Necropolis

1. OTHER VOICES

During Edgar Miret Supervielle’s lecture, I kept peering anxiously around at the audience, hoping to recognize the guest from Room 1209—looking, in fact, in order to confirm my theories or, rather, my vague conjectures, for Walter. But the auditorium was poorly lit, the ICBM favoring subdued lighting to concentrate the audience’s attention on the speaker, and I did not see anyone who looked like him. In response to the applause, Supervielle made a series of athletic bows at the front of the proscenium, bending almost double as he did so. Marta Joonsdottir announced to me that she was going to her date with the doctor: she had no wish to arrive late. Then she gave me an imploring look and said, I have rather a big favor to ask of you, which is that when I get back I’d like. . to sleep in your room, can I? I left my cell phone there and I can’t get back to my hotel. I told her she could, and added: remember, I owe you one.

Things were a bit chaotic on the way out, with people pushing and shoving to get from the hall to the corridor. Many lingered in small groups to pass comment on the lecture, stopping the others from advancing. I was making my way through the crush when I heard a familiar voice saying, my distinguished compatriot, what a pleasure to see you, come, let’s have an aperitif together. It was Kaplan. Reluctantly, I said yes. What I really wanted at that moment was to keep an eye on the people heading for the lobbies and staircases, but as I was unable to think of an excuse, my reflexes still being slow, I accepted.

In the first-floor bar, Kaplan ordered two whiskeys and said, what a tragic thing about that preacher, my God, who knows what sins he must have committed in his life, and what pangs of remorse he must have felt! Well, he certainly paid for those sins with his life. Kaplan sipped at his drink and asked me if I had left Colombia for political reasons, but I said, no, I left because I needed a change of scenery and wanted to know the world, but the world just seems to be getting bigger and bigger, and I still don’t really know it, that’s why I keep moving, and that’s the only reason I’ve stayed away. . It’s an excellent reason, my friend, and how long do you think it will be before you go back? I don’t know, I said, sometimes I think what I’m looking for is a way out, but that has nothing to do with the world or even with our distant country, to be honest, I don’t really understand it myself.

There was a rumbling in the distance, and the floor shook slightly. Soon afterwards sirens sounded, and Kaplan said, they’re pounding Talpiot, what a shame, it’s one of the most beautiful parts of the city, the writer S. Y. Agnon, the uncle of the novelist Amos Oz, used to live there, on Joseph Klausner Street. So many trees in the area, pines, eucalyptus. I hope they don’t destroy it. I spent some time there, in Bet Hataava. The houses have been evacuated and they’re putting up a strong resistance, with Patriots to destroy the enemy missiles in the air, mobile hospitals, chains of evacuation, oh yes, it’s a real war all right. We both fell silent for a while. Then I said: why hold a conference here, in the middle of this chaos, with people dying on the outskirts of the city? Kaplan downed his whiskey in one. Oh, my friend, I’d say the opposite, I think right now this is the one place in the world where an event like this has any meaning.

There was another silence, then I said, don’t forget you still owe me the end of your story. Kaplan ordered two more whiskeys and said, that’s right, my God, so much time has passed, I can speak about it now as if it had happened to someone else, the pain and anger have worn off; it’s like when you walk away from a fire and stop feeling the heat.

I told you last time that my family had decided to fight back, well, after our warnings the paras counterattacked, setting fire to my brother’s house, and killing the guard, who was only twenty-two; one of our agents called New York and they said to us, you have to respond, and we have a number of suggestions. One was to kill one of the politicians linked to the paras, but I said we weren’t murderers, no, let’s bring them down, I said, let the shit hit the fan, I want everyone to know what they’re doing and raise a fuss about it. It’ll be more difficult, they said, but we’ll try. They followed these people, tapped their phones, and finally managed to catch some very interesting conversations: one of the politicians, for example, demanding the head of a mayor with the words, “get rid of that Communist for me”; another call where a paramilitary phoned a governor and said, “I need eighty million pesos, I’ll send for them tomorrow,” and the governor replied, “Yes, chief, I have them ready here, send for them whenever you like.” My agents informed the press and there was a big scandal, the men were arrested and forced to give up their seats in parliament, now they would have to face the law and see if they could bribe and threaten ordinary judges, but that wasn’t our problem anymore, it was the country’s. Of course, they told the press it was all a set-up orchestrated by their political enemies. One day I sent their lawyer the following message: “Tell your client, yes, we Jews do all have the same sense of humor.” We found out that they had asked the paras to kill us, but by that time we had already left.

He finished his account with a burst of laughter and ordered another drink. Then he said, let’s change the subject, friend, shall I tell you what most impressed me about Maturana’s story? It was that, in the end, the famous savior that everyone believed in was just a wimp! A real wimp, to screw up a business like that through pride! I put my glass down and stood up, pretending that I was expecting an urgent call. Thanks for the aperitif and your stories, Señor Kaplan, the next time it’s on me. He gave me his hand and said, it’s obvious you’re a writer, oh, by the way, if you have any of your books here I’d like to read one, do you have any? I was thinking about his request when he himself said, if you have a spare one leave it in reception in my name, I’m in Room 1211. I stopped dead, 1211? He was next door to 1209! I went back to him and said, excuse me, but have you noticed anything strange about the room next to yours, number 1209? But Kaplan said, I haven’t even seen the person staying there, has something happened? don’t frighten me. Nothing special, I’m right underneath, in 1109, and I heard noises, that’s all. My friend, this city is full of noises. That’s because of all the spirits hovering in the air.

I said goodbye to Kaplan and headed for the elevators. Twelfth floor. I crept to the door of Room 1209 but could not hear a thing, nor could I see if there was a light on inside. Apart from Walter, the second likeliest guest, in my opinion, was the black man, Jefferson. As I stood there, I saw a hotel employee coming with a tray, delivering room service; I looked at him out of the corner of my eye and saw that he was carrying a chicken sandwich and a Diet Coke. I thought he might stop at 1209, but he walked right past.

I decided to go back down to my floor, the eleventh, and take another look at the ex-pastor’s room. Again, the door was open! I pushed it cautiously, stood in the entrance, but could not see anyone. Suddenly, I heard a moan. On the other side of the bed, a young woman in the hotel uniform was writhing on the carpet, with her legs apart. A man, also in uniform, had his head under her skirt. Seeing me standing there, the young woman froze. When the man’s head emerged, I recognized Momo, who said: I’m sorry, sir, I’m so sorry, as you can imagine, working in a place full of beds it really makes you want to. . The young woman leaped to her feet and ran out the door. Then Momo said: you have to understand, these beds just seem to be saying, sex, sex. . Her name is Mel and she’s my girlfriend. We usually meet in 2918, which is a suite, but Mel is studying cinema and sociology and wanted to see the place where that man killed himself, are you going to report me? Don’t talk nonsense, Momo, the only thing I might feel is envy, what’s her job here? She works in the snack bar on the third floor, she’s Brazilian but her family is from Belarus, these Russian women, my God, they’re stunning, and with this war all around it gives you a hard-on all the time, I’m really sorry, sir, it’s not my fault.

The room was in perfect condition, ready to receive new guests. The cleaners had done their work well. Momo said that a police team had come that morning and taken everything away, even the dust and the water in the vase. We’re used to it, these things happen quite often, was that telephone number I gave you any use to you? Yes, I called Tel Aviv and got hold of an address. I was thinking to go tomorrow. Momo snapped his fingers and said, if you like I can take you, it’s my day off and I always go to Tel Aviv. I thanked him. We agreed that he would pick me up outside the main entrance of the King David at eight in the morning.

Back in my room, I grabbed my notes again, but it was hot, so I opened the window and breathed the night air. It was very cool, even the noises of war seemed distant. Marta had left a bunch of newspapers on the table, which she must have picked up from reception. The international news agencies had reported Maturana’s suicide and a few papers had picked it up before they went to press. I looked at the headlines: Suicide at the ICBM, or Death Hovers over Conference; one of the more sensationalistic was Death Gatecrashes the Feast of Life. The most succinct was in a French-language newspaper: Death of a Biographer. The item mentioned that the marks found on the body “would seem to indicate suicide.” I was looking at this when I heard a conversation coming from the terrace of the floor below. Somebody was saying: what bad luck to give my talk after Maturana’s suicide, and how ironic, after I’d e-mailed and telephoned the organizers and managed to have the program changed so that I could go before Sabina Vedovelli, it’s like a bad joke, pour me a little more of that. The voice was Supervielle’s. Then I heard Kosztolányi say, don’t be so negative, people were really pleased and interested to hear your story, you told it really well and it’ll stay lodged in their brains, I assure you. Maturana’s story may have been loud and attention-grabbing, and made even more so by his subsequent suicide, but yours was a slow burner, you’ll see, very soon everyone will be praising the sober manner in which you conveyed the narrative, the vividness of the metaphors you chose, the convincing way in which you handled time, with a highly original mise en abîme that cracks open and leads to an equally original anagnorisis or recognition, my God, yes, Edgar, and if one adds the stenographic accuracy of the dialogue, your discretion in dealing with burning issues, and your firm control of the emotional content, I don’t know what else to tell you, I don’t think you should have the slightest worry about the result, it was impeccable, don’t you see that?

Thanks, Leonidas, replied Supervielle, you’re a friend and what you say is some consolation, although you might be exaggerating a little, I don’t know, do you really think he came to hear me? did you see him at the talk? There was a silence. Perhaps Kosztolányi made a gesture asking, who are you talking about, who was supposed to be there? because Supervielle replied, who do you think? the head of Tiberias! Ebenezer Lottmann! Did you see him? My agent sent him two of my books a couple of weeks ago and he’s considering them, didn’t I tell you that? Kosztolányi said: oh, well, there’s no need to worry about that, he was there, and I’ll tell you this, he was taking notes and he had a rectangular object in his hand that might have been. . I don’t know, a Palm, a cell phone or even a miniature tape recorder, yes, something like that, I can see it now, and that’s good, isn’t it? it means he was interested, he wasn’t only there as a member of the audience but as part of his job, and guess what, now that I rack my brains, I can remember there was one moment he spoke into the machine, yes, there’s no doubt about it, it was his cell phone, putting two and two together we may assume he was calling his office, he might have been saying, find those books by Edgar Miret Supervielle, check if there’s a chapter about two chess players named Osloski and Flø, put them on my table, take them out of the pile and give them a place apart, and he might even, my dear friend, have been giving instructions to draw up a draft contract to send to your agent, perhaps this very day, now that would be tremendous news, wouldn’t it?

Supervielle must have been soothed by his friend’s words, because he interrupted, saying, do you think he used the telephone for that? wait, I’m very nervous, if that were the case it’s possible that my agent has already received something, mother of God, let’s find out immediately. Then I heard him on the telephone, saying, Supervielle here, now listen to me carefully, Ethan, did you receive anything from Tiberias this afternoon? no? how strange, I have reason to believe that Lottmann is thinking of making an offer at any moment, whatever you do keep your eye on the fax machine, and for the love of God, check to see if that damned piece of junk has paper and is connected!!! Make sure you don’t miss any calls, Ethan, I wouldn’t ask it if it wasn’t VERY important, what did you say? yes, of course the war is still on, but who the hell cares about that now?? keep an eye on the machine, sit by it till that damned contract arrives! Am I making myself clear?

He hung up and said to Kosztolányi, there’s no offer yet, at least according to my agent, who of course is an idiot, why must we always be in the hands of idiots? May God forgive me, Ethan is the son of a friend, but the poor man never gets things right, I must change agents as soon as I get back to Paris, phew, there’s no offer so far, that means if he called his office from the hall it wasn’t because of that, a false alarm, don’t you think? what if he called the publishing house to say exactly the opposite, to tell his assistant, put everything in an envelope and return to sender?

Anything’s possible, said Kosztolányi, but if that was the case your agent would already know, why send back manuscripts if he can write an e-mail? you can never tell with somebody whispering on the phone, he might even have been calling his wife, Edgar, or his young mistress, I don’t know, a female writer of the new generation anxious for recognition, why not? it often happens, he might have been calling to say, listen, darling, I know I promised I’d be there at seven but I’m listening to one of the best talks I’ve ever heard in my life, please wait for me, ask room service for whatever you like, clear out the minibar, but wait for me, don’t you think it could have been something like that?

You’re right, Leonidas, anything’s possible, my contract, his wife or mistress, but I prefer to be optimistic, to believe that at the end of the conference he’ll get in touch with my agent and make an offer, I truly believe that’s what will happen, come on, let’s have a drink, we have to celebrate in style.

I fell asleep.

Marta got back just after two in the morning and went straight to the bathroom. When she came out, I noticed she was drunk. Well? I asked, how was your romantic dinner? She turned to look at me and said: there are no words, phew, let me try and tell you. . Where should I begin? He took me to Jaffa market, or rather, a place near the market that’s badly damaged but still functioning. Delicious, spicy food, and a bottle of wine from Mount Carmel that tasted divine. Then we went to an apartment to have a drink, it wasn’t his place. He said he would count the beauty spots on my body and that when he got to number twelve he would give me a kiss in that spot, and then he would say a city corresponding to the first letter of the part of the body he had kissed. A bit complicated, but he turned out to be an expert. Arm, Amsterdam, belly, Brussels, thigh, Tallinn, and so on, are you following? When he did that I had to say the country that it was the capital of, or imagine another city where I would like to get married to a Korean or get divorced from a Korean. Each time I failed, I had to take off one garment. When he’d finished explaining all this, I said, my dear Amos, the object of the game is to fuck me, isn’t it? so come on, let’s get down to it, because that’s what I want, too.

We had a fantastic fuck, I don’t think I’ve ever screamed like that before or had so many orgasms. We did it three times in a row and I thought of a great idea for an article, let’s see what you think: the life of a military doctor in a city under siege, don’t you think that’s a great subject? I said yes, and asked if she had found out anything new about Maturana. She stood up again and went back to the bathroom. She returned after a while, naked, with a damp towel in her crotch. I’m sorry, it burns a bit. . I haven’t fucked so hard for ages and Amos has a huge penis, what were you saying? Maturana, did you find out anything new?

She lay down beside me and said, yes, Amos saw the tests, apparently he had drugs in his blood, heroin, highly concentrated, in anyone else, Amos said, a quantity like that would have caused an overdose, but he was strong. Then Marta lit a cigarette and said, Amos is married, that’s why he wouldn’t stay the night with me, but he’s coming to the hotel tomorrow. Here? I asked. No, my hotel, I didn’t want to take advantage of you.

She stood up, walked to the window, and looked out at the night sky, which was again filled with storm clouds. I know it’s wrong to get involved with married men, but what can I do, he might die tomorrow and he really wanted it, I could sense that, so why not please him? I’m also going to die. He’s attractive but I’m not planning to fall in love, I’m not stupid. They promise to leave their wives and never do, especially if they have children. When we finished fucking, he lay down beside me and talked to me about her, can you believe that?

He loves and respects her, but doesn’t feel desire for her anymore. Her name is Esther. He saw her from a distance in a university cafeteria and knew she would be his companion, knew that he loved her and wanted her by his side all his life. You know, I feel sorry for people who say things like, “when I saw her I realized. . ” or “it was at that moment that I knew. . ” That’s all bullshit. Nobody knows or realizes anything, certainly not so suddenly.

She lay down on the bed again, covered herself with the bedspread and gave a big yawn. Before falling asleep she said: dear Esther, tomorrow I’ll have sex with your husband again, and I hope you’ll forgive me; he has an amazing penis. . If you have sex with him tonight, don’t suck it, I know what I’m talking about. .

The next day, Momo arrived at the hotel nice and early. He was driving a beat-up old Toyota station wagon. The bodywork was rusty, one of the rear windows had been replaced with a plastic sheet, and there were springs sticking up out of the seats. I got in and we set off. We drove along the side of the street where concrete and steel barriers had been set up to protect passers-by from snipers. Then we turned into a maze of narrow alleys. It’s the shortest route to the highway, he said, wait and see. On the corners, there were overturned cars being used as barricades and old sandbags with holes in them. Why aren’t you fighting? I asked, and Momo replied, I’m in the reserve, I’m an only child and I look after my mother, who’s sick, and my grandmother, who has a number tattooed on her forearm, know what I mean? I suppose if you take a good look at my life, it’s fairly lousy, but just like in the story of the Zen master, what’s good luck and what’s bad luck? that’s why I don’t have to be out there killing people or waiting for them to kill me, I’m a pacifist, you know? well, a realistic pacifist, because if they come to my home I’ll die fighting.

The street narrowed until we could almost touch the walls from the car. Two Orthodox men in torn suits, sitting on the front steps of a building, looked at us indifferently. A woman who was chatting with her neighbor from a window shouted at us angrily as we passed. What did she say? I asked Momo. That we weren’t at the front and her son is. A bit farther along, the fenders of the Toyota hit an empty cardboard box and a hen squawked as it dodged away from the car. I said to Momo: are you sure this is the way? Trust me, the highway is straight ahead. And indeed, we were soon descending through Bab el-Wad toward Tel Aviv.

Didn’t your girlfriend want to come with us? Momo asked. She isn’t my girlfriend, only a friend, she’s a journalist, she’s covering the conference and I met her in the hotel. How strange, he said, I know women and I can assure you she looked at you as if you were her boyfriend, I can seen that in women; pardon me asking, but have you fucked her? No, I said. Momo turned in his seat. If you want my advice, sir, tell her something sad, it never fails; sadness always finds a kindred spirit. I have a bit of experience in this.

As we passed the Monastery of the Seven Sorrows at Latrun, a jet with the star of David on the back passed over our heads, flying very low. Fumigation, said Momo. What did you say? Fumigation. When the enemy is so close, we can’t shoot too much shit at them, because if the wind changes it falls on our heads; instead they fumigate with a burning liquid that only works for a few seconds but drives anybody who doesn’t have a protecting cream crazy; they have to fly low to spray it, and that has its dangers, they’ve already brought down a couple of planes. But it’s worth it. Their operations are becoming less frequent, which gives us a bit of a respite. We’ve been at war for many years, and we know each other well.

The streets of Tel Aviv were filled with pedestrians in shorts and sandals. It was summer in the Middle East, something that did not seem to exist just forty miles away, because the perception of reality was different there: as if the world’s tribulations had come to an end and only one fortress remained to fall. We entered the noisy, traffic-clogged streets. Momo said: my mother’s place isn’t far, we can have a cold drink and you’ll meet my family, then I’ll take you to your address. Momo’s mother lived in the northern part of the city, near the harbor. The smell of the sea filled our nostrils as we got out of the car. I took a deep breath and felt slightly dizzy, but I was fine otherwise. My health was holding up in spite of all these excesses.

You’re the writer, said Momo’s mother. Come in, please, you must be hot.

The living room was a small space filled with rickety furniture. On the table was a tray with two glasses and a jug of lemonade with ice and mint leaves. The lemonade was really delicious. Mother and son said something to each other in Hebrew and Momo went out into the corridor. Then he appeared from another room and said to me, come in, sir, just for a minute. His grandmother was in bed, with her eyes open and an anxious expression on her face, as if fearing that something was about to happen. She hadn’t spoken for months, but she could hear, so I greeted her with a nod and told her my name. She turned her face to me and a shudder went through me. Her eyes were like two windows through which all the horror and madness of destruction, the proximity of death, could be seen. She raised one hand and I saw the number tattooed on her wrist. She put her hand on mine and smiled. She stayed like that for a few seconds and closed her eyes. That’s enough, said Momo, she’s tired. We went back to the living room and finished the jug of lemonade. Momo gave his mother an envelope (money, I assumed) and she gave him a bundle of fruit and canned food. I said goodbye to the woman, walked back out onto the street, clambered into the Toyota, and waited for Momo.

The Universal Coptic Church was located on Rothschild Avenue, a tree-lined boulevard whose sidewalks were overflowing with people at that hour, toward noon. The address I was looking for was on a corner, in an old Bauhaus-style building that curved toward the adjoining street, giving a lovely feeling of flow. On either side of the entrance were other businesses, a video rental store and a dry cleaner’s called Salonika.

As I got out I made a mental list of what I was looking for, or rather, what I assumed I might find out: whether Miss Jessica was indeed now attached to this organization; the possible links between the Coptic Church and the Ministry of Mercy; and how everything had changed since the destruction of the Ministry as Maturana had told it. Of course, I had no very clear idea of what the Universal Coptic Church might be. From somewhere deep in my memory, I recalled that one of the characters in The Alexandria Quartet was a Copt and that in Egypt it still existed as an official Christian sect, would it be the same here? It hardly seemed like it, to judge by the building.

When I entered the reception area, I noticed how bare the place was. No large crucifixes or altarpieces, just a dilapidated wooden desk, a first-generation IBM computer, and a few posters with images of Christ.

