Jessica and Jefferson still regarded Estiven with suspicion. To them he was an intruder who had Walter’s full attention with something they were excluded from, and in addition, I insist on this, there was the whole physical thing, not only that big head due to water on the brain, but also a lack of carburation in one of his digestive organs, because every time he opened his mouth his breath absolutely reeked, it was like lifting the lid off a container of organic waste, which was why Jefferson, who was sensitive to men’s smells, him being a faggot and all that, and Jessica, who in spite of her religious dedication had already given signs that she was still a hundred per-cent woman when it came to sex, despised him and found him disgusting and made passing comments to win over the others against him, which must have been quite hard to bear, but Estiven must have been really needy because he stood all the joking in spite of the fact that nobody ever offered him a glass of Coke or a meat pie or a piece of the cake made by Felicity, the black cook. He seemed used to all that kind of thing, as if he’d seen it all before. On one occasion he went into a drugstore at night and as he approached the cash desk the owner was waiting for him with a sawn-off shotgun, aiming it at his chest and saying, get out of here, you fucking thief, and don’t come back! and other people shouted, can’t you read? no pets allowed, out! But I liked him and admired his work, and apart from that, as he was from Magangué he talked like us, the friends of the immortal Caribbean, a man from the land of reggaeton and champeta and vallenato, a man who, like me, had been overtaken by life but was still pedaling, with the wind and everything else against him, the wind and life and the world in general, and there he was, floating like a turd or a log in this Babylon of the Caribbean.
As I’ve already said, he had a good ear for getting convincing phrases out of Walter’s words. He was able to put in prose what he said in his dialogues; at the end of the afternoon he’d tell me what he’d done and then I’d take over and make a fair copy, correcting and adding, intensifying this effect or polishing that idea so that the whole thing was harmonious and the basic message shone through even more, which really opened my eyes, until one day, going over the text, I had the brilliant idea of turning it back into dialogues, a traditional way of conveying knowledge; when that idea came to me my eyes filled with tears and I said to myself, José, you son of a bitch, you’ve just given birth, for the first time in your damned life, to a good idea, a fucking brilliant idea! you’re going to be the Plato to the new Socrates! What an opportunity!
With Walter’s approval, I set to work. I gave each section a separate heading, like Conversation with an Angel on 47th Street, or Answers to a Disciple with AIDS, a kind of mixture of the classical and the contemporary; and I organized everything by theme: drugs, poverty, violence, abuse, prostitution. . My head started flying like a falcon that’s been let loose: a dialogue with three Caribbean girls selling their bodies I entitled The Open Legs of Latin America, and a conversation with a black neighborhood leader Sad Song for the Great-Grandchildren of Kunta Kinte. I was overcome with lyricism, my friends, and as I worked I became aware of how technically complex the whole process was, and so one evening, after getting the go-ahead from our financial controller, in other words, Miss Jessica, I set off with a couple thousand dollars to buy a computer, an Apple Mac that I installed in my cabin, a big screen, and as a screensaver I of course chose a sunset over the Caribbean, and I began to pound the keyboard, convinced that I was dealing with something really big.
I soon came to one of the greatest dilemmas: the title. I thought and thought for several days until it came to me: Encounters with Amazingly Normal People, and so I put it on the draft. As was to be expected, Walter approved it, and I continued with the process. Later I had to deal with the question of what I call “hot and cold writing,” in other words, the way you perceive the writing as you’re doing it and the way you see it after being away from it for a few hours, when the words get cold and you can look calmly at what you did, and think about the distance between that result and the impression you had as you were doing it in the heat of the moment. It’s like the casting of the metal in the making of bells, as you see in the film Andrei Rublev, by old Tarkovsky: the tone and appearance of a cast when you put the molten steel in the mold is very different than its final form, when it’s cooled down, and the same goes for words: when they’re a flow of lava descending from the cerebral cortex to the fingers they have an shiny appearance that blinds and flatters, but their true face is the one they acquire hours later, when the smoke clears and you can see them by the light of day; they’re never as radiant as they were before, and you dither and feel lost and go back to the beginning, you stand back and redo it or give it all up and are left with the empty space that’s the silence of writing and which, as in music, has its own value, that’s the way it is, my brothers, but anyway, let’s carry on with the story.
Walter started having highs and lows again, sometimes he was euphoric and then he’d plunge into a deep depression and wouldn’t come down from his tower for three or four days. Those were the years that biographies dismiss in a couple of lines, but as you know, life happens every day and we can’t always be on the crest of the wave, until we come to that chapter in which lives rush through a gorge that quickly leads to the void, sometimes to death and very rarely to happiness, in fact almost never.
Oh, my friends, my dear friends, maybe we need a little fresh air here, so let’s remember the story of that man who made himself wings with feathers stuck on with wax and started to fly, higher each time, and having seen the world so much from above cherished the fantasy of dominating it, because from up there it looked like something he could hold in his hands, a loose stone, a bottle top, and he dreamed of reaching the gods, he continued rising and rising, friends, and when he got to the top of the sky his wings went all to hell, the wax melted and down he plummeted, free fall without a net. Let this serve as an introduction to what follows, in metaphorical terms, even though the beginning of the end for the Ministry of Mercy was an unexpected visit, a man in suit and tie who came to the gate and asked, does the Reverend Walter de la Salle live here?