Shooting Up: A Childhood in San Blas

SHOOTING UP:

A CHILDHOOD IN SAN BLAS

A coming of age memoir

By Jonathan Tepper

SHOOTING UP / TEPPER / 2�

To my parents and brothers

With much love.

Some names have been changed,

but the places, the people and incidents

have been rendered as accurately as memory allows.


PROLOGUE

PRÓLOGO

Boy scout trips; little league games; waking up early to watch Saturday morning cartoons; sweltering summer days chasing ice cream trucks. These, I have been told, are the memories of American youth. But they are not mine. I grew up as an American missionary kid in San Blas, a neighborhood in Madrid.

A story I read recently in a Spanish newspaper recounted how a man everyone called Demonio had tried to buy drugs. Anyone who was anyone in San Blas had a nickname, no last name: Veneno, Majara, Tigre, Picha Palo, El Tocho; Poison, Crazy, Tiger, Hard Dick, Stocky. Demonio tried to buy some heroin from a pusher named Daniel and his girlfriend, but he did not have enough money. That's when the argument started. Demonio insulted Daniel’s girlfriend. A fight broke out, and Demonio pulled a knife and stabbed Daniel in the neck. He quickly bled to death.

Daniel and Demonio were not friends of mine, but they fought in Parque del Paraíso near the Simancas Metro stop where I played fútbol as a child. Drug addicts congregated at the entrance to the Metro, drinking liter bottles of beer, smoking marijuana, and buying heroin. Drugs were their religion, and heroin was their daily bread. After the siesta, children wandered out to play until the mothers called them in for dinner around ten or eleven at night. I was a chaval, a kid from the neighborhood. Amber clouds of dust


hung in the air as we played. The damp smell of stale beer and piss clung to the Metro steps, and along the sidewalks lay discarded syringes filled with drying blood.

Open fields bordered San Blas, but the four story red brick buildings within the city were squat and packed together as if clinging to each other. In the barrio three generations, children, parents and grandparents, often lived in the same apartment — children sleeping two or three to a bed. The original government designs for the neighborhood contained parks and green spaces, but things didn’t work out that way.

The apartment blocks all looked the same and were beset by structural problems. Parque del Paraíso was fairly well kept, but the smaller parks had reverted to their former state as dirt lots, collecting garbage. A few buildings had small gardens, fenced in to keep strangers out. The trees on the streets were mutilated, and any that survived the zealous pruning of the municipal gardeners provided little shade or comfort. It was easier to cut the branches off once than it was to collect the leaves every autumn.

Everything in the neighborhood, though, had its own rhythm and particular order. Men sweated as plumbers, painters or butchers. The brick masons wore blue coveralls sprinkled with fine dust from mixing cement and plaster of Paris, and the painters wore paint-speckled white coveralls. They worked through the day and retreated to the local bars for cañas y tapas in the afternoon. Mothers spent their days sweeping and mopping the portales, the communal entrances to the apartment blocks, in the morning and shopping for their families’ needs at noon. They dragged their shopping carts behind them and searched the market halls for fresh olives, cheese and cured sausage.

People from San Blas had orgullo de barrio: they were proud, they tried to keep the streets clean. Spanish housewives maintained impeccable apartments. Their white laundry blew in the wind as it hung from clotheslines strung across the apartment block balconies. It was important to have an immaculate, dust-free, orderly home — as if cleanliness itself were an act of defiance against what the neighborhood had become. Used syringes and garbage collected near the buildings, but the portales were always swept and mopped. There may have been a heroin addict son or daughter living at home, but a family’s living room never betrayed the secret.

The death of General Francisco Franco in 1975 brought libertad y libertinaje, freedom and license. For most Spaniards Franco’s death meant all sorts of freedoms: political parties were no longer prohibited, people could vote for elected officials, films were no longer censored, gays no longer feared being locked up, stores were open on Sunday, and Protestants could openly practice their faith. The mood was euphoric: anything was possible and everything was permissible. For the young, Madrid became the center of la movida, a burst of sex and drugs. Under Franco drug dealers had been shot, which (understandably) curtailed drug dealing. After his death drugs were plentiful, and people experimented with them as they never had before. The chavales tried marijuana, hashish, LSD, amphetamines, cocaine and heroin. Sometimes they tried the drugs one at a time, sometimes together, most often in alternation. Of all of these, heroin was the most powerful. It quickly destroyed families and rent the fabric of the neighborhood, making San Blas itself a byword for drugs.

In 1983 my parents arrived in San Blas as Protestant missionaries with four young sons. They were drawn to the palpable suffering that surrounded them. With an Australian missionary, they took in one heroin addict as a simple act of love, and by chance


a drug rehabilitation center was born. Men like Daniel and Demonio — pimps, conmen, bank robbers, drug dealers, even murderers — became my friends. As a child I met them when they were junkies on the streets, and I grew up around them in the rehab center.

Some addicts in San Blas died of overdoses and others drank themselves to death, but it was not the heroin, the alcohol or even the violence that took so many lives. At the time few in the neighborhood knew anything about a recently-discovered disease that was quietly infecting almost everyone who shot up. It spread rapidly from one junkie to another with each needle that was shared. Years passed before most people knew anything about it, and by then it was too late.

Addicts could stop shooting up, but they were powerless against Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Some addicts were too ashamed to tell their fathers and mothers, and they died without their families knowing why they were ill. AIDS hit Spain a few years after it exploded in San Francisco and New York, but it was just as deadly. For San Blas the disease was devastating; many of its youth became part of “the almost lost generation.”

When the epidemic engulfed the neighborhood, my family was quickly surrounded by friends who were sick and dying. We spent our evenings and weekends in the drab infectious diseases wards of hospitals. As a teenager I saw dozens of friends suffer when they were ill, and I stood by helplessly and watched them die.

This is the story of San Blas, of my family that struggled to change the neighborhood, and of the many friends I have lost. It is also my story. The men and women in the center who were recovering from heroin became a part of me. No matter how far away from San Blas I might live or what I might do, these friends from the barrio stay with me.


1: HELL

INFIERNO

Abandon all hope, you who enter.

Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto III

We were on the lookout for yonquis. My brothers and I held our piles of tracts anxiously and shuffled them, hoping to get rid of them. In a small phalanx we moved forward through the sand and patches of green in the park, glancing nervously from side to side for anyone who might look like a heroin addict. I had seen the yonquis in the parks and watched them shoot up near our apartment, but they inspired more curiosity than fear. I felt a quiver of childish excitement every time we went out to meet them. More than anything, I looked forward to the chocolate ice cream my father had promised me for helping.

Further ahead I spotted a young man leaning against a park bench. His skull was tilted to the side, his eyes staring into nowhere. His hair was matted with oil and dirt. Why did he not shower? Did his parents and brothers not look after him? I squatted and pushed the piece of paper into his hand, but he did not respond. I folded it and slid it into his shirt pocket.

“Keep it. It’s got a phone number. Dial it if you want to get off drugs,” my voice was little more than a whisper. He looked up at me but his eyelids moved lazily and he said nothing. It was as if time were proceeding more slowly for him than for me. “Don’t lose it, O.K.?”

Each person I greeted was different; I could not forget their faces, their sunken cheeks and rotting teeth. Some addicts threw the paper on the ground and sneered, “Déjame en paz, chaval, o te rajo. Leave me alone, kid, or I’ll slit you.” Others took it without saying a word and walked on. A few kept the pamphlet and read it as they walked away, and I hoped we would see them again.

As I walked up to yonquis, I asked myself: were they on edge and out to get money to buy drugs? Were they already puestos? If they had just shot up, they were always easy to approach. I was just a seven-year-old kid, and my mother and father said that as long as we did not get between them and their fix, they were not dangerous. Maybe it was the magic of childhood that gave my brothers and me safe passage or perhaps it was my parents’ belief that God himself would protect us.

I stepped among the broken syringes, their missing needles glistening before me. They were everywhere in San Blas. I had seen them in the dump behind our apartment and by the buildings down the street. They blanketed the entrance to the Gypsy camp. The yonquis scavenged for used syringes and rebuilt them, mixing a needle from one and


the body of another as long as the blood inside had not dried. Then they shared them. We could not escape the needles; sometimes I thought they stalked us.

As the sun set, the distant orange glow of cigarette ends guided me like faint beacons. My pile was thinning, and one by one I gave out the leaflets until none were left. The chocolate ice cream would be mine.

It had all started a few weeks earlier when David, my older brother, and Peter and Timothy, my younger brothers, and I were getting ready for bed. We had just had our baths. Our hair was wet and neatly combed, and we were in our Star Wars Underoos when my mother and father called us into the living room. I clutched my copy of Kipling’s Just So Stories for Little Children, anxiously waiting to go back to bed and read about snakes and mongooses. We sat restlessly on the edge of sofa with our legs dangling, waiting to hear from my father.

In our small apartment, my father made a study with bookcases that lined the walls from the floor to the ceiling. Books cluttered the carpet, stacked randomly in piles like stalagmites. David shared a room with Timmy, who was almost two, and I shared a room with Peter, six, only one year one month and one day younger than me. But the books had a room all to themselves. Why did they have a room while the four of us had to share bunk beds? My father said we needed a separate room for peace and quiet and reading and ideas.

When we landed in Spain my parents planned to start a church among university students. University students were people who liked books and learning just as much as we did. They were the sort of people you could have conversations with and argue with at the dinner table. My father regularly visited universities in Madrid in search of congregants but returned home disappointed and downcast. He would shut the door, take off his tweed jacket, make a cup of tea and go quietly back to his study to read the Bible and pray for their lost souls. But there were no takers for what he had to offer. It was puzzling to him that they did not want eternal salvation, even if it was free.

My father spoke to us in the voice he always used to explain things. Planting a church among university students had not worked. We were going to have to do something much bolder and more radical if we were going to succeed. Fortunately, my parents told us that God had spoken. They said it as if He were a next door neighbor.

My father and God talked to each other often and I was sure they talked early in the morning before my brothers and I woke up. They chatted in the study among the books where they found peace and quiet. Perhaps that was why I had never seen God.

God had called them to start a church of yonquis. From then on we were going to work with heroin addicts. My father made it sound simple, and I believed it was. We would hold devotionals and speak to them about God. They would make up our church, and we were going to go out to the streets and invite them to our home for meetings. My father said with great certainty — the kind that comes from having spoken to the Almighty, Himself — that we were going to establish a church and that we were going to fill it. It would be different with the heroin addicts; they would be desperate enough to listen.

I carried my book back to my room and did not know what to think. In the back of my mind I knew that if the plan to work with university students had succeeded, my


parents would not have dragged me and my brothers into their new calling. We would not be trying to hand out religious tracts to peculiar addicts in a park full of bloody syringes.

Mary and Peter, Elliott and Jonathan (left to right)

David held Timmy in his arms, who pressed his cheek against the glass to get a better view. From our enclosed balcony we looked out at the barrio from our small, second floor apartment and saw the neighborhood’s red tiled rooftops merge together in the dry summer heat. The brilliant sunlight bleached them into a distant mirage. I wondered if God turned up the heat on some places and then absentmindedly forgot about them.

The fields behind our building were dull and barren except in the springtime when, almost overnight, they turned green and were dotted with blood red poppies. Then, just as quickly as the colors had appeared, the grass died and the poppies wilted. Thistles and weeds were the only plants that could withstand the scorching sun. When the wind blew, it whipped up fine dust that stuck in my nostrils long after the gusts of hot air had passed. At the end of the summer, when the weeds and shrubs had dried, fires from discarded cigarette butts turned the fields black as tar.

Our apartment on Calle Butrón stood as a lonely sentry on a steep hill, and garbage accumulated in the dump behind it. Hardened pieces of cement, dried plaster of Paris, black garbage bags, and cardboard boxes mixed with used heroin needles. Brick masons came from all over Madrid to discard their rubbish late at night, driving with their lights turned off down the dirt roads at the far end of the dump.


A Gypsy camp sat on the opposite side of Avenida de Guadalajara, a busy two-lane highway that connected San Blas with the nearby town of Vicálvaro. The highway was the very edge of San Blas, and the gitanos lived at the periphery of Spanish society. They built chabolas with odd pieces of wood, roofing tiles and plastic sheets held down by abandoned tires. The small huts were like skulls whose glassless window panes were sockets from which children peered out like eyes. The camp had electricity, furtively stolen from the municipal grid, but no running water. The gitanos sold toilets, tubs, pipes, televisions and anything else they could find. Their donkey-drawn carts loaded with goods proceeded slowly alongside the highways, the braying animals and squeaking wheels announcing their coming and going.

The sounds beckoned, and full of curiosity, my brothers and I stood at a distance from the entrance to the Gypsy camp to watch the spectacle. As we saw the carts and donkeys, we could not help but see the thousands of yonquis who came from all over Madrid to buy, forming long uneven lines as they made their way towards the camp. Some police said it was the biggest drug supermarket in Spain.

It did not matter if the sun was blazing in the middle of a summer day when Spaniards took their siestas, or if it was freezing and the ditches iced over in the dead of a Madrid winter: the addicts came and went constantly, like ants marching, carrying a burden greater than themselves, forming a long line of pedestrians and vehicles. Their ashen grey outlines were a blur from a distance, only becoming people as they came closer.

Whenever I went to Gypsy camp, I found someone with a cut that they refused to take to the hospital. Sometimes the cars that drove in and out ran over their feet, but they refused to leave the dump so doctors could set their bones. The leg swelled, the bones set badly, and they were left with a limp for life. Often I saw men with cuts in their arms or throats from infected track marks, but they did not get treatment for those either.

Heroin is the great escape, and once the addicts were living in its dream state, little tied them to this world. The addicts were so numb they could feel no pleasure or pain. Heroin always required larger and more frequent doses, and the effect was always diminished. They lived in the transactional present, always seeking to score the next gram.

At the entrance to the Gypsy camp someone had spray-painted a graffito in Spanish on a wall, “Abandon all hope, you who enter.” Mysteriously, the quote was never erased. Perhaps the Gypsies liked it that way; the fewer payos who entered their camp the happier they were. My father said he doubted the Gypsies had spray painted it themselves; it was from an Italian man named Dante. I was reassured to hear that there were other foreigners in the neighborhood.

The Spanish government had set aside for the gitanos a few prefabricated houses on one side of the camp, but they were mostly uninhabited, the plumbing torn out and the doors taken off their hinges. Everything had been sold. These prefabricated houses were nicknamed Los Focos, and true to their name, they were the focus of the heroin trade in San Blas. The gitanos sold heroin for the same reason they sold tubs and pipes: there were buyers. If they had not sold caballo, someone else would have.

Gypsies were an odd mixture of poverty and affluence. They sold heroin but almost never consumed it. My father said it was part of their unwritten code. They drove shiny new Mercedes Benz vans, yet lived in dilapidated houses. The vans were large


enough that they could pack their meager belongings and travel when they liked. They were migrants; the Spaniards encouraged them not to settle anywhere for too long.

At home, for our family dinner, we prayed for the Gypsies and the yonquis before my parents served the food. We ate beneath Norman Rockwell’s painting Thanksgiving Day. My parents sat at both ends of the table, presiding over the meal, much like the parents in the painting overhead. My parents said that if we did nothing to help the yonquis, we would be no better than the Pharisee walking by the suffering man in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The addicts may have ruined their own lives, but it was our duty to show them grace and mercy. God would protect us and look after us in our task. We would try to live by the words of Saint Francis of Assisi, “Preach the gospel at all times, use words if necessary.”

In a Children’s Crusade, my brothers and I were drafted into the evangelistic effort. The first evening my father took us to the park, he divided religious tracts into three piles: one for David, one for Peter and one for me. He instructed us to look out for drug addicts and not return until we had handed out every single tract.

As children, David, Peter and I obeyed with unquestioning enthusiasm. David was a fast runner, determined to give everyone a copy of the pamphlet. He went so far as to chase a frightened Spanish kid for a few blocks and forced it into his hand. The startled boy took it. I doubt it had the desired effect.

Every Friday night we went out to the streets of San Blas and invited people into our home. My mother would accompany us to the park and carry Timothy in her arms. He was still too young to go with us, but he sometimes played at my father’s feet while David, Peter and I handed out tracts. We were all white-blond, and our American family must have looked odd trying to talk to the yonquis.

Week after week we went out to the Gypsy camp, the parks and the bars. Some yonquis wanted to know if we could send them to a rehab center. Perhaps they thought we were easily duped and would give them money for their habit. They had no jobs they spent their days wandering around parks and Metro stops looking for things to steal. Once they had succeeded, they sold the goods and bought drugs. They were only at rest once they had shot up.

My parents worked with Lindsay, a young Australian fellow missionary who lived a few blocks away from our house, and Myk, a missionary from New Zealand. Lindsay was a clean-cut man in his late twenties. He was earnest in appearance, with brown hair parted down the middle and a short, well-groomed moustache. Myk always brought her guitar along to play in the park. After every song, my father and Lindsay invited people to come to our home for Bible study, but almost no one came. Sometimes David, Peter, Timothy and I were the only people in attendance. While my father spoke, I squirmed on the living room rug with my brothers and pondered more important questions. Could my toy Tyrannosaurus Rex could beat my Triceratops in a fight, if the Triceratops was quick and used his horns? When would the meeting finish?

Week after week, my brothers and I went down to Parque del Paraíso with my parents, Lindsay and Myk to hand out tracts and bring yonquis back to our apartment for Friday afternoon meetings. You could find camellos everywhere in San Blas, but most of them did their deals in bars. El Nilo, Torre del Campo, and El Sila were the usual points of


sale. Near our home, the center of drug dealing was the bar Torre del Campo on Calle de la Masilla. It would have been an unremarkable place if its clientele had not consisted of dealers and yonquis.

The bar was in the middle of the maze of small, claustrophobic buildings. The passageways between them were covered so that you moved from one to the other without seeing the sun. Nearly every family living near the bar had a child who was a heroin addict — sometimes all their children were on drugs, and they had often lost a son or a daughter to an overdose. At the bar, my father learned that dealers slashed yonquis in the chin when they failed to pay; the scars marked them as thieves. Others suffered from the impurities put into the heroin to dilute it. Enrique, an addict my father met at the bar, went blind after shooting up. His heroin was cut with strychnine, a rat poison.

I stayed outside Torre del Campo with my brothers while my father and Lindsay entered. My father and Lindsay talked to the heroin users there, sometimes inadvertently walking in on an exchange of tin-foil papelinas for money. The bar was a ground floor storefront, its windows barred. Torre del Campo had black wrought-iron doors and glass windows, and a large striped awning kept it in the shade. From a distance it was impossible to see where the black doors ended and the darkness inside began.

One day while my father and Lindsay stood at the bar, a man introduced himself, “My name’s Ángel. Everyone just calls me Veneno, but I don’t mind.” He rolled up his sleeve and showed a tattoo on his right arm that read “POISON.” Veneno was short and had brown hair that covered his eyes and ears. His green eyes darted and flickered as he peered through his long bangs, and he moved about nervously, only relaxing when he saw that my father was listening. Without coaxing, he unburdened himself of his own story. He spoke quickly, with a rat-tat-tat of stories, dates and anecdotes that he juggled in his mind. Ángel’s mother was a prostitute who had left him to be raised by her father in his small one bedroom apartment. He had fought and been wounded in the Spanish Civil War, and once a month Ángel carried him on his back to collect his old age pension. Veneno borrowed a thousand pesetas from his grandfather for a gram of heroin. He always promised to repay it, and he convinced himself he would.

Veneno was the kind of man my father had been waiting for. He knew everything about everyone and he promised he would bring many people to my father. He would point to someone, “See that guy...,” and the stories would pour forth. As my father looked around the neighborhood, I always caught Veneno glancing back, waiting eagerly for a smile or a nod. Information was his currency, exchanging it only for rapt attention. He would put his hand on my father’s shoulder, guiding his audience, and then take him over to meet his targets. David, Peter and I stuck close behind like remoras, hoping some of the juicier stories would fall our way.

The men wore Rolling Stones, Iron Maiden or Metallica T-shirts, but in the summertime they walked around with their shirts off, their skin deeply tanned and adorned with tattoos. When they wore shorts you could see the marks of their addiction, running up and down their legs. The yonquis who congregated at the entrance to the subway near the Simancas Metro stop all looked the same to me. But Veneno knew them by name and could tell their stories.

He explained that heroin is not a path to enjoyment, it is a way of life. What everyone wanted was to chutarse, to shoot up. When the yonquis were not shooting up, they


were scrounging to get money to buy a papelina. Heroin was the only thing on their mind. Not having it made them anxious, pulsating with a nervous energy, violent and single-minded. An addict keen for a gram would not stop until he got it. To keep themselves going they consumed chocolate, candy and Cokes. The sugar gave them a quick burst of energy but that was about it. If they were lucky, nicotine helped a little. When they did not have money for a pack, they found long cigarette butts on the floors by the bus stops, where people left half a cigarette when their bus arrived early. They were always desperate to score one more gram. Some addicts tried to hawk Kleenex boxes at traffic lights. Selling tissues was not easy; they had to stand out for hours in the sun and compete against groups of Gypsy children who threw water on the windshields and wiped them with newspaper whether the drivers wanted their cars cleaned or not. Other yonquis stole cash from store owners at knifepoint or broke into cars to steal radios.

Veneno introduced my father to “people who counted” like Majara, Crazy. He was short but strong, with large, rough hands, and I liked to see the muscles in his jaw bulge and ripple when he gritted his teeth. My father had tried to talk to him, but the first time my father approached him, he responded in a calm, gruff voice and threatened to slit my father’s neck if he ever spoke to him again. Majara always carried a knife in his boot and showed it off theatrically, but it was not an idle threat. The next time he pulled out a gun and stuck it in my father’s face, just testing him, “I could use this on you, if I wanted.”

“I’m sure you could.” My father too was a strong man, but his muscles came from college athletics.

“You may be very brave... or just very stupid,” Majara said, unsure himself of the answer.

Slowly, as he came to tolerate my father, I overheard his story. Majara lived in the crowded buildings near Torre del Campo. He grew up as the seventh of eight kids, and his mother and father constantly fought. He organized a gang and led other gangs from San Blas into fights with clubs and knives against the kids from Vicálvaro, the neighborhood on the other side of the Gypsy camp. Majara ran his own business as a camello dealing heroin to support his habit. His brother helped him at first, until he was arrested in England and locked away for five years for trafficking. After that he got his wife Mari Carmen to help. She accompanied him with her stroller and hid the heroin she dealt in her children’s diapers.

One Friday evening as David, Peter and I stood back in the distance, my father approached Majara and invited him to come to our home. And that was enough for him to come along. We walked slowly back to the house, and I could tell my father was nervous. Would Majara change his mind before he got to our front door? Before the meeting began, my mother served snacks and lemonade, so as not to serve alcohol to alcoholics. The absence of liquor did not go over well.

“Give me the bottle. I need something strong.” He took the bottle of lemonade concentrate and put it to his lips and drank it straight like I saw the winos do with their Tetra Paks of wine. He grimaced, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand and smiled broadly. I figured he deserved the nickname Crazy.

Even though he was selling heroin and should have been making money, he always asked for things. It did not matter if they were humdrum or expensive, he wanted them.


My mother held Timothy in her arms, and one by one Majara opened the kitchen cabinets, pulling out packages of sugar, rice, flour and pasta.

“I need milk. And bread.” My mother stared at him. “It’s for my kids.”

He grabbed the bread and took some cans of food as well. “Thanks. I’ll take that.” He pointed at Timothy. “He must wear diapers. I need some of those too.”

My mother hesitated and looked over at my father. He nodded, and she went away and returned with two diapers. “Have these for now.”

Majara thanked my mother and excused himself. “I’ll be back.”

My father was delighted. He thought this was real progress.

“What kind of man steals thousands of pesetas with a gun and then asks priests for food and missionaries for diapers?” my mother asked.

Veneno was true to his word: every meeting he introduced my father to more addicts and brought them to our house. Some were slightly deranged, others just too high to be coherent. Many fell asleep in the meetings, and others entered and left without paying much attention to what was happening. But they kept on coming, and it was clear they were hungry for help.

“You have to meet Raúl, but everyone calls him El Tocho,” Veneno said. He explained that in San Blas, if you didn’t have a nickname, you weren’t worth meeting. Raúl lived on Calle Porcelana near Torre del Campo. Despite his heroin addiction, he never lost much weight or strength and was nicknamed El Tocho, Stocky, by the yonquis in the neighborhood. Most addicts were gaunt and weak because they could only think about one thing: food came a very distant second behind getting a gram of heroin. My father and Lindsay got to know him, but approached cautiously, particularly if he was out for his fix.

The first time Raúl came to our home was at Christmas when my father’s parents were visiting us from the United States. Raúl teetered in, smelling as if he had forgotten to shower for a few days and with his left arm covered in bandages. I suspected his arm was covered up because his track marks had become infected.

“Does it hurt when the needle goes in?”

“You shouldn’t ask questions like that at your age, kid,” he said as he smiled at me.

Like Raúl the yonquis had track marks up and down their arms. If they could find a vein in the forearm, they shot up in the same place until they developed scabs. By injecting as often as they could, their veins eventually collapsed. Addicts can shoot old veins, but they’re liable to shoot the skin instead. They start with their left arm and then turn to the right when the left is wasted. Then they shoot up in the arteries behind the knees or on the back of the hands –- finally, the groin, the neck, or under the tongue. I wondered where Raúl was shooting up now, but he was wearing jeans so I could not see the skin on his legs.


As I looked more closely at his hands, I noticed the burn marks. After shooting up yonquis appeared to fall asleep, and sometimes while smoking a cigarette they burned their fingers. My brothers and I quickly learned to identify addicts by the stigmata of their addiction, the track marks and the burnt circles on their fingers.

My brothers and I took Ángel and Majara back to the room I shared with Peter to play with our toy dinosaurs or our miniature futbolín. Majara had little interest in the toys and pinched me for amusement. When he shook my hand, his grip was strong, crushing my knuckles and fingers.

He squeezed and I winced in pain. I was sure my knuckles would break but I had not heard a crack. “Stop! Please, please stop!” I knew that if I called out for my father, he would ask me why I was fighting and not setting a good Christian example.

Majara only offered a pitying laugh. With my free hand I punched his arm, but he just punched me back, hurting me far more than I hurt him.

“Leave the kid alone.” From the doorway to my room, I heard a voice. I turned around and saw Raúl standing there with his bandaged arm.

“What are you going to do? You’ve only got one good arm,” Majara taunted.

“That’s all I need. I said leave the kid alone.” Majara held my hand as he glared at Raúl. He slowly let go and left the room as he laughed.

I rubbed my hand, trying to coax blood back into all my fingers.

“Don’t take it too hard, kid. It’s got nothing to do with you. His dad used to beat him. Well, until his mother pushed the old man down a stairwell. That finished him off alright.”

I wanted to thank Raúl but didn’t know what to say. “Want to play futbolín?”

“Maybe next time.” He paused to think, “You heard it. I’ve only got one good arm.”

Raúl left and went back to the living room. I did not know why he had helped me or what he meant about Majara’s father. When I first met the yonquis, I thought them peculiar. It had not occurred to me how strange my family must have seemed to them.


2: THE CALL

EL LLAMADO

“Woe to you wicked spirits!

Do not hope to see the sky again.

I come to take you to the other shore,

Into eternal darkness, in heat and ice.”


It was odd that my father, Elliott Tepper, should become a Christian missionary. Odd because he was born and raised a Jew, and Jews as a general rule do not become Christian missionaries. But that was the least improbable thing about the way God called my father.

At the dinner table, my father entertained us with stories of people he perhaps feared we would never meet and places we would never see. In a story that my father told hundreds of times a — a story that never got old — the Teppers came to the United States in 1900 fleeing the frequent Russian pogroms targeting Jews. My great-grandfather, Louis Tepper, clambered into a crowded train to Odessa, Ukraine, and boarded an even more crowded boat that took him to Ellis Island. The Teppers made the same trip hundreds of thousands of other ragged and poor Eastern European Jews made to the United States. Louis’s journey with his family was not particularly unique, but in my mind it had an almost sacred quality to it. Sometimes I wondered if being American was more important to my father than anything else — even being Jewish.

My grandfather Papa Charles grew up in Chicago and was the first American child in the family. During World War II Papa Charles was an officer when he met my grandmother, a beautiful army nurse. Blonde and petite, Alaine Miller came from a small country town in South Carolina and was a Christian. When I look at her in the old, faded black and white photos I can see why Papa Charles fell in love with her despite their obvious differences. He prevailed and she converted to Judaism in order to marry him. After World War II, they settled in Massapequa, Long Island, along with the thousands of other postwar families that moved into the new towns that cropped up outside of New York City. Massapequa was typical of the towns on the south shore of Long Island, known as “Matzo Pizza” because it was half Jewish and half Italian. That was where my father grew up.