Can I help you? asked a woman sitting behind the desk. I told her I was looking for a woman named Jessica, and added, she’s an American friend of mine, of Latin origin, when I knew her she was called Jessica, although I realize that names change when people have a religious vocation, I haven’t seen her in quite a while and then I heard she was is in the Coptic Church, she’s a woman of about forty.

A sly look came over the receptionist’s face and she said, wait here, I’ll see what I can do. Momo, who was by my side — I forgot to mention before that he had come in with me — had not opened his mouth yet, but now he said: this looks like the complaints department of an industrial complex in a Communist country, I bet they won’t tell you anything, sir. I looked at him and shrugged. What else can I do except ask them, this is where the call you received came from, the one Maturana had in his book before he killed himself, obviously they may not know anything about it, we have to be discreet. Momo gave me a knowing look and said, O.K., I understand, my lips are sealed.

Behind the desk there was a window that looked out on an inner courtyard. A fat man was shifting some garbage pails and putting them together near the door. When he had finished, he lifted the flap of his coveralls, took out a bottle, and had a couple of good swigs. Then he looked up at the sky with an expression of gratitude and cleaned his mouth with his sleeve.

At this point the woman came back and said, would you come with me, please? the Metropolitan’s secretary would like to see you. We followed her along a corridor, past a number of prayer rooms, and up the stairs to the third floor. A man of about fifty was waiting for us in an office. Sit down, he said, without getting up or holding out his hand to us, merely indicating the leather armchairs with both hands, would you like a glass of water, iced tea, coffee? Nothing, thanks. The man stood up, turned his back to us, and said: I’m Eddy Peters, at your service and God’s, welcome to our church. Now that he was standing I could see how fat he was, but in a strange way, with a small, thin face, thin arms, and sunken chest, and then a very large potbelly. I noticed the surprise in Momo’s eyes and thought he might be on the verge of committing an indiscretion. I would have to watch out.

So you’re looking for somebody, eh? he said, sitting down again, theatrically. Yes, an American friend, I haven’t seen her in years, but then some friends of mine told me she’s a parishioner of this church and had mentioned to them that she was coming here, that’s why I’ve come to look for her. Oh yes, he said, chance, chance is the ink in which God dips his pen in order to plot the destinies of men, and what leads you to believe that she’s here in this particular branch of our church? I looked at him and said, absolutely nothing, just my intuition.

The man scratched his neck and caught a bead of sweat as it trickled down behind his ear.

The fact is, there’s nobody of that name here, you’ll have to give me more information. As I said before: she’s of Latin origin, forty years old, and has worked for other evangelical churches. . And why do you imagine she may be with us? He was nibbling at the cap of a ball pen. I repeated: because of what our mutual friends told me, that’s the only reason. I paused and added, I’m a writer, I’m used to doing research.

When he heard that, his face changed color, and he spat the pen cap from his mouth and said, you aren’t one of those filthy opportunists who write about the crimes of the church and crap like that to fill their pockets by deceiving people? No, how could you think that? I’m not even writing, in fact I haven’t written anything in more than two years, I only mentioned it to. . But the man was beside himself. And what’s to guarantee that after this visit you won’t recover your inspiration and start slinging all kinds of shit at us? The scene was starting to be grotesque, but I was enjoying myself, so I said: I’ve never done that, I mean sling shit, I only want to know if among your parishioners there’s a woman who fits the description I gave you, from what I know the Coptic Church isn’t a secret society or anything like that, its followers don’t have anything to hide, it doesn’t do anything criminal or shameful, or does it?

He went to the window, put his hands on his hips, thrust his body back, and let out a big breath. All right, my friend, I think it’s time we put our cards on the table, don’t you? let me tell you how I see things: you’re a writer and you came to this country for the conference in Jerusalem; you say you’re looking for a long-lost friend but that wasn’t in your mind at all when you first arrived; but then a tragedy occurs, and one day later you get it into your head to come here and inquire after your friend, don’t you think that’s a rather curious coincidence? I looked at him in surprise and said: maybe so, but that’s all it is, a coincidence. The woman I’m looking for worked with the dead man years ago in an evangelical church in Miami, don’t you find that a bit disturbing?

By Christ and his cross, said Eddy Peters, I can see it now, you are writing a book, I can see it in your eyes, the way they’re shining. Let me see if I can guess the plot: you think it wasn’t suicide but murder and that the Coptic Church may be involved? My God, I can just see it: millions of copies, you and your publishers are denounced, there’s a great scandal, but then it all fizzles out and everything goes back to normal. . Do you have a title yet? I looked at him with a neutral expression. There is no title, because there is no book, but if you insist we could call it. . Death of a Biographer, what do you think?

He played with the ball pen in his fingers and said, quite catchy but there’s something missing, I don’t know, maybe it should mention the Church in the title, don’t you think? Then he stood up and said, even though you clearly have no scruples I like you, I must confess. The Coptic Church has nothing to do with that man’s suicide, and it’s not our fault that it happened; you must surely know that suicides are the work of individuals, and that they’re all different? How many reasons can there be to give up on life? To me there are none, because life doesn’t belong to us, it isn’t ours; you may be obsessed with finding out what happened, but you mustn’t lose sight of the fact that the truth doesn’t have to be known by anybody for it still to be the truth. Write your details for me on a piece of paper, how long you’re going to be in the country, and your full name, and if I come across her, I’ll be in touch, now good afternoon.

When we came out, the sun was still beating down. It was a bit early to go back, so we crossed the avenue and went into a café to have a drink. As we were about to sit down at one of the tables, I noticed a woman putting a bill down on the counter and picking up a package. Her face seemed familiar, and a voice told me: talk to her, it’s her.

The woman turned and looked at me in surprise.

Seeing her full-face like that, I realized that it was not from the photographs that I recognized her but. . Was it possible? She was the woman I had seen at the opening cocktail party! Yes, it was her, but it was also Jessica, because she stopped when she heard her name. I asked her if she was who I thought, but she shook her head and headed for the door, so I said, in Spanish, I’m a friend of José Maturana, I have to talk to you. She stopped again and gave me a searching look. Look, let me buy you a coffee, please. We walked to a table. A friend of José? she said, her voice was soft and beguiling, and I replied, yes, I’ve come from the conference, I didn’t know that José was sick and I was impressed by his story, I was the first to reach his room when. . when that happened, you know, I saw his body with the cuts on it, I found his notes, anyway, are you, Jessica?

She put her bag down on the table and said, I know who you are, you’re the writer, aren’t you? I saw you at the conference. I told her I had gone to the church to look for her but the Metropolitan’s secretary had said he did not know her and that there was no Jessica in his church, had she changed her name? No, she said, I asked them not to give out any information about me, that’s why, but why were you looking for me? why are you interested in Maturana? I told her there were things about José that I was trying to understand. I’m not an investigator or anything like that, nor am I, as Peters thought, planning a scandalous book, at least I don’t think so; it’s a very human story and for some strange reason I’d like to find out more, to get to the bottom of it, it just seems the right thing to do.

They brought two coffees in big cups.

Jessica looked at the steaming liquid with an anxious expression, and said, all right, all right, let me tell you a few things, you’re a writer and if you’re going to put this in one of your books it’s best you know what really happened, anyway, it’ll be better if I talk but don’t tell me you’re not going to do a book — I had been sincere, I did not know it yet — I’ve lived surrounded by people who say they won’t do this or they won’t do that, and then it’s the first thing they do, so don’t come to me with that.

Having said this, she began her story.

When he first arrived at the Ministry, José scared me. He was a tall, strong man, with a face pockmarked from smallpox or acne, swollen veins on his arms, bulging muscles, and those horrible lacerations he called tattoos, which he’d gotten in prison. If Walter was an angel who walked preceded by a ray of light, José was the king of shadows. Everything in him was an expression of evil, starting with his eyes. I had seen murderers, really perverse, cynical people, and I knew what was in a cold look like that. But Walter’s affection for him made me lower my guard. Maybe I was wrong, maybe José was like one of those mythological creatures who are all dried up but still have a few drops of life in them, and if somebody can extract those drops they revive, and I imagined that was what Walter had done.

But it was Walter I felt most afraid for, not me. As I said before, I had seen it all, I’d swum all my life in turbulent, shark-infested waters. According to the story José told at the conference, Walter was a violent man who had beaten him up in the penitentiary and as a result of that he had found God. I heard this story many times and the truth was that in the cellblock, when José was pushed, he slipped and hit a hot water pipe, which not only knocked him out but also caused burns, because a nut on the pipe came loose and the water gushed out in a kind of geyser; I assume the mixture of all that led him to see God. Walter wasn’t capable of hitting anyone, let alone like that. He was an angel, as I said before. José, on the other hand, was a tough, violent individual. One day he confessed to me that he had killed a man with his bare hands, that he had never been brought to trial for it, and that it weighed on his conscience. He told me that on one of our excursions to spread the word, when Walter had asked us to work together. He mentioned it in his talk, a dive called the Flacuchenta Bar; of course the things he said about it I don’t remember that way at all. One night, he went to the bathrooms in that filthy place and when he came back he was very pale, and he said, did you see the face of the man who just came out of the bathroom? I hadn’t seen anyone, because I was listening to the music, and he said, oh, Jessica, it’s like a zombie movie, I just saw a dead man come out of the bathroom, you have to believe me, are you sure you didn’t see anyone? and I said, José, if there had been a dead man we would all have seen him, dead people attract attention, but he’d already stopped listening, he was just looking out at the street, very pale and very scared. Then he said, Jessica, that man who just came out of the bathroom is dead and I know because I killed him myself more than five years ago in Charleston. You killed somebody? I said, and he said, with a look of shame on his face, I don’t think he was a great loss to the human race, and I doubt that anyone mourned him, I killed him because he was hitting a woman who wouldn’t let herself be raped in a crack house, you know, one of those places where people go to do drugs; there are women who shoot up and then they’re anybody’s, but even in a place like that there are rules and if the woman shouts, you go away; usually they don’t even realize what they’re doing, but if they push you away you have to respect them, anyway, this man tried to have sex with this woman, this junkie, who had a crying baby next to her, and she resisted, so he started hitting her, but not the way a man hits a woman, with his open hand, but as if he was hitting a cop or another black guy as strong as him. I got up from my chair and grabbed him by the neck, and said, hey, nigger, are you so stubborn you haven’t noticed that she’s a woman? have you already forgotten that you wanted to have sex with her, which, even with a brain like yours, ought to tell you that she’s a woman? The guy tried to punch me, but I caught his hand in mid-air and squeezed it hard until I heard a couple of bones cracking, then I grabbed him by the hair, and before pushing him against a table, I said, you don’t treat a woman like that, let alone a mother, didn’t you see she has a child? I hit him a few times; when I picked him up to look at him he spat out a lump of blood, and I said, the next time I’ll fuck you myself, you son of a bitch, then I grabbed hold of his head and banged it against the wall about five times, as hard as I could; then I slammed it into the screen of a broken old TV set, which smashed into a thousand pieces, and I left him there, blood all over him, with his head stuck in an old TV. Then I walked out onto the street with the woman, who was pushing her stroller and rubbing her swollen cheekbones. I gave her some money so she could go away and that same afternoon I left the city for a while, but the police never came looking for me. One junkie less in the neighborhood, who gave a shit, but now I saw him in the bathroom, Jessica, and I thought, José, if you left him bleeding maybe he didn’t die, maybe that’s why the police never came looking for you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was why José betrayed him.

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

Sometimes I ask myself, when exactly did José start to plan his betrayal? why did he betray him? what on earth did Walter ever do to him apart from drag him out of the gutter, give him his dignity, show him a path to follow, and provide him with a home? Great men are always betrayed by their disciples or their favorite sons, who are closer to the light, the light they want to have all to themselves, and if they can’t have it, they don’t want anyone to have it. They want it so much, they prefer to destroy it. This is what I believe happened: José wanted the whole logistical apparatus of the Ministry to disappear, he wanted Walter to again be a fragile young man treading the sidewalks of the world, with José by his side, protecting him, keeping the beasts off him, giving him warmth. I believe José betrayed Walter because he loved him.

José talked about a fight that never took place in Moundsville, but what he did describe very well was that when he came to, they both wept. That image reduced me to tears: two men who had lost their way, suddenly realizing that something unites them, and that they will have to be together for the rest of their lives. That’s very beautiful, and it only happens to the disinherited. It happened to me, too. But then comes the rest of your life. What starts well gradually acquires a bitter taste until somebody goes crazy. And that’s because inside love, hate resides, a nasty animal waiting to hatch and take flight. That happened to José, and his wings never stopped growing. He wanted to take his revenge, but on what? He probably didn’t even know that himself.

Walter’s fall had to mean that the crown would pass to José. Walter disappeared, and that was his victory. But you must be thinking, what kind of victory is it to spend the rest of your life wracked with guilt, constantly harking back to the paradise you destroyed, the paradise you lost through your own selfishness and hate? That’s how it was, José wanted to be Walter, to possess him completely, to be the only person who received his love, and in order to do that he had to destroy him. It wasn’t for the luxury or the money, in that at least José was a true follower of Christ.

The one time I went into his cabin I realized how pure his hate was, and I said to myself, it is as devoid of greed and reasons as the blindest love, it is a clean uncontaminated hate. His hut was a bare space filled with books, an easy chair, a stool, a writing table, a mattress, and nothing more, no decoration, no reminder of the beautiful things there were in the world, in the lives of the common people. Nothing at all. Only austerity and discipline. It was obvious that the person who lived there was concerned only with his own soul. A strange silence seemed to hover in the atmosphere. There were no mirrors, only a single light over the chair. José’s hatred for Walter is one of the purest, most uncontaminated things I’ve ever known. A motiveless hate that asks only to be exercised.

As the afternoon wore on, it was becoming increasingly more humid, so I asked for a lemonade. The noises of the street seemed to be carried ever more clearly on the air: scraps of conversation, horns, cars accelerating. Jessica did not seem to hear them. She lit a cigarette and continued her story.

José spent his days in his cabin in the garden, far from the everyday life of the house, and that protected him. It served his purposes. All that resentment would have been visible in the eyes, there’s no way you can hide something like that every minute of the day, but with him being at a distance we just didn’t see it. What happened in Colombia was another example. I don’t know if you remember. José mentioned a party at a hotel, when Walter was depressed and I gave them drugs. Well, I’ll tell you what really happened. It’s true that Walter was sad, but not because he’d turned into a prima donna, as José’s story suggested, but because he was genuinely hurt that his word was not being heard after so much effort and so much traveling, especially as, for him as for José, Latin America was the territory of his dreams. You can choose to believe me or not, but that night the drugs came out of José’s bag. Half a kilo of cocaine and three bundles of twenty-four crack cigarettes. The three of us drank and snorted. Remember, we were children of the streets, all that was part of our environment. It was the first time I’d seen Walter taking drugs, and I confess that the reason I did it was fear, fear of being left behind, abandoned, like someone running through a maze afraid to let go of the hand leading her. That night something took possession of us; I remember hearing some kind of construction work going on in the distance and feeling that I was being buried alive. That fear drove me to look for strength, just as it did them. It wasn’t a pleasant night, the fear didn’t go away, it was there in our words, in our glances, and, of course, in the silence. I stayed out on the balcony, in case they started fighting. We were on the twelfth floor and it wasn’t worth taking risks, anything was possible. They talked about the future of the Ministry. José said we should continue working in Latin America, expand, but Walter said no, better to carry on in our own territory, where we know what we’re doing, this attempt has been a lesson to us, we should listen to God, hear what He’s telling us through these failures. The same thing always happens when two men try to change the world: one prefers to stay within his own territory and the other wants to go out and knock down barriers; one of the two ends up badly, usually the one who goes outside, but in this case it was different because there was another element: resentment.

That night José felt frustrated and slit his wrists in his room, but they found him in time. Exactly as he told it, although I don’t know if his motives where those he said. José was ready for anything. It’s hard to see the danger when it’s disguised as love and lives with you, when you see it every day and have stopped recognizing it and it doesn’t surprise you. I never stopped seeing it, which is why one day I made up my mind to talk to Walter. I had to warn him and tried to find the words, but couldn’t. I wasn’t good at putting the blame on others, or speaking out of turn. My love for Walter was too strong. But in order to protect him, I was ready even to do that, so I talked to him on the plane during a trip to Charleston. I told him what I thought of José, how scared of him I was, how sure I was that he would end up hurting both him — Walter — and the Ministry; he let me speak without interruption, looking straight at me, his eyes like two letters blazing in the darkness, a and f, for example, standing for always and forgive, two words he used a lot; when I stopped speaking he hugged me in a fatherly way, and said, poor Jessica, what you must have suffered, feeling all that, being scared without my knowing it, without my being able to help you; he hugged me tighter and said, listen, listen carefully. What, Father? and he said, my heart, Jessica, do you hear it beating? Yes, Father, I hear it. Then remember, those little heartbeats are the life that you give me, through your love and faith. You are the one who protects my heart. While there is love in you, it will continue beating in my breast, whatever happens. He closed his eyes and we both cried. I felt relief for a few days, but then the fear returned.

When José started writing the book, there was a lull. We’d stopped going to the Flacuchenta together, so I was able to devote myself body and soul to Walter, to him and to prayer, because the call that God made to me was great and my answer a genuine one, although you may find that hard to believe. My devotion and my vocation are as strong as ever, do not doubt that for a second. The same could have been said of Walter, who was a pure soul; that was the only thing his burnished, muscular body had ever expressed, yes, it may have been a beautiful wrapping, but his strength came from inside, from his will and his love and his word. I don’t want you to think that I’m some kind of fanatic. In talking of him I talk of God. Many people accused the Ministry of being a cult, like the Moonies or the Davidians; they accused it of stealing from believers, of selling false dreams to the working classes. Poor accusers, what ignorance and what wickedness, what energy expended on wickedness. Why don’t they accuse the Church of Rome, with its marbles and alabasters and artistic salons? Churches are powerful because they represent something powerful: the faith of those who believe in them.

After the Ministry was destroyed, I devoted myself to study, I took two university courses, in theology and philosophy. For more than ten years I’ve been reading, learning about ideas, examining the images of devotion from the inside. When I first arrived at the Ministry I was seventeen, I was a scared girl, and in twelve years of spreading the word with Walter I turned into a good priest; today, with twelve years of university studies behind me, I still believe in Walter. I’m a monotheist. Nothing of what I learned in all those years has made me doubt what I felt about him, and if I could put the clock back and see the house in South Beach reemerge from the dust, I would renew my love and devotion to Walter, who represents the supreme idea of holiness.

I realized that she was about to finish, so I ventured to say, to ask rather, if Walter was so holy, why did he suddenly turn into a soldier and open fire when the police came for him? Jessica cleared her throat and took a sip of coffee. She looked around, nervous again, and said: there were weapons in the house, I don’t deny that, and the reason is that there was always money, a lot of money in cash. I never agreed with all that, but there were weapons and money. The way José tells it, it’s as if Walter was a sniper or something like that, but it wasn’t like that. José was in his cabin and didn’t see anything, he imagined it all. But I was in the tower and I know that the people who kept shooting right up until the end were Jefferson and the bodyguards. There were bullet casings clattering on the floor, the boys were jumping from one window to another and throwing each other cartridge clips, everything was filling up with smoke but they carried on; remember they came from the underclass, the school of the street. A shoot-out was a game to them, and better still, it was against the law. While this was going on Walter was kneeling on the floor, with tears in his eyes and an expression that had stopped being human. When fire started to engulf the house, he ordered us to leave and he stayed behind. In my last image of him, he is silhouetted against the flames, bare-chested and with his arms open in the shape of a cross. The Lord decided at that moment to come and take him back and that is why nobody found any traces, of his body or anything. He vanished into thin air.

Having said this, she looked at her watch anxiously and said, it’s getting late, now it’s your turn to tell me why you’re looking for me, and especially how you found me.

I hadn’t expected that question, so instead of replying, I took the message out of my pocket and threw it on the table. We’ve found you. She looked at it in silence and nodded, then said, so it’s because of this. I thought I saw, deep in her face, the beginnings of a smile. You traced the call back to the Coptic Church? I assume the answer is yes, otherwise we wouldn’t be sitting here. Let me ask you another question, why are you interested in this story?

I came across it by chance, I said, a thread flung down in front of me that I decided to follow. I could have decided not to, but I did it for no other reason than that it was there. I did it because I could.

Jessica read the message again, and this time she did smile. Poor José, maybe he never even read it. Yes, I said, he did. I found it in his room, inside his book, Encounters with Amazingly Normal People. By the way, who was with you when you made the call? why the plural?

She left the paper on the table and said, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I insisted: if you’d been alone you would have said, “I’ve found you” wouldn’t you? Jessica seemed confused and looked toward the door. That’s none of your business, let me remind you I’m under no obligation to answer your questions, this is a pointless conversation, do I have to justify myself? well, I won’t, but I will answer your question, the reason I used the plural is that I was referring to God, who is always with me. And now I have to go, they’re waiting for me at the church.

