saw the impressive image of Christ tattooed on his back, because as I was recovering consciousness he’d started doing a series of silent exercises, like an animal gearing up for a fight in which it may lose its life. I got down off the table and looked for my fork, thinking to attack quickly, stick it in under his ribs and kill him stone dead, but when I was halfway he turned his eyes on me, my friends, and what can I tell you, they were like two streams of fire, like the swords the Jedi use in Star Wars, something you really can’t define, and I mean that. I couldn’t retreat because the whole cellblock was following the fight and placing bets. If I’d chickened out I’d have lost respect and the consequence, as everyone knows, would have been to suck cocks for the rest of the year in the toilets or be everyone’s bitch in the cells, which I don’t like because I’m not of that persuasion, apologies if that makes me sound homophobic, so I carried on toward him, forced my way through the lines of fire coming from his eyes and at last drew level with him, but once again he seemed to have about thirty arms and I fell to the floor again, so hard this time I heard a crack, as if I’d broken several bones, which was in fact what had happened, or so the male nurse said later, and there I lay, with my eyes open, conscious but with my brain a thousand miles away, my friends, or as they used to say, in the arms of Morpheus; then he bent down and picked me up by the neck, almost affectionately, and said, beg God for forgiveness right now or you’re on a one-way trip to the Land of Oblivion, and, being an animal brought up in the mud, I was about to say to him, you’ll be the one going to the Land of the Shit Eaters, I was just about to say that to him when I saw a powerful ray of light behind him, a fiery sunset, and in that sunset a shining city, like the eye of somebody waiting anxiously for something to end, and was dazzled, and said, I beg forgiveness, almighty God, this slave is falling to his knees and begs forgiveness from the bottom of his soul, and I said it not talking to him, in reality, but to that eye shining in the glow of the sunset, and as I said this the man’s eyes stopped throwing out fire and started crying, he prostrated himself on the ground, buried his head in my chest and said, forgive me and may God forgive both of us for everything we had to do this afternoon for you to come to Him.

From there, he took me to the infirmary and didn’t leave my side for the next three weeks, which was how long I was there, I’d been beaten up so bad, how does that grab you, my friends? it’s a miracle I’m alive, but something even worse was to follow, which was that in those same weeks Walter helped me cleanse not only my soul but also my cells, which had been completely colonized by smack, my narcotic love, the serpent of ice that had grabbed me by the balls or, to be more precise, by the inner lining of my balls, apologies to the purists, and what can I tell you about that cleansing, my friends, it was as if I was dead, cut up into pieces, labeled and frozen in the refrigerator of a factory ship, as if I was in flames and tied to a turning post, as if I was falling into the void and drowning in the ocean, I felt cold and lost my teeth from chattering, I saw monsters with hooks ripping my flesh, I saw Satan himself tempting me, disguised as a Puerto Rican transvestite dancing tropipop, but at the end of it, my brothers, when my blood cooled and I got back down to earth I realized that I was full of peace inside, as if the particles of the air had stopped damaging me, and I started prostrating myself and praying, and Walter, who came every morning to read me the Gospels, talked to me about the life of Jesus and made me realize why all of us who live in this filthy highway parking lot called the Earth have to be grateful to Him, and taught me that I could be like him, save others, win over to Him those who didn’t have the strength to do it alone.

When I left the infirmary, I said to him, Father Walter, I want to be in your Church, to be one of your people, and he said, you already are, José, it was the eye of God that looked at us and showed you the way, let us give thanks that we met and are both already in His militia, and then he shook my hand and looked at me intensely and I felt life stream into me through all the cavities in my face, as if shot through a powerful hose, as if I had done ten lines of coke in one go, and I think my body started healing at that moment, because I felt this enormous desire to jump up and down and climb the walls and even the ceiling, it was the greatest high I’d ever had and the beginning of my new life, my friends, because with Walter’s power and influence and lawyers, after six months I was out again, free and back at work, first in the mansion in Charleston and then in the Ministry of Mercy’s house in South Beach, because he said I had to help him in the alma mater, Miami, where heaven and hell lay in wait on the same corner, where Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Big Master, could meet Satan the Traitor in any bar or any grocery store, that was how things were in this city at the end of days, and when I got there and felt the heat of the sun and saw the shiny asphalt and smelled gasoline and frying oil I started crying, my eyes filled with big tears, remembering hard times, the abandonment and the fear, the wish that something happy would happen just once, hazy memories of that life filled with knives and syringes, and I cried because for the first time I felt that I’d be more useful alive than dead, and because I’d found a path I was ready to follow, by the side of Walter and Miss Jessica, by the side of the Everlasting Father, the Big Enchilada, and his son, who were both tattooed on my heart.

At night I would cry again for all the years I had wasted that wonderful thing called life, take note, my friends, especially the younger ones, and sometimes my tears were tears of anger and I would scratch my arms until they bled and bang my head on the floor, because I thought, José Maturana, what a piece of shit you are and what undeserved luck has fallen from the sky, damn it, and I swear to you that in those days I was so angry with myself that I came close to slashing my wrists, which was what I deserved for being scum and an opportunist, but I didn’t do it, I took a deep breath and let time pass, and stayed in my corner, in silence, praying and devoted to God.

After a few weeks’ training, Walter and I started in earnest, preaching the word in prisons, which was my natural modus vivendi, and there I started to realize that the world and each one of us, in reality, were the great stage where a struggle with knives and bullets was taking place between good and evil, because in more than ten years of visiting prisons I saw a bit of everything, the hosts of the Big Enchilada triumphant, of course, but also those of Satan, who seemed to be advancing the fastest, and that’s why it was so necessary to go and fight him in the yards and cellblocks, it was there that evil found its raw material, that wickedness was made flesh, Latino flesh, Irish flesh, black and mixed race and oriental flesh, every kind of flesh imbued with wickedness, everywhere distorting faces, turning them into threatening masks, expressions so common they became almost invisible, because disguised as surprise or boredom, but carrying inside them dark, thick water, ladies and gentlemen, have you ever wondered what the souls of the wicked look like? I’ll tell you, the souls of the wicked are black, it’s a shadow on the faces of those who are afraid.

Apart from the prisons, we opened another front in our campaign to recycle human garbage: the nightclubs, especially those of Little Havana, where everyone was hooked on drugs, liquid or solid, fucking up their brains, and offending God, and there, too, we saw a bit of everything, well, let me tell you a few anecdotes.

One night I went out on one of these field trips with Miss Jessica, who was good to take with me, seeing as how this had been her world, and we went to a club that was very hot at the time, called the Flacuchenta Bar, with good music, the kind that heats the blood of us Latinos and gets us leaping onto the dance floor, do you copy me? rap, tropipop, champeta, and techno-salsa, anyway, we sat down at a table and she asked for a Tom Collins and I ordered a non-alcoholic beer, because after that heavy detox I’d been through I couldn’t even look at a drink, and around eleven in the evening, which is the hour when wickedness starts to get in the body and Satan wakes up, Miss Jessica said, José, go take a look in the men’s bathrooms, so there I went, fearlessly, dear brothers and sisters, because with my natural authority, a result of my time in prison and these muscles you can see, I started looking in the stalls, and what can I tell you, it was enough to make a man weep, in the first there were two young guys doing lines of coke on the toilet bowl; in the second there were two more young guys and some leftover coke, but one of the two was giving the other a blowjob that could have given Monica Lewinsky a run for her money! it looked like mouth to mouth resuscitation, only through the cock; in the third a black man the size of a refrigerator was vigorously screwing one of the waitresses from the bar, who was kneeling over the toilet, with her back to the action; in the fourth a young guy was smoking freebase with his pants down, and as he inhaled the smoke he was jerking off and his cock was so huge it looked like an escalator, and in the fifth and last, ladies and gentlemen, you’ll never guess what I found, the rarest thing of all in a Miami disco, can you guess, my friends? I found a man taking a shit! just that, and as he was taking his shit he was reading an old edition of the Miami Herald, the political page, to be more precise. Of course he was the only one who protested, saying, hold on a second, you fucking junkie, I’m already leaving the place warm for you. The last words I didn’t hear because the people in the other stalls were already coming out, looking very upset, of course, so I cried, this is your lucky night, this is a police raid, but we’re looking for someone in particular, consider yourselves lucky and leave quietly, I said, but the man from the fifth stall said, oh yes? and since when is taking a crap a crime? and he added, don’t fuck us around, go back to your town and sell secondhand condoms, if you’re a cop then I’m Butch Cassidy’s gay grandfather! The guys in the third stall said, listen, you fucking Castro Nazi, what the fuck you got against homosexuality? eh? come out of the closet, homophobe, a good fricassee of cock is what you need, you fucking psycho! The only one who was really scared was the waitress, who came out and said, I’m sorry, officer, he’s my boyfriend and we almost never see each other, we’re going to get married, I swear we’re going to get married; right then and there I left the bathrooms before the black man, who was shaking his dick and wiping it with a Kleenex, could come out and add his opinion to the others.

When I got back to the table I said to Jessica, my friend, we’re going to have to do a lot more work in these places, there’s a bit of everything here, and she said, I know, José, I went to the women’s john and saw what you always see, cocaine, syringes, pills, vibrators with dinosaur tails, and then she said, I’ve never told you anything about my life, but I used to be on the edge myself and I know what happens in these toilets and what you find in these girls’ G-strings, and it isn’t only bodily fluids, no sir, but anyway, that’s woman’s talk, and she raised her glass and said, José, I’m going to tell you my story, so listen, this is how it was.

This will be brief, because she was young when we met and she told me all this. This was what she said: she was born in Los Angeles of a single mother, a Guatemalan with Indian features, so God knows why she turned out blonde, although it’s easy to imagine; she had a brother who’d died of typhoid when he was thirteen and her mother, because of that, started hitting the bourbon and vodka, hard, and neglecting her, so she practically grew up alone and of course started hanging out with the neighborhood gang, which was her real school. She started going to discos when she was thirteen and that was when she got laid and did her first line of coke, both at the same time, and so she went from party to party every day of the week, hitting the pills and coke and acid and washing it all down with Four Roses bourbon, which was what the gang members stole, until after a while she became the girlfriend of a Colombian dealer who took her to Miami and kept her like a queen from the age of fifteen until they killed him, which was a really nasty business, apparently they nailed his tongue to a wooden table and left him there for a while, then they released him by slicing through his tongue with a scalpel, took out one eye with a salad spoon, cut off his balls and penis and threw them to his dog, right there in front of him, and when he was almost dead doused him in gasoline, set fire to him, and shot him seven times in the head, and Jessica actually saw the whole gruesome scene, hiding in a closet, and one of the things that most upset her was that the killer was her boyfriend’s cousin, the same one who had sprung him from prison in Colombia and brought him to Miami and made him his partner, paying his expenses, anyway, it was obviously Satan pulling the strings. She was alone again, but through her disco contacts she met another Mafioso, Brazilian this time, who took her to his mansion in Coral Gables, complete with a jetty, a yacht, six maids, three cooks (one of them specializing in Thai food, her favorite), and two bodyguards, and she lived there with him for more than a year, although she remembers almost nothing about it because she spent all day by the pool, high on pills and booze, drinking bourbon, gambling in the casinos until the morning, doing coke, and fucking her Brazilian, who was very affectionate. After a while, her boyfriend’s brother arrived, who was better looking and who she liked more because he wasn’t a drug dealer but an art student, my friends, in other words, he wasn’t dealing blow, and so Miss Jessica started seeing him, a fuck here and another there, in secret, but as she was always drugged, she forgot to cover her tracks and the Brazilian ended up catching them in flagrante, dancing the dance of Sensemayá the serpent, and then it was all slamming doors and slaps and out on the fucking street, although luckily the Mafioso didn’t shoot them or throw them in the sea with concrete balls on their feet, and he didn’t do it because it was his brother and he really loved Jessica, so she went off with the artist, who if I remember correctly was some kind of graffiti artist, a mixture of Keith Jarrett and Basquiat, for those who know about these things and apologies to everyone else, who thought he was a genius destined to change the perception of art forever and, of course, my friends, like all those who aspire to genius he was really smug and self-centered, convinced he had a key role to play in the contemporary world and crap like that, and spoiled by two rich, alcoholic old women, his patrons, who organized parties for him that inflated his ego, though what he gave them in return nobody was quite sure, because the old ladies already had everything, and so time passed and Jessica started to notice that her artist wasn’t the same anymore, the young man with a brain boiling over with dreams had turned into a pretentious drunk who wore eccentric clothes and ridiculous silk handkerchiefs and told anyone who would listen, with a glass of whiskey or a joint in his hand, how far he was destined to go in the history of art, even though he’d pretty much stopped painting by now, because he’d get up past noon, always with a hangover, and in the evening would go to parties and society dinners. One night, after they had a fight and Jessica told him he was a loser, he hit her and she ran away without taking anything with her, not even her jewelry, or her clothes, and that was when Walter found her, a raw soul exposed to wickedness but ready to be redeemed.

For Jessica, the hardest part of her new life had been to give some kind of structure to her days, knowing that expanse of time wasn’t just a dead space but could be used doing useful, instructive, and even beautiful things, and where many people, for example, went out to work, something that hadn’t been part of her world, because her days, as I’ve already said, were all the same, waking up at two or three in the afternoon, doing the first line of coke and going down to the pool, ordering a burger or a Hawaiian pizza from Harvey’s, with a beer to lessen the hangover and a siesta on a floating mat while she called her lover to find out where they were going that night, and then, it being quite late by now, putting on perfume and nail polish and lipstick, doing a few lines of coke while she chose from the closet what she was going to wear that night, and, finally, waiting with a vodka and tonic in her hand for her lover’s Hummer, ready to go out and tame that wild tiger called night, and so it went on day after day.

It was hard to get used to a structured life. One night, after she’d been in the house six weeks, she ran away and got drunk in some club somewhere, but that longing gradually disappeared and after a while the prayers and the devotion and being so close to Walter made her strong, they were the armor that protected her from the other Jessica, the handmaiden of Satan. Being with Walter made her believe that life had a meaning, that after the night the sun would come up again and everything would continue in spite of the questions and that strange unreal feeling that things have when you see them in natural light, without alcohol or drugs; every now and again terrifying voices came from the bottom of the mine, the howls of the wolf, my friends, but she was able to contain them, and even ended up the strictest person in the house. It was she who made the Ministry rule that anyone caught high on drink or drugs had to leave, arguing that whoever was in the Ministry should be so close to God that such a thing would be intolerable, and even though Walter, who was very realistic, thought the rule a tad harsh, it was enforced to the letter.

And so, my dear friends and listeners, time passed, just like in a daytime soap, and over the next couple of years the Ministry of Mercy continued its unstoppable rise, becoming a really flourishing institution; the first chapel had become a model and now there were six more in Florida, where we went regularly, always the three of us, by the way, Walter, Jessica, and I. And we were still recruiting friends and followers of Christ in the prisons, which was my area of expertise, and in some counties in Florida we managed to open evangelical prayer rooms financed by us, or rather, by the neighbors in each county through us, which we called workshops, and in many of them I was the one who led prayers.

During a visit to the prison in Sarasota, Walter met a black man from Ohio named Jefferson who struck him as a serious, devout man; after putting him in charge of the workshop there, which he ran for seven months, dealing with the inmates himself, he decided to bring him to the house. The crimes he’d been imprisoned for were minor ones, he wasn’t a murderer or a pedophile or anything like that, so it was relatively easy to pay a bond and get him out, and I have to be honest, my friends, when I saw him I almost fell down: he was the ugliest man I’d ever seen in my life, uglier than a farting she-donkey with colitis, I swear, but then the house wasn’t a catwalk for male models, so he was accepted, with a rank similar to mine, insofar as our situation vis-à-vis Walter could be compared, or measured in ranks.

I was suspicious of him from the start, and I say that in all honesty, because it was obvious that with the success and growth of the Ministry we were all starting to be possessive of Walter, fearing that his unpredictable passions might remove us from the limelight of his love, and that was why we kept watch on each other, and especially newcomers, seeing as how Miss Jessica and I were, in a way, complementary; we weren’t in competition with each other, but Jefferson worried her, too, and I noticed this because from one day to the next she decided to say her afternoon prayers in her room and not in the communal prayer room on the second mezzanine of the house.

Things got more serious when Walter decided that Jefferson was also going to be his physical trainer, and they started to do exercises. They went out jogging in the mornings, lifted weights, did Pilates, and worked out according to the instructions in a book on bodybuilding that Jefferson had bought the first time he got out. To Walter, the obsession with physical strength was the necessary balance between intellect, faith, and reality, the three anchors of life, but for Jefferson it was pure animal vanity, that prison image of the man with thick arms and a chest of steel, anyway, they started talking about exercise all the time, at breakfast, lunch and dinner, and it started to disgust me; it didn’t seem to me much of a philosophical topic, but Walter would say that Jesus Christ must have been physically strong, how else could he have held out for forty days and forty nights in the Judean desert, which is close to here, and he’d also say that the struggle between good and evil could start any day and that was why we had to be prepared, not only with a clean, agile soul, but also with the body, because it would be a human confrontation, a human battle, like any of those that man has been waging since his beginnings, and that’s why it was necessary to be very well prepared, and in saying this, Walter would take off his T-shirt and show us his splendid muscles, his perfectly toned body, it was incredible, he wasn’t a boy anymore but a man, there were those tattooed worlds that narrated his story and his devotion and that light that emanated from him and filled all our hearts with joy and pride, my brothers, and so the disgust and even the suspicion passed and I gave even more thanks to Our Lord, the Big Enchilada, the Master, for having led me by the hand to that house, for taking me out of those foul waters and putting me in the middle of that group of saints, and my eyes would fill with tears, my friends, believe it or not, you have to have lived through something like that to understand it. At such moments, Miss Jessica would always stand up and say, Father, you are the principal proof of the existence of God, you are His son, and she would touch him with devotion, slide to the floor, get on her knees, and say, Father, show us the way to life and salvation, I’ll follow it with my eyes closed and I’ll tell others, and then Walter would look at her with affection and say, Jessica, rise, finish your food, I need you to be strong and robust at morning prayers. Having said that, he’d stand and say to his new apostle, Jefferson, let’s go train for a while in the gym, and I’d go out and walk along those dark streets winding between the mansions and think that Walter must indeed be the son of a God, because until now I hadn’t seen anything human in him, no human reactions or passions, let alone vices.

But this was not to last, my friends and listeners, and it’s here that the story begins to reach its climax, because a few months later, on one of those nights when I took an after-dinner stroll to walk off the meal and think over the events of the day, I came across a dog that must have been a stray and seemed to be dying of starvation, because it was lying under a bush, howling as if it was injured. Of course I went to it and picked it up, because I don’t think there’s anything more moving in the world than the look in the eyes of a sick dog, so I lifted it in my arms and walked home, but as I reached the garden I remembered a conversation with Walter in which he’d said how immoral he thought it was that people were always in such a hurry to help animals when the world was filled with desperate human beings, and remembering that, I hesitated, and didn’t know what to do, so I took the dog to the kitchen and asked Felicity, our Haitian cook, to give it a plate with some leftover meat and rice, and then went to tell Walter, because I didn’t want him bothered the next day, after all he was the owner of the house and the founder of the Ministry.

I went up to his private area and Jessica told me he was in the gym, so I headed there, but when I opened the door I saw a scene that left me horrified, though those of you more accustomed to the plots of novels may already have seen it coming. Walter was lying on one of the weight machines, moving as if he was dancing reggeaton, which was the music they’d put on, as it happens, while Jefferson, his fitness trainer, was supporting his legs or something, but on looking closer I realized that what they were doing was fucking, I didn’t look too closely because I didn’t want to see it properly, but it seemed obvious to me that they were on the verge of an orgasm, and just at that moment the song finished, imagine the shock, my friends, so I held my breath, closed my eyes and kept quiet until another song started and I was able to get out without them hearing me, as silent as a ninja, calm in the midst of danger and dangerous in the midst of calm, because something deep down, that instinct for self-preservation that doctors say is located in the cerebellum, but for me is somewhere between the prostate and the balls, told me, if they see you, you’re in danger.

By the time I got out of there, my heart was pounding irregularly, like an out of order washing machine, and I thought, that’s it, it’s all up for me, my heart’s going to stop, time to check out, goodbye to all this, and I don’t know how I managed to get to my bedroom, but I lay down on the bed and cried for a long time, in that harsh, bitter way that grown men cry, and you may wonder if deep down there wasn’t a little bit of jealousy involved, but I hasten to say, no, what there was fear, was a fear that chilled me to the bone and made my hair stand on end, that made me think I was at the bottom of a dark abyss, at the bottom of a well, covered with ice-cold water, in other words, I was already dead, because, to me, seeing Walter with Jefferson was irrefutable proof that he wasn’t the son of God at all, just a piece of shit like me and everyone else, a man with his human passions and mistakes, and that made me scared, I felt defenseless, I didn’t have the voice of something great by my side anymore, just a traveling companion, and so life started going downhill again.

And what if it was a hallucination? could it be that Satan had played a dirty trick on me to confuse me? it was possible, that damn struggle between good and evil was always unpredictable, except that you knew good would win out in the end, but, yes, it must have been that, I said to myself, Jefferson was helping him to train and Satan made me see it as sex in order to create a rift between us, the best thing to do was go to sleep and forget about it.