The United States was still coldly anti-Semitic in the 1950s. My father suffered under the insults of “Jew boy” and “Kike,” but he fought the kids in the neighborhood and literally rubbed their noses in the ground when he subdued them. When he was fourteen, his parents divorced. Their differences had been too great. When they fought, my father would climb the highest tree in garden until the leaves and wind muffled his parents’ raised


voices. He looked out over the rooftops of Long Island, dreaming of going far away across the sea. He poured himself into wrestling and his studies, becoming a New York State wrestling champion and securing a wrestling scholarship to Lehigh University. He was short, wiry, competitive, and would spare no effort to win in a fair fight.

After graduating from Lehigh, my father boarded the Queen Elizabeth for England and he fell into the grooves of its old, elegant existence: the sherry before dinner and formal dinning times; the walks on the decks and the evening talks with Marshall and Rhodes scholars who were taking the same boat; long hours of reading and writing in deck chairs. At Cambridge University, he studied economics under John Maynard Keynes’s disciples, but he spent more time attending poetry lectures, hearing W.H. Auden read his own writings, and acting. Cambridge was otherworldly and intoxicating. At dinner time in San Blas, my father told us that if we could only see the colleges we would be overwhelmed by the beauty of gothic spires and courtyards with grass that was gently trimmed for centuries. He kept his memories like framed sepia prints, regularly returning to them as if to dust them off and polish them.

During summers in college and at Cambridge, my father worked on fishing boats in Alaska with the Tlingit and Haida Indians. He would fly to Los Angeles and hitchhike up the west coast with little more than his rucksack and the Odyssey and the Iliad. He slept in the woods and under bridges until he reached Alaska. He had applied to Harvard Business School and while he was on the road, the letter of acceptance to arrived for him at his father’s address. Papa Charles took the liberty of accepting for him rather than deferring for another year, and cut short my father’s time at Cambridge.

During the Vietnam War one of the anti-war slogans at Harvard Business School was “Make money, not war,” but my father was more interested in reading poetry. Even though he was a top-ranked wrestler, he had always competed with a knee brace, and so ironically the army doctors deemed him physically unfit for military service. My father was not about to protest. He lived as a hippie on a commune not far from Harvard Yard and bought his LSD from chemists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With his friends he regularly drove to the coast to take LSD, spending the weekend tripping on the great sand dunes of Cape Cod. He would return to Boston Sunday afternoon to go back to Monday classes on cash flows and balance sheets.

My father said that in the middle of the New England winter of 1971, as he was crossing a bridge over the Charles River, God spoke to him. The river had frozen over, the snow on the shores was packed, and the wind blew so hard it entered the marrow of his fingers like needles. As he braced himself, he looked out over the river and had a vision of heaven. He said he was swept up by a great force and saw angelic creatures he had never imagined.

Suddenly, a deep, haunting voice called out, “Give me your life.”

“Yes, but not now,” my father responded.

At that moment he felt he was brought from the heights of a spiritual revelation back down to the bridge he was on, and then a vision of earth opened before him. He saw the mouth of hell and a long slope that led deeper and deeper into eternal anguish. My father was overcome with panic and fear at the circles of hell. He believed that he had


turned down salvation and was damned forever. He wandered the streets of Boston crying out to God, pleading for another chance.

The voice had told him to give his life to God, but he had no idea how to do that. In desperation, fearing the flames of eternal damnation, he threw himself through a storefront window, in an attempt to deliver himself to God. Shards of glass stuck in his arms and shoulders and he lay there still in a pool of blood until an ambulance arrived. In the emergency room, however, he felt what he thought was Jesus’ luminous presence, this time reassuring him in a whisper he was going to live.

My father often tripped out on LSD, but he told me that he had not taken drugs that day and had never experienced anything as solid, real and terrifying as his vision of heaven and hell. Even as a seven year old, the story seemed weird –- nothing like that had happened to any kids I knew. So one day I asked. “Was it an LSD flashback like the ones yonquis in Parque del Paraíso talk about.”

“Only God can sort that one out,” my father retorted.

When my father told his story he was not like the crazy people I met handing out tracts in San Blas; he was not conducting orchestras that existed only in his head; he did not stroke his face constantly; he did not tremble and babble paranoid theories. My father spoke calmly, in even tones, when he recounted seeing angels and demons. And I could not figure out what was stranger and more unsettling: what he said or the matter-of-fact way in which he said it.

Raised in a Jewish family, my father knew little of Christianity. He wanted to learn more but did not know where to begin. He left his job at the Museum of Fine Arts and drove his Mini Cooper down to North Carolina to visit his mother, who had settled there after divorcing Papa Charles. He enrolled in a Bible college in South Carolina, and his country teachers frequently complained about his cerebral questions. They recommended he have a John the Baptist experience — he would understand Christianity better if he got his head cut off.

With the enthusiasm of the newly converted, my father went to church and attended Bible studies every chance he got. As he discovered, the meetings offered many benefits beyond spiritual instruction. At a Bible study in North Carolina in 1973 my father met my mother Mary, a young Southern Baptist woman. They wrote letters to each other while my father studied the Bible. What attracted them most to each other was their desire to preach the gospel to the lost. She dreamed of being a missionary or an evangelist and wanted to find a man who shared her religious fervor. After a very brief courtship by letter that belonged more in the nineteenth century than twentieth, they got married and spent two years attending Bible college to prepare themselves for the mission field.

A Jewish New Yorker and a Southern Baptist were not the most likely couple, and my parents’ calling to be missionaries caused great consternation of all my grandparents. But no amount of disapproval could keep my mother and father from marrying and fulfilling their desire to save the lost. Papa Charles was puzzled that my father had become a Christian, and my mother’s parents were unhappy that their daughter had married a Jewish hippy, someone who had decided to convert to Christianity after seeing heaven and hell. It would be a difficult marriage, they reckoned.


When my parents decided to be missionaries, I was bound to a strange childhood before I was even born.

My parents did not move immediately to San Blas. For four years we lived in Puebla, outside of Mexico City. I was born in the United States, but my parents moved to Mexico when I was two years old. God had spoken to my father again. He had told him to move to Mexico to plant a church. They were not part of any organized mission, and had no visible means of support. My parents had embarked on the trip to Mexico in a dilapidated grey Oldsmobile, containing all our belongings. My mother will never forget driving through Texas and Mexico in the summertime with no air conditioning and three noisy, tired and irritable children in a car burdened with more than it could carry.

My parents spoke no Spanish when they first arrived in Mexico. They went to the Universidad de las Américas in Puebla to learn the basics. When my father applied to study Spanish, the faculty noticed Cambridge and Harvard on his academic transcript and snatched him up to teach introductory classes on microeconomics, money and banking in English. While he enjoyed his time with his students and fellow professors, and teaching microeconomics classes satisfied him, his real purpose in Mexico was to establish a church, and he was successful, with many students converting.

I have only fleeting memories of Mexico, but they are radiant. Mexico was noisy, dirty and colorful. My first recollections of childhood are of peacocks, armadillos, and earthquakes. Occasionally we saw armadillos scurry around our large gardens, and my brothers and I chased them and threw stones at their carapaces. We also did this to the peacocks of some fellow missionaries until my father caught us and gently reprimanded us, telling us that Saint Francis of Assisi preached to the animals instead of throwing stones at them. And we were puzzled because we had never seen my father preach to animals.

My parents’ preaching meant as little to me, David and Peter as it would have to the peacocks. David was two years older than me, and Peter was one year younger and none of us were old enough for school. Our lives as children in Mexico took place in a cocoon, carefree and oblivious to the world around us. My father built a three-story tree house for us in the avocado tree in our garden. The fort was tall and had a long pole we could slide down; it rivaled anything we had seen in the drawings of the pages of The Swiss Family Robinson. My mother packed sandwiches for us in tin lunchboxes, and we ventured into our vast garden, pretending we were on a desert island. Many evenings we lay in our sleeping bags in hammocks looking up at a full moon that I imagined kept watch over us. The stars that seemed just beyond our fingertips in the clear night air. We talked until we fell asleep, only to wake up in the morning neatly tucked back into our beds.

On weekends after church we ate in the plazas surrounded by Spanish colonial architecture. We loved mole poblano, a specialty of Puebla made of chicken and chocolate mixed with spices, and the tamales that women cooked on open fires. Mount Popocatapétl overlooked Puebla; the immense volcano was once fiery and irritable, but it had fallen into a deep slumber. When it tried to wake up, it caused earthquakes. As children we thought they were exhilarating and looked forward to feeling them beneath our feet.


The author in a marketplace in Mexico

Even though I was only five, I was certain that my life was complete. I could eat fruits from our garden, sleep under the stars with David and Peter, and climb trees and play whenever I liked. It came as a shock when my father called my brothers and me into the living room to tell us that something was missing in our family. We were going to have a younger brother and we were going to have to go back to the United States for his birth. Papa Charles liked to think ahead and insisted that all his grandchildren be born in the United States so they might be eligible to become president.

Earthquakes or climbing mountains could not compare to the excitement of seeing Timothy after he came home from the hospital. For months I waited to hold him. My mother looked tired and weak but happy. She rocked him gently to sleep and stroked his head as I watched anxiously. The day she finally placed Timmy in my arms, I looked him in the eyes and he smiled at me for no reason at all and I felt he loved me. His hair smelled of Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo, and when I held him I felt like my father, grown up and responsible. Already I could plan on how we would look after him, how he would join us in the hammocks and sleep under the stars and learn to climb trees and how we would chase peacocks, but not throw stones when my father was around.

My father’s mother said that religion is when you speak to God, and lunacy is when God speaks to you. God spoke to my father often. David, Peter, Timothy and I were informed of these conversations with God after the fact. I had not seen God, but my father talked about him as if he were talking about our next-door neighbor. One day after Timmy was born and we had returned to Mexico, my father told us that God had spoken. He had called our family to go to Spain. The decision to move did not bother us. We were too young to understand it. We packed our old station wagon, loaded it up with all of my parents’ books and headed for the border. We just assumed we would get another big tree fort somewhere else.

This time my parents decided to join an established mission and went to Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, to join WEC, Worldwide Evangelization Crusade. It was Protestant, but non-denominational and not dogmatic, which suited my parents’ religious tastes. While my parents trained to be missionaries, my brothers and I attended a year of school in the United States. In many missions, new missionaries go to replace retiring missionaries and take over established parishes. But my parents were assigned to plant a


church where none existed. The mission provided no salary, and missionaries were supposed to live off tithes and offerings that churches might send them. One could never know how much that would be from one month to the next.

Mary, Peter, David, Jonathan, Timothy and Elliott (left to right)

In the first grade I discovered the United States — my own country — for the first time. At Fort Washington the red, yellow and orange leaves announce the arrival of the fall, and as weeks passed we watched them float to the ground, making a sodden quilt. In the winter blizzards dumped blankets of snow on the ground. David, Peter and I trekked out into snow that reached up to our waist, leaving deep tracks in wandering, spidery patterns in our front yard and returned home tired, eager to curl our hands around cups of hot chocolate. Spring passed and in the hot, humid northeastern summertime we ran around with jars and collected fireflies, only to have my father release them.

In the summertime we raced around the grounds of the mission headquarters and pretended we were the Olympic gold medalist Eric Liddell in the film Chariots of Fire. In the movie Harold Abrams studied at Cambridge, while Liddell came from a Scottish missionary family to China. As blond missionary kids, we wanted to be like him and to run with our heads held high. When my father took us to the movies to see the film, and for the first time we saw Cambridge as he experienced it.

The life of missionaries had changed greatly in the last century. Missionaries departed from the United States and Great Britain and spent decades in Africa and Asia without seeing their relatives or returning to their home countries. Many died of malaria or dysentery; others were killed. Chariots of Fire ends with the words:

Eric Liddell, missionary, died in occupied China at the end of World War II.

All of Scotland mourned.


Liddell rarely saw his relatives in Scotland. He died of a brain tumor in a Japanese concentration camp, teaching classes to the interned children until the day he died.

At WEC we were surrounded by young missionaries preparing to go to dozens of countries around the world as well as old ones who had spent their lives abroad. The younger missionaries had recently left Iran after the revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini. Some had worked for decades as medical missionaries in the Congo. The old couples that hobbled about on their canes had worked as teachers and doctors in Beijing before Mao Zedong and the Communists kicked them out. I thought they looked a little Chinese, imagining that was what happened to you if you stayed anywhere too long as a missionary.

The founder of WEC, C. T. Studd, was one of three sons of a wealthy retired tea planter who had made a fortune in India and had returned to England to live a comfortable life. Studd became captain of the Eton and Cambridge cricket teams. He was one of the greatest cricket players in England, and he could have stayed in England and become a prominent public figure like his brother, the Lord Mayor of London. Instead he gave up his inheritance to be a missionary in China, Chad and the Congo, where he died penniless.

My father exhorted us to follow Studd’s example and give up everything to help others. He said we had to be prepared to die for our faith. This sounded exciting to me.

About to turn six, I was too young to understand what being a missionary entailed. I did not know if Spain was like Mexico, the Congo or the United States, but ignorance has never suppressed a child’s enthusiasm. I borrowed tribal weapons of polished ebony from the retired missionaries who had worked in Africa to take to Show and Tell, and stood at the front of the class. Full of pride, I looked at my classmates seated in their rows of desks and knew that I was different. I was going to live in foreign lands and meet new people. None of the American kids at school could say the same.

I was anxious for the year to end. I could only think of one thing — the coming airplane flight to Madrid. The TWA terminal at JFK looked like a giant white seagull, and the stewardesses gave us endless gifts: chocolates, flight wings we proudly clipped onto our shirts, and more snacks than we could finish. They even took us up to the cockpit where we met the pilots and held the controls as we floated along. Out the window you could see thin, wispy clouds and below them puffed-up clouds that looked like fields of white cotton candy. Could I open the door to the plane and what would it be like to touch a cloud? Everything seemed like a whimsical dream. I anticipated that the flight would transport me to another world. I could not have known how right I was.

As soon as my family made its way through the cramped, smoky arrival hall of Madrid’s Barajas airport, my father’s wallet was stolen. The policeman my father spoke to said it was the work of professional pickpockets, probably the work of yonquis stealing to feed their habit. They especially liked foreigners he said.


3: AN APARTMENT FULL OF JUNKIES

UN PISO LLENO DE YONQUIS

Some wish to live within the sound of church or chapel bell;

I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of hell.

C.T. Studd.

As we entered through the doorway of the apartment block, my father stopped and put his hand on my shoulder, “Want to race up to Pilar’s house?” I nodded. My mother was sensible and walked straight over to the elevators that rattled all the way up.

“OK. Ready... Set... GO!!”

As I skipped steps two at a time and pushed myself off the walls on the turns between floors, I could see him gaining on me, and in a few leaps, he was ahead and disappeared around a corner. My mother was waiting by the door with my father was at her side. My father laughed, “Slowpoke, you may beat me some day, but it won’t be anytime soon...”

We rang the doorbell and greeted Pilar with a kiss on both cheeks. She welcomed us and served coffee, hot chocolate and biscuits and talked to my parents. Pilar had a thin face and pointed nose, and short dark hair. When we met her, she was soft-spoken and rarely smiled. I sat quietly eating as many cookies as possible, looking around the room and trying not to drop crumbs on the floors. The room was spotless, the tiled floor smelled of lemon, and the furniture had been polished and emitted the faint odor of artificial pine. The lace on the coffee table was bright white, and the bric-a-brac on the shelves carefully arranged. On her walls she had crucifixes and photographs of her children during their first communions. Nothing was out of place, except for the stories about overdoses and shootouts.

While my mother and Pilar spoke, I eavesdropped, avoiding all eye contact. Their voices rose and fell, weaving around each other. At home Mom did not speak often, uttering words only when they were better than silence, but with her friends the words un-spooled themselves freely. I tried to follow the thread of their stories and listened to Pilar tell brightly colored anecdotes. They shared their stories, speaking of whose son was on drugs, whose daughter was prostituting herself where, who was in jail. The stories about the heroin needles that covered the floors of the neighborhood knitted my mother and Pilar together. As I sat quietly, it occurred to me that women always knew what to say. They did not speak like the men on the streets — Majara, Veneno and Raúl — who talked


in clipped, guttural slang, saying as little as possible, conveying their meanings by gestures and nods. The rich quilt of stories and happenings was something it seemed only women could make and share among themselves. All the while, Dad stared off into space, probably thinking of books. I sat back, amazed by my mother, hoping that maybe one day I could talk to people like that, too.

Pilar said that at first San Blas was known simply as el barrio. It had grown far too quickly. She could remember years before when no one lived there; the area had been desolate fields of brown dirt and weeds. It existed on the edge, standing forlornly between Madrid and the countryside towns. “None of the older people are from San Blas. We just moved here in hope of something better.” She came like the hundreds of thousands of others from the provinces, leaving their dying country towns in search of jobs. “We were all Gypsies then,” she said, “and we had nothing.” The first people to arrive built crude shacks which sprouted up overnight and then, like weeds, quickly disappeared. The better houses were made of bricks unevenly cobbled together, washed bone-white with lime. The houses were built hastily, and Franco’s government tried to bring order to the area by developing large tracts of housing. Pilar was among the lucky ones who moved into government-built housing. Lucky, however, until her husband ran out, and left her with seven kids.

Pilar had watched four of her seven children become yonquis. Her oldest son José was a heroin addict and had been killed in a shoot-out with police following a bank robbery. She recounted mundane stories in endless detail — his fútbol games in the streets, walking him to school, minor neighborhood squabbles — that must have been of no importance at the time, only acquiring resonance after José’s death. Her daughter Begoña, who I had met on the streets, was also a yonqui. As far as I could tell, the San Blas women’s stories were sad, but they all sounded the same. How long were we going to stay? Would Pilar mind if I took another cookie while she finished her story?

I tried to befriend the fathers who came to our Friday night meetings. They worked hard all week and on payday poured their money into slot machines or puked their wages after a long evening at the bar. Their shirts were always ironed, their hair pomaded and neatly combed. The men had hacking coughs from incessant smoking, and sometimes walked unsteadily. When I stood next to them in the bathrooms and peered over the urinals, I learned to recognize the pinkish piss of alcoholics.

A few of the fathers were tubercular, and it was not uncommon for them to leave the meetings to cough up blood on the sidewalk. The bone-rattling sounds drew David and Peter and me to gawk, and we would run to a nearby bar to get sawdust to sprinkle on the ground to soak up the bright red drops.

Pilar’s daughter Begoña agreed to go up north for help, so my father sent her to a Christian center in Santander on the northern coast of Spain. Begoña did not stay long and soon was back on drugs, prostituting herself to pay for her habit. My father found her on the street near Torre del Campo and offered to help again, but she said she was not interested. “I don’t need any help. I’m pretty and can always sell my body.” But it was only a matter of time before Begoña would ask for assistance again. Lindsay and my father sent one of her younger brothers to a center. Every week he called home to reassure Pilar that he was doing better, and Begoña followed him and went back to the center. This time she stayed. Begoña, in turn, invited her friend Toñi to join her, and Toñi invited her husband


José, who had just gotten out of jail for armed robbery, and he invited his friends. My parents, Lindsay and Myk were fighting heroin one addict at a time, and the church grew.

My parents tried to help all the heroin addicts who came to them, and their first attempts at assistance were earnest to the point of being naïve; they only confirmed what many yonquis thought about foreigners. A young woman from the neighborhood asked my parents if they could send her to a drug center, and they volunteered to drive her up to a Christian drug rehab center in the Basque country. My parents could have bought a train ticket and let her get herself there. If she really wanted to help herself and make a clean break from drugs, she could have. Instead, they packed our family’s bags and accompanied her on the long trip. They made sandwiches and bought drinks and encouraged her during the drive. We dropped her off at the center, but it did not suit her. She made it back to Madrid before we did. After this, my mother and father, Lindsay and Myk stopped accompanying addicts and just bought them bus tickets. If they had enough ingenuity to score a gram of caballo on the streets, they could find their own way to rehab.

My parents’ efforts to help the yonquis in the neighborhood consumed all of their time. My father carefully wrote down the names of people he sent to centers in the first year and a half, but he stopped after sixty-three. Heroin is a powerful master, and most of the addicts my parents referred to centers failed to stay. Even so, my parents searched for them on the streets and earned their gratefulness and grudging respect, and the addicts kept coming to see us. Our family living room was no longer big enough to accommodate everyone who came to us, so with money that my parents received from American churches they rented a small storefront in Lindsay’s building and turned it into a church. Evangelical churches in Spain were small storefront affairs that had only appeared a few years earlier. Franco’s laws had mandated “no other external ceremonies or manifestations than those of the Catholic religion shall be permitted,” and Catholics outnumbered Protestants a thousand to one. Even the head of the Spanish Communist party baptized his children, but few were remotely observant. We were an odd minority, but no one cared. We were there to help, and many mothers and family members of the addicts continued coming to our church meetings even after their sons and daughters returned to their lives of addiction. My father decided to call the church Betel, which is Hebrew for “House of God”.

Most of those who attended our church were older mothers. They desperately wanted their children to get off drugs, and they came to our meetings every week, hoping their children would join them. My mother and Myk organized a women’s group that met every Tuesday. They loved spending time with women in the church and getting to know them.

The mothers were fond of David, Peter, Timothy, and me, and referred to us as their nietos, grandchildren. On Sundays after church they invited us to their modest homes and prepared typical Spanish dishes like gazpacho and paella. They did not have much but sometimes gave us twenty-five peseta coins to buy candy, and it did not make my parents happy that we accepted them. The mothers called us pequeños rubitos and ran their fingers through our blond hair, as if we were strange specimens.

The old mothers were very short. David, Peter and I were as tall as they were. They suffered from malnutrition during the Spanish Civil War and endured further privations following World War II. They were poor, and their children’s heroin habits only


made them poorer. It was rare to meet a family whose furniture, television, or silverware had not been stolen and sold on the streets to pay for a gram of caballo. Many had lost a son or a daughter to an overdose, and they spoke sadly as if they too were already muertas del disgusto, dead from sadness. And I could not understand it because I was never sad.

My parents could not escape the need that surrounded them. Madrid did not have enough centers to cope with the wave of yonquis seeking help. After much prayer and discussion with Lindsay and Myk, they realized they had to do something themselves in Madrid. They put together a proposal for the mission to create a drug rehabilitation center like the ones to which they were sending the addicts.

They visited Christian centers in the north of Spain so they could refer addicts to them. Some families travel on vacation to Yosemite to learn how Sequoias can grow to three hundred feet and how geysers spew boiling water. Our vacations were visits to drug rehab centers with our parents to learn if addicts were likely to vomit when they were going cold turkey.

The mission wanted nothing to do with the project, despite the overwhelming need. Converting people was much safer than helping them. My parents were free to proceed if they liked, but they would not receive any support. My parents and Lindsay refused to give up, but they were on their own and did not know how to begin to embark on such an ambitious project. The mission had reason on its side. Starting a charity from scratch is a daunting task, and neither Lindsay nor my parents had worked with addicts before or even had any professional degrees in counseling or psychology. My father had taken industrial quantities of mescaline and LSD at Harvard, but that did not qualify as professional experience.

The drug center grew from a spontaneous act of kindness. Raúl had left the center my father sent him to. He spent five months on the streets, robbing to support his habit. Life was miserable, and when he was drunk he often thought of killing himself. He wanted to go to a drug center but did not want to leave Madrid. He came to Lindsay and asked for his help. Without hesitating, Lindsay offered to let him stay in his apartment for two weeks so he could begin to detoxify. He figured that most addicts never showed up for appointments to go to a drug center, and thought Raul would be no exception, so he told him to show up at nine the next morning. The next day Raúl showed up on Lindsay’s doorstep a few minutes early, and we had our first addict in residence.

Raúl came from a working class family of eight children. His smelled of brandy and an un-brushed mouth whenever I saw him, and I hated when he pinched my cheeks and breathed on me. Raúl quit school when he was thirteen to work as a plumber. Employment was not steady in San Blas, and when he was not working he smoked marijuana. He moved on to amphetamines, and from amphetamines to LSD. At first he consumed the drugs one by one. Then he tried to combine the effects of various drugs and alcohol as many times a day as he could.

Raúl liked drugs but felt he could not control himself. He hoped that a year of mandatory military service at the age of eighteen might help him kick the habit. When he was released, however, he was back in San Blas. Needing to escape from the neighborhood’s streets and drugs, Raúl took a job as far away as possible. Spain under


Franco still ruled Equatorial Guinea as a colony, so he accepted a job as a plumber in Malabo, the capital, and moved to Africa. It looked like a long way away on a map.

Like a dowser seeking water with a divining rod, Raúl immediately found more drugs in Equatorial Guinea than he did in Madrid. He was stoned most of the time and did not get along with the other workers, frequently getting into fights when wasn’t working. The authorities threatened to send him home, and he stayed for less than a year. When he returned, his friends had moved on from consuming marijuana and cocaine to mainlining heroin. He had found his drug.

Injecting heroin with his friends gave him such a sense of calm and peace that when he had the urge to vomit the first few times, even the queasiness felt good and provided a strange, soothing warmth inside. As he stumbled around, nothing mattered; vomiting, pissing, drinking — it was all the same and all of it was better than he had ever felt before.

Like most addicts in the neighborhood, Raúl dealt to support his own habit. He spent all the money he made taking bigger and bigger doses. Raúl was not much of a dealer; soon he was forced to rob to support his habit. He stole from supermarkets, his face covered by a mask, threatening the cashier with a gun. He robbed stores throughout Madrid during the day, and at night robbed people who were taking paseos on the street, holding a knife to their necks. One of Raúl’s preferred methods for stealing was to take a messenger of a camello and hold him up with a knife to get the heroin wrapped in tin foil. The drawback to this method was that the dealers wised up and would not sell to him. After that, he pretended to be a camello, and he would take the customers to the toilets in the basement of Torre del Campo, and he would pull a knife on them there and take their money. He got away with that for a while.

While Raúl used a knife and brute strength to obtain his drugs, friends and acquaintances of his used different methods. Victor, known as el Granos because of his pock-marked face cut with deep grooves, had long hair and he wore a raincoat even in the summertime under which he could carry an axe underneath without attracting attention. His brother had died in a shootout with police, and ever since then it seemed he did not care about dying in a robbery. He would open his trench coat, point to the axe with one hand and wait for the cashier to give him money. Often he would trash the stores even after he got his money. Juan Carlos, known as el Rubio because of his unusual light hair, and his little brother Oscar woke up early to follow the phone company vans. One day they found the man with the master key taking money out of a booth at six thirty in the morning. They approached him and — tap, tap, tap — touched the narrow tip of a six-inch knife against the glass. Without speaking, the technician handed over the master key. Juan Carlos and Oscar stole from phone booths all around Madrid for weeks. Still, the addicts possessed a sense of honor, and Raúl and his friends tried not to rob in their own block.

One Sunday morning meeting, Raúl came with Hippy, another addict, who always had shoulder length hair and was given to wearing tie dyed shirts. They had been up all night breaking into a bar to steal the coins in the slot machines. With their loot, they headed over to the Gypsy camp to buy heroin before the service. They were both high when they came to church. As my father opened the meeting, he invited people to pray aloud. Hippy careened forward but balanced himself on my shoulder, “Thank you, Lord, that while we were burgling the bar you didn’t let the police catch us.”


The first week Raúl lived with Lindsay in the apartment, his body began to function without heroin. He was restless and had insomnia, but it did not last long. During the week he said he had no feeling, no purpose, and no desire to do anything. It was not painless, but Raúl did not hallucinate, his teeth did not gnash uncontrollably, and Lindsay did not need to tie him down. That is the stuff of movies. Within a week, Raúl was eating constantly and sleeping well.

When Lindsay took in Raúl, they became inseparable. They spent much time talking, cooking, buying groceries, reading the Bible, and talking late into the night about the scriptures. At the end of the first week of living with Lindsay, Raúl had a religious conversion and found God. Like my father, Raúl was changed. He still had his rough edges, but now all he wanted to do was tell others about what had happened to him.

After four months of sharing an apartment with Lindsay, Raúl was anxious to help his friends on the streets. He asked Lindsay if he could bring in more yonquis, and Lindsay agreed. One by one, Raúl found his friends who also wanted to leave heroin. He rounded up Victor El Granos, Luis Mendoza, Paco Corrales, Luis Pino, and others and soon the small apartment was crowded with eight men. Even Manolo Majara wanted to come in. We found him sleeping in front of the entrance to the church. He said he would not move until Raúl promised to let him move into the apartment. Lindsay, my parents and the small band of men were like a first-century Christian community, sharing everything they had. To help pay for meals and the cost of living, my parents and Lindsay gave the money from the tithes they received to live on from churches they knew in the United States and Australia. The mothers of the men came by, often to prepare lunch and dinner. The center had no real method to its rehabilitation process except, I suppose, love and grace. My parents and Lindsay had no offices, no staff. They were not registered as a charity or accredited by the government to operate as a drug center. All of this came later.

