The Cola di Rienzo trattoria is a couple of blocks away, on the corner of Via Pompeo Magno and Via Lepanto. I usually order spaghetti a la amatriciana, with an artichoke salad and a bottle of white wine. With that on the table I continued thinking about what lay behind all those books, which were like a trunk containing the fears of so many solitary people who, like me that night, needed to understand something just so that they could tell others that they had no need of it and had never asked for it, or so that they could tell themselves and then find the strength to continue, their brains seething with images and premonitions. And so the days passed, filled with books, dinners at the trattoria, and fierce looks from the caretaker, who had suspected something ever since he had seen that envelope and the writing in Hebrew. The other day, for example, he stopped me at the front door and told me that in one of the booklets put out by his group there was an article on the physical characteristics of the Jews, which made them less potent sexually, or so the article said, but I took no notice of him, just told him that I was expecting a call from my doctor and walked away.
The blank pages were gradually filling up, and, just before I was due to set out in my journey, I finished the first draft of a lecture that I entitled Words Written in the Cave of Silence, in which I tried to explain that the literary concept of words is that of an underground stream that runs very deep, dictated by the distant, obscure howling of creation, with extracts from different authors and a Kafkaesque tone reminiscent of A Report to the Academy. In the same folder I put three old texts on related themes, knowing that they always come in useful at round tables.
2. THE MINISTRY OF MERCY (I) (AS TOLD BY JOSÉ MATURANA)
I’m a Venezuelan and was born in Santo Domingo, in a brothel full of crazy alcoholics hiding under the tables, licking their wounds clean with their tongues. I’m a Panamanian and first saw the light of day on a pile of corpses in Quintana Roo, or was it San Juan? I don’t remember. I’m a Cuban and resulted from the coupling of a junkie whore and a blind, mangy stray dog in Tegucigalpa. I was born Latino in Miami and when I opened my eyes three hit men were sodomizing the nurse, who was very drunk and putting powder in her nose. I wasn’t born of woman, I was shat out by an animal with three heads who then cleaned himself with a dirty sheet and staggered away between the palms, his three brains befuddled by crack. I’m a Nicaraguan, a Costa Rican, a Dominican, and a Puerto Rican. I’m from Bogotá and Caracas. I’m a punk and a Rasta and a vagrant and a gangbanger and a paramilitary and a drug dealer. I’m black and mixed race and mestizo and Indian and purebred white. I’m sick and I don’t know who the hell I am. I don’t know if I’m already dead. Maybe I am. I’m a Caribbean. I’m a Latin American.
This was what I told myself every time I opened my eyes and saw the bars of my cell in Moundsville Penitentiary, my dear friends and listeners, before the guard came and hit the bars with his baton and cried, José, wake up! get off the toilet, we’re going to change the water! and I’d rack my brains, but all I found was an empty screen, a concrete wall like the towers of the prison, my head was empty, and I’d tell myself, José, you must remember something, search deep down, search, or did you fall from a palm tree like a coconut? even the frogs matter in this world, as the Bible says, and I’d search and search, but it didn’t work, all I ever saw was a hill of stones and gravel in the distance, tin houses held up by ropes, a stretch of wasteland in the Latino district, near the Orange Bowl Stadium, with buzzards flying overhead and a wall full of holes. Plus a footbridge strewn with organic waste, empty or near-empty soda bottles, dried dog shit. That was what I had in my mind whenever I woke up and thought of my Latino origins, and the continent I didn’t have, the continent that was far from me, as if I was its leprosy. The continent that had abandoned me and expelled me and that I loved, my friends, more than anything I’ve ever had and loved.
I longed to see a face or remember a voice, because I’d say to myself, somebody must have been pleased to see me some time, even if only for a few minutes, but nothing came, only cold distant images, newspapers blown about on the air raised by trucks passing on the avenue, flies and rotting food, used syringes, sanitary napkins with dried and blackened blood, and when I heard the guard shouting again, “José, thirty seconds!” I would think that somebody must have given birth to me for me to be in this shithole — what did the woman look like? — otherwise, I’d be a stone or a seashell, and so I went out into the corridor and breathed in the fetid air of the cellblock, one, two, three, and then I’d throw myself on the floor and do press-ups, because I had to be strong, and as I did that I’d feel a ball of fire in my guts, the moaning from the cells reminding me of something urgent, the voice of a sick girl saying in my ear, where’s today’s smack, friend? and I’d reply, when they open the door to the yard, sweetheart, I’ll go fetch it, it’s in my hiding place though I can’t tell you where that is, I have today’s supply there and maybe tomorrow’s, if the monster trapped in my chest that won’t let me breathe doesn’t get too upset in the afternoon.
We prisoners would leave the cells and go to the showers and then to the dining hall for breakfast, but by now I was already outside, my friends, I’d swung by my hiding place and had transported myself to the sky, or as they used to say, I was riding the dragon, with the heat of the smack in my veins, which was even nicer than having your cock in the ass of a black female dancer in the province of Oriente, Cuba, or in Maracay or on the island of Guadalupe or in Cartagena de Indias, oh what joy, my friends, and forgive the coarse language, but the fact is, if I don’t use that language I won’t be able to convey the main gist of my story, which is, and no more beating about the bush now, the piece of lowlife shit I was before the Word of the Lord, of the Man Himself, the Supreme Brother, came into my life in the voice of his missionary on earth, Reverend Walter de la Salle, who was also called Freddy Angel or José de Arimatea, depending on the period or which year his driving license was issued, because without that, and with all the changes of personality, even he himself didn’t remember where or how he’d started, and I really mean that, my friends and listeners, and I tell you here and now, Freddy Angel, the original name of that Caribbean Jesus Christ, had the same beginnings as me, in other words, the fucking street, which is what I’m talking about, born like me at the mercy of the elements, under a car fender, and brought up by an angel who was his protector, a cone of light that enveloped him and kept him out of trouble and stood between him and knives and even bullets, and that was why he was called Freddy Angel, because the person who protects us is the one who gives us our name.
The first person in Walter’s life was that angel, so that was what he was called, and that was how he explained his origins: that an angel had left him on a bench in Echo Park, under an oak tree, and that only after a few hours did he start to wake up, ah-ha, and open his eyes, and when both of them were wide open he realized what it meant to be a human and not a stellar android, a piece of the sky or a particle of light, so he said, and then Walter or Freddy got up from the bench and started going around the world doing good, because apparently the angel had brought him already fully grown; but doing good isn’t the easiest thing, especially if the people who need it don’t realize it or don’t want it, because anyone who hasn’t seen God, my friends, when he does see him he gets a bit scared, and so the young man started to talk to whores and young drug addicts about the Redeemer, to see what they said, and of course, the first person he addressed, a fat black man with eyes as red and bulging as those of a wife-killer, said, God? what’s that? and added, I haven’t had the pleasure, son, who is he? is he from the block? isn’t he the guy in the gray Dodge Polara? and so Walter thought, forgive them, Lord, and talked to them about the origin of life and the origin of love and sadness and problems and how to solve them.