I pressed my eyelids shut, hoping that by the next day everything would have been blotted out, but it was no use, because when it was time for prayers I saw them arrive at the chapel together, and at breakfast, from the things they were saying, I realized they had been jogging together, early in the morning, so I didn’t open my mouth, I just ate my food, my friends, and when I left it was as if I’d been expelled, or maybe I should say, repelled, and I went for a walk by the sea, because there’s a kind of conversation with yourself that you can only have in spaces like that, facing the sea or in demolished aircraft hangars, anyway, I tried to calm down, saying, well, you have to understand, José, the man is flesh and blood and he likes to dip his wick like anyone else, surely the Big Enchilada also stops to think from time to time, if He made us in His own image and likeness then it must happen to Him too, because it’s one of the things that most troubles the human race down here, and well, my friends, like with the ancient Greeks, there are men who are that way inclined and prefer cock, as you know, we have to accept it because we can’t all be the same, just think, the Big Enchilada created things that nobody understands, like mosquitoes or cholesterol, I mean, can you tell me what they’re good for, eh? and yet the Man Upstairs invented them so they must be there for some reason, we just have to be patient, and so I said to myself, let’s see, when was the last time you fucked a woman? I couldn’t even remember, I must have been out of my head on smack at the time, locked inside myself with the key on the outside, but what I did remember was some old affairs, like Susy, for example, a black girl with hair so hard it was like a copper brush, and banging her was like dancing with a porcupine, oh man, I mean it’s something you can do but you have to be very careful, and there was another, Serena, who before she gave the green light would put in spermicide capsules so strong she started producing foam that smelled of DDT, anyway, my friends, forgive this very personal digression but it’s just that that morning, facing the swelling sea, I had to use everything I could to try to understand what was going on, until I said to myself, that’s it, brother, end of story, go on to something else because you’re already losing it, and that was what I did, although with tremendous difficulty, because since my arrival at the Ministry I’d gotten used to a collective life, do you get me? we were like a family, like the Waltons, does anyone remember them? we did everything as a community, we commented on each other’s work, and everybody was interested in what everybody else did and said and even thought or dreamed, we didn’t have secrets and everything was fine, because we were all in it together and we supported each other in doing good in the middle of all that shit, but that image, the way Walter had been moving, Jefferson’s proximity to him, broke something, one of the longest and strongest branches, so I started to isolate myself, stopped making comments when we were together, even though I didn’t neglect my work, of course not, I threw myself headfirst into what I myself called “pastoral resistance” in prisons and bars, still confronting Satan and fighting vice in his alma mater, the city’s nightclubs, the discos where they played tropipop, techno-cumbia and salsa, because there’s nothing more beautiful for those hooked on smack to shoot up and then go to hear Caribbean music, “our Latin thing,” as sung by Héctor or Ramón or Willie, any of those mega guys, the masters of the dance hall and the stadium, and I’d go there quite early, my dear friends and listeners, and work away at it all day, with enthusiasm, but at night, when I got off the 137 bus on the corner of Sausalito Road and Richmond Street, it was as if a buzzard had come to rest in my heart and was pecking at it, and I was bleeding and bleeding, in the most terrifying solitude, as if the rest of the world was a wasteland laid bare by some catastrophe, a nuclear warhead or something like that, and I was the only son of a bitch still alive on the face of the Earth, the only person in the middle of the ashes and the rubble and the skeletons of smoldering cities in which there was nothing left, not a soul, not even a human sound, nothing to recall this fragile, capricious, crazy species, only the crackling of the hot coals and the twisted girders, wet from a recent shower, and in that fantasy, I suddenly saw a group of hooded men climbing a staircase of rubble and ash to a kind of temple that had survived the conflagration. The group was led by a hooded man who supported himself on a staff, but when they were almost at the top there was a sound of explosions and out of the blackest part of the night came projectiles and warheads that killed all the hooded men, and again I was alone, because the fantasy was over, and I saw the beach again.

It’s a well known fact, my friends, that God may grab us by the throat but doesn’t choke us, so as a result of that solitude I decided to do something with my life. When you come off hard drugs the first thing you notice is that the days are very long, they’re full of unbearably slow hours and minutes and you think the Earth has stopped turning and you’re already dead because a nervous calm has invaded your brain, but I’d said to myself, no, go back, and I’d found the Big Enchilada and His son Walter, and devoted myself to filling those capsules of time with evangelical resistance, but now it was different: I had to use my head, but not only the outer part, the one you use for wearing a hat or for head butting someone in a fight, but the other part, and I said to myself, the time has come to explore what’s inside that sphere you have on your shoulders, and that, my dear friends, is how I started reading, beginning with books about Jesus Christ, my boss, my immediate superior, picture books for children first, because my mind was still undeveloped, but then I moved on to a study of the Gospels and another of Mary and the apostles, and I realized I was becoming engrossed, and when night came it was great to know that I could immerse myself in those reams of paper, and greater still to confirm that the next day I remembered everything, or almost everything, and so time passed and I continued working hard and reading everything I could, while Walter continued with his bodybuilding and his muscles grew ever more perfect, a sculpture in marble, my friends, and as I was becoming less of an idiot than I’d been before I said to Walter one day that we ought to make a library, which he immediately approved, so I brought up from the cellar the boxes of books that had belonged to old Ebenezer, who being a faggot had been sensitive to literature, and let me tell you this, my brothers and sisters, I didn’t have to go back to the library at Kennington school anymore, which was where I used to borrow books from, because now I had all these books to start on, and it was all top quality material, pure dynamite, as the drug dealers say.

In all that ocean of words, I discovered poetry, and set out with enthusiasm to learn its meaning and enjoy the rhymed phrases, something that before then, to tell the truth, had always seemed to me a bit faggoty, and note this, my friends, it was through poetry that I started seriously giving a meaning to my life, in spite of the fact that, obviously, the question of the hairy orifice through which I had come into the world was still a mystery, let me make that clear, but at least I already felt a brotherhood of meaning and solitude through those rhymed words, and that was something I saw in William Carlos Williams or Whitman or Milton, the last of these on a religious theme, which was especially beautiful.

In those words I saw the same stream of light that had blinded me that first day. The same voice coming from on high, but in another format, and sometimes, I confess, a rhyme made me cry because of its perfection, the cleanness and purity it concealed; ever since then, beautiful things have moved me and made me want to cry, beauty touches me deeply, takes my breath away, as if I hadn’t expected anything of the world but trash and gruesomeness; the beautiful turns mystical and allows us to regain our belief in appearances, in the possibility of goodness and tranquility, in other words, peace. Beauty, in those days, was synonymous with peace, that space where the spirit, or at least mine, grows wings, launches itself into the air, and sees everything from a long way up. And so I felt grateful to those blocks of printed paper, that black ink, those numbered pages. It was the great revelation of my life after the Eye of the Big Enchilada, and I really mean that, my friends.

A year passed and on my side things improved a lot, because the library in the house had more and more books, so I was able to shut myself in with them and read until late at night in my room. By the way, we called our rooms “cells,” just like in a seminary, even though ours had television and Wi-Fi and radio and a thousand things more, including shelves and en-suite bathrooms. For her part, Miss Jessica worshiped Walter more and more every day, and of course he himself was increasingly handsome and conceited, his body so perfect now it was like a sculpture by Bernini, so perfect it seemed untouchable; he still had Jefferson at his side, although with one novelty, which was that at least once a month he brought Walter groups of young men for “evangelical gatherings”; it sounded strange to me, because these young guys weren’t thieves or dealers, but did look like faggots.

I could imagine what those gatherings must be like, and from the start I told Walter that I preferred not to take part, no, thanks, I’m teaching myself with Ebenezer’s books, ever since I discovered reading I’ve realized I can become a better person and I think it’ll benefit my pastoral work, so please excuse me, I’ll join you later, for now I prefer to be alone, and, very theatrically, because he was already wearing made to measure red and yellow tunics, he gave me a kiss on the forehead, closed his eyes and said, José, José de Arimatea, you were my first disciple, you must grow spiritually so that you can bring even greater honor to our Church, follow the path you’ve found, but don’t become a stranger.

So he excused me and, in a way, blessed our separation, with him on one side and me on the other, close but taking different paths, and it’s something I really have to thank him for today, yes really, because I studied and read and thought and became, mutatis mutandi, an enlightened animal, I joined the world of civilized people, my friends, I’m sure you understand, and I read the poetry of Góngora and Quevedo and Juan Ramón Jiménez and Pedro Salinas and especially León Felipe, and I read studies on the moral evolution of Jesus by Harold Iridier, S. J. and the three volumes of his monumental work, Distant Christ, and I studied the works of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas and also Tertullian, father of the Church, who talks about the truth of the impossible, which I think is really beautiful, and in this way my brain started to put forth shoots and show me that the world was something greater than that city of vacant lots and highways and grocery stores with fronts eroded by the wind from the sea; I also discovered history and learned that what we are today is connected with what we were, that we’re in a tunnel and can see the end of it but not the beginning, and there in that dark corridor is the philosophy of Hegel and the Punic Wars and that fat man Balzac writing Old Goriot and drinking coffee through the night, anyone would think he was Colombian, and you also see the martyrdom of St Lawrence on the grill and old Michelangelo painting his fresco, and even Muhammad’s ascent to heaven, which happened quite close to here, and the birth of Jesus and his crucifixion, which is the most painful event of all, and Abraham raising his knife to kill Isaac before the Big Boss stayed his hand, and who knows how many things more that we don’t know, my brothers, like the story of the birth of yours truly, your servant and God’s, or the birth of Walter de la Salle, which was also a mystery, and remains one, and that’s why it seemed that his destiny had to be so elevated, but anyway, let’s take our time, let’s fly slowly down to the property in South Beach, but take a little pause first, my friends, just two or three minutes before we return for the final part of the story, which is the best part from the spiritual point of view.

5. THE DELEGATES

When I entered the reception room, which was lit by seven-branched candlesticks, a man in a dark suit was talking from a pulpit. I tried to make sure that nobody saw me, but no sooner had I taken a few steps than the speaker looked up, uttered my name, and bade me welcome. A few of the guests turned, so I said, good evening, I’m sorry I’m late, I’m a bit tired and I lost all sense of time, but nobody said a word or smiled or even nodded, so I added, I’ve been sick…

From a corner, a waiter emerged with a tray full of glasses of champagne and offered me one, but I did not take it, not because I did not need an aperitif, but because I had been hoping for something stronger. The waiter took no notice and handed me a glass, so I took it and raised it, looking at the speaker, and said, it’s a pleasure to be here, cheers to everyone. There was a tumultuous toast and the room cheered up again, as if coming back to life after an anxious moment. The speaker continued with his speech, talking about the tradition of the hotel in difficult times, these walls that had seen fighters firing rifles and patriots falling, sacrificing their lives for a cause, he said, and yet, just as it was now, it had also been a symbol of excellence and refinement, however difficult the times, at other times it had been a barracks and had even been partly destroyed, adding, after a theatrical silence, of course I refer to “that bomb,” and when I heard that I was intrigued; only later did I find out that he was referring to the bomb the radical group Irgún had planted in the hotel when it was the headquarters of the British Administration at the time of their mandate in Palestine, an event linked to the name of Menachem Begin, originally considered a terrorist and later prime minister of Israel, that was how it was, it is well known that in the fertile field of History people make astonishing comebacks, as the speaker put it, and he continued talking about these wars of the past, as well as the war outside, which you could breathe in the air and see in the stony, terrified faces of the passers-by, and because of all this, he said, raising his voice, because of what is happening and must be remembered, because of all these select or even simply human things that we must preserve and protect, we have decided to call this conference, whose ultimate aim is to honor memory through memorable lives, those which you, dear delegates, bring us in your notes or in your memories, with no obligation that they should be great lives in the traditional sense, of course not, in no part of the Old Testament are we told that it is obligatory to live great lives or perform heroic deeds, no, gentlemen, man is small and that condition may make him fragile, but it also ennobles him, that is something that all of us here know very well, as we have decided to meet while the world is falling apart, in a chaos of rubble and smoke and ashes, and we are meeting because we believe in the word and in the testimony of life, our most precious gift, and that is why I want to thank you, truly thank you, shalom, welcome, the man concluded, raising his arm and making another toast, and the audience rewarded him with applause.

A moment later, a fat man with a nose like a potato approached me and said, you don’t know me, my friend, allow me to introduce myself, my name’s Leonidas Kosztolányi and I’m a delegate at this conference. He gave a bow, which seemed very appropriate amid all these tapestries and big velvet drapes, and on hearing my name added, yes, yes, I read your résumé, you’re the writer, a pleasure to meet you. Then he approached my ear and said, I suspect this champagne is too mild for the complexity of our minds, come, let’s go over there, I think they have something more substantial.

At the drinks table, I asked for a double whiskey with two cubes of ice, and when I had it in my hand — I had decided to forget my doctor’s warnings for a while — I was ready to listen to Kosztolányi, who asked me if I knew his city, Budapest, to which I replied, yes, I do, and what’s more, I said, I consider it one of the most beautiful in the world. In an antique shop in the Jewish ghetto, near the synagogue, I bought a small model plane made of metal, which I still have on my desk, next to my books of poetry. The man responded by striking himself on his stomach, that’s good, poets and aviators, of course, Saint-Exupéry and all that, very good, and then he said, you just mentioned an antique shop, which struck a chord with me, my passion is for things of the past, objects created by hands that are no longer with us but are now just ash or earth, anyway, I’m sorry if I’m waxing lyrical, you’re a writer and that’s why I allow myself such license, my interest is in those things that have a patina on their surface that could be the patina of memory, the air of times gone by, and you must be wondering, listening to me, do objects have a memory? I hasten to say, yes they do, of course they do, you just have to know how to approach them, how to put your hands around a statuette or a piece of porcelain and listen; that is when, suddenly, there appear images, things that were lived, words that echo, souls that are no longer with us, people who once populated this old world and surrounded themselves with beautiful things in order, no doubt, the better to bear the essential tragedy of life, which is its brevity, don’t you think so? As I was about to answer he continued speaking — I realized that his questions were rhetorical — and said, you are one of the most interesting people at this conference and I’m going to tell you why, it’s because you’re new, I mean, new to these biographical debates, many of us have met before on other stages, doubtless less dramatic ones, I’ll give you an example, do you see that man over there? he said, pointing to a bald man, that’s Edgar Miret Supervielle, the famous bibliophile, you probably saw him on the list, and well, he and I usually meet at antique book fairs, philatelic or antiques trade events; I can tell you he’s a thoughtful and highly cultured man, with a keen nose for business and an uncommon ability to spot a lie, but he’s a genius, believe me, a real genius. On hearing this I felt a certain unease, realizing the extent to which I was an impostor in this group, so I said, thank you for considering me interesting, I’m here to learn about all of you. Suddenly Kosztolányi, who was clearly not listening, said, come, my friend, I see Supervielle has been left on his own, it’ll be a pleasure to introduce you. The man arrived and held out his hand, which I shook firmly; then he repeated my name and said, ah, I know you, you’re the writer, the only one among us who writes fiction, isn’t that so? a true artist, and I said, well, if we abide by the traditional definition perhaps yes, although I believe that any act of writing has. . a connection with the shadowy areas where esthetics lie. Kosztolányi got excited and said, very good, shadowy areas! that’s what I call speaking, this is the beginning of a true friendship and that deserves another drink, don’t you think? of course it does.

With our glasses full, I asked Supervielle if he lived in Israel, and he replied, yes and no, I have a house in the Negev Desert, to the south of Jerusalem, and an apartment in Paris, which is my base for some of my European business, but my family is spread around the world, one son in New York, another in Costa Rica and a daughter in Buenos Aires, can you imagine, you’re Colombian, aren’t you? Yes, I said, and what does your daughter do in Buenos Aires? and he replied, well, you know, a question of love, she married a colleague of mine, a bibliophile and a treasure hunter, like me, only Argentinean, I should tell you that of course I was opposed to the marriage and the truth is that even today, seven years later, it makes my blood boil, a young woman of twenty-eight with a man of fifty-six, is that normal? I was not sure what to reply, because age is no impediment to anything, so I shrugged, but he said, any age may have its mitigating points but in this case there’s an aggravating circumstance, which is that he was my partner in two bookstores, one in Madrid and the other in Buenos Aires, and to tell the truth, I must say it was and still is strange to know that I am working to build a legacy that, on my death, through my daughter, will pass to my partner, do you see? I try not to think about it when I add to the family capital, because I could very easily argue that he ought to contribute more, but in the end, this is all nonsense, the ramblings of a grumpy old man, what matters is my daughter, not that I’m saying she’s exactly happy, because marriage, as I’m sure you know, has the same decaying effect on love that heat and the passing of the days has on meat, turning it into a shapeless and foul-smelling mass, that’s why I know that she isn’t happy, but never mind, that’s life and what’s done is done, I’ve been to visit them a couple of times and I was dazzled by Buenos Aires, its bookstores are like the wreck of a sunken liner, I’ve found some amazing titles, it’s a highly cultured country, a country of immigrants, and there are books in every language, it’s magnificent, and I said, I agree with you there, Monsieur Supervielle, I also like books, first editions of authors I admire, and I have one or two important ones myself, like A Poet in New York, by Federico García Lorca, Editorial Séneca, Mexico City, 1940, with original drawings and an introduction by José Bergamín. As I said this I noticed that Supervielle was changing, a sharp expression came into his eyes and he nervously raised his thumb to the base of his nose and pushed it up, then said, very interesting title, if you don’t mind my asking, did you inherit it? was it a gift perhaps? may I know where you obtained it? I’m sorry, my friend, it’s a professional deformation, but I hastened to say, it’s not a secret, I bought it in a bookstore in Seville for not much money, I don’t remember the name, it wasn’t a specialized store and it’s possible they didn’t know its value, I felt a bit guilty when I bought it, I confess, and Supervielle said, you don’t have to justify yourself, my dear colleague, as you can imagine, being a bibliophile I don’t have that kind of scruple, I think objects, like people or civilizations, have a destiny, or many destinies, given that they’re perennial, that’s why it’s normal that they should pass from hand to hand, just like antiques; whatever is valuable and beautiful ennobles a life, but then must pass to someone else and then someone else until the cycle is complete, don’t you think so, my friend? sometimes the cycle ends with fire or at the bottom of the sea or simply turns into something else, into parts of something greater, anyway, Leonidas, do you agree with my appraisal? Kosztolányi seemed to wake up and said, very much so, Edgar, yes indeed, and as the talk is acquiring the muddy color of profound matters, I suggest we have another drink.

As I walked to the drinks table, my eyes met those of an extremely attractive woman with a wonderfully pure face. I saw her for barely a second, as she turned and put a glass down on a tray. Then she stepped back and our eyes met again, for an even shorter time, before she disappeared in the crowd. After that apparition, Kosztolányi and Supervielle seemed to me like two strange gnomes, wandering jugglers created by a lame, blennorrhagic Shakespeare in a waterfront tavern. I stretched my neck, trying to see her, but in vain. I looked at the waiter’s tray and, strangely, it was empty. The glass that the woman had left there a moment before was already gone, so I told myself, it must have been a hallucination due to my tiredness or the alcohol I had consumed, I must have had about five glasses already, my God, my doctor would scream blue murder, it must have been that, something that had emerged from my subconscious; I started to imagine that this narrative might well take an abrupt turn toward the fantasy genre, but Kosztolányi and Supervielle were real enough, and when I focused on their faces both were looking at me, questioningly, and I realized that the last words Supervielle had spoken, don’t you think so, my friend? had been directed at me, so I said, I’m sorry, I lost the thread, I’m very tired, I’ve only just recovered from a long illness, could you please repeat what you were saying.

They looked at me in surprise and Supervielle said, we were talking about the conference, of course, and about the dramatic context of this war, unpleasant and inhuman like all wars; we were saying that people are talking in small groups about those spray-painted notices that have started to appear all over the city and the roads with the word Alqudsville, which sounds oddly picturesque, you know that the Arabic name for this city is Al-Quds, so the word is a kind of joke, or worse, something that many fear but that nobody here dares to say out loud, don’t you think so, my friend? So I said, I’m not sure what to think, I haven’t been following current events for quite a while now because of my convalescence, so it’s hard for me to express an opinion, but I’d love to hear yours, it would be enlightening. Kosztolányi made as if to speak, raising his index finger like a conductor about to bring in the percussion or the wind section, except that instead of words we heard a loud explosion that shook the building, cut off the electricity, and turned out the lights.

There were cries, people running blindly, and a couple of glasses fell to the floor and shattered, but the master of ceremonies, helped by the flickering light from the candles, jumped onto the platform and begged for calm; then he ordered the musicians to carry on playing, by heart. The party continued and Kosztolányi said, it was a six-inch shell, I can recognize them, I think it’s time for another drink, we don’t want to lose the momentum, we’re at war and war is men’s business, so he moved his bottle closer and filled our glasses.

After the conflagration, the second speaker went up to the platform, knocked with his fingers on the microphone and started speaking, thanking the audience for their presence, especially the international delegates, and said, I know this is a strange time to be holding conferences, these fateful years it has befallen us to live through would be more suitable for seclusion and solitude, and that is why we are so grateful to you, the intellect must continue its work in the midst of the most horrifying circumstances, it’s always been that way and today more than ever, when the present is growing ever angrier as if to punish us, it is worthwhile looking at the past, turning to memory, which is one of the keys of this international conference, because in memory lies the origin of ourselves and of reality, let us remember that each one of us, or so the novelists tell us, is unique and irreplaceable, but above all it is what each person can tell or remember, what he can tell others, or that other who takes shape in the smooth mirror of writing, and I’m sorry if I speak to you in metaphors, in spite of being a sociologist I have cultivated poetry, where I have found the best of life, its truest consistency, anyway: that thing, so precious and fragile, that is in danger just outside these walls, and not only here but in so many other places, and in so many other wars, that is why we must continue to speak and write and tell stories; I believe in the redeeming power of the word and I know you do too, and that is why I now raise my glass and say, cheers, welcome, shalom, and thank you.

I listened to the speech passively, without knowing who the man was, let alone why he was on the platform. I assumed that at the beginning of the party the organizers of the conference had introduced themselves and that was why they were not doing so now, so I asked Kosztolányi, who’s the man who just spoke? and he said, ah, you’re a dreamer, adrift in reality, it’s obvious you’re a poet! That man is none other than Shlomo Yehuda, president and director of the ICBM, author of at least fifty books, scholar of language, essayist, teacher, and legal consultant, one of the most distinguished intellectuals in the country, and that’s why I advise you, dear friend, when you’re introduced to him pretend you know him, say something like: it’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Yehuda, I have known your name since I was a boy, I never thought I’d shake your hand, do you see? You have to tell him something flattering because Shlomo is a vain man, an all too common failing in exceptional people, unfortunately, prepare one of those phrases that don’t commit you too much and which, above all, don’t have to be explained.

Suddenly the door opened and a woman came in. I recognized her immediately. It was Sabina Vedovelli, the Italian diva of the porn industry. I looked at her with great interest and was genuinely captivated by what I saw. Her body and her clothes seemed to say, or even scream, to each man present: “I know how good I am, that on seeing me your cocks stand up like harbor cranes, pulling your underpants to one side; I know you’re trying to imagine my boobs jumping over your face and that you’re fantasizing about my inflamed cunt and imagining my labia swallowing your penis, and your veins are already as swollen as the muscles of an athlete, and I also know that you’re visualizing my anus that you’d like to sodomize, and you want to kiss me like a thirsty dog drinking from a puddle, and bite my tongue, which has sucked so many different cocks, oh, how well I understand you and how sorry I feel for you.”