Lindsay did not let Raúl smoke or drink, and when his friends entered they could not consume alcohol or tobacco either. Strangely, the addicts were more likely to complain about not being able to smoke than they were about not being able to shoot up. Many addicts left within the first few weeks because they could not part with nicotine.

Raúl had worked as a plumber before he became a heroin addict, and most of the men were tradesmen as well. To keep busy and help pay for the rapidly rising costs of the community, the men took on odd jobs. In San Blas and the rest of Madrid, moving or discarding furniture was a hassle. It was difficult to carry heavy closets up four or five flights of stairs, so the men helped people move. They did not charge anything and took whatever people could donate. Eventually they saved enough to start a furniture store. People donated furniture they no longer wanted, and Raúl and the men took it away for free. They repaired and restored the pieces and sold them to people in the neighborhood who could not afford new furniture.

Everyone in the center worked. Once addicts made it through the first few weeks, they were given a job. No one sat around alone with their thoughts. Everyone had to attend morning devotionals and Sunday morning services. The only program was work, discipline, love and grace. Grace was the oil that greased the center’s creaking wheels; without it there was no way to forgive insults, to settle petty squabbles, to bear others with love. The men said that they had never experienced anything like it on the street.


Raúl had invited his old friends from the neighborhood into the apartment. When they were yonquis on the street, they pulled knives on store owners together, broke into cars together, and shot up together. Letting Raúl help Lindsay run the apartment and supervise the addicts could have been encouraging the wolf to lead the fox. But when the men saw Raúl tend to their needs, stay up late to clean up their vomit, prepare cups of herbal tea for them whenever they needed it, and give up his own bed for them, they knew he had changed and was no longer the violent man they had known on the streets. They did not know what the foreigners had done to him, but they wanted whatever he had.

As more men entered the apartment, they were sleeping on the beds, on the floors, and on the sofa in the living room. Lindsay, the Australian missionary who had never touched drugs, was living with all the yonquis and he became the responsible older brother to them, mediating their fights and encouraged the men to stay when they wanted to leave. The old women in Lindsay’s building were less understanding of his little experiment. They complained about taking the elevators with dirty men whose arms were covered in tattoos. The new yonquis were often so marinated in beer and sweat that we had to take them first to the storefront church for a shower, a shave, and a change of clothes before Raúl smuggled them in at night. The protests mounted, and rather than fight them my parents and Lindsay decided to find a more suitable home for the men. The center had little money and could not afford new facilities, so my father, Lindsay and Raúl found a derelict farmhouse right outside the city near the Madrid airport. They located the owner and rented it; at last the men had their own place.

What had begun by accident as gesture of kindness to Raúl and his friends was on its way to becoming a fully-fledged drug center. My parents and Lindsay formally founded Asociación Betel, a registered charity dedicated to helping drug addicts, alcoholics and people at the fringes of society. With the money the men had earned and donations from my parents and friends, the men bought used vans for the center. My father created a logo, and on the side of the bright white vans we painted a large blue dove flying over a broken heroin needle. It became our trademark.

Lindsay and my father worked with the men and went with them everywhere. The idea of the “shadow” surprised the men and made many uncomfortable. A recovering addict, if left alone, might lose his resolve and shoot up, so the men always went out two by two to buy bread and milk, tools for plumbing or painting jobs, or anything they needed. It worked, and many of the early men stayed.

The rules of the center were clear:

Residents are to participate in the full schedule and activities of the community, keeping a structured day from 7 AM to 11 PM.

Smoking or the use of any tobacco product is not permitted.

The use of drug, alcohol or tobacco substitutes is not permitted.

All residents are to be accompanied by a “shadow” during their first few months.

The regulations and life at the farm were not negotiable. Raúl made sure of that. My father preferred to err on the side of grace, as he said, but Raúl was convinced that people


were either making progress or they were not. It was that simple. When they were not, he did not mind encouraging them to leave. He wanted to make sure that people who really wanted to change could stay. Manolo Majara and Ángel Veneno entered the center but did not stay. But Luis Pino, a short balding man with a knack for stealing and drug deals, was so shocked that Lindsay would trust him with money that he decided from that moment on that he would not touch heroin again. His family did not want to see him, and no one on the street cared about him or trusted him, but Raúl had given up his bed for him. Pino decided that he too had to find his acquaintances and bring them into the center.

One by one, the yonquis were changing, and they in turn wanted to change San Blas.


Raúl 1986

4: THE FARM

LA GRANJA

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

John 15 : 13

The crowd was frozen in awe. Raúl was dressed as the devil and the men were his demons. They threw Lindsay on the ground and violently kicked him outside the Torre del Campo bar as a throng of over a hundred huddled nearby. I stood by with my brothers and watched. We knew it was a play, but many times even I wondered if it was real. It looked as real as any fight I had seen on the streets.

The skit was Cadenas, Chains, and it was wildly popular. Lindsay played a fit, happy youth, enamored with fútbol. He looked innocent, and the skit believable. Raúl and the men dressed as demons in ghoulish black and tempted him with alcohol. Lindsay bit the apple of temptation and drank. For this he got a small chain on his arm. The demons of drugs tempted him again with cigarettes, and he tried them and liked them. For this he got another chain. Again Raúl and the demons tempted him with hashish, and he tried it and liked it, too. This time he got a larger chain on his legs. Like so many of the chavales of San Blas, he had gone from one drug to the next; he took the heroin needle when the demons offered it. Lindsay staggered around tied down by chains. When Lindsay was on heroin, Raúl and the demons violently knocked him over and mercilessly kicked him in the


ribs. Our men were unpredictable, and Lindsay sometimes thought perhaps they took too much pleasure in their roles.

The skit was a caricature of the progression from one drug to the next, but every time the men performed it, they drew crowds. It spoke to the kids and the men in the neighborhood because they had seen it and often lived it.

As the skit was ending, an old housewife arrived just in time to see Lindsay shoot up. She had missed the first half of the skit and tried to peer over the shoulders of the men in the crowd. “What’s the man doing? Is he shooting up?”

“Yeah, he’s shooting up,” I told her.

Her face contorted in a rictus of anger, “What is the neighborhood coming to? Young people gathering around to watch other young people shoot up…” As she left, I heard her mutter to herself, “The neighborhood has gone to hell.”

After the plays, David, Peter and I walked through the crowd that had gathered to hand out our leaflets. They were my favorites because everyone read them. Under the headline, “I AM DRUGS,” a smiling skeleton reached out his claw-like fingers towards the reader as he introduced himself:

It’s me who in the beginning makes you live beyond the present world full of problems. But with time I am the very thing you cannot live without. After you have tried me, you’re mine for the rest of your life.

I am purposefully destroying your life in every area – physically, morally, and spiritually. It’s me who has destroyed your family. It’s me that has caused you to go to prison.

I have you trapped.

You are in love with me. There is nothing in the world that can break our love affair.

While we did our work, Raúl stood out in front of the mass of people who had gathered and shared with them the story of how he had been a yonqui and got off drugs. I would have been embarrassed to talk with so many eyes watching, but Raúl said it was easy: “The most beautiful story anyone can tell is the story of his own life.” After he finished, he called out to people he knew by name and invited them to follow him to the Betel church on the ground floor of Lindsay’s building. Many followed.

When Raúl saw me at church, he grabbed my elbow with one arm and hold my hand with the other. He took my arm and twisted and turned and shook it as he said, “Hi, I’m a plumber. I fix faucets, pipes and elbow joints.” He had a slightly high-pitched cackle that started and stopped abruptly. Whenever I got into trouble, he would ask me, “¿Johnny, dónde están mis pistolas? Johnny, where are my guns?” I had no idea where he got the silly phrase. My father said perhaps it was Hidden Guns, a Western starring John Carradine, or the anti-war film Johnny Got His Gun. Raúl himself could not remember. His sense of humor could be strange. Often it was the oddity and obscurity of his jokes — so obscure that sometimes even he did not know where the punch lines came from or what they meant — that made them all the more funny.


Raúl was solid, his hands meaty and strong, his fingernails curved and closely trimmed. His reddish cheeks smelled of aftershave. His arms were thick like branches extending from his trunk, and when my brothers and I saw him before church services, we tried to climb him. I would hold onto his arms and pull myself up. Sometimes he would let me sit on his shoulders, but Timothy was his favorite to carry. Timothy delighted looking down imperiously at David, Peter and me. He looked like a village boy who had tamed an Indian elephant and never wanted to climb down.

When our wrestling and jostling became animated, we would elbow and punch each other to try to be the closest to him. He just grinned and told us to punch him. At first I refused because I did not want to fall into a trap. Manolo Majara would fight with us and then tell my parents we were misbehaving.

“Come on, punch my arm. Punch as hard as you can,” he said, rolling up the sleeve of his T-shirt.

I clenched my fist and threw a punch that landed on his shoulder.

“That was pathetic. Try again.”

I drew my arm back and held my breath and hit him as hard as I could.

“Johnny, you insult me.” No one but Raúl called me Johnny. “Don’t throw papers at me.”

It did not matter how hard I hit him, he laughed — and never had a bruise to show for any of my punches. He smiled broadly, “Let it be a lesson. Don’t get into fights. There’s always someone stronger than you.”

I was glad that Raúl was on our side. Once a deranged visitor named Lucio threatened to stab my father in Lindsay’s apartment. The man ran for the kitchen to grab a knife, but Raúl put himself between the knife and my father, wrestling Lucio until he subdued him. The Bible says, “No man has greater love than he that lays down his life for a friend.” Raúl was not hurt, but it was not an exaggeration to say that he would have taken a knife for us. In San Blas that was the highest thing you could say about a friend.

David, Peter, Timothy and I were like dogs: we could smell timidity. We misbehaved in Sunday school because our teacher Ramón let us get away with small things, but Raúl never let us misbehave. When I got out of my seat during a lesson, he would pick me up from the ground, holding my elbows, and put me back in my chair. “Cuidado o cobras. Careful or you’re going to get it.” We could play with him as much as we liked before classes, but when he taught us, we had to behave. After church Raúl sometimes bought donuts for us at a bakery near the Metro stop if we behaved in Sunday school. A drug dealer owned it and gave Raúl a discount. Raúl knew the store because it sold sweets and pastries to the yonquis who needed a quick sugar rush.

On weekends Raúl never failed to come by and take us out to play fútbol so my mother could rest. He brought two of his nephews along and took Timothy on his shoulders and we walked to the open fields. David, Peter and I ran ahead, kicking the ball and dribbling in circles as we yelled to Raúl and Timothy to hurry up. Raúl had taught us how to dribble properly, how to balance the ball on the top of our shoes, and how to hit a header from a corner shot. If we ever did misbehave in Sunday school, he punished us by not taking us out to play fútbol with him. And that was almost as bad as being spanked.


On the streets my brothers and I absorbed Spanish slang. No one taught my parents swear words, and people used them so rarely in their company that they had no idea of much of the dirty slang. I was almost as ignorant. And one day when we were playing soccer with Raúl, I missed a goal.

“¡Joder, me cago en la hostia!”

“What’d you say, Johnny?”

“Joder, me cago en la hostia.“

“You know what it means?”

“Of course I do,” I said, running after the ball.

“Come back here! Right now, I said!”

I grabbed the ball and held it under my arm and ran back.

He glared at me. “Well, if you say you do, what does it mean then?”

“I… I…”

“I can’t hear you. Speak up!”

“I dunno.”

“Johnny,” he said sternly, grabbing my shoulders and staring at me. I could not look away, “It means ‘Fuck,’ which is a really bad word, ‘I shit in the host,’ and that’s the body of Christ in the communion. You’re not a parrot. You can’t go around repeating everything you hear on the streets. Colleja! Bend your neck down. Assume the position.”

I hated collejas. He gave them every time I cursed. I tilted my head, exposing the back of my neck, and waited for him to strike. With his thick hand he slapped hard. I felt its sting. “That’ll teach you. Don’t you ever say that again. Now, let’s play some fútbol, and you watch that mouth of yours.”

The men at the center competed in leagues against other churches, wearing the Betel colors: blue and white. Raúl and the men gave us small uniforms that were still far too large for us. The shirts reached our knees, and we had to hold the shorts up with our hands as we ran along the sidelines and cheered for them. We were Betel’s mascots. We were proud to see the men playing fútbol in the dirt lots of their neighborhood. They were great sportsmen and did not curse. They probably wanted to, but Raúl gave collejas and made the men wash dishes for weeks or months if they cursed. They learned their lesson, just like I did, or they left the program.


David, Jonathan and Peter (left to right)

Raúl and the men taught my parents how to cook like Spaniards. They learned how to prepare tortilla española, Spanish omelet with egg and potatoes, and paella, a dish with shrimp, mussels and vegetables, served in saffron-colored rice. In return, my parents invited Raúl and a few of the leaders in Betel to our home for a Thanksgiving dinner so they could taste traditional American food. My parents worked all day beforehand and woke up early on Thanksgiving to prepare the turkey and the stuffing, make pumpkin and pecan pies and steam the corn and the vegetables. Peter and I prepared seventeenth century Pilgrim hats from cardboard for the men and we explained the story of how the English and the Indians shared their harvests.

Ten men crowded around our small dinner table. The food was odd to their palate. Paco, one of the first addicts in the center, had lost most of his teeth because of all the candy he ate when he was a yonqui. When he smiled he grinned with only one tooth. “This food may taste good to you, but it is soso. Come on. Give me tortilla and some bread. Let’s stop fooling around here.”

Raúl patted him on the back, “Paco, Paco... open your mind. The food is excellent. In fact, the stuff inside the turkey tastes like the monkey brains I used to eat in Equatorial Guinea when I worked there.” He looked over at me as he grinned, “You see, I’ve got an open mind.” As a child I could never tell if Raúl really enjoyed the meals or if he was just being courteous. Raúl joked about our food, but he never once complained about drinking my mother’s Southern iced tea, which no one drank in Spain, or eating things like my father’s Reuben sandwiches with corned beef and sauerkraut.

If we were well-behaved, my parents let my brothers and me spend weekends with Raúl at the farmhouse in Barajas. David, Peter and I had a few friends our own age in the neighborhood, but our closest friends were the addicts in the center. Raúl was our older brother, and he looked after us and made us part of the center’s life. The first time we went out to stay with him my mother helped us pack for the weekend. After the Friday


night meeting, all of us boys were going except Timothy. He was only four, and that was too young for my parents to let him spend a weekend out on the farmhouse.

“I wanna go. Why can’t I go?” Timothy cried. “It’s not fair. Why do I always have to stay home?”

My mother hugged him. “When you’re a few years older, you’ll go. It will come sooner than you think.”

Raúl bent over, put his hands on Timmy’s shoulders and looked him in the eye, “When you’re old enough, you can come out and stay with me. I promise.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

The men piled into their dilapidated vans. Raúl had no driving license, so he usually sat up in the front seat by the driver. Peter, David and I fought to sit up front, but I won and got to sit with Raúl. The old vans rattled with every vibration of the motor, and the air smelled of diesel fumes. The noise was so loud that talking was impossible. Raúl and I just glanced over at each other and smiled at the din of the engine.

Two men had stayed at the farmhouse to cook dinner for everyone, and as soon as the vans swung into the long driveway in Barajas, we jumped out of the van and ran into the house to wait for dinner. It was past midnight before we ate. Music spilled out from the kitchen as an old stereo player cranked out Christian Gypsy songs in Spanish. David, Peter and I offered to help in the kitchen so we could get closer to the food, but the cooks laughed and sent us away within seconds.

Once dinner was ready and all the tables were set, Raúl gathered the men into the dining room and waited until absolute silence prevailed. He prayed. The moment he finished, the room erupted with the clanging of men serving food onto their plates. We ate a simple lettuce and tomato salad with just the right amount of salt, olive oil, and vinegar. Then the cooks brought out large plates of tortilla española, and baskets of bread. For dessert we ate flanes and cakes that Betel received as donations from large Spanish supermarkets. Most of the food had passed its sell-by date, but no one cared. Dinners were noisy, the air filled with the men’s yells for more food. On the streets the men rarely ate, but in the center they put on weight. Gluttony may have been one of the seven sins, but it was better than shooting up. It was easy to spot the men who had been in the center for a few months: they had the “Betel gut.”

After dinner, Raúl let us help in the kitchen. The men washed the large pots and pans, and we helped dry the dishes. As we were working, Raúl peered into the kitchen and told David, Peter and me to come collect some sheets and towels. I followed him back to the large rooms filled with bunk beds. The floors smelled of bleach from constant mopping, but a ripe smell of men’s bodies filled the air around the bunk beds. I hoped that I would not grow old and smell that way one day. Raúl knelt and helped make our beds for us. After we had changed into our pajamas, he said a short prayer and tucked each of us in before he turned the lights out. I lay in bed and could not sleep.

When Raúl woke us, I could see the stark light of day, casting the long shadows of the curtains against the walls. He gave us towels and told us we should use the showers immediately before the rush to use the bathroom began. At eight in the morning, after


everyone had had a shower, the men gathered around in the dining hall for breakfast. I sat next to Luis Mendoza, who was short; when he smiled he pursed his lips to hide few unfortunate teeth. All the men had a café con leche, into which they poured heaps of sugar. And Luis dumped mountains in his; he probably figured his teeth were already gone. They dunked their cookies and ate them soggy. We wanted to be like the men, but Raúl would only let us have hot chocolate like the yonquis going cold turkey. He said we were rowdy enough without caffeine. As I drank my chocolate, I thought of ways I could furtively drink from Raúl’s glass after he was finished. At the end of the table, Faris, an Iranian refugee who had ended up on drugs, caressed a glass of tea. He had prepared it himself with roots and leaves he had collected from the fields. Raúl pointed and spoke loud enough for Faris to hear him, “He think’s it’ll make him trip out, but he doesn’t need the tea for that. He’s already slightly nuts.”

After breakfast, the men moved all the chairs and tables out of the way. Everyone sat around in a circle waiting for the devotional. Some of the newer men draped themselves in blankets, even though it was summertime, and held mop buckets between their legs. They lurched forward as if they were going to vomit, but they almost never did. Raúl sang boldly, if a little off-key, and the men joined in. When Raúl gave the devotional message he spoke simple y llanamente, simply and candidly, in a way the men would understand. Just two years earlier I had seen him in my living room with track marks and the sharp, overpowering smell of alcohol on his breath. His speech was eloquent because it was vigorous, simple and direct. As he spoke, you knew why his friends from the streets of San Blas followed him into Betel. Raúl often did not take men in immediately when they needed help, forcing them to come to a few meetings to show they were serious about getting off drugs. The yonquis came to the Sunday services weeks in a row, even if they were high. And as Raúl promised, he took them in once they had proved themselves.

When Raúl had finished speaking and closed the devotion with a prayer, the men divided up the jobs for the day. David, Peter and I helped them sweep and mop the house, pull the weeds in the garden and whitewash the walls. We worked around the house all morning until lunchtime. The men knew how to eat. The cooks had prepared a giant paella with a message written in thin red pepper slices in the center: DIOS ES AMOR, God is love. Before the meal, Raúl thanked God Almighty for the many blessings He had provided. Almost every head bowed, but as I peeked around the room, I could see the new men exchanging glances while he prayed.

Mentions of God’s love and prayers were everywhere in the house. A few of the men thought the program was a religious sect. Journalists who wrote articles about Betel and other Christian centers in Spain would have agreed. As El País, the main paper in Spain, put it, “The rehabilitation centers run by Evangelical communities have been criticized on occasion because of their mysticism, substituting an alienating relationship with drugs for another one with religion. Although others maintain that, even if that were true, it is better to end up mystical than dead on a toilet bowl from an overdose.”

I had met old alcoholics, but never old heroin addicts. Some died quickly overdosing; others died slowly from diseases such as Hepatitis C. Whether it was fast or slow, most addicts died young. I discovered that yonquis who mixed alcohol or amphetamines with heroin were more likely to throw up, sometimes choking on their own vomit, unable to wake themselves. A doctor once told my father that people do not die from heroin but from its impurities. Whether it was from the heroin or the impurities,


addicts in San Blas often overdosed by the Gypsy camp; the men in the center and the police found them in the ditches. I often wondered if it was the fear of dying alone that made the men put up with too many Aleluyas for breakfast, morning devotionals and Christian messages in their paella. Was it death that made people believe?

After lunch we had a siesta — a work day could never be complete without one. Then came our favorite part of the day. With thirty men in the program, we had enough to put together two fútbol teams. Not everyone could play. Some men were still weak, and one guy named Miguel Jambrina was so thin that the men joked that he would break if they ran into him. But no one could keep him off the field: the game had to be played. The men divided into teams, and David joined in as well. Peter and I stood at the sidelines, watching the action, begging to be let on the field, but Raúl had ruled we were too young.

Midway through the game, an addict held his hand to his eye. “Stop! Stop running!” Raúl yelled, “Manuel el Vasco’s eyeball has fallen out. Be still and help look.”

“Not again!” The men were annoyed at the hold up. Manuel had come from the Basque country and he had lost an eye on the streets years earlier. For some reason the glass eye never stayed in its place, falling out at the most inopportune moments. When he traveled on the subway he unwittingly frightened people. Disheveled and tired, he would fall asleep, but only one eyelid would close fully and his glass eye stared at fellow passengers.

“Help search for it. The sooner we find it, the sooner we play.”

Raúl held the ball and leaned over, scouring the ground and sifting through the dust and small rocks for the missing eyeball. After a few minutes of searching, we found it. Manuel el Vasco could not thank us enough.

After the game everyone was sweaty and covered with dust, and we changed into our bathing suits to join Raúl and the men in the crudely constructed pool they had built in the garden. It was small, only reaching Raúl’s shoulders, but it was deep enough for us to dive in. Lolo, one of the men, kept a pet ferret that he took with him into the pool. It was a great swimmer. It tucked its front paws under its chin, poked its nose out of the water, and paddled with its hind legs, using its tail as a rudder, gliding through the water until it was exhausted and Lolo pulled it out.

Sunday morning after breakfast, David, Peter and I got into the vans to head to the Betel church service where we would see Timothy again. Perhaps we could even convince my parents to let us bring him along next time. The steering wheel vibrated from the clattering of the engine’s pistons. Gusts of wind roared in through the open windows. I closed my eyes as I felt the coolness on my face and hoped it would not be long until the next time we could go back to the farm to be with Raúl.


Peter, Jonathan and David (left to right)

5: HOOKED ON SOCCER

ENGANCHADO AL FÚTBOL

Poverty is good for nothing, except perhaps for fútbol.

Jorge Valdano, Real Madrid player

“...in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

Those were the most beautiful words of any church service: they always marked the end. David, Peter, Timothy and I were too young to have any choice about whether to attend every church meeting. But we did not mind as soon as we heard the benediction. At church our main concern was looking at our watches, waiting for the final Amen so we could go out and play fútbol.

My brothers and I knew nothing about baseball or American football. The only game that mattered was fútbol. It was the obsession of children everywhere – except the United States. It is probably safe to say that it was the main preoccupation of grown men as well. In San Blas the sports newspapers Marca and As had a wider circulation than the national dailies such as ABC and El País. Most of the kids left school when they were


about thirteen, but everyone knew how to read. If you could not read, you could not know the sports scores.

Every kid in the neighborhood played fútbol at all hours in those hot, sunny days when school was closed for the summer and could not threaten us. We started early in the morning, played until lunch, had our siesta and then returned to play some more.

David, Peter, Timothy and I joined in with the kids and played fútbol in the courtyards between buildings. The lots were littered with dirty syringes and empty wine cartons; and the sour smell of borrachos lingered. They left behind empty Tetra Paks of cheap Spanish table wine and the odor of urine and vomit. We hated the smell, but played on nonetheless. The bare walls of the building were ideal for drawing goalposts with discarded chunks of plaster of Paris, and the small enclosures made perfect fields for a fast game on cement.

When we had no ball, we developed ingenious games with whatever we could find. My favorite was to use the bottle caps we collected by scouring the floors of local bars before the owners kicked us out. They chased us away because we applied the sparks of electric cigarette lighters we disassembled to short-circuit their videogames and trick the machines into giving us free games. Using a chick-pea as our ball, we played our bottle cap teams against each other in small make-believe stadiums we made in the dirt. The bottle caps were versatile, and during the great cycling races of the Vuelta de España or the Tour de France, we raced them against each other in the long, winding racetracks we created in the dirt lots.

Fights erupted for many reasons among the kids in the neighborhood, but none were as serious as those involving a disagreement over fútbol and none were forgotten more quickly. One evening a boy named Luis, whom everyone called Luigi for no obvious reason, punched me in the nose following an argument over a goal. My fingers felt the blood on my upper lip. Majara once told me either you feared others or made them fear you. Luigi was going to fear me; I challenged him to a fight. He turned and ran, and I yelled out for him to come back and be a man.

I was livid at his cowardice. My father was an Eagle Scout, and he had given me a penknife like the one he had as a kid so that I could cut ropes, punch holes through leather and strip bark. But it was useless until I pulled it out and chased Luigi. We raced around building corners, swerved between cars, and jumped over garbage cans. With each step I got closer to him, and his shirt was almost within my grasp when he slipped into a bar. I gasped for air, but controlled my breathing, wiped my bloody nose with my hand, and clutched my knife and hid it in my pocket.

I walked into the bar and looked around. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and fried grease, and the floor was covered with sawdust, toothpicks, olive pits, and used napkins. On the walls were posters of nude women and large calendars of Real Madrid. The men at the bar stopped drinking their cañas and looked at me. If I was going to grab Luigi, he would scream and we would have to make a scene. I was not about to do that. The owner would kick me out and ban me permanently. Luigi smiled. He knew he had gotten away, so I gave up the pursuit and headed home. I swore I would get him some other day.


As I was walking home, his father and the other men found me and dragged me by my ears as Spanish parents do. I had not anticipated that he would call his father, his brother Rafael and half a dozen friends. Not only was Luigi a coward, he was a chivato. How could I have known he would snitch on me? That went against the unwritten code in the neighborhood: chivatos were the lowest of the low. Even a kid in second grade like me had picked that up, and kids beat up any tattle-tale outside of school. I was afraid they would punch me and kick me and leave me in the street, but they dragged me home, holding onto my ears the entire way. I stood at the door to our apartment in front of her with a bloody nose, breathing heavily still.

“He’s mine. I’ll punish him,” my mother said, as she pulled me away from them. Never before had I been so relieved that my mother would punish me. “I’m so sorry. My husband and I will take care of this. This will never happen again.”

My mother took me back to the bathroom, “Breathe slowly. Calm down, now.” She knelt down and with a warm cloth cleaned the blood from my nose. “Jonathan, why would you do something like that? What did you think you were going to do with the knife? Stab him?”

“I wanted to fight him fair, but he ran away. I just wanted to scare him so he’d never hit me again…” She looked at me with disappointment. “You won’t tell Daddy, will you?” Maybe she’d feel sorry for me; what had happened could be a secret that only we would share; it could even bring us closer together.

She ran her hands through my hair and said nothing.

My father spanked me ten times with his belt, the most severe punishment I could receive, but it was my mother’s look that hurt the longest. My parents were ashamed that their son would behave in such an un-Christian way. It took months before my parents gave me back my penknife, but Luigi and his father quickly forgot about the fight. My brothers and I hung out in bars to play futbolín or video games, and Luigi’s father never failed to buy me a Coke and some Spanish olives whenever I bumped into him in a bar.

Real Madrid was the greatest fútbol team ever. Madrid had three teams but only one of them mattered. Atlético de Madrid could play a good game if they were lucky but they almost never won the league. Rayo Vallecano was hopeless and went back and forth between first and second division. Real Madrid had all the best players: Emilio Butragueño, Hugo Sánchez, and Jorge Valdano, the great Argentinean forward. On occasion I met kids in the neighborhood who supported Barcelona, Madrid’s arch-rivals, but they never wore the blue and crimson Barça shirt because they’d get badly beat up.


Peter, Jonathan, Timothy, and David (left to right) at Santiago Bernabeu

Being a Real Madrid fan had all the trappings of being a follower of an organized religion, but it came without the long sermons. The Santiago Bernabeu stadium was the high temple. It could have fit a dozen cathedrals of devout followers. The local bars in the neighborhoods were the churches. They were the homes of the peñas madridistas, Madrid fan clubs, and on the walls they had shrines to the players, calendars of the season games, photographs of the whole team, and scarves in Madrid’s colors. On Saturday evenings and Sundays, the team played games that people in the neighborhood watched on television in bars; the schedule of the games was respected more scrupulously than any church calendar. When Madrid played, the braying of cars and the mingled voices in the street quieted so the neighborhood could tune in.