She stood up, looking nervous, and walked toward the door. Before she reached it, I said, is God the guest in Room 1209? As I uttered the question and saw her turn, something welled up in my memory: her voice. I had heard it before. It was the voice from the first night. She came back to the table and said, what else do you know about me? I looked her in the eyes. I know you went to the morgue at the Notre Dame de France hospital to see José’s body — actually I was starting to have doubts about that — and that you went there with somebody, I don’t know who, perhaps with the mysterious William Cummings, is that his real name? For the first time she looked at me with a defiant expression, and said, the person you’re referring to is a companion in faith, who’s been with me on and off over the years. He has nothing to hide and has no connection with José, so I would ask you not to call him “mysterious”; he’s no more mysterious than that young man who came in with you and is waiting for you at the back there, throwing those very crude glances at us, trying to figure out where our conversation is heading, do you think I didn’t see him?

That’s Momo, a young employee from the hotel. He brought me here because today is his day off, and he was coming to Tel Aviv to visit his mother. Why didn’t he come and sit with us? asked Jessica, but then she snapped her fingers and said, I know why, he was the one who told you about my calls, about the message, about Room 1209, tell him to come here. I refused. He doesn’t speak Spanish and he doesn’t know anything about this story. She paused again, then asked: what do you find so strange in the message?

It’s quite a coincidence that José decided to kill himself after reading it, don’t you think? But you didn’t know that. Why didn’t you put your name on the message? did you think those three words would be enough to tell him it was you? Jessica’s eyes filled with tears, and she said, I don’t know, I didn’t want to leave my name, maybe I felt scared again, I don’t know, you said people do things without knowing why, just because they can, well, this was like that, believe me, there is no puzzle, I simply didn’t want to.

Knowing you’d found him wasn’t sufficient incentive to stay alive, I said, why do you think he killed himself? and another thing, from the message I assume you hadn’t heard from him in quite some time, why were you looking for him? what was José running away from?

Miss Jessica took a deep breath and looked toward the door again. There are many things I haven’t told you, she said. In the last years of the Ministry, José used a power of attorney signed by me to steal large sums of money. He would put some little phrase like “miscellaneous expenses,” “contribution for Oregon Street,” “infrastructure,” and nobody asked any questions; at first it would be amounts like seven thousand dollars, but then they crept up to twenty-five thousand, and once even fifty thousand. He must have had someone advising him, because after a while it became very difficult to understand what he had done, and impossible to trace. Of course there was still money left in the Ministry, but it was all very strange. So I told Walter and he summoned José to the tower one night, just the two of them alone. He asked me to listen from behind the door, because he wanted me to help him figure it out afterwards. Walter said to him, are you taking money out, José? what do you need it for? He said he wasn’t taking it out for himself but for charitable works, and he didn’t know he had to justify himself. But Walter insisted. Look, brother, there are days when you withdrew seventy thousand dollars, why? what do you need so much money for? I want you to know something, José, if you want money just tell me straight out and I’ll give you all you want, this is just between you and me and all you have to do is ask, you know that, but don’t go taking out money here and there like that, it makes everyone nervous.

José didn’t own up, he denied it, saying that these sums of money were not for him but for charitable works, that Walter could go out on the streets and see what he had done, everything was there, invested in young people and in reformed prostitutes who were worth more than that money. Walter wouldn’t listen to him anymore, he sat down on the floor and asked José to leave him alone. A week later the police arrived, doesn’t that seem strange to you?

I was about to speak, because I still had a lot of questions, but she raised her finger to her lips and said, that’s enough now, we’ve talked for a long time, I suggest you go back to Jerusalem and think about everything I’ve told you. In a couple of days I’ll get in touch with you and we’ll continue our talk. But I want you to know that I didn’t go to the morgue. The last thing I want is to see a dead body, let alone José Maturana’s. I saw him from a distance at that cocktail party, and left again immediately. Then I saw him during his talk. Actually I just heard him, because I was sitting at the back of the room with my eyes closed. It hurt me just to look at him, anyway I can’t go on, goodbye. She left the café and crossed the street without once turning back.

The highway to Jerusalem seemed shorter now, in spite of the fact that the army stopped us several times. The Jerusalem number plates helped Momo to get through, but he constantly had to give explanations and show his safe conduct. We soon arrived at the military checkpoint on Jaffa Road and passed the hillock that leads into the valley.

There again was the tortured face of the city.

On the horizon we saw the skeletons of buildings that had burned after the first explosions and were now black and covered in dust. Eviscerated apartment blocks, twisted girders, towers turned into huge torches, heaps of broken glass, soot-blackened windows like empty eye sockets. On the corners, mountains of garbage from which foul-smelling streams flowed and buzzards pecked in search of food.

The whole city was laid out before us, and Momo pointed it all out to me. There was the Jewish district of Mea Shearim, with its synagogues and its Hasidic population; there, Bekaa, which had previously been Arab; to the south, Ohel Moshe; the elegant Rehavia and Kiryat Shmuel, near the hotel, and farther out, Talpiot; then the Arab districts, Katamón, Beit Safafa, and East Jerusalem, the German, Greek, and American colonies, and in the middle, like a giant jellyfish run aground on a coral reef, the Old City, that much sought-after treasure.

All this, said Momo, is no more than the entrance to a place that can’t be seen from here but is down there, the Valley of Josaphat, where the trumpets will sound for the Last Judgment, because this city, basically, is made for death. Everyone’s death. That’s why it’s the great necropolis, the cemetery of East and West.

I looked with interest at the stumps, mutilations, and pustules of that capital still under siege, which seemed to keep reserves of strength in its centuries-old memory that might allow it to rise again. The sun was setting.

The sharp crack of a grenade broke the fantasy and Momo started the engine. Let’s get out of here, he said, and may God protect us.

It was after five in the afternoon by the time we got back to the hotel. As I crossed the lounge on the first floor, one of the organizers of the ICBM approached and said, my dear friend, are you all right, we missed you at the round table this morning, I hope you weren’t in any kind of accident? I looked at the board with the conference schedule and read, 11:00 A.M. Round table. On the manifold forms of remembering, evaluating, understanding, and transmitting a life. My name was on the list of speakers. How embarrassing, it had been at eleven in the morning.

I’m so sorry, I had some urgent business to attend to in Tel Aviv and got back late, but to tell the truth, I didn’t know about this, I forgot to look at the program before I left, you must forgive me, please add my name to any of the remaining round tables, I beg you, but he said, don’t worry, my friend, life is full of imponderables, we just have to carry on with the conference, we’ll wait for your next contribution, he said, adjusting his glasses, and added, I’m sure it’ll be worth the wait, in fact, I can tell you that there’s a great deal of expectation building up among the public and the specialized press.

I took my leave shamefacedly, how could I have forgotten something like that? Then I ran to my room, eager to get my encounter with Miss Jessica in Tel Aviv down on paper.

When I got to my room, I found a note from Marta saying, take a look at these papers, I’m going out with Amos, don’t wait up for me. It was the medical report on Maturana. I didn’t understand most of it, but a few things caught my eye: Kaposi’s sarcoma, pustules in the liver, pneumocystis carinii, fungus in the mouth and the wall of the esophagus, dying lymphocytes, presence of the HIV retrovirus in the ganglions, plus a series of figures I couldn’t make head or tail of. He had AIDS! I immediately went to the table and started writing.

The next day, the telephone jolted me out of my sleep, like an arm grabbing me by the neck and pulling me out of deep water. It was Rashid, and he was in the King David, he had come to hear Sabina Vedovelli and suggested we meet down in the bar. I told him to wait for me. I threw water on my face and walked to the elevators, but when I got downstairs I found that Rashid was not alone. He was with Kosztolányi, Supervielle, and the head of Tiberias, Ebenezer Lottmann.

When I arrived, the three men looked at me.

Rashid rose to greet me and said, I think you all know each other? I felt somewhat ill at ease. The only one who seemed pleased to see me was Kosztolányi, who said, my dear colleague, what a pleasure you can be with us, would you like a coffee? we were talking about the latest events. I assumed a surprised expression and asked, which events, exactly? Supervielle threw me a sardonic glance and said, which events? well, Maturana’s suicide is. . striking, wouldn’t you say? I’d go so far as to call it outlandish; perhaps the ICBM should suspend the scheduled sessions and host a panel with the title Interpretations and Variations on a Suicide, what do you think? and he added, in an irritable tone: everyone’s interest has shifted away from the lectures and debates because of this unfortunate event, and obviously a suicide deserves our attention, but. . isn’t it, when you get down to it, merely the story of a man reaching the limits of his contradictions? In France, nobody would hesitate to call that famous Ministry a cult, and of course, between ourselves, what they did would be considered a crime; both the pastor, may he rest in peace, and his guru, may he also rest in peace, if they were French would have been put behind bars and nobody would think of them as heroes. Anyway, sighed Supervielle, poor man, although I’m not sure his tragedy is worth the incineration of a conference like this.

As he spoke, Supervielle observed Lottmann out of the corner of his eye to see his reactions, but the publisher, who was apparently used to having his face scrutinized like that, did not move a single muscle. Then Kosztolányi said, of course, a conference of this kind, with international delegates and in a city like this, with all that it symbolizes, has enough going for it to sustain such a blow, and that’s what will happen, I don’t have the slightest doubt, in fact your talk, my dear Edgar, was an example of how the public’s interest did not fade at all, don’t you all agree?

Rashid and I nodded, but Lottmann still sat there, motionless and hieratic, until he raised his hand, moved it to his glass of mineral water, and said, what I think about the subject has more to do with my work as a publisher, I believe that if Maturana’s story can be well written, it would make for a very good book; anyone, however poor his instinct, would be able to recognize that and it’s a pity that the protagonist did away with himself so early, although his own final suicide is excellent, it gives the story an incomparable romantic aura, a perfect ending for a narrative on modern violence and the role of faith in social redemption, something very shocking and very contemporary, a strong, hard-edged urban narrative, almost a piece of narrative journalism tracing the lives of each of the characters up until the conference starts, and then, bang, the suicide, the mystery of why he took his own life and the endless questions this creates in the others, in those who remain on the side of life, and of course the different interpretations, and what if, instead of being a suicide, and this is just for the sake of argument, it turns out to have been a murder, then we would get into the territory of the noir novel, an extraordinary noir novel in which the same sociological elements would become the natural theater for a tragedy, the story of a solitary man who is redeemed by God and who in the end takes a secret to the grave to him, because somebody, who? has eliminated him to stop him divulging it, who could be the killer?

I found myself interrupting him: it wasn’t a murder, Mr. Lottmann, I thought that too, at first, but now I’m sure Maturana committed suicide. He was very sick, and he also felt guilty for a whole series of things he did in the past and his relationship with the Ministry. It was a suicide, believe me.

Lottmann looked at me in surprise, and said, ah, my friend, obviously as a writer you weren’t going to let such a story get away. . I see you’ve been doing some research, am I wrong in thinking you’ve been making notes on the subject with a view to a future book? I was not sure what to say, but I nodded: yes, it’s possible I will do one, I don’t know yet, but I have been making notes and thinking a lot about the subject.

They all looked at me, waiting for me to say more. Fortunately, Ebenezer Lottmann spoke again: well, if you write the book, I’ll be more than happy to read it, my friend. I thanked him. Then he added: it would also be interesting to find that book Maturana mentioned, what was it called again? I told him the title, Encounters with Amazingly Normal People. Lottmann took out a notebook and asked me to repeat it; thank you, my friend, I’ll ask my office to find a copy so we can get some idea of it, now that the author has died it could be a real hit, I can see it now, I think I’ll buy the rights anyway, you never know.

I had a copy of the book in my room, and knew details of the story that nobody else at that table knew, but I kept quiet. Supervielle spoke again, and said, the world is full of good subjects through which we can gain a deeper understanding of the human soul, just look at our old continent, filled with anonymous gestures and heroic lives that are not always recognized but nevertheless form the true profile of the century; that’s what comes to my mind when I think of my two chess players, Oslovski and Flø, characters who may appear insignificant in the light of History, with a capital H, but in whom a profound truth is lodged.

Deeply moved, Kosztolányi said, you’re right, my dear Edgar, it’s in that kind of simple adventure that we find the small print of history. Rashid and I nodded again without saying anything, and Lottmann remained silent. Then he said, excuse me, gentlemen, took out his cell phone and called his office; in front of us, he asked his assistant to look for Encounters with Amazingly Normal People by Walter de la Salle, and to make an offer for the translation rights. Supervielle’s lip started trembling, as if he were holding back a fit of anger, but all he said was, it’s nearly eleven, gentlemen, Sabina Vedovelli will be starting soon.

2. STORMS

After Sabina Vedovelli’s talk, Eve Studios invited those present to a cocktail party in the third-floor bar — the most exclusive — at which clips from her films would be shown, along with an exhibit of photographs and videos of important prize ceremonies, and a documentary on her tours around the different film festivals of the world, from Cannes to San Francisco, from Tokyo to New York, with the title Sexocalypse Now!

On the invitation poster for the cocktail party was a picture of a very young Sabina in the position known as “the mountain range”—or “looking at Constantinople”—about to stick a carrot inside her. It was the front cover of her first feature-length film. To tell the truth, her story had left us all both surprised and captivated. To my mind, the way that young woman had found her way out of her many difficulties and transformed herself made Sabina Vedovelli, in spite of her eccentric costumes and her body pumped full of Botox and silicone, seem like one of the most fragile people at the conference. Unlike some of the others, I did not have a moment’s doubt as I entered the Heroes of Masada room on the third floor of the hotel, to see some images of her work, have a drink with her, and congratulate her on her lecture.

I was one of the first to arrive, which might have been why I found her at the door. She gave me a kiss on the cheek and said, thank you, my dear colleague, thank you for coming to this modest reception, which we are holding as mark of affection; I have to tell you that my husband and I would like to talk with you later, if that’s possible, there’s a subject we’d like to discuss with you. This greatly surprised me. I confessed my admiration and said, whatever you like, Sabina, after hearing your talk I admire you and have even grown quite fond of you, so of course I’m at your disposal to talk about anything you want.

Next up was her husband, Kay, who gave me an affectionate handshake (I looked closely at his arms and it was true that one of them did not move). He was a tall, impressive-looking man, elegantly thin and slightly snobbish, wearing a silk scarf and a casual but very elegant suede jacket, the very image of a wealthy fifty-something left-leaning European intellectual. A screen at the back of the room was showing images of Sabina performing various kinds of sexual acts, stunning views of her buttocks, legs raised, close-ups of her vagina, huge penises, her face twisted, lips sucking, expressions of pleasure. . As the images were silent, I had to imagine the moaning; her acting was so magnificent that it echoed in the mind, and the sounds she made could be heard perfectly, and so, with a glass of Glenfiddich in my hand, I was letting myself be carried away by the images, unworldly and obscene at the same time, when Sabina approached and said, I assume you speak Italian? I read in your biography that you live in Rome. Yes, I said, of course I speak Italian. She took me aside and said, let’s talk a while in that delightful language, come, have another drink.

She was wearing torn jeans, which made her look very youthful. I told her I had been impressed by her ability to fight, come what may, to find the strength to overcome everything, and she said, thank you, my friend, who better than an artist can appreciate what that means, living to please other people is worse than riding a tiger, and just as dangerous; I’m sure you’ll agree with me that living for your art requires you to weave a net that will catch you when you fall, to catch you every time you fall, making sure you don’t hit the bottom but stop somewhere halfway, from where it’s easier to get back up again, but tell me, what kind of subjects do you write about? I took another sip of my whiskey and said, somewhat shamefacedly, I write about things I consider important, friendship and separation, solitude, the past, betrayal and love, the same old subjects, I suppose, the ones you find in writers like Andreas Stiflit, Chekhov or Piotr Bordonave, and even in less well-known writers like Péguy or Bernanos. She said, and do you like Italian literature? Well, I said, we could spend several days talking about all the wonderful things in Italian literature, where do I start? Carlo Emilio Gadda, Bufalino, Carlo Levi and Primo Levi, the poetry of Ungaretti, that remarkable poem by Salvatore Quasimodo that says: Everyone stands alone at the heart of the world / pierced by a ray of light / And suddenly it’s evening, I may have gotten it wrong, I don’t have a good memory; and Calvino and Sciascia and Boccaccio, who wrote about people sheltering from the plague who get together to tell stories, rather as we are doing in this besieged conference, anyway, I said, Italian literature has always been with me, I should say that I learned your language when I was a child and it’s always been close to my heart.

As I said this, I glanced out of the corner of my eye at one of the plasma screens and saw what she would have called a “multiethnic and multiracial double penetration,” because one of the penises was black. Noticing that my attention had shifted away from her, Sabina exclaimed, oh, I can’t believe it! that’s Shadows of Lust! I’m sorry, my friend, this documentary is a gift from Kay and I don’t know what’s in it, so it’s a constant surprise to me, look at those images, we shot them more than fifteen years ago and I still remember the arguments we had about the message of that scene; one of the associate producers thought it would be more commercial if the African penis, which for anthropomorphic reasons is larger, penetrated the anus, but Kay and I thought that would be sending out the wrong message, as if the anus was the dark part of the body and therefore the natural place for a black man, which didn’t satisfy us from the political point of view, so we said, let’s take a commercial risk for the sake of an idea that’s not only esthetic but also ethical, an idea of social harmony, and so the anal penetration was done by the Caucasian and the one from in front was given to the African, a way of saying to the world, let’s have done with preconceived racial ideas, let’s respect each other’s differences, and well, I think we made our point, we’ve never been like other producers, who are ready to do anything to be commercial, no, we’ve always been consistent and perhaps that’s the key to our success, anyway, I’m sorry if I changed the subject somewhat, but now I’m going to come to the point and ask you a question, do you think José Maturana’s suicide was premeditated? do you think he had been planning for some time to do away with himself in the middle of the conference in order to give his death an esthetic dimension by turning it into a theatrical mise en scène? The question took me by surprise and I did not know what to reply, I had assumed that I was the only person trying to make sense of José Maturana’s act, at least the only one thinking about it beyond the typical banal comments on his motives and so on.

My husband and I, said Sabina Vedovelli, have talked a lot about it and we see that final gesture as something highly poetic; Kay has been making notes for a possible screenplay dramatizing his life, and that’s when we thought of you, because after all you are the only genuine writer at the conference and we’re very interested in your vision of what happened. We’d like to make you a formal offer and that’s why I’m inviting you to have dinner with us in our suite tonight, could you come? you don’t have any other engagement? I said that, unless I had some unexpected appointment with my Maker — like that character in Somerset Maugham — I was free and ready to oblige. She laughed and said: oh no, touch wood! Come and see us then, it’s in the right wing of the hotel, third floor, Suite 9D, we’ll expect you at eight tonight. I’ll be there, Sabina, and she said, excellent, now enjoy our canapés, I’m going to greet our other guests.

One minute before the hour, I was knocking at the door of 9D, the Judith and Holofernes Suite.

It was Kay who opened the door, still dressed casually, but so exquisitely that it made me regret my commonplace costume of blue shirt and khaki pants. He invited me into a luxurious apartment. In the middle was a sunken area covered in rugs and cushions and lit with indirect lighting. Soft music was playing, a concerto, I thought, possibly by Handel, although I was no expert. There was a glass dome above us, through which the stars looked down, indifferent to what was happening below. Scotch? he said, opening a drinks cabinet with dozens of bottles glinting agreeably in the light. Sabina will be here in a minute, I know she’s already put you in the picture about what we want and why we’ve invited you here tonight.

Then he asked me to choose a whiskey, so I looked at the labels and selected the bottle of Lagavulin, which I had discovered years ago in a novel by Vázquez Montalbán. Please sit down and make yourself comfortable while I bring some ice. The large cushions were really welcoming. The windows were closed and covered with prints of the city.

Before coming to the conference, we looked at the biographies of the delegates, including yours of course, and now, in the light of what happened to Maturana, we believe you’re the perfect person to write his story. You can write it as fiction or nonfiction, whichever you prefer; then our team will adapt it as necessary in order to turn it into a terrific movie. Sabina and I had been thinking, even before coming here, of writing something about this city, but the best things are always the most unexpected, and bang! the story just turns up, like an animal poking its nose out. That’s why we always have to be alert. The pastor’s life, reaching a masterly climax with his suicide: what a fantastic subject! I know we shouldn’t talk that way about somebody who’s died, but I suspect he wanted to make his death a ceremony, a theatrical performance, so I applaud, well done, reverend, excellent work! It made such an impression on us that we went to the morgue to see his body, just to make sure it really was a suicide, and there was no doubt about it, those vertical cuts in his veins said one thing very clearly: dear friends, I’m not joking, this is it. On hearing this, I thought: so it was you. . Marta, I don’t think much of your powers of observation if you couldn’t recognize Sabina Vedovelli!