Sabina Vedovelli was wearing a one-piece black leather tailleur, like Modesty Blaise in the comic strip (does anybody remember that?), with prominent cleavage, high heels in spite of her height and a silk bow around her neck. She had padded lips, violet eyelids, and intense dark blue eyes, like the doom-laden sky in a painting by Van Gogh, which seemed able to drill holes in anything put in front of her. Of course, seeing her I thought of the other woman, the one I’d seen not so long before, and I thought, she isn’t the same, they were very different although there’s something about them, the way you can say about somebody that they have a similar rhythm to somebody else, a certain cadence, even though the first one had a beauty that seemed to have appeared fully grown, pure and uncontaminated.

I remembered the video I had seen on the internet, her ass lifted in that legendary position, immortalized in the drawings of Milo Manara, which some experts on erotica call Looking at Constantinople. It seemed incredible that this was the same woman and yet here she was, before my very eyes. Part of her unattainable air came from the two gorillas who came in with her — and when I say gorillas I do not mean Tarzan’s friends, I am using the term in the other sense, meaning bodyguards — two men with dark glasses and earphone leads sticking out of their ears, who cleared a path for her through the crowd. She waved and smiled at the organizers as if these men were not beside her, intimidating everyone, and I thought, she must be used to it, they are her guard dogs and for her they do not even exist.

Supervielle and Kosztolányi were also looking at her.

She’s a catlike, dangerous woman, said Kosztolányi before taking a big slug of his whiskey, but you can’t imagine the talks she gives, they’re real performances, with photographs and animations, I was at a conference similar to this in Stockholm and the fact is, her contribution was fantastic, don’t you remember, dear Edgar? Supervielle said, yes, although I must confess that her aggressive style bothers me, without wishing to be critical, I know it corresponds to a way of life that’s very widespread in all cultures and it’s useful that she’s among us, which does not prevent one from feeling somewhat. . how can I put it? remote from it all, yes, that’s the word. Then they remembered an occasion when Sabina Vedovelli (was it in Seattle or Bucharest?) had appeared with a tiger cub, which had aroused a mixture of admiration and fear in the audience.

Listening to them, I realized that most of them had been at other conferences together, and I asked them, do you all know each other? to which Supervielle replied, well, the ICBM is new and this is its first conference, but we’ve met at similar events. Kosztolányi added, those of us in the trade have periodic meetings, more or less once every two years, I can understand your surprise, I don’t know what writers’ conferences are like. They both looked at me, so I said, writers’ conferences are usually on a specific theme that’s sufficiently vague for everyone to fit in, things like The Writer and the New Century or Where is Literature Going? and, well, once the group is together there’s an opening reception similar to this one, and then the round tables start; some people bring written texts and read them and others improvise, depending on their experience, and the members of the audience applaud and get quite excited because the only reason they’re there is that they’ve read the authors’ works or have heard of them, and at the end of each session they come up and ask for autographs and dedications, anyway, it’s all a bit mechanical. At night, some writers set off on the prowl looking for young female readers or women delegates, and it’s normal to see them in the bars and on the terraces, making passionate speeches about themselves or their books, enthusiastically telling anecdotes in which they, with all due modesty, appear as heroes or even superheroes and their books as outstanding masterpieces of modern culture. Others prefer to stay in their hotel rooms watching TV channels like MTV or Discovery so that they can then talk about them with scorn at dinner, when what they’re actually saying is, I don’t mix with you, you lousy bunch, I’m above all that, thereby creating an aura of respectability and mystery about themselves. There are also those who devote their time to drinking and forging closer ties that will allow them to obtain invitations to other conferences, and so some colleagues are able to go from one conference to another and spend the whole year traveling, giving interviews from which literary matters are usually rather absent, either because they’re talking off the tops of their heads or because what they really want to create is some kind of political controversy, and so the writers sound off, taking sides and making accusations, ensuring themselves a great deal of visibility in the press, which records their invectives in banner headlines, and if the writer in question is lucky enough to be contradicted by some political or ecclesiastical authority, things really start to heat up, giving rise to a juicy polemic that increases their fame, and other writers jump on the bandwagon to support that first writer, because if the controversy is big enough there’ll be enough left over for them, too, although, of course, the first writer wants to protect the fame he’s acquired, he doesn’t want to lose it to opportunists, and so, in the end, his books will sell more copies and the polemic will have given the event a contemporary, committed, and cosmopolitan air, which benefits everyone and will undoubtedly ensure that the banks and the financial or political organizations that sponsor them want to continue supporting them, even if one of those organizations was the very one that was being criticized or insulted.

On the last day, the historic achievements of the conference are proclaimed, both from a libertarian point of view, and in generating pure concepts and ideas, and a great final binge is held at which everyone swears friendship and respect and at which traditionally, in spite of the fact that each person knows that he is the best, everyone praises everyone else, saying things like this, “You’re the greatest living storyteller since Cervantes, or Borges, or the best poet since César Vallejo,” to which the other replies, “Oh no, don’t exaggerate, that’s going a little bit too far,” they exchange quotations from books, and raise their glasses, and usually, by the time dawn breaks, there are already two and even three Nobel Prize winners at each table, depending on the amount of alcohol they’ve imbibed, including some who swear they’ll refuse it if it’s offered to them, because it’s a disgrace that they never gave it to Borges, which means it’s worthless, all these vows made on a great tide of whiskey, before they rush to the bathroom to throw up.

Kosztolányi and Supervielle looked at me in surprise, and Kosztolányi said, my God, you don’t have a very high opinion of your colleagues, but I hastened to say, don’t take all this literally, one always criticizes one’s profession, but the truth is that I’ve also attended excellent conferences in which people talk seriously; nor did I say I wasn’t myself one of the writers I was talking about. For years all I ever did was go to conferences.

After her triumphant entrance, Sabina Vedovelli had settled elegantly in the middle of the room as if she was in her own home. A tray of drinks was brought to her. With two fingers, she picked up a glass of champagne and raised it to her lips slowly and with great relish, as if instead of a glass container it was a fruit or a delicious ice cream or even a penis, and I could not have been the only one to think that, seeing that several men, including the main speaker, cleared their throats and shifted nervously.

Suddenly somebody clapped a hand on my shoulder, and when I turned I almost fell to the floor in surprise, it was my friend Rashid Salman! In the second it took me to open my arms and receive him I remembered evenings in Rome with him and his movie associates, barbecues at a cultural festival in Damascus, and encounters in Berlin and Oslo, as well as his novel Arab Sunsets, translated into many languages, in which he recounts his own life as a young Israeli Arab educated in a Jewish school, and the contradictions and humiliations of that situation, and in the same second I thought, how on earth could I have forgotten that Rashid lived in Jerusalem? how come that wasn’t the first thing I thought of when I arrived in this city?

My friend, he said, I saw you on the list of delegates and was starting to wonder where on earth you were! I’ve been in the room for more than an hour thinking, if he hasn’t changed, sooner or later he’ll come to the bar for a drink, and I was right! I know you’ve been sick, how are you now? Very well, I said, back on form, as you can see, happy to be here and embarrassed that I didn’t look you up earlier, but I only arrived this afternoon.

Our previous encounter had been five years earlier in Vienna, yes, Literature on the Frontier, that was it. He had gained weight and his hair was very short, like an adolescent’s, an image reinforced by his pink Converse tennis shoes combined with his linen suit and his tie knotted below the second button of his shirt. His face was still the same, a huge smile and two cross eyes, like planets floating in the middle of a storm. I could tell by the way he spoke and waved his hands in the air that he had already drunk quite a bit. This is going to be a really special conference, he said, like nothing you’ve ever seen before, I can guarantee you that! So I asked, are you referring to the war that’s going on outside? and he said, no, that’s the least of it, there’s always been war here, I’m referring to the helplessness, the profound solitude that infects this region, even though it’s in the eye of the hurricane, but come, actually I was referring to something more serious, which is that this hotel has the best bar in the Middle East, let’s go fill our glasses, what are you drinking?

Kosztolányi and Supervielle were talking to a couple of venerable-looking old men, so I left them and followed Rashid through the crowd. Listen, I said, what on earth does Alqudsville mean? and he said, oh, that’s nonsense, don’t take any notice, people invent that kind of thing to give the foreign press something to write about, but here it’s of no importance, you know wars are fought at every level, including the level of language, we’ll see what happens, just forget it for now, better to hit this damn hotel’s reserves of alcohol, don’t you think? I took a long slug of whiskey and remembered that evening many years earlier, I no longer knew how many, when Rashid and I had gone to an Arab wedding in Tira, his native town, north of Tel Aviv. The bride and groom greeted the guests in the door of the living room, beside a huge strongbox with a slot, into which, after congratulating them, people put envelopes containing cash. Of course, the Arab tradition of not serving any alcohol was being respected, so we sat down at a table at least a hundred yards long that snaked through the living room and waited for dinner. There were bottles of mineral water, Fanta, and Coca-Cola, so Rashid, his father, and I spent the whole time passing each other a bottle of whiskey under the table. Parties without alcohol tend not to last long, so within a couple of hours we were already back in his house, drinking and waving to the neighbors. Rashid’s novels were about the people of that town, so that journey was like entering the world of his books. A few years later, we met again in Bremen, at a conference called Writing in the Midst of Chaos, at which we were asked to reflect on fiction in countries in conflict, in cities under siege or under pressure, and of course, there were Rashid and I, an Israeli and a Colombian, as well as a couple of Angolans, some poets from Rwanda, and a few Yugoslavs, in addition to the Western Europeans, who theorized about other people’s violence and seemed to have the best ideas. As it turned out, the best thing about that conference, as we both remembered, was the night the Belgian professor Céline July burst naked along the corridors of the sixth floor of the hotel, very drunk and a bit drugged, fleeing from the Congolese poet Abedi Lassora, who was following her waving a cock so big it knocked down flowerpots and candlesticks as it swung from side to side. They had been about to have sex when the author of the essay Postcolonial Metaphor in the Former Zaire had been startled to see the exaggerated dimensions of the member possessed by one of the leading practitioners in her field.

Something similar could well happen at this conference, given that the presence of Sabina Vedovelli seemed to emit a kind of eroticizing gas into the atmosphere of the hotel, affecting all the men and women gathered there. Would anyone succeed in getting to first base with her? As I thought this, I searched for her with my eyes and spotted her at the far end of the room, just as she was putting her tongue in a glass of martini to extract the olive. A long red tongue that was like a living being. Then Rashid pointed to somebody and said, come, let me introduce you to my publisher, he’s the man over there, his name is Ebenezer Lottmann, he runs Tiberias, the largest publishing company in the country, come, you should meet him. We made our way through the human tide until we reached a short, bald man in a tuxedo, who greeted Rashid effusively. After we had been introduced, the little man looked me in the eyes, nodded, and said, it’s a pleasure, my friend, a real pleasure, but before we say anything else I need to tell you something: one of your books is being considered by Tiberias, our editorial board is very selective and I haven’t heard anything from them yet; I prefer to tell you that now, in order not to raise false hopes. Don’t worry, Mr. Lottmann, I hastened to reply, the fact is, I didn’t even know my agent had submitted anything to you, but he insisted, I prefer to be honest from the start, I’m surrounded by writers who want to get their friends published, and of course Rashid is no exception, but I want to make it quite clear that if the verdict of the editorial board is a negative one it won’t have been through any fault of mine, let alone of your friend Rashid’s, don’t think that, the board is very selective, as I already said. .

I turned my back on him and walked away in irritation. His harangue was starting to ruin the party for me, but Rashid caught up with me and said, wait, he’s a good man, just a bit distrustful, as you know, everyone has some stupid flaw in their character, and his is that he’s a bit arrogant, but I assure you he’s worth it. I thanked Rashid, and said, I know the world is full of rich, arrogant people, but I think it’s time I went to bed, I’m tired. Come even if it’s only for a minute, he insisted, and the little man, who had heard my words, approached saying, don’t worry about Rashid, really, if publication with Tiberias isn’t assured it’s not because of him, you must try to understand that we’re very selective, so I said, I understand that perfectly well, but this scene strikes me as absurd, I have no idea what happens to my books until things actually work out and I have to give my agreement or sign a contract, do you follow me? so I’m not expecting anything at all from you, because until thirty seconds ago I didn’t even know you existed, got that?

The little man tilted his head to one side and looked at me gravely, in silence, then, suddenly, he gave a smile that spread all over his face to such an extent that it distorted it, contracting muscles and making his eyes bloodshot, and he said, almost cried, excellent! really excellent, friends, a little masterpiece! Was that prepared or was it an improvisation? At that moment I also laughed and decided to have another whiskey, one last one, because I was starting to like the little man.

You should know, dear friend, that Tiberias has the most demanding editorial board in the publishing world, because it works like an inverted pyramid: at the bottom are the least perceptive, those who can only spot obvious mistakes in construction and characterization, but then, at the second level, the book or manuscript begins its Stations of the Cross, because I want you to know that the same system applies to everyone, even Rashid had to experience this Via Dolorosa, dolorous indeed, if you’ll pardon the expression, climbing through every level until it reaches the top of the pyramid, where I sit, the final stone, and I want you to know that just because I’ve worked my way up from the bottom doesn’t mean I’m in any way indulgent toward the candidates, no sir, quite the contrary, when I know perfectly well that I run the best publishing company in my language, how could it be any other way, do you see that?

I told him I did, and, my curiosity aroused now, asked him what Latin American authors he had in his catalog, and he replied, ah, well, that’s another matter, it’s no secret to anyone that Tiberias publishes the most exclusive products of the human mind, hence the difficulties of selection and, of course, the huge disappointment of those who remain on the outside, which has brought us, believe me, a great deal of criticism, my God, they’ve said the most horrible things about us, but all that, as you can imagine, is a product of envy and frustration, which is understandable on a human level, I know that a rejection from us is a tragic occurrence to an author and I understand that the natural thing is to search for extra-literary reasons, to play the aggrieved victim, or claim that there is some kind of personal vendetta against him, can you imagine, most of those who remain on the outside of what I call the “Tiberias ladder” react with anger and immediately swell the ranks of our most embittered critics and enemies, oh, my friend, you look surprised but I assure you that’s the way it is, and that’s why I dare to ask you, to beg you, if we reject your book, not to be tempted by hate, antipathy, or resentment, don’t do it, I implore you, stay away from those resentful coteries, because in the long run it achieves nothing, none of the more spirited refutees has ever gotten in with subsequent books, while those who choose the stoic path of resignation, with integrity and a vision of the future, always get a second chance, and believe me, we have had notable cases of condemned men who swallowed their pride and persevered and in the end saw their books in the sky blue covers of Tiberias, yes sir! and as he said this, he raised his glass and said, a toast to forbearance and tolerance, and the three of us drank.

Lottmann did not drink alcohol, only soft drinks. Excuse me, Mr. Lottmann, I said, but you haven’t answered my question, and he looked at me in surprise, what question? I did answer, you have to be patient and wait for an answer, but I said, no sir, I asked you what Latin American authors you have in your catalog, and he said, ah, yes, well, you see, I’d rather not give you names now, in spite of the fact that our catalog is no secret; I prefer to tell you the type of writer we’re interested in publishing, and then you’ll be able to think about it, then confirm your ideas by taking a look at our website, tiberias.net.com, do you think you can remember that?

And now, coming to the main subject, what interests us is what we might these days call the “versatile writer,” the writer capable of adapting to the tastes of the public without in any way renouncing his own creative magma, his individuality, do you follow me? I’ll give you an example: do you remember, a few years ago, there was a great explosion of historical novels about sects and secret societies in the Middle Ages and that kind of thing? I nodded, and he continued: that is the typical situation of which a “versatile writer” will take advantage, putting his own logs on an already blazing fire and making it burn gracefully, while keeping his own identity, of course, which will allow him to defend himself against the accusations and insults heaped on him by old, dyed-in-the-wool writers, who will brand him an opportunist, a sellout, a traitor, a whore, and all those things the resentful say, those who don’t sell, the fundamentalists who cling to tradition, you know who I’m talking about, well, anyway, that’s my idea of the “versatile writer,” the writer who is able to swim in the cloudy waters of popular taste without it being too obvious, without shouting it on the rooftops, without being seen at fashionable parties and getting his face in the papers, because that would be suspicious and counterproductive in the long run, it’s good to keep a high profile but not too high, better a two-thirds profile, a three-quarters profile, because anyone who’s always at the crest of the wave will fall in the end, I don’t know if I’m explaining myself well, number three on the bestseller lists here, a second prize there, a mention somewhere else, do you understand me? Perfectly, I said, and you’ve made me so curious that bright and early tomorrow morning I’m going to ask at reception for a computer so I can look at your catalog, and he replied, ah, my catalog, the Tiberias catalog! you’ll be surprised, the list of guests at the most exclusive council of the human spirit, the great literary party of the century, the one that has now finished and the one just starting; at this point, I raised my glass and said, well, then I propose a toast to the only one of your authors I know, Rashid, and he said, dash it, Rashid is a very special case because, without being really “versatile,” seeing as he persists in a confessional vein with touches of drama and humor, a literary stance that, in theory, might appear decadent and suicidal, yet has turned out to be very successful, his books are very popular and we never have any problem in selling the foreign rights, so for me he’s the exception that proves the rule, oh, God knows yes, at the end of the day nothing in this business is written in stone and that’s why one should feel one’s way, or rather, crawl one’s way.

Sabina Vedovelli was talking with three weary-looking men. The fattest of them was sweating profusely, his hair stuck to his forehead, as if somebody had thrown a glass of water in his face. Listening from a distance, I thought I caught the music of the Russian language. Suddenly the fat man gave a loud laugh and said, eta horoshó, which removed any lingering doubts. I assumed they were partners of hers, the porn industry having flourished in the former Tsarist empire, thanks, among other things, to the great beauty of their young women. I found myself looking at Sabina Vedovelli’s cleavage, which was like a maelstrom between her magnificent breasts, and just as I was about to fall into that ravine I saw something really extraordinary emerge from it, nothing less than. . the head of a small snake! a kind of periscope that appeared for a second, looked right and left, sank back down, and disappeared. Did you see that!!?? I asked Rashid, and he said, what? I felt disoriented, suspecting the wine I was drinking, my tiredness, even my illness. A snake just popped out from between Sabina Vedovelli’s breasts! I said.

Ebenezer Lottmann looked at me reprovingly, but said nothing. Rashid, as a way out of the impasse, said, oh, my friend, I see the Jerusalem syndrome has gotten to you, too many prayers create an electricity in the air that causes madness, but don’t worry, it passes, the best thing we can do is go as quickly as possible to the bar and get some more whiskey. He took his leave of his publisher with a nod and said in my ear, you’re going crazy, friend, when was the last time you had a decent fuck? But as we passed Sabina the little snake popped up again. The three Russians screamed and Rashid stopped dead. Half the room turned to look at Sabina’s fleshy promontories, and she, with a smug look on her face, took the thing out, a little rubber toy, which was greeted with shouts and laughter.

This strange bazaar of humanity seemed boundless. On the other side of the room was a mysterious-looking man trying to hide amid the velvet drapes. Seen from a distance, he looked like a medieval warrior from one of those “versatile” novels Lottmann had talked about. He was wearing a black cloak with a hood and only the lower part of his face was visible. His forearms were bare and covered with tattoos, giving them a brocade-like appearance; as I walked toward him, I could make out Roman crosses, the figure of a bloodstained Christ, Latin inscriptions in Gothic writing, an eye that looked like a sun shining over a remote fortified city, and I said to myself, here he is, the Templar, that was all this party needed, and I thought, maybe thanks to him this story will take flight and turn into a resounding bestseller, a Templar of our times! what an extraordinary stroke of luck! I hope he can be part of this narrative, I swear he’ll have a leading role, of course he will, the others will have to understand that, we’re all in the same boat, oh yes, it was time I became a “versatile writer,” and having a Templar on board was the best guarantee.

As I came level with him, these fantasies faded. I saw that one of the tattoos showed the helm of a boat, with the words, in Spanish, “God is my co-pilot,” and what I had thought was an armored breastplate turned out to be an elegant gray jacket, so I resigned myself, farewell Templar. This might well be the former evangelical pastor, so I asked him, are you from the Caribbean? and he pulled back his hood, revealing a pair of bulging eyes, and said yes, my brother, from right in the middle of the Caribbean, and how about you, if I’m not being indiscreet? I’m Colombian, I replied, and he said, oh, give me your hand, brother, Walter José Maturana, at God’s service and yours, in that order, with the Almighty first, yes indeed, and I replied, pleased to meet you; I turned to introduce him to Rashid, but Rashid was nowhere to be seen, and I thought: he must have gone back to the drinks table, I’ll catch up with him later.

The pastor, with his untidy gray beard, raised his index finger and said, I know who you are now, brother, you’re the novelist! the first thing I want to tell you is that I haven’t read your books, but when I saw your name it sounded familiar, so I started searching for it on the Internet, telling myself, I’ve heard it before somewhere, and then it came to me, a woman I had dealings with some years ago was a fan of yours, not because of a book but because of an article, something about mature women, she’d stuck it up on the wall and always said, if ever I meet the man who wrote this I’m going to smother him with kisses, starting with his dick, those were her exact words, and having heard your name mentioned so often, I’ve remembered it ever since, and now I’ve actually met you! oh God, life is amazing, isn’t it? you can’t imagine how important that article of yours was to her, and how it helped her, my God, the poor woman was trying to get down to two grams and clung to those words as if they were her last hope. Two grams of what? I said to him, and he replied, what do you think, my brother? two grams of smack, horse, don’t you get it? heroin, brother, when I received her into the Church she was on four sachets a day and she didn’t have any veins left, poor thing, she’d lost her looks because the smack rots your gums and your teeth fall out like seed from a rotten corncob, poor girl, nobody wanted to hump her anymore and that’s when the drama started, she was used to giving the dealers blowjobs or sleeping with them in exchange for coke and horse, but then they got bored with her and said, that’s it, Cinderella, go sell your pussy to junkies because we don’t want you anymore, either bring us money or the flow dries up, baby, the party’s over, can you imagine, the same guys who got her hooked in the first place just so they could fuck her when she was nice and pretty now left her in the trash, oh, brother, this world really is one big shithouse and stinks like rancid cottage cheese, because to add to that, when she went with junkies they gangbanged her, three or four of them at a time, and when she had the smack inside her the poor woman didn’t know what was going on, sometimes they even crapped on her, and I really mean that, she was like the living dead when I pulled her out of the garbage, I put Christ into her nostrils and if you saw her today, my friend, you’d be knocked out, even her mother who brought her into the world wouldn’t recognize her, she’s clean again, and by a miracle of the Lord, the Big Enchilada, the Man Upstairs, she doesn’t have anything nasty in her blood, because I tell you, with what they put in her she should have had AIDS the size of a Soviet ship, but anyway, Christ held out his hand to her, and she’s the woman who has your article hanging on her wall.