David, Peter and I bought fútbol cards, and learned the name of every player in the Spanish league by heart, as if we were memorizing Bible verses. On Fridays David would fill out the quiniela for us all and furtively bet on the games. The money usually came from stealing the change my father left on his dresser at night. David was good at math and always took a small percentage that could go unnoticed. When the weekend was over, on Mondays we pooled our allowances to buy Marca, the veritable Bible of sports dailies to find out if we had won. My father bought his Herald Tribune on trips downtown, but as kids we thought that our sports dailies had news of greater consequence. Stealing and gambling were grave sins, but we figured that if we won, we could donate some money to Betel, which would not have been possible if we had not placed our bets.

The Bernabeu stadium stood right off the Castellana, a street that was once named Calle del Generalísimo in honor of General Franco. My father said Franco was probably happy that fútbol was the civic religion — it kept people’s minds off everything else. The massive structure rose hundreds of feet into the sky and held over ninety thousand hinchas when it was heaving with people. At last I understood Dad’s stories of catching the Long Island Railroad and the New York subway to see Mickey Mantle play at Yankee Stadium. Going to the stadium was a rite of passage, and no childhood in the neighborhood was complete without a pilgrimage to the Bernabeu. Until we had made that trip with Raúl and


stood in the stands and heard the deafening chants of the fans, smelled warm beer and cigar smoke, heard the crackle of sunflower seeds beneath our feet, and watched Real Madrid crush their rivals, we had not fully lived. As we left the Bernabeu, Raúl told us, “One day, you will be the first Americans to play for Real Madrid.”

My parents’ love of books was only matched by their disdain for television. The draconian rules governing our television were only relaxed to watch fútbol games. Winston Churchill called television “the idiot’s lantern,” and my parents agreed. For years we had not owned a television, and were encouraged to read or go outside and play if we were bored. But they made an exception for fútbol.

In my mind the enemy of fútbol was bullfighting. During the bullfighting season we resented the interruptions to the schedule of games. How could anyone enjoy seeing an animal suffer slowly and painfully? Saint Francis of Assisi would have hated the spectacle. I detested seeing the proud bull tired and thirsty, panting with its tongue hanging out. It was excruciating to watch the needlessly lengthy, methodical way the helpers stabbed the beautiful beast with the banderillas and lances, drawing streams of blood. My brothers and I childishly hoped the audience would cheer for the bull and turn on the matador, and I hoped the bull would gore the matador to teach him a lesson, even though Saint Francis would not have approved of that either. Secretly, I was sad we had missed the historic goring of the great bullfighter Paquirri because we had turned the television off too soon.

When we played the game on the streets, David was the best. His body would move one way, the ball another, but they would reconnect further down the field, as if they were magically tethered to each other. After he scored goals, he would jump up and down for joy while I did cartwheels and flips. My self-appointed task was to organize leagues among the kids that lived near us. Kids stood in a pack, while David and I chose sides for everyone at random. Somehow David, Peter, Timothy and I managed to play on the same team every game. David played forward and Peter played midfield, passing balls up for him to score. I was goalie and Timothy was my trustworthy defense. He was small but brave and stood in the way of oncoming attacks without flinching before he was run over by half a dozen players who were twice as big as him. We played for hours until we were covered in sweat and dirt and our legs hurt. After long games, I could think of nothing better than bending over with my hands resting on my knees and breathing deeply. Every muscle in my body ached, but as I took in lungfuls of air mixed with fine dust, I was ready to play again.

As we played during the day, I would see the girls in the neighborhood talking and playing hopscotch. They knew Madrid was first in the league and Barça second, but they did not understand all the rules and felt no need to talk about the fútbol league or the Vuelta de España. In their presence I had a strange, new tingling feeling and could hear my heart beating in my ears. I was frozen and could not say anything intelligent. Taunting them for not playing ball was as refined as my attempts to play with them got, and I was surprised when they did not enjoy it. They were tanned and became more striking towards the end of the summer.

At lunchtime children went home to eat and stayed there for far longer than they would have liked. Mothers in the neighborhood insisted on a good digestión. If you cut short your rest after lunch, strange and unspeakable things could happen. No one ever died from playing fútbol without a proper siesta, but no one took any chances. The day was


at its hottest and the sun pounded the earth. The only relief available was stepping into the shade of a building and feeling the quick stream of cool air near the walls. David, Peter, Timothy and I would gather our pesetas and share flavored popsicles, sucking on the blue and red ice until our tongues grew numb and you could feel the cold blood in the back of the brain.

Evening was the most beautiful time to play fútbol. The sun hung from the sky and slowly dipped over the rooftops. In the distance we could see the street lamps lined up on Carretera de Vicalváro, and when the tip of the sun had sunk behind the buildings, the sky turned shades of lavender and the street lights came to life. Like fireflies they flickered brightly and then dimmed, and then swelled into a blue-green glow and burned a brilliant white. The lights lined the road like pearls on a long thread suspended by lampposts, and we played on until the sky grew black and these bulbs were all that gave us light.

When we played we lost all track of time. We knew it was late when the sun had set, but played until a mother came out to find a son for the third or fourth time. She would berate him for playing out past dinner, and we would grab our ball and scurry home, remembering that my parents were also waiting for us. We headed home sweaty, our legs cramped. After a few blocks, David, Peter, Timothy and I grew tired and walked with our arms locked around each other’s shoulders, laughing, remembering the goals, commenting on the game, telling the stories repeatedly until they no longer had anything to do with the facts.

We rang the buzzer to our apartment since none of us ever carried keys, and heard my mother’s disapproving voice, “You’re late again.”

When we got upstairs, I wanted to wash my face in the sink and my feet in the bidet, but my father called us all into the living room for a talk. He was somber. We were certain we would be punished for arriving late. Perhaps we would not be let out for days.

My father led us all into the living room. We sat down and glanced at each other.

“We need to talk. Scientists discovered the virus for a terrible, terrible disease three years ago. Cases have begun to crop up in San Blas. It is called AIDS. It stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. People who are going to get AIDS are HIV positive and...”

“But Daddy, if AIDS is bad, why’d they say it’s positive?” David asked.

“It isn’t positive like when you say something’s good. It just means that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, the HIV virus, shows up in their lab tests.”

“So, Daddy?”

“Yes...”

“Daddy, how bad is it?” I asked.

“Yeah, is it worse than fever, like when I missed school last year?” Peter inquired.

“As far as doctors know, it leads to death. The virus is a retrovirus, a really bad virus. Think of it sort of like... like a spy. It enters the body and quietly attacks the human immune cells, called T cells. Those are the ones that protect us from colds. When they are infected by these retroviruses, they replicate themselves and quickly destroy the immune system.”


“But what happens to you?”

“Well, when the immune system has very few T cells, then the doctors say the patients officially have AIDS. And patients can get sick and die from almost anything.”

We just listened and did not know what to say.

“So far no one we know has it. Scientists do not know much about the syndrome, but don’t worry about getting it yourselves. You can’t get it by shaking people’s hands at Parque del Paraíso or at church. You can only get it by shooting up and handling dirty needles. From now on, you need to pay attention to the needles. Whatever you do, don’t touch them; you can get the virus from blood.” We had seen the needles everywhere in the street, and they often had fresh blood from the addicts. I wondered why my father was telling us not to touch syringes. Watching drug addicts shoot up was normal for my brothers and me; it was simple common sense never to touch the blood stained needles we saw lying around.

As my father spoke, my mind went back to the first time my brothers and I saw addicts shoot up. I spotted them in the dump behind my apartment while we were on our way to play fútbol. Two yonquis hid in the dump behind piles of bricks and plaster of Paris as they crouched together. David motioned for us to follow him and put his finger to his mouth, “Keep quiet.” He was two years older than me and knew a great many things. I breathed slowly and tried not to make a noise. We took cover behind mounds of discarded construction material. I was mesmerized. One of the men used the hollow of the bottoms of coke cans to cook heroin powder with lemon juice before he drew it all into the syringe. He shot up and blood filled the syringe, and then he passed on the needle. I could feel my heart pounding as I leaned against the mounds of bricks. When they finished, they lay back, their eyes slowly drifting into a hollow stare before closing and shutting out the world around them. After a few minutes, the addicts got up and were gone, but they had left their syringes behind and I walked over and crouched until my knees touched my chest and stared at the needles....

“Jonathan? Are you listening?” my father asked.

I snapped back. “Yeah.”

“I don’t have to say anything more about it. Do I? All I ask is that you please be careful.”

“Can we go now?” David asked.

“You can go.”

As we walked away, David stopped us in the hallway and whispered, “That was close. At least Dad didn’t call us to punish us for being late. We’re lucky we weren’t grounded. Tomorrow we can play fútbol again.”


6: THE RASTRO

EL RASTRO

A faithful friend is a strong defense, and he that has found one has found a treasure.

Ecclesiastes 6 : 14

I took my small yellow bike and peddled furiously under the blazing summer sun. Dodging cars and the large city buses, I raced through the streets of the neighborhood. It was good to be out of school, and I wanted to see how Betel’s rastro worked. When I arrived, drops of sweat were beading on my forehead, rolling down into my eyes. I wiped my eyes with my forearm. I parked the bike and went to the candy store next door to buy a popsicle to cool myself off from the dry Madrid heat.

The used furniture store on Calle Esfinge had a white façade with a large sign in deep blue letters, and it had bars on the windows. When I walked into the rastro, I saw Jambri standing in the small office where he coordinated the pickup and delivery of furniture. The rastro sold beds, wardrobes, dressers, dining tables, bookshelves filled with books and anything else people donated. In the back of the shop the recovering addicts ran a small workshop where they repaired the furniture and re-upholstered chairs and sofas.


“Hey!” Jambri yelled out to the men, “One of the Tepper brothers has arrived. Make sure this one doesn’t shoplift!” He walked to the front of the store and welcomed me into the rastro.

Jambri’s name was Miguel Jambrina, although everyone called him by his nickname. He was twenty-four and even though I was just a kid, he treated me as a friend. Jambri was soft-spoken, with an almost imperceptible lisp. He was a tall man with a thin, angular face. His forehead was slanted, as was his nose; when he played fútbol without a shirt on you could see his ribs protrude. Many of the yonquis entered the center emaciated and weak. I could not remember what Jambri looked like when he came to us, but it was difficult to imagine him any thinner.

The rastro buzzed with activity. My father or Raúl would often come by to see that everything was going smoothly. Raúl would show up with a team of men between plumbing or brick masonry jobs. Jambri did not need to be checked on, though. I never saw him stop working. He took calls from people who wanted to throw away old furniture. He organized the men and vans to put together pickup schedules. He supervised the workshops where the men in the program disassembled and restored the pieces. And he was the sales manager, haggling with the customers over the right price for a dresser drawers or a wardrobe. He was good at his job, and he loved it.

At first I watched, but I wanted to work. “Can I help? I can help them over there.” I pointed at the men unloading furniture from one of the Betel vans.

“Jonathan, don’t be stupid. I don’t want your parents telling me you got hurt helping here. This is a man’s job. The furniture weighs more than you.” He replied laughing. “Let’s see. How old are you?”

“I’m already ten.”

“Definitely far too young…”

“Come on! Please. Please.” I was embarrassed and knew that throwing a fit would not help my case.

“You just get in the way around here. But stick with me. Maybe I’ll figure something out.”

Jambri relented and let me answer the phones. I was sure that was a job I could handle. I sat by the phone impatiently waiting for a call. The receiver hung on the end, and the cable snaked around the desk. I waited with pen in hand for the ring, like a mongoose ready to pounce, ready to take notes on when and where to pick up furniture. It finally rang. The first few calls were easy. I checked the schedule for deliveries, booked appointments in the empty slots and wrote down the addresses and contact information of the donors. I felt grown up. I was no longer pretending to work. Even though I was coming in at noon, following Jambri around and answering a few phone calls, I believed I was no longer a little kid playing fútbol or bottle caps in the neighborhood. I was a real worker — at least for a while.

After an hour of answering the phone my bike beckoned. What the other kids in the neighborhood were doing? Were they out scoring goals? What color popsicles could I buy with the coins I had in my pocket? I asked Jambri if it was all right for me to come back the next day to help work. He just laughed and asked, “Tired from work already?


You can leave. Take a book if you want.” He went back to the shelves and gave me The Poem of El Cid, which I tried to read at home but discarded after concluding that there were too many words and too few sword fights.

Jambri let me come back every day and work with the men. Some days he was sick with bad colds and fevers, and I never stayed if he was not at the rastro. But when he was there, he and the men shared their chorizo bocadillos with me and gave me cold Coke cans that he would roll against his cheek to cool him down when he felt a fever coming on.

The men had all been yonquis, but some had been pimps, pickpockets, and bank robbers, too. Tattoos and scars covered their arms, and some of the men had broken noses. They treated me like a younger brother and taught me their slang. The lunches were my education in the colorful, even feral slang of buying heroin. Every trade and profession has its jargon, and the urban safari of San Blas had a precise taxonomy. Drug dealers were known as camellos, camels. People who carried drugs were known as mulas, mules. Quitting heroin was pasando el mono, passing the monkey. Heroin was called caballo, horse. As Jambri said, you could ride the animal at first, but in the end it always rode you.

It was at lunch that Jambri told me his story. He grew up in one of the four-story red brick buildings, one door down from Raúl on Calle Porcelana, even though the two had rarely talked to each other. Raúl was four years older, and they were part of different gangs. Jambri knew everything about the neighborhood. He could explain the smallest detail of the streets where he had grown up. Franco’s fascist trade unions had built the neighborhood and left their marks, and if I looked closely I could see the fascist yoke and arrows on the walls. The unions wanted San Blas to be purely working class, set apart from rest of the city. The streets and alleyways bore faded blue plaques with names like Brick Masons’ Street, Sculptors’ Street, and Chiselers’ Street. The streets had been properly named: almost everyone worked with their hands. Jambri’s father was a tradesman and his mother made her living cleaning the portales of the buildings in the neighborhood. The skin on her knees was thick and hardened from scrubbing floors. They tried to do their best to raise Jambri, his four sisters and one older brother. Like Raúl, Jambri quit school when he was in his early teens and became a manual laborer.

As a teenager Jambri became an apprentice spray painting cars. He earned good money, but it did not last long. He started drinking and smoked chocolate, the brown resin from cannabis, and hierba, the weed from the same plant; he smoked whichever one he could get. Within a few months he was shooting up. He quit painting and stole to support his drug habit. Through his friends, he got involved in a gang and became a bank robber. He never wore a mask or pulled a machine gun on anyone — he just drove the getaway car. The gang was good and pulled off a couple of big heists, but no matter how big the robbery, they usually blew the cash on drugs.

When he robbed banks, he never used the same car twice. He did not want the police to catch him and trace a bank robbery to him, so he stole cars downtown to use as getaway cars. One day he found a big, powerful Mercedes Benz. He thought it would be the perfect escape car and stole it. The next day he and his friends went to a small town outside of Madrid and held up a bank. They made their escape easily. Jambri was flushed with pride at how good he was getting, and he and his friends decided to rob another one the same day. Within the next hour they had found another bank, and his friends entered the bank with their guns. He waited nervously at the wheel for them to come out, but they


were taking a long time. When they left the bank, the green and white cars of the Spanish Civil Guard had already set up roadblocks at the exits to the town.

Jambri knew that if he was caught with weapons and bags of money in the car he was going to go to jail for a long time, and he was only seventeen. “I’m going to ditch the car down a side street and let’s make a run for it,” he said. But one of his accomplices had a limp and would have none of it. He pulled out his revolver and put it to Jambri’s head, “I’ve been in el talego. No way am I going back.” Jambri shifted gears quickly, letting go of the clutch and stepping on the accelerator with all his weight. The Mercedes lurched and sped up to 140 miles an hour and rammed the police cars that had been set up as a barricade. In that moment, the Civil Guards unloaded dozens of rounds into the car with their machine guns. Jambri ducked while he drove, and the car made it through the barricades. He kept his foot on the pedal until he reached an empty field. He and his friends stepped out of the car unharmed, and they set it on fire and ran.

The following day Jambri bought a newspaper. He saw a photograph of the Mercedes riddled with bullets. Above it was the headline:

MINISTER’S CAR STOLEN, USED IN BANK ROBBERY.

The article explained that the car was the official bulletproof, bombproof vehicle of a Spanish politician.

The police finally caught up with Jambri when he was eighteen. He was sentenced to five years in Carabanchel, a prison in the southwest of Madrid that was built for political prisoners under Franco. Life in jail was just as violent as on the streets, full of death and sadness. He passed his hours looking at the sky through the bars in his window, reading Papillon by Henri Charrière and fantasizing about escaping.

While Jambri was in prison, his father developed cancer and deteriorated rapidly. His mother and sisters told him his father was going to die. The prison administrator said he could visit his father in the hospital, but he could only go if he went handcuffed and accompanied by two policemen. Jambri could bear being in jail, but he could not face being dragged to his father’s deathbed in handcuffs. His father had suffered enough watching him become an addict, and he decided that either he went without handcuffs or not at all. Jambri did not see or say goodbye to his father before he died. The prison administrators told him they would let him go to the funeral, but he would have to go handcuffed and with guards. Jambri refused. When he walked out of the prison gates, he was going to go as a free man — without handcuffs and without guards.

After Jambri got out of jail, however, his problems with the law did not end. He was indicted with three other members of his gang for another bank robbery. The prosecutor asked for a sentence of eleven years for his crime. Jambri did not want to return to jail where he believed he would probably die. You could find more drugs and fights inside of the Carabanchel jail than outside. He went into the courtroom afraid and lonely, but the prosecutor told him a fire in the offices had destroyed all the paperwork. They had no choice but to drop the charges. Jambri could not understand how it could have happened, but he was not about to argue. He thought that God, fate, someone was


looking after him, and in turn decided to turn his life around. He stopped the bank robberies but could not kick the drugs.

When my father and Lindsay went around the neighborhood to evangelize and talk to the addicts they attracted attention — Raúl was with them. They went to the Simancas Metro stop by Parque del Paraíso where a crowd of yonquis would buy and sell drugs. Raúl knew most of them already, and when he spoke to them they could tell he looked different. He was not there to buy a gram of heroin. Some of the addicts were intrigued by what my father had to say, others were indifferent, some were downright hostile, throwing stones and empty beer bottles. They called him priest and facha, and no one liked fascists. Jambri was one of the men who yelled at my father and called him guiri and told him to go back to his own country. That was where guiris belonged.

The addicts usually left after a while to go buy and sell heroin somewhere else, undisturbed by the street preaching. But Jambri never walked away and he stayed and listened to what my father had to say. He did not like my father at first, but he knew he had to change. He was tired of going in and out of jail, living on the streets and seeing friends die of overdoses. Jambri came to a Friday night meeting at Betel and finally asked if he could enter the center. He came into the program and lived with Raúl and the men out at the farm in Barajas near the airport.

Jambri (left) on the farm

Jambri gave up heroin and drinking and smoking, but he had been a smoker since he was thirteen. When no one was around in the field behind the farmhouse, he made cigarettes with pages from a Bible. The thin paper was ideal for rolling and he crushed dried leaves to use instead of tobacco. When he smoked the cigarettes he had concocted, his lungs burned. He just wanted to spit and wash his mouth of the taste. It was almost as stupid as when prisoners in Carabanchel scraped the white plaster from the walls of their


jail cell and snorted it, thinking somehow it would help them through withdrawal. The experience disgusted him; he knew that if he was going to change, he was going to have to abandon all of his old habits. Sitting alone and feeling miserable, he decided that he wanted the same relationship with God as Raúl, and he prayed that from then on God would be with him and guide him.

Jambri worked diligently in the Betel’s second hand stores, volunteering for work around the farm and trying to help Raúl run the house. He encouraged the new addicts when they were going through withdrawal and threw himself into his daily work. On weekends, he volunteered to visit Carabanchel prison and talk to his old friends. He invited them to come to Betel when they got out. My father, Lindsay and Raúl were happy with Jambri’s attitude and work and gave him the responsibility for running the rastro on Calle Esfinge. In less than a year he had gone from stealing and shooting up to managing a legitimate business.

It was during the workday that I realized how the process of rehabilitation was not a formal series of steps. The addicts were like stones that a river drags out to sea. Living and working together they bumped up against each other for hundreds of miles on their way to the shore, all the while wearing away the edges.

Jambri had been good to me that summer and given me many books, and I wanted to give him a gift. Some American missionaries had given me a green T-shirt that read in English: “If you meet me and forget me you have missed nothing, but if you meet Jesus and forget him you have lost everything.” It was not much of a gift, but I folded the T-shirt, put it in a plastic bag and rode my bike to the rastro to say goodbye before school resumed again.

I gave him the shirt and translated the writing, impressed by my own ability to read in two languages.

He began to read the English with his Spanish accent, “If you forget me…” He coughed and then stopped. He stared at me in disbelief, “I can’t forget you, Jonathan. I can’t even get rid of you. You just keep coming back.”

Besides running the rastro on Calle Esfinge Jambri ran one of our second men’s houses out in Loeches, a small town not far from Alcalá, the birthplace of Cervantes. It is risky having yonquis who have been off heroin for one year supervise recovering addicts who have been off heroin for a few weeks. What guarantee was there that the new guy would not sneak away from his supervisor to shoot up or, worse yet, how would you know if the supervisor was shooting up with the new men? For all my father and Lindsay knew, the recovering addicts could have all been drinking, smoking and covering up for each other, but that was how Betel worked.

My parents were pleased when the process worked, and when it did not all they could do was laugh so as not to cry. Juan Carlos, one of the first addicts in the program, came from Vicálvaro, a town on the other side of the Gypsy camp. He had entered the center because he said he did not want to die on the streets. Friends of his had died asleep in abandoned cars because some Gypsy had decided to torch it for fun. He told me that if he was going to die, he wanted to die with a bed and clean sheets and a roof.


Juan Carlos dropped out of school in his teens, but he read Cervantes and St. John of the Cross when he was not high. He was smart but absentminded. One day he drove a van to the house in Loeches. The house was nestled on top of a cliff overlooking Alcalá. He parked the van without putting on the parking brake, and it rolled off the edge. When the men in the program found it at the bottom of the hill, the van was upside down and crushed, but the wheels were still spinning and the engine running. It was spectacular, and every visit to Loeches required a visit to the van at the bottom of the descent. Juan Carlos’s younger brother Oscar also entered the center. His parents decided to hire Betel to repaint their house in order to support the center. Oscar was assigned to the job with another guy in the program. During a lunch break, the addict stole their TV and video and left Oscar’s house unpainted. That was how it went sometimes, but still I could not believe it did not happen more often.

Betel supported itself almost entirely from businesses it operated. An experienced accountant or business manager would have been horrified at how rudimentary the bookkeeping systems were. Not a single addict understood accrual accounting, gross margins, operating profit, inventory turns, or other standard terms by which business managers live. Like Raúl and Jambri, they had left school when they were thirteen or fourteen to work as manual laborers. But if none of them had MBAs, they intuitively understood cash flow: the center’s businesses needed to have more cash in the evening than they had in the morning. My father knew accounting and economics, but that was not what made the center thrive. As he said, he operated by faith and not by figures.

Betel may not have been the most efficient business, but efficiency was not the point. Jambri said he had never been happier in his life than when he was restoring furniture. I loved watching him work. When the used or abandoned furniture entered through the doorway, the pieces came in with scrapes and dents, disfigured by years of neglect and abuse. The former owners had been unkind to the dresser drawers, wardrobes and desks. The handles were broken or missing, the mirrors cracked and shattered, and often layers of faded paint covered what had once been solid oak. No one wanted the battered and worn pieces, and the donors were more than happy for Betel to take them off their hands. Seeing the furniture come from the vans into the repair shop, it was difficult to imagine what they would have looked like if they had been treated with love and care.

Jambri and the men in the rastro took the furniture apart piece by piece, revealing stains in the wood, scratches, and peeling off layers of old coats of paint. Then they doused the pieces with harsh chemicals that ate away at the ugly exterior. The men sanded for hours, smoothing the uneven surfaces and exposing the grain of the wood until they could see the patterns that had been hidden.

When the original piece had been laid bare, the guys slowly applied coat after coat of varnish until the wardrobe or dressers shone again as they had when they were first made. A box full of bright, polished brass handles sat in the back of the repair shop, and the men found the most appropriate ones to screw on the drawers. They took out shards of glass, measured the size of the mirrors and replaced them so they could at last see their own reflection, undisturbed by cracks.


Elliott

7: OUR OWN LITTLE UNIVERSE

NUESTRO PROPIO PEQUEÑO UNIVERSO

I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books

than a king who did not love reading.

Thomas Macaulay

My father was the autocrat of our breakfast table. Every morning before school we had a long devotional that, beyond providing spiritual edification, gave us patience and long-suffering, which we suspected was one of the desired results. He insisted on silence and attention when he read. We sat around the table, buttering our toast and drinking our orange juice as quietly as possible to avoid the clinking of knives on plates or clanking of glasses on the tabletop. We listened while he shared light readings from texts such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, Thomas a Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, Saint Augustine’s The City of God, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and books from the New Testament. He would


enlighten us as to the difference between Koine and classical Septuagint Greek, and elucidate tenses and moods in the Apostle Paul’s writings. He enjoyed explaining things and relished using long words on little children. Not only did he read to us, but he frequently commented upon the passages, providing marginalia and footnotes to the text. This practice was his “pontification,” as he liked to call it.

The readings were not confined to the morning, and more often than not, my father read to us after dinner as well. He never wore a watch and kept few clocks in the house so as to avoid the tyranny of being rushed for anything. This never helped us argue that the pontifications were too long.

When the gatherings were lengthy — even by the standards of your average pontification — we feigned tiredness in the hopes of cutting them short. The stunt was a mild sign of protest at the length of the proceedings, and my mother always caught on. Our heads drooped slowly, our hair almost touching the remains of dinner.

“Jonathan, you’re getting spaghetti sauce on your hair,” my father said interrupting his reading. “Don’t you want to hear what Thomas Merton has to say to us tonight?”

“Sorry, so sorry, Dad. I’m just tired.”

“Elliott, it’s probably enough for this evening... I think it’s everyone’s bedtime.” My mother rarely spoke at the dinner table, preferring to conserve her words as a marksman manages his ammunition. She took aim at my father’s pontifications, never going for the kill but casually grazing him. “Even I’m falling asleep...”

“As Joseph’s brothers said before they tore his colored coat and sold him into slavery, ‘Behold, the dreamer cometh,’” my father would plaintively say as he recited Genesis. “One day, you will thank me for this reading.”

“Yes, one day....” she would say. But until that day, we were grateful for a mother who with the least effort could curb my father’s devotional excesses.

Her interruptions only made him like her more. He would get up from his chair and tell us, “Look away boys, look away,” before he would kiss her. And we would scurry to our rooms. They were an odd couple, but my father needed her like Don Quijote needed Sancho Panza.

The readings, though, were a doorway to a different world. Through them, our parents read biographies of William Wilberforce, C.S. Lewis, and C.T. Studd and exhorted us to be great men. “Grandpa Louis Tepper didn’t take the train to Odessa and the boat to Ellis Island for nothing,” my father told us. Somehow it always came back to the train, the boat and the Statue of Liberty. We were Teppers, and he told us that if we strived and worked hard, one day we would be like the Booths who founded the Salvation Army; we were going to reach poor people in slums, bars, jails, brothels, and factories like the Booths did in East London. I wondered: why did he always have such strange dreams that I found faintly ridiculous in their grandiosity?

Christianity was our religion, but reading had a liturgy all its own in our house. After dinner and before we were allowed to leave the table, my parents read books to us. Reading to touch the past is a constant in human history, as my father pointed out to us when he read from Tablet I of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the earliest piece of literature known to man. The writer harks back to writings of an even more ancient time:


Take hold of the threshold stone – it dates from ancient times!

…

Take and read out from the lapis lazuli tablet

How Gilgamesh went through every hardship.

As they read from Gilgamesh, I felt the lapis lazuli tablet with my fingertips and saw the ziggurats of Uruk, and I wondered: who wrote the first story ever told on those tablets? Did Gilgamesh’s parents read even older stories to him?

