At the checkpoint a soldier, clearly Slav in origin, checked my papers and gave the go-ahead with a whistle. A heavy metal bar, kept in balance by a concrete ball, was raised and we were able to enter. Facing us was a labyrinth of asymmetrical streets, pockmarked with holes and filled with steaming garbage. The houses, cubes of stone the color of sand, bore the marks of grenades and mortars on their walls.
A strange place for a conference, I thought, still taken aback by the magnitude of the war.
We now came to a wide avenue, lined with magnificent buildings of the same sandstone color. There were touches of vegetation here, pines and dusty old olive trees. Sycamores. In stark contrast with the general appearance of the city, there were boxes with flowers at the windows. The limousine drove along the avenue and turned in toward a building that in its glory days must have been quite majestic. Over the main entrance was a sign saying King David Hotel.
A jovial man who seemed in something of a hurry greeted me at reception, and when I showed him my papers he handed me a folder with information on the conference, a rosette with my name and the word Writer, a T-shirt with the letters ICBM, a CD of Israeli music, and a glazed ceramic key ring in the shape of a fish. At seven this evening there will be a cocktail party to welcome the delegates, he said. The bellhop pushed the cart with my baggage to the elevator and I went in after him, but a second before the door closed I read on one of the pillars the following notice:
The King David Hotel apologizes to its guests for any inconvenience caused by the state of war.
When I got to my room I collapsed onto the bed and closed my eyes, which were smarting with fatigue after the uncomfortable journey. I do not know how long I slept, but when I woke up it was already starting to get dark, so I went to the window. The sight startled me. In the late afternoon sun, the walls of the Old City were like a cliff. The towers and minarets glinted like spurs amid the gathering darkness. The whole of Jerusalem might succumb, but the Old City was a pearl surrounded by mud, a melodious voice amid a tumult of inhuman cries, and perhaps that was why everyone respected it. What time was it? Eight minutes after seven. I was going to arrive late at the opening cocktail party.
4. THE MINISTRY OF MERCY (II)
The Church went from strength to strength. Within a couple of years it had several thousand members. In other words, things were working out. Walter de la Salle, who was starting to think like a businessman, had the idea of going to Charleston and using the other house he’d inherited from old Ebenezer J., which was a spacious villa with extensive grounds. He started going there every week with Miss Jessica, to check out the lay of the land and see how they could extend the Ministry of Mercy to West Virginia. By doing this, my friends, Walter’s life and mine started moving closer together, like two planes on a collision course, and we did indeed collide in the end, ladies and gentlemen. That was in Moundsville Penitentiary, but let’s take things one at a time.
In Charleston, Walter and Jessica began with the same tactics as in Miami, visiting the wards for terminal patients at the Ancient Ghedare Hall and the Memorial; at the same time work started on a replica of the Chapel of Mercy and the Living God, to the same plan as the one in Miami but bigger, because by now Walter had great confidence in his word and the finances of the Ministry were growing, thanks to contributions from members, which in spite of being voluntary amounted to tons of greenbacks, and that’s putting it mildly, because the rich clean their consciences the way the rest of us clean our you-know-whats, if you get what I mean, my friends, especially if their dough is going toward comforting dangerous people and helps to calm social tensions, that electricity in the air of the streets that makes the lives of the rich so difficult and forces them to hire bodyguards so they can carry on being rich, rich in the middle of shit, which is the most ignoble way to be rich; rich amid the ulcers and pus of the saddest, most desperate cities.
Having started this work, he next began visiting the places favored by the local underclass, places awash with opiates, as you might imagine, until somebody told him about the prison in Moundsville, describing the horrors of the place and the kind of human flotsam it housed, and so he asked permission to pay a visit, which, it should be said in passing, cost him a fair amount, because the chaplain of that hellhole was very corrupt and, above all, fond of dark king-size bananas, applied rectally, in other words: he liked to be sodomized, and picked his boyfriends from among the prison population, because as I’m sure you know, prolonged confinement makes people become very versatile when they get the itch, and most aren’t too fussy about the kind of living creature they stick their dicks into; man, woman, or priest, it’s all the same, anyway, as I was saying, the chaplain was the master of that hell and of course he refused to allow anyone in who wasn’t from his Church, like Walter.
Anyway, a sizeable wad of dollars appeased the faggot, and Walter had access to the cellblocks, introduced and in some cases even assisted by the chaplain, because Walter, with his long hair and his tattoos and his muscles, which were already pretty impressive — he’d had a gym installed in the basement and worked out every day — became very popular among the inmates and there wasn’t enough of him to go around, even though most of the time they listened to him in silence and with very deep understanding, as if “downloading files” to use computer language, something the chaplain hadn’t managed in twenty years of preaching and holding services and being fucked in the ass. That’s how Walter managed after a while to get permission to see the inmates individually, listen to them, forgive them, pray with them, and get them to beg forgiveness of God, the Big Master, so that then they’d go off to reflect on what they’d done and on how life was a beautiful creation that shouldn’t be tainted by violence and other evil ways. And it worked, like everything he did, because starting with a dozen people he ended up seeing three hundred a week, that is, almost one whole cellblock.
I hadn’t been in Moundsville long when I first heard about him. I was there because of a badly planned drugstore holdup that had ended in lots of shooting and people lying flat on the asphalt. My partner in crime, Teddy, born in Oregon but into a family from Puerto Rico, caught a bullet through one of his nostrils, which were more accustomed to receiving coke or crack or smack. The bullet went through the nasal septum and lodged in his brain, causing what I’d have to call irreparable damage, not that there was anything very much in Teddy’s brain to start with, and what there was wasn’t worth much, it was more like a room without any furniture, but anyway, there he was, lying on the ground in a pretty unnatural position, with more than half the contents of his cranium spattered on the sidewalk, as if his head had turned into a ketchup dispenser, and I got away with a few bills, but that same night, when I went back to the flea-ridden motel on Cedar Creek where we had our headquarters — in other words, where we kept the drugs and the syringes — hoping I could just get in and out again scot-free, I ran unexpectedly into six police officers who, judging by the way they hit me in the ribs with their batons, had little or no talent for conversation, at least with me, and then they bundled me into a patrol car, saying, your partner had the key to your room with the address and the phone number in his pocket, oh brother, what a bunch of beginners, and that, my friends, is how I ended up in Moundsville.
Once inside, I focused on surviving, which, in that sinister sausage factory with no retail outlet, meant above all avoiding the punishment cells, the so-called Sugar Shack, the cellar of ghosts, which was so dark that if you closed your eyes you could see the insides of your skull, the kind of extreme experience nobody should have to remember, that’s how that place was, like being stuffed in the ass of a rhino, because it was hot and smelled like hell, thanks to the pipe that carried filthy water from the bathroom in the third cellblock to the septic tank, and I won’t go into details about the animals crawling around on the floor, but they didn’t all have four legs, some had a hundred, and feelers too; I was put in that cell twice, because if you’re moving about on the edge of the toilet all day you’re bound to fall in sometimes, right? but anyway, my friends, my dear listeners, all that suffering also makes a person strong and I survived, of course you turn into an animal, yes sir, but being an animal wasn’t the worst of it, and neither was the fear, because, with apologies to the more sensitive, you had to protect yourself from everything, keep a tight hold of your ass, because as I already said there were groups there who grabbed you in the toilets and used you like a woman or a whore, and if you didn’t open your mouth to suck their cocks they opened it with a screwdriver and pulled your teeth out; you had to be really good not to be endlessly cauterized with wax in the infirmary.