Necropolis Read Free Page A

Reverend Walter de la Salle, founder of the Ministry of Mercy, a church and advice center for drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, depressives, the suicidal, the violent, the antisocial, pedophiles, and other deviants who wish to find redemption through faith. Among his works are
Miracle in Moundsville
,
Christ Stopped on Crack Drive,
and
The Redeemers of South Miami
.
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    By that point, I had lost all sense of reality. The delegates and their bizarre lives seemed straight out of a play by Tennessee Williams, one of those waterfront dramas where everyone is drunk and desperate, women and men endlessly lust after each other, and everything is profoundly tragic, but I also thought: this is where I belong, when you come down to it, with my illness and my solitude and my novels, what will the former pastor think when he reads my biographical sketch? The ICBM was right to invite me, even though, and there was no doubt about it now, they had made a mistake, a big mistake.
    Just before dawn—staring up at the wreaths of smoke from the cigarillo I was forbidden to smoke—I told myself that perhaps the people in the ICBM saw something in my work of which I was unaware, something that did have a connection with biography and exceptional lives and might be about to manifest itself, like so many things we ourselves are unaware of but are obvious to other people: the white whales or Moby Dicks we carry inside us and cannot see, and so I told myself, I will have to be very much on the alert. At that hour of the night, I came to the conclusion that I would not miss the conference for anything in the world, that I would be there from the first day to the last.
    The next day I woke up very late, almost noon. On my desk table, next to the telltale ashtray, I found a bottle of gin with almost nothing left in it—I did not think to mention that before—and I realized that much of what I had been thinking (the reference to Moby Dick, for example) was due to that perverse analyst and futurologist to which Malcolm Lowry refers in one of his poems, when he says, “The only hope is the next drink,” good old Lowry, but anyway, it was time to continue thinking about the topics to be treated at the conference, so after a light snack I went back to work, and in the course of the next few hours I looked at books by Voltaire, Goethe, Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
, which I have never read, but which other people have told me about and from which I remembered a quotation I could not find; plus, as always, the diaries of Julio Ramón Ribeyro and his extraordinary
Prosas apátridas
, as well as Cioran and Fernando González, the “philosopher from somewhere else.”
    I read and read, jumping from one book to another, and as often happens to me I ended up rereading poetry by Gil de Biedma and paragraphs from Graham Greene, two or three maxims by Cortázar and verses by León de Greiff, the great León, who had the courage to write the following:
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    Lady Night, give me Sleep. May my Weariness sleep long
    And I with it, (Oh, Night! Let us sleep forever:
    Never wake us, tomorrow or ever!)
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    And so I went on, book by book, phrase by phrase, from Epictetus to Les Murray, from Musil to Panait Istrati, from Bufalino to Malraux, sometimes only a paragraph or a sentence, and then I thought again about the biographical genre and took from the shelf
Primo Levi
by Ian Thomson, and
Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life
, by Howard Sounes, the life of poor lonely old Bukowski, with his monstrous acne—worse than mine, pitted with craters as my cheeks are—his alcoholism and his love of desperate people and the dark corners of bars. Time passed, and the sky of Rome was filling with dark, terrifying black holes, like something out of a painting by Caravaggio, and I started to wonder if those written lives were real or if their only reality was in the writing itself, the fact