In Mexico the academic environment had suited my father, and he read and wrote at all times. Our Protestant house was devoid of religious iconography, but books we had in abundance. Whenever he found something in one of the books he enjoyed, he read it aloud to us at the dinner table and before he tucked us in at night. Most of it was entirely lost on us, as David had just entered first grade and Peter and I had not even started school yet. Day after day in San Blas my parents laid the books on the table, fitting them tightly together like bricks with no other mortar than curiosity, laying one upon the other until they had assembled them into a bridge leading us to places we had never even dreamed of visiting.

We read The Song of Roland, the 11th century French chanson, The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, Robinson Crusoe, and others. Every night we were anxious to take our baths, brush our teeth and hear what might happen to Roland and Oliver, Robinson and Friday, or Lucy and Tumnus. Not all books were created equal; we read The Chronicles of Narnia endlessly until the sharp corners of the pages became rounded and fuzzy. The stories were transparent Biblical allegories, and being a Narnian was like being a Christian, but the theology did not spoil the story. The world that Lewis had created was as real as the one that surrounded us. When Lucy entered into Narnia, we could all feel the thrill of pressing through the warm fur coats and emerging in soft cold snow on the other side of the wardrobe.

We had a keen empathy for the characters, and all cried when my father read from The Song of Roland about Ganelon’s betrayal of Roland and Oliver and their deaths at the hands of the Saracens. I knew Roland and dreamed we had been in battle together before he died. If he had had me at his side, I would have protected him. Roland’s sadness when he saw Oliver’s dead body overwhelmed us:

The count Roland, when dead he saw his peers,

And Oliver, he held so very dear,

Grew tender, and began to shed a tear;

Out of his face the color disappeared;

No longer could he stand, for so much grief,

Will he or nil, he swooned upon the field.


Even though I had never known anyone who had died, a strange softness in the chest and a heaviness that I had never felt before came over me. I could not fully understand Roland’s sadness at seeing his friend Oliver die, but I felt it acutely.

As a boy, my father never had his Bar Mitzvah because he spent all his time wrestling, and I knew he regretted it. He only went to synagogue for the high holy days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but he had great nostalgia for the synagogue. My father said you could not be a man in Judaism until the Rabbi called you up as a boy to read the Torah in front of others and lead part of the prayers. It was reading that made you an adult. He said my brothers and I should aspire to Torah lishmah, the highest form of learning – learning for learning’s sake. But we were completely ignorant. I had never set foot in a synagogue or met any Jews besides my father’s relatives. When I asked if we were Jewish too, he would reply, “Jewish enough to be killed in a pogrom.” That was enough for me. Even if it meant you were targeted, it was good to be part of God’s chosen people.

In Mexico we had a three-story tree house in our avocado tree with a long pole that we could use to slide down from the very top to the ground, whereas in Spain the small fort my father built on the front balcony was only four feet wide. It got crowded if David, Peter, Timothy and I tried to get in at the same time. It was too small to be a Swiss Family Robinson fort, so inside it we drew control panels, gauges and navigation charts with crayons and turned it into a spaceship. At night my father turned our rooms into a planetarium by using a small light bulb and a toilet roll peppered with holes. He rotated it so we could have our own little universe with the Ursa Major, Perseus, and Orion swirling about the ceiling. When the lessons on the galaxies and constellations were over, he tucked us in, prayed and told how proud he was to have us as his children. It is what he always said, even when it grew wearisome through relentless repetition.

My father taught us compulsively. It did not matter if it was pulling encyclopedias off the shelf and explaining how Chompollion used the Rosetta Stone to crack Egyptian hieroglyphs or teaching us Greco-Roman wrestling. He derived as much pleasure teaching as we did learning, as long as it was not during a pontification, and I believed that no subject was so complicated that he could not explain it with a fountain pen and a few drawings. But he said we did not even need him. As long as we had books, there was nothing we could not teach ourselves.

When it was my father’s turn to scrub the pots and pans, we sat around with him waiting for the news coming in on his short wave radio over the crackle of the ionosphere. Then a voice with impeccable enunciation began, “This is the BBC broadcasting from Bush House, London…” In our little kitchen in San Blas my father taught us to follow events around the world and learn who foreign leaders were. Gorbachev and Reagan met at Reykjavík, Iceland, even though I could remember President Regan calling the Soviet Union “The Evil Empire” three years earlier. I figured memorizing world leaders was what grown ups did instead of learning the names of fútbol players by heart.

As children we thought my father was invincible. In college at parties he would drunkenly challenge people to acrobatic tricks; he could climb three flights of stairs balanced on his hands and taught us all to do handstands and flips at home. When he taught us how to wrestle, we ganged up on him all at once. We climbed over him and


clung to his legs and arms like birds perched on a scarecrow. But with utmost ease he took us one by one and pinned us together on the living room carpet. With one arm he could hold me upside down by my ankle, and with the other he could hold David, Peter, and Timothy at bay. We wriggled and squirmed, getting rug burns on our elbows and knees, but he was quicker and stronger than all four of us put together.

When my father was around, I had the feeling nothing could go wrong. As a child I was afraid to enter the Gypsy camp alone. Gypsies were too distant, too frightening to approach. None of the kids in the neighborhood knew any, as far as I could tell, so they were never real people, just characters people skirted on the streets. One day our bikes were stolen, so we accompanied my father when he ventured into the camp. Everyone feared them, which I strangely admired.

We wandered from hut to hut, until my father found the Gypsy family that had them. Two sons were driving our bikes around in circles kicking up dust in front of the family shack. The children were barefoot and in tattered clothes. They probably did not go to school. The patriarch sat on a small wooden carton for vegetables, smoking and watching people go by. He was a sight to behold, seated with his back perfectly erect, wearing a vest, creased trousers, a clean shirt and a hat.

“Those are our bikes,” my father said.

“Go home! Leave us alone,” a woman yelled. She was carrying a baby in a saffron-colored sling around her shoulders.

“Shut up, woman! I’ll speak.”

The patriarch spoke Spanish in a distinct accent. The father claimed his children had found them abandoned in a field and deserved a reward, a finder’s fee, for their good work. My father refused to pay, and argued with the man. I thought that we might have a fight on our hands, but that would have been out of character for my father. He appealed to the Gypsy’s conscience and sense of right and wrong. I was not sure how far that would get us. After all, they had taken my bike. But my father, never threatening or raising his voice, got the bikes back; maybe it was just the work of one father talking to another.

As we walked away from the Gypsy camp, he ordered us, “Never go in there without me.” He might as well have told us not to stick our fingers in a socket or chew on glass.

The streets of San Blas near the apartment blocks were busy. Everyone went around on foot. Mothers went every morning to the corner panaderías and dragged carts behind them full of groceries and the long, protruding bars of bread that everyone simply called pistolas, guns. The older women hovered around the counters, talking about menopause, goiter, lumbago, and other mysterious ailments. My mother spoke excellent Spanish, but her American accent marked her as foreign, and it grated. Cashiers grinned when she spoke and preferred to talk to me, as if my mother were somehow deficient. My hair was white blond, but I spoke like a chaval from the neighborhood.

The main shopping area was the Galerías de San Blas, which was right next to the Metro stop. It had a cavernous basement full of tightly packed stalls. Like the women in the neighborhood, my mother shopped at the panaderías for bread and milk and down to


the galerías to buy steaks, fish that I loved to touch and slide my fingertips over, and wheels of queso manchego. I followed behind her and learned to navigate through the sharp, enticing odors that rose from each stall as I dragged the small shopping cart all Spanish mothers carried with them. She would pay the butcher or baker and would hand me whatever she bought. In the butcher’s store rabbit carcasses hung upside down and pigs heads with their sickly pink skin and closed eyes made me wish I had never seen them. The bright red blood that oozed from the meat reminded me that everything I ate was once alive. I would have been happier not knowing anything about what my mother bought. My own sensitivity embarrassed me, and I kept it to myself.

One day I volunteered to help her carry her cart, and my father came along as well. He was lean and strong. The lady behind the counter laughed and told my parents, “It is good thing you two look like you get along. I’m sure that if he beat you, there wouldn’t be much left of you.”

As we left the store, I tugged at my mother’s arm and asked, “What was she talking about? Dad never beats you.”

“No, it was a bad joke. But she must have clients whose husbands beat them. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have mentioned it.”

I had never seen my father hit my mother, and at that young age I could not imagine a mom and dad fighting at all.


8: THE SHAME OF FEELING ASHAMED

LA VERGÜENZA DE SENTIRSE AVERGONZADO

Everything gave way in his mind instantly to one desire: that was to get close to the prince, and have a good, devouring look at him.

Mark Twain, The Prince and the Pauper

At precisely nine-thirty, as soon as the second hand marked the change of minute, we stood at attention by our little desks. We were dressed in uniforms of blue sweaters, white shirts, and grey pants. Evangelical Christian Academy was thoroughly Christian and almost all the kids were preachers’ kids, the sons and daughters of missionaries. Most classes did not have more than five or six students, so many grades shared the same room. The sons and daughters of missionaries from England, Canada, and the Netherlands were present, but it did not matter. Every morning our day began with the Pledge of Allegiance. We all put our hands on our hearts and stared at a small Stars and Stripes on the teacher’s desk and recited our oath of loyalty to a country to which many kids did not belong and which others had rarely visited. We stood at attention, reciting by rote:

I pledge allegiance to the Flag

Of the United States of America,

And to the Republic for which it stands:

One Nation under God, indivisible,

With Liberty and Justice for all.

The morning Pledge of Allegiance was strange, almost alien, to me. In the neighborhood we never saw the red and yellow flag or heard the national anthem because for many people it still had the faint whiff of fascism. When General Franco died almost all the street names changed and even the old coins with his face engraved on them were taken out of circulation. The only time I heard his name growing up was when children in the streets sang dirty limericks about him as they parodied the national anthem. At school we took social studies classes that reverently taught us about the Boston Tea Party, the Gettysburg Address, and D Day. Even though we were in Madrid, we started every morning as if in small town America.

As soon as the Pledge was finished, we had Bible classes and memorized verses. The Bible classes were boring because I knew everything already from our breakfast and dinner devotionals. David and Goliath were easy, but I thought it unnecessary to hear


again about Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. In my mind, any child who was not an idiot should know they were in the book of Job.

While the class held its lessons, I stealthily took out my A Child’s History of the World by V.M. Hillyer and hid it under my Bible. With my crayons I colored in the faces of Xerxes, Henry VIII and a few of his prettier wives, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The class became less oppressive, and my mind took flight. As I drew, I asked myself: if I became President one day, would a young boy color my face with a crayon on hundred years later? I trusted that with a little luck, he would make me look good and stay inside the lines.

As the lesson drew on, I imagined I was Jambri and remembered his stories. I tore a sliver of paper from my notebook and wrote a secret message. I rolled it up inserted it into my hollowed-out pen, which I had disassembled, as if I were inside an educational prison. While the teacher wrote on the blackboard, I passed the note on to Ely.

Even though Ely went to a missionary school, his father was a successful Spanish businessman who had studied in the United States and – as was unusual in Spain – a Protestant. By third grade, Ely and I were buddies and called each other often to work on our homework or just talk about fútbol. And one day he finally invited me to his home for the weekend to play with him and his older brother Patrick.

Ely’s family lived in Santo Domingo, a gated neighborhood on the outskirts of Madrid. Like American country clubs, Santo Domingo had tennis courts and swimming pools for its residents, but this did not keep most of the large three-story homes from having pools and tennis courts of their own. Astutely, I figured it was so that when kids from the neighborhood peed in the public pool, Ely could always go back to his own.

We passed the guards’ house on the road leading in to the community. I rolled the window down and, like an excited dog, stuck my head out to get a better view of everything. The air smelled of freshly cut grass and the trees provided coolness and shade. Ivy climbed all over the walls. Young people in Santo Domingo did not sit on benches drinking from oversized beer bottles and spitting out sunflower seeds on the pavement. People drove new BMWs and Mercedes and they parked them unlocked in the streets. Everything was tidy; garbage did not mar the open fields.

Ely’s home was like his neighborhood: impeccably clean and beautiful. It was impeccable because he had a Guatemalan maid. I had read about maids, but I had never met one before. San Blas had none. Almost all mothers in our church had calloused hands and gnarled knuckles from scrubbing their own homes and the portales in their buildings.

As I dropped my bags off in Ely’s room, his brother Patrick peeked through the door. He was holding a racket. “I’m going to play tennis. Don’t get your hopes up. I’ll dunk you in the pool as soon as I’m back.”

“Do you play tennis?” Ely asked.

“Of course,” I said, “it’s just that I prefer fútbol.” I did not even know the rules of tennis. My father played when he was growing up on Long Island, but I had never asked him to take me to the sports center in San Blas that had the only two courts in the entire neighborhood.

“No problem. Let’s get into the pool.”


In San Blas few kids paid the admission price to go to the pool; many Gypsy kids scaled the barbed wire in their underwear. All the kids wanted to swim, and none wanted to play tennis. If you could not kick the ball around, the game was not worth playing.

In Santo Domingo children had no need to climb fences to swim. We swam and played for hours in Ely’s pool. And when we had enough of swimming, we raided his father’s video library that had more films than I could count. His massive color Sony TV was so much sharper and clearer than our small black and white one. I felt a powerful hunger for things – big, beautiful things – that I had never felt before.

At Ely’s home I enjoyed myself, but around his parents I was nervous, afraid that I might say or do something stupid. They were kind and hospitable, but different. They did not dress like my parents. When Ely’s father came home from work in his BMW, he wore suits that fit him perfectly. Men in San Blas wore coveralls, not suits to work. My father only wore a suit when he went to church in the United States; he said wearing one for Betel’s Sunday morning services would make people feel uncomfortable and it was ungentlemanly to make people feel out of place. Whenever he went out on the streets of San Blas, he wore jeans, a short sleeve shirt and a pair of scuffed leather shoes. I assumed Ely’s mother dressed well because she did not have to worry about getting flour or dirt on her clothes. She had a maid for the cooking and cleaning, who remained impassive and silent no matter how much noise we made around her. What made me feel odd, though, was not the way they dressed, but the way they talked, the questions they asked.

While we were eating some bocadillos at lunch Ely piped up and told his mother, “Jonathan’s parents work with yonquis and his friends shoot up. He says he’s seen them do it.” He put his hand to his elbow and acted as if he were doing it himself. “He says that’s how they do it,” he told her as he giggled.

I fidgeted in my chair and held the cushion tightly with both hands. I just wished that Ely would shut up and stop trying to embarrass me. I looked at him and nodded my head for him to stop, but it was too late.

“Is that so? Ely tells me your parents have started a center for heroin addicts. That is fascinating.”

I tried to finish eating a bit of my sandwich and washed it down quickly with some water. “It’s not bad,” was all I could think of saying. What a dumb answer, I thought.

“What’s it like? Is it dangerous to work with them?” She was genuinely interested.

“No, we help them and they like us.” I cleared away crumbs from the bocadillo and played with them without looking at her.

“How admirable to live in San Blas. I’ve never been, but I hear it has a lot of drugs. How did your parents decide to live there?”

“God told them to do it.” We were missionaries, after all. That was the sort of thing God did to missionaries.

“Is it difficult for you and brothers to grow up there?”

“Not really. We like it,” I said.

“Well, I think your parents are brave to live and work in a neighborhood like San Blas.” I knew she meant it as a compliment, but it grated.


When I returned to the neighborhood, nothing looked the same. I was acutely aware that not only was San Blas not as beautiful as Santo Domingo, it was not beautiful at all. For the first time I was ashamed of where I lived. I wanted to invite Ely to my home, but was too embarrassed. Why did we live near a dump? Why did my parents not find a regular job like other people? My father was highly educated and knew economics and finance; he could make some money. We could have had a pool.

I wanted to ask why we were missionaries in San Blas, but I knew my parents would only be hurt by this question. And I felt the shame of feeling ashamed.

San Blas was not the nicest neighborhood, but my consolation was that I always had the most interesting stories to tell. I regaled Ely with Jambri’s tales of robbing banks and escaping from the police. And I told him about addicts from the Basque country who knew terrorists. But my favorite was when Javi, an addict I often played with after church, killed a camello. Javi insisted it was an accident and that he only meant to threaten the dealer in a fight, but when the drug dealer lunged at him, the knife stabbed him in the chest. My family was traveling at the time, so Lindsay and Myk hid him in our house. They convinced him to hand himself in directly to a judge, because the police always beat him up. Lindsay and Myk covered him in a blanket and drove him to a courthouse where he was arrested. He was the first but not the last murderer I had known. With stories like that, Ely loved hearing about San Blas.

In time I built up the courage and invited Ely to spend a weekend with my family. He wanted to see the center and the yonquis I had told him about. David, Peter and I initiated him into collecting plaster of Paris from the dump behind our house and using it to leave white scrawlings on the sidewalks or drawing a fierce addict like the kind I saw by the Metro stop – Mohawk, stitches on his shaved head, and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. We raced around and played fútbol in the streets, occasionally setting off the alarms on the newer SEATs or Citroëns if our stray balls. When that happened, we grabbed our ball and hid until there were no Moors on the coast, as the Spaniards said when all was clear.

David, Peter, Timothy and I took Ely to buy candy from a frutos secos store on the ground level of an eight story apartment block near our house. They had every type of sunflower seeds, dried snacks, potato chips and drinks sitting on the counters. Ely and I entered the store to buy a piece of chewing gum, and as I was taking out my coins to pay for it, a Gypsy boy entered. He was my age and had short brown hair and brown eyes so dark they were almost black. His clothes were dirty, and his jeans had holes in them. He put his money on the counter and told the young Spanish woman, “I want a lollipop.”

She looked at him with contempt. “You all come in here to rob when I’m not looking.”

“You all? I haven’t come in here before.”

“You Gypsies are all the same. You say you want a lollipop, but when I turn around, you run off with my candy on my counter. I don’t want to sell to you.”

“Here is my five pesetas. That’s enough to buy a lollipop. I want my lollipop!”

“Out! Now! You’re not getting one.”


“I’ve got the money. Give me my lollipop!” he yelled. I could see his upper lip quiver.

“Out!” she screamed, as she pointed to the door, leaning over the counter to look down at him.

He was angry but on the verge of tears. He grabbed a lollipop and a piece of gum and ran away, leaving his five pesetas on the counter. She ran to the door, “Never come back!”

I waited to pay for my gum, and when the girl returned I asked her why she would not sell to him if he had the money. “You saw it. He stole the gum. They’re all the same. They’re all thieves,” she replied.

I could not help but feel anger mingled with pity. Gypsies could not be trusted because some of them were thieves, yet they were thieves because no one would sell them even a little piece of candy. No one in the neighborhood knew any Gypsies, as far as I could tell, so they were never real people, just distant characters to be skirted on the streets. They were too frightening to approach.

San Blas was definitely not Santo Domingo. During Ely’s visit, my parents made us go with them to the bar Torre del Campo for an outreach with Raúl, Lindsay and the men in the center. Ely and I wandered away from the group so I could show him the neighborhood.

When I got back, Peter and David were excited and they spoke at the same time, interrupting each other. “The Guardia Civil were here! You should have seen it,” David blurted out.

“No, no, let me tell him, we were playing and...” Peter rambled excitedly, “ – zoom! – Guardia Civil cars came that way on the pavement. Right up here, right up on the sidewalk by the bar.”

No one messed with the paramilitary police. In Spain the Policía Municipal who dressed in navy blue and white were harmless. The Policía Nacional, the national cops, dressed in dark shades of brown, but we did not see them often. Yonquis were not afraid of them. The Guardia Civil were not ordinary police, and even the toughest men feared them. And I admired them for that and was jealous of their large guns, which they stroked when they stood on the lookout. When they showed up, they came with machine guns and dressed in drab olive green like soldiers and walked around with perfectly polished shoes and tri-cornered patent leather hats. I would have given all the candy I could buy to have seen it.

“And then, then they came out with their machine guns and then they grabbed a woman in the bar...”

“Why’d they grab her?”

“I dunno. She was screaming and kicking and insulting them and then they carried her over their shoulders and threw her in the back of the car, and then, and then they...”

“And they drove away. Just like that,” David concluded.

David and Peter did not know who she was, why they wanted her or what was going on, but they had watched it all and told me every detail over and over. Kids in the


neighborhood lived for this kind of excitement; I was disappointed I had missed all the action by wandering off. But secretly, though, I was relieved that Ely had not witnessed it. I was convinced his mother would never let him visit us again if he went home and said that he had seen a drug bust in San Blas.

I had seen Ely’s neighborhood, and he had seen mine. I do not know if he ever told his parents much about his visit, but after that weekend, when we got together, I went to Santo Domingo.


Rebuilding Mejorada

9: REBUILDING THE RUINS

RECONSTRUYENDO LAS RUINAS

If you give your food to the hungry

And satisfy the needs of the wretched....

You will be called the rebuilder of broken walls

The restorer of houses in ruins.

Isaiah 58 : 10, 12

My father loved ruins. Landlords always offered a lower rent for a derelict property than for a new one, and few landlords wanted to rent a refurbished place to a bunch of yonquis. Betel did not have a large budget, but it had the free labor of tradesmen. If anything needed fixing or rebuilding, the men could do it for free. Ruins were easier and cheaper to rent, but my father loved them because he could see in them what others could not.

Betel’s first church and office were in a storefront on Carretera de Vicálvaro, and the main room could fit a hundred people at most for a service. Sunday mornings it was


standing room only and people poured out into the hallway and out the front door. The office was so small it could fit only one desk. When Ramón or Raúl taught us Sunday school lessons, they had to teach us in the kitchen in the back, but that was inciting misbehavior. Peter and I raided the refrigerators for yoghurts, ham, and cheese when we were bored.

Raúl and my father scoured the neighborhood for properties. My father wanted to rent Cine Argentina, the only movie theatre San Blas ever had. It had recently closed; the property was in disrepair, boarded up. The yonquis from Torre del Campo gathered around the walls and shot up there. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the place, and my father thought the familiarity would be good advertising for the church. But the owner did not want to rent it to a group of ex-heroin addicts. It was hard to see how we could have made Cine Argentina any worse.

They looked at abandoned nightclubs, warehouses, factories – anything with a lot of room. Finally, he and Raúl found an old dance hall on Calle Raza, right off Calle Alcalá, one of the busiest streets on the north side of the neighborhood. The place had not been used in over twenty years. Half of the ceiling had caved in, the paint on the walls had peeled off, revealing layers of green and blue, and the bricks and plaster had been damaged by water leaks. The courtyard in the entranceway had been overrun by weeds that sprouted through the tiles. Yet somehow my father knew it was Betel’s next headquarters, and he harassed the landlord until Betel got it. The building was much bigger than the old church, but the rent was ten times as much. Raúl was not sure that Betel had the money, but he did not argue. As he often said to me about my father, “¡¡Este hombre es demasiado!! Pero aprendo cantidad. This man is too much! But I’m learning a ton.”

I had never seen my father so excited. He paced about, measuring rooms and making mental notes. “The offices will be here. We’ll put up walls of plaster and hang new ceilings. And over there,” he said as he pointed, “we’ll have a reception area with sofas. We’ll fix the walls, treat them for water damage and put pinewood sideboards on.” He looked up, his eyes darting left and right, as he pictured in his own mind how the ceilings and walls would look one day. “We will have a big, beautiful church,” he said, not as if he were boasting; it was like he was letting us in on the grand opening before anyone else.

As soon as my father signed the contract and got keys to enter the building, Betel’s vans pulled up to rebuild the place and everyone went to work. The men poured out of the back doors armed with paint buckets, rollers, ladders, hammers, saws, picks, and shovels. Raúl, Jambri, Luis Pino, and Juan Carlos attacked en masse and tore up the place. If you put your fingers to the bricks, they turned to dust. The men smashed the bricks and plaster, and Raúl and the plumbers put in new pipes and sealed all the leaks. Peter and I followed behind, collecting the discarded rubble.

Out on the street, men mounted ladders and prepared the façade. They were going to put up Betel’s trademark blue dove and broken needle, but my father intervened. The broken needle had to go: my father said they did not want to scare the neighbors.

The rebuilding took weeks, but on the last day of work, after we had swept and mopped the building, it looked exactly as my father had said it would. The roof was fixed. The courtyards were clear of weeds, and the men had put potted plants around the steps. The entranceway had sofas that we took from Jambri’s rastro. The walls were all covered in


pine wood siding. The church hall shone brightly as distinct rays of sunshine streamed through the narrow windows near the ceiling. And my father was as happy as he had been when he saw it in his mind’s eye for the first time.

I wondered whether my father was addicted to ruins – the worse the ruin the bigger the challenge. The landlord of the farmhouse in Barajas near the airport liked the way we had fixed it up, and he gave us a month to leave so he could sell it. Francisco, an addict from San Blas, said he knew of an abandoned house in the town of Mejorada del Campo that he had used as a shooting gallery. The place he took us to was a ten minute drive from San Blas, and it was a disaster. It had been a warehouse in the Spanish Civil War and had been unused for decades. To reach the house you had to drive through winding uneven dirt roads. Our car lurched from side to side as it hugged the ruts in the road. The house sat at the bottom of a hill right by a small creek. There must have been a factory upstream because the banks of the water bubbled with white soap suds. The main building had three walls about twenty-five feet high and no roof. Next to it were living quarters with five rooms. They had no windows, and the doors hung askew, twisted off the hinges. Stray dogs had obviously been squatting and the rooms smelled of urine. I took shallow breaths, trying not to fill my lungs completely.

“This is ideal,” my father said.

“You can’t make the guys stay there,” I protested. I did not like visiting, and I could not imagine it would be any better to live there.

“It’ll be beautiful.”

“Not even the dogs stay,” I said as I glanced over at my brothers who were equally astonished.

“Just trust me.”

When we went to the church at Calle Raza for the first time, if I strained my imagination, it was possible to see what he saw. But at the farm I could not see a house and could only see decay no matter how hard I tried.

Raúl, Jambri, and the thirty five men moved all their things from the old farmhouse in Barajas to the ruin in Mejorada. They brought in windows and repaired the roofs in the living quarters. They shoveled out the dog excrements and swept the rooms clean. The place had no running water, but they fixed the water storage tank that had not been used in years. Every morning they brought in water and doused the floors and swept them to get rid of the accretions of dirt. I worked with Jambri and the painters, cementing holes in the walls and whitewashing them with lime when the cement had dried. The odors burned my eyes.

We worked from early in the morning until late at night fixing and cleaning the place. Without a kitchen, the men prepared simple food in the open air. For dinner we ate pan tomaca, bread smothered in olive oil and vinegar with crushed tomatoes and garlic, and strips of chorizo that had been roasted over an open fire.


Lunch at Mejorada

My father and the brick masons built the fourth wall and when they had finished, he helped them put a roof on it. I wanted to be working with my father and Raúl, but David, Peter, Timothy and I stood below, watching my father dangling from the scaffolding. Day after day we returned to the ruins to work on them. With small hammers we tried to break the large boulders; we only managed to chip off small pieces, but my father and Raúl climbed down and picked up a sledgehammer and broke them effortlessly. My brothers and I then carted the chunks of stone away. We were not much help, but we were helping my father do what he loved most, which was to fix broken things.

The house was remote and Raúl led the men in an ascetic existence. During the day they may have worked at their jobs in Madrid, but at night, they communed with nature. You could hear the electricity on the pylons crackle. The lines were held high by what looked like giant iron men with outstretched arms. Yet below, the house was not connected to the grid. In the evenings the electric generators whirred loudly and erratically, and the light bulbs flickered fitfully, attracting moths and swarms of mosquitoes that buzzed in sympathy. When the fifty men sang in the morning devotionals, they raised their voices in unison and the nearby hills echoed in response.

The only visitors who came to the isolated community were the police. They drove up in many cars with ordenes de busca y captura, search and arrest warrants, and with their hands on their holsters, ready to take one of our men into custody. Almost everyone had been in so many armed robberies they had lost track of what crimes they were wanted for. Sometimes my father was able to convince the judge to allow the men to serve their sentences in Betel while they continued their rehabilitation process, but other times the center could do nothing for them. Manolo Majara, who had just re-entered Betel, was the first they came for. They locked him up for two years for a heist he did on a large electronics warehouse. My father was able to obtain permission for him to come to Betel on weekends.


If my father wanted to turn convicted felons into ordained ministers, he had much work to do. For years the men’s minds had been in disrepair. Most of the men could not read or write well because they had dropped out of school in their early teenage years. The only thing most addicts read on the streets was Marca and As for the weekly sports scores. My father and a Canadian missionary created a small Bible school to train the men to read and write and teach them theology. At first, they had courses every day, but that got in the way of work, so they did three hours a day, two days a week, in the evening. Raúl, Jambri and the men studied ethics, patristics, apologetics, hermeneutics, and many other long words whose meanings were veiled in mystery to me.