Suddenly Sabina appeared from one of the corridors at the far end of the room. She was wearing thigh-length white leather boots, a miniskirt, and a white latex top, an aggressive Seventies-style outfit in sharp contrast to her cobalt-blue eye makeup and lipstick. Seeing her gave me a sense of calm, like the blue domes in certain towns in the Mediterranean. What are you drinking? she asked, and Kay said, whiskey, shall I pour your martini? it’s ready. She drank two tiny sips and went to the door. The dinner had arrived. A bellhop came in, pushing a trolley with silver trays. He arranged everything on the table, lit two candles, uncorked and poured the Sancerre wine, leaving the bottle in the ice bucket, and withdrew with a little bow. Only then did Sabina greet me with a rapid handshake and we sat at the table.

The discussion started immediately. I’m sorry to be so direct, my friend, but I’d like to ask you a question by way of introduction. . What’s your favorite part of a woman’s body? Without thinking I said: the buttocks. I love touching them, sinking my fingers into them, sucking them, feeling their girth, appreciating their hardness, resistance, and volume, finding architectural similes, domes of mosques, vaults, opera houses, stupas, ziggurats, coliseums, and pantheons, I love reciting poems by Pietro Aretino to them and proclaiming myself their slave, looking at the sky and finding likenesses in the clouds or in the mountains, anyway, the buttocks, without doubt.

Sabina cracked a smile and said, I like your style, for a moment I was afraid your answer would be: I love the outline of the hands or the delicate shape of the instep or even the shadow of a beauty spot on the cheek, which is what hypocrites reply, even if while they’re saying it they’re looking at the crotch of the woman walking past. People say empty, stupid phrases that reflect their fears and that insubstantial vision of the world that’s so common today in so many groups, the dictatorship of verbal, ideological, and physical asepsis, God, that desire to smother the animal nature of the body, ugh, I also like Pietro Aretino, do you remember any of his poems? Of course, I said, I know a lot of them, and she refilled the glasses and said, let’s hear one, tonight should be filled with poetry.

Open your thighs, my darling mine,

That I may see your wondrous rose,

That lovely hole where soft hair grows,

Gate to my dreams! O honey fine!

And having made that journey south

And tasted fruit of such delight

Then turn I must, to end the night,

And plant my tool within your mouth.

Sabina grinned with pleasure and raised her glass: to Aretino, the poet of the cunt and the pleasures of the ass! As we clinked our glasses, a drop of Sancerre spilled on the tablecloth, and she put her finger in it and crossed herself. Ah, how I love the love that is sincere and human, the love of the body, the clitoris and the cavernous textures of the penis and the labia, that’s the most important, most daring revolution in the world today, and it’s what Kay and I try to demonstrate through the stories we tell at Eve, stories that both entertain and convey models of thought, stories that are instructive and, at the same time, real, performed by men and women who sweat and ejaculate and shit, the last bastion of a truth that’s on the verge of disappearing from the world forever, and not because of a war, the kind threatening this city and of which this city is a symbol, but because of something worse, the war of infinite human stupidity, a siege just as cruel, just as terrifying, as those waged with bombs and guns, Eve is fighting that war in hand to hand combat, or should I say “body to body,” because it’s in the body that it must be won, and I tell you, my friend, that we are prepared to use all the resources we have and even die in the attempt, we will save and spread that profound truth of the body, my God, we are made of blood and bones and flesh and the juice that moistens our vaginas, not only of prayers and empty words and polite phrases; our heads are in our crotches, setting off a ruddy geyser of sperm; there is no art or doctrine unconnected with those liquids, because much of art, basically, is an immersion in those liquids, a series of blind discoveries in primitive waters, like the harmonious wandering of nomadic fish, for example, everything that an artist can extract from that dark cave and bring out into the light, making others see it, that is great art, my friend, but there are fewer and fewer of us, hence the importance of going as deep as possible, into the essence, rejecting the light and frivolous, fleeing anything that lacks that patina of brilliance that the parthenogenesis of the Earth gives certain metals, anyway, it is urgent to act, this civilization is mortally wounded and the duty of Eve, our duty, is to be the guardians of that ancient nobility of ideas and feelings that once allowed great art to exist, that is the only thing we possess, as I’m sure you will already have noted at the conference, it is we who are really under siege, a small group of men and women telling stories in the midst of disaster, convinced that in doing so we are protecting something essential, something we can’t lose and for which it’s worth risking all, with all our strength and talent, we are knights of something that’s about to die, an order or lodge in the greatest poetic sense.

Sabina paused and sipped at her wine. Her cheeks had flushed as she spoke and she seemed dazed. She again looked me in the eyes and said, I suppose you must be asking yourself why I’m telling you all this, aren’t you? I was about to agree, but noted that, like the others, her question was rhetorical, a prolepsis, because she went on, obviously I didn’t ask you here only to tell you about our battles, but because we want you to join us, to fight at our side, to join Eve Studios as a creator of stories, beginning with the story of José Maturana, a story with great potential. We’ve imagined a movie that tells that adventure, that goes back to the beginnings, to the great secrets of life, that asks questions about the divine and the human and shows us a way, do you follow me?

I said yes, and Sabina filled my glass again.

Before I could say anything, Kay spoke up, saying: we are willing to give you a check for two hundred thousand euros, right now, so that you can start work on something that could be called, as a working title, The Passionate Pastor, something like that, I even think it would be a good idea to include the word Christ in the title, what do you think, darling? and she said, I don’t know, I like “pastor,” or even “priest,” it would arouse more morbid curiosity because it includes the idea of pedophilia in its semantic field, which would allow us to make it more combative and accusatory, but there’ll be time to discuss that.

Kay continued: anyway, we’re interested in the story and we believe you’re the best person to write it, given that you were here and saw him. By the way, did you have the opportunity to meet him? I said yes, I had spoken with him at the opening cocktail party, but did not say anything about Jessica or the book or of course the message. We could see about that later.

Good, said Kay, you knew him, you remember his voice, his figure, his style, that will make it possible for you to recreate him in verbal and at the same time philosophical terms, and I say to you right now, don’t worry about inventing sex scenes, we have some very talented people who specialize in creating them from any text, I assure you you’ll be surprised, they would be capable of making a sex scene from the opening chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason, that’s why what you have to provide is a literary version that holds up by itself, that’s all we need; the publication rights will be yours, all that matters to us is the adaptation rights, and if it turns into a box office hit you’ll receive royalties, do you understand? We only ask that you deliver it within six months, do you think you can do that?

While I was thinking of a way to accept the commission that would not reveal my precarious situation, Kay interrupted me: we know you’ve been out of circulation for more than two years for health reasons and haven’t published anything in quite a while, but contrary to what others might think, in our eyes that makes you an even more attractive proposition for this project, since we assume you’re less influenced than the others by all the shit that’s been dumped on us in the last two years when you were absent, and believe me, there was a lot of shit; and as far as the previous shit is concerned, I assume that being alone will have allowed you to cleanse yourself, and that’s important, it means that in your subsequent work that wisdom you’ve acquired with distance will manifest itself, that translucent condition of the soul, do you accept our offer?

It was the first contract I’d had in front of me since my illness, one related, moreover, to something that had already become an obsession. I accept, I said, I’ll write the story of José Maturana within six months.

Kay stood up, went to his study and came back with a folder. He took out a contract with my name printed on it and said, please read it, and if you agree print your initials on each page and sign the last. He handed me a pen, I wrote EH on all the pages and signed at the end. When I had done that, he opened a checkbook from Citibank and wrote me out a check for two hundred and one thousand euros, explaining that the extra thousand was to cover bank and postal charges. He blew on it to dry the ink and handed it to me, then shook my hand. Sabina gave me a kiss and again filled the glasses for a toast.

Then we ate herrings and smoked salmon with vodka. We talked about cinema and literature, Cassavetes and George Cukor, the epigrams of Svellenk, Kristin Lavransdatter. I asked Kay if there really was a newspaper in Norway called Morgenbladet, as mentioned on the first page of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, and he said, of course there is, I read it every day, it’s the national newspaper.

As he talked about a film version of a book by Daphne du Maurier we started to hear explosions, with increasingly shorter intervals between them. The fifth one made the building shake and Kay said, damn, that fell close to here. The sky lit up and its glow entered the room through the glass dome. The suite was flooded with bluish electric light, which made our faces look ghostly.

The subsequent explosions ruined the atmosphere of the dinner, so I put down my knife and fork and announced that I was going back to my room, which seemed to relieve them. It looked as if it might be a difficult night. When I was already at the door, Kay handed me a card with all the information I needed to contact them, and said, call any time you need something or have any doubts, our way of working is based on trust and friendship. I thanked him. When I said goodbye to Sabina I saw two purple rings around her eyes, and an inflamed vein or nerve just under the skin throbbing in her face like a small uneasy heart.

As I walked out into the corridor, the explosions continued.

The lights were flickering so much that it was impossible to walk more quickly. I passed marble-clad reception rooms, wide staircases with handwoven carpets, polished doors, but there was not a soul about. The hotel was one huge abandoned house and from outside came the noise of the bombs, as if a loudly howling wolf was eating what remained of the night.

My body is torn to shreds and my skin red-hot, said Marta when I entered the room. She was dancing about naked, completely drunk. But I’m happy, I want to spend my life with this burning, these pains that emerge after pleasure, oh, I want to sing, I want the walls to let my voice through and everyone to hear me and know about my happiness, I want the angels of this holy city to celebrate with me, instead of the bombs and the fires, I want the last judgment to find us singing, let’s drink, the world is going to end! I feel calm and fulfilled, I’m sorry, I think I’m in love. .

She went into the bathroom and from there called out, don’t wait for me, I need a long restorative shower, then you can tell me where you were and what you’ve been doing, what time is it? what does it matter where the hands of the clock are, the important thing is where we are, don’t you think? I said something but she had stopped listening, so I started making notes on my dinner with Kay and Sabina, trying not to think about the explosions. To cheer myself up I looked at the check from Citibank, a figure I had never before seen in relation to money, let alone money that would soon be mine. I was doing this when something novel and unforeseen happened. Another shell roared, the building shook, and the electricity went out. I stood up and went out on the balcony. There were a few flashes still visible, but the whole city was in darkness. I gazed for a while at that thick blackness, feeling slightly dizzy, and heard voices from the lower floors. People were opening windows and, like me, coming out on the balconies.

I went back into the room and heard Marta calling from the bathroom, why did the light go out? has something happened? I opened the door and said, we have to go down to reception, there’s a lot of bombing tonight, let’s go, hurry up.

She put on one of the white bathrobes and we went out into the corridor, where others were lighting the way with cigarette lighters. We ran to the stairs and found a swarm of frightened guests. I was sure the light would come back on or that the hotel’s generator would start working before we got down to the first floor, but neither happened. Marta looked for my hand and squeezed hard. I hate the dark, she murmured, which you may think is stupid coming from a country that’s in darkness most of the time, but that’s how it is, my analyst says it’s related to sexual fears, he may be right.

I saw the backs of the people moving in front of me in rhythm with their steps. Whenever one lighter went out another flared up, and so we had light all the time. By the time we got to reception I felt that I was in the bowels of the earth, the gallery of a mine dug centuries ago. Outside, the explosions were increasing in intensity and we were asked to keep calm. The manager stood up on a chair and said, we’ll go down a few floors to the sports club. We’ll be safe there because it’s an air raid shelter, but in any case there’s no danger, it’s purely routine, the light will come on again any minute now, could I ask you please to form groups of twenty and carry on down, it’s vital that everyone stays calm.

Near us somebody said: I know what happened, the defenders cut the lights off because a squadron of enemy planes has gotten through the antiaircraft batteries and anti-missile radar and is on its way here. The defense planes are already flying overhead. There’s going to be a battle in the sky, planes will crash onto the roofs and there’ll be fires, may God help us. Marta got scared and squeezed my hand hard. Another voice said: a missile of enormous power is heading straight for us from long range, that’s why they cut the electricity and made us go down, but a second voice rejected that, saying, long range missiles with nuclear warheads move according to pre-established GPS systems, and just turning the lights out won’t save a city from the impact, that might have been true in the days of biplanes and the Red Baron.

The sports club, with its sauna and Turkish baths and muscle-building machines, was covered in tiles. The groups advanced slowly, somewhat inhibited by the funereal atmosphere of the place. Marta and I sat down in a corner, on the track of a treadmill, and waited for everything to pass. It was only when she laid her head on my chest that I realized she was crying. Nothing’s going to happen, it’s just routine, in a minute the light will come back on, relax, but she said, that’s not why I’m crying, I wish my sadness were only fear, no, I’m crying because of Amos, I’m crying because I’ve realized that I love him with all my soul and because at this moment, when a woman needs her lover’s embrace, he’s embracing another woman, protecting another woman; I know he would be capable of putting himself in front of a grenade to save her, and here I am, wrapped in a bathrobe, with my body still trembling because of him, but I’m alone, in a poetic sense I mean, please don’t take it badly.

I interrupted her and said, I understand you but don’t think too much, and don’t keep going on about it, any moment now the generator will come on and everything will be the way it was. Then Marta said, you’re an angel, why the hell didn’t I fall in love with you? it would have been simpler. To tell the truth it never even occurred to me.

And what about your planned article on the life of a doctor in a city under siege? I don’t think I’ll do it, said Marta, I’m too involved personally and I wouldn’t be objective; I don’t want to violate journalistic ethics, that was one of the first things I learned in this fucking profession, ethics, and I’m not going to throw that overboard now. I think I’ll go with my earlier idea, something on Maturana and his tragic death, a summary of his life and the circumstances of his death, all that spiel, of course I’ll have to rely a lot on you, my dear, I’m a bit of a disaster when it comes to organizing my work. By the way, how did it go in Tel Aviv?

I told her about my encounter with Jessica, adding something I forgot to include in my notes, which is that she had been with the Universal Coptic Church for ten years, first in Miami, then in Bolivia and Ecuador, then in Nairobi, and finally in Tel Aviv; she had donated the property she had inherited from the Ministry to the order and thanks to that had been allowed to jump the queue in being assigned to the Tel Aviv branch, which was closer to the tomb of Jesus, where every true Christian longed to be.

The story seemed to calm Marta down, so much so that she stopped sobbing and was now making circles with her finger, saying, Amos is turning into an obsession, I can’t stop thinking about him, I feel his warmth and his smell, I feel his touch, being a woman is the dumbest thing in the world, always falling in love at the most inappropriate time, damn it, I’d rather be a male who fucks and forgets, so I said, but Amos hasn’t forgotten you, as far as I know, he simply isn’t here, that’s all, don’t think too much, don’t let your imagination run riot, think about your life just forty-eight hours ago, isn’t that too short a time to be making such a big thing out of this?

Marta looked at me with a hint of annoyance: you’re talking like an attorney, someone who analyzes and dissects, not like a writer, don’t you know that literature is filled with cases like mine? cases of women who turn their lives upside down overnight for love, without looking back? have you forgotten Twenty-four Hours in a Woman’s Life by Stefan Zweig? I mean, that woman took half the time I did, and I have more of an excuse than her, because I’m in the middle of a war, where love affairs are common because the fragility of life is so evident, have you forgotten Malraux’s La condition humaine? You should know all that.

Look, I said, I’ve just come out of a long period of silence and illness, surrounded by people with greenish skin and eyes bloodshot with hatred. People sick with emphysema, the swelling of the pulmonary tissue, who think they can’t breathe because of the others, and that’s why they look at them with the silent hatred of the weak, who can’t act on their hatred but only feel it. Having been there I’ve developed strong nerves. My sensors are covered with a layer of what might be ice, like a plane in a cold airport, and I react slowly, like those who’ve been in this siege for a long time. Don’t ask me for tears I don’t have, don’t ask me to screw up my eyes in anxiety. At the moment all I feel is tired and sleepy.

Murmurs could be heard. The shadows around us were engaged in agitated discussion. Suddenly there was a movement, the arrival of another group of guests in the protected cave of the gym. Some came and sat down with us, no doubt haggard and resigned. We could barely see them, until a woman said: we’re going to lose everything, who had the terrible idea of holding the conference in this dead city? When the light comes back I’m going up for my things and getting out of here, I should have done that earlier. Damn it, this is all my fault.

She was a woman of fifty, slightly weather-beaten, but still proud and beautiful. She was wearing tight jeans and Texan boots. As she bent, her backside protruded over her pants and part of her buttocks appeared, revealing a triangle of black thread and a tattoo with the opposing signs of the yin and the yang. Her hair had been dyed thousands of times in different shades and the roots were iridescent lines; her nails were purple half moons, with white tips.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where did I see him for the first time?

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

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

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

So that was how I met him. We spent the evening together and that night I slept by his side, and I mean, by his side, without touching, let alone screwing, and also the following night and so on all week, together with him, in silence most of the time or else telling him about my past, but he wouldn’t tell me about his, whenever I asked him a question he’d simply look up in the air, so I finally realized it was better if I kept quiet, but I was ready to do anything as long as he let me stay with him.

At least five years had passed since the end of the Ministry, according to my calculations, because he never said anything. He was very silent. We had a very strange relationship, I don’t think a man and a woman have ever had a relationship like that before, at least not on this planet. I don’t know how to explain it, it was as if every day we started again from scratch; as if every day we had to spend hours and hours breaking a thick, grimy pane of glass that covered his heart. After that, slowly, the man he’d been the day before might emerge, though not always. Sometimes he didn’t surface for several days and you could wear yourself out looking for him, and when he appeared he never appeared completely. Life with José was a constant process of loss. There was always less there, nothing seemed to accumulate. We lived in anonymous hotels, changing every now and again; by the time I’d started getting used to one, we already had to leave. What are we escaping from? I would ask, and he would say, we aren’t escaping from anything, we simply have to go, come on now, hurry up. We took with us two small beat-up cases and some plastic bags from Dalmart. Sometimes, when they saw us walking by the side of the highway, police cars would slow down and they’d look at us very suspiciously. José didn’t care, he’d say: let them stop, we have nothing to hide. I don’t know why I decided to stay with him. I didn’t want to lose him, I longed to be by his side and get away from the dizziness, the cold, the solitude. I’m a typical Aquarius-Pisces cusp, the silent fish staring out from caves of coral. For me, José was like the sun he saw on Walter de la Salle’s tattooed back, one of those eyes of God that shine brightly and burn; I burned up in that fire, but I clung to the man, and I was his woman, although he never let us live together properly, he never even wanted me in the same room as him, never, he’d pay for my accommodation and food separately and leave me banknotes in the pages of the Bible; he never registered with me, as if being together was an offense to God or that young Christ he worshiped and was always talking about, night and day, so much so that I ended up drawing my own conclusions about their relationship, but anyway, that was my life during those years, although I must also tell you that I was happy and that there were many times he made me feel fulfilled as a woman. A woman pursuing a man who basically was never there or who never loved her, although now I’ll never know. I was never able to demand anything of him, except when I fell sick. Then, yes. Then he’d come and give me shelter and care, and I swear I managed to feel happy when my throat was overrun with platelets or ganglia, or when my ovaries hurt or I had infections. I’d get down on my knees to the doctor and beg him to diagnose horrible things and take a long time to cure me, because when I was sick I meant something to José, like the poor in my country, who only matter when they have epidemics or they die of nasty things.

That’s how things were for me with José, who was still Cyril at the time.

By the way, let me tell you how I found out about this whole name-change thing. He’d gone to Delaware, to a little place called Zinc Town, where they’d invited him to talk about his books and about God. Zinc Town is a stretch of earth and stones with nothing beautiful about it at all. It’s like hell. Most of the people worked in the mine, whole families. They’d set up a platform for him opposite the church, with chairs in front. I sat down in the front row and waited for Cyril to come out with the local bigwigs, but when I took a close look at the flyer they’d left on the chair it said:

Presentation of the book A Star in the West, by its author, Silas Ebenezer Burnett.

I thought Cyril would be coming later, but suddenly I saw him come out with the mayor and the priest and sit down at the centre of the table. The mayor blew on an old microphone and said: please give a warm welcome to the great religious authority Silas Ebenezer Burnett, who has been kind enough to travel to our humble town to talk to us and introduce his book, and imagine my surprise when I saw Cyril stand up and lift a hand to his heart, in a sign of gratitude, and then raise his clasped hands, like the black leaders did; I sat there petrified, watching him saying a prayer to Christ the Redeemer before beginning his talk, and I said to myself, this man is a real mystery, and then just laughed, but in time Silas Ebenezer Burnett, author of A Star in the West, turned into Uriah Tennyson, author of Builder of Hearts, and then into Sean Méndez, whose work Gods of Mud in the 18th analyzed violence from an evangelical point of view.

