Necropolis (46 page)

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.