I saw Rashid in the distance. He signaled to me, making a fanlike gesture with his fingers that meant, see you later, so I said to Maturana, listen, all I know about you is what the conference gave us and that’s why I’d like to get to know you, I mean, my God, you must have seen some pretty harsh things in your life, I guess? The man twisted the hairs of his beard and said, yes indeed, brother, I’ve seen the devil in Technicolor and black and white, and I’ve even seen him in the mirror, brother, because between you and me I can tell you I came out of the garbage truck with the engine on, or when they’d already closed the lid and were throwing earth on top, really, everything’s passed through this body, smack, mushrooms, weed, coke, crack, freebase, I was so addicted, brother, I’d lost all sense of shame, until one day I touched bottom and I won’t tell you how it was to wake up the day after, man, that was really rough, no kidding, try to imagine the scene, opening your eyes on the sidewalk of an avenue at three in the afternoon, with the sun beating down, pants torn, no shoes on your feet, so thirsty you could have drunk a gallon of gasoline, the syringe still in your forearm and a cop slapping you and saying, hey, hey, wake up, what’s your name? and you making an effort to remember something as basic as your name, who the fuck you are and what you’re called, that isn’t an easy question to answer, brother, and then seeing them almost dying of disgust as they lift you up and put you in the back of a patrol car with the bars around, and hearing them say, this scumbag fell out of the garbage truck, I’d rather clean a dog’s vomit with my tongue than touch him again, I’d rather kiss an ass with colitis than smell the breath of this bag of germs, anyway, things like that, and then they put me in jail for destitution, vagrancy, a long way from where I’d grown up because all this happened in the north, in a little town in West Virginia I’d gone to for some business that turned out badly, and I went straight to prison, my friend, I’m not telling you the half of it, but it was there that I met the man who saved me, the Jesus Christ of the Caribbean, anyway, that’s the story I’m going to tell, so it’s better if I don’t tell you the rest now.

Did you see Sabina Vedovelli? he asked. She’s going to be the center of attention: there’s a rumor around that she’s going to tell her life story, and I said, I’m new at this, I don’t know what kind of things are being rumored. Maturana continued: may God forgive me if I’m slandering anybody, I’m only repeating what I’ve heard, but they say she’s been the lover of Mafiosi and politicians and all kinds of VIPs, they say Berlusconi, you remember the bald guy who was president of Italy a few years ago and became famous for banging young girls? and I said yes, of course, and he continued, well, they say one night he gave her as a gift to the president of Russia, who was on a state visit, and at dinner Sabina got up on the table and danced and threw plates and glasses on the floor, and then she lifted her skirt and went closer to the men, who must have been drunk and coked-up, and she pulled aside her G-string and peed in their faces, she was aiming streams of urine at them while they sang the balalaika or some crap like that, and they mixed it with champagne and drank it, and then they both screwed her, one from in front and the other from behind, on the table, and they gave her a tremendous fricassee of cock, that’s what they say, I don’t have any evidence, but what a life, eh? and they also say that she always carries in her suitcase a pair of underpants that belonged to Pope John Paul II and that she worships them as if they were the Turin Shroud and they say she lost her virginity at the age of eighteen, because until then she only took it up the ass, and that the first man who gave it to her from the front and took her virginity was a pilot of the Swedish airline SAS, flying from Rome to Gothenburg, who came out of the cabin to take a leak in the middle of the night and found her in the bathroom, with her pants down and crying with fear, and when the giant, who was probably called something like Olaf the Bastard, saw her, he closed the door, took out his cock and impaled her on it as they crossed the Apennines, and they say that’s why she kept the taste for screwing in exotic places, even while parachuting or at the bottom of the sea, and that she’s had sex with various kinds of living creatures, not all of them human, in fact human isn’t necessarily what she likes best, anyway, brother, everybody says something, because it’s like this Vedovelli woman is from another planet.

Suddenly, I heard a voice beside me saying, are you the writer? It was a young woman with rectangular glasses. Hi, she said, I’m Marta Joonsdottir, I’m from Iceland, I write for the Ferhoer Bild in Reykjavik, I’m here to cover the conference, my readers would be interested to hear about your opinions, maybe you could grant me an interview, so I said, yes of course, it would be an honor, although I’m not quite sure how interested your readers would be, and then I said, let me introduce the ex-Reverend Walter José Maturana, and Maturana looked at the girl and said, it’s nice to see a young woman who’s pure of heart, with her soul shining out of her eyes, and she replied, thanks for the compliment, Father, but don’t be deceived, these eyes have already seen everything an adult person ought to see and more, I know about your evangelical work and I’d like to talk about that as the conference goes on, and he said, whenever you like, I’ll try not to die first.

Just as he said that, there was another coup de théâtre, a second bomb going off, even louder than the first, which made the building shake. A murmur went through the room, there were a few stifled cries, and the candles flickered. Two seconds later, the musicians struck up again as loudly as ever and the guests continued talking, all except Marta Joonsdottir, whose eyes screwed up like frightened squirrels, how can this be normal? she cried, and I replied, I don’t think it is, it isn’t normal for anybody, but everyone pretends because they’re too embarrassed to say anything or they don’t believe it. Marta looked at me gravely and said: one of these days there’ll be a flicker of light and a moment later we’ll all be dead, and that’ll be normal too. Before she walked away she added: I’ll look for you.

I moved away from the pastor and went to one of the windows that looked out on the western part of the city. I heard the sound of a siren and the roar of engines and saw an intense blaze creating sinuous shapes and flashes of light. That’s where it must have fallen, I thought. But then I saw something strange: below, on King David Street, people were strolling along as if it were a cool summer night, indifferent to what was happening or, at least, what I thought was happening, because by this time, with all those glasses of whiskey and the long journey, I was not the right person to judge the gravity of what was happening, or how much danger we were all in.

Rashid reappeared and said, the smell of the candles is choking us, friend, it’s time for a change of scenery, let’s go, the city is calling us, it’ll be an honor to show you something of this huge coffin that is Jerusalem under siege, a nest of flames whose combustion brings forth monsters, igneous creatures; a fallen burial mound, dressed in funeral clothing; a dolmen brought to its knees but resisting blindly. Let me show you how people enjoy themselves at night in this city.

I walked behind him to the exit and a second later we were walking up King David Street, just like the people I had been so surprised to see from the window. We had gone three blocks when I saw the Icelandic journalist on the opposite sidewalk, so I called her over, so you also wanted to go for an evening stroll? to which she replied, I’m going back to my hotel, did you think I was staying at the King David? no newspaper in Iceland could afford it, I’m in a small hotel on Agrippa Street, the Hotel Agrippa. I introduced her to Rashid, who invited her to have a drink with us, and she accepted.

We could hear explosions in the distance, but Rashid did not slow down at all. We came to a shopping street, Ben Yehuda, and turned into some narrow side streets that were quite lively, couples in the darkness, people on their own enjoying the night. We walked past some old doors until Rashid entered one and said to us, here we are, welcome to the Diwan, the curtain rises!

In my mind, I categorized the bar as noisy postmodern, dark and insalubrious, and its clientele as fringe characters, drunks, drug addicts, mentally unbalanced people addicted to prescription drugs, tranquilizers, and psychoactives, people who had had tough childhoods and had crossed the thin line between reality and the mental hospital, just like in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and in the case of the women, with the addition of being easy lays, not forgetting that some of the habitués of these bars usually belong to various high risk groups, people with AIDS or carriers of multiple staphylococcus, pneumocystitis, various kinds of gonorrhea, hepatitis B or C, candida albicans, Kaposi’s sarcoma, anyway, all of this might well have been in the Diwan, but I said nothing and walked to the counter with a certain reluctance and a vague feeling that I was crossing a line, until I was able to take my first slug from the glass of whiskey Rashid put in my hand. Then we went to the back of the room, where music was playing loudly, and sat down.

Rashid stopped to say hello to some acquaintances of his, so I asked Marta, do you like the place? and she said, very much, it’s the kind of bar I go to in Reykjavik, where I can chill out, a space where nobody looks at anyone and everyone respects everyone else, not like those awful places with leather armchairs and indirect lighting where people go to see and be seen; I have a long history of love affairs and friendships in bars like this, and what about you? do you like it? I forgot what I had thought when I came in, because I had already stopped feeling nervous, so I said, it’s a typical bar of our time, when the archeologists of the future want to figure out our civilization they’ll find traces of places like this, which are exactly the same in different parts of the world, do you live in Reykjavik? and she said, no, in Paris, I’m their arts correspondent, that’s why they sent me to cover the conference, I’m a graduate in philosophy and letters, and philology too.

When I heard that I said, I’m a philologist too, that makes us colleagues. I proposed a toast to the noble science of philology and I said, the only thing I’ve read from your country is Paradise Reclaimed by Halldór Laxness, oh, and Meek Heritage, too, but Marta shuddered and said, that novel isn’t by Laxness, it’s by Frans Sillanpää, who’s Finnish, you’re confusing them because they’re both Northern, just like everyone does, and she added, bitterly: the rest of the world doesn’t distinguish between Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland, and yet they’re so different! You’re right, I said, I confused two writers, but not your countries. She took a sip of her whiskey and said, I’ll forgive you if you change this shit for something stronger for me, this is no time to be drinking something that’s only forty proof! I stood up and went to the bar. I saw a green bottle with a sinister name, Black Death. I asked for a glass of it and took it to Marta.

She took a sip of it and her cheeks turned very pink, and she cried, Brennivín! they have this at the bar? drinking Brennivín is the most patriotic thing an Icelander can do, and added, I have to confess something, this drink has a connection with the first time I got drunk and also, predictably, lost my virginity, it all happened on the same night. I’d been drinking a bit and dancing in an old disco called Nasa, in the center of Reykjavik, where underground bands played like Björk’s Sugarcubes, Juliette and the Licks, Ghostigital, who play really weird rock, and there I was, only fifteen, and I wanted to drink up the world in one go or snort it into my brain with a line of coke; what I did was drink and drink until a guy wearing a helmet with horns and a leather vest took me on the dance floor and whirled me around and around; my feet literally lifted off the ground. From there we went to the men’s bathroom to have sex, he was nice and he treated me quite well; it hardly hurt at all. The next day he gave me a couple of aspirins and drove me home on his motorbike. I never saw him again.

Rashid came to the table with more whiskey, and said, what do you think of this bazaar of disturbed lives? It’s like a warehouse of humanity, the equivalent of the Museum of Mankind, only with living species that aren’t yet completely extinct, don’t you find it interesting? I noticed a woman bobbing up and down on the edge of the dance floor. Her head was shaved, and she was wearing an Indian skirt and military boots. I found it strange to see thick hair under her armpits and on her legs, it had been ages since I had last seen a hairy woman. No woman had hair now on any part of her body and I had almost forgotten they had any.

Suddenly Marta cried, hey, I’ve just had a brilliant idea, how about doing the interview right now? I looked at her and said, my God, you work late, to tell the truth I’m tired, but she insisted, I won’t tape anything or make notes, it’s just a first approach, I’ll use my memory.

And she began: why do you write? The question fell like a stone into water and I was not sure what to say, why do I write? or rather, why did I write before, when I wrote? To tell the truth, I do not have any very clear idea of why I do it, so I said, I don’t know, but she insisted, there must be some reason, it may be that you don’t see it immediately but there must be one, think and you’ll find it, it’ll come, we’re in no hurry. She asked Rashid the same question, how about you, why do you write? And, although he seemed more distracted than I was, he replied without hesitation: because it would be much worse if I didn’t. I was impressed and said to myself, damn it, now that’s a convincing answer.

Marta smiled and looked down, a sign that she was pleased with the sentence and wanted to remember it, then continued: and what would be much worse? Rashid, who must have thought he had already won the game, looked surprised, but said, my life would be much worse, and the lives of the people around me, and probably literature.

Marta replied: do you consider yourself a great writer? I’m not the one who thinks that, said Rashid, it’s the press and my readers who consider me a great writer, at least that’s what they say to my face. They may be lying but that’s what they say, and I believe them, because nobody is forcing them; my books are successful in a dozen languages and that must mean something, mustn’t it? He took a long slug of whiskey and said, I don’t want to appear arrogant, I don’t think my books are important, but I like them, that’s why I write and publish them. Other people think they’re important.

Again Marta looked at me, as if to say, it’s your turn, do you have your answer yet?

I can think of a thousand reasons not to write, I said, in fact I haven’t written for quite some time now; things like illness or boredom, irritation or fatalism, or remembering that all human enterprises are doomed to disappear, however long they last. . Thinking that doesn’t exactly inspire one to write.

And are you going to start writing again now? she asked, and I said, perhaps I’ll try a new genre, biography for example, this conference may be a sign.

And why would you start writing again?

There are things we do without any reason or for the most trivial of reasons, I said: going out and walking along the road during the rush hour and looking at people in their cars; showing up in midafternoon at the box office of a movie theater or browsing in bookshops or sitting on a balcony watching people on their way home, and repeating to yourself in your mind, why am I doing all this? why today did I walk to a bookshop or go to a movie theater and just as I got to the door decide not to go in? We do things that have no meaning or only acquire meaning over time, perhaps because deep down we want to change our lives at the last moment, when everything appears fixed, like those roulette players who one second before the close of bets nervously shift a tower of chips, from one number to another, and then bite their fingers; because we’re searching for some kind of intense experience, or because we want to be someone else, yes, to be someone else, there you have your answer: I write to be someone else.

Marta smiled and said, you see, we’re making progress already, I told you we could still get a good article at this hour, the idea that alcohol and work are incompatible may be correct for dentists or people who perform circumcisions, but not for those of us who work with words. Of course, provided we stay a bit horizontal, or support ourselves with the other hand.

I took advantage of our eyes meeting — hers were two blue fishbowls — to ask her, how about you, Marta, why do you write?

The change of trajectory disconcerted her, but she seemed to enjoy the game, and said, I write because it’s what I do for the arts pages, that’s rather a stupid answer, I know, but it’s the literal truth; if I were on the financial pages or the sports pages my life would be different, I’d write less, I’d be dictating results or commentaries by telephone, and that would be all; I should add that I feel proud when I see my texts printed and imagine they’re going to be seen in railroad stations and tea rooms and hairdressing salons and the people who read them will approve or reject them and one in a hundred or a thousand will remember my article that night and make some comment over dinner, that, by and large, is what drives me to write, don’t you feel the same way?

I said yes, I was pleased that what I wrote would be seen by readers unknown to me, but I didn’t feel any pride, because to tell the truth the books we leave behind us drift away from us and we end up kind of mutually rejecting each other, as if after a while we did not recognize each other, and that’s what’s happening to me today, I’m miles from them, I’m not the same person who wrote them; I genuinely think those books are dead.

A loud explosion plunged the bar into silence and darkness.

There were a couple of grotesque screams and some laughter. Then somebody struck a light, and I saw that the people were all frozen in their places, even those who were on the dance floor. There was another explosion, and I grabbed Marta’s hand and headed for the exit. Where the hell had Rashid gotten to? I found him in the corridor and I said, it’s time we got back. The windy night carried the smell of gasoline and scorched tires.

When I got to the hotel I realized how much I had been drinking. The steps were moving like the keys of a pianola and I almost fell. As I walked toward the elevators I heard music on the second floor and decided to go have a look. In the main reception room a waiter was extinguishing the candles and collecting the candlesticks. Another was removing the tablecloths and the remains of food. On one side of the room a few delegates had appropriated a few bottles and gathered around the piano. The person playing turned out to be none other than Leonidas Kosztolányi. They were all singing out of tune and drinking.

When I got to my room, I left my clothes on the armchair and went to take a shower, the only way to clear my head before sleep. I switched out the light and stepped inside the jet of water, which felt really good. I do not know how much time I was in there, but I actually fell asleep and even dreamed. Then I turned off the water, grabbed one of the towels, and stepped out of the shower, shivering as I did so.

It was then that I heard the voices. A woman on the verge of tears and a man trying to console her. Being in the dark, I lost all sense of direction and was not sure where the voices were coming from. I even thought they might be coming from my own room. I did not have the strength to switch on the lamp, so I concentrated all my energies on listening. I love you, the man was saying, you’ve always known that, why should everything be different now? The words made the woman moan even louder and the man insisted, blaming her. You can’t keep returning to that time, he said.

The fact that her moaning did not diminish in intensity made me think that she was hoping for more affection, and I tried to imagine the scene: the two of them on the couch, the man embracing her, the woman with her face in her hands; but his attempts at consoling her, perhaps because they had been repeated too often and had become old and tired, did not convince either of them anymore, and I wondered, what is it that she returns to and reproaches him with? how, out of the many ways you can hurt somebody, has he hurt her? After these questions came others: were they young? middle-aged? The fact that the man was whispering made it hard to determine his age.

He said: I love you and that’s all that matters, forget everything else, what does the past matter? life is full of traps; but she continued sighing and crying, and he insisted: if I were lying I wouldn’t have brought you here. That phrase produced a special effect, because at last she spoke: I prefer not to believe you, because if it turns out that you’re lying I’ll slash my wrists and this time I mean it, and it’ll all be your fault, listen to me, your fault for making me heartless and false. Now it was the man who paused for a long time, a pause that made me assume they had embraced and the woman had stopped crying, but I was wrong, because the sighs started again: nobody’s realized what I’ve done, but that doesn’t mean that I’m ready to keep doing it, do you understand me? let alone for a bastard like you.

Her tone became threatening. Then there was a different sound, which, in my delirium, I associated with a kiss, a long kiss, profoundly desired by the two of them. Finally he spoke, and said, feel how much I love you, you can smell it, touch it, it’s no lie. And again the kiss. Don’t try to break my heart, she said, you won’t succeed this time, I’m strong now, and he said, I don’t deserve anything, I know that, what I deserve is for you to spit at me and humiliate me and even pee in my face, if you think it’s necessary, I deserve that, you know, I’m not trying to convince you of anything, all I want is to clear the way so that the truth can come out without any shame.

There was a sigh from her, different this time. It wasn’t a moan anymore but something more elaborate, and suddenly she said: you know what’s going to happen if you keep sucking me there! That’s what you want! But he said, I’m doing it because I can sense you want it, it’s exactly what you want and I’ve always been your animal. Again there was a silence, a longer one this time, and a soft creaking sound that suggested a change of position on the couch. Suddenly she said: how can you touch me again after what you made me do? and he said, it was for you, only for you. That was the last thing I heard before falling fast asleep.

6. THE MINISTRY OF MERCY (III)

Here we are again, my friends, to conclude this story, which I hope you’re finding both entertaining and instructive, because that’s why we’re here. A couple of years had passed since the start of the Ministry when one evening, coming back to the house from an evangelical trip to the penitentiary at Sundance Creek — where, by the way, I’d managed to get three black gorillas, each weighing about two hundred and sixty pounds, to go down on their knees before the Man Himself — I learned that Walter had hired some bodyguards, four guys of different races, their muscles developed at the neighborhood gym or in jail, with wires coming out of their ears, who followed him everywhere and kept everyone at bay, including me, because when I went to say hello to them they grabbed me and, as the police say, immobilized me, until he said to them, it’s O.K., guys, cool it, this is my partner, he can come to me whenever he likes. All of which struck me as very strange.

The Ministry was doing better than ever. The safes were bursting with dollars, rotten with greenbacks, millions of them. People gave monthly tithes, and Walter’s tours to spread the word, with services for up to twenty thousand people, were great for business. All we had to do was fart and we’d be showered with coins. That was how it went. But Walter wasn’t the same anymore, for a reason I could well understand, even though I’m no great student of character or anything like that, which is that if you tell a person, from the moment he gets up in the morning until the moment he goes to bed at night, that he’s mega, A-number-one, the boss; if everyone who works with him tells him every day that he’s the goose that lays the golden egg, and the sun shines out of his ass, well, that person ends up believing it! I mean, that’d be enough to give anyone a swollen head, don’t you think, my friends? It’s something that’s hard to keep in check, like blindness or one of those diseases people have in their blood today, because there comes a moment when that person starts to believe it’s all true, that he really is the great Macho Man and all that, and that’s where things turn sour, believe me, and I’m not trying to come off as some kind of philosopher or psychologist, but if someone believes something like that about himself it’s because he already has one foot and half the other stuck in the shit, one ball and half the other in the wrong orifice, and I’m sorry, brothers and sisters, but this part of the story makes my blood boil, and here I have to make a confession that’s very difficult for me, which is that this process of self-canonization that was starting up in Walter’s consciousness ran parallel to another process in me, one that went in the opposite direction, which was that I stopped believing in anything, I let go of all those fairly tales and focused on my work on the streets, on the most down-to-earth things, on whatever shit was most recent and smelled the worst, I’m sorry, that turned out a bit scatological, which wasn’t my intention; as Walter grew and grew like a balloon, I distanced myself from it all and went out on the street; I discovered that at the center of the world, in the world itself, was goodness, human generosity, what Walter had called in earlier days “the narrative of forgiveness and generosity,” which had been his great theme.

