Necropolis by Santiago Gamboa Page A

especially newcomers, seeing as how Miss Jessica and I were, in a way, complementary; we weren’t in competition with each other, but Jefferson worried her, too, and I noticed this because from one day to the next she decided to say her afternoon prayers in her room and not in the communal prayer room on the second mezzanine of the house.
    Things got more serious when Walter decided that Jefferson was also going to be his physical trainer, and they started to do exercises. They went out jogging in the mornings, lifted weights, did Pilates, and worked out according to the instructions in a book on bodybuilding that Jefferson had bought the first time he got out. To Walter, the obsession with physical strength was the necessary balance between intellect, faith, and reality, the three anchors of life, but for Jefferson it was pure animal vanity, that prison image of the man with thick arms and a chest of steel, anyway, they started talking about exercise all the time, at breakfast, lunch and dinner, and it started to disgust me; it didn’t seem to me much of a philosophical topic, but Walter would say that Jesus Christ must have been physically strong, how else could he have held out for forty days and forty nights in the Judean desert, which is close to here, and he’d also say that the struggle between good and evil could start any day and that was why we had to be prepared, not only with a clean, agile soul, but also with the body, because it would be a human confrontation, a human battle, like any of those that man has been waging since his beginnings, and that’s why it was necessary to be very well prepared, and in saying this, Walter would take off his T-shirt and show us his splendid muscles, his perfectly toned body, it was incredible, he wasn’t a boy anymore but a man, there were those tattooed worlds that narrated his story and his devotion and that light that emanated from him and filled all our hearts with joy and pride, my brothers, and so the disgust and even the suspicion passed and I gave even more thanks to Our Lord, the Big Enchilada, the Master, for having led me by the hand to that house, for taking me out of those foul waters and putting me in the middle of that group of saints, and my eyes would fill with tears, my friends, believe it or not, you have to have lived through something like that to understand it. At such moments, Miss Jessica would always stand up and say, Father, you are the principal proof of the existence of God, you are His son, and she would touch him with devotion, slide to the floor, get on her knees, and say, Father, show us the way to life and salvation, I’ll follow it with my eyes closed and I’ll tell others, and then Walter would look at her with affection and say, Jessica, rise, finish your food, I need you to be strong and robust at morning prayers. Having said that, he’d stand and say to his new apostle, Jefferson, let’s go train for a while in the gym, and I’d go out and walk along those dark streets winding between the mansions and think that Walter must indeed be the son of a God, because until now I hadn’t seen anything human in him, no human reactions or passions, let alone vices.
    But this was not to last, my friends and listeners, and it’s here that the story begins to reach its climax, because a few months later, on one of those nights when I took an after-dinner stroll to walk off the meal and think over the events of the day, I came across a dog that must have been a stray and seemed to be dying of starvation, because it was lying under a bush, howling as if it was injured. Of course I went to it and picked it up, because I don’t think there’s anything more moving in the world than the look in the eyes of a sick dog, so I lifted it in my arms and walked home, but as I reached the garden I remembered a conversation with Walter in which he’d said how immoral he thought it was that people were always in