Let me tell you how things were in a bit more detail. When at last everything was ready and Jessica pretended that sixteen thousand people had come in, he’d withdraw to a portable chapel he had and pray in silence for a minute, and then go out on stage in the middle of a cloud of smoke, with a spotlight following him and loud symphonic music, nothing less than Zarathustra by Richard Strauss, do you copy me? The people would rise from their seats and yell and the women would bite their purses and urinate and some would faint, it was completely crazy; the security people would have to contain the crowd, until Walter would turn on the microphone and cry, God is watching you tonight! God is looking at each one of you tonight! God sees what there is in each of your hearts and comes down, slowly, to kiss them! Then he would point to the audience with a powerful finger and cry:
Ooooopen your hearts to Goooooooodddd!!!
The applause would be deafening. His handling of the microphone was excellent, with crescendos and diminuendos that bent the audience to his will, and the rest was a real pop opera, my friends, suddenly he’d say, let’s tell sin what we think about it, let’s say it loud and clear, I hate you, I hate you! and the hall would be bursting with yells and stamping of feet. Then the lights would go out and there’d be a scary silence. Suddenly, a red light would fall on Walter, presenting himself now as a billy goat in the middle of a witches’ Sabbath. He’d take off his chasuble and reveal his tattooed, muscular body. More beams of light would show the illustrations on his tattoos and the people would cry out in admiration and fear, yes, ladies and gentlemen, fear was part of the story. The cripples would jump out of their wheelchairs and the lame would yell with pride, recovering some of their dignity, and later these same little people would go back home along the street, kicking tin cans, poor devils sitting in forgotten parks looking at the world with misty eyes, tangible human idiocy, my friends, but for a few hours these people were happy and that’s why Walter was a drug, a kind of crack or coke that was snorted through the ear and maddened the brain for a few days, or only a few hours, I don’t know, because it had stopped doing anything to me.
We eventually had more than sixty thousand members, just imagine, and every one of them donated a monthly tithe that could vary between fifty and a thousand dollars, just imagine, and so there were no limits to anything anymore; the house in South Beach was turning into a resort, very different than it had been at the beginning, because Jefferson and the seven samurai, which was what I called that gang of athletic faggots, refurbished the place, knocking down walls, extending the rooms, and building a swanky gym with electronic apparatus and giant LCD screens so that Walter could watch recordings of his own services while he lifted weights or did Pilates. All this coincided with the purchase of the house that adjoined the rear of the property, and as both houses had extensive grounds, a path was laid to join the two gardens.
At that time, my friends and listeners, God put in my devastated brain one of the best ideas I’ve ever had, which was to move to a cabin on the border between the two gardens, but closer to the newly-purchased house, a cabin that had been used by the children of the previous owners to throw wild parties with alcohol, drugs, and group sex, because during the cleaning I found mineralized condoms, black sanitary napkins, crack pipes and coke papers, colored G-strings with strange stains on them, and dozens of empty tequila bottles and half-empty jars of Vaseline. I even found a box of tampons, because it had been fashionable for girls to wet them in liquor and stick them in their asses so they could get drunk without getting fat or damaging their stomachs. I cleaned the cabin without spending a single dollar of the Ministry’s money. I opened the windows, let the air in, and installed some of the old furniture that was piled in the attic of the main house.
Soon I’d constructed a lovely space, with wooden shelves for my books, a comfortable living room, a table, and a few kitchen utensils, very few to be honest, because the one thing Walter asked was that I should continue to have lunch and dinner with the group. From that cabin at the bottom of the garden I devoted myself to observing the life of Walter and the others: Miss Jessica, Jefferson, along with the samurai and other dissonant elements in the life of the Ministry that had become a necessary evil by this time. I also devoted myself to devouring books, poetry and novels, exemplary lives, world history, whatever there was, I was interested in everything because I wanted to make up for lost time, like the time I told you about. I’d read after my Bible-thumping visits to reformatories and crack dens and other places of ill repute in the city, the way Walter had taught me, and the first thing I realized was that real life was poor compared with the lives in books; in books there was harmony and complexity and the most fucked-up things had a sheen of beauty, I noticed that when I read Dostoevsky and Dickens and Böll, and I’m even going to confess something to you, dear friends, which is that with all this reading I found out a little about history and finally learned, at the age of almost forty, that in Europe there’d been an almighty mess called the Second World War, don’t laugh, just imagine what a crummy piece of shit I was, because before, whenever anybody mentioned Hitler, I thought he was a Mafia boss or a serial killer, and nothing more; when I read that he’d been chancellor of Germany, or president, or whatever they call it over there, I was completely stunned, and said to myself, I don’t understand, is that the same country where writers like Thomas Mann and Musil come from? no way, and I decided to ask Walter if we could hire a teacher of modern history for the young people.
Ask Jessica for whatever money you need and take care of it, said Walter, it’s a great idea, as always, so I hired, for a fair amount of money, a guy who wrote historical notes in the Miami Herald, a Cuban named Víctor Mendoza, and as it turned out, I wouldn’t have missed those classes for anything in the world because I was constantly being surprised, like with that great story of the Cuban revolution and the guys with beards coming to power, I could hardly believe it, or the story of Pinochet, my brothers, it was like being born again every day, discovering that this motherfucking planet was a very complicated place, full of angry people always fighting, shooting each other, throwing nuclear warheads, going in for ethnic cleansing, dissolving each other in acid, running each other through the ass with Belgian rifles and everything, that was the kind of thing Mendoza taught us and I carved them into my brain and then went and repeated them to the young men on my prison visits, guys who, as I’ve already explained, found it really difficult to concentrate on one complete sentence, by the time you got to the predicate they’d already forgotten the subject and then they didn’t remember the verb, but they were my children, what else could I do but love them? I was no different or better than they were, just as damaged by reality and the new psychotropic technologies; I’d tell them over and over: Columbus arrived, Bolívar died, Berlin fell, Tenochtitlan fell, Homer existed, Lenin died, Lindbergh arrived, Che was killed, Allende committed suicide, Trotsky was assassinated, anyway, the prosody of History, my friends, and my boys looked at me with red half-open eyes, their brains working extremely slowly, with smiles that had no connection with the situation, I don’t know if you can imagine it; that was my space, alone in the prisons or in the bars with Miss Jessica, almost always in the Flacuchenta.