Of course I never stopped believing that Walter was somebody special, endowed with an enormous sense of life, with those eyes that seemed like a lighthouse beacon turning very high above our heads, and that’s why he was ahead of our thoughts and of reality, because he knew what was coming and was able to adapt himself to it, but also because his voice, his innocence, and his message were a drug to be injected with his word, a verbal substance that made the weak man think he was strong and the cripple a light-footed Achilles, his word had that curious gift of being able to transform things, reality, life itself, to bend circumstances to his will, and that was the source of his success. That was why people went crazy when they heard him and many fainted and felt that the sun was warming their cheeks, that life had stopped being that terrible shithouse it usually is for most people and was transformed into something in Technicolor, like a song by Pedro Infante or Toña la Negra or the great Celia, that’s understandable, but I don’t think, dear friends, that all that necessarily made him a God, as everyone used to say, as I myself used to say, no sir, and do you know why I say that? it’s very easy, because all that he had to give others were human attributes; a man is the best support for another man who’s desperate, and to do that he uses human words, which are the only ones we have, and the best, that’s the great secret, and now I turn especially to my younger friends here and ask them to listen to this lesson that comes from a distant time, from years already past that were different than today, you can’t imagine how different! and not only because there were no cell phones or computers, or because movies were different and people were a bit fatter and women had hair on their vaginas, begging your pardon, I’m not referring only to that, I say it because it was a time when people were scared of life and that’s why they felt their way, very slowly, testing everything before making a move, like a blind man who’s lost his stick in an inhospitable side street, and that’s how things were in those slow, gray years, my dear friends, almost nobody had that self-assurance and that confidence expressed by people today, which demonstrates a complete absence of fear; the fear went out of their lives, and now it’s life itself that should take care, and so I tell myself, the story of Walter de la Salle may seem amazing today, it may seem barely credible that somebody could turn into a God like that, a guide to the blind, a beacon to those lost in the fog, but that’s what life was like, my friends, and that’s why, in those worlds that were hungry for the absolute and the metaphysical, somebody who looked above the clouds and saw beyond the horizon should become a prophet, and then it was only a step for him to become Jesus Christ reborn, and that was what Walter represented to thousands of people.

I would see him getting into his armor-plated limousine, surrounded by Jefferson, Miss Jessica, and the horde of tattooed young men who were always with him now, and I would believe less in him as a demigod, just think of the paradox: the more the world believed in him, the more I saw his human side, in other words, his fallible side, and of course I still loved him and was ready to sacrifice my own life if I thought it would make Walter more real, more magnificent, but life’s a very troublesome and contradictory thing, fuck it, sometimes even a suicidal thing, yes, which may be why nobody gets out of it alive; the greater the man’s word grew, the higher his image as a Redeemer rose from the ground, the more he seemed to me a false Messiah, full of weaknesses, very attached to trivial things, and increasingly self-centered, which was something that seemed to cover his brain like ivy; it’s a complex thing, my friends, but an extremely human thing, and a well-known phenomenon, that people who become famous immediately go a bit crazy! Let me give you an example, when we held services in stadiums, and Jessica went to the dressing room and told him, it’s time to make your entrance, there are fifteen thousand people out there, he’d reply, tell me when there are sixteen thousand, that’s my number, God woke me with that number in my head. Then he’d sit back in his chair and let Jefferson massage his shoulders while Jessica changed the slices of cucumber he put around his eyes to moisten them. He only drank Vittel water, imported from France.

Let me tell you how things were in a bit more detail. When at last everything was ready and Jessica pretended that sixteen thousand people had come in, he’d withdraw to a portable chapel he had and pray in silence for a minute, and then go out on stage in the middle of a cloud of smoke, with a spotlight following him and loud symphonic music, nothing less than Zarathustra by Richard Strauss, do you copy me? The people would rise from their seats and yell and the women would bite their purses and urinate and some would faint, it was completely crazy; the security people would have to contain the crowd, until Walter would turn on the microphone and cry, God is watching you tonight! God is looking at each one of you tonight! God sees what there is in each of your hearts and comes down, slowly, to kiss them! Then he would point to the audience with a powerful finger and cry:

Ooooopen your hearts to Goooooooodddd!!!

The applause would be deafening. His handling of the microphone was excellent, with crescendos and diminuendos that bent the audience to his will, and the rest was a real pop opera, my friends, suddenly he’d say, let’s tell sin what we think about it, let’s say it loud and clear, I hate you, I hate you! and the hall would be bursting with yells and stamping of feet. Then the lights would go out and there’d be a scary silence. Suddenly, a red light would fall on Walter, presenting himself now as a billy goat in the middle of a witches’ Sabbath. He’d take off his chasuble and reveal his tattooed, muscular body. More beams of light would show the illustrations on his tattoos and the people would cry out in admiration and fear, yes, ladies and gentlemen, fear was part of the story. The cripples would jump out of their wheelchairs and the lame would yell with pride, recovering some of their dignity, and later these same little people would go back home along the street, kicking tin cans, poor devils sitting in forgotten parks looking at the world with misty eyes, tangible human idiocy, my friends, but for a few hours these people were happy and that’s why Walter was a drug, a kind of crack or coke that was snorted through the ear and maddened the brain for a few days, or only a few hours, I don’t know, because it had stopped doing anything to me.

We eventually had more than sixty thousand members, just imagine, and every one of them donated a monthly tithe that could vary between fifty and a thousand dollars, just imagine, and so there were no limits to anything anymore; the house in South Beach was turning into a resort, very different than it had been at the beginning, because Jefferson and the seven samurai, which was what I called that gang of athletic faggots, refurbished the place, knocking down walls, extending the rooms, and building a swanky gym with electronic apparatus and giant LCD screens so that Walter could watch recordings of his own services while he lifted weights or did Pilates. All this coincided with the purchase of the house that adjoined the rear of the property, and as both houses had extensive grounds, a path was laid to join the two gardens.

At that time, my friends and listeners, God put in my devastated brain one of the best ideas I’ve ever had, which was to move to a cabin on the border between the two gardens, but closer to the newly-purchased house, a cabin that had been used by the children of the previous owners to throw wild parties with alcohol, drugs, and group sex, because during the cleaning I found mineralized condoms, black sanitary napkins, crack pipes and coke papers, colored G-strings with strange stains on them, and dozens of empty tequila bottles and half-empty jars of Vaseline. I even found a box of tampons, because it had been fashionable for girls to wet them in liquor and stick them in their asses so they could get drunk without getting fat or damaging their stomachs. I cleaned the cabin without spending a single dollar of the Ministry’s money. I opened the windows, let the air in, and installed some of the old furniture that was piled in the attic of the main house.

Soon I’d constructed a lovely space, with wooden shelves for my books, a comfortable living room, a table, and a few kitchen utensils, very few to be honest, because the one thing Walter asked was that I should continue to have lunch and dinner with the group. From that cabin at the bottom of the garden I devoted myself to observing the life of Walter and the others: Miss Jessica, Jefferson, along with the samurai and other dissonant elements in the life of the Ministry that had become a necessary evil by this time. I also devoted myself to devouring books, poetry and novels, exemplary lives, world history, whatever there was, I was interested in everything because I wanted to make up for lost time, like the time I told you about. I’d read after my Bible-thumping visits to reformatories and crack dens and other places of ill repute in the city, the way Walter had taught me, and the first thing I realized was that real life was poor compared with the lives in books; in books there was harmony and complexity and the most fucked-up things had a sheen of beauty, I noticed that when I read Dostoevsky and Dickens and Böll, and I’m even going to confess something to you, dear friends, which is that with all this reading I found out a little about history and finally learned, at the age of almost forty, that in Europe there’d been an almighty mess called the Second World War, don’t laugh, just imagine what a crummy piece of shit I was, because before, whenever anybody mentioned Hitler, I thought he was a Mafia boss or a serial killer, and nothing more; when I read that he’d been chancellor of Germany, or president, or whatever they call it over there, I was completely stunned, and said to myself, I don’t understand, is that the same country where writers like Thomas Mann and Musil come from? no way, and I decided to ask Walter if we could hire a teacher of modern history for the young people.

Ask Jessica for whatever money you need and take care of it, said Walter, it’s a great idea, as always, so I hired, for a fair amount of money, a guy who wrote historical notes in the Miami Herald, a Cuban named Víctor Mendoza, and as it turned out, I wouldn’t have missed those classes for anything in the world because I was constantly being surprised, like with that great story of the Cuban revolution and the guys with beards coming to power, I could hardly believe it, or the story of Pinochet, my brothers, it was like being born again every day, discovering that this motherfucking planet was a very complicated place, full of angry people always fighting, shooting each other, throwing nuclear warheads, going in for ethnic cleansing, dissolving each other in acid, running each other through the ass with Belgian rifles and everything, that was the kind of thing Mendoza taught us and I carved them into my brain and then went and repeated them to the young men on my prison visits, guys who, as I’ve already explained, found it really difficult to concentrate on one complete sentence, by the time you got to the predicate they’d already forgotten the subject and then they didn’t remember the verb, but they were my children, what else could I do but love them? I was no different or better than they were, just as damaged by reality and the new psychotropic technologies; I’d tell them over and over: Columbus arrived, Bolívar died, Berlin fell, Tenochtitlan fell, Homer existed, Lenin died, Lindbergh arrived, Che was killed, Allende committed suicide, Trotsky was assassinated, anyway, the prosody of History, my friends, and my boys looked at me with red half-open eyes, their brains working extremely slowly, with smiles that had no connection with the situation, I don’t know if you can imagine it; that was my space, alone in the prisons or in the bars with Miss Jessica, almost always in the Flacuchenta.

Walter gave up going out on the streets to spread the word, because he didn’t have the time. All those meetings and services and journeys to other cities monopolized his schedule, so he himself said to me, you’re going to take charge of the hardest part, you’ll be my shepherd of souls, you’ll have to bring them from the bottom of the well up to where I can save them, José, gather them together, be strong, it’s the greatest responsibility there is in this Ministry and I give it to you, comrade, you’re the oldest and most experienced of us, you believe in me and you’d be capable of giving your life blindly for Christ, that I know.

The separation became even greater. I’d observe him from my cabin, and I saw many things.

I saw that the lights in the tower, where Walter had moved his private rooms since the last refurbishment, were on until late, and sometimes I’d see frenzied silhouettes projected on the window. If somebody opened a window you could hear music and laughter. I stayed there in silence by my own window, spying on the movements in the tower, although sometimes I didn’t even look; I only thought and thought about what Walter had come to do in the world and how little I understood of his mission, poor wretch that I was, so I said to myself, continue with your education and one day you’ll understand, and I went back to my books, the poetry and the religious writings and the biographies, and I started to devour them again, and that way life got back on an even keel.

One evening, one of the Italian lawyers told him that the best way to spread his word nationwide was television, why had he never thought of it before? He ought to build a studio in his house, buy air space and hire a team of communicators to help him, and that was what he did, because Walter was extremely impressionable. He was won over by the idea of expanding, like everyone. Don’t you think so, my friends? Doesn’t a human being naturally prefer to have two of something rather than one? That was how Walter began his second stage as a businessman and The Ministry of Mercy in Your Home went on the air, for which he developed a different method. His advisers persuaded him that the style and esthetics of his concerts, with red lights and bulging muscles, wouldn’t work on TV, because all those action series had set the bar really high when it came to convincing the viewers, and what he was doing would look like a children’s game. That’s why he thought up a kind of spiritual call center, with a theoretical part presented by Walter and another part where he was joined by Miss Jessica and they’d answer questions from viewers, using Biblical passages and other religious examples to get across their points.

Within six months the show was generating more money for the Ministry than all those exhausting national tours, and again there were changes. He didn’t entirely stop going out on the streets, because, as he always said, nothing could replace direct contact with reality, grappling at first hand with a person desperate to find a direction in life, and I’d think, oh Walter, you haven’t been in touch with reality for a long time now, but I only thought it, I didn’t say it. At that time there were a lot of things I didn’t dare say.

One night I was alone in my cabin, drinking tonic water and reading Pindar, when I heard heavy breathing in the garden, the noise of footsteps, dead leaves being crushed underfoot, what was it? I went to have a look and was stunned to see that a group of women had climbed over the railings and was heading for the house. I followed them at a distance to see what they were going to do. . They wanted to see Walter, so they tried to force open a couple of doors, and, when they didn’t succeed, they broke a window and got into the house that way. That worried me, so I said to them, hey, ladies, cool it, but they didn’t listen to me, they seemed possessed; there was blood on the glass, so now I was really worried, but I didn’t know what else to do except follow them, and I said to myself, where the fuck are the bodyguards? now that we need them they’re nowhere to be seen, although I also thought, it’s better this way, those savages might hurt one of the old ladies and then it’d be goodbye Ministry, big scandal, so we had to be careful. The women realized that Walter might be in the tower, because they saw lights, and looked for the staircase. I ran up the service stairs and got there before they did, to warn Walter. I saw that his apartment was open. I nervously approached the door and half-opened it, and light spilled out into the corridor.

The scene I saw gave me goose bumps

The young athletes and Walter were stark naked on the couches, having sex in a variety of incredible positions, sucking cocks and balls, the whole thing kept afloat with whiskey and gin, and with a smell of grass that knocked you back; as I was trying to recover my composure I heard a loud nasal snort, and looking to the side of the room saw Miss Jessica lifting her face from a mirror covered in coke, and I don’t know if I dreamed it, but I had the impression that somebody was fucking her in the ass, because what I do remember is that she was in a G-string and her tits were bobbing up and down. I couldn’t speak. I was petrified, I walked to the opposite wall and heard the intruders coming up the main stairs. By a miracle there were already two guards struggling with them, hitting them in the ribs with stun batons, but the women kept coming up. I saw it all unfolding in front of me like someone seeing death, my friends and listeners.

When they heard the women screaming, the guys in the orgy froze and Miss Jessica came to the door, naked. She must have been so zonked out she didn’t know what was going on; the guards looked at her in surprise, because in addition to everything else she was smiling and moving her head in time to a tune. My God, I thought, seeing her with her G-string around her ankles, her mound of Venus shaved, a blood-red circle on her buttocks, as if she’d been sitting on the edge of a wall, and completely out of it. I just wanted to jump out the window onto the ground below to blot out those images. My world had shattered into a thousand pieces and, like a shell floating in a whirlpool, I didn’t know what to do, how to stop it, I wasn’t even sure that all this wasn’t one of Satan’s dirty tricks, but no, it was quite real; I didn’t have the courage to face it, so I went back down the service stairs, without anyone noticing me.

I had to stay away from the house. When, the next day, Walter and Jessica ordered increased security, including electrified fences, I realized that the days of the Ministry were numbered. God would destroy us soon and the only question was, how would he do it? Would He use nuclear warheads, which was the modern way, or would He throw a few thunderbolts? You could smell it in the air. Walter asked me if I’d heard anything the previous night and I said, no, I hadn’t, I’d only woken up at the end, after the guards had intervened and the police had arrived. During lunch, he said that love sometimes took on a destructive form and had to be channeled somewhere; that was what had happened in the house, and we had to remember that. I said yes, shrugged, and went back to my cabin.

For Walter it was a hard blow, something that should have started his brain ticking over, because it threw a beam of light on his great contradiction. I would have liked it if he’d come and talked with me honestly about what was happening, because I could have helped him, but he didn’t. He became reserved and false. His smile was false, and so were his words of optimism. The falsity of words is obvious from listening to them, my friends, prick up your ears and you’ll see, it’s like hitting a wooden surface when there’s nothing behind, the sound bounces and echoes, that’s how hollow words sound. That’s what falsity is. And people must have noticed it, not only me, because things started to go downhill, the ratings dropped, went sharply up and down for a while, then flatlined. At this point, Walter took a couple of decisions that seemed lucid enough, but actually made matters worse, like giving a gold casket to a drowning man. In other words, the things might have been good in themselves, but they didn’t do anything to stop the rot. One of them was the project to spread the word outside the country, going to meet my people on the brother continent, the Land of Delight, Latin America.

The idea was to start in Puerto Rico and travel to the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Panama, Venezuela, and Colombia, sadly skipping over the supreme island, the summit of greatness and enjoyment, my beautiful Cuba, because my cousin the Supreme Bearded One wouldn’t let anyone preaching the word of Christ come anywhere close, oh, what a pity! Walter threw himself into the plans for the journey, advised once again by the Italians, who told him, you have to have a commercial vision, you have to be managerial, efficient, you have to set targets, identify strategic objectives and base your operations on results, you have to optimize and find reliable indicators; Walter’s eyes were opened, and he started to say, let’s decide on objectives, let’s lay down strategies, let’s find reliable indicators. Another important question, according to the Italians, was the question of IMAGE! That was why they hired a small private jet, a Falcon, I think, and put the name of the Ministry on both sides, because one of the consultants said, the Church mustn’t convey the idea of poverty, when did you ever see the Pope traveling economy class? the less you convey the idea of poverty, the more you’ll be listened to, and if anybody criticizes you or talks about ostentation, remember, the word that lights a fire in people’s hearts and cleanses their souls has an obligation to be universal and efficient, and that’s the main thing, the objective; and Walter said: yes, let’s go in the Falcon, let’s be universal, we’re going to cleanse souls. They contacted showbiz promoters in every country and hired sports stadiums, bought advertising space on radio and TV and in national newspapers. I helped write the advertising copy and select the photographs, my brothers, which was more amusing than useful.

The advertising read:

He is coming, He is coming. .

Open your heart to the Supreme Mystery. .

Become part of the Great Ministry.

For peace, the conjunction of souls, and harmony. .

Join the Ministry of Mercy.

If you are lost and cannot see the world,

if your eyes do not help you. .

close them and hear the word

of Reverend Walter de la Salle.

They also had T-shirts, pencils, pamphlets, pennants, posters, and commemorative coins produced, and hired the best lighting, sound, and technical teams that specialized in concerts. Apart from the Italians, Walter invited Jessica and me to travel with him in the Falcon, and sent the samurai in a regular scheduled plane, which they didn’t like one bit. To be honest, I’d have preferred to stay in Miami because I could see the Master’s punishment coming, but I let myself be persuaded because of my desire to see my Land of Delight, which I couldn’t even do in the end because I was too busy organizing the services. The whole thing, as I’ve already hinted, went badly. In Puerto Rico it wasn’t too bad, but in Costa Rica there were three hundred and eight people at the first service and ninety-six at the second. In Panama we didn’t even sell six hundred tickets, and as we’d hired a stadium that seated seven thousand Walter preferred to cancel. There was a scandal in the press and we had to refund the money. As you can imagine, my friends, things went from bad to worse, and Walter was once again a soul suffering in the shadows; if the souls of evil people are black, those of fragile people are gray. Jessica and I would say to him: it’s normal, nobody knows you here yet, your word will reach them but it’s going to take time, and he’d say, where are the management indicators? what did we do wrong? According to the Italians, our calculations for the tour had overestimated the role of the passive element, and he told himself that maybe we should have targeted those strata of society that were more developed from the spiritual point of view. But this was no consolation to Walter, who kept asking himself the same question: why does no one come to me here, whereas they do in the United States, if they’re the same people? what accounted for the difference? why did the people up there never speak to the people down here? He was blinding himself, and would have sudden fits of anger; then he’d lock himself away in the suites rented for him for the tour, without anyone coming to the hotel to look for him or to take photographs or even give him their hand or touch him. The security guys spent their time drinking beer in the lobbies and eating peanuts, because there were never any fans to hold back, no screaming, let alone fainting, and that hurt Walter. God, he would say imploringly, where did they all go? why did you take them? what are you trying to tell me? And I’d say, he isn’t trying to tell you anything we don’t already know, Walter, it’s a problem of space and voice, your voice should win people over, we’ve made a start, more will come, now let’s talk about something else.

One of those nights, in Cartagena de Indias, as we were talking on the balcony of his suite in the Hotel Santa Clara, he grabbed me very hard by the arm and said, José, you’re a good person and that’s why you have to understand that, basically, I’m human, I have human pains and frustrations, nothing makes me different than the others, than any of those that come to hear me; I’m a son of the streets like you, it just so happens that people listen to me. Then he went to the bar and grabbed a quart bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label, two glasses and a full ice tray, and said, I know you’ve distanced yourself from all this, but for tonight I want you to think of us as two friends who need to talk, two friends or partners or flesh and blood Latinos who have to level with each other, this won’t damage you, you’re strong, you have structure in your life; he poured the whiskey and I drank, and in my soul it was as if galleries were collapsing, and a kind of echo rose to the surface from deep inside; a taste of another life or an intense emotion, when you find something that can destroy you the more you long for it, whether love or just obsession. By the third glass, I was confessing my fears to him, saying: you’re bringing down what you yourself created with effort, and all for what? What you get from your shitty life in that tower isn’t much, compared with what you’re putting in danger, but he retorted, you’re wrong, José, if it wasn’t much I wouldn’t do it, I need it, period, I’m like you, I dream of pleasure and things hurt me, don’t be deceived about me; I said: be careful, you’re riding a tiger and if you dismount you’re going to break your legs, and he said, trust me, we’re having a downturn, but it’ll pass, it’ll pass, you have to believe me.

Then we talked about God and life and the distant stars that could be seen over the sea and what hard work it must have been for the Master to create this universal shithouse we live in is only seven days, thing by thing, trees and grains of sand and flies buzzing around shit and the blind fish at the bottom of the sea and the diseases of kangaroos and the flocks of birds, hats off, and we talked about that son of a bitch Satan, who was always interfering in our lives and twisting them around, and the worst thing was that he never tired, we talked about all that until I went to the bathroom and saw that Jessica had returned and was on her iMac chatting or watching videos on YouTube or something like that, because she was dancing with her headphones on: I noticed that beside her, next to a glass filled to the brim with gin, there was a mirror with a considerable quantity of coke, but I walked past and went back on the balcony, where Walter and I continued going over life and the future and the contradictions.

An hour later, with the second bottle of Johnnie Walker half-finished, Jessica came and brought us a tray of coke, and we took turns snorting it, and again something inside me opened my eyes; on top of that Jessica brought a pack of joints and so we smoked then too and inside me I could hear the grunting of an animal that was familiar to me, that had never abandoned me, and so it went on until the black of the night turned ocher and our brains or what remained of them were already bursting; Miss Jessica was jumping like a cricket, she was so high she was climbing the walls, and so, with the last neuron in my brain, I decided to go to my room, just as Jessica was bringing another tray of coke, but I said to myself, if we carry on like this we’re going to end up fucking, better if I go.

I went down to my room, put my head under the faucet and said to myself, what a piece of shit you are, José, how can you offend God like that; the grunting of the animal was becoming unbearable, so I said to myself, it’s over, there won’t be any more crap like that in your life; I grabbed a penknife and made a cut in my right wrist, and then the left, and I swear to you, my friends, it was like a liberation, I saw my blood coming out in the water like a pink ribbon and I felt clean, as if all the poison had gone out of me! I lay down and again saw the light-filled eyes I’d seen that first day, a drop of water glowing in the middle of the night, and I started praying, and I prayed until I was overcome with a great sense of calm and my eyes closed.

