Necropolis (41 page)

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.