José was so schizoid, he even had names for other genres. His poetry he published as Iván Arabi, and incredible as it may seem it was very successful, almost more than his religious and self-help books. His poetry book Bullets from the Night against the Last Man won a prize in San Francisco and was translated into Spanish and French. At a conference in Minneapolis somebody compared his poetry with Bukowski, and this wasn’t a young guy high on crack but a university professor. His poetry had depth because it came out of the filthiest, most foul-smelling parts of the city, out of the lines of coke laid out by pale women on lavatory seats, and out of newspaper pages smeared with shit, and out of the frenzied couplings of immigrants scared of being deported back to their grim cities, oh God, all that fed into José’s poetry, or rather, Iván Arabi’s, I don’t know where the hell he got that strange name from, and it also fed into his life, which was also mine because I was his guardian; I’d get down on my knees and beg him to let us spend a few days in a cabin by the sea, or in a little house in the mountains, or go fishing by the lake or go camping, but there was no point, it was impossible to get him away from those shabby motels with people having loud sex in the next rooms and breaking bottles against the walls; he never explained why he was so afraid of happiness, why he was so disturbed by light, or the centers of towns, or a settled life; maybe he thought he’d be betraying his origins, out of his old loyalty to Walter from all those years ago, which was a lot stronger than his ties to me.

We’d spend the days in those motels, on the outskirts of towns, most of the time in silence because he’d be writing a lot, or reading one book after another, so I’d kill time listening to music on my iPod or going on Facebook and chatting day and night with invisible friends and even having steamy affairs on the internet, because I couldn’t spend one whole day without talking to somebody, without finding out about other people’s lives, without somebody asking me things, and while I was chatting I’d be making imaginary journeys, looking at photographs of countries, cities, lost towns. Once I looked up the motel where we were staying on the internet and when I couldn’t find it I had the feeling we were already dead and none of what I saw around me was real. After a time I became like him. I preferred to stay in the room, sitting on the carpet, with the laptop on my knees and my headphones on.

The only thing we shared was prayer, and the hours in church, with him on his knees, in an attitude of supplication and penitence, and me behind, pressing my hands together, and asking God, or rather, imploring Him to explain why He had given me such a strange destiny, why, Lord? why, when you know that I’m a woman like any other, with human desires and rages? That was what I asked God, over and over again, without any hope, because my prayers were never answered, I don’t know why, maybe because of the sins I’d committed or the things I’d neglected, there were certainly plenty of those. A few years passed and one day he said: I’m going on a journey, Wanda, I’ll be back in six months, I have to go alone, wait for me in the Comfort Inn on Sausalito Drive, I’ll be there the first week in September. When he said this, he already had his things on his back, and he just walked out without looking back. I couldn’t ask anything, only listen and obey. I saw him getting smaller in the distance. I’d never before felt so unhappy to be his companion, so I begged God: make him turn around and come back, let him be by my side when I open my eyes, let me see him sitting on the balcony when I wake up. But it didn’t happen. What I did find was a book he’d wrapped for me. On every page there was a hundred-dollar bill and a note saying: Wait for me on Sausalito Drive.

I collected my things and went to a hotel in the center, near the bay and with a view of the sea. From there I called my daughter, but when they wouldn’t put her on to speak to me I went out and bought her a whole lot of gifts and asked for them to be delivered to her. Then I had dinner in a nice restaurant, and had Mexican tacos, and without thinking twice ordered a margarita with a double shot of tequila. The first led to a second and then a third, and then five more; then I went to a bar I’d often been to when I was a teenager and drank three more, one after the other. In the bathroom, I bought two grams of coke. I started taking it right there, and drank some more. It was like I was seeing my life coming back in the opposite direction. I fell into the darkness like a body falling in water and sinking, hearing reality in the distance as if it was a bus I’d missed that had left with all my bags on it.

When I opened my eyes I was in a bed next to an unknown man who was snoring. My legs hurt. I slipped out without making a noise, and that was when I saw that my money had been stolen. Fortunately, the book was still in the hotel and there were still lots of pages, so I went back to tequila and cocaine, a long party that never ended, I’d go from one bar to another, from one mirror to another, mirror, mirror on the wall, until one day I looked at the calendar on my cell phone and saw that it was September 3, six months had already passed! I drank a million coffees, swam in the pool and took a little more coke until I could remember what José had told me, the Comfort Inn, and that was where I went. When I’d paid the taxi, all I had left was three ten-dollar bills, one of five, and a few coins, but it was enough. I rented a room and sat down on the carpet to wait. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I screamed.

He arrived two days later, as if everything was normal. Hello, Wanda, are you sick? He looked after me for about a month, stopped me drinking and taking drugs again, but then our life resumed its old rhythm: silence and motels, journeys on Greyhound buses, walks on obscure back roads, long mornings in local churches, and the occasional book signing. One night I found a snake in the shower and fainted. Thanks to that, José agreed to go up a category and we started staying in slightly better places; he also got in the habit of inspecting my room before he went to his just in case.

One year later, one morning before breakfast, he again said the same thing: I’m going on a journey, I’ll be back in six months, the book is in your case. This time, though, I managed to say, why don’t you take me? but he replied, I can’t, not yet, wait for me at the Comfort Inn, first week of March, and again he disappeared into the crowd; as I watched him getting smaller and smaller I felt my legs go weak and my brain was like a railroad station in New Mexico, filled with confused immigrants. I opened the minibar and drank all the little bottles one after the other. Then I went to a 7-Eleven and bought three bottles of JB, as green as emeralds, and drank them over the next two days without leaving my room, eating nothing but yogurt.

In the book there was a large amount, twenty thousand dollars, so I made another attempt to contact my daughter. The result was the same and again I jumped into the void, submerged myself in an ocean of alcohol, but when I came up again I felt disappointed. Only three weeks had passed. What was I going to do with the rest of the time? I’m sorry to be telling you all these sordid details, but I decided to add something to the drugs and the alcohol and hired two male prostitutes, two Spanish guys who were really depraved and did things to me like the things you see in Sabina Vedovelli’s movies. I have only vague images of that, because to tell the truth I was so out of it I can barely remember. Better that way. José kept his promise and came back on the date he had told me, stayed with me for another year and then left again. His journeys were becoming a ritual, and I was also starting to get used to that plunge into dark waters that left me exhausted, ready for his return.

Two years later, something new happened, which was that his laptop got damaged and he had to buy a new one. I managed to get hold of the old machine and tried to get into it, but I couldn’t so I hired a specialist. The man charged me seven hundred dollars, but anyway now I could get into the files and see what was there: his drafts of books, his rejected poems and the final versions, his personal pages, which didn’t really have much. It was when I connected it to the internet that things turned good, because that was when I saw all those e-mails from a travel agency confirming flights from Miami to Johannesburg via Sao Paulo, the first leg on Continental Airlines and the second with Varig.

I was puzzled, what on earth was José doing in Johannesburg? And worse still: why didn’t he take me with him if his route took in my native country, Brazil? why did he go every year? who did he have there? Through the e-mails I found out that whenever he arrived in Johannesburg he would rent a hotel room for three days and then disappear. Where did he go? My theory was that he was going into the jungle to spread the word of God, he wouldn’t have been the first to do that with native tribes. The next time he left on a journey I was prepared. After saying goodbye to him I went to the travel agency and asked to speak with the employee who had done the ticket for him. The man received me in his office, but said he couldn’t reveal Mr. Burnett’s itinerary — that was the name on his passport — unless I could prove I was his wife by bringing in a marriage license. I changed tactics and stroked his penis through his pants. I said that if he gave me that simple piece of information I’d give him a blowjob in the bathroom of the bar across the street. The man agreed to give me a copy of the complete printout: flights, hotel, times, everything. When he’d finished I changed my mind and said, listen, wouldn’t you prefer a hundred dollar bill? My gums are bleeding and I wouldn’t like to get blood on you. Then I went and called the hotel in South Africa and asked for Burnett and they said, he’s arriving tomorrow, madam, would you like to leave a message? Yes, I said, there are problems with the transportation to the jungle so he’ll have to wait. There was a silence at the other end, until the person said, what jungle are you referring to, madam? I thought it was weird that somebody in Africa should ask me that, but I had to keep up the lie. Mr. Burnett hired transportation from his hotel to the jungle, but there have been some problems and he’ll have to wait. Another silence on the line. There must be some mistake, he said, Mr. Burnett can’t have rented any transportation, because on Friday he’s taking the Tupolev to Tristan da Cunha, we booked it for him.

I hung up, and went and looked up Tristan da Cunha on the internet and, to my surprise, it turned out to be a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic, halfway between Africa and America, with a population of three hundred. Why the hell had José been going there all these years? I confess I still don’t know.

A strange silence descended, interrupting Egiswanda, and at that moment the lights came on.

Immediately a voice announced that the danger was over and that we could go back to our rooms. The light from the generator had started working and reality, after that horrible flickering, seemed to have returned to us. But we weren’t the same anymore. In the light I recognized some of the shadows: there were Kosztolányi and Supervielle, and I even thought I saw Kaplan in the distance. Our faces were haggard. Marta was so pale she worried me, and Egiswanda, who I had never seen in the light, looked really grim-faced. From the way they were both looking at me I assumed they were struck by my appearance, too.

It was clear that the situation was moving quickly, that our days at the conference were coming to an end.

We went up in the elevator, after a long wait for our turn. When we reached the floor where my room was, Egiswanda looked at us anxiously and said, can I stay with you a while longer, I feel a bit scared. Marta hugged her and said, of course, our room is also yours, I think we should drink something. We sat down on the bed with some gins from the mini-bar and Egiswanda continued her story.

One day José himself said to me, why do you never ask me where I go? to which I replied: because I know perfectly well you won’t answer and I’m not stupid. José was silent for a long while, lost in thought, and finally said: you’ll come with me soon to live in another country, I’m getting everything ready for that; it will do you good, you and the people who need you, the moment is coming, you just have to wait.

Time passed and one day he said, get your bags ready, we’re going on a journey. I thought he was referring to a change of motel, but he said, no, we’re going to travel together, bring your passport, and that’s how we came to this conference. Of course he didn’t want us to share a room and asked me not to be close to him. He said: stay in your room and think about important things like your destiny or the destiny of the world, I’ll come for you when I need you. The day of his talk, he asked me to go and hear him, saying: only by listening to me will you finally understand who I am, and that was what I did, I went to hear him. I listened to him eagerly, drinking in his every word. I cried. I got goose bumps. I got wet. I felt all that, listening to him. It was what I’d been waiting to hear for years and I assumed there would be a change in our life. First the journey and then his words, why wouldn’t I have imagined that everything was about to change? Men like José, who love humanity, aren’t capable of loving one particular person; that’s something they have in common with the prophets. When he finished his talk I met him in the corridor and tried to speak to him, but he brushed me aside, saying we would talk later, he would come and find me.

I was in my room waiting for him, with the TV on, and had no idea what had happened. I found out in the most brutal way, because I kept calling his room until the switchboard operator answered, and said, we’re terribly sorry, the guest in that room has just had an accident. I went to reception and that’s where I heard the news. I almost fainted. They also gave me a letter, they said they’d been going to take it up to my room but had been distracted. A letter? I recognized José’s handwriting on the envelope and when I opened it I found another envelope inside, with these words written on it: Don’t read this today, wait until tomorrow. I went into a corner to cry, trying to hide my grief from everyone, but then I said to myself, if he’s not here anymore there’s no reason for me to hide, I’m not harming anyone and I deserve to be able to cry for him, after all the sacrifices and the sad, solitary life I’d lived with him. I deserved to cry rivers of tears in that lobby where nobody knew I was his wife, which was why nobody had a kind word, nobody bothered to talk to me with any kind of tact, it was just: the man slit his wrists, they took his body to the morgue; I tried going to his room but, as I walked toward it, I felt his presence and got scared. I thought he was watching me and was going to fly into a temper, seeing me break the rules: never approach him, only wait for him to come, so I went back to my room and lay down on the carpet to cry, I wanted to drink but I couldn’t swallow the alcohol, I’d lost even that, and besides, he wouldn’t be there to take care of me anymore, so I cried and cried until there were no more tears left, until the last cell of grief left my body, and I was empty, and this city and this destruction and all that’s happening here seemed to me the ideal place from which to go away, and I even imagined that if I slit my wrists I could still get to him, get to where he was before he moved off and squeeze his hand and fly together to who knows where, I don’t know what there is after death, because deep down I’m not very religious. The world hurts me without him, the light and the air, everything hurts me without him. This conference and its delegates hurt me. The world is still turning, as if nothing had happened. I can’t believe it, José’s death can’t go unnoticed, like the fall of a dead leaf in a forest. It can’t be. I’ve read the letter about ten times or perhaps a hundred, and I know parts of it by heart. I have it here, would it bother you if I read it aloud? Marta wiped the tears from her cheeks and said, no, please, Wanda, read it.

Before doing that, Wanda asked if she could go to the bathroom to wipe her tears and freshen up, but what we heard were two loud snorts. She came out looking a little better, and said, you two are special, you’re the only people in all this mass of vanity who really care about José’s death. She picked up the letter and read:

Wanda,

My purpose isn’t to explain to you what happened to me, and notice that I’m speaking in the past tense, not in the future, even though as I write this nothing has happened yet. But it will happen. There are no reasons for certain things, and there doesn’t exist the slightest possibility of transferring experiences that are untransferable. Within three hours at the most, I will leave this frozen planet for good, and unlike Jesus Christ, my master, I won’t be coming back on the third day, because despite your admiration for me and the books I’ve written I’ve never been anything other than a total shit, a swindler. I’m not coming back after three days, among other things because nobody is waiting for me, with the possible exception of you. I am going to the world of the shadows, where I lived curled up before I was born, before somebody put their hand in that bag and pulled me out by the scruff of my neck and dumped me in the world, a hand that left me defenseless and in the most terrifying solitude, or, which amounts to the same thing, said, aha, my brother, I saw you, have a nice stay in this shithouse, you’re going to spend a few decades here, you already know that, the rest depends on you, you will see whether after a while you will be the grain that appears in the shit or the paper that cleans it or the stream of water that pushes it through the pipe, I give you those three possibilities, I’m feeling generous today — the hand continues — because, my friend, we’ll meet again during the race, and then the hand withdrew from the world with a nervous and rapid gesture, like someone pulling their hand out of a snake pit, and there I was lying on the street, bleeding and weeping, covered in entrails and shit, more alone than the first man on earth, without a trace of a past and without a history, my memories are the dirty walls of an orphanage, the concrete floor of a kitchen, the garbage piled up in the corners, a leaning lamppost filled with pigeons, anyway, I tried to do something in life and I don’t know if I succeeded, but it’s over now, what’s going to happen to me, in fact what’s already happening, can’t be changed, and that’s why I’m writing to you, let’s hope by the time you read this letter the situation in the city hasn’t gotten worse, because this is a farewell and a request, but let’s take things one at a time; first I’ll say goodbye and thank you for all the suffering and the deep faith you always had, accepting those silences and those abysses of mine, you were the strong one and I was the absent one, you were the island of air and clouds and me the nothingness; you knew how to respect my silences, which climbed all over yours and were harder to bear, and I say thank you, seriously, thank you, Wandita, my queen, what I am saying comes from the heart and there is something important: together with this letter there is a smaller blue envelope and a yellow one. Open the yellow one, you’ll find the details of a bank account into which I’ve transferred all the money I have, which now belongs to you, because you will have to carry on without me.

The request has to do with the other envelope. Look for God in the deep, say the gospels and that is what you are going to do; you are a rock on a cliff, strong, tough, I never told you these things but today I am saying them and writing them, so that you know they were inside me, so that you remember them, I leave you these words; being so close to death leads me to say them to you, I don’t know, in any case you deserve them and they are yours, in the end, I am leaving many things but not you or your company, my own life has finally caught up with me and now I can only escape by flying, like the birds or the souls, oh, the past never ends and is unpredictable; one of the first things I think I will ask the Big Enchilada, if he forgives me and I can see him even if only for a couple of minutes, is why he puts us to live on the tightrope of time, which brings us so much anguish and makes us act wickedly sometimes as long as we forget that sensation of emptiness, which is why we seek instant pleasures and put coke in our veins and look for ways to escape, but it doesn’t work, time is relentless and is always there in the corner, that’s what I want to ask the Big Boss, not even about my origin or about this shithouse where he made us live, but about the mystery of time; anyway, I’m finally getting to the point, because I don’t even understand myself anymore and I don’t want to write this letter again: in the blue envelope there is a map with an island marked on it and directions on how to get there, like in stories about treasures, except that in this case the treasure is the whole island, the one place on Earth where peace exists, a rock remote from the world where I would have liked to take you, I really had planned to take you there if this emergency had not come up, so the request is that you go and settle there; you can go whenever you like and move into our house, ask for the chaplain, his name is Talisker, he will help you because he knows about you and knows you’ll arrive sooner or later. You have to go there to be pure and clean and then, when that day arrives, you will make the leap into the infinite where the Big Enchilada and I will be waiting for you; but in the meantime go there and stay, that island is how I was when I was born, something small and solitary, lost in the world; on it you will be protected by millions of tons of water and you will be happy, because it is an emanation of the soul of God; my last gift is more solitude, Wanda, but what can I do, I was born alone; when I look at the world it will be to imagine that you are there, on that solitary dot, and to tell me that that pure uncontaminated place is Wanda’s island.

When she finished reading, Egiswanda brushed away a few tears, and said, thank you for listening to me, being with you has been a real consolation; José’s death is slowly becoming part of my life, and that’s how it must be, a grief that very, very slowly turns to resignation. Then she swallowed two pills out of a bottle, closed her eyes, and laid her head on one of the pillows, saying, let me sleep here, I beg you, I don’t want to be alone.

Marta put on one of my T-shirts and lay down next to her. I sat down on the carpet, thinking about Maturana’s words, José Maturana’s life. I was slowly drifting off to sleep, but before sleeping I asked myself: what kind of island is that? is it true you can find peace and tranquility there? I had a strange dream. I dreamed I had woken up in a clinic in ruins. My room had a hole in the wall and part of the roof had blown away because of some kind of explosion. I opened my eyes and looked up at the sky. There was nothing in it apart from a faint tinge of color, but I felt calm. From the bed ran cables connecting me to machines to check my heartbeat, my blood pressure, my breathing. There was nobody around. I heard the sound of the wind blowing through the dusty, rubble-filled corridors. The medical staff had left and I was the last patient, but my bandages were clean. How quiet it is, I said to myself, is this what death is like? There was no way of knowing. Suddenly a bird came to rest on the back of my bed. It looked at me in surprise, moved its head rapidly from side to side, and flapped its wings, stirring the air, and again I felt alone. The sickness had disappeared and I breathed in the air with relish, I could feel its sweet taste, the joy of its clean, fresh taste. My temperature was fine, below 96 degrees. The coolness of my body was transmitted to my soul. I was alone but I had recovered.

The next day the city woke up to silence.

After the night’s explosions the air seemed even thicker with mist and smoke. It was hard to see anything beyond a few yards. We were advised not to leave the hotel and to avoid the windows. Marta was asleep beside me and Egiswanda had gone, so I decided to go down and sit at one of the tables in the coffee shop, with my notebook. I drank two very black coffees. I put down in my notes what had happened the night before, the appointment with Sabina Vedovelli, her proposition, the air raid, and Egiswanda’s long story, all these things seemed to be finally putting an end to my period as a writer who does not write, so I immersed myself in my notes with a concentration close to what I had before my illness.

An hour later, the explosions started again. Every now and again, you could hear the unmistakable whistle of a grenade crossing the sky and how it was intercepted by the defense system, creating an area of conflagration. But I carried on with my notes. One can get used to anything, believe me. As Hemingway might have said: outside they are fighting for a city or for a world, but at this moment I belong to this pen and this notebook.

Some time later, I went back up to my room. I had to get ready for the round table at noon, The Soul of Words: A Look Inside, for which I had brought a number of short texts I could read in case the muses of inspiration did not lend me a hand. It was my first contribution to the conference and I wanted to make a good impression, especially after that had happened with the first of my round tables. By the time I got to my room, Marta had gone. Her laptop was open at a page with the heading The Body of a Suicide, but the screen was blank. Instead of writing she had been chatting: I saw various windows open with answers sent twenty minutes earlier: are you still there? are you coming back? What to say in my talk? I would talk about literature and life, I thought; I felt the desire to compare it with other artistic disciplines and also to tell human stories. I wanted many things but only had twenty minutes. The texts I had prepared had been written for other conferences or for short story anthologies, so I had to find a way to adapt them to the debate.