To those of you who think I’m going to tell you about my own death and are already making incredulous faces, let me tell you straight away that after what might have been a very long time I opened my eyes again. Mysteriously, instead of the hotel or the fire and brimstone of Hell and the servants of Satan, I saw a white, very white room; I was surrounded by nurses who were all hard at work over me, an injection here, a thermometer there. I was alive, ha ha, like in the movies, the hero is saved at the last moment because the water overflowed and went out under the door, so they called reception and bang! I hadn’t checked out after all, I was saved.

Soon afterwards Walter came and said: I understand why you did it, but you must resist. It doesn’t matter what you and I do, what matters is them, the thousands of people who believe in us, don’t you understand. .? Those eyes filled with questions, those people with broken lives who look trustingly to us. It’s them, damn it! They will save us and they will give us redemption, because they believe in us! You have to be strong and take care. Yes, I said, and closed my eyes. When I opened them again he was gone.

Two weeks later I left the hospital. Jessica drove me in silence to the airport and from there we flew with two nurses in another Falcon, hired specially for me. I was moved by that, my friends; we traveled in complete silence, with me looking at the clouds that seemed like whirlpools in the air and thinking about what had happened, and forgive me if I wax a little lyrical here, but it’s just that wanting your own death is something that calls everything into question, because if life is the most precious gift, how is it possible that a person can choose to throw it away? and so I asked myself the most difficult question of all, my friends, which is, what makes life worth living? Walter’s words lodged themselves in my tired brain and from there opened fire: it’s them, it’s their faith that’s going to save us.

When I arrived, Walter held a private service in my honor; he never used the word “suicide” but “accident,” and kept repeating the expression “the fragility of life” and also that “life sometimes gets away from us.”

Time passed, and I continued to distance myself from the house and stayed in my cabin, and the really paradoxical thing was that Walter started to visit me at night. I can’t get to sleep, José, he’d say, tell me what you’re reading, and he’d sit down on the floor, and I’d read him poems by St John of the Cross, the greatest of all, and by St Teresa and Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz and of course by Abbot Marchena and Góngora, and he’d listen in complete silence, not saying a word, not breathing, not moving any part of his face, nothing, it was as if he wasn’t really there, which at the beginning sent a shiver down my spine but which I eventually got used to. At other times he’d cry, also in silence. The way somebody who’s understood something very profound cries, or somebody who’s moved by a beautiful or noble gesture, I don’t know what exactly Walter understood as he listened to me reading poems, I never asked him, although he must have found something important in it; at the crack of dawn he’d go back to his tower, but his spirit was still tormented, I’d see him pacing back and forth up there, going around and around in circles, as if he was writing a message with his body, the answer to a question I didn’t know and neither did he, my dear friends, I know this is all a bit obscure but that’s the way it was and that’s the only way I can tell it.

One day Walter decided to hire someone to write down his words and the ideas that cropped up in meetings with his parishioners. The idea had come to him one day in the Carruthers Bookstore on Hopalong Street and Quincy Drive downtown, where he saw a book with a blue cover entitled My Lives, by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. He looked through it and decided to buy it, not because he believed in Scientology but to see how it was put together, at least that was what he told me, because clearly an idea was going around in his head; then we went to the Big Kahuna on Atlantic Square to have a burger, and after leafing through the book for a while he said, don’t you think my ideas on life and salvation ought to be written down? that way they’ll survive if the Father decides to take me, what do you think? My feet turned cold when I heard him. It was the first time I’d heard him talk about his own death.

The idea was a good one, so I made a few inquires and found an unemployed writer, a guy from the north of Colombia who wrote essays for the students at the Faculty of Letters at the university; his name was Estiven Jaramillo and his job would be to go with Walter when he met the people and write down what he said. Miss Jessica and Jefferson looked at him incredulously and didn’t seem at all pleased, among other things because this poor Estiven, I have to say, had a few problems, including one particularly bad one of a physical nature, a spectacular disproportion between the huge size of his head and the limbs of his body, like those human dolls you see at the entrance to toy shops with pumpkins or watermelons on their shoulders, but this was on the physical level, because on the intellectual level Estiven was tremendously tough and he demonstrated as much right from the start in the quality of the notes he made.

In this way, he was also helping himself, because from what he said he’d had to leave Colombia in a hurry. As a result of a series of articles on the laboratories maintained by the guerrillas in a number of areas of that long-suffering country, they put a bomb in his car, to be detonated when he started it, but as so often happens in movies, it was his wife and two children who were blown up.

The first day Walter brought Estiven’s notes to my cabin and we read them out loud, and they were really good! The next day we did the same and so on for several nights until Walter asked me to be the official editor, the one who would take a chisel or a fountain pen to Estiven’s notes, O.K.? That was the start, my friends, of what we might call “my vocation” for writing books; at the same time a kind of mystique about the affairs of the Ministry was reborn, something I’d almost completely lost. I threw myself into the work. The texts were good, they convincingly conveyed the greatness of the message in a few words; each section had a narrative thread that made it both easy to follow and educational. Imagine what that meant for me, I’d only recently tried to slit my wrists, and now I was writing a book. Christ must really be great, no kidding. It was like an award for my fascination with books, because after the Big Enchilada and His son books were what I loved the most, those parallelepipeds of paper that had given me a past and even a future. So I asked Walter, how much freedom do I have to rewrite and interpret? and he said, complete freedom, a hundred percent, you were my first disciple and you know what I do better than anyone, the only reason I didn’t ask you to make the notes was because I didn’t think I had the right to do so, and I think I made the correct decision, because this book has to be the work of at least three heads, Estiven’s and yours being more cultivated and mine the one that advances blindly, like a submarine without lights at the bottom of the sea, following the inspiration that the Big Boss whispers in my ear when I encounter a wretched soul, like a mystical Doppler effect, an impulse that comes and goes, indicating distance, but when it returns is enriched by the space it has traveled, the speed of whoever hears it, and, who knows, even by its own ideas; let’s make a great book that’ll be a summary of our work, the final achievement of the Ministry and both our lives, friend, that was what he said and again I sensed a cloud laden with dark premonitions. He clenched his fist, raised it and knocked it against mine, which is the way people greet each other in the Caribbean, fist to fist and fist to the heart, that was how Walter said goodbye before going to his tower, and outside it was raining, just like in a movie, and as he was happy he raised his arms into the lines of water and let them hit him for a while, maybe with the idea of purifying himself; it was very beautiful to see him there, with the water streaming down his armpits, falling from his jaw and his fingers. That night, my friends, I almost believed in him again.

Jessica and Jefferson still regarded Estiven with suspicion. To them he was an intruder who had Walter’s full attention with something they were excluded from, and in addition, I insist on this, there was the whole physical thing, not only that big head due to water on the brain, but also a lack of carburation in one of his digestive organs, because every time he opened his mouth his breath absolutely reeked, it was like lifting the lid off a container of organic waste, which was why Jefferson, who was sensitive to men’s smells, him being a faggot and all that, and Jessica, who in spite of her religious dedication had already given signs that she was still a hundred per-cent woman when it came to sex, despised him and found him disgusting and made passing comments to win over the others against him, which must have been quite hard to bear, but Estiven must have been really needy because he stood all the joking in spite of the fact that nobody ever offered him a glass of Coke or a meat pie or a piece of the cake made by Felicity, the black cook. He seemed used to all that kind of thing, as if he’d seen it all before. On one occasion he went into a drugstore at night and as he approached the cash desk the owner was waiting for him with a sawn-off shotgun, aiming it at his chest and saying, get out of here, you fucking thief, and don’t come back! and other people shouted, can’t you read? no pets allowed, out! But I liked him and admired his work, and apart from that, as he was from Magangué he talked like us, the friends of the immortal Caribbean, a man from the land of reggaeton and champeta and vallenato, a man who, like me, had been overtaken by life but was still pedaling, with the wind and everything else against him, the wind and life and the world in general, and there he was, floating like a turd or a log in this Babylon of the Caribbean.

As I’ve already said, he had a good ear for getting convincing phrases out of Walter’s words. He was able to put in prose what he said in his dialogues; at the end of the afternoon he’d tell me what he’d done and then I’d take over and make a fair copy, correcting and adding, intensifying this effect or polishing that idea so that the whole thing was harmonious and the basic message shone through even more, which really opened my eyes, until one day, going over the text, I had the brilliant idea of turning it back into dialogues, a traditional way of conveying knowledge; when that idea came to me my eyes filled with tears and I said to myself, José, you son of a bitch, you’ve just given birth, for the first time in your damned life, to a good idea, a fucking brilliant idea! you’re going to be the Plato to the new Socrates! What an opportunity!

With Walter’s approval, I set to work. I gave each section a separate heading, like Conversation with an Angel on 47th Street, or Answers to a Disciple with AIDS, a kind of mixture of the classical and the contemporary; and I organized everything by theme: drugs, poverty, violence, abuse, prostitution. . My head started flying like a falcon that’s been let loose: a dialogue with three Caribbean girls selling their bodies I entitled The Open Legs of Latin America, and a conversation with a black neighborhood leader Sad Song for the Great-Grandchildren of Kunta Kinte. I was overcome with lyricism, my friends, and as I worked I became aware of how technically complex the whole process was, and so one evening, after getting the go-ahead from our financial controller, in other words, Miss Jessica, I set off with a couple thousand dollars to buy a computer, an Apple Mac that I installed in my cabin, a big screen, and as a screensaver I of course chose a sunset over the Caribbean, and I began to pound the keyboard, convinced that I was dealing with something really big.

I soon came to one of the greatest dilemmas: the title. I thought and thought for several days until it came to me: Encounters with Amazingly Normal People, and so I put it on the draft. As was to be expected, Walter approved it, and I continued with the process. Later I had to deal with the question of what I call “hot and cold writing,” in other words, the way you perceive the writing as you’re doing it and the way you see it after being away from it for a few hours, when the words get cold and you can look calmly at what you did, and think about the distance between that result and the impression you had as you were doing it in the heat of the moment. It’s like the casting of the metal in the making of bells, as you see in the film Andrei Rublev, by old Tarkovsky: the tone and appearance of a cast when you put the molten steel in the mold is very different than its final form, when it’s cooled down, and the same goes for words: when they’re a flow of lava descending from the cerebral cortex to the fingers they have an shiny appearance that blinds and flatters, but their true face is the one they acquire hours later, when the smoke clears and you can see them by the light of day; they’re never as radiant as they were before, and you dither and feel lost and go back to the beginning, you stand back and redo it or give it all up and are left with the empty space that’s the silence of writing and which, as in music, has its own value, that’s the way it is, my brothers, but anyway, let’s carry on with the story.

Walter started having highs and lows again, sometimes he was euphoric and then he’d plunge into a deep depression and wouldn’t come down from his tower for three or four days. Those were the years that biographies dismiss in a couple of lines, but as you know, life happens every day and we can’t always be on the crest of the wave, until we come to that chapter in which lives rush through a gorge that quickly leads to the void, sometimes to death and very rarely to happiness, in fact almost never.

Oh, my friends, my dear friends, maybe we need a little fresh air here, so let’s remember the story of that man who made himself wings with feathers stuck on with wax and started to fly, higher each time, and having seen the world so much from above cherished the fantasy of dominating it, because from up there it looked like something he could hold in his hands, a loose stone, a bottle top, and he dreamed of reaching the gods, he continued rising and rising, friends, and when he got to the top of the sky his wings went all to hell, the wax melted and down he plummeted, free fall without a net. Let this serve as an introduction to what follows, in metaphorical terms, even though the beginning of the end for the Ministry of Mercy was an unexpected visit, a man in suit and tie who came to the gate and asked, does the Reverend Walter de la Salle live here?

Jefferson looked him up and down curiously and said, meetings with parishioners are over for the day, and he turned away, but the guy stopped him and said, wait, that’s not why I’m here, come closer, and took out a shiny police badge, I’d like you to tell me your name, seeing as we’re here; Jefferson turned pale and said, my name’s Jefferson, I haven’t done anything. The officer adopted a forceful tone and said, cool it, nigger, I’m not saying you’ve done anything, I was only asking for your name, O.K.? and he said again, Jefferson Lafayette, I work here; O.K., Jefferson, we’re doing fine, the next thing I’m going to ask is even simpler, open the fucking door and call Reverend Walter right now! you think you can do that, nigger? Jefferson let him through and ran to the house.

The detective had come for information. They’d arrested a minor with six thousand dollars in bills buying crack on Meridien Island and when they questioned him he’d mentioned the Ministry. Then he’d retracted his statement and his parents were adamant that the boy was being rehabilitated thanks to the Ministry, but the whole thing sounded fishy. In the course of his investigation, the detective had heard a rumor that Walter hired minors for private parties. There was no actual accusation, but he wanted to take a look around and see if he could figure out how these rumors had started.

Tall stories, detective, said Walter on receiving him, you can’t imagine the number of people who envy my success; more than one jealous pastor would love to see my Ministry in ruins, but they won’t, detective, because the work we do doesn’t belong to me but to all the people who believe in it, and nobody will ever able to bring it down, do you understand me?

Absolutely, said the detective, that’s what I’m trying to avoid with this visit, I’ve seen your TV show and I’ll tell you something, my wife believes you’re the son of God, and she really believes it, is it true? I mean, are you really the son of God? Walter looked straight at him and replied: I’m a son of the God of those who believe in me, officer, will that do? No, replied the man, unfortunately not, I’d like to see your property, may I? it isn’t an inspection, only a visit. Go ahead, said Walter, we don’t have anything to hide.

They went to the communal rooms and the refectory, the kitchen and the garage. Then they came to my cabin and when he saw me the detective asked, is this one of your apostles? Nobody laughed at the joke and I showed him my papers. He took them to the window to look at them in the light and said: former inmate of Moundsville, eh? you’re certainly living in style now. . He looked through the bookshelves, grabbed The Odyssey and said, very good book, yes sir, which of you has read it? He flipped through the pages, as if shuffling cards, and put it back in its place. He was looking for something, that was obvious. Returning to the garden, he looked up and said, what’s in that tower?

Jessica, alerted by Jefferson, had already cleaned the place.

My God, reverend, what luxury, he said when he saw the white leather couches, the LCD screen, the Jacuzzi with the piped music, the paintings with 3-D images of Christ. I didn’t know sons of God lived such a. . He stopped to think of a word, but it didn’t come, so he said, do your followers know you live like this? Walter looked at him and said, do you think there’s something reprehensible or inappropriate about that? No, reverend, not in the eyes of the law, but I seem to remember Jesus saying something about the rich and the kingdom of the Lord, I don’t remember exactly, I’ll have to ask my wife.

You’ve surprised me, said the detective, as they went back down to the garden, to be honest, your wealth raises a lot of questions in my mind. They walked along the paved path to the street and Walter said, when I feel I need to know what those questions are I’ll call you, but for now give my very best regards to your wife. I don’t think you’re really interested in my questions, replied the detective, but if I were you I’d get a lawyer, I’d hate my wife to miss her favorite show, if you get my meaning, my visit is over, the Miami police department thanks you for your cooperation; then he left without shaking anyone’s hand.

That’s how things were, my friends, and of course I thought, shit, the hurricane is heading straight for the living room of our house, no doubt about it. The next night, when Walter came to my cabin, I said, what about that thing with the detective? but he dismissed it, it’s nothing, José, accusations by the envious, it’s that son of a bitch Malik McPercy of the Church of Juliana the Redeemer, because nobody goes to his prayer meetings, or the people at Crisostom Abogalene just around the corner, whose hall is always empty, and I said, that’s as may be, but you have to be careful about what you do, Walter, they have us in their sights and we mustn’t give them ammunition; but he said, if something happens I’ll know how to defend the Ministry and everyone, don’t worry, how’s our book going?

A few days later Walter asked me a strange question: do you have a bank account? I looked at him in surprise and said, of course not, why would I want something like that? I have everything I need right here, and he said, go with Jessica and open an account, I’ll give you instructions, don’t contradict me, I want you to be paid for the work you’ve done on the book, which is really excellent; Estiven has already had something and I want you to have the same as him, it’s only fair, don’t refuse, I won’t take no for an answer. I opened the account and Jessica put in two thousand dollars, but I said to her, I’ll never touch that money, never, and she replied, do whatever you like, it’s yours, I’m just following Walter’s suggestions.

I sent the book to a publishing house with a financial proposition, and three months later we received the galley proofs, which Walter and Estiven and I read out loud in my cabin. There were 987 pages, to which I decided to add a very brief history of the Ministry and a basic chronology of Walter’s life. Then came the question of the cover. My first suggestion, my friends, was a photograph of Walter during one of his services, showing him kneeling, bare-chested, and the congregation making the sign of the cross, but he said, no, José, I don’t want the book to be about me, I’m only an emissary, I communicate with something that’s already in the people, the nest where God resides; I know you mean well, but it can’t be a photograph of me. Miss Jessica suggested a photograph of the Chapel of Mercy the Living God and, with all the crosses in the vault lit up and looking really beautiful, but again he said no, we mustn’t ape the vanity of the church of Rome, and he opted for a photograph of a slum neighborhood with a group of black teenagers playing basketball, a Dodge Dart with flat tires, a drugstore on a corner, and three people sitting on the sidewalk in an expectant attitude; to one side of the picture a man in a sweater is talking to a woman who’s been beaten up, and in spite of the fact that the man has his back to us and is wearing a hood we sense that he’s somebody special and that he’s giving solace to the woman, who’s only just stopped crying and is starting to give a timid smile in spite of her bruised cheeks and the dried blood on her nose. Her expression is what the cover is all about, my friends, and finally we came to the last subject, which was how to distribute it among the parishioners, whether or not we should charge them, because obviously the Ministry was buying twenty thousand copies from the publisher, which was why they’d agreed to publish it immediately.

Again Miss Jessica gave her opinion, saying, we have to charge something to cover our costs; if we give it away people won’t attach the same value to it, after all, they buy Bibles, don’t they? In the end it was decided to give it away free to those members who contributed more than five hundred dollars a month, and we all agreed. To everyone else, it would sell for thirteen dollars, and I won’t even tell you how much of a fuss it caused. The book had to be reprinted several times because we didn’t have enough copies, and Walter was reborn. Excellent reviews appeared in the Miami Herald and other local newspapers, he gave long interviews on radio and TV, and we reached a hundred thousand copies, which was incredible; I was prouder than I’d ever been in my life, it was as if that object of a thousand pages was a child that other people appreciated and read, and that gained widespread recognition, but that I’d modestly helped to create.

Every joy has its danger, my friends, believe me, because after this resounding success those who were against us now took our good fortune personally and brought out the heavy artillery; I don’t know what he’d been paid, but one of the black faggots who came to Walter’s parties started spilling the beans, describing those parties to a newspaper, without skipping anything: the lines of coke, the poppers, the whiskey, and of course the sex, and the problem was that the boy was a minor.

Soon the detective showed up again, this time with a search warrant and six of his colleagues, but we were able to get out of things thanks to the Italian lawyers. A large check is a great help, a small check is a small help, so we settled for half, O.K.? The boy’s mother withdrew her complaint and everybody went home happy, but the next month there were two more accusations, one of them with recordings and cell phone photographs where you could see everything. The family told the Sicilians they’d drop everything for two million dollars, but Walter wouldn’t agree, going into one of his trances, which I’d once thought were mystical but now didn’t know what the hell they were or where they came from, and saying, I’ll protect everyone, there’s nothing to fear. Three days later, the next accusations fell like a meteor shower. The parents of six boys asked for millions in compensation for the abuse to their minors, presenting sworn statements, photographs, and videos. There was nothing we could do about it and the scandal blew up in the press.

The police came to take Walter away. It was a massive operation, they closed the neighboring streets, a helicopter flew over the house, and of course there were TV crews outside to film the arrest live. Large numbers of police officers took shelter behind the wall and the one who seemed to be in charge took out a loud-hailer and said, Reverend Walter de la Salle, please come out with your hands up, along with everyone else in the house.

I was watching it all that from my cabin, thinking, what a ridiculous spectacle! it isn’t as if we’re murderers! I opened the door to go toward where the police were, but at that moment I heard a series of shots, and I cried out, don’t shoot, they’re coming out! Much to my surprise, dear friends, the shots were coming from the top of the tower and one of the police officers was writhing wounded on the asphalt.

I threw myself on the ground and closed my eyes, and my head turned into a swarm of questions, or rather dilemmas or aporias, shall I go to where Walter is, stand by his side and resist until they shoot us down? should I go out and try to negotiate with the police, act as a mediator? go back to my cabin until the commotion dies down? Another burst of shots distracted me, and in a second I saw destruction hovering over us. My vision had come back, my brothers, my listeners, the one I’d dreamed some time earlier: the image of a monk leading a group of hooded men through a destroyed city; rubble, dead bodies, twisted metal, ash in the air, tongues of fire.

I crawled back to the cabin, because by now it was impossible to get near the house. The shots were tearing up the tiled floor of the patio and making holes in the walls; there was a shower of glass, tiles, red stone. The firing was concentrated on the tower, where there was fierce resistance, and I thought, what fools, there’s no way they can win, they ought to come out; I was still thinking that when I saw one of the gates of the garden open. Jessica was waving a white flag and coming out with a group: Felicity, two gardeners, and a driver; then Jefferson came out, wounded in one arm, and finally the bodyguards, but Walter wasn’t among them. They were all handcuffed and bundled into a van, but as the police moved toward the house more shots came from the tower.

He wants to die, I thought, he wants them to kill him like Christ; the response from outside was a violent one, and a minute later the first floor was in flames, with tongues of fire coming out through the windows and rising toward the tower. A SWAT team got in the house and a tanker truck put out the fire. By now, the shooting had stopped. After a while they signaled that they’d searched everywhere, but hadn’t found him, so the alert continued; and now comes the strangest part, my friends, which is that after the search not a trace of Walter’s body was found, not a cell or a print, nothing at all. He’d vanished into thin air.

That was when I finally left my cabin, with my hands behind my head. Before they could throw me to the ground, the detective stopped them, and said, let him go, he can help us. He put his arm around my shoulders and said, now then, José, your name is José, isn’t it, now why don’t you tell me where the hell the secret passages and hiding places are in this house, I don’t want to have to pull it to pieces but that’s exactly what I’ll do if I don’t find him in, let’s say, an hour, do I make myself clear? Yes, detective, but believe me, I don’t know any passages or hiding places, this house was built long before the Ministry took it over.

