The young man stayed in one of the upstairs bedrooms for nearly two months until he vomited up the last sick cell and recovered, sustained by prayer.
He was the first. From that point on, they started giving shelter to people with problems. It was a time of great changes. One day, Walter sat down with an architect on the terrace overlooking the garden, pointed to a space between two oaks, and said, I want you to build me a chapel there, look, I’ve already drawn it, this is what it looks like, and he took out that drawing that would later become famous, the first vision of the Chapel of Mercy and the Living God, a concrete dome and colored windows, with a cross on top of it, a cross that, according to him, should be in purple and yellow neon so that it could be seen from a long distance, so that the planes passing over the chapel should know that that distant heart shining in the darkness was the Heart of God, and remember that all those who’ve been baptized have to cross themselves and say a prayer and forgive somebody or ask for forgiveness, and of course, a cross that size, almost twenty feet high, ended up drawing the attention of the neighbors, who started asking questions like, what kind of church is it? what times do you hold services? As the staff didn’t know what to answer the mystery kept on growing until one day, I think it was a Saturday, Miss Jessica was coming back from the market when a woman asked her for the times of services and the name of the church and she replied, it’s the Ministry of Mercy, we’ll put up the schedule for the services next week.
When she got to the house she found Walter prostrate before a huge red plastic crucifix, with a Christ twice life-size and a green light flashing inside it, and she said, Father — because she already called him Father — Father, the faithful are already asking about the chapel and the times of services, and I told her that we’d put them up on the door next week, so you have to think about that, and he, still prostrate on the floor, listened to her without looking at her, surrounding her with a great silence, as if the church were his body, a temple where the priests officiated from silent cubicles.
Miss Jessica looked at him affectionately, recognizing in him a divine being: his bare chest with the rippling muscles, the trapezoid formed by his back and the back of his neck, his prominent vertebrae, and the long hair cascading over his shoulders like a waterfall; she waited reverently by his side, because she knew that when Walter was at prayer he often reached an extremely deep state, such was his devotion and closeness to God, who without doubt was his father; that was what Miss Jessica was thinking, my friends, she’d already gotten it into her hypothalamus and cerebellum that Walter was none other than the son of the Master, the Big Enchilada, the Man Himself, how does that grab you? and so, after all that silence, seeing him start to move, she said: you’re ready, Father, you have to begin and the people are waiting for you, and he replied, we’ll put up the schedule on Monday.
With the conviction that Miss Jessica gave him, Walter started holding services at the Ministry of Mercy, which in those early years created quite a stir, my dear brothers, because Walter dispensed with hosannas and had music videos in the background, playing rock and even rap, and invited dancers up on the stage behind the pulpit, because he said that in order to preach in today’s world you had to take your inspiration from today’s world, the world of the street, with its music and its harsh, sometimes violent but very real images, and he’d say that if his enemies were drugs and violence and promiscuity, which indeed they were, then he had to fight them with the same weapons, turn the lyrics around, you know, those modern urban songs don’t exactly inspire the noblest of feelings, they’re all about killing blacks and Jews and shooting up and sodomizing your sister and murdering your father, and those are just the gentler ones, but Walter was good at extracting other messages from them and using them to his advantage, because at the end of the day they were what he’d listened to since he was a boy on the streets and in children’s homes.
In addition, he’d appear at his services stripped to the waist, his upper body covered in tattoos that depicted Christ, not only in Nazareth but also in the back streets of an industrial slum, preaching to alcoholics and heroin addicts. His back was covered with an image of the crucifixion, but instead of Mount Golgotha, my brothers, the Redeemer was hanging in an old basketball court on Syracuse Drive, surrounded by potholed streets and smog-blackened buildings with God knows what dramas happening inside, young girls raped by their stepfathers, minors having sex for hard drugs, sweaty men in a drug-induced stupor on foul-smelling carpets, old men with prostate cancer groaning with pain, and women trading their anal virginity for doses for their husbands, anyway, my friends, all this could be sensed in those grim tenements surrounding the basketball court where the new Christ was crucified, the Jesus of the slums, the Redeemer of the people sent by the Man Himself to save us from our sins, and that was the central image that Walter had tattooed on his back: the mystery and paradox of evil.
From the pulpit, with rap music in the background, Walter would speak of God and the virtues of suffering and what a great thing it was to be one of Christ’s marines and that voice that says to us a second before we fall into the abyss, stop, dammit! what are you doing? be careful of that sharp edge, don’t jump into the void, boy, look, they took the net away yesterday, you’ll slam straight into a floor dirty with spit and condoms or the roof of some dusty old taxi, don’t let your children see that, make sure your blood stays inside your body, my friend, that’s the main thing, I know all about that, because if a hole opens everything comes out and doesn’t go back in, the body is like a blister and can burst, and the soul is the desire to look after that blister and its aspiration to the stars, so give your hand to the fallen, talk to the lonely, give up your food to the needy and weep for those who are about to sin because your word has not reached them, and for those who do not hear and close the door to your love and repent in sorrow for not having opened it, because that’s what handles are for, as was demonstrated by Syriacus the Abogalene in Nineveh, and weep for those who feel a humming in the brain inciting them to open fire in a classroom, and for those who are sweating with cocaine pellets in their stomachs, weep for all the people who long to die because they don’t know anything but the smell of poverty and fear, great is their number and great is their fear, all these things Walter said from his musical pulpit, with lighting effects and artificial smoke and shadow play and videos, while Miss Jessica sat like a queen by the side of the altar in religious contemplation, dressed very simply in T-shirt and jeans.
With these spectacles, the Chapel of Mercy and the Living God was soon filled every Saturday evening and Sunday noon, dozens and then hundreds of worshipers grew fond of his direct, plainspoken style, his exalted rhetoric, my friends, which was something to be reckoned with, especially when he attacked the devil, and that was when he really got into his stride, because Walter really hated him, and he would point to the LCD screen at the side that projected a silhouette with horns, and say, go from this place, Satan! do not dare to enter this sacred ground, because we hate you! we will beat you to death, Satan! Then the faithful would rise from their seats and cry out, in fearsome unison, we will beat you to death! we hate you! come no closer, Satan, you scum! and Walter would continue urging them to be ever crueler and more ruthless with Satan, in his own language, which was that of curses, Satan the Foul, the Obscene, the Repugnant! and the people would raise their hands to the clear sky and answer, Satan the Bastard, the Son of a Bitch, the Faggot, God will leave you on some radioactive island with sharks all around, unable to climb to the top because of the snakes, the most poisonous in the oceanic regions, oh Satan, you’re done for, your glory days are over, yes sir, now begins the reign of the good, because Walter de la Salle is in town! and someone even cried out, Satan to Guantanamo!