After a good shower, I dressed in a newly ironed suit, although without a tie; I combed my hair as best I could and went down scented and ready for my performance, which was in the Heroes of Masada room.

My companions at the table were all intellectuals specializing in the subject. Elsa Goudinho, from Mozambique; Dionisio Bumenguele, from Kenya; Itamar Machado, from the University of Oporto; Shé Kwan Mo, from Singapore; and, much to my surprise, Rashid! Rashid Salman. Seeing him at the door, I said, what a surprise! I didn’t know you were here, I didn’t see you on the program, but he replied, I asked them not to announce me for security reasons, as you know, these days there are a lot of weird people on the streets, the smell of gunpowder makes everyone go crazy, but here I am and you’ll see, I’m the best, the audience will take me in their arms and the most beautiful women will ask for my cell phone number and e-mail address, others will say with sly expressions on their faces that they’re waiting for me in the bathroom, get ready, I’m a tornado.

The debate was being chaired by Professor Emma Olivier Dickinson of Cornell University, and the first question she threw out was, “Can we get to the bottom of a life through the word?” As Professor Elsa Goudinho replied, skillfully improvising, I looked around the hall, which was quite full in spite of the bombardment. I saw the publisher Lottmann in the fourth row and a little farther back the inseparable Kosztolányi and Supervielle, watching him, obsessed as they were — especially Supervielle — by the Tiberias publishing house; they were craning their necks in their desire to see what he was writing in his notebook, but as I was close to him it was obvious to me that he was drawing circles or sunsets or sailboats, not taking notes on anything connected with the words of Professor Goudinho. Farther back I saw Kaplan, who on seeing me looking at him raised his hand and waved.

I continued looking for a face that would tell me something concrete. A face that would say: I’m Walter, you found me, let’s have a talk after the event. Even after my conversation with Jessica, I still believed — at least that was what I wrote in my notes — that Walter could not have died in the shoot-out at the Ministry; to escape, he must have used a ploy similar to that used by the guerrillas of the Polisario Front, which consisted in burying yourself alive in the sand with a straw sticking out just above the surface to breathe through, and in that way tricking the enemy. Then Walter must have gone looking for José and Miss Jessica in order to recover his money and move to another country, clandestinely, to begin a new life, but for some reason José must have betrayed him, taking part — or all — of those funds; all this was possible, and I was hoping that it was, because, to tell the truth, my mind was already on what I was going to write about José Maturana, and that seemed like the most convincing and dramatic ending.

After reading the letter to Egiswanda, I had completely ruled out the idea of a murder, but I kept thinking about the unknown person in Room 1209. The guest was a man and had some kind of relationship with Jessica, but I did not know who he was or, rather, I had been unable to confirm whether or not he was Walter under a new identity. The idea that he might simply be a lover of Jessica’s, without anything to do with the story, refused to lodge in my brain. As I thought about this, I realized that Jessica and Egiswanda had very similar voices: a slightly accented Spanish, an underlying sense of nervousness, which of the two had been the woman waging that terrible battle of love the first night? The voice was the same, but whose voice was it?

I was still scrutinizing the audience, row by row, when the door at the top opened and a slim female figure entered the room. The light was dim but I recognized her immediately: it was Jessica. She was alone and I assumed she would look for her companion and sit down beside him, but that did not happen. She simply looked for a free seat at the back of the hall. As she sat down I noted something incredible: the person beside her was none other than Egiswanda. The two women had never met, and Jessica could not possibly know that Egiswanda even existed. It was strange. There they were, sitting side by side, not knowing how much they had in common. They were linked to one another by men who were now dead, and I, who had not even lived through those events, was the only person who could have revealed that fact to them. I vowed to do so after my talk. Each woman had a piece of José; their descriptions and experiences revealed different, contrasting men.

Sabina Vedovelli and her husband were not in the hall, but it was well known that they did not attend events, not for the reason that might have been imagined, a lack of interest in anyone’s activities but their own, but in order to avoid becoming the center of attention and stealing someone else’s show. This was what Sabina had said at the cocktail party when she was asked why she had not attended other talks. She said that she followed them through the hotel’s closed circuit, and she demonstrated, by quoting accurately from them, that this was indeed the case.

After Elsa Goudinho’s contribution, the chair asked Rashid to speak. I put aside my reflections and got ready to listen to him. Rashid cleared his throat, took a sip of water, thanked the chairperson for her words of introduction and the organizers of the ICBM, and said: allow me to tell you a story, which is after all what we are here for. My story is this:

I have come to tell you about an old Palestinian who once traveled throughout this region as a driver of trucks and buses. His name is Jamil Abu Eisheh, he is eighty-two years old and was born in the city of Hebron, on the West Bank. But let us take things one at a time. Hebron is the most densely populated Arab city in Palestine and of course the capital of the West Bank. Hebron is a white city extending over a number of hills, whose center is the mosque, built over the tomb of the patriarch Abraham, worshiped by both religions. We Arabs call him Ibrahim, but he is the same man as the Abraham of the Jewish tradition, the father of Isaac and Ishmael.

It was there that Jamil Abu Eisheh was born, in 1923, when the West Bank was known as Transjordan, and the whole of Palestine was part of the British Mandate. Jamil still has his British identity papers and his British driving license, which he had when he started working as a driver, like his father, who owned a bus that did the route from Hebron to Jerusalem. But those were other times. Today, sitting in his house on Ein Sara Street, Jamil has talked to me many times about his childhood. “Our neighbor in the old city of Hebron was a Jewish woman. When my mother had to go out, she would leave us in this woman’s house and if it was for a long time the neighbor would breastfeed her son and then my little brother.” That was what life was like between Jews and Arabs in those days. It was the British who created the problems, the old man says, when they gave the power and the government buildings to the Jews. They set the two sides against each other and then just left.

Jamil remembers his journeys by truck. He has thousands of stories. For example, when he traveled alone along the edge of the Red Sea to get to Jedda, in Saudi Arabia. Six hundred miles without roads through the desert, praying to Allah that the engine of his truck would hold out and he would not have to abandon it in some solitary place through which other truck drivers rarely passed. He finally reached Jedda, the city of the white towers, and then, after another forty-five miles, Mecca, the holy city of Islam, the pilgrimage to which he has done seven times, which gives him the title of “Hadji,” and that’s why, whenever he talks about Mecca and remembers his pilgrimage, the old man gets down on his knees and touches the floor with his forehead. What’s Mecca like? I asked him once, and he replied: there’s nothing like it in the world, it’s the holy city, it’s the center of the universe, it’s the first and last city, it’s a prayer made of tile, white walls, and towers. Jamil knows all the distances in the Middle East in miles, which is something that everyone has forgotten now, because of the borders and the barbed wire fences. Today most of the roads are either closed or can only be driven along if you have a safe conduct. “From Jerusalem to Amman is seventy miles,” he says. “From Amman to Daria, on the border with Syria, another seventy, and from Daria to Damascus, seventy.” At this point he opens his eyes wide and exclaims: “And from Damascus to Beirut, another seventy!” If the region were at peace a person could have breakfast in Jerusalem, lunch in Damascus, and dinner in Beirut.

Then I decided to ask him an uncomfortable question, which I hated asking him but if I hadn’t done so, I would never have been able to round out his portrait. I said to him: what do you think of life these days in Palestine? The old man shifted in his chair, frowned, and lifted one of his arms. “Let them go and make their Palestinian State in Gaza, they and the crazy fundamentalists, and leave us alone. The best thing that could happen to the West Bank would be to revert to Jordan, and be ruled from Amman.” There was not the shadow of a doubt in his words. “That would be my dream, because in the past, when we belonged to Jordan was the best time.” Between the wars of 1948 and 1967, the West Bank had been under Jordanian control, and Jamil had driven a bus that did the route from Hebron to Amman, there and back every day. “I know that road like the back of my hand,” he says, “and I would give my life to drive it again, freely.” Then he was silent for a moment before adding, slyly: “more than anything else I’d like to go back to Beirut, with its movie theaters and its nightclubs, its women with eyes as black as caves who take you back to the first day of the world, with its neon lights in the night that seem to say to the visitor: you’ve just gotten here after a long journey, now just enjoy yourself.”

Jamil still has his Jordanian documents, his passport and driving license. After the 1967 war and the Israeli occupation, he had to change documents again. He was living in Israel now and couldn’t go back to Amman. The border on the river Jordan, which before had been only a small bridge, had now turned into an unbreachable wall. The region had become smaller and he had to limit his journeys: to Jerusalem, to Nablus, to Haifa. After a few years, with the Oslo Accords and the new maps, he had to change documents again for those of the Palestinian Authority and the territory became even smaller, so he decided to retire, sell his truck, and open a store selling cold drinks, ice cream, and candy.

The story of this old driver is the story of a whole region, with a past that is cruel, intense, and beautiful. A metaphor for life in the world: Jamil has lived in four different countries without ever moving house.

Rashid was applauded, and I looked again at the back of the room, where Jessica and Egiswanda were. They were still sitting side by side, without talking. I felt like getting up and going to them, and revealing to them something of what united them, but I could not leave the table. In this, I must confess, there was also a slight erotic charge: I wanted to know which of the two had been the voice I had heard in the darkness.

Suddenly I heard my name and, looking at the chairperson, saw that she was smiling at me. In my distraction, I had heard neither her introduction nor the question with which she had handed over to me, so I had to rule out the idea of improvising, especially because, as I now realized with horror, I had completely forgotten the theme of the round table.

I thanked the chairperson and the directors of the ICBM, apologized for having missed the first event at which my presence had been scheduled, and announced that, as a writer, the best thing I could do would be to read a story. And I immediately grabbed the first of my papers and started to read:

The story I am about to tell you is rather sad, and the truth is, I don’t know why I should tell it to you now and not, for example, in a month or a year, or never. I suppose I am doing it out of nostalgia for my friend the Portuguese poet Ivo Machado, who is one of the main characters, or perhaps because I recently bought a model plane made out of metal that I now have on my desk. Excuse the personal tone. This story will be extremely personal.

The protagonist of my story is, as I have already said, the poet Ivo Machado, who was born in the Azores, but what matters to us now is that his everyday job was air traffic controller, in other words, he was one of those people who sit in the control towers of airports and guide planes along the air routes.

The story is as follows: when Ivo was a young man of twenty-five (in the mid-Eighties) he controlled flights in the airport of the Azores, that Portuguese archipelago in the middle of the Atlantic, an equal distance from Europe and North America. One night, when he came into work, the chief controller said: “Ivo, today you will direct a single plane.” He was surprised, because the normal thing was to guide the flights of a dozen aircraft. Then the chief explained: “It’s a special case. An English pilot taking a British World War II bomber to Florida, to hand it over to a collector of planes who has just bought it at an auction in London. He made a stop here in the Azores and continued toward Canada, because he has to follow a strictly laid down route, but he was caught in a storm, had to fly in a zigzag, and now doesn’t have much fuel left. He won’t reach Canada, and he doesn’t have enough fuel to turn back. He’s going to fall in the sea.”

Saying this, he passed the headphones to Ivo. “You have to keep him calm, he’s very nervous. A Canadian rescue team has already left in boats and helicopters for the spot where he’s expected to fall.”

Ivo put on the headphones and started talking to the pilot, who was indeed very nervous. The first thing he wanted to know was the temperature of the water where he was going to fall and if there were sharks, but Ivo reassured him that there weren’t any. Then their conversation became more personal, which doesn’t often happen between an air traffic controller and a pilot. The Englishman asked Ivo who he was and what he did in life, he asked him to talk about his tastes, even his feelings. Ivo told him he was a poet and the Englishman asked him to recite something. They were talking in English and luckily Ivo knew by heart a few poems by Walt Whitman and Coleridge and Emily Dickinson. He recited them and thus they continued for a while, commenting on the sonnets of life and death and a few passages that Ivo remembered from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the story of another man struggling against the fury of the world.

Time passed and the pilot, already calmer now, asked him to recite his own poetry, and so Ivo made an effort and translated some of his poems into English just for him, just for that pilot battling a storm in an old bomber, in the middle of the night over the ocean, the clearest and most terrifying image of solitude. “I sense a deep sadness in your poems, and even a certain disillusionment,” said the pilot, and they talked about life and dreams and the fragility of things, and of course about the future, which would not be a future full of poetry, until there came the dreaded moment when the needle of the fuel gauge went into red and the bomber fell in the sea. Then the chief controller told Ivo to go home, because after such a difficult experience, it would not be a good idea for him to handle other aircraft.

The next day Ivo found out what had happened. The Canadian rescue team had found the plane intact, floating on the water, but the pilot was dead. Part of the cabin had came away and struck him on the back of the neck. “The man died at peace,” Ivo said to me, “and that’s why I still write poetry.” After a while, IATA held an investigation into the accident and Ivo had to listen, in front of a jury, to his conversation with the pilot. They congratulated him. It was the only time in the history of aviation that the frequencies between a plane and a control tower had been filled with poetry. The whole thing created a very good impression and some time later Ivo was transferred to the airport in Oporto.

“I still dream of his voice,” Ivo told me once, remembering him, as we drank whiskey in Póvoa de Varzim, where the great writer Eça de Queiroz was born, and I understand him. All of us who write should do it like that: as if our words were for a pilot struggling alone, in the middle of the night, against a raging storm.

When I raised my eyes, the audience realized that I had finished, and I received some timid, uncoordinated applause. The chairperson looked at me again, not with a smile as she had at the beginning but with a touch of incredulity, which suggested to me that my text had little or no connection with the theme that was being discussed, or at least with her original question, which unfortunately I had not been able to hear and which I had been too embarrassed to ask her to repeat. Anyway, she took the microphone and said, very good, we thank the writer for his imaginative words, a truly original and unexpected way of dealing with the subject of words and life, which recall, as he himself said, the deep links that exist between poetry and aviation, between the fragility of existence and our idle words, thank you again for your contribution, at the end of the first round there will be questions and comments and we may ask you to expound a little more on these literary ideas.

After this, she turned her attention to the other side of the table, and the poet Dionisio Bumenguele, with these words: dear bard, you are one of the most exalted sons of Africa, an intellectual bathed by the springs of that fascinating continent so full of stories. In the talk we have just heard there was mention of the sky and the hurricane winds, which is the most common meteorology in lyric poetry, and that is why I now give the floor to you, so that you can give us your own testimony of how you remember and evaluate a life.

The poet gave a huge smile that seemed to cover his whole face, cleared his throat, gave the microphone a couple of little knocks, and said: a very good afternoon to all of you, ladies and gentlemen, it is an honor for a modest poet like myself to be in this distinguished place, surrounded by such remarkable personalities. Before reading my text, I should like to tell you that it is dedicated to the memory and legacy of the great African patriot Patrice Lumumba, some of whose verses I want to read by way of epigraph and as a kind of prayer for hope:

Music: you have allowed us too

to raise our faces and see

the future liberation of the race.

May the banks of the great rivers that transport

your living waves toward the future

be yours!

May all the earth and all its riches

be yours!

May the hot noon sun

burn away your sorrows

May the rays of the sun

dry the tears spilled by your ancestor,

in the torment of these sad lands!

Our people, free and happy,

will live and triumph in our Congo.

Here, in the heart of great Africa!

The audience greeted the poem with thunderous applause and somebody at the back cried out: “Freedom for Lumumba!” The poet Bumenguele raised his hands to calm the enthusiasm and announced that he would now read his text. When the audience had fallen silent he brought the microphone closer and began reading:

It might not be entirely pointless to tell you something about myself, but for now I shall refrain from doing so and will only tell you that little of myself that truly matters to the narrative. Indeed, I should like to create a wall of smoke around my own life, a wall that might be of bamboo or of sand, or even of ice, something to separate me from the person of whom I am going to talk to you this afternoon, about whom I have written and thought so much and who justifies this introduction, as you will see, none other than the great poet Elmord Limpopo, one of the greatest that post colonial Africa has had, in the opinion of many, worthy to stand beside such outstanding figures as Joseph Yai Olabiyi Babalola, from Benin, or the Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, and without any doubt the best poet in Kenya, may God place him, not at His right hand, but in the darkest of His dungeons.

Although I am quite aware that it is inappropriate to use this kind of expression at the beginning of a biographical speech, I will say that these are words that express the purest of truths, which after all is the objective of any scholar of life, whether a biographer, a philosopher, or simply a citizen, which is why I repeat, they are an expression of the truth, which is a way of saying, they come from my own truth and experience, and in spite of the fact that they presuppose an adverse moral posture, I want to make it very clear to you, from the start, that I was one of Limpopo’s most devoted followers, that I have given the best years of my life to his work and that, in some strange and inhuman way, I still admire him. I write about him because I know him, in that always imprecise way in which one may know a life, including one’s own, that is to say, as an interested and in no way impartial observer, because any life that is close to us usually has serious repercussions on one’s own, I know what I am saying and so do you, given that as one’s life, the life of any one of us here, including the honorable audience, is a block of marble that is shaped by circumstances, our times, and the corner of the world in which we chanced to arrive, as well as the people we meet, and that close contact, that drumbeat whose rhythm never varies and never stops, helps a figure emerge from the stone, an imprecise silhouette that is born inside the block and gradually acquires depth and volume until it forms that unique, irreplaceable being that is each one of us, as unique and irreplaceable as the circumstances of each life. It is the immaterial and intangible tam-tam of life that makes us different, but anyway, some of you may already be saying to yourselves that I was not invited to this golden conference to come out with polished reflections on existence, which is something that should be done in privacy, or is more appropriate to a written essay or a bohemian disquisition. I am aware of that, and I beg your forgiveness in advance. I assure you that I am as suspicious as you are of those philosophers who constantly practice the vain exercise of great ideas on their audience. In any case, we shall see how these introductory reflections acquire their full meaning as we find out about the terrifying life of this man, or rather, of this unusual human case, and now we are indeed coming to the point.

I shall begin by telling you that Limpopo was born in Kilimani, an area of Nairobi that we could define as previously middle-class and now definitely well-off, close to Ngong Road and Argwings Kodhek Road, and although his young mother could have chosen between the National Hospital and the Aga Khan, both very close, she decided to give birth in her own home, a two-story wooden building with a porch, facing north toward the famous hills of Ngong so often spoken of by Karen Blixen, whose mansion, as you know, is today one of the attractions of the capital. In the mornings, a very cool air blows through the city from the mountains and is one of its subtler vices. Whoever has breathed it, enjoying it in silence, will find it difficult to leave it behind and Nairobi will be impregnated forever in his memory, he will remain irrationally trapped in that plain and his imagination, his pleasures, will be marked by the memory of those cool mornings, still damp with the night rain, when a slight mist rises and the red earth of the streets is like a mirror in which the children sink their feet as they run to school. It could also be the image of a lost innocence that refuses to disappear.

During the 1960s, one of those children was a boy running to the Presbyterian school of Newshenwood with a bag tied around his neck and his head seething with dreams, with constellations of dreams that might begin with the most distant star and end with one of the hummingbirds he could see from his window. His father, Clarence Limpopo, was Professor of World History at the National University of Kenya, and his mother, Evelyn, who had studied to be a teacher, taught biology at the English College. Young Elmord was an only child, so the attention of these two intellectuals, fascinated by independence and the socialist ideal of a dignified, self-sufficient country, as represented by Jomo Kenyatta, was entirely focused on him.

When he was nine, his father read to him aloud from the poetry of William Blake and Milton’s Paradise Lost. He explained to him why Africa had to unite in a single great nation and recover its dignity before the white man, who should not, however, be hated, because what was hateful was the system imposed by a series of white nations which, with the shameful complicity of Africans, had come to Africa to steal its wealth, rape its women, and confine its men in labor camps or, in the best of cases, to give them ridiculous uniforms, with epaulettes and boots, and make them serve in their houses and clubs.

But according to Elmord’s father, all that was over. With Jomo Kenyatta at the helm, his country could lift its head high and look with dignity at the other nations of the globe. Now they were independent, masters of their lives and destinies. They had to educate themselves, work hard to obtain the benefits of freedom, and make sure these reached the whole population, not only a few privileged people, as used to happen, and as had happened to him, Clarence Limpopo, who had gone to university and graduated in contemporary history, a destiny that had come about by chance, as he had been born on a farm owned by an old Englishman who had decided for some mysterious reason to give him an education, perhaps out of philanthropy or a feeling of guilt, he never knew which, because his mother, who might have known why, died when he was a child, so Clarence Limpopo had gone to university and was now a professor, and that was why his son, Elmord, had to have the best, had to be privileged so that he could be first in line and show the way to his countrymen who had not had the same luck, those Kenyans who died of malaria or typhoid, who lived in the slums of Nairobi, near the railroad tracks, feeding themselves on something similar to ugali, but without proteins, a crust of hard bread in water, hence the huge bellies of the children, the absent eyes of malaria, the high fevers, anyway, that was the great luck of Clarence and later of young Elmord, who by the age of ten was already mentioning in his poems the grave injustice of God, so grave, he wrote, that it deserved human judgment, a Nuremberg trial, or at least the same legal process that was given to any of his brothers when they were caught stealing or killing, because that serious crime had caused death and humiliation and was the midwife of great violence. “My God, I don’t know how anyone can still believe in you,” was the conclusion of young Elmord Limpopo’s poem.