They put me in the van with the others and sat me down next to Jessica. Where is he? I whispered, and she said in my ear, I don’t know, he ordered us to leave and said, I’ll stay here and pray to the Lord, you go, and that was the last I saw of him.

This happened twelve years ago, my dear friends. The police never found Walter, dead or alive, despite a thorough search that involved the blueprints of the complex, scanning devices, drills, and so on. All the furniture was carefully taken to pieces, but nothing was found. They questioned Jessica and me for weeks, but in the end they had to let us go; the bodyguards and Jefferson, on the other hand, they put back in prison.

So it was that one day Jessica and I met on Sylvester Road, soon after we were released, and I said, what do we do now? She replied that she wouldn’t do anything. I know Walter’s alive and will look for me, so I’ll wait for him. I looked her in the eyes and saw again the young woman from all those years earlier. I gave her a kiss on the cheek and walked away, saying: if he comes back, he’ll make sure we all get together again.

I didn’t know what to do or where to go, but then remembered the bank account, so I went to the branch to withdraw a few dollars and have a bite to eat while I cleared my mind. At the window a surprise was waiting for me: the balance was three million dollars! Walter, what a fucking bastard you are, what a piece of shit. I took out five thousand bills. A little way along the street there was a not too dirty hotel, the Stardust Inn. I went in and took a room. I asked for a chicken sandwich and a Diet Coke, what could I hope for? I looked at the scars on my veins and thought, now would be the perfect time to do it, but maybe it’d be better to wait until morning. Besides, the sandwich was good. I took out the bills and laid them out on the bedspread, took my clothes off and filled the bathtub. I immersed myself in the water with the can of Coke and took a few sips. Outside, night was falling. Then I closed my eyes and went to sleep.

7. THE MAN WHO GOT AWAY

José Maturana slumped forward across the table, with tears in his eyes, and was immediately buried beneath an avalanche of applause. It was strange to see him with his long gray mane of hair, his unkempt beard and his tough guy tattoos, so moved by his own words; he stood up, took a few steps toward the proscenium and gave a simple bow that earned him more applause, in fact a standing ovation. I was impressed and, to say the least, inhibited; could my text hope to arouse a fraction of this enthusiasm? of course not. . mine was supposed to last no more than twenty minutes, the time that, according to the form, every speaker was allotted, but Maturana had spoken for nearly an hour, although I had not kept count. What was more, his talk had not been read but improvised, which was an amazing feat, something only a real professional could have achieved. I again looked for his biography in the form that the ICBM had given out at the door, but the information was the same, and extremely concise: nothing on his childhood and nothing on the years since the end of the Ministry of Mercy. There was not even any mention of something as simple as his country of residence, was he still living in Miami or somewhere else in the United States? The dossier mentioned that he had published other books under a variety of pseudonyms, and there was no photograph.

I left the lecture hall trying to digest what I had heard and saw that there were other activities going on in the side rooms. In one, the poet from Benin and president of the Circle of African Poets, Joseph Olalababa Jay, was speaking; at the end of the corridor, in an adjoining hall, the round table Concentric Circles of Modernity was in progress, chaired by Professor Aparajit Chattoppadhyay from Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. But I kept going. What with the ravages of the previous night’s alcohol and Maturana’s words, my head was overloaded; better to look for a place to be alone, in silence, so I went down to one of the inner gardens of the hotel.

It was like stepping back in time.

The path that wound past the bushes was of sandstone, like many of the buildings in this part of the city. I sat down on a bench and watched a robin peck at a puddle of water, then a dragonfly. I remembered my days in the mountains, my long, long soliloquies with the stones, the dragonflies, and the robins. There was a certain language in things, a language that had spoken to me in those days. Now I tried to hear it again, but my ears were as hard as stone. Standing by one of the ornamental fountains was a short man with a gray beard. As I passed him, he turned and said, are you the writer? His accent sounded familiar so I asked, Kaplan? Yes, he said, I’m Kaplan, pleased to meet you, it’s nice to find a fellow countryman in such a remote place, come, let’s walk together for a while, I think there are orchids along that path.

The war that is destroying this place has deep roots, he said, so unlike our sad war. I told him that I had been outside the country for a long time and that I had been ill, but Kaplan replied, it isn’t necessary to keep up to date, it’s the same war that’s been going on for forty years, or is it fifty? Things never change: boundless ambition, rivers of blood, hatred, ignorance; I wanted to know if he had been a direct victim, and he said, come, let’s carry on as far as that fountain and I’ll tell you the story.

My family is from the city of Armenia, in the department of Quindío. We’re Jews. For a hundred years we’ve been in the clothing and wholesale fabric business, and we’ve done well, with branches in Medellín, Pereira, Cali, and Bogotá. Kaplan’s Tailors, maybe you’ve seen some of our advertisements. Three hundred employees and a seven-story building in Armenia. A hundred stores throughout the country. The work of four generations, because the first Kaplan arrived in Colombia in 1894, from Polish Galicia; he escaped to avoid military service and got on a ship he was told was going to America. South America, as it turned out. Seven years later, he went back to Poland to fetch his wife, and with her he opened his first tailor’s shop. Three generations have passed since then, we’re Colombians. The problem started in the middle of the year 2001. The paramilitaries of Quindío started sending us messages: we had to pay them a large sum of money every month in return for protection; we said no, no thanks, we’re peaceful people, we provide work and progress, we don’t have enemies. We told them we didn’t think it was right to give money to murderers. We’re Jews and we can’t deal with murderers. A family meeting was called, us three brothers and our brother-in-law, and we confirmed our decision; there will be consequences, we said, but we just have to keep firm; they asked for money again and again we said no. What they were asking us for we spent on bodyguards and bulletproof cars. A couple of months went by until they put a bomb in one of our stores in Pereira, an assistant was killed, and three loaders were seriously wounded. That night they called again and said, you see? you need protection, but we refused. The following month, they attacked my brother Azriel on the highway to Medellín, fortunately he was in a bulletproof car with three bodyguards. One of the paras died, and that was the start of the war. The family met again and we said, we need to be stronger, redouble our security, buy weapons, be prepared. Our brother-in-law went farther: I have contacts in Israel, they can help us, but I said: let’s wait.

It was distressing not knowing where the next blow would come from, like protecting yourself from a mosquito in the dark. We spoke to the police but they couldn’t do anything; they said they’d increase their patrols, tap our phones, have people followed. They didn’t do a thing and one day the attack came. A car bomb on the building in Armenia; it destroyed the first three floors and left nine people dead, innocent people who were just passing by. We met again and took the decision: part of the family would go to New York and Tel Aviv, and we brothers would stay in Armenia and fight. Reason was on our side, we thought, God would have to help us. I made inquiries and found out the names of some politicians who were friends of the paras. I summoned them to a restaurant and said to them, why are the paras treating us like this? don’t we pay taxes and create work? don’t we deserve respect? But the politicians said: you’re businessmen, hardworking and honest, you should support them; the paras are defending the businessmen and the hardworking families of this country. I said: we don’t need that kind of protection, we have to respect our history, haven’t you ever heard of the Holocaust? we can’t negotiate with murderers, we’re Jews. The politicians looked at us gravely and said, we’ll study the case and pass it on, of course all that comes at a price, but you can pay it, you’re wealthy; I said: aren’t you elected by the people? you already have salaries, that’s your income, why should I pay you? They looked at me in surprise and their expressions gradually began to decompose; first a soft laugh, then a noisy peal of laughter that distorted their faces, turned their cheeks red, inflamed their eyes. One of them said, you’re funny, you know, do all Jews have such a good sense of humor? You really are very funny, said another, wiping away his tears of laughter. They took a few seconds to recover their composure. Good, said the one who seemed to be their leader, now seriously, the day after tomorrow we’ll tell you how much our mediation is worth and then you can decide, but I can tell you right now that it’s advisable to accept because this country is becoming very unsafe, with all those guerrillas everywhere, cooperate with the country in which you’ve made money, show some solidarity. The other politicians stood up saying, yes, it’s highly advisable, give that to Colombia, be patriots even though you’re foreigners, don’t be such bastards. Before they went out, they threw a piece of paper on the table. We’ve left you the check, to accustom you to being friendly: a bottle of Buchanan’s and some meat snacks, you kept us waiting a long time; and six Absolut with tonic because the fat man is well-bred and only drinks vodka, not much for you, Mr. Kaplan. But I stood up and left without paying.

A week later, they asked for thirty million pesos. I didn’t even gather the family but said, we won’t pay a single peso, you have salaries, the State pays you. Oh, you’re a foreigner, you don’t understand, but I interrupted and said, no, señor, I’m not a foreigner, and I do understand, I’m not going to pay you a single peso, you or your bosses. The politicians said, oh, then you’ll have to face the consequences, and I replied, that’s what we plan to do, but you’ll also have to take the consequences. I was filled with rage, I had to pray to calm down; then I called my brother-in-law in Tel Aviv, and told him the moment had come; no problem, Moisés, he replied, I’ll send somebody. Six people arrived from Israel, bought weapons, and followed the trail from the last messenger all the way up to one of the bosses of Armenia. They grabbed him one night when he was out painting the town red with some girls from Cali, they took him out naked and left him lying in the center with a note that said: Beware of the Kaplans, get out of town, you have three days. I thought it would be the last thing I did in the country, when it was over I would go to New York, where I had quite a bit of capital invested. We put the business in the hands of administrators. Colombia was expelling us. We had to get our help from Israel, can you imagine? The one thing worse than losing your country is losing your dignity, and I said, we’re going to see this fight through to the end! Four days later, our people grabbed two of the politicians and said, you have a week to leave the Congress and the Senate, whether you like it or not, if not we’ll bring you down like rotten fruit.

Two days later, we gathered them together. They weren’t so proud now, they wanted to know if we were declaring war on them, but I said: you already declared it, being strong with the weak and weak with the strong. Another asked if the group that had threatened them was ours, and I said, you don’t deserve a reply, they’re soldiers of God, aren’t you believers? A third one tried to reconcile us: Señor Kaplan, we understand your case and we could intercede without charging you, but you have to assure us of your goodwill; I replied: we don’t want your understanding or your clemency, you had the chance and missed it. . Get out of here, you sons of bitches!

That evening, my brother and I left the country. I felt angry and very sad. God willing I can go back some day, I dream of the mountains of Quindío, the smell of the coffee plantations and the wet earth. From that moment I devoted myself first to reading biographies, and then to writing them.

He approached an orchid, sniffed it and said: hmm, it’s the smell of the country we’ve just been talking about. I moved my nose closer but could not smell anything. Then I asked him: and what happened to the politicians? He looked at me slyly and said, well, that’s another story, I’ll tell it the next time we meet, which I hope will be very soon. He walked to the gate of the garden, stopped, turned, and said: of course you know that tomorrow I give my talk, did you see it on the program? I hadn’t seen it, but I said, of course, Señor Kaplan, are you going to tell your story? No, he said. I’m going to tell a similar story.

On returning to the coffee shop, I saw Marta. Although she was talking on her cell phone, I assume to her newspaper, because she was taking notes, she signaled to me to come over. She hung up and said, hi, speak of the devil, I was just talking about you to the arts editor and we’re in luck, he doesn’t know you but he’s agreed to an article about you, his idea is for a long article that illustrates the current situation of midrange writers, the moderately successful ones compared with the bestsellers, what do you think? it would come out in the Saturday supplement as one of the items connected with the ICBM.

I thought about it, then said, are you sure that’s a literary subject? publishers would have much more to say on the subject, they’re the ones who classify their authors depending on their sales, why don’t you ask Ebenezer Lottmann, from Tiberias? I think that would make for a better article. She sat there for a moment, staring out at something in the garden, and said: O.K., I suggest another, the situation of the writer in Latin America, how about that? Oh, that’s been done to death, I said, but she retorted, you don’t think that in Iceland we spend our lives reading Latin American novels, do you? you may think it’s been done to death, but I have to think of my readers. I was not very convinced, so I said, and what does your editor think about that? She looked at me very gravely, looked through her notes and said: for him any subject is fine, provided it reflects the current situation of the committed writer. As I listened to her, I remembered the Icelandic writer Arnaldur Indridason, the author of Jar City, and asked her whether in Iceland, mystery novelists were committed to the depiction of reality? She nodded but did not speak. I prefer not to say anything in order not to influence you, what’s your opinion? I have opinions on what happens around me and I suppose that shows through in what I write, I said. Marta hesitated, wondering whether or not to take out her recorder, finally decided against it, and said, no, wait. . I know! It’ll be better if I do a article in a literary style, a piece of “new journalism” about the impossibility of interviewing a writer in the middle of a city under siege, how about that? It depends, I said, what’s the cause of that impossibility? is it the war or is it you? I don’t know, I hope to answer with the article. Do you want to start now? I said, and she said, not really, or maybe yes, but as an exercise, in fact we’ve already started, let me take a few notes.

I turned my attention to the garden and, right at the end, beyond a stone wall, the image of some distant buildings reminded me of what was happening outside. In all this time I had not heard any explosions, but I assumed that even in wars people do not shoot all the time. I went to one of the balconies and looked at the city — the cube-like sandstone houses, the acacias and jacarandas, the wall, the minarets, the sky filled with crescent moons and towers — through the evening mist.

On the other side of the garden, between the bushes, I saw José Maturana. He was waving his arms in the middle of a group of people. It stuck me that it was going to be very difficult for the next speaker. I noticed that Marta was also watching him and thought: now there’s a good subject for her newspaper. I told her that and she asked, do you think it’s all true? I don’t see any reason to doubt it, it’s a story that may seem unusual to us, but in Miami, in those neighborhoods that are like a jungle, it may be the most normal thing in the world, a life like any other. She studied him for a few moments and said, there’s something about the way he moves that confuses me, but I still don’t know what it is; as I listened to him I had the feeling it must all been have a dream, but I don’t know, don’t pay any attention to me. I looked again, but Maturana had already gone. Don’t you think his scars and tattoos are real? the proof of his story is on his body. . Marta had already stopped listening to me, she was now taking notes, with great concentration, so I went back to the garden in search of dragonflies and robins.

It was getting toward evening and the delegates were chatting and laughing, some drinking coffee, and others already warming their engines with white wine or beer. I caught the fact that the round table Tendencies in Autofictional Narrative, chaired by the Congolese Theophilus Obenga, professor at the Sorbonne, had been a great success. I saw him on the way to the bar and heard him say: “Life is above all a narrative, the truths of reality create very clear links of language, which are then stored in the memory and are transformed into experience.” I looked for José Maturana again, but he was not there. Marta, holding a cup of coffee, said to me: I have to get straight down to writing but I don’t want to miss dinner, they say there’ll be a few words by the honorary president of the ICBM, would it disturb you if I work in your room? Of course not, it’s Room 1109, here’s the key.

When I was alone, I looked around the throng and spotted Supervielle, so I went up to him and asked him about the afternoon’s debate. It was really good, friend, weren’t you there? I said no and he started to tell me about it: you know, there’s a sentence in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, which says: “Man is a fickle creature of doubtful reputation, and perhaps, like a chess player, he is more interested in the process of reaching his objective than in the objective itself,” I don’t know if you remember it. . I shook my head and Supervielle continued: that’s what we were discussing, my friend, that simple yet profound way of reading experience, what drives a person to make one decision and not another at a specific moment? to get off a train, get on a boat, cross the street? What there is at the end of a life is irrelevant, it isn’t the result that makes a life exceptional, but the path trodden, am I being excessively obscure? There are great lives that don’t get anywhere, but what does it matter? That’s not a paradox. I’m reminded of a text by a twelfth-century Persian poet, The Conference of the Birds, I assume you don’t know it? I did know it, but I preferred not to contradict him. Anyway, it’s all about Simorgh, King of the Birds; everyone’s looking for him, everyone would like to find him because they believe that when they do they will be better and happier. A group of birds decides to leave for the mountain where the king has his home. They meet with many obstacles along the way and many turn back or die; only a group of thirty noble birds reaches the summit where Simorgh lives, but when they get there they realize that the throne is empty, the King of the Birds doesn’t live there but within each one of them, he has their face, his soul is that of a bird wearied by flight, the flight of a bird searching for Simorgh. The story I’m going to tell in my talk is about chess and that kind of life, that’s why I don’t want to go deeper into this, I don’t want to spoil the surprise for you, I assume you’ll be there? Of course, Monsieur Supervielle, it will be an honor.

I drank two more coffees as I walked up and down the corridors, hoping that José Maturana would appear, I wanted to congratulate him on his story that morning, about which, of course, I had already made a few notes. To tell the truth, it had overwhelmed me.

Not meeting anybody, I realized I was in one of those pockets of time that are typical of conferences, moments when nothing is happening, so I decided to go up to my room to rest and see what Marta was doing. I knocked at the door several times but nobody opened. Had she left? was she asleep? I asked the cleaner to open it for me. Just as I was about to lie down on the bed, I heard the bathroom door open and Marta came out, stark naked, wrapped in nothing but a cloud of steam. She had a nice body, with smooth white skin, pear-shaped breasts, a shaved pubic area, and a piercing in her vagina, a silver ring through one of her labia.

I thought you’d gone, I said, I knocked but you didn’t hear me, wait a minute, I’ll go out so you can get dressed in peace. Marta walked past me and bent over her heaped clothes. Don’t worry, it doesn’t bother me if you see me, does it bother you? I shook my head. She sat down and lit a cigarette. I asked her about the article, have you written it yet? No, she replied, to tell the truth, I only had a few notes, and I don’t know what it was, but they suddenly seemed empty and meaningless, or rather: they didn’t have the force I think a true story should have.

She took the towel from her hair and went and hung it on the handle of the bathroom door. Her breasts bobbed up and down as she passed me and I found myself with an erection, which I managed to conceal. From the bathroom she said, and what do you think about this war? I did not reply immediately, not sure of what to say, but she went straight on: or are you one of those pacifists? So I said: it’s just one more war, although it could well be a metaphor for all wars, the frustration, the discord, the hatred, the separation; but that’s just words, whereas bullets are quite real, they pierce the skin and damage organs, they puncture and maim. The most absurd wars are those that aren’t even of any benefit to those who win them, although that doesn’t mean there aren’t times when it’s necessary to fight them. Even knowing full well that nobody will win. There’s a perverse logic, a human destiny, that leads to war, and individuals can do nothing to stop it.

As I said this, I recalled images I had seen of the bombing of a church in Colombia with shrapnel-filled gas cylinders, a bombing carried out by the guerillas; I saw the mutilated bodies, the ground soaked with blood, the kind of thing that has been happening for centuries, although you never get used to it; I suddenly found it hard to breathe, and my eyes filled with tears, I was falling into one of those hypersensitive states all too common in convalescents, so I said, I’m sorry, but she came to me and said, cry as much as you want, there’s nothing more touching than a man crying; naked as she still was, she embraced me. I was afraid she would become aware of my erection, which was still there, but she did not seem to notice it, only hugged me tighter. One of my tears dripped onto her shoulder, trickled down her back and lodged between her marmoreal buttocks. The scene was like a Pietà, and was interrupted by some cries coming from the corridor; I thought at first that it was my neighbors, embroiled in another argument, but it was not them; these cries were more urgent and desperate, so I broke free of Marta and ran to the door.

A group of male nurses was shouting at the end of the corridor, outside the last room. The cleaner was crying and somebody was consoling her. What was all this? what was happening? Before long, a stretcher appeared. I went closer and saw the blood-drenched bathroom, the body emerging from the tub, lifted by four strong arms. On the pale skin with its ocher reflections I recognized the tattoos, the sun-like eye on the inert forearm, the town in the background: it was José Maturana.

I looked at him, incredulous, as they tipped him onto the stretcher, a bag of bones that seemed to have emptied, the skin like a damp cloth, that mysterious diminishing process that operates on lifeless bodies. They had tried to resuscitate him, but to no avail, which was understandable, judging by the vertical gashes on his forearms: anyone who slashes himself like that means business.

I moved aside to let the stretcher pass, then just stood there, unable to move. Marta came out a second after the elevator closed its doors and only saw the end of the funeral cortege. Who was it? what happened? Maturana, I said, he slashed his wrists. Marta opened her eyes wide, what?! She took a couple of steps along the corridor, then turned back and said, this is a bombshell! I have to call my newspaper. She placed a collect call from my room and, by the time she had hung up, her hands were shaking. I only have forty minutes to write an article! I told her what I had seen but she was so busy with the table lamp, switching on her laptop, plugging in the adaptor, that she did not seem to hear me. Then she said, what title should I give it? Let me see, how about something like Blood at the Conference? No, she said, don’t be so sensationalistic, that’d be fine for a crime report, this is for the arts section, it has to be a bit more poetic. Go ahead and write the article, I said, and then we’ll think of something, in the meantime I’m going to have a look around and maybe grab a bite to eat as well. You’re lucky, she said, I have to stay here, bring me a chicken sandwich and a Diet Coke. If you see or find out anything call me, O.K.?

As I left the room, I was overcome with an intense feeling of danger. A strange wind was pushing me toward that room at the end of the corridor, the dead man’s room. Everyone seemed to have gone. I tapped nervously at the door and went in. The carpet was soaked in water and blood that had overflowed from the bathtub; I saw towels, tiles glowing red, a bathrobe with the hotel’s emblem. The bed still bore the imprint of a body. On the table were papers with notes for his talk, and some open books. I picked up one at random and it turned out to be Encounters with Amazingly Normal People, by Walter de la Salle. It was dedicated to José: “How absurd, me dedicating your book to you. With love, Walter.” There were penciled annotations. On page 267, for example: “The death of the fetus is an invention, a way of talking about the formation of life.” On page 347: “The addict is Millie, I changed her age from twenty-five to sixteen to make it more dramatic.” On page 560: “Complete passage from an astrological discussion between L. Ron Hubbard and Kaspar Hauser.” Maturana was the true author of the book. It was his magnum opus.

Among the other books on the table were works by St John of the Cross, with more scribbled notes in the margins (one said: “This is about the eye I saw”), the complete works of Feijóo, and The Life of Bartolomé de las Casas (another annotation at random: “He licked the Indians’ sores, why?”). I opened his briefcase and found a folder containing photographs; in one of them, two well-built young men were raising a crucifix in a garden, and on the side someone had written: “Sammy and Jairo in Oakland Road.” I shuffled through them quickly until I found one that had the word “Walter” on it: it showed a tall, well-built man, bare-chested, with powerful dorsal muscles and long hair gathered in a ponytail, just like José; in one hand, a crucifix covered in diamonds, and in the other, a microphone; tattoos depicting man’s quest for God. I thought of Marta writing in my room, a long way from the real story.

