This will be brief, because she was young when we met and she told me all this. This was what she said: she was born in Los Angeles of a single mother, a Guatemalan with Indian features, so God knows why she turned out blonde, although it’s easy to imagine; she had a brother who’d died of typhoid when he was thirteen and her mother, because of that, started hitting the bourbon and vodka, hard, and neglecting her, so she practically grew up alone and of course started hanging out with the neighborhood gang, which was her real school. She started going to discos when she was thirteen and that was when she got laid and did her first line of coke, both at the same time, and so she went from party to party every day of the week, hitting the pills and coke and acid and washing it all down with Four Roses bourbon, which was what the gang members stole, until after a while she became the girlfriend of a Colombian dealer who took her to Miami and kept her like a queen from the age of fifteen until they killed him, which was a really nasty business, apparently they nailed his tongue to a wooden table and left him there for a while, then they released him by slicing through his tongue with a scalpel, took out one eye with a salad spoon, cut off his balls and penis and threw them to his dog, right there in front of him, and when he was almost dead doused him in gasoline, set fire to him, and shot him seven times in the head, and Jessica actually saw the whole gruesome scene, hiding in a closet, and one of the things that most upset her was that the killer was her boyfriend’s cousin, the same one who had sprung him from prison in Colombia and brought him to Miami and made him his partner, paying his expenses, anyway, it was obviously Satan pulling the strings. She was alone again, but through her disco contacts she met another Mafioso, Brazilian this time, who took her to his mansion in Coral Gables, complete with a jetty, a yacht, six maids, three cooks (one of them specializing in Thai food, her favorite), and two bodyguards, and she lived there with him for more than a year, although she remembers almost nothing about it because she spent all day by the pool, high on pills and booze, drinking bourbon, gambling in the casinos until the morning, doing coke, and fucking her Brazilian, who was very affectionate. After a while, her boyfriend’s brother arrived, who was better looking and who she liked more because he wasn’t a drug dealer but an art student, my friends, in other words, he wasn’t dealing blow, and so Miss Jessica started seeing him, a fuck here and another there, in secret, but as she was always drugged, she forgot to cover her tracks and the Brazilian ended up catching them in flagrante, dancing the dance of Sensemayá the serpent, and then it was all slamming doors and slaps and out on the fucking street, although luckily the Mafioso didn’t shoot them or throw them in the sea with concrete balls on their feet, and he didn’t do it because it was his brother and he really loved Jessica, so she went off with the artist, who if I remember correctly was some kind of graffiti artist, a mixture of Keith Jarrett and Basquiat, for those who know about these things and apologies to everyone else, who thought he was a genius destined to change the perception of art forever and, of course, my friends, like all those who aspire to genius he was really smug and self-centered, convinced he had a key role to play in the contemporary world and crap like that, and spoiled by two rich, alcoholic old women, his patrons, who organized parties for him that inflated his ego, though what he gave them in return nobody was quite sure, because the old ladies already had everything, and so time passed and Jessica started to notice that her artist wasn’t the same anymore, the young man with a brain boiling over with dreams had turned into a pretentious drunk who wore eccentric clothes and ridiculous silk handkerchiefs and told anyone who would listen, with a glass of whiskey or a joint in his hand, how far he was destined to go in the history of art, even though he’d pretty much stopped painting by now, because he’d get up past noon, always with a hangover, and in the evening would go to parties and society dinners. One night, after they had a fight and Jessica told him he was a loser, he hit her and she ran away without taking anything with her, not even her jewelry, or her clothes, and that was when Walter found her, a raw soul exposed to wickedness but ready to be redeemed.
For Jessica, the hardest part of her new life had been to give some kind of structure to her days, knowing that expanse of time wasn’t just a dead space but could be used doing useful, instructive, and even beautiful things, and where many people, for example, went out to work, something that hadn’t been part of her world, because her days, as I’ve already said, were all the same, waking up at two or three in the afternoon, doing the first line of coke and going down to the pool, ordering a burger or a Hawaiian pizza from Harvey’s, with a beer to lessen the hangover and a siesta on a floating mat while she called her lover to find out where they were going that night, and then, it being quite late by now, putting on perfume and nail polish and lipstick, doing a few lines of coke while she chose from the closet what she was going to wear that night, and, finally, waiting with a vodka and tonic in her hand for her lover’s Hummer, ready to go out and tame that wild tiger called night, and so it went on day after day.
It was hard to get used to a structured life. One night, after she’d been in the house six weeks, she ran away and got drunk in some club somewhere, but that longing gradually disappeared and after a while the prayers and the devotion and being so close to Walter made her strong, they were the armor that protected her from the other Jessica, the handmaiden of Satan. Being with Walter made her believe that life had a meaning, that after the night the sun would come up again and everything would continue in spite of the questions and that strange unreal feeling that things have when you see them in natural light, without alcohol or drugs; every now and again terrifying voices came from the bottom of the mine, the howls of the wolf, my friends, but she was able to contain them, and even ended up the strictest person in the house. It was she who made the Ministry rule that anyone caught high on drink or drugs had to leave, arguing that whoever was in the Ministry should be so close to God that such a thing would be intolerable, and even though Walter, who was very realistic, thought the rule a tad harsh, it was enforced to the letter.
And so, my dear friends and listeners, time passed, just like in a daytime soap, and over the next couple of years the Ministry of Mercy continued its unstoppable rise, becoming a really flourishing institution; the first chapel had become a model and now there were six more in Florida, where we went regularly, always the three of us, by the way, Walter, Jessica, and I. And we were still recruiting friends and followers of Christ in the prisons, which was my area of expertise, and in some counties in Florida we managed to open evangelical prayer rooms financed by us, or rather, by the neighbors in each county through us, which we called workshops, and in many of them I was the one who led prayers.
During a visit to the prison in Sarasota, Walter met a black man from Ohio named Jefferson who struck him as a serious, devout man; after putting him in charge of the workshop there, which he ran for seven months, dealing with the inmates himself, he decided to bring him to the house. The crimes he’d been imprisoned for were minor ones, he wasn’t a murderer or a pedophile or anything like that, so it was relatively easy to pay a bond and get him out, and I have to be honest, my friends, when I saw him I almost fell down: he was the ugliest man I’d ever seen in my life, uglier than a farting she-donkey with colitis, I swear, but then the house wasn’t a catwalk for male models, so he was accepted, with a rank similar to mine, insofar as our situation vis-à-vis Walter could be compared, or measured in ranks.