None of the men found studying easy. Jambri told me he was tela de torpe and doubted he would be able to learn anything, but the moment the classes began, he did not want to stop reading. He knew he could rebuild his mind. After two years of study, the mission ordained Raúl, Jambri and three other leaders in Betel. My father was immensely proud to see them become ministers in the church they had rebuilt with their own hands.

Not everyone was as happy with Betel’s workers as my father. Once Raúl had been ordained, he went along with my father to meetings of the Protestant pastors in Spain to represent Betel. In one meeting, a pastor raised the issue of what a drug rehab center was doing ordaining ministers and starting churches. He pointed towards Raúl, “Why don’t you do what you do best? You do rehabilitation work. And we run churches. We’ll send you our guys to get off drugs, and when they’re straight, you send our guys back to us for pastoral care.”

Raúl stood up and faced all the pastors. “Your guys? Let me get this straight. You want us to do all the dirty work, so you can have them back all clean, sitting politely in your church? No. It doesn’t work that way. You can call them your guys when you’ve bathed their sores, sat up all night through their withdrawal, dealt with them when they’re threatening you, and then slowly watched them change. Only then can you call them your guys.” The episode gained Betel few friends, but when my father recounted the story at the dinner table, I sensed in his smile the same swollen satisfaction he had when my brothers and I did something well.

Raúl led the men in the Mejorada house just as he had in Barajas. He gave them collejas whenever they cursed, made them wash the dinner dishes for a month if they were caught smoking, and forced them to leave if he felt they were not making progress. Many feared him when they entered the center, but he was fiercely protective of his charges and he was respected for it.

One Saturday evening the men were in their underwear, stretched out on folding chairs and benches, cooling off after a long summer day of work. A missionary couple stopped by unannounced. They said they wanted to see the yonquis and walked around the house and gardens. The men called over to Raúl to talk to them. The conversation did not get far, and he swiftly sent the missionaries away, “There’s nothing for you to see here. We are not apes in a zoo on display for you. This is our house!”

Just as Raúl’s move into Lindsay’s apartment was done without any grand design, so was almost every step in Betel’s growth. The farmhouses kept filling with men, and whenever a


house was full and the men were running the rastros responsibly, Betel opened another house and another store. The yonquis needed help, and they kept coming.

At first the new residences were all in Madrid, but soon Betel opened centers in other cities. Myk and Lindsay got married, which came as a surprise to no one but themselves. The two of them went to Valencia, a city on the east coast of Spain, and started a center with some of the men from Madrid.

Jambri had been a good leader in his house in Loeches and had run the Esfinge rastro well, so my father, Lindsay and Raúl gave him the job of opening a center in Cuenca, a city about an hour and a half east of Madrid. Cuenca is a town of medieval architectural curiosities and stone homes precariously perched on the edge of the cliffs. Jambri took Juan Carlos El Rubio, who had driven the van off the cliff, and Pedro El Puñe, the Fist, to help him. My father and Jambri found an ancient house with thick stone walls and massive oak beams. It was a ruin, and the center was able to rent it cheaply. Jambri, his men, a van loaded with used furniture and bags of tools, cement and plaster of Paris – that was all he needed to start a new center. It did not take them long fix the whole place up and return it to its old splendor.

Jambri got sick easily and was so skinny he always looked like someone who had just checked into Betel, even though he was the leader of the house. The townspeople often did not believe him when he insisted that he was the director of Betel in Cuenca, and it grated. Even some of the new men teased him. One evening a man who had just entered the center refused to do a simple chore to help clean up the second-hand furniture store. Jambri asked him politely to follow the rules like everyone else.

“Why should I listen to you? You look worse than me,” the new guy taunted him.

Jambri picked up a crowbar that was among some tools nearby and raised it to strike the guy. For an instant, he hesitated and put it back down.

“I knew you were a coward,” the new guy gloated.

Suddenly, Jambri slapped him with all his force. The guy walked out and left the center without saying a word.

Jambri glanced around the room and saw everyone staring at him in disbelief. For months he had worked diligently at the men’s house, had been so conscientious with his men, and had tried to live humbly, turning the other cheek. Jambri packed his bags, unable to speak. He felt that in a moment he had ruined everything.

As Jambri walked out the door, El Rubio followed him out to the street. He pleaded with Jambri to stay. The men needed a leader, he said. Jambri sobbed and begged for forgiveness for having let the men down. El Rubio promised they would not tell anyone about what had happened, and they kept their word.

Everything would have been fine, if the new guy had not gone back to Madrid and told Raúl. Over dinner Raúl and my father talked about the episode. No Betel leader could behave in such an un-Christian way. Jambri would have to come back to Madrid.

When I saw Jambri, he was dejected. We said nothing about why he was back. I knew what had happened, and I suspect he knew that I knew. Dad and Raúl could punish him, but it did not matter. When we worked together, I never heard him raise his voice at


any of the men in the rastro. Whoever he hit probably deserved it, I thought. He was unfailingly kind to me. He was my friend, and that was all I needed to know.

Jambri, Raúl and Jenny (left to right)

One day Raúl burst in through the front door of our house, his chest exploding with pride. He was smiling more broadly than I had ever seen him smile. When he was ecstatic, his eyes would squint and his cheeks would turn red, as if he had been caught having too much fun. He brought some ice cream and gathered us all in the living room. My parents stood near the doorway and smiled. Obviously, they already knew whatever it was he was going to say.

He was going to marry Jenny, a young missionary from New Zealand. They had known each other for over a year. She had briefly shared an apartment with Myk. I often saw her when she went out to the parks with us to talk to the addicts. And I had seen her talking to Raúl after some of the Betel fútbol games. When he saw Jenny earlier that morning, the first thing he asked if she wanted to go for a walk. They walked for a minute without saying a word. Nervously, he stopped and, affecting great casualness, held her hand. He said he had practiced that all week.

“You know I’m a rough man, and I know you don’t speak Spanish well yet, so you don’t have to say much.” Raúl never liked to waste time, “Just say yes or no. Will you marry me?”

She said yes. Raúl took her downtown and showed her his favorite spots in Madrid. He paid for a large meal in Plaza Mayor but was so nervous he did not eat a bite.

She was like Dad in that she had had “hands-on-experience” with drugs before becoming a missionary. Jenny grown up as a devout Anglican Sunday school girl in New Zealand, but once she left home, she lost interest in religion and in the church. With her new friends she tried heroin, but it only made her vomit and kept her from eating anything


for the rest of the day. Cocaine, LSD and hashish, though, were drugs she felt she could enjoy.

When Raúl told us he was going to marry, David, Peter and I looked at each other in astonishment. We immediately focused on the most important issue at hand: did this mean he was going to spend less time with us? Could the marriage even threaten our fútbol games? Raúl had brought the ice cream so we could share in his happiness, but I wondered if he had also done it to soften the blow.

My father married Raúl and Jenny four months later on a clear October day. The day was so unnaturally warm and bright that the wedding was held outside in the church’s patio. Never had the church been so beautiful, and Raúl’s men even found doves to release after the ceremony. David, Peter, Timothy and I enthusiastically pelted Raúl and Jenny with rice.

Almost a year later, Raúl and Jenny took four men and a van full of furniture to open a rastro and drug rehab center in Cataluña. Raúl and Jenny had a little girl shortly before arriving in Barcelona. Raúl said only Betel could have made him move to Barcelona. For a Madrid fan, the blue and crimson shirts of their fútbol team set the nostrils flaring like a matador’s red cape in front of a bull. I tried to convince him not to go. Raúl said he had no choice; Jesus loved tax collectors, prostitutes and Roman soldiers, so it was not much of a stretch to love people from Barcelona.

Raúl and Jenny shared an apartment with the men until they could find a suitably dilapidated wreck to rebuild. The men wanted Raúl to have some privacy, so the apartment was divided by nothing more elaborate than a large blanket that hung by clothespins from a rope. Jenny preemptively placated the neighbors by collecting and distributing food that had been donated to Betel to everyone in the building. The men met their neighbors and invited them to lunches and dinners. After a few months of living in the apartment, Raúl found an abandoned house. My family came to visit, and there was the same excitement in Raúl’s eyes that I had seen in my father’s when he first came across a ruin.

After Raúl’s wedding I thought that marriage was a disease like chicken pox: everyone got it at some point in their life. But unlike a contagious disease, it was not over quickly and people did not mind catching it. Jambri was not far behind Raúl. At the Betel meetings, he met a nineteen year old girl named Mari Carmen. She was too young for him, I thought. After Jambri got married, the Betel leaders and my parents sent him back to Cuenca with Mari Carmen to run the center. Mari Carmen did not care that Jambri had been a yonqui or a bank robber. Her older brother had been on as well, and her older sister had died of AIDS. Mari Carmen may have been nineteen, but she was not naïve.

The first leaders in Madrid were all gone. Raúl and Jenny had gone to Barcelona, Jambri and Mari Carmen were in Cuenca, and Lindsay and Myk had moved to Valencia. In a little over three years, Betel had gone from eight men in an apartment to over two hundred men and women in four cities. I missed Raúl and Jambri, but was happy for them – at last they had received their own ruins.


10: SARDINES AND LENTILS

SARDINAS Y LENTEJAS

We are never as happy or as unhappy as we imagine ourselves to be.

François de la Rochefoucauld

We lived well on little and never wanted for anything because in the early 1980s the almighty dollar went a long way in Spain. But it was too good to last. I knew that because every year my grandparents sent me a twenty-five dollar check for my birthday. My father personally cashed the checks, did not take a commission and gave me the rate published in The Herald Tribune. I got a good deal, and he even took me to McDonalds in downtown Madrid so I could buy a birthday meal for David, Peter and Timothy. As we drank our Cokes he explained currencies and told me that Big Macs should have similar prices across countries if you take into account exchange rates; that is what economists call Purchasing Power Parity. With flourishes of his pen, my father drew squiggles, symbols and equations, explaining that this elegant idea did not always work in practice; currencies could lose their value in an instant. The terminology was beyond my understanding at the time, but the explanation was unnecessary. When the dollar lost half its value against the peseta in 1987, even as an eleven year old boy I knew it because my birthday checks were buying half as many Big Macs.

I noticed the changes to our lives in the mundane details. We were eating less chicken and beef and more sardines and lentils, my parents bought ice cream less often, and my brothers and I received our one hundred peseta allowances infrequently. As the winter set in, my parents turned the heating on less often and set the thermostat lower and lower, and I learned to hate the cold.

My parents received no fixed salary as missionaries, and they did not accept a peseta from the drug center. They lived day to day off the tithes and offerings they received from churches in the United Sates. Whenever they addressed the congregations, I felt ashamed, as if we were going around like the alcoholic beggars at the San Blas Metro – they cupped their hands and gave you a look that you knew was a con. But my parents never mentioned either our or the drug center’s needs. That was against the mission’s policy of “living by faith” – one of the many Christian euphemisms for not getting a steady paycheck – and it went against my parents’ pride. Money was not a problem; my parents did not have much, but they did not want much either.

Not only were the dollars not going as far as they used to but churches were sending fewer of them. The tithes and offerings slowed to a trickle. I wondered if my parents’ faith was inadequate.

On the wall of my father’s study, there was a Biblical quote warning against pride and self-satisfaction that said: “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and


loses his soul?” I did not understand it, and such high-mindedness all seemed foolish to me. As we ate sardines and froze, there was no danger of us ever gaining the world.

When my parents thought we were asleep they talked about money. From the hallway I could overhear them in the kitchen counting every last peseta, deciding to ask for food from the drug center that had passed its sell-by date, debating whether they should withdraw money from my brothers’ bank accounts where they regularly deposited small amounts. The sums were insignificant, but it had come to that.

Once again my parents called David, Peter, Timothy and me into the living room. My parents did not have enough from tithes and offerings to send us all to ECA. They had decided that only David would go and my mother would teach Peter, Timothy and me at home. I did not understand. Had we become as penniless as the people we had come to help? Who would help us now that we could not help ourselves? Why had my father not gone into business after Harvard? If he had, I was certain we would not be eating lentils and refried beans that made you fart all day, and my mother would not have to teach us at home.

Why had my parents chosen to be missionaries? I had not chosen it. Did my parents love Betel more than they loved David, Peter, Timothy and me?

It was not fair. David went to ECA just because he was the oldest. I would not see Ely and my friends at ECA. We would not play fútbol at recess or pass notes in class to each other or call each other to work on homework. What were Peter, Timothy and I going to do all by ourselves? I was angry and then much more ashamed than sad.

How could I tell this news to Ely and everyone else at ECA? I would lie.

At the breakfast devotional a few days later, my mother began with a hymn. We rarely sang together. My father’s favorite and the one he sang the most often was the simple tune “Be Thou My Vision”. My mother held the faded old Baptist hymnal she had grown up with, and she began to sing with her clear, beautiful voice:

Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart;

Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art

Thou my best Thought, by day or by night,

Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.

Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise,

Thou mine Inheritance, now and always:

Thou and Thou only, first in my heart,

High King of Heaven, my Treasure Thou art.

As my mother sang the words of the hymn, I saw tears roll down my father’s cheeks. Was he crying at the thought of some heavenly treasure? I hoped, though, that he knew exactly what he was putting us through to get it.


“Everyone, please come into the living room,” my father said. Those were my least favorite words. I was afraid we had done something wrong, perhaps he wanted to talk about AIDS again or maybe God had spoken to my father again and told us to go to another country.

It was even worse: we were leaving our apartment. I stormed out of the family meeting and went to my room to lie down on my bed. My father followed me and sat on the edge of my bed, “You’ll make new friends and find new places to play. When my parents divorced I had to move. I know what it is like to leave one’s friends and home.” He said, “I’m very sorry, but our landlord wants the apartment and we don’t have a choice. Come back and let’s talk to your brothers.”

We were going to move from a small apartment on our street, Calle Butrón, to a real house with a small garden. An old couple who liked Betel agreed to give my father a very low rent. It was one of the few houses on its street that had not been torn down during the vast building campaign in the 1970s. He told us he knew we would come to love our new home. I did not want to leave our home on Calle Butrón. I knew that if we moved, we would rarely see Luigi, Rafa, César and our other friends again. How could my parents do this to us? David, Peter, Timothy and I had spent the last four years in that home. I did not want to leave the only home I had known in Spain.

San Blas was changing, but not for the better, and I wondered if that was the reason we were leaving. The dog track where families went to watch the races had just closed. A few of the schools were shut because they were structurally unsound, and most of the kids dropped out early anyway. The city government never paid much attention to the neighborhood; perhaps they thought San Blas did not merit libraries or cultural centers, like the other neighborhoods in Madrid. The city did provide a municipal pool, and perhaps they thought it was enough: mens sana in corpore sano.

I had not spent much time in the area of Canillejas, the other end of the neighborhood where my parents said we were moving. I had been to the old dog track there; kids learned that you could lose money just as easily betting on dogs as you could pouring coins down the gullets of the one armed bandits that filled every bar. Beyond the track was a military barracks with watchtowers and barbed wires that never showed any signs of activity. The Spanish army still had a year-long compulsory military service where young men fritter away their time.

Our house on Calle Caspe looked like it was a world away from the apartment on Calle Butrón. The area was once a quiet town, but San Blas ate it up as it grew and it had become a quiet part of the neighborhood. The house was surrounded by a hedge and a gate that led into the garden. The garden was much bigger than my father had described it, and it had a mulberry tree and a fig tree. I had never seen so much greenery in San Blas. We were no longer near the Gypsy village, and the windows of our back porch did not face out on a dump. Even though I was embarrassed when Ely visited, I would have traded all our mulberries and figs you could eat to be close again to the dump, the Gypsies and the vast rows of apartment blocks.

Our garden had a small shed with a caved-in roof and my father said it would be our classroom. The structure looked like it might fall down at any moment. My father and


a few of the men from Betel repaired the beams and white washed the walls. I could not believe that my parents were serious and were going to go through with their idea. I did not want to be home-schooled. Only in books had I read about one-room schoolhouses on the American prairie. How was I going to learn without classmates and lessons? What was I going to do for school books?

The small, unadorned room could barely fit a desk for my mother, two tiny desks for Peter and me and an even smaller one for Timothy. We sat in a circle, crowding around an electric heater whose coils glowed orange and the air around it always had the tang of something burning. My mother made sure we were reading and studying, as she sipped cups of hot tea and corrected our work and answered our questions.

Every morning began with a pledge of allegiance to a six-inch American flag on her desk and a brief devotional, just as we had at ECA, but the similarities ended there. The only formal texts that served as instruction were thin packets with coursework in history, science, mathematics and English grammar which we raced through every morning, propelled in a competition against each other.

With ink on my fingers, I scribbled furiously, attempting to finish everything by recess. But Peter always seemed to retain the advantage. I switched to pencil and eraser, retracing my steps, trying to find my missteps. “Psst... Peter, where are you?” He would not respond and hid his answers from me. I held the side of the desk and squeezed it, hoping the answers would appear miraculously to me without thought. Peter would glance over his notebook, never resorting to eraser, sure of his own calculations, and ready to help me. “I can do it on my own.” I feared that the one year one month and one day that divided us in age felt smaller as he was grew older and smarter. And in the end, defeated in my struggle against the small clock on my mother’s desk, I surrendered and asked for his help.

But the true education did not start until we were dismissed from our coursework and given complete freedom to go into my parents’ study to climb and pull books off the shelves. Our appetite for books and magazines was omnivorous. Peter, Timothy and I learned everything quickly and forgot things with even greater ease. The only thing that guided our tastes at first were the covers of books and their photographs. My mother encouraged us to gorge ourselves on the books so long as we kept quiet and left her alone for a few hours. Peter and I fought over the American Heritage Dictionary as we read definitions from adze (n. An axlike tool with a curved blade at right angles to the handle, used for shaping wood) to zygote. The best words came from almanacs. I could not get the names of Hawai’ian Queen Lili’uokalani and King Kamehameha out of my head — Kamehameha, Kamehameha, Kamehameha. But my favorite books were the medical ones. The American Medical Association Complete Encyclopedia had anatomical diagrams of sexual organs and disappointingly dry discussions of insemination, ovulation and gestation. The best chapters, though, were the ones on first aid, and I imagined myself a hero. Yes, some day fate would call on me in a great accident to clear a windpipe or staunch the blood flow of a severed artery, and the world would marvel at my knowledge and courage and all because I had read it in an encyclopedia. Then Peter and I moved on to the faded National Geographic magazines. The Geographics always had enthralling articles about sharks, orangutans and flies, but we loved the ones with Pygmies and Masai warriors and we read each article two or three times, giggling and showing the pictures of the bare-breasted women with large nipples to Timothy for amusement. Peter, Timothy and I read the same


books, but no book gave us the same message. Our favorites were: The Tower Treasure from The Hardy Boys’, How Things Work, The Red Badge of Courage, Family Therapy of Drug Abuse and Addiction, The Prince and The Pauper, The Psychology of Counseling, Great Expectations, Huckleberry Finn, and AIDS: Immunology Series. Other than that, we would read pretty much whatever we could get our hands on.

After we had studied and read almost all morning, we had earned the right to watch a little television. Years earlier my mother and father had said that sometimes TV could be an instrument of the Devil. As a young child, I had wondered why he liked it more than books, figuring perhaps it was the cathode tube that kept him warm and comfortable.

The more tired my mother was, the less of a threat television became to our morals and intelligence, and we could watch it as long as we kept absolutely quiet and did not disturb her. It was through television that I learned that John Wayne and James Cagney spoke wonderful Spanish, just like me. After Franco’s death dubbing was no longer used to censor supposedly obscene works such as Romeo and Juliet and Camille, but the alternative was just as bizarre and confusing. Why did Dirty Harry sound like Darth Vader, and why did Al Pacino have exactly the same voice as Robert De Niro, except when they were in the same movie? On rare occasions Spanish television showed American films and a radio station would broadcast the English soundtrack simultaneously, but when the radio and TV got out of synch it only made the actors seem demon-possessed. When that happened, Timothy, who was only six, would lay hands on the screen and shake like a televangelist, “Be healed! Be healed!”

Most days I was relieved not to be at school. My body was not as I remembered it, and it did things that made me feel uncomfortable. Why was my voice changing, and why was I growing hair in odd places? Would I eventually have hair on my back and legs like my father, and would children look at me funny playing fútbol? Had I been at school the girls would have been able to see my pimples and black heads, appearing daily without warning or mercy. My private moments revolved around the bathroom mirror, and I pleaded with it for the changes to stop, but it never answered and pitilessly revealed my flaws.

Studying at home and being able to read whatever we wanted all day was better than playing hooky. Throughout the day, Peter scoured the house, collecting samples of liquids and powders. He had a restless self-confidence; the world was his and with enough work he could figure out how it all worked. An alchemist, he and Timothy would make potions from the perfumes and creams they furtively pilfered from my mother’s dresser. Timothy never minded helping as long as you could convince him that he was doing the most important work. They hoped to copy Alexander Fleming’s discovery of Penicillin and Roy Plunkett’s creation of Teflon. Peter said that one day they would be rich and children would read about them. He hid the concoctions in improvised vials in his desk, but the escaping smells betrayed their hiding place. With Timothy’s help, they set out on expeditions to the open fields near our house, gathering pieces of quartz, mica, and limestone that they would hide in egg cartons with meticulous labels for the benefit of future generations.

In the early afternoon, once we had finished all our coursework and read until we were satiated, I would walk with Peter and Timothy to Betel’s offices to watch the new men enter the center. Seeing the men check in for the first time never ceased to excite me. The


office took no photographs of people when they entered the center, but if I could glimpse their haggard appearance and memorize each face for the first time, I would never forget them. Whenever I saw them again, the first image would return to me, as clearly as if I had retrieved the faded card of a fútbol player from my desk drawer.

One day, I saw a blond boy who was smaller than me slouched on a sofa in the entranceway. The boy was skinny, his eyes were blackened and his lower eyelids drooped. He was with his father who did not appear much better. The boy looked at me with an empty, haunted stare and then turned away. I glimpsed his arms and saw the abscesses. Never before had I seen such a young heroin addict. Raúl, Jambri and all the men had started in their early teens to drink litronas, smoke weed and chocolate; then they moved on to tripis and coca, and even when they shot up they did not enter the center until they had been hooked for years. There were many stops along the way, but heroin was always the end of the line.

I asked a secretary about the kid. His name was Jorge and he had been shooting up for about a year before he entered Betel. He was ten and I could not believe he was three years younger than me. I often wondered: what if there was someone else out there, another me in a home in the same city living not a parallel but a perpendicular life to mine? At that moment, the lines had crossed. Who was he? How did he ever start shooting up? Was it fun at first? Was he a Real Madrid fan like me? I hoped he would not leave the center so he could answer all my questions.

Little Jorge did not leave and during Betel’s church services I watched him from across the room. After the meetings, I loitered near him, trying to come closer, hoping that he might introduce himself. But he never said much and would only sit next to his father. One day I sat next to him at a lunch at the men’s house. His father was sitting far away. At last I would be able to ask him all the questions I once had. I had no fear of asking Jambri about shooting up, but I was strangely afraid to talk to Jorge.

“Did you... You used to...”

“What?”

“You used to shoot up, didn’t you?”

He started to speak and then caught himself. And then on second thought began, “Yeah. I did. But not at first...” When Jorge was nine years old, he started working as a correo delivering heroin to his father’s regular customers. Jorge took the papelinas of tin foil to the right person and always brought back the exact amount of change. He was good, and the police never stopped him. But one day, out of curiosity he opened a packet and snorted the heroin, as he had seen his father do at times to test the powder. What began as an occasional indulgence, like eating candy when he was not supposed to, became a habit. Jorge hid it from his father, but once he found out, he did what only a disturbed drug-dealing father would do. He set his son straight and showed him how to shoot up instead of sniffing.

Jorge left Betel a few days after we talked. What kind of father involved his son in his own work like that and put him in the way of heroin and needles? Why had he not thought of his son and tried to protect him from drugs? And why did his mother not do anything to help him? It was always the kids who ended up paying for the choices of the


parents. My own parents faced the accusation of exposing us to destructive influences from other missionaries. Jorge, much like me, was just along for the ride.

It was then that I realized that strange as my parents were and as much as I hated sardines and lentils, and not having enough money to go to school, I had pretty much lucked out in the lottery of life.


11: “HALF THE CHURCH HAS AIDS”

«LA MITAD DE LA IGLESIA TIENE EL SIDA»

Every time that someone has died, it has produced more seriousness, more compassion and more love.

Raúl Casto

“¡Buenos dias! ¿Dígame?” From the dinner table, I could hear my mother’s voice in the other room. It became even brighter when she answered the phone, almost as if she wanted the person at the other end of the line to hear her smile. And then I heard silence. Suddenly her voice dropped a tone and dimmed. David and I glanced at each other, trying to figure out what she had heard.

“Elliott... Elliott, it’s for you. Jambri and Mari Carmen... You better come to the phone.”

That evening as Jambri and Mari Carmen were returning to Cuenca from Madrid, a drunken truck driver crossed into their lane on a sharp turn. In an explosion of glass and steel, their car hurdled off the road. Their bodies were crushed and trapped in the twisted wreck, and they passed in and out of consciousness while they waited for an ambulance and firemen. The mechanical Jaws of Life arrived and cut them loose, but by the time they reached the hospital, they had lost a lot of blood and their situation was grave.

Jambri was at the Gregorio Marañón Hospital, and I wanted to see him. I hoped he was being looked after properly. My brothers and I had never been seriously ill, nor had we broken a single bone, and hospitals remained a mystery to me. Were nurses always in a hurry and did doctors run around barking orders like they did on television? Did the patients’ rooms look like the ones in Betel, with bunk beds for everyone, or were they spacious like hotel rooms with a television, flowers and chocolates to make the patients enjoy their stay?

As we took the large hospital elevator, my mother and father said nothing and I nervously overheard the conversations of families all arriving at once during visiting hours. We got out on Jambri and Mari Carmen’s floor and searched for their rooms. My parents had told me about the accident, but even knowing the catalogue of injuries was not enough to prepare me. Mari Carmen’s eyebrow and forehead were torn up, her right eye had come out of its socket, her ribs had been broken, and her spleen had ruptured. She could barely see out with her one good eye, and she was not in a condition to talk. I stood at the back of her room, already hoping we would not stay in the hospital too long.

When I went to Jambri’s room, he was lying immobilized, bound by bandages and pulleys. Pins and screws went straight into holes in his arms, and his exposed skin was a


wounded-looking purple. The accident had shattered his wrists and broken his arms, legs and ribs in many different places. Just looking at his body made my stomach queasy. I wanted to look away and leave the room but feared offending him.

“Does it scare you to see me like this?” he asked.

“Of course not.” I steadied myself at the edge of his bed and squeezed his iron bedposts. “How are you?”

“Glad to be alive.”

I tried not to say much and let my parents do all the talking.

Immediately after the accident, the doctors and nurses had worked for hours and saved Jambri and Mari Carmen’s lives. But some of them did not want to touch Jambri. He was HIV positive. The hospital staff were afraid of blood contamination from needle pricks and scalpel cuts. In the operating room, they wore surgical goggles, waterproof gowns and double latex gloves. The chances of infection were not high, but even the smallest possibility was too great a risk.

My father said the doctors were professionals and did their jobs by rote and reflex, but once the operation was over, Jambri felt the cold touch of the interns as they did their rounds and saw the nurses whisper in the hallway before they entered his room.

Jambri had always been skinny, but before he entered Betel came down with a vicious fever that lasted for days. He lost a lot of weight and became very worried. He went to see a doctor who diagnosed him with tuberculosis and awkwardly delivered the news: he was HIV positive. At the time, Jambri did not even know what it meant.

It was months before Jambri and Mari Carmen were able to leave the hospital and go back to Cuenca. When I saw him again, we shook hands, but he held mine at an angle and could not squeeze. His left wrist was twisted; the bones had set badly. And I wondered: was that normal after an accident or was that what happened when nurses were scared to touch a patient?

Why were people afraid to touch Jambri? Jambri was hurt, not sick; surely he would be fine. When I worked with Jambri at the rastro, he was infected. I had shaken his hand, hugged him, and nothing had happened to me. My parents had told us not to worry about being around people who were HIV positive, and so we never even thought about it. We had already lived with ex-yonquis for the past few years. Even if we wanted to worry about HIV, it was a little late for that. Tuberculosis was a greater concern, but I had been exposed many times and was never infected.