I stood there, looking at Walter’s photograph, because there was something in it that held me spellbound; after a while I noticed in the background, in the middle of a group of people standing behind him, a face that looked familiar, a woman, where had I seen her before? I was thinking about this when I heard a noise in the corridor and was immediately on the alert. Somebody had died in this room and sooner or later the police would have to come, so I rushed to the door, and looked out. A police officer was standing there with his back to me, talking on a cell phone, so I slipped out without making a noise.

Downstairs, in the lobby, there was a great deal of agitation. Some police officers were taking notes and the director of the ICBM was making a statement to a TV channel. I caught him saying: “. . suicide is a mysterious, multifaceted, and very profound choice, an act of supreme freedom whose reasons, of course, we do not know; for the ICBM this is a great loss, and I can announce right now that we will take care of everything, the transportation, the funeral, etc., wherever his nearest and dearest decide.”

I went to the dining room, wanting to be alone. In the rush to get out, I forgot to say that I still had the photograph of Walter and the book, Encounters, in my jacket. I sat down at one of the tables at the far end, ordered an omelet and a beer, and settled down to read, but as I took out the book a sheet of paper fell out, it was a message on headed hotel notepaper saying: José, we’ve found you. I was stunned, and read it several times. The words boomed in my head like an echo in a cave: We’ve fooouuund yooouuu, oouund yoouuu, yoouu!

The message bore the time, 19:38 that same day. Everything was clear now: Maturana had decided to kill himself after reading it, perhaps because of it, who was it who had found him? I gulped my food down and went back to my room. Marta was drinking a Coke and chatting on Facebook. Seeing me, she cried, did you forget my sandwich? I can’t concentrate, damn it, I have less than ten minutes left and I don’t even have a title, this is a disaster, I’m just telling a Spanish friend I met on Erasmus all about it. . Don’t write any more, I said, Maturana didn’t kill himself.

Marta looked at me incredulously, why do you say that? Look at this, I said, he received it today. Marta looked at the message with intensity and said, and what does this prove? It proves this is all very strange, don’t you think? At that moment the telephone rang and Marta said, it’s my newspaper, can you answer for me? tell them I’m doing an interview, and that I need more time. I lifted the receiver and gave the excuse, but they said, we’re getting the news on the wire, so it’s covered, just tell her to write us a good article for tomorrow. That solved everything. I showed her the book and the photograph and Marta said, good, let’s get to work, where do we start? I’ll help you on one condition, which is that you let me tell the story. I accepted and said: we have to start with the message, find out who sent it, the operator who gave it to Maturana may know.

We went down to the lobby, where, in spite of the fact that it was one in the morning, the agitation continued. We went to the offices where the switchboard operator worked, and found a young woman there. I asked her if she had been on duty at 19:38, and she said no, she had started at 21:00. Are you the only people who take messages for the guests? No, she said, another guest or a visitor can leave messages at reception, in which case it doesn’t go through the switchboard. Who distributes the messages to the rooms? One of the bellhops from the main lobby, she said. And is there a register of those messages? Yes, there’s a book with the destination and time of each one. I looked at her, pleased. Good, then you may be able to help me, was there any message at 19:38? The woman asked for my name and room number, then she took out a book and, making sure we did not sneak a look, turned the page. Can you confirm your room number? 1109, I said. She hesitated. There was a message at that time, but it wasn’t for you, you could ask my colleague tomorrow, were you expecting an urgent message? Yes, I said, very urgent, there may have been a mix-up over the room number, can’t you call your colleague? The woman was silent for a moment then said: I can’t call him, he’s working right now. If it’s very urgent you can find him at the Bamboo, near Rehavia. His name is Mordechai but everyone calls him Momo.

We thanked her and went out onto the street.

The Bamboo was a modern-looking bar, full of mirrors, indirect lighting, wooden recesses. We sat down at the counter to be close to the staff; it was really strange to see a place like this in the middle of a siege. Three young men were serving: one making cocktails, another taking them to the tables and bringing the orders, and the third taking the money. Put your intuition to work, I said to Marta, which one do you think is our man? She asked for a Herradura tequila, downed it in one, asked for a second tequila, and said: give me ten minutes, if I’m wrong you can ask me for anything you want. Anything I want? Yes, a blow job, money, whatever you want, just let me concentrate.

When the ten minutes were over, she said: that one over there. She pointed to a young man of about twenty-five, Caucasian in appearance, perhaps of Slav descent. She went to the other end of the counter to talk to him and came back after a while. I’m never wrong, she said, he’s Momo. How did you know? It’s something I’ve had since I was a child, I look at people for a while and suddenly I know who they are, as simple as that. I was amazed: I didn’t know you had powers, what else can you do? She gave a wicked laugh and said: many things, but you lost your bet. I ordered another double whiskey and said, did you tell him what we want? should I go and talk to him? Marta smiled smugly. He’ll come to us, but he’s already given me a lead: the message was left by a woman of about thirty-five in a long distance call, he doesn’t know where from, because he didn’t look at the caller ID. I wanted to know what her method was for obtaining so much information in such a short time and she said, the oldest and most traditional method of all, I asked him and he told me, and I’ll tell you something else, he’ll answer every question I ask him, I could smell his pheromones, he wants to fuck me and because of that he’ll tell the truth. I was stunned and said, can you always smell that smell? and she replied: always. It’s another of my powers.

Within a short time, most of the tables were empty and Momo came over to talk to us. The man you took the message to killed himself, I said immediately, just to see his reaction. He became nervous and said, I didn’t take it to him, there’s a bellhop who slips the messages under the doors, do you know why he did it? did he leave a note or anything? was it because of the message? who are you? I told him I was a friend of the dead man and a delegate at the conference, and asked him, could you describe the woman who left the message from her voice? Momo closed his eyes for a moment and said: I know enough about women to assume she’s thirty-five, single, an only child or maybe the eldest child. . Marta interrupted him, an only child or maybe the eldest child? how do you know that? It’s easy, replied Momo, she doesn’t hesitate, she has a naturally authoritarian manner; when I asked her to dictate the message she did it in a very sharp way, as if she was saying it to me: “We’ve found you.” I can still hear the words in my head, my God, I’m not surprised he killed himself, who was he, another delegate? Yes, I said, it’s strange that somebody should decide to do that so suddenly, after a success like the one he had with his talk in the morning. Momo shrugged and said, it’s sudden for us, but maybe not for him; by the way, I almost forgot to tell you that the woman had called before, three times, she seemed really desperate to speak to him; she even asked to have the call transferred to the restaurant, it’s strange, she had to speak to him as soon as possible but she didn’t want to leave her name; when I asked her she said, that’s all you need, write it down just as I say it, thank you, and hung up. What Momo was giving us was worth its weight in gold. I asked: how did you know it was a long-distance call if you didn’t look at the caller ID? She told me herself when she called the first time, she wanted me to know how urgent it was and she said: this is a long-distance call, please try to find him; you could look at the caller ID, which has a memory, but that’s confidential information and we aren’t authorized to give it out to guests.

Somebody called Momo and he excused himself. Marta said to me, do you still think somebody killed him? It’s a possibility, I said, that phrase “we’ve found you,” could be taken several ways: we’ve been looking for you, you’ve been running away, you owe us something, you have to pay, why did you do it, all that time ago, you betrayed us, you hid from us, all kinds of things. But the basic question is a simple one, who are “we”? Marta polished off her drink in one go and said, well, after hearing his story it seems pretty obvious that “we” are the people from that Ministry, don’t you think? maybe the guru didn’t die, maybe things were very different than the way Maturana told it. It’s possible, Marta, it’s very possible, the next thing we have to do is gain access to the caller ID and see the memory, the number must have been recorded. As we were about to leave, Momo came and said, I’ve just remembered something else: the guest in that room, the one who killed himself, called the operator twice during the afternoon and asked if there’d been any messages for him, and when he was told there hadn’t he insisted, not even any calls without a message? and I told, him, no sir, not even without a message, so it’s obvious the poor man knew they were looking for him and was expecting to hear from them.

Another notable thing happened that night.

As we were on our way out of the Bamboo, we heard a voice from an inside table, somebody calling out Marta’s name; she turned and cried: Bryndis! It was Bryndis Kiljan, the war correspondent for her newspaper in Iceland. When we were introduced, Bryndis said: I know and love your country, oh, Colombia! it has the most cruel and unnecessary war of any I’ve seen in the world and therefore the stupidest, I’m sorry if I say it as I see it. . If it wasn’t for the number of people killed, it would be laughable. She was with other journalists, they were drinking iced vodka. Bryndis had just come back from the front and was exhausted. She said: all I want to do is drink and cause a great scandal. They obviously had a lot to talk about, so I preferred to leave them to it and went back to the hotel.

The next day, I went to the switchboard operator’s office. At that hour the person on duty was an older man who looked at me with great reluctance when I asked to check the caller ID. I’m a delegate at the conference, I said, and I need to check something quickly, can I? The caller ID isn’t at the disposal of the guests, if you give me your room number I can tell you the source of the calls you’ve received, and I’ll send you a message about it, that’s all I can do. I thought to give him Maturana’s number, but the deception would be obvious immediately, he did not look stupid and he must have heard about what had happened the night before. The man was waiting for my answer, so I said, can you please check the calls from the United States, it’s code one, the person who was supposed to call didn’t know my room number, so that’s irrelevant, could you have a look yesterday between 19:00 and 20:00? I’ll be back in half an hour, thanks. As I got to the door he said, you don’t need to wait half an hour, at that hour there weren’t any calls from the United States, for you or anybody, is there anything else I can help you with?

I went to the coffee shop thinking: if the call was not from the United States, where the Ministry had been located, well, that was understandable, I would cross check this with Momo later. It was time to make a few notes. This was what I wrote:

The message (we’ve found you) raises one basic question: who are “we”? Hypothesis: Walter de la Salle and Miss Jessica. They are looking for José for a reason we don’t know, something he concealed in the story he told, because it may be assumed that the death, if it really was a suicide, was a way of escaping. If it wasn’t a suicide — which is what I think — then the death was a punishment. What had he done? This poses another question: how did Walter de la Salle escape the fire? What really happened at the Ministry? The fact that José Maturana used pseudonyms for his books reinforces the theory that he was running away. For all we know, he may have only ever used his real name at this conference, but why?

One thing that argues in favor of the suicide hypothesis is that in the story told by Maturana he himself said that he had already tried to kill himself at least once, using the same method of slashing his wrists in a hotel bathroom. It was something he carried inside him, it was on his mind.

As for the telephone call, what to make of it? If it didn’t come from the United States, where was it from? Anything’s possible, even that it came from inside the hotel. It’s also possible it wasn’t Walter but Jefferson, why not? Or that it was the detective, or a blackmailer, or simply somebody who has no connection with the Ministry. The fact is, I know very little about Maturana’s life. Do we ever know much about a life, even after it’s been well told?

I closed my notebook and left the coffee shop. From a window in the corridor I looked out at the city. Over it there hung a heavy curtain of fog, the smoke from fires, the smell of fuel, the thick air of war. In the distance, on a flat roof, I saw an old lady moving about, taking clothes off a line and putting them in a basket. At that exact moment a voice echoed in my brain: it’s time to start writing again. I went to my room, ordered a Diet Coke and a chicken sandwich and started writing, quickly, not rough notes now but a narrative, everything I had lived through since I had received that invitation from the ICBM.

I had been scribbling away for just over an hour when there was a knock at the door. It was easy to guess who it was, and in fact, when I opened it, Marta gave me a hug and said: I need something strong, and I’m referring to alcohol. What happened? I asked, and she said, wait, wait, let me catch my breath, or rather, let me drink this, and she drank a miniature bottle of vodka in two gulps, and, having recovered her breath, muttered a few words of Icelandic, then said, you’ll never guess what I saw this morning, something really heavy, really heavy, and I said, what did you see, Marta? and she said, I saw Maturana’s body! I was in the morgue of the hospital, the Notre Dame de France, and I saw it, his arms with the cuts on them, his skin like a parchment, his mouth in a fixed grin, his face all sunken and expressionless, as if the flesh had been sucked in to his cheeks, I’d never seen a dead body before, do you think the bodies of people who’ve killed themselves are the same as those of other dead people? I don’t know, I said, perhaps they have an expression of relief or sadness, but what made you think to go there, and how on earth did you manage to get in? Oh, my friend, we journalists have ways we can’t reveal, even more if you’re a woman journalist, so I said, I respect your reticence, would you like some more vodka? I opened the minibar, took out another little bottle and she said, you’re a friend, I really don’t mind if you know, so here’s the story:

I found out that some bodies qualified as “select,” those that have nothing to do with the war, go to the morgue at the makeshift Notre Dame de France hospital, and so I went there this morning, on foot, because it’s not far from Agrippa Street. I arrived, walked all around the outside of the building, and when I saw it was a bunker I realized it wouldn’t be easy to get in the normal way; I was just pondering this when I saw a doctor walking toward one of the side entrances and had a brainwave, something that came to me out of the blue: I screamed as if something had happened to me and the doctor rushed to me and said, what’s the matter, miss, and I said, I’m in great pain, I’m sorry, and started to collapse and of course he immediately caught me, and then I said, I have pains in my uterus, doctor, I can’t move, I’m a journalist, I write for a newspaper in Iceland. I pretended to faint, which provoked an even stronger reaction, and he said, calm down, take deep breaths, come with me; he helped me walk to the door, and we went inside and along a corridor until we came to an empty office. He sat me down on a chair, but I said, do something, please; I pulled my jeans and my panties down to my knees, and the man, who was about forty, came closer, touched me, and said, take a deep breath, hold it, then let it out slowly, I’ll see if you have any lesions. .

He put his head between my thighs and discreetly explored the area; after a while he said: superficially at least, I can’t see anything unusual, apart from that silver ring, are you feeling any better? It’s easing off a bit but it’s still there, like a stitch that keeps coming back, a dormant pain, and he said, I’ll give you a pill, come, but I insisted, how can you prescribe something if you haven’t even touched me? His face changed and he said, what is it you want? The moment had come to take the plunge, and I said: what I want most, only you can give me. He blushed, gave a smile, and said, well, you’re in luck, ask me what you like, and he laid his hand on my belly. You may think that what I’m going to ask you is a bit strange and you may refuse, but he insisted, tell me, remember I’m a doctor, I live with the dark side of things, with life and death, pleasure and pain; then I raised my pelvis a little and said, I want you to take me to the morgue to see the body of the man who killed himself at the conference, I know you have him here.

He was surprised when he heard that, of course, and drew back a bit. I had already realized that the doctor wanted to fuck me, I told you I can smell pheromones, didn’t I? and in fact, there was frustration all over his face, but he pulled himself together and said, I don’t know if I can do that, remember this is a military hospital and the deaths are confidential, but I moved again and my mound of Venus sent him a signal, so he said, I could try, I’d do anything to ease the pain of a beautiful Icelandic woman; we went back out into the corridor and walked for a while, up and down stairs, until we came to an iron door. It’s through here. We entered a dark, damp room, with a kind of spooky atmosphere, all tiled, and with a slight smell of formaldehyde. He gave me a mask and said, put this on, you’re going to need it, and it’s compulsory anyway. We came to another door, and there was a fat male nurse there who must have been guarding it, reading a magazine. They said something to each other and we went through. There were huge concrete tables and other tables of iron where they did autopsies.

That was when I saw him, from a distance. They’d pulled back the cloth covering him and I recognized his face, his white beard; we had to wait so as not to bother the people who were with him, but they soon left, so we went closer. I saw his open forearms, two violet colored wounds, his expression of calm or indifference, anyway, it was heavy, really heavy, that’s the only word I can find to describe it.

Marta fell silent, looking at the wall. And what about the doctor? Ah, the doctor, his name is Amos Roth, he’s a very well-mannered and attractive man. He’s invited me to dinner tonight.

Then she asked, were you writing? Yes, I said. She seemed a bit disconcerted. I’m sorry, she said, I was thinking to ask you the same favor as yesterday, that you let me work here, to tell the truth, I prefer to be close to the conference and the people in it, I may have to go out and check some information, you don’t mind, do you? I could put my laptop under the bed, but I said, it’s no problem, I can go out and work on the balcony, I write by hand. By hand? she cried, wow, I’ll never understand you writers, all that spiel about the manuscript and being close to the text, my God, I’ll never understand it, and she took out her Dell Inspiron, switched it on, and started typing.

I went out on the terrace, thinking about Marta’s visit to the morgue, and suddenly something occurred to me, so I went back and asked: you said there was somebody with the body, who was it? I don’t know, she said, two people, maybe three, it was very dark, the only light was over Maturana’s body and I was concentrating on that, why do you ask? It just seems odd to me, did they look like people from the hospital, from the police or something like that? but she said, I couldn’t say, they were wearing masks. Would you say they were a woman and a man? two women? two men? Let me see, wait, I need to concentrate, she said, and closed her eyes. One of them was definitely a woman, I remember the noise of high heels, I heard them long after she’d gone out, they were echoing in the distance, what are you thinking? Well, I said, it’s odd that José Maturana should have visitors in the morgue, don’t you think? It could have been somebody from the hotel, said Marta, or from his embassy, or the police, or from the conference. Did you notice what language they spoke? They didn’t speak, said Marta, they were just looking at him in silence. Would you say it was a sad scene? Yes, it was: a dead body, not much light, the smell of formaldehyde, that’s a pretty sad scene, wouldn’t you say?

I went back out on the balcony, thinking, it’s them, they’re here. My head was seething with ideas and I started writing again. They’re in Jerusalem, they came for him, perhaps they heard his talk at the conference, but the reason they left him that message is that they preferred not to approach him, they must have been waiting for the right moment, they wanted to announce themselves through a message to see his reaction, and he was unable to bear it. Perhaps he did kill himself after all.

I heard the telephone and went back in the room. Marta was lying on the bed, smoking. She had taken her clothes off. I’m sorry, she said, it’s hot and I feel more comfortable like this, I wouldn’t do it if things weren’t so clear between you and me. Don’t worry, I said, and I lifted the receiver. It was Momo. I have news, sir, the woman who left the message has just called the hotel again, to Room 1209, just above yours, and something more, sir, the caller ID gives me a number in Tel Aviv, would you like it? He dictated it to me. Then I said, Momo, please, can you check if the call yesterday was from the same number, and he said, yes, sir, exactly the same, I already looked. I hesitated, then asked him, in whose name is Room 1209 registered? William Cummings, he said.

Momo, I’m sorry to ask this, but. . do you know if Cummings is black? That’s hard to say, sir, the register with the photocopy of his passport is in reception, and I don’t have access to it. Thanks, Momo, anything else you hear, let me know immediately. Of course, sir, how’s the young lady? Fine, Momo, she’s working. Give her my regards. I will.

I dialed the Tel Aviv number, with my hand shaking, and to my surprise it turned out to be a branch of the Universal Coptic Church. I had never even imagined an eventuality like that, so I decided to ask, is Miss Jessica there? There was a silence and then they said, there’s nobody here of that name, Jessica who? I thanked them and asked for their address, because I wanted to visit them. Aaron Pater Street, number 19, near Allenby Street, sir, we’re open from eight in the morning to seven-thirty in the evening. Then I dialed the number of Room 1209 but nobody replied. I had an idea. I went down to reception and asked the receptionist if it was possible to be moved to the room directly above mine, Number 1209, is it occupied? The man typed on his keyboard and said, yes, it’s occupied until Tuesday of next week, sir, I’m sorry, by that date you’ll already have left the hotel, won’t you? Yes, I said, it’s a pity, is the person occupying it at the conference? No, sir, no.

I walked away, thinking that I had to go to Tel Aviv to pay a visit to the Coptic Church. At six there was Supervielle’s lecture, and early the next day the much-awaited talk by Sabina Vedovelli, one of the high points of the ICBM, because according to gossip she was going to tell her life story. I had just over an hour to rest.

With all the demands of this conference, my recovery was taking longer than expected.

Going back to my room I found Marta in the same position, wearing nothing but a white G-string. I asked her about her work and she said, I haven’t been able to start, I checked my e-mail and then I started chatting with an old friend, and the time just went, my God, and how about you? I’m tired, I said, I’d like to sleep a while before Supervielle’s talk. Good idea, she said, I’ll do the same, yesterday I drank like a prostitute from Minsk. I could really do with a nap.

She closed the curtains and lay down beside me. Her closeness and her smell gave me an erection, which I tried to conceal, but she put her arm on my hip and finally noticed it. What about this? I was silent at first and then said, it’s only an erection, leave it, it’ll pass. Is it me who’s causing it or are you thinking of somebody? I told her it didn’t matter. It had not happened to me in a while, and it was like meeting an old friend; but she insisted: you won’t be able to rest, let me help you. She lowered the zipper of my pants and took out my penis, which grew even harder at the touch of her hand. Yes, you’re very hard, you must really like the woman you’re thinking about, let me help you, I think you need it. She started caressing it and squeezing it in her hand. Close your eyes, she said, I’m good at this. Imagine someone you like, a naked woman you’d like to fuck, O.K.? I looked at her out of the corner of my eye. She had gotten on her knees, with her legs half open; where the pubic hair should have been there was a soft furrow of golden dots, on the verge of sprouting. She moved her arm rhythmically and I felt I was about to ejaculate; she also must have felt it, because she said, wait a moment. She got up and ran to the bathroom. Her ass and breasts bounced up and down and I had to make an effort to contain myself. A second later she came back with a towel and said, leave it to me, just tell me when, O.K.? She continued rubbing my penis with increasing force until I felt myself coming, and I told her, so, still rubbing, she put the towel around it. When I had come, she got up and went and left it in the bathroom. I heard her sitting on the toilet and tearing off pieces of paper, had she become aroused? It was quite likely.

When she came back she said, all right, now you can rest, and she lay down again by my side. You didn’t have to do that, I said, by the way, there’s a drop left on your arm, clean it off. Instead of which, she raised her arm to her mouth and licked it. Your semen tastes of iron, I like it. Then she knocked back what was left of the vodka and said, don’t talk anymore, we only have an hour’s sleep.