Slum Virgin. Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
the details, dates, names. I know I’ve forgotten a lot, my memory collapses under the weight of what I can’t recall, but I remember Kevin with his feet in the water and his head in the mud and the mud full of blood and the colourless carp floating on the surface of the pond.
Our escape was supposed to be pretty much immediate. We thought we’d row to Uruguay, but in the end we stayed on the island for three months. I was always with Cleo and Cleo was always with the Virgin, that chunk of cement that occupies the centre of the living room still today, even if we are able to buy art after the success of our cumbia opera. The centre of our living room is an altar. I don’t believe in the Holy Trinity or in the virgin wife, mother, sister and daughter, but I live with Cleopatra, my wife, the mother of my daughter. I love her and so I’ve come to terms with this trinity. We started out in March and we didn’t end up leaving until the end of June. All this was almost two years after that first day Daniel and I had happily set off down the road to the slum.
We had no idea that that road was like the passageway to another dimension, the most important channel-change of our lives. Or at least of mine; I don’t know if Daniel was able to change his. I don’t think so. We’d stopped for coffee on the road... it must have been early November. I clearly remember the crowd of little slum children with white flowers spilling from their hands. They would throw themselves against the windshields shouting ‘Jasmines! Jasmines! Don’t you want some flowers, doll? Buy your girl a bouquet, boss, it’s just some spare change.’ I wanted some and Daniel liked the smell so the kid left with the change and his body in one piece. He was lucky, it’s easy to get hit in these zealous sales attempts. Every once in a while the tarmac gets splattered with their guts and the cars don’t stop and the kids end up flattened, like the dogs on the same roads.
It was early November when we first visited the slum, Daniel and I, together but united by what? What were the bonds that held us together? They were strong bonds and they endured, from the moment we met until his death. Was it something to do with that infantile faith he had in his Kirlian photos? For the record, my aura is blue and ‘blue is the colour of noble souls’, as Daniel affirmed with unshakeable certainty. It was the kind of faith an engineer has in his equipment. Daniel needed the electronic sophistication of his Kirlian camera’s lens in order to believe something else existed, to believe in goodness, and in a limitless colour, the colour blue. There was good in me, according to Daniel. And isn’t that kind of certainty enough of a bond?
But it wasn’t all aura with me and him. Our relationship had begun as a professional one: I was a crime reporter for a large newspaper and he worked for the Secretariat of Intelligence. We’d met when they’d sent me to cover a horrible case, the murder of a teenage girl from a poor family by a group of rich teenage boys. ‘Homicide,’ said Daniel, who didn’t like small talk, ‘is sometimes a necessary evil.’ But to fill a girl up with coke only to then fill her up with come and empty her of blood, ripping her to shreds ‘as if a pack of tigers had fucked a deer as they were eating it for breakfast’, until she was almost dead, and then burying her when she was still almost alive, seemed to go beyond the realm of necessity to him. Also, I thought to myself, the boys’ families were rich but not so rich as to be above the law – ‘and besides, this isn’t Ciudad Juárez,’ Daniel added. He seemed genuinely offended. ‘They had no reason to do something like this. There was no need: these little sons of bitches just gave in to gluttony, or worse, to lust, or worse still to the sin of killing for pleasure,’ declared the stoical Daniel, who did however believe in killing when it wasn’t for pleasure. This was over the first coffee of the hundreds we’d have together. We weren’t linked only by his Kirlian photos: like me, he’d studied literature at university, and like me, he’d dropped out. To take up a job with the Secretariat, in his case. ‘I picked the wrong path: I turned my life into a sad, boring spy novel when I really just wanted to write a thriller, not live one,’ he told me that night in the bar, two or three years before the November morning that turned out to be the first day of what I now consider the rest of my life. At the time, I thought it might somehow lead to my return to literature as well. I too had wanted to be a writer and had studied classical literature, but I abandoned my artistic ambitions and the Greek language for the newspaper and the good coke I was guaranteed through close contact with the police. I lived to work and to snort blow and so my sources, my cops, my dealers, thieves, judges, lawyers and prosecutors became my friends, my lovers, my family. That was my life.
When Daniel told me the story of Cleopatra, I thought I’d found the perfect subject for the book that would allow me to apply for the hundred thousand dollars the Iberian New Journalism Foundation gave as an advance to fund the stories that interested them. And a transvestite who’d managed to organise the slum thanks to her communication with the Heavenly Mother, a dick-sucking daughter of Lourdes, a saintly whore with a cock to boot, would surely be of interest. And then I could quit the newspaper and go back to the beginning, to literature, the Greeks, the motionless maelstrom of translations and the dry violence of academic debate.
And in a way, that’s what happened on that November morning when Daniel, who believed there was good in me, and I, who wanted to believe the same, went into the slum. November, the white flowers, the coke, the sunrise on the motorway, the writing, Daniel and his Kirlian camera, me and my Smith & Wesson, the bridges, the asphalt, the guts, the golf course adjacent to the slum; everything and everyone rolled down the green slope outside the shantytown and smashed into the grimy containment wall of El Poso, that dark, jumbled, shrill and oozing cluster of life and death.
5. Quity: ‘It all started with the cops’
It all started with the cops
busting open my face
but the Holy Mother appeared
and healed me through her grace
and she told me I had to stop
spending my life sucking cock
so I quit my job as a trannie whore
and told the world it was She they should adore.
But even before sliding down into the slum from the higher ground around the motorway like the rainwater that left it constantly flooded, I’d seen Cleo looking so very pretty and sounding so very eloquent on screen. Dani had copied the surveillance videos from the El Poso slum along with the criminal record of Sister Cleopatra, as they called her back then. It was pretty illegal, supposedly only Intelligence employees were allowed to see the surveillance and the tapes were meant to be destroyed if there was no crime. Ever since the walls of the shantytown had been studded with cameras, the devotional routine of the ‘Sister’ had become more like a talk show hosted by some daytime diva. Cleopatra – or ‘Kleo’, as she called herself when she used to advertise her services, before God started talking to her – adopted, after God started talking to her, the look of Eva Perón and a stage presence that rivalled that of Susana Giménez, all-time TV diva and Cleo’s childhood obsession. The first records they had of her came from a hospital, a jail and a newspaper clipping. She was twelve years old, she was still called Carlos Guillermo and her father had almost beaten her to death ‘for being a fucking faggot’, as was explained in an article for the obscenely sensationalist newspaper Crónica published under the headline: Homophobic Brutality: Father Nearly Kills Oldest Son for Wanting to Be Like Susana. The press went to interview the boy at the hospital, and the TV diva was so touched when she found out how much the boy loved her that she invited him onto her show. That’s when Carlos Guillermo was definitively transformed into Kleo, still on crutches but dancing delightedly with the feather boas the diva placed around his neck. A few years later Kleo re-entered the limelight, as a result of some changes made to the slum that meant the poorest of the poor were finally able to enjoy the latest technology as well as everyone else. If the rich had security cameras and walls, why couldn’t they put up a wall and cameras around the shantytown? They deserved safety as much as anyone and desperately needed protection from the gang members who robbed even their own neighbours. This was the argument laid out by the middle and upper classes, politicians and the media. The gangs of teenage thieves didn’t like it one bit. At first they splattered the cameras with paint, but the next day the cops would come in and take away the person they’d filmed vandalising. Wearing