In the months that followed the news came slowly and unevenly, like the first drops of a storm. We figured, though, it was little more than a fleeting summer shower. Victor El Granos, who used to rob stores with the axe he hid under his trench coat, died of pneumonia. Luis Mendoza, one of the first men to live on the Barajas farm, also died of pneumonia. I rarely talked to him because he was so shy. But I remembered his bad teeth and the way he piled sugar into his coffee at breakfast on the farm. I even went to the hospital, heard him wheeze as his chest heaved, and saw his breath fog up the oxygen mask. His pained eyes rolled in their sockets as he struggled for breath. It seemed odd to me that he would catch a cold in the summer when it was not raining. Lolo, the young man


who kept the ferret on the farm, also died in the infectious diseases ward. I assumed it was pneumonia as well.

Raúl came down with a fever, and he thought all he needed was a little rest. His condition did not improve, and staying in bed and drinking water constantly did not help. His fever got worse and he started losing weight. Jenny took him to the hospital near their home. She thought he would be back in a few days as soon as the doctors figured out what his problem was. Each day she went to visit him and his fevers persisted and he lost more weight.

Two years earlier Raúl had found out he was HIV positive. When Jenny became pregnant with Ana, the doctor told her and Raúl to take some routine blood tests. It was only then that they found out. Raúl knew he was at risk from all sorts of diseases and six months before moving in with Lindsay he had a blood test. The lab tests told him he was negative. He must have caught the virus in the last few months he was shooting up.

The day the doctor told him he was HIV positive, he called Lindsay and Myk. The words fought to come out between the sobs. Raúl immediately understood he had a disease that was killing his friends and had no cure. He could not even speak, and as he and Jenny tried to tell Myk and Lindsay everything he held his face in his hands.

The doctors in the hospital in Barcelona knew that Raúl was HIV positive and told Jenny that persistent, unexplained fevers were common. She should learn to be patient. The vague reassurances and platitudes of the doctors became meaningless as the days led to weeks and the weeks turned into a month. There had to be a specific reason why Raúl’s health did not improve.

My father and Raúl had been to Equatorial Guinea three months before he got sick. He had been there as a drunk plumber years earlier, but he wanted to return with Jenny as a missionary to help start Betel in Africa. Raúl told the doctors about his visit in case he had picked something up there, but their specialty was not tropical diseases. The doctors ran the obvious tests and then a few more. Nothing came up positive.

Slowly the number of doctors that came by his bed increased. Older doctors came by with younger residents, and they looked at his medical records and talked to him. For some of them Raúl was their first AIDS case, and they could not come by often enough. His was a curious case. But despite the doctors’ medical interest, Raúl continued to lose weight and grow weaker. He stayed in the hospital awaiting a breakthrough that appeared increasingly less likely.

September passed and then October. Jenny came to the hospital every day to visit him, and sometimes she brought Ana along. Ana’s second birthday was in November, and on her birthday the family shared a cake and blew out the candles in Raúl’s hospital bedroom. Jenny was almost seven months pregnant with their second daughter, and she wondered if the baby would be born before Raúl got out of the hospital.

Raúl had been in the hospital almost three months and the doctors still had no idea of what he had. He had almost lost half his weight and was in agony. The doctors kept coming by to talk to him and look at his charts. They seemed incapable of anything but empty expressions of curiosity.


One day during their regular visits, Jenny pleaded with the head doctor, “If you don’t do something, he could die!”

The thought had not occurred to her before, and she wanted to take the words back as soon as she had said them.

“Yes, he could.”

The doctor was surprised that she had not realized it sooner. He looked at her and said nothing more.

One day, after dozens of tests, the doctors finally found the source of his sickness. He had contracted tuberculosis of the stomach and intestines, extremely rare in Europe but not uncommon in Africa. It had punctured the stomach wall and spread. The doctors began a new treatment, and Raúl’s condition improved immediately, but the damage was done. Raúl was too frail to run the Barcelona center again. When he left the hospital, my father recommended he and Jenny return to Madrid. They took a flight so he would not have to face the seven hour drive, and the men in Betel of Barcelona loaded up a van with their things and drove down to Madrid.

I accompanied my father to see Raúl, Jenny and the girls. They had moved into an apartment on Calle Butrón, our old street in San Blas. Raúl was sitting on the sofa, wearing pajamas and wrapped in a blanket. He gave me a hug, put his arm on my shoulder, “How are you, Johnny?” I realized how skinny his arm had become. He was El Tocho: he was not supposed to look like that. I wondered if I would ever punch his arm again, and would he only ever be strong in old photographs?

Raúl realized it would be a death sentence to go to Equatorial Guinea but was dejected to give up his dream. “I’ve often preached from Job, ‘Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble.’ But after the past few months, I finally understand the book. Some people say they’re going through a wilderness — sometimes I think that I am never going to come out of one.” Raúl struggled for words, “I want... I need to work again.”

Raúl and Jenny agreed to stay in Madrid and help my parents pastor the church. He was a good preacher and it would be less physically demanding than running one of Betel’s businesses or overseeing the men’s residences.

Just as Raúl had not known that he was HIV positive when he entered Betel, many of the leaders in Betel did not know either. It was after Raúl got sick that my parents and Lindsay and Myk encouraged all the directors and staff in Betel to have their blood tested. The center also asked all new addicts to get blood tests as soon as they entered the program. With each set of lab results, the Betel central office updated the medical files on the central computers, adding another piece to the puzzle. After everyone went for their tests, my father told us the news: Raúl, Jambri, Majara, Veneno, and almost every addict I had grown up with was HIV positive.

Spain could claim the dubious distinction of being the country with the highest number of AIDS cases in all of Europe. Even more remarkable was that it was the only country in the world where most of the cases came through intravenous infection. The Spanish government estimated that two thirds of all AIDS cases involved heroin addicts. We had no way of knowing if that was true. The government also thought that forty percent of all heroin addicts were infected. I was convinced that was wrong. How many yonquis like Raúl and Jambri had not even been tested?


Shortly after Raúl and Jenny came back from Barcelona, their second daughter was born. The first blood tests showed that mother and daughter were both HIV positive. Jenny had not even been aware she was infected, and the doctors did not know if Maria became infected during pregnancy or delivery. Doctors said Maria would have Jenny’s antibodies for up to a year and a half after birth. Before then it would be impossible to tell if Maria would produce her own.

In a strange way I was jealous of Jenny. My family and I stood on the outside of the disease looking in at everyone’s suffering. But Jenny was more than just a foreign missionary in San Blas. She had married Raúl and had become infected: she was an insider. When Raúl married her, he joked that he was becoming medio guiri, half-foreigner, and Jenny would become half-Spanish. She had become part of Betel and the plague in a way I never could. But deep down I knew that my thoughts were insane. Would I really trade places with her if given the choice?

It was not fair. How could Jenny and little Maria be punished for something Raúl had done years earlier? How many wives and daughters in San Blas were HIV positive? It was only a matter of time before we would know.

I could not help but think that the yonquis in San Blas were twice punished. Heroin can be smoked, snorted or injected, but the vast majority of addicts injected it. By using heroin they ruined their lives, and by shooting up and sharing needles most became infected. The recovering addicts in Betel could quit heroin, but they and their families were helpless against AIDS.

So many leaders in the center and yonquis on the street were infected that my father and Raúl organized a conference. Between coffee breaks and lunches we packed into the church to hear doctors and ask questions. Many addicts knew so little that AIDS appeared as random and capricious as a biblical plague.

All the leaders of the center came from around Spain to the conference, and my brothers and I sat at the back of the room and listened. Like nestlings with open beaks, we eagerly awaited the answers, nibbling with further questions. We all heard about how the disease developed, how the virus spread, and how medical researchers were struggling to find a cure. But that was not what most people wanted to hear.

They wanted answers.

Should they take their Retrovir and other drugs if they were getting headaches and nausea?

How should they behave in Betel’s residences if more than half of the men and women were HIV positive?

Should they marry and have family if they could pass on the virus to their kids?

Would they ever be able to live a normal life?

Everyone was struggling with the questions, and for many it was the first chance they ever had to ask.

Raúl led a roundtable discussion on living with AIDS. He had regained most of his weight, although the tuberculosis had completely run down his defenses. His T-cell count very low and his immune system was compromised. Jambri, Juan Carlos El Rubio and


others spoke, but I will never forget Raúl’s words. “AIDS has been positive.” He paused, and you could hear gasps of disbelief in the audience while people exchanged glances. But Raúl continued, “Every time that someone has died, it has produced more seriousness, more compassion and more love. We have cried tears for them and are sad that they are gone, but we are aware more than ever that we have to make each day count.”

Faced with the disease, Raúl was going to continue working in Betel and transmitting Christian hope as long as he could breathe. Others spoke openly, many for the first time, about carrying the disease and knowing they were going to die; their words were all variations on Raúl’s theme.

I did not have the virus, but knowing that almost all of my friends had it made me despair. They were HIV positive and had to live with it, yet it did not make them withdraw from life. The virus forced people to choose how they wanted to live. Some addicts I talked to in the neighborhood knew they had the virus ticking inside them, ready to explode, and it made them more reckless shooting up. They said nothing could happen to them that was worse than getting AIDS. Stories circulated in the neighborhood and the press about addicts who robbed in the subway, not with knives or guns but with needles with infected blood. If yonquis were going to die, they were going to take others with them. Yet I was certain it was a lie. No one I knew in the center had ever done that.

After the conference, my parents cleared a shelf in the study and little by little the trove of information grew. I devoured the books and scientific journals, reading anything in an attempt to understand. Our 1976 World Book Encyclopedia had nothing on the disease, and I read TIME, Scientific American, and The Economist, cutting and collecting articles on the disease. What was the average life expectancy of someone who was HIV positive? Was it likely scientists could find a cure? Some of the articles were apocalyptic and alarmingly inaccurate; they projected up to a billion people would become infected and die. Others were dry scientific texts from which I learned about reverse transcriptase inhibitors, recombinant DNA, and random mutations, but these just depressed me. Even if doctors could produce the medicine to suppress the virus, it would mutate and become resistant to drugs. Nothing could stop AIDS.

I wondered what the point of reading was. Did I think that information was a switchblade to defend me, as if the disease were a knife fight in San Blas? AIDS is impersonal and you could not fight it — not on your own terms.

From what I could read AIDS in America was a gay disease and a political cause. I wanted to learn more about how it erupted and spread in the United States and I read Randy Shilts’ And The Band Played On. I saw the newspaper photographs of ACT UP protesters chaining themselves to federal office buildings, fighting the police, demanding more funding for AIDS research, and carrying banners that read SILENCE = DEATH. It all made little sense to me. It was not the National Institute of Health or even the political establishment that was killing my friends.

There were no protests in Madrid; yonquis had no political power, and in Spain AIDS was their disease.

I had gay friends in Betel. All of my gay friends were HIV positive, and it was impossible to know if they got the virus from sex or from shooting up. Most of them were hairdressers, perhaps because it was a tolerated, harmless way to be gay in a culture


that was still very macho. My friends always gave me haircuts when I spent weekends out in the men’s residences. And I loved hearing their stories of working downtown, cutting and styling the hair of Pedro Almodóvar and other famous Spaniards. In response to AIDS some Christians would have called down fire and brimstone from heaven if they could. Reverend Jerry Falwell said, “AIDS is the wrath of God upon homosexuals.” Falwell loathed “faggots,” but it was impossible for me to see how one sin could be so much worse than any other. Surely Falwell’s hate was as awful as the sin he condemned.

As my parents had told my brothers and me, Jesus never called down judgment on anyone. I could not live with the kind of God who was capable of such a thing. If AIDS was God’s wrath against homosexuals, that made him a drunken marksmen.

The press became interested in Betel because of the large number of heroin addicts who became HIV positive. A Dutch television station came to make a documentary on the center and the church, and my father, Peter and I took them to the Gypsy camp, the men’s residences, the used furniture stores, and the Simancas Metro stop to interview yonquis on the street. At the Gypsy camp the paramedics resuscitated a man who had just overdosed; at the Metro stop the reporters met prostitutes who had been in the center. My father gave them a complete picture of who we were and what we did.

When the package with the video arrived, my father opened it eagerly. He read the title: “Half the Church Has AIDS.” The caption missed any distinction between those merely living with the virus, those who were showing the first signs of sickness and those who had full-blown AIDS. It did not matter. From the outside, all people could see of Betel was the disease. It was the last time my father cooperated with the press.

In a way, though the Dutch reporters were right. When AIDS exploded in Spain, Betel grew exponentially. When they interviewed Jambri, he told them that everyone with AIDS would die, but so would everyone without AIDS. As a teenager he had shared needles with his friends and become infected. Nothing could change that, but he could choose to spend the rest of his life in Betel trying to rescue his friends.

Jambri was not the only one who thought that way. In a little over two years Betel grew from around two hundred addicts to over six hundred. Perhaps the only motivation was the fear of dying, but when yonquis came to the center they stayed.

The new men in the center were becoming leaders much faster than usual and helped open houses in new cities. My parents hoped they would not rob the center’s money, mismanage the stores or shoot up in the program. Betel trusted the men and women, and they returned the confidence. My father and Lindsay ordained the ex-yonquis as ministers more quickly than the mission’s guidelines allowed. As my father wrote in his monthly newsletter to churches back in the United States:

We are moving quickly because of the urgency of the task: a lost and dying world; and because of the fragile nature of the vessels God has given us to build his house. Half our church and more than half of our leaders are HIV positive. We have no time to waste and cannot wait on or follow the traditional methodologies of preparation. We are cast upon the Lord, trusting in his supernatural enablement, and in His mercy to heal or extend the lives of His servants until all that has been


committed into our hands has been done. Perhaps God is doing something new. Perhaps we are only in the eye of the storm. Either way we will finish the course.

It made little sense to send the men and women in Betel away to seminary for three years when they could die at any moment.

When Protestant pastors and missionaries in Madrid complained about what they viewed as Betel’s lax standards in ordination and the quality of our people, Raúl politely reminded them that it was Jesus who had once told to his disciples, “I tell you the truth, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.”


12: ALL FIGURED OUT

TODO PREVISTO

[T]he other half of my heartbeat.

Dizzy Gillespie on Charlie Parker

Missionaries live at the whim of exchange rates and the spontaneous generosity of Christians. Churches in America had been generous once again, and I almost wished they had not been. After a year of home schooling, my parents once again had money to send us to ECA. What if the money dried up again, and more importantly who needed school when you could learn everything on your own?

As soon as I woke in the morning, I got dressed, brushed my teeth, combed my hair in front of the mirror with a part on the left side, the way I had watched my father do. My father and I woke up first and had a cup of hot tea and watched the American news together to see what was going on around the world. He hated most of the news and corrected the fallacies that the economics reporters peddled on trade policy and exchange rates. “Jonathan, they’re doing it again...” he would bristle. I learned that television can give you the news but not always the truth. With his stainless steel fountain pen, he drew graphs showing me the short run relationship between inflation and unemployment and how GNP was calculated. He taught me to love the morning news the same way we had enjoyed hearing the BBC over the short wave radio when I was a child.

It was 1990. How could we not be glued to the television every morning? The Berlin Wall had fallen and millions of people were still feeling the aftershocks. Thousands of East Germans stormed the Stasi headquarters in Berlin to view their own files. F.W. De Klerk released Nelson Mandela from prison and Apartheid began to crumble. Ryan White died of AIDS.

We watched the news together, but no morning, however, would be complete without his pontifications. We all sat at the breakfast table with my mother and father while they held devotionals and read from whatever book they brought to the table. This was our morning routine, and as long as we were not traveling and visiting the drug rehab centers, it never varied. As soon as the devotion was finished, I made sure Timothy was in his elementary school uniform of light grey pants, white shirt, and blue sweater. David, Peter, and Timothy fought for their slots to use the bathroom, and Timothy was always the last one to get it all to himself. When he finally had his turn, I helped him comb his hair exactly the same way my father had taught me. He brushed his teeth, scrubbing his two large front ones more than the rest.

Brotherly love is irrational, and it is natural to think that one’s brothers are smarter, funnier and more handsome than everyone else. But Timothy had truly graceful features. His fine blond hair and bright blue eyes made him stand out from the Spanish kids. He


had a light mole on the right side of his jaw and another small dark mole under his left eye, exactly like my father and me. He had a delicate pointed nose like my father, but my mother’s well proportioned chin. I thought that Timothy looked almost exactly like me, but better.

Timothy was four years younger than Peter, five years younger than me and seven years younger than David. My mother wanted one of us to walk him to school. If only the walk had been longer, we could have all taken the bus. Peter was the closest to Timothy in age, but they fought and teased each other endlessly. Sending them on walks together through the neighborhood would be like asking Northern Irish Protestants and Catholics to march together in summertime. David was the oldest and there were few things are worse than being seen with young, immature brothers. The last thing he wanted was to walk Timothy to school every day. The task of walking him to school fell on me since I was thirteen and responsible. My mother figured I was the least bad of all options. Timothy and I rarely fought and we already shared a bunk bed in our room with little trouble.

It would have taken the ingenuity of the great Nineteenth century diplomats Prince Talleyrand and Lord Castlereagh to navigate the shifting alliances that we formed with each passing day. Our skirmishes were short and unpredictable, ending with uneasy truces.

We walked from our house on Calle Caspe, winding through apartment buildings and made our way to Calle Alcalá. Timothy had a jaunty ebullience that was infectious. He would sing the Beach Boys’ Barbara Ann loudly and off-key in the street. David and Peter would walk ahead even more quickly to avoid being associated with us. They had enough embarrassment for us and the entire neighborhood. Even I wished I could have left Timothy.

“Shut up! You’re annoying me. And everyone probably thinks you’re nuts.”

“I can’t hear you...”

“Someone is going to beat the shit out if you don’t stop.”

“Ah! You said the S-H-I-T word. You’re in so much trouble with Daddy. No allowances for a while. I’m telling unless you sing...”

And once I had started singing, I could not stop either.

Half an hour after my father taught me lessons while we watched the news, I taught Timothy about America’s growing trade deficit with Japan, our high fiscal budget deficit, and the decline of America’s manufacturing base. Every day he learned new words, which he casually inserted into his conversations with his teachers: “Miss Clark, I think Andrew is uttering platitudes.”

Timothy was an impish boy with an irrepressible sense of humor. He could be purposefully unbelievably obtuse. With a straight face he would ask my parents the most ridiculous questions: “If we need to save the environment by recycling paper, why don’t we recycle toilet paper?”

During recess Timothy played games with his classmates and teased them. He was often blissfully unaware of how different our lives were from theirs. One day I heard him telling some little girls that they had AIDS.


I pulled him over by the shirt collar. “What are you doing? You can’t go around saying stuff like that.”

“They told me I had cooties, and I don’t have cooties!”

“They were just winding you up.”

“But I don’t have cooties!”

“They’re imaginary, Timothy! AIDS is real and people are scared of it. You don’t want them repeating it to a teacher. Do you?”

“Are you deaf or something? I said I don’t have cooties!”

“Fine! You don’t have cooties. But don’t you ever say that again about AIDS. If you do, I’ll give you a colleja.”

He may have been a rascal, but he wanted to be a medical missionary to Africa and work in Equatorial Guinea. He dreamed of being like David Livingstone, the Scottish missionary and intrepid explorer of Africa who did much to fight the slave trade. Sometimes my father visited other missionaries in Africa, and Timothy asked often if he could go along. My father promised that one day he would.

Timothy was only eight, but we expected him to keep up with our conversations and games. David taught him mathematics, even forcing him to take the math section of the SAT when he was eight to see how smart he was. Timothy protested that he wanted to go out and play, but he was proud and boasted when he got a good score. David, though, insisted on going through all the problems Timothy missed and explaining them to him. For David math was elegant, and if only one could see its beauty any problem could be solved.

My father had bought a used weight set from one of Betel’s rastros, and David, Peter and I worked out three or four times a week even though we were probably too young to be lifting heavy rods of iron. We wanted to be like Arnold Schwarzenegger and transform our spindly arms and legs. My father could do over fifty one-handed push ups, and he would offer money to whoever could do the most chin ups. Without my parents’ approval, we sometimes made Timothy do bench presses, curls and squats with what we thought was little weight for us, but which probably required a Herculean effort from an eight year old boy. He would dress up in his shorts and a small tank top and borrowed my gray weight lifting gloves with cut off fingertips even though they were far too big for him. Like us, he would take off his shirt in front of the mirror in the bathroom to admire his muscles.

One summer we went to a town on the Costa Brava, on the northeast coast of Spain. During the day we went skin diving in the crystalline waters near the rocky beaches, and we read books at night. Near the coves, a rock jutted out like a railroad spike from the sea. My father would swim out to the rock, climb up and dive in. One morning, my father and Peter had jumped, but the rocks were high and even David was afraid to jump. I stood with Timothy at the peak. He looked out on the water hesitantly and held tight to the rocks.

“I’ll buy you an ice cream cone if you jump.”


He kept looking down at the water, weighing the decision. As the minutes passed, the water dried on our skin, leaving a sticky, salty feeling. Perhaps he was trying to judge the distance, how hard he would hit the water, whether or not it would hurt. After some thought, he looked over at me and asked, “What kind of ice cream?”

“Any kind you want.”

“It is going to be chocolate chip.” He grinned and jumped into the sea. The turquoise water parted into a thousand phosphorescent bubbles of air, and when he came back up to the surface, he jubilantly waved at me to join him.

Spanish television played American black and white movies early on Saturday mornings, and I woke up to watch them and see something of American culture. The film A Young Man and His Horn, based on the life of the great Jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and starring Kirk Douglas was unforgettable. Beiderbecke was one of the greatest players of all time, and Louis Armstrong once remarked that if Beiderbecke had lived, he would have been the greatest. But he was an alcoholic and died of alcohol poisoning in 1931. He was only 28. From the moment I saw the film, I wanted to play the trumpet.

My father did not share my love of jazz. In his mind jazz was associated with a drug culture from New York in the 1950s. If Timothy and I wanted to play it, we had to put on our records when he was not nearby. We could never work out why New York in the 1950s was worse than San Blas in the 1980s, so we kept quiet and obeyed.

He was right. Jazz and heroin had a long history, and it is impossible to talk honestly about jazz without talking about heroin. Heroin was a problem for Stan Getz, Miles Davis, Chet Baker, John Coltrane, and Charlie “Bird” Parker. Bird died of an overdose at the age of thirty four. Getz struggled with his addiction for many years and died an alcoholic. Davis kicked the habit cold turkey. Coltrane, on the other hand, quit his habit after Davis fired him from his band, spending many days alone in his room fasting and having a profound religious experience. He later dedicated his album A Love Supreme to the Lord. “My goal,” Coltrane said, “is to live the truly religious life, and express it through my music.” I liked to think that these musicians with their many addictions would not have been too far out of place with Raúl and Jambri in Betel.

Timothy and I planned to be famous musicians and play in clubs like Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem or the Village Vanguard in the West Village. We were going to be like Dizzy Gillespie and Bird. They had an explosive relationship, but despite their differences they were the duo of jazz history. Timothy was as stubborn as Bird but wanted to play the trumpet. I often wondered if Timothy and I would go our own ways like Dizzy and Bird. It took many, many walks to school to settle the debate, but I was adamant. Dizzy and Bird played the trumpet and saxophone, not two trumpets. He finally understood: Dizzy was older; I was older and I was Dizzy.

Whenever Timothy tired of my pontifications on jazz, he hid one of my music books and told me I could not obtain its release until I taught him to play my trumpet or took him out to wrestle until we got rug burns. I refused and searched for the books, but he always found a secure hiding place. Or, if I was lucky enough to find the books, he simply hid them again. I was defeated by his ingenuity, and in this way he forced me to teach him to play the trumpet. As soon as we were playing scales and arpeggios, I forgot


about my books and was glad he had outwitted me. A day or two later, he would return the books unharmed but would not reveal where he hid them.

We had grand plans. We were going to play the trumpet and sax together and we were going to attend Harvard to get a decent education. I had heard so many stories about Cambridge and Harvard from my father that I decided that we would go and be just like him. Timothy was five years younger than me, so I would have graduated before he was a freshman, but we had figured that one out too. I could find a job in Boston and Timothy could share an apartment with me. We would continue our walks no matter what happened.

We even knew what we were going to do after Harvard. David, Peter and I had been born in America, and in 1981 Papa Charles had insisted that we leave Mexico so that Timothy could be born in the United States as well. You can only be president if you are born on American soil, and in his immigrant fantasy he wanted all of his grandchildren to be eligible to be president. Timothy and I had decided that I would be president for two terms, and Timothy would be my vice-president. After that, assuming the country had not tired of us, Timothy would be president for two terms and I would be his vice-president. We would be like the Kennedys, minus the drinking and womanizing. It was not clear how we could have combined the presidency with playing jazz at the Village Vanguard every night, but the problem never dawned on us.

Our plotting was obsessive, bordering on the maniacal. One day I had detention and told Timothy to walk home with Peter or David. I did not want my mother to worry about him. When I got out of hour-long detention, I found him playing basketball with Salva, the school janitor who had been a heroin addict. They were laughing as Salva cracked jokes.

“What are you doing here? I told you to go home!”

“I wanted to walk home with you. We’ve got a lot of planning to do.”

Timothy and I were young, but we had life all figured out.


Peter, Mary, David, Timothy, Elliott and Jonathan (left to right) 1991

13: A BEND IN THE ROAD

UNA CURVA EN EL CAMINO

About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”– which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Matthew 27 : 46

The United States was a jarringly familiar place. I looked to our trips back there with a mixture of anticipation and dread. I had an American passport and had lived there before during first grade, but everything was recognizable because I had seen it all in the movies on television on Saturday mornings. I derived an eerie comfort from the familiarity.

As missionaries, we had to go back as a family every four years to visit churches that supported us. Wilmington, North Carolina, the town where my mother grew up, was our base while my parents traveled. The Presbyterian church of which my parents were members found a large house in downtown Wilmington for us to have during the summer. It was an elegant antebellum house surrounded by tall oaks draped with Spanish moss. Many of the homes had large gardens filled with azaleas and oleander trees. Downtown was beautiful, and not far from the house was the old red brick Cotton Exchange. Wilmington was a quiet town, and when I wandered around my grandparents’


neighborhood, I missed the busy streets of San Blas and could not help but think of Louis Armstrong’s song “When It Is Sleepy Time Down South.”

We loved downtown, but most of all we loved the public library there. David, Peter, Timothy, and I had never been in such a large library. We walked through the front door and were awestruck. The staircases ascended and cascaded floor after floor, and as far as we could see in every direction stacks of books sprung from the ground and walls. Like vast waterfalls, each row cascaded upon the other. We were eager with anticipation, and quickly figured out that between the four of us we could check out as many books as we liked. David checked out books on mathematical puzzles and IQ tests to learn new equations and patterns. Peter checked out as many science and engineering books as he could possibly find. Timothy and I headed for the music section and we knew we were lucky. The library had biographies of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bix Beiderbecke, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus. Best of all, the library had recordings of every major jazz album.

The records were old and they hissed and popped as the needle moved through the vinyl grooves, but we were hearing jazz history. Timothy smiled and tapped his feet to the syncopated, animated dialogue between Davis’s horn and Coltrane’s sax on Milestones. We played the tracks at home and then played them again so as not to miss a note. We loved Bebop, but we could never figure out how to tap our feet to it. As Dizzy said, “Bop is part of jazz, and jazz music is to dance to. The trouble with Bop as it’s played now is that people can’t dance to it.” It did not matter: we were happy to listen to the spastic fireworks of Dizzy and Bird.

In Madrid I walked Timothy to school and in Wilmington I walked him to the library. We had fallen into our comfortable routine once again. I loved feeding him ideas and information. He had read books on instrumentation, and had memorized as much as any nine-year-old could about the history of the saxophone. That summer our grandparents took him to buy a saxophone. The salesman asked Timothy, “How much do you know about saxophones?”

Without hesitating, Timothy replied, “Adolphe Sax invented the saxophone in 1841 as a way to merge brass and reed instruments. There are fourteen saxophones from the sopranino to the contrabasso, but the four main ones are the soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone saxophones. And Charlie Parker played the saxophone.” He smiled and looked pleased with himself, but he could not have been half as pleased as I was.

While my brothers and I were content mining the recesses of the library for books, my father was incapable of being still. He was always on the move, hungrily searching for new things to read or see. In Wilmington he missed visiting the men’s houses and traveling to visit our centers around Spain, so he kept himself busy that summer between his preaching trips by taking us to the gym to play squash and lift weights. He took us to the beach to run and swim. My father thought that God was perfect, but if there was a flaw in the well-ordered world He had created, it was that there were not enough hours in the day.

One Saturday my father insisted the men in the family drive up to Kitty Hawk to visit the sand dunes where Orville and Wilbur Wright first flew a plane. My mother had gone to a women’s conference with some women from our Presbyterian church. It would four or five hour drive from Wilmington, but he was insistent that we could drive up, spend


the night and be back early in the morning. We knew from the tone in his voice that he had already decided and the matter was not up for discussion.