At the English College, his poems were regarded with a degree of anxiety, but because he was the son of a teacher none of the staff took much notice. Not even when at the age of twelve he presented in the English literature class a poem that said:

Yesterday, in the midst of sleep,

I saw trees on fire in Nairobi,

rivers of forest where before there were streets

and specters of ash weeping on the sidewalks.

A group of lone men were climbing a hill

crowned by a church,

climbing in the midst of pain,

death and ashes

led by a strange being.

But before reaching the church,

all the way up there,

something exploded in the blackest part of night.

A burst of gunfire stopped the silent group

and threw it in the dust,

in the ashes.

It was pure chance that this and other poems came to the attention of Dr. Growsery, an elderly English entomologist now retired from the university and a great lover of poetry, who read them with great interest up to a dozen times and finally delivered his verdict: a great poet has arrived, but I don’t know if we are ready for what he has to say.

It is worth pointing out that this had all come about by chance. On Wednesdays, Dr. Growsery would come to Westlands to pick up his grandson from the English College. He was waiting in the cafeteria when he found a small case that somebody had left behind and, in order to find out who it belonged to, opened it and found the young man’s poems. Then, when he had located the owner, who of course was Elmord, and went to give it back to him, he said, I saw there are poems in your case, whose are they? and Elmord replied, they’re mine, sir. Although surprised, the old man asked, but are they yours in the sense that they belong to you or in the sense that you are the author? The young man said, I’m the author, sir, I wrote them.

That was the beginning of the friendship between Dr. Growsery and young Elmord Limpopo. Growsery decided to send a selection of his young friend’s poems to London and eight months later his efforts bore fruit and a university review, Literary News, published three of them on a page devoted to Africa. Two weeks after this a package arrived, addressed to Dr. Growsery, with five copies of the review. Elmord’s poems were on page 76. It was a very emotional moment when the young man first saw his work in print, and it made him feel dizzy. It is such an extraordinary thing for a human being to see his creations on display, a beautiful, complex thing that can determine the future course of a life. After the first impact, Elmord looked at the page with his poems and it struck him that they would have been better if instead of being arranged horizontally across the page they had been placed one above the other. He also had objections to the typeface used and the size of the capitals. A young poet writes to get close to the center of his soul, and the graphic appearance of his work is the packaging of that search. .

At this point, a loud explosion interrupted Bumenguele, and the amphitheater, where the audience had been listening with delight, filled with cries, smoke, and gas.

Such things can happen in a second.

The building shook. The lights flickered and went out. Only one of the walls remained illumined by the glare of a fluorescent tube, giving the hall a marmoreal appearance. Glasses of water fell to the floor and a shower of dust and fragments shrouded the air.

Then came a second explosion which must have hit the hotel full on, and almost immediately there was a third, which made part of the ceiling come crashing down on us. Not the structure, luckily, but a stucco vault and a few lamps.

The air filled with the smell of fuel, of chemicals. Also with smoke and the smell of burning plastic. A cloud of dust hit our heads like hail.

In spite of being on a mezzanine, with windows that looked out on an inner garden — which luckily had shattered, letting the air in — the people clambered over the rubble to reach the main doors at the top of the semicircular auditorium. I looked toward where Jessica and Egiswanda had been, but could not see them. It was darkest in that area of the auditorium, and a layer of dust and smoke hung in the middle.

I was under the delegates’ table. The first explosion had thrown me to the floor, and that sturdy table seemed like a good place to wait; I had been in bombed cities before and I knew that the best thing was to stay still, like a hunted animal. I was not the only one under there: farther back I could make out Elsa Goudinho, Bumenguele, and Rashid. I went to Rashid and asked, are you O.K.? Well, I’ve been better, said Rashid, but I’m not complaining; I think I have a few pieces of glass in my underpants, but no cuts, how about you? I’m fine, I said, but there are some wounded people in the hall.

Above the cries of those clambering over the rubble, I thought I could hear moaning from people lying on the ground, unable to move. I thought of Jessica and Egiswanda, had they managed to get out? or were they on the floor, bleeding, hit by one of the lamps or trampled by the others? Some of the bodies seemed strangely motionless. Marta was not there, but that did not worry me too much as I had not seen her earlier either, perhaps she had gone to meet Amos? It was highly likely. In the upper part of the hall, dozens of desperate people were piling against the doors, since only one was open. They finally opened wide and there was a stampede. A powerful beam of light invaded the hall and everything appeared to come back to life.

I thought of Ferenck Oslovski, trapped deep in a well. That was how it had been in the hall, although now we were about to leave, and, of course, we did not have the slightest idea of what awaited us in the lobby and the other floors. Outside, a war was raging, and it had finally reached us, in spite of all our words and theories about words. Even language had its limits. The barricade of language. Our refuge was as exposed as the rest of the city and our luxurious bedrooms might even now be in flames. I thought of my notes, but saw that I had them in the notebook and felt relieved. The check from Eve Studios was in my billfold. The rest might as well blow up.

With the return of the light, things became clear. Nobody had died, fortunately, but many were wounded. The most serious was a Norwegian poet, Sven Tellegar, who had suffered a heart attack; he was already under observation in the hotel’s infirmary. Others had been hit, there were bruises and a few broken bones, but nothing really serious.

Rashid and I went out together and found out that three mortars had fallen in a cluster and hit floors nine and ten. A team of firefighters were at work in the left wing. I thought of Sabina Vedovelli’s elegant suite, now reduced to rubble. I ought to take an interest in her fate, we had a contract and I would hate to have to give it back.

The management asked us to go down to the gym, like the previous night, but I decided to slip away. Rashid went out onto the street, saying that he was going with his family to Tira, his Arab town. The moment had come, and he knew how to get out. We hugged. I told him that I would go to see him before I went back to Rome, and he thanked me, but we both knew it was impossible.

On my way back to the coffee shop, I found Jessica in one of the wide corridors on the first floor. She was standing there looking at a tapestry on the wall, as calmly as if she were in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The tapestry depicted the destruction of Jerusalem as described in the prophecies of Jeremiah. The city in flames, gray creatures escaping from the smoke and destruction, an old man looking on with sorrow. I greeted her and she looked at me gravely; she had been crying, but I considered it impertinent to ask her the reason. There were reasons to spare. I’m surprised to see you here, I said, and she replied: I came to look for somebody who’s already gone and could have said goodbye. Walter de la Salle? I ventured to ask. No, she said, he died many years ago, in the ashes of his house. You don’t need to keep looking for him, that’s the truth.

Then I asked her: was the person you were hoping to meet the guest in Room 1209? She shot me an angry look and just when I thought she was going to either burst into tears or hit me she said, yes, he was a kindred soul, a friend pure and simple, somebody who experienced what happened at the Ministry from a distance and decided to write a book about it; I met him in Miami, or rather, he came looking for me. He was the one who investigated and finally tracked down José, who had changed his name and had been invisible for years. I don’t know how he tracked him down to this conference, but he decided to come and see him, and talk to him; as I was nearby, he suggested we meet here. He registered in the hotel under a false name, he didn’t want to attract attention. His name is Mario Zambrano, although he signs his work Mario Simonides, he’s a writer and journalist of Latin origin. It’s a pity you never met him, he’s a lot like you.

And don’t you think he’s coming back? I said. No, said Jessica. Mario is like José: always with his jacket on and a knapsack over his shoulder, ready to disappear, I know he won’t come back. He spoke to José after his talk, told him I was here and wanted to see him. That day, I had to go straight back to Tel Aviv, but Mario told him I would come back when he wanted; José asked me to leave him a message to confirm that, and that was what I did. Then he killed himself.

Why did he kill himself? I asked. Jessica looked at her nails, scratched her forearms hard, and said, I’ll tell you what I think: he killed himself because he didn’t want to show his face, he wasn’t capable of looking me in the eyes after what he had done, all the lies he had told; he killed himself out of cowardice. We’re all of us cowards. Even Mario. All those who leave are cowards.

The ground shook and there was another violent explosion. Pieces of stucco fell from the ceiling. Jessica sought protection in my arms. A cascade of earth and rubble rained all around us. From outside came the clear sound of a siren. So I asked her, what do you mean when you say José hurt you? Jessica did not look at me, but clung tighter to me. Again she was crying. She took two steps back and looked around, as if trying to find a way out, so I said, I’m sorry, Jessica, I don’t have a right to ask you these questions.

A smaller explosion shook a column, and as it fell it shattered. We had to either get out of there or take shelter in the basement.

Then Jessica said in a low voice, almost in my ear: José raped me on three occasions, I want you to know. I’ve never told anyone, but I think we’re going to die here. He did it three times, three long and painful times, you know what that means for a woman? I took her hand and said, I can imagine, Jessica, now let’s go, nobody’s going to die today.

Wait, she said, wait a moment. Things weren’t so simple. He raped me on three occasions, but there were other times when I consented, I was young, I felt terribly jealous, I loved and hated him at the same time. Those years are over and José is dead, Walter is also dead, and I’m dead too, anyway, that’s all over; I’ve survived a world that doesn’t exist anymore and has no place in this one; nothing of what we were then can be understood by anyone today, nobody believes in what we believed in; the things that were important to us provoke laughter or curiosity, do you understand? We’re dead, we’re all dead.

Two more explosions blew out the large windows of the terrace and a splinter lodged itself in my forearm. We ran to the door and found several hotel employees there. Among them was Momo, who said, come with me, sir, I can get you out of here, there’s an airfield just outside the city and a Hercules plane to evacuate you, but we have to go now. I asked him to stay with Jessica and went down to the basement.

When I got there, I looked around at the various groups, but could not see Egiswanda. At the far end, on a bench, was Marta. I rushed to her and said, where were you? are you O.K.? She said yes, indifferently. She was worried about her laptop and wanted to go up to my room. I told her that was absurd, her newspaper would give her another one when she get back, but she said, I’m not going back, I’ve decided to stay, I was thinking of using your room until the end of the conference, if you don’t mind, it’s in your name, right? I looked her up and down. Are you crazy? I’m not crazy, she said, nothing too serious will happen to this building and I already brought all my things, my best clothes, my most daring underwear, do you forgive me for not coming to hear you this morning?

Another explosion shook the building, so I grabbed her hands and said: let’s look for Egiswanda and get out of here, Momo’s waiting outside to take us to a plane we can leave on, but she said: I’m staying, please don’t insist. Her attitude exasperated me and I said, where’s the sense in staying? you’ll be in grave danger in return for very little; as far as I know, you haven’t written a single line so far, about the conference or anything else, so what reason do you have to stay, apart from Amos, who’s married and has a life he has no intention of giving up? I don’t understand.

Marta moved to the wall and said, obviously Amos is part of my decision, but he isn’t all of it, don’t you see? don’t you understand? Egiswanda’s story was a great revelation. It filled me with questions, things like: would I be capable of giving up everything for something I believed in or for something I wanted without thinking about the risks? have I ever believed in anything or anybody intensely enough to do that? You’ll say that’s simplistic, but these are the questions I’m asking myself right now and they seem important to me, and I think most people ask themselves these questions all the time, in every foot of this overpopulated planet there’s somebody asking themselves things like that, that’s the truth of life, and I tell you something: if in your books you dealt with this subject and imagined answers, you’d be more successful, you’d increase your loyal readership, you’d be translated into Icelandic and I’d be able to read you, anyway, to go back to what I was saying, I’m staying in the city, I decided last night, while I was trying to sleep. I realized that I’d never believed in anything seriously and that’s why I never made a radical commitment, not even to journalism, which to be honest I couldn’t care less about, like almost everything right now except the questions I’m asking myself, which I want to answer and which have to do with the fact of being more or less European and white and being born in that rich protectorate that’s the north of the world, where everything’s arranged so that nothing ever shocks you, and where life ought really to disgust us.

That’s what many of us feel: disgust or shame or uncontrollable anger. When I heard Egiswanda, I felt ridiculous, poor, disgustingly poor in spirit. I felt an infinite sadness, having it all and at the same time having nothing. It’s contradictory, isn’t it? The things that stifle me today are the result of wars and destruction and learned books and terrible peace treaties; many people have died so that we, the grandchildren of the century, can have what is crushing us today, as if we were on the verge of falling into a deep sleep, an opium sleep. Coming to a place like this is a way of waking up completely, opening your eyes and, once they are wide open, you can’t let them close; beyond the borders of our beautiful countries there is a terrifying outside world filled with life, a black sun that stretches over a number of continents, only revealing its beauty after the first impact. What you see on the surface is horrible and cruel, but slowly the beauty emerges; in our world, on the other hand, the surface is lovely and everything is bright and shiny, but with time what we see is the horror. I don’t want to go back to that opium dream that’s our paradise of the north, I’m staying here, with real people and real problems, where everyone has to go up on the trapeze without a net and the struggle for existence is real and not a metaphor; I’ve found life here, I’ve understood the value of that miraculous, fragile thing called life and that’s why I’ve developed an overwhelming desire to live it, to exhaust it to the last drop, what a miracle. This I discovered thanks to Amos, with his pink fingers and sweet penis; the best way to live life to the full is to take it to the limits, putting your face in its deepest depths, its edges, its caverns and ruined palaces, only that way will we keep our bodies hot and our heads boiling with dreams, I’m staying here and I’m in love with Amos, I love him with all my heart and with my vagina, both throb for him, my chest is bursting, I’m wetting my panties, everything is happening because of him.

That’s fine, Marta, I understand you, I said, you’ll be part of that smaller stream of contrary immigrants, those who go from the north and its wealth to lose themselves in the tropics or the deserts or the jungles of the south, you see, that demonstrates that paradise isn’t in any one place and everyone paints it with the color of his own needs, because you have to be aware of the fact that this boring, predictable, overprotected life you curse is the dream of millions of poor Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans; the dream of all those who see their children die of typhoid or malaria in the slums of Khartoum or Dar Es Salaam, the young people who fall asleep in their rickshaws in broad daylight because of malnutrition in New Delhi; the dream of those who grow up without schools or health and have to make do later on with picking up a rifle or a package of drugs in Burma or Liberia or Colombia; the dream of those who, because of poverty, lose their humanity and are capable of cutting throats, decapitating, lopping off arms and legs, castrating. You want their smiles and their dances and their freshness and their contagious optimism and they want your schools and libraries, your hospitals, your thirty-five-hour weeks and your paid vacations, your labor laws and your human rights, and of course they also want the abundance and the glitter. You want their soul and they want your money. The difference is that they can’t choose and you can. You can have both worlds just by wanting them. They can’t. Their world is a prison from which they can only escape by knocking down a wall or jumping into the sea or digging tunnels as if they were rodents; you just have to buy an airline ticket, you don’t even need a visa. To get what you despise, they risk their lives, you know what the fundamental difference is? that the rich can choose to be poor if they want, or pretend to be poor, but never the opposite. I was silent for a second and then said, what’s going to happen to your articles?

Marta gave a weary gesture and slapped the air. I’ll carry on writing, she said, but differently. Not to satisfy that daily appetite for the latest news, but writing non-topical articles, things the newspaper can give more of a spread when it’s less rushed, and I said, surprised, I didn’t know you were involved with news, I thought you were already doing non-topical articles, and she replied, I know, don’t remind me, I was going to do articles but they had to be connected with current events, do you understand? the proceedings of the conference, the debates, after all, that was what they sent me here for, but being here I realized there was something more important and that’s why I want to write real human-interest articles, something like Oriana Fallaci, do you know her? yes, I said, and she continued: a bit like that, but the truth of something that’s being lived through real people, which here means all those linked to the war and its victims, not the biographies or the literature of the conference, and I’m really sorry if saying that offends you, but I’m convinced that what’s important is happening outside, on the streets and on the walls protecting the city and not in these conference halls; it would be idle to devote my time to literary topics when half a mile away the destiny of one or several cities is being played out. The night I met Bryndis, my newspaper’s war correspondent, meant a lot to me. Hearing her tell her stories of brave men who leaped into the fray, the courage with which they went on the attack and fell under the crossfire of the tracer bullets, hearing those really profound adventures, I felt empty, without anything to give her in return, and I realized that what was happening in the conference was only words, nothing more.

Then I said: don’t you think the death of Maturana and the mystery of his life is something profound? Yes, perhaps it is, but not enough. It was because of that story that I met Amos, I can’t forget that, but believe me, there are times when literature has to take a back seat, and this is one of them; maybe you don’t like what I’m saying, but I respect you and I’m only trying to be honest.

I thanked her for her honesty and asked her about Amos, did he know she was planning to stay? what did he think about that? When she heard his name the blue fishbowls of her eyes shone.

He loves his wife and children and that’s something to be proud of. I came later and I have to respect that, but I’ve seen his eyes looking at me and heard his voice and seen how his skin quivers and his penis rises like a sunflower toward me, I can’t live as if I didn’t know that, as if I hadn’t seen it; to be honest, I don’t know how important I am to him, but that doesn’t really matter. You can love someone who doesn’t love you, can’t you? Literature is full of cases. It’s the beautiful and terrifying thing about love, a prison of pleasure with bars that vibrate and punishments that give us spasms and fluids, addictions, anyway, love doesn’t always expect anything in return; in this city people love gods they’ve never seen, gods who don’t love them and of course don’t repay them, but they still love them, and have done over the centuries, isn’t that the supreme proof of love? I’ll love Amos and I’ll be his secret lover or his whore or whatever he wants; I told him that yesterday: wouldn’t you like to gather every whore together in one single whore? He didn’t answer, there are questions that don’t require an answer. Amos looked at me in silence and smiled, then turned me over on a cushion and entered me from behind, and we both enjoyed it a lot, I swear to you, I saw stars, not only the star of David, but the western star and the star that lit the wise Kings and the fleeting stars of this war, this war that will do away with all of us, even with this passion I feel for him, a passion that expects nothing but to be lived to the full, and that’s what I think and want, to take command of my own ship and steer it as I wish, and if it sinks to sink with it, as captains used to do in the old days, those who had a high sense of honor, and what about you? are you leaving already?

The building shook again, and I realized that a lot of time had passed. Yes, I said, the conference is over, the sessions are indefinitely suspended, so I’m going. Marta gave me a big hug and said: thank you, take care, think of me, and now go, I hate long farewells, the kind of farewell you see in movies is for movies, I’ll look for you in a chat room or on Facebook, and remember this, joonsdottir73@livadia.com. .

When I got back to the lobby, I saw that Jessica and Egiswanda were standing side by side. I felt relieved. Momo signaled to me from the car and I said to the women: come with me, please, I’ll introduce you on the way, hurry now.

As I got in the car I saw the female employee I had caught him with. I know how you can get out of here, said Momo, they’ve organized a shuttle from an airfield near Rehavia. All entrances to the city are closed because of the continued attacks, the only way to get out is by air.

Thank you, I said, but as you can see I’m not alone, there are three of us, do you think it’ll be possible? He looked and seemed to make a calculation, that doesn’t matter, if there’s enough space in my car then there’ll be enough space in the plane, now let’s go. It’s better if we don’t talk on the journey, I have to concentrate.

A cluster of grenades fell near us, setting off a chain explosion. The ground shook. According to Momo, an international intervention force was forming, but the people from the conference needed escorts to get out of the city, which was not easy. The wall around the city, which had once protected it, was now strangling it.

The residents could only go in and out through the check-point on Jaffa Road, which was the target of fierce attacks. The enemy armies had advanced as far as the walls, and from there they could easily control the siege.

We went out through the back gate of the parking lot and on reaching the street we were overwhelmed by the smell of smoke and gasoline. Sirens could be heard, and simultaneous detonations in places now distant; there were people seeking shelter, dragging cases and plastic bags. Momo accelerated along the street, dodging fallen trees, charred automobiles, and craters in the middle of the asphalt. A little farther on, we came across the body of an old man hugging a shopping cart; two young Orthodox men were reciting Kaddish and trying to separate him from the cart in order to put him in a van where other bodies were piled up. It reminded me of the plague.

Suddenly there was a blinding purple light and Momo had to brake abruptly.

The explosion shattered our eardrums.

What was around us disappeared for a moment and there was an infinite emptiness, a terrifying silence. .

There came another explosion, and a third.

Everything disappeared from our sight, everything was illumined by that strange light. .

Egiswanda and Jessica, who had been talking in whispers, hugged each other. The wave passed over our heads, stretching the tops of the trees, as in a painting by Munch, bringing down roofs and antennae. The rubble fell in front of us, but the mortar exploded in the street parallel to ours; the force of the blast reached us through courtyards and houses whose windows had been blown out.

