Walter gave up going out on the streets to spread the word, because he didn’t have the time. All those meetings and services and journeys to other cities monopolized his schedule, so he himself said to me, you’re going to take charge of the hardest part, you’ll be my shepherd of souls, you’ll have to bring them from the bottom of the well up to where I can save them, José, gather them together, be strong, it’s the greatest responsibility there is in this Ministry and I give it to you, comrade, you’re the oldest and most experienced of us, you believe in me and you’d be capable of giving your life blindly for Christ, that I know.
The separation became even greater. I’d observe him from my cabin, and I saw many things.
I saw that the lights in the tower, where Walter had moved his private rooms since the last refurbishment, were on until late, and sometimes I’d see frenzied silhouettes projected on the window. If somebody opened a window you could hear music and laughter. I stayed there in silence by my own window, spying on the movements in the tower, although sometimes I didn’t even look; I only thought and thought about what Walter had come to do in the world and how little I understood of his mission, poor wretch that I was, so I said to myself, continue with your education and one day you’ll understand, and I went back to my books, the poetry and the religious writings and the biographies, and I started to devour them again, and that way life got back on an even keel.
One evening, one of the Italian lawyers told him that the best way to spread his word nationwide was television, why had he never thought of it before? He ought to build a studio in his house, buy air space and hire a team of communicators to help him, and that was what he did, because Walter was extremely impressionable. He was won over by the idea of expanding, like everyone. Don’t you think so, my friends? Doesn’t a human being naturally prefer to have two of something rather than one? That was how Walter began his second stage as a businessman and The Ministry of Mercy in Your Home went on the air, for which he developed a different method. His advisers persuaded him that the style and esthetics of his concerts, with red lights and bulging muscles, wouldn’t work on TV, because all those action series had set the bar really high when it came to convincing the viewers, and what he was doing would look like a children’s game. That’s why he thought up a kind of spiritual call center, with a theoretical part presented by Walter and another part where he was joined by Miss Jessica and they’d answer questions from viewers, using Biblical passages and other religious examples to get across their points.
Within six months the show was generating more money for the Ministry than all those exhausting national tours, and again there were changes. He didn’t entirely stop going out on the streets, because, as he always said, nothing could replace direct contact with reality, grappling at first hand with a person desperate to find a direction in life, and I’d think, oh Walter, you haven’t been in touch with reality for a long time now, but I only thought it, I didn’t say it. At that time there were a lot of things I didn’t dare say.
One night I was alone in my cabin, drinking tonic water and reading Pindar, when I heard heavy breathing in the garden, the noise of footsteps, dead leaves being crushed underfoot, what was it? I went to have a look and was stunned to see that a group of women had climbed over the railings and was heading for the house. I followed them at a distance to see what they were going to do. . They wanted to see Walter, so they tried to force open a couple of doors, and, when they didn’t succeed, they broke a window and got into the house that way. That worried me, so I said to them, hey, ladies, cool it, but they didn’t listen to me, they seemed possessed; there was blood on the glass, so now I was really worried, but I didn’t know what else to do except follow them, and I said to myself, where the fuck are the bodyguards? now that we need them they’re nowhere to be seen, although I also thought, it’s better this way, those savages might hurt one of the old ladies and then it’d be goodbye Ministry, big scandal, so we had to be careful. The women realized that Walter might be in the tower, because they saw lights, and looked for the staircase. I ran up the service stairs and got there before they did, to warn Walter. I saw that his apartment was open. I nervously approached the door and half-opened it, and light spilled out into the corridor.
The scene I saw gave me goose bumps
The young athletes and Walter were stark naked on the couches, having sex in a variety of incredible positions, sucking cocks and balls, the whole thing kept afloat with whiskey and gin, and with a smell of grass that knocked you back; as I was trying to recover my composure I heard a loud nasal snort, and looking to the side of the room saw Miss Jessica lifting her face from a mirror covered in coke, and I don’t know if I dreamed it, but I had the impression that somebody was fucking her in the ass, because what I do remember is that she was in a G-string and her tits were bobbing up and down. I couldn’t speak. I was petrified, I walked to the opposite wall and heard the intruders coming up the main stairs. By a miracle there were already two guards struggling with them, hitting them in the ribs with stun batons, but the women kept coming up. I saw it all unfolding in front of me like someone seeing death, my friends and listeners.
When they heard the women screaming, the guys in the orgy froze and Miss Jessica came to the door, naked. She must have been so zonked out she didn’t know what was going on; the guards looked at her in surprise, because in addition to everything else she was smiling and moving her head in time to a tune. My God, I thought, seeing her with her G-string around her ankles, her mound of Venus shaved, a blood-red circle on her buttocks, as if she’d been sitting on the edge of a wall, and completely out of it. I just wanted to jump out the window onto the ground below to blot out those images. My world had shattered into a thousand pieces and, like a shell floating in a whirlpool, I didn’t know what to do, how to stop it, I wasn’t even sure that all this wasn’t one of Satan’s dirty tricks, but no, it was quite real; I didn’t have the courage to face it, so I went back down the service stairs, without anyone noticing me.
I had to stay away from the house. When, the next day, Walter and Jessica ordered increased security, including electrified fences, I realized that the days of the Ministry were numbered. God would destroy us soon and the only question was, how would he do it? Would He use nuclear warheads, which was the modern way, or would He throw a few thunderbolts? You could smell it in the air. Walter asked me if I’d heard anything the previous night and I said, no, I hadn’t, I’d only woken up at the end, after the guards had intervened and the police had arrived. During lunch, he said that love sometimes took on a destructive form and had to be channeled somewhere; that was what had happened in the house, and we had to remember that. I said yes, shrugged, and went back to my cabin.
For Walter it was a hard blow, something that should have started his brain ticking over, because it threw a beam of light on his great contradiction. I would have liked it if he’d come and talked with me honestly about what was happening, because I could have helped him, but he didn’t. He became reserved and false. His smile was false, and so were his words of optimism. The falsity of words is obvious from listening to them, my friends, prick up your ears and you’ll see, it’s like hitting a wooden surface when there’s nothing behind, the sound bounces and echoes, that’s how hollow words sound. That’s what falsity is. And people must have noticed it, not only me, because things started to go downhill, the ratings dropped, went sharply up and down for a while, then flatlined. At this point, Walter took a couple of decisions that seemed lucid enough, but actually made matters worse, like giving a gold casket to a drowning man. In other words, the things might have been good in themselves, but they didn’t do anything to stop the rot. One of them was the project to spread the word outside the country, going to meet my people on the brother continent, the Land of Delight, Latin America.