There was a sigh from her, different this time. It wasn’t a moan anymore but something more elaborate, and suddenly she said: you know what’s going to happen if you keep sucking me there! That’s what you want! But he said, I’m doing it because I can sense you want it, it’s exactly what you want and I’ve always been your animal. Again there was a silence, a longer one this time, and a soft creaking sound that suggested a change of position on the couch. Suddenly she said: how can you touch me again after what you made me do? and he said, it was for you, only for you. That was the last thing I heard before falling fast asleep.
6. THE MINISTRY OF MERCY (III)
Here we are again, my friends, to conclude this story, which I hope you’re finding both entertaining and instructive, because that’s why we’re here. A couple of years had passed since the start of the Ministry when one evening, coming back to the house from an evangelical trip to the penitentiary at Sundance Creek — where, by the way, I’d managed to get three black gorillas, each weighing about two hundred and sixty pounds, to go down on their knees before the Man Himself — I learned that Walter had hired some bodyguards, four guys of different races, their muscles developed at the neighborhood gym or in jail, with wires coming out of their ears, who followed him everywhere and kept everyone at bay, including me, because when I went to say hello to them they grabbed me and, as the police say, immobilized me, until he said to them, it’s O.K., guys, cool it, this is my partner, he can come to me whenever he likes. All of which struck me as very strange.
The Ministry was doing better than ever. The safes were bursting with dollars, rotten with greenbacks, millions of them. People gave monthly tithes, and Walter’s tours to spread the word, with services for up to twenty thousand people, were great for business. All we had to do was fart and we’d be showered with coins. That was how it went. But Walter wasn’t the same anymore, for a reason I could well understand, even though I’m no great student of character or anything like that, which is that if you tell a person, from the moment he gets up in the morning until the moment he goes to bed at night, that he’s mega, A-number-one, the boss; if everyone who works with him tells him every day that he’s the goose that lays the golden egg, and the sun shines out of his ass, well, that person ends up believing it! I mean, that’d be enough to give anyone a swollen head, don’t you think, my friends? It’s something that’s hard to keep in check, like blindness or one of those diseases people have in their blood today, because there comes a moment when that person starts to believe it’s all true, that he really is the great Macho Man and all that, and that’s where things turn sour, believe me, and I’m not trying to come off as some kind of philosopher or psychologist, but if someone believes something like that about himself it’s because he already has one foot and half the other stuck in the shit, one ball and half the other in the wrong orifice, and I’m sorry, brothers and sisters, but this part of the story makes my blood boil, and here I have to make a confession that’s very difficult for me, which is that this process of self-canonization that was starting up in Walter’s consciousness ran parallel to another process in me, one that went in the opposite direction, which was that I stopped believing in anything, I let go of all those fairly tales and focused on my work on the streets, on the most down-to-earth things, on whatever shit was most recent and smelled the worst, I’m sorry, that turned out a bit scatological, which wasn’t my intention; as Walter grew and grew like a balloon, I distanced myself from it all and went out on the street; I discovered that at the center of the world, in the world itself, was goodness, human generosity, what Walter had called in earlier days “the narrative of forgiveness and generosity,” which had been his great theme.
Of course I never stopped believing that Walter was somebody special, endowed with an enormous sense of life, with those eyes that seemed like a lighthouse beacon turning very high above our heads, and that’s why he was ahead of our thoughts and of reality, because he knew what was coming and was able to adapt himself to it, but also because his voice, his innocence, and his message were a drug to be injected with his word, a verbal substance that made the weak man think he was strong and the cripple a light-footed Achilles, his word had that curious gift of being able to transform things, reality, life itself, to bend circumstances to his will, and that was the source of his success. That was why people went crazy when they heard him and many fainted and felt that the sun was warming their cheeks, that life had stopped being that terrible shithouse it usually is for most people and was transformed into something in Technicolor, like a song by Pedro Infante or Toña la Negra or the great Celia, that’s understandable, but I don’t think, dear friends, that all that necessarily made him a God, as everyone used to say, as I myself used to say, no sir, and do you know why I say that? it’s very easy, because all that he had to give others were human attributes; a man is the best support for another man who’s desperate, and to do that he uses human words, which are the only ones we have, and the best, that’s the great secret, and now I turn especially to my younger friends here and ask them to listen to this lesson that comes from a distant time, from years already past that were different than today, you can’t imagine how different! and not only because there were no cell phones or computers, or because movies were different and people were a bit fatter and women had hair on their vaginas, begging your pardon, I’m not referring only to that, I say it because it was a time when people were scared of life and that’s why they felt their way, very slowly, testing everything before making a move, like a blind man who’s lost his stick in an inhospitable side street, and that’s how things were in those slow, gray years, my dear friends, almost nobody had that self-assurance and that confidence expressed by people today, which demonstrates a complete absence of fear; the fear went out of their lives, and now it’s life itself that should take care, and so I tell myself, the story of Walter de la Salle may seem amazing today, it may seem barely credible that somebody could turn into a God like that, a guide to the blind, a beacon to those lost in the fog, but that’s what life was like, my friends, and that’s why, in those worlds that were hungry for the absolute and the metaphysical, somebody who looked above the clouds and saw beyond the horizon should become a prophet, and then it was only a step for him to become Jesus Christ reborn, and that was what Walter represented to thousands of people.
I would see him getting into his armor-plated limousine, surrounded by Jefferson, Miss Jessica, and the horde of tattooed young men who were always with him now, and I would believe less in him as a demigod, just think of the paradox: the more the world believed in him, the more I saw his human side, in other words, his fallible side, and of course I still loved him and was ready to sacrifice my own life if I thought it would make Walter more real, more magnificent, but life’s a very troublesome and contradictory thing, fuck it, sometimes even a suicidal thing, yes, which may be why nobody gets out of it alive; the greater the man’s word grew, the higher his image as a Redeemer rose from the ground, the more he seemed to me a false Messiah, full of weaknesses, very attached to trivial things, and increasingly self-centered, which was something that seemed to cover his brain like ivy; it’s a complex thing, my friends, but an extremely human thing, and a well-known phenomenon, that people who become famous immediately go a bit crazy! Let me give you an example, when we held services in stadiums, and Jessica went to the dressing room and told him, it’s time to make your entrance, there are fifteen thousand people out there, he’d reply, tell me when there are sixteen thousand, that’s my number, God woke me with that number in my head. Then he’d sit back in his chair and let Jefferson massage his shoulders while Jessica changed the slices of cucumber he put around his eyes to moisten them. He only drank Vittel water, imported from France.