Once the conflagration had passed, Momo accelerated up a slope and we reached one of the highest points. From there, between the columns of smoke and the thick air, we saw the gleaming silhouette of the Old City, a heart of jade in the middle of the night, a jewel in the black earth of a cemetery, a beacon amid the chaos. Nobody dared to say anything, such was the impact of the vision.

A second later, Momo and I got out on the opposite side of the hill, just as the sky again became an electric cloud and a new explosion could be heard.

I was starting to get nervous and I asked Momo, are you sure of the route? Very sure, sir, in a few minutes we’ll be at the airfield; if we aren’t hit by one of these bombs, of course, but don’t worry, I’m taking the long way around to avoid the most dangerous areas. It won’t be long now, relax. He accelerated again, zigzagging between fallen walls, charred skeletons of buses, trees turned into columns of charcoal.

Suddenly Momo cried: We’re there!

In front of us, we saw a huge hangar that had so far escaped the grenades. There was a helicopter parked next to it; on the sides of the building were antimissile protection systems and nests of cannons pointing at the sky.

Entering the improvised air field, we saw a group waiting with cases to be taken on board and recognized some of the delegates to the conference. There were also wounded people on stretchers and a half-erased inscription saying Alqudsville, that word that had so intrigued me when I arrived. A hand waved at me, it was Edgar Miret Supervielle, who said, my friend, this has ended badly but at least I had the opportunity to present my story before they chased us away with cannon fire, that was my victory against barbarism! I’m sorry you weren’t able to present your main speech, because I greatly appreciated your words at the round table, a good story, very human. I’ll read your speech at the next conference of the ICBM, if they manage to repeat it.

I told him I would keep my story, and added: I’ll take away with me many of the things you said in your lecture, which were enlightening and profound. Supervielle smiled and said: there’s no need for you to say that, my friend, although I appreciate it, my story had a good reception because, basically, if we analyze it in detail, we find a novel philosophical aspect that perfectly fits the present moment, in spite of coming from another time; although sometimes one feels as if one is plowing in the desert, my friend, because, as you have indicated, many people aren’t capable of seeing such a clear message, or what is worse: they refuse to see it, and I say this because most of my colleagues, among whom I do not include you, seeing as, strictly speaking, we aren’t colleagues, anyway, most of my colleagues refuse or simply pretend not to see that importance and enjoy maintaining their silence and ignoring me, condemning my work to ostracism out of envy or even, in some cases, because I’m Jewish, you know the attitude in certain intellectual sectors on that subject, it’s a never-ending story, but anyway, why do I need to say that to you, you were present at the tasteless spectacle provided by that former pastor who bamboozled everyone and who, along with Sabina Vedovelli, gained the greatest honors at the conference, the greatest applause, although I’m referring to easy applause, that programmed applause that does not celebrate a strong idea or an accurate touch, but the amusing and empty phrase, the boutade, an ingenious remark that means nothing beyond itself; that kind of demagoguery gets good results, what can we do, verbal pyrotechnics like that seduce isocephalic minds with a flat neuronal spectrum, and that’s why nothing remains afterwards but a huge ontological lagoon, and that’s even without mentioning the suicide, although this has to remain between you and me, I know it’s politically incorrect to say so, all that pseudo-humanist verbiage, that crude style of his, was carefully calculated, I’m not deceived by these miracle workers; what I can’t understand is how he ended up at a conference as serious as ours, he should have been giving advice in women’s magazines or attending minor events, not the most distinguished assembly of analysts of the past, as was the case; if I were a little sharper in my conjectures I might even think that some rival had slipped him into the program before me in order to put a spoke in my wheels, do you understand me? you know that once one has reached a point of international recognition playing tricks or tripping one up is the order of the day, and the saddest thing is that it sometimes happens between close colleagues, those who through that closeness are more exposed to your lucidity and therefore more confronted with their own contradictions, and what immediately happens? resentment, the desire to restrain and outshine, to bring down.

Supervielle paused, so I said: the fact that others envy you is a confirmation of your talent, it shows that you’re on the right track, don’t you think? from that point of view it’s something positive, trust me, although I’m unacquainted with envy, nobody plays tricks on me or puts a spoke in my wheels, which must mean that people are indifferent to me.

It seemed strange to be involved in such a discussion in that huge hangar, with the sound of bombs in the background, and waiting for a plane to evacuate us.

An interesting point of view, said Supervielle, and one I have already considered, but I confess, one gets tired of the fact that time and time again the results we hope for do not come, it has happened too many times in the history of thought and culture that the genius of exceptional people is unrecognized because of the stupidity and limited vision of their contemporaries, but what can we do if we live surrounded by idiots and simpletons? I know that poetic justice will save us eventually, but when we are already ash and mineral remains, as might happen to this city if things don’t change, but at least let me tell you that although I was dissatisfied, I do have one reason to be happy, and that is the promise of a contract with Tiberias, one of the most important publishing companies, in whose catalog any student of the past, indeed any writer, dreams of appearing, given the range of subjects it handles; he is a hard but upright man, in love with knowledge, sensitive and with good taste, in short, a true Renaissance man, so at least I will have that consolation.

I said: that’s excellent news that cancels out the other things, I know perfectly well what it means to be with Tiberias, it’s a privilege to share a publisher with so many great men, but I’m curious about one thing, which of your titles is to be translated and published by Tiberias? and Supervielle replied, well, I’m still not very sure, several of my books are being read in his office, but I assume it will be the one that tells the story of the chess players, because that was what finally made Mr. Lottmann’s mind up; he was very impressed with my talk and before I had even finished, he had already called his office from the hall, to tell them to put my books in a special place, because he wanted to consider them personally, so there you are.

Momo had stepped forward to talk to one of the soldiers in charge of the evacuation and tell him that our group was from the ICBM. Jessica and Egiswanda sat down on a bench. They continued talking in low voices, with their heads very close together, which made me think that they had already discovered what united them, so I preferred not to disturb them. Suddenly a Hummer appeared in the hangar, advanced to the middle of the runway, and parked next to a small private jet I hadn’t seen before, which had three letters painted on its back part: EVE. Immediately, Sabina Vedovelli and her husband got out of the Hummer and walked up the steps, and the plane left.

In the next transport, Kosztolányi and Kaplan arrived, together with other delegates who had decided to leave — others preferred to wait, to stay a little longer. Kosztolányi came over and hugged Supervielle; he said that on the way they had seen horrible things, an inferno of destruction, pieces of bodies flying through the air, people running in flames, human torches, wounded people lying on the streets, mutilated bodies. That’s war, said Supervielle, nothing more, nothing less.

The soldiers had told us that there were two possible destinations for the planes: one was the city of Haifa and the other Nicosia, in Cyprus. I assumed we could get in either, because the important thing was to get out, so I wrote our names, mine, Jessica’s and Egiswanda’s, on a piece of paper and gave it to the lieutenant.

I went to say goodbye to Kaplan, who was standing in another of the lines, looking very pale. When he saw me, he said, oh my God, these things follow you all your life. To think that what I most like is to have lunch in peace with my family and spend the afternoon reading history books, I don’t know what brought me here, or rather, yes, I do know and that’s why I came, but now I’m glad to be leaving, I never thought I’d say that about leaving this city. But I’m accustomed to departures, my friend.

Can I ask you if your story is true? I said, and he replied: Oh, all stories well told are true, that’s my motto, but please don’t think I’m arrogant; to be honest I don’t know if it was all right and I don’t even really want to know, I like that story and that’s why I tell it. Don’t forget it and, if you can, tell it one day yourself. It’d be a pleasure to come across it in one of your books. I’ll try, I said, although I think it’s already been told, isn’t it The Count of Monte Cristo? Ah, I see you’re a good reader, you may have been the only one to realize that, yes, it’s my version of Edmond Dantès, but based on reality. I hope life smiles on you, my friend. You too, I said. Good luck.

Momo approached and said, sir, the next flight leaves in five minutes and is going to Nicosia, do you want to get on it? I went to ask the women. Both agreed to go to Nicosia and Jessica said, it’s a good time to leave, Egiswanda and I have decided to spend some time together. Supervielle and Kosztolányi were still waiting for the next transport. They preferred to go to Haifa and try to get back to Tel Aviv from there to catch their flights.

I gave Momo a big hug and said, you saved our lives, next time you get under your girlfriend’s skirt make sure you lock the door first, O.K.?

We got on the Hercules and sat down on one of the side benches, between the stretchers carrying the wounded. The plane started moving with the ramp still open. The soldiers of the intervention force asked us to adjust the harnesses and keep our luggage between our legs. Through a round window we saw the roofs of the destroyed houses, the walls punctured by shrapnel, the metal twisted by fire.

Goodbye, Jerusalem.

Many stories had died and others were just beginning. It had always been that way in this city. The plane rose into the air and we were off, leaving behind that battlefield where I had been on the verge of recovering part of what I had lost. I looked down and saw the rocks, the aridity. From the air the city seemed to merge with its surroundings. A vast ocean of sand.

3. WANDA’S ISLAND

After two days in Nicosia, in the Greek part of Cyprus, near the military airport at Lakatamia, Jessica and Egiswanda decided to come with me to Rome, a nearby destination where it was possible to resolve practical matters. Egiswanda, for example, checked her account in Citibank, on which she had a Visa card and an American Express card, and was able to confirm that José Maturana had transferred a large sum of money to her, although she was too embarrassed to tell us how much it was. All I found out was that she gave five hundred thousand dollars to Jessica, who in turn donated half to the Universal Coptic Church. She wanted to give me a similar amount, but I refused.

All this happened in a very short space of time.

In the nights, the hot nights of the Roman summer, we gathered together in the living room of my apartment or in my library to chat, listen to music, or simply sit there in silence, the three of us together, drinking tea or even a last whiskey. The two women settled into the room at the back. It comforted me to know that they were near and that nobody had an urgent reason for the situation to change.

And so the evenings passed.

The air seemed so clean that it hurt our nostrils. There were no bombings or smoke, or the acrid smell of garbage; there were no burning tires or flame-lit sunsets; no lights turned blue by the din of mortars or violent explosions. The city was not under attack from enemy armies, only from banality and indifference. The horror wasn’t in the air filled with dust and chemicals, but in the anonymous looks of the passers-by, their frozen pupils, the gestures of the younger people, the men and women walking indifferently across the cobbled squares, the defeated attitudes of the elderly. There was the horror. All of the cities we came from seemed to us, suddenly, equally cold and inhuman. Equally cruel. How to explain that profound rejection? how to convey that certainty that something in them was wrong, profoundly wrong? what to call that feeling that everything was empty and insubstantial? We just had to look at each other to be in agreement and we very soon came to a decision. We were going to the island where José had fled, and where he had chosen to establish his residence.

When Egiswanda pointed it out on the map I was impressed. That rock in the middle of nowhere perfectly represented what his life had been, or his situation in life: a small boat in the middle of a storm, lashed by surging waves and storms. He, like me, was a small boat. The fact he had found in such a place a refuge for his soul was a great lesson, and I did not doubt for a second that I should go.

We flew from Rome to Johannesburg, stopping in Jedda and Nairobi. From there we went to Cape Town, where we had to wait three days. We rented two rooms in the Winchester Mansions, facing the Atlantic, and killed time walking around the city, as if we were three tourists rather than fugitives.

Finally the Friday came, the day when the Tupolev flies out provisions, mail, and equipment. The only quick way to get to Tristan da Cunha.

Our arrival was a highly emotional moment.

After flying over those limpid skies so common in the south of the world, with the sea shining bright red and ocher, we saw that awesome dot in the middle of nowhere, the smooth, volcanic surface, like a lunar crater or a dry, chapped old nipple. Then the plane nosedived toward that tiny planet until it was almost swallowed up by the waters or the wind, so fragile did it seem from the air.

The little airfield had the same name as the colony: Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, and lay in the foothills of a huge volcano. It could hardly be described as a town, not even a small town or village. It was a collection of large houses beside the headlands. A settlement.

When we got off the Tupolev, it was cold and there was a strong wind. A group of people was waiting at the military base, and on seeing us getting out, a man with a white beard, in his fifties or sixties, approached and said, are you visitors? I handed him the envelope with José Maturana’s letter and the old man read it, screwing up his eyes. His neck was red and rough, like a rooster’s, and his long hair was gathered in a ponytail. Without looking at us he called to another of the old men, a man nearly seven feet tall, and showed him the letter. The giant took out his glasses and read. Then they nodded and came toward me. Welcome, the three of you are welcome, and they introduced themselves:

Reverend Ebenezer Talisker, said the first. Reverend Silas Folkes, said the second. As they said their names, they put their hands over their hearts and gave theatrical bows.

They hugged me and greeted the two women effusively. Reverend Talisker called something to the others which I did not understand, and then said to us, come, it’s cold and the wind will rise in a few minutes. I’ll take you to your house so you can settle in as soon as possible. Two young men picked up our bags and put them in an old Silverado rotted by the salt and sea breeze. Talisker motioned me to get in, with Jessica and Egiswanda, and drove for about ten minutes along a coast road in the foothills of the volcano, until we saw the first houses. A few people came to the windows to see us and smiled. Most were more incredulous than anything else.

José’s house was on the other side, near the post office and the cliff. It was a two-story house of wood and slate, with wide balconies, reminiscent of British houses in the Caribbean. On the front there was a plank hanging from two chains on which the words Black Sparrow could be read. Talisker explained that for the construction of the house they had used the rigging from a ship of that name, which had run aground here.

The house looked out on the ocean on three of its sides. Does it get very windy? I asked. The two men laughed. Instead of replying, they took out their pipes and filled them with tobacco.

In one of the side naves was the chapel. A modest cross and an inscription that said: Chapel of Christ the Redeemer. At the back were two rooms which communicated with the living room and the dining room on the first floor. The chapel had about twenty wooden benches, an altar, and some images of the Virgin Mary, St Antony and St Paul. And at the front, behind the vestibule, a huge and very modern image of Christ with a heart of alabaster fixed to the wall, which appeared to throb in the sunlight.

The young men helped us to unload the things, of which there were not many, just a few cases and some hand luggage. Jessica said she would live in the rooms that adjoined the chapel. Egiswanda took over two of the rooms on the first floor and I settled into those on the second floor. I unpacked my case in the bedroom and occupied the adjacent study. Everything was furnished simply and in good taste. Tables and chairs of wood and leather. Fitted closets. There was a good library, with literary classics and philosophical works. I assumed that Maturana had slept in what was going to be my bedroom and I approached the large windows, which were like the mouths of caves facing out to the heart of the ocean. I connected my laptop on the work table and arranged the few books I had brought with me: the Complete Plays of Tennessee Williams, Old Masters and Frost by Thomas Bernhard, Marcel: First Dialogue on the Harmonious City by Charles Péguy, Diary of a Country Priest by Bernanos, and the Diaries of Léon Bloy. Then I discovered that Maturana had them in his library, with annotations. I also placed my old chessboard on a side table, and a Book of Openings. I was complete.

We rested for a couple of days, each engaged in his or her own activities and walks. At night, we would get together for dinner in the huge oak dining room — did it come from another shipwreck, like the rest of the house? — and Jessica or Egiswanda would explain the dish they had cooked. The provisions we obtained at the administrative office, although soon after settling in a very silent man brought two boxes filled with food. A gift from the reverend, he said before he left.

The second night I went to the only pub in the village and saw three fishermen sitting at the bar, having an animated conversation. On the wall there was a huge stuffed swordfish and a white and red life preserver. I asked for a whiskey, and then another. The men smiled at me and very soon I received two free rounds. They invited me to go out to sea with them whenever I wanted; only it would mean going to the harbor at three in the morning. They went out early to catch banks of fish farther south, past the other two islands in the archipelago, Nightingale Island and Inaccessible Island.

308 people lived in Edinburgh of the Seven Seas.

One night some time later, Egiswanda also came to the pub. The men were surprised. She drank three whiskeys with them and reminded them that continuing in a straight line westwards you would reach Brazil, her home country. They already knew that, but were delighted to hear it. We played darts, drank a few more whiskeys, and got back home after midnight. Jessica was already asleep.

After four weeks, I felt strong enough to start writing about José’s life, and I asked myself, should I tell the two women who were now sharing my life? They were leading characters in the story, but I preferred not to say anything. I started by making a fair copy of the notes I had made during the conference, which were a whole notebook. One day I asked Egiswanda to let me reread José’s letter and I copied out the section that referred to the island, which said this:

The request has to do with the other envelope. Look for God in the deep, say the gospels and that is what you are going to do; you are a rock on a cliff, strong, tough, I had never told you these things but today I am saying them and writing them, so that you know that they were inside me, so that you remember them, there I leave you these words. (…) In the blue envelope there is a map on which is marked an island and the way to get there, like in stories about treasures, except that in this case the treasure is the whole island, the one place on Earth where peace exists, a rock remote from the world where I would like to take you and I really had planned to take you there if this emergency had not come up, so the request is that you go and settle there; you can go whenever you like and move into our house, ask for the chaplain, his name is Talisker, he will help you (…) You have to go to be pure and clean and then, when that day arrives, you will make the leap into the infinite where the Big Enchilada and I will be waiting for you; but in the meantime go there and stay, that island is how I was when I was born, something small and solitary, lost in the world; on it you will be protected by millions of tons of water and you will be happy, because it is an emanation of the soul of God; my last gift is more solitude, Wanda, but what can I do if I was born alone; when I look at the world it will be to imagine that you are there, on that solitary dot, and to tell me that that pure uncontaminated place is Wanda’s island.

Two weeks later I attended a service in the chapel, organized by Jessica and Egiswanda, with help from Reverend Talisker. From what Jessica told me, they had tried to follow the model of the Ministry of Mercy, but it was difficult, because she now realized that all that had been entirely based on Walter’s personal charisma, and without him it did not work. But they prayed and listened to contemporary music and talked about people’s problems in a simple, direct way.

I had not exactly acquired a new faith, but I did believe in them and was starting to love them. I have to confess that I also desired them, and some nights my brain filled with voices, the ones I had heard that first night at the conference, which one of them had it been? Those voices made me imagine them and desire them even more.

I also decided it was time to recover my health completely, so I started doing exercises in the meadow and taking long walks over the mountains that climbed to the volcano. Later, I installed a gym in the garage and my muscles responded well to the exercise. My back got stronger and my arms swelled. On my walks I went farther each time and was able without too much effort to reach the terraces where the peasants planted potatoes. At other times I went down to the harbor and plunged into the swelling waves of the Atlantic. I never again got out of breath. I was being born again.

One evening I talked in the village with a man whose name was Jonathan, a Maori who had stayed on the island after being found guilty of organizing a mutiny on a factory ship flying the Australian flag. I made a few drawings on a piece of card and said, I want these tattoos on my back and chest, could you do them? He said he could, but needed ink. He would do them as soon as the next boat arrived.

I was growing accustomed to my new life, my two women.

One night, after drinking a lot of whiskeys in the pub, Egiswanda got down on her knees at a bend in the dark road that led to our house and gave me a blowjob. When we got home we went up to my room and made love until dawn. During the day we did not speak and at night we would spend a cozy evening with Jessica, reading poems or articles recently arrived from the continent, and then have sex. I understood that Egiswanda’s rhythm was one or two sessions of sex a week, behind Jessica’s back. And I agreed to that. I liked the fact that she was in control.

When Jonathan received the colors and did the tattoos on my arms, chest, and back, the two women were delighted. You look really good, you’re magnificent, they said. That night I decided to let my hair and beard grow. I felt an urgent need to transform myself.

One afternoon Jessica came to my study and said, I have to talk to you, do you remember Simonides, the writer? Yes, I said, the guest in Room 1209. She rubbed her hands nervously and said: I got in touch with him and asked him to come. I got a reply from him today, he says he’ll be here soon. I wanted you to know. The two of you will get along well.

I continued with my walks as far as the foothills of the volcano and along the headlands, breathing in the salty wind. At night I would sit down to write, although I spent most of my time looking at the storms whipping the ocean, our protecting ocean. Storms that recalled the violent siege of the city where the three of us had met. Or perhaps I should say: where Maturana had brought us together.

The fury of the thunder lit up the blackness of the night, which had abolished the boundary between sky and sea. The lightning flashes were like electric vipers sinking their teeth into the water. With each flash, the threatening clouds could be seen. The waves were mountain ranges of water hitting the cliffs of our fortress.

Those terrifying lights suggested a battle, but what battle? The final one, Armageddon, as Jessica sometimes thought, or a more conventional one, fought with missiles and nuclear warheads? None of us knew, but our little island, lonely and drifting, made me think that all of that had happened in another time, and that the horror was over now, and that the world as we had known it was already a distant, forgotten planet.