The night before my father took us to the library and checked out Zorba the Greek to watch. He told us stories of traveling around the Greek islands during his “reading days” at Cambridge and how he ate sardines roasted over an open fire and drank ouzo on the beach with local fishermen. Timothy did not feel well and he left half way through the movie to go to bed. I followed him, found him already asleep, and took his shoes off and tucked him into bed, as I often did.

Timothy and I would have preferred to go to the library or to the Cotton Exchange for an ice cream. But we had no say so. I packed some books on jazz and trumpet playing. Timothy, however, did not want to read. He sat in the front of the minivan and slept.

David drove while my father enjoyed the trip. In a few weeks he would turn seventeen and was anxious to drive. Peter had made sandwiches that morning. My father gave us Cokes and snacks of salsa and Doritos, and then read to us from the Bible as he always did. He began with Psalm 120 and read through to Psalm 127:

Children too are a gift from the Lord, the fruit of the womb, a reward.

Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children born in one's youth.

Blessed are they whose quivers are full. They will never be shamed contending with foes at the gate.

He prayed, and he told us how much he loved us, how proud he was to have us as his children, and he told that us one day we would be great men.

I thought: why does he always have to be so hyperbolic? Couldn’t he give it a break?

The drive up to Kitty Hawk on the day of July 19, 1991 was completely unremarkable up until 10:45 AM when the car went off the road. I was reading a book and looked up seconds before it happened. I saw the white stripe delineating the edge of the narrow, winding country road and the ditch beyond. It was a badly designed bend in the road. A few inches from the side the shoulder led into the ditch. David must not have been paying attention. One wheel strayed slightly over the line, and then the minivan lost its balance and rolled over and over.

The accident could not have taken more than a few seconds. Timothy was in the front seat asleep. My father was sitting in the middle seat, and Peter and I were reading books in the back. The moment the car rolled over, I heard the deafening roar of grass and gravel scraping the side of the car. Then I heard my father, “Hold on boys!!!” The minivan rolled and rolled and I heard the crunching of steel. We were thrown around against the van’s sides, the roof and the floor. My father kept yelling, and I tried to hold on as he said, but could not. The violent force did not let me to hold fast to anything. Books flew everywhere, and all my father’s notes for his poems and sermons filled the back of the car like a ticker tape parade. I fell on top of Peter. My head and my shoulders slammed against the roof and the sides of the van.


Suddenly, everything was quiet. I was on the floor of the car and my body was coursing with adrenaline from the accident. I looked around and grabbed the seat with my hand and then felt my own arm; it was all there and real. Peter was lying next to me, looking as frightened as I felt. I saw my father. He reached up front to see if David and Timothy were fine.

“Is everyone all right?”

“I don’t know.” All I could do was pull myself back up.

“Daddy, what happened?” Peter asked.

We looked to the front.

David screamed, “Timothy! Where’s Timothy?”

Timothy was not in his seat. The side doors were jammed and we could not open them. We all climbed out through the windshield. I leaned over the dashboard and pushed myself out, taking care not to cut myself on the glass. I walked around the side and saw my brother lying unconscious next to the minivan, blood gushing from his mouth and ears. I had read the American Medical Association encyclopedia and knew that his skull had been damaged.

Instantly I knew he was going to die.

I yelled harder than I had ever yelled. “No! No! God, how could You do it to Timothy?” My throat constricted and my lungs ached. I came to my knees by the car and pounded the green grass that was covered in blood until my fists hurt.

We never know what stuff we are made of until we face death. That day I believed I was a coward. The sight of Timothy dying was so terrible I could not bear it. Our car had landed on someone’s property, and I took it upon myself to go to the nearby house with Peter to use their phone. Someone had already called an ambulance, so I tried to call my mother at the women’s conference. I called the Presbyterian church to ask someone to pick us up at the hospital where the ambulance would take us. I asked them to find my mother. I called my grandparents in Wilmington, but could not reach them. I fooled myself into thinking I could bring order to the situation. But I was powerless. I avoided being at my brother’s side and watching him die. The decision of that moment still gnaws away at me.

My father knelt and held Timothy in his arms as he prayed. I screamed at God and blamed him, but my father asked God to show mercy on little Timmy, to heal him if possible and to take him gently if not. My father prayed while the paramedics struggled.

They could do nothing; they pronounced him dead.

After they put Timothy in a stretcher, my father stood by the minivan crying silently. As I looked at my father, I saw that part of his face was covered with blood. I raised my hand to clean it off and as I touched his cheek noticed that it was just the red salsa from the snacks we had in the back seat. I was struck by how absurd death is. It does not announce itself. It is not melodramatic. Timothy was unconscious before he died, and there were no parting words imbued with meaning. My father had just read the Psalms and told us he loved us, but that was what he always did; he did not know they were the last words he would read to us as the band of four brothers.


As for my mother, I had left a message that we had had an accident, but I did not want to let her know yet that Timothy had died. I remembered suddenly that my father had once told me that Papa Charles’s mother was never the same after losing a son. I could not even begin to think how my mother would react.

The ambulance took Timothy, David and my father to the hospital. Before they put Timothy in the ambulance, I looked at him and noticed his two large front teeth. They were the front teeth he brushed every morning before we went to school. They were the same large teeth I had when at his age. We looked so much alike. It could have been me who had died. Why had I survived? Timothy looked at peace, as he was the night before when he was sleeping, but now all was not well with the world. Nothing could ever be well again.

A painter stopped by the roadside to see if he could be of any help, and he drove Peter and me to the hospital in his van. I lay down in the back of the van between the brushes, the canvases and the cans of paint and wept until I felt my body had run out of tears.

At the hospital my father, Peter and I sat in the waiting room while the doctors treated cuts to David’s shoulder. My father answered relentless questions for a hospital administrator about David and Timothy. Was David insured? What was Timothy’s full name for the death certificate? His age? And social security number? My father struggled to remember the numbers.

My head drummed with an unbearable headache. Why? Why had it all happened?

I asked for an aspirin. A nurse took me back to a room. Did I hurt anywhere? My head and maybe my shoulder a little. Did I have any cuts? I didn’t know. I hadn’t stopped to check. I needed to sit down. A chair. Where was a chair? She examined me, and I had some cuts. I needed a tetanus shot. And a painkiller. I think that is what she said. The nurse gave me the shot and told me I needed to be X-rayed. She put me in a wheelchair and took me to a dark room and left me while she prepared the machine. I sat in the wheelchair by myself in this room without windows or lights and cried once again. It must have only been a minute, but it felt as if I had been left alone for hours. Where was David? My father and Peter? And then from the back of my mind: You will never see Timothy again. I gasped for breath and my arms would not move when I told them to. Where was I?

The room. I needed to get out of the room.

I sat in the wheelchair, crying, calling out for a nurse to come back and take me to my father. The nurse returned and apologized for leaving me alone. She said it was normal to panic and cry. She said I’d had a rough day but shouldn’t worry: everything was going to be O.K.

News of the accident reached my mother at the women’s conference. She was having lunch in the dining hall when one of her friends led her to a hallway. Half a dozen women surrounded her as they led her to a chair. They gave her the news. There had been a bad accident but they did not know who had been hurt.

One of the women immediately said she would drive my mother to the hospital in North Carolina. It must have been six hour drive, and my mother was speechless, in a state


of shock. When she arrived, we had already been taken to Wilmington. She heard the nurse say, “Somebody’s gotta tell her.” My mother was taken to a phone, and before she knew what was happening, she heard my father’s voice telling her that Timothy was dead. She cried out, “Oh, Timothy, my little Timothy, my little missionary!”

When she returned to Wilmington, we met my mother at her parents’ house. David, Peter and I stood at a distance as my parents slowly approached each other.

“I’m sorry, Mary. I’m so sorry...” my father said.

“Timothy...” she sobbed as she hugged my father, “My little Timothy.”

My mother turned towards David, Peter and me and we walked over to her and embraced her; then we stood in a broken circle.

As soon as Lindsay and Myk and the leaders of Betel found out Timothy had died, they bought Raúl a ticket to the United States. He would represent Betel at the funeral. He boarded a plane from Spain to New York and from New York to Raleigh, North Carolina, and from Raleigh on a small plane with two propellers to Wilmington. He was sick, exhausted and suffering from a fever when he arrived. Nonetheless, he came.

I was the first one to see him at the small airport. He was wearing wrinkled brown shorts and a white T-shirt. He dropped his bags in the middle of the ramp and ran towards me with his arms outstretched, embraced me and cried. All he could say was, “Os quiero, os quiero, os quiero. I love you all, I love you all, I love you all.”

The day of the funeral, the mortuary sent a car to my grandparents’ house to pick us up and take us to the church. Raúl rode with my family, and at the service he sat in the front row, next to my mother and father. My father introduced Raúl as his son, and Raúl delivered a solemn, moving eulogy in Spanish, which my father translated. He spoke of the great love that everyone in Betel had for our family and he said that Timothy, David, Peter and I were his brothers.

My father spoke briefly. He recounted how we went back to the wreck after the accident to pick up our books. The clock on the dashboard was frozen to the time of the accident. He found his notes and a crumpled, dirty sheet of paper amid the shards of glass and debris. It was the poem To An Athlete Dying Young by A. E. Housman. My father had read the poem to us many times before:

The time you won your town the race

We chaired you through the marketplace;

Man and boy stood cheering by,

And home we brought you shoulder-high.

Today, the road all runners come,

Shoulder high we bring you home,

And set you at your threshold down,


Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away

From fields where glory does not stay

And early though the laurel grows

It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut

Cannot see the record cut,

And silence sounds no worse than cheers

After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout

of lads that wore their honors out,

Runners whom renown outran

And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,

The fleet foot on the sill of shade,

And hold to the low lintel up

The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head

Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,

And find unwithered on its curls

The garland briefer than a girl's.

My father said he had consoled many parents in San Blas who had lost a son to overdoses or AIDS. He had counseled them and read verses of the Bible to comfort them. But suffering had always been something that happened to other people.

We were now other people.

My father said never could imagine how much it hurt to lose a son. Not until Timothy died.


Friends of my parents picked up the casket and put it in the hearse. Dozens of cars drove slowly from the church, and the streetlights flashed red and green, but everything stood still for the motorcade. At the cemetery, row upon row of plaques dotted the ground, and I quickly did the math in my head. On every gravestone, I could see the dates were of births and deaths of people who had died in their old age.

The burning, blinding sun shone down, and I looked to the sky and then closed my eyes. The sun’s negative was burned on my retina. I could hear the wind in the trees and the throbbing of engines on a distant road. When my eyes opened, everything blurred and I thought I was a hallucinating. Standing by the coffin was a young boy no older than five or six. He had the same blue eyes and fine blond hair Timothy had. He smiled at me, and I smiled back. For a moment, it appeared Timothy’s presence was with me.

After the service, family friends came to the house where we were staying. It was oppressively hot and humid, and I went upstairs to change my clothes. I heard a knock at the door to my room. The little boy was standing at the door.

“Are you sad?”

I did not answer.

He walked in and wandered around the room. “Whose are these?” he asked as he picked up Timothy’s toys.

“They’re Timothy’s.”

“Can I have his toys?”

“No.”

“He isn’t gonna need 'em anymore...”

“Please leave.” I wanted to push him out the door and slam it in his face, but he was just a little kid and did not know any better. “Don’t come back.” He left without arguing. I sat at the end of my bed and looked at Timothy’s belongings. We would have to do something with them, and the thought had not occurred to me before.

In the days that followed the funeral, friends and relatives prepared dinners for the many guests that came to the house to offer their condolences, and they washed dishes and cleaned the house. Raúl stayed with my family in Wilmington for a week. David, Peter and I tried to escape the well wishers, walking with him down to the waterfront and to the old Cotton Exchange. Raúl was tired, and he stayed in my room to rest. We slowly and carefully took apart the bunk bed that I shared with Timothy and made two beds. Timothy was small and could sleep on the top bunk, but Raúl feared he would come crashing down on me in the middle of the night. The bed would not have broken under his weight, but it was good to take it apart and share the room with him. Perhaps it just postponed for me the sight of Timothy’s empty bed.

I was not going to do anything with Timothy’s toys until we returned to Madrid. In the hospital after the accident my father, Peter and I sat in the waiting room while the doctors treated David’s shoulder. I thought of all the people in Betel and all the people that Timothy wanted to help in Africa as a medical missionary. I held my father’s arm with both hands, “Daddy, death is real... I could have died today... Timothy wanted to be a


missionary in Africa. That’s what he wanted. I need to take his place. I need to help as many people as possible before I die.”

He looked at me with tears in his eyes. His voice cracked as he said, “Jonathan, you don’t need to make any decisions now... From now on, you have to try to live life one day at a time.”


Timothy 1990

14: ONE DAY AT A TIME

DÍA A DÍA

We have seen the faces of those we know best so variously, from so many angles, in so many lights, with so many expressions – walking, sleeping,

laughing, crying, eating, talking, thinking – that all the impressions crowd out our memory together and cancel into a mere blur.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

You can live life one day at a time forward, but never backwards. There were many things I wished I had not said and even more that I had left unsaid. I had promised Timothy I would put flowers by his grave if he got hit by a car. On our walks to school every morning we had rarely followed the crowds at the crosswalks and instead jaywalked whenever cars were not racing down the street. We were convinced we were invincible, that nothing could ever happen to us. I had had no idea that our banter could be anything but a joke. I regretted ever joking with him about it. Everything replayed itself, and foreshadowing conversations and omens came to mind. I rummaged through my past with him: it was now all that I had and I could take none of it back.


Timothy had died five days before his tenth birthday. He was buried in Wilmington at a cemetery that is less than half a mile from the hospital where he was born. It was not natural for a father and mother to bury their son like that, or an older brother his younger brother. Old people die, not the young, I told myself — certainly not nine year olds.

We returned to San Blas a few weeks after Timothy died. He was everywhere. His bed in our bunk bed was empty. When I set the table and counted the number of plates, I realized that we would never again set out six plates for a family dinner, and he would not sit at the table in his usual seat. His clothes were all neatly folded in his drawers, but he would never wear them again. We had to do something with them, but I refused to move them.

Even the smallest detail at home in Madrid exposed the hole in our lives. When I cleaned out his drawers, I found some of my trumpet books beneath his underwear and shirts. He had hidden them there to force me to go out to play basketball before we left Spain. I smiled as I cried. He had had the last laugh.

As I cleaned out the drawers of the desk we shared, I found a diary in a small ringed notebook that I did not even know he kept. In his childish scrawl, I read entry after entry:

Oct. 9, 1990 I don’t like the cold wether but I like it when it snows. But I walk to school every day and its very cold. I freeze even when I have a coat on.

......

October 24, 1990 People know Im a Christian because we help them and we treat them nice. We have devotions.

......

Nov, 14, 1990 When I feel sad, I go and punch my pillow. Then I go to my friends house. Then I come back and I punch my pillow again. Then I sing the beach boys song and then I’m not sad.

......

January 14, 1991 I know that Martin Luther King had a dream that whites and blacks should be equal. He boycotted everything.

......

February 1, 1991 My family is a missionary family and it helps toxicomanos get cured.

He even wrote about David, Peter, and me, “They take care of me and I like them.” Even though we dragged him around the neighborhood when he was little and forced him to be one of the big boys, he knew we loved him.

Timothy wrote about his toys, slime monsters and giant pizzas, but he also wrote comments on the Gulf War and on the US debt. He wrote short thoughts about what he would do if he were president, how he would have more robots to make American


automobile factories productive and how he would cut the trade deficit with Japan. It was astonishing stuff for a nine-year-old kid. He had paid more attention to what we talked about on our walks to school than I could have imagined.

But now Timothy was gone. Had Timothy been sick, perhaps I could have been ready for his loss, but nothing could prepare me for seeing my brother die so suddenly and violently. Many mornings I woke up thinking that it was all a bad dream, that somehow Timothy would be sharing my room with me once again, that I would walk him to school. And then I realized that it was not a dream — not even a nightmare. Never again would I sing Beach Boys songs with him on the way to school. Never again would I watch him jump triumphantly off the cliff into the sea.

But how could he be dead? After Timothy died, my mother had gone to see his body in the mortuary, and she said he looked at peace. I did not want to see him; it would have been too final. I struggled to accept that he was gone. Instead, I operated in a twilight, writing letters to Timothy and burning them, hoping the rising ashes would carry my thoughts to him. This state of insanity continued until my mother asked, “Is there a reason you keep taking the kitchen matches and why are there ashes in the patio?” I confessed, but she could not bring herself scold me.

I had experienced sadness before, but never grief. Grief was altogether different. Timothy’s death was an exposed wound that hurt unbearably. After a few weeks, life for those around us returned to normal, but for us nothing could ever be the same again. What eventually took over from that sharp pain was a dull emptiness. I lost my appetite and could not sleep. My senses had died. At dinners, in class, or even playing fútbol, I excused myself from everyone to weep in private. The pain followed me no matter what I did or where I went – I could not slip it.

For months after Timothy’s death, even the shortest car journey induced panic and sheer terror if the car hit the slightest bump. I could do nothing to escape that fear. When I traveled with friends, I clenched my seatbelt with white knuckles and did my best to hide it, but when I traveled with my family, my mother or David and Peter sat next to me and held me tight in their arms, “Breathe, Jonathan, breathe...” I had watched the car go over the side of the road and was convinced it would happen again. And I stared out the window and looked at the white line delineating the side of the road as tears rolled down my cheeks.

The worst part of losing Timothy was losing even my memory of him. How could I forget someone I loved so much? I had watched him grow up, yet I found it hard to remember his face. The evanescent image flickered in my brain, disappearing if I concentrated on any detail.

My parents, David, Peter and I all scoured the house for pictures of him to frame and keep. We looked for traces of him and talked about him at the dinner table. We told faint memories that we recounted again and again, perhaps hoping they would grow stronger with each retelling. We held onto them like pieces of a puzzle, feeling their uneven outlines, fitting them together, gluing them in our memory, waiting for the scattered fragments to form an image and become clearer in our minds.

If at the age of only fifteen I struggled to remember the outline of his smile and the sound of his mischievous laugh, what would I remember when I was old? One day I


might go to college, find a job, get married, have children, work and retire. And the person I would be then would certainly be very different from the teenager I was. Timothy, though, would forever be a nine year old boy with a frozen smile. He would be the framed photograph on my mantelpiece.

The plans Timothy and I had painted together on the vast, unfurled canvas of our future were gone. There would be no great concerts or recordings of the next Dizzy and Bird. We would not share a room in Boston when he would follow me to Harvard. I read his diary many times looking for clues to his thoughts about me and found an entry dated February 14th, 1991, “I like my brother Jonathan because he shows me how to play the trumpet.” He did not want to play the sax; he wanted to be like me and play the trumpet.

For all my grief, life did not come to a standstill. The school year resumed once again in September, and I had to start tenth grade and go to classes, even though most of the time I did not want to. The routines which had given me so much comfort before he died now tormented me. Walking to school was painful, and I walked with Peter and David so as not to be so alone. In Betel we still had Friday night and Sunday morning meetings to go to. And there again I felt alone. Timothy used to sit in the front row, and if he was tired during one of the sermons, he rested his head on my shoulder and fell asleep. Not anymore.

Grief appeared in waves: like a surge it came crashing in and receded slowly. In the lulls I forgot the pain of Timothy’s death for the briefest of instants. The little daily chores of life took over and I forgot my sadness. One morning, as I tied my shoe laces before going to school it occurred to me that I had not thought of Timothy yet that day. Other times it was because the grief temporarily lifted. It is impossible to be sad permanently, and brief respites of contentment and happiness appeared unannounced. Then the feeling of guilt over forgetting my brother was even worse. It was as if the small mercies of friendship or the simple pleasures of life were an affront to his memory and the agony of losing him. In that moment, my grief lapsed into guilt. I substituted an imagined pain for a real one. My tears were no longer about the anguish of losing him, but the self-pity of losing my own sadness. Timothy would not have wanted me to be as disconsolate and unhappy as I was, but a sense of shame haunted me if I found myself not in mourning. It was as if the depth of my grief was the measure of my love for him.

Timothy’s death was senseless. Friends and strangers offered answers for why he had died, but none of them were satisfactory. Some Christian friends of my parents said that God was trying to test my father’s character like Job. Was he just a callous God experimenting on a man who loved him? If He was, I did not want any part of Him. If that was the kind of God my family had so faithfully followed in Mexico and Spain, God had a lot to answer for. Others said that we took loved ones for granted and we could only realize how much we loved them when they were gone, so God had to take them. If that were true, I could not imagine a punishment so out of all proportion to the crime.

None of the answers made any sense, and we groped blindly for some greater meaning, for some reason behind the madness. My parents turned to books, but they offered nothing. My father read C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed at the dinner table. Lewis taught English literature at Oxford. Late in life he met Helen Joy Davidman, an American writer, and married her. She died of cancer just a few years after they married. Lewis, the


great man of faith and letters, struggled bravely and articulately with death and grief, but he had no more answers than I did.

My father rarely said that Timothy had died, and I wondered if he had accepted it. He became more mystical and overtly spiritual and found comfort in the hope that one day we would see Timothy again. Our family would be reunited in heaven; all our tears would turn to laughter and rejoicing. He talked about Timothy’s “homecoming to God,” his “graduation” to a better life, his “being called on by God” – anything but saying Timothy was dead. It seemed odd to me simply not to say it. Timothy died. He was dead. And he was never coming back. Perhaps then it was just too difficult to say. When I asked my father why he watered down the truth, as ever, he had more answers than I expected or wanted. Shakespeare wrote about “this sleep of death,” and Henry Longfellow wrote of “a covered bridge leading from light to light, through a brief darkness.” The Apostle Paul wrote, “Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.” My father said that throughout human history everyone has called death by another name. He had Shakespeare and the Apostle Paul on his side, yet it did not bring Timothy any closer.

My father’s belief in God and heaven was not a convenient spiritual placebo he turned to make his pains go away. He had believed firmly before the accident, and afterwards he remained true to his faith. To him Timothy’s death was an agonizing reminder to him that we live on the very edge of eternity, balanced precariously between life and death. I could tell he suffered, but did not talk much about it. He poured himself all the more into Betel, worked even harder to start centers, visit houses, conduct devotionals at the men’s residences, and see our friends in the hospitals.

My father found some sliver of meaning in Timothy’s death. But what greater cosmic good could come from ending the life of such a young boy? Perhaps it could produce long suffering and patience in our family and give us compassion for others. This explanation made God the stern schoolmaster; a death in our family was the only way we could learn the pain of all the families in San Blas. Perhaps that is how things work in the arithmetic of suffering. The greater the number of deaths around us from overdoses and AIDS, the less they all added up to; and it took our own individual loss to multiply our suffering. But I rejected the notion: we were not self-absorbed people, and we did not even do good works self-righteously. My parents loved helping others, and if God had some grand plan I could not see how Timothy’s death could fit in with it all.

When David, Peter, Timothy and I were younger, we were inseparable and wandered around the neighborhood together. We were as close as brothers could be and had shared everything: ice cream, toys, chicken pox, lice. As long as we stuck together, nothing could go wrong. Now we were about as complete as a compass with only three points. At first we retold stories trying to enlarge them, hoping to bring Timothy back to life, but his absence never changed. We spoke less and less. All the joking and mischief left our lives, and we retreated from each other.

The spring before the accident, the students at ECA had voted David student body president and president of the National Honor Society, and Peter, Timothy and I were proud of him. David had always lead the band of brothers when we went out to play in the streets or when we played soccer. He was the brains and always knew what to do.


David was highly intelligent, handsome, and popular. After the accident, though, he went from being a tall, athletic, extroverted teenager to an introspective young man. He had entered his senior year in high school and he wanted to go to Princeton to study mathematics. I often wondered if he poured himself into his studies to block out everything else. Books were the shell we had always withdrawn into as kids to create our own world at home. I was not looking forward to seeing him go to college. He would be so far away from our family, Betel and the neighborhood.

David had been driving the car when the accident happened, and he held himself personally responsible for Timothy’s death. It was a freak accident, and Timothy would probably still be alive if his seatbelt had not failed. After all, David only had a few cuts to show for the wreck. He could not understand why Timothy had died yet he had survived. At night I could hear David’s voice in a whisper, “Why? Why did it happen?” We tried to reassure him that it was not his fault, but nothing we said could lift the load he had placed on himself.

One morning as I walked to school with Peter, he said, “I guess I’m the youngest now. Before Timothy was. He was the joker.” I could tell he had been giving this much thought. “I guess I need to be the clown now... but I don’t know if I can.”

“No one’s going to take anyone’s place, you hear me? You just got to be yourself.”

But he was right: he was younger and, without wanting it, he had become the youngest.

In our lives there was only before and after. Timothy’s death was the equinox, and when he was gone every day became a little dimmer. The gray haze of depression grew thicker, blocking out anything that might have raised our sights from the ground before us. Sometimes we struggled to see even the next step ahead. David, Peter and I walked together to school each day and strained to speak and could not make sense of things. The question of why Timothy had died was unanswerable, as was the question of why we had survived. There was a randomness to it, like some cosmic lottery that we had never asked to play. We wondered what we had possibly done to be worthy of death’s reprieve. And we felt the burden of being alive.


Mary and Timothy, vacation (1989)

15: THE HEART OF A MOTHER

EL CORAZÓN DE UNA MADRE

There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the

messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.

Washington Irving

We all suffered after Timothy died, but my mother suffered most. We had teased Timothy and called him “Mommy’s boy” because it bothered him. He was much tougher than boys his age, but like all joking insults, there was some truth to the jab. Timothy was the youngest, and my mother spent more time with him than with any of us. She loved all of us, but I think she loved Timothy in a protective way that mothers can love only their youngest.

Minutes after the accident, I thought of my great-grandmother who I had never met and about whom I knew very little. My father once told me that Papa Charles had a younger brother who died at the age of three, and after his death Papa Charles’s mother was never the same, living the rest of her life in the dusk of depression. I was scared that


my mother would change, that she might become depressed, that she might not be able to love us as she had before, in case any more of us died and made her sadder. Perhaps she would even need to see a psychiatrist. And men in white gowns and white gloves would take her away and we would never see her again.

Before Timothy died I never saw my parents fight. Perhaps they did, but never in front of me and my brothers. My memories were of them staying up late at night drinking tea and reading together in the living room. After Timothy died, that changed. They argued elliptically over trivial things, raising their voices in anger. They retreated from each other’s touch, as if they had suddenly become brittle. My certainty that they loved each other vanished. I hated the fights, but what I feared even more were the terrible silences. They were like ghosts that entered the house and became larger, more real and more terrifying the longer my parents avoided each other.

I do not remember what any of the arguments were about, but I knew why they were fighting – it was always Timothy’s death. Speaking only made things worse, compounding their hurt. My parents grieved differently, and the space between them filled slowly with the cobwebs of misunderstandings and affronts.

My mother wrestled with God in a struggle we could understand but could not fight for her. Before she had sat in her room in her wicker chair where she listened to music and read, but now she sat in silence, motionless and unresponsive, crying silently. Was there a finite supply of tears, a reservoir somewhere that ultimately ran dry? Surely it had to end. I tried to speak to her, but she would not answer. I reached out and held her hand, but she did not hold mine. Why would she not talk or only speak in a whisper? She was holding the memory of Timothy like a shard of glass that was slowly tearing at her insides. When I was a boy she had picked me up, cleaned my cuts, and treated my wounds. But the mother I had known was gone, and I did not know if she would ever return.

When we came back to Madrid, it seemed like everyone was suddenly getting ill from the opportunistic diseases of AIDS. My mother’s friend Marimar, one of the first women in the center, came down with severe pneumonia. She was married to Carlos El Bruto, who got his name because of the ease with which he could start and finish a fight on his own. They lived in the program and left after a year. It was wonderful to see their family happy and healthy together. They had another daughter named Maria, and Marimar started a cleaning business. Marimar loved my mother and had given her a beautiful art naïf charcoal print that hung in our living room.

At first Marimar’s fevers weakened her and gave her terrible fits of coughing. Finally, she entered the hospital with pneumocystis carinii and a fungal infection called candida that left her partially blind. She could no longer work or even care for her daughters. Her thick hair had been black and thick, but it was thinning; she was frail and did not look like the woman I had known. Some people at church said that was what she got for not taking her AIDS medicine, but I could not bring myself to blame her. I had seen many people die who did take Retrovir, and those who lived often suffered awful side effects. I thought it did not matter whether she took it, and perhaps she thought the same.

My mother went to the hospital to cheer up Marimar, but usually found her in good spirits already, encouraging the woman in the next bed over. My mother's trips outside the house were rare. At church or with other missionaries, she chafed at the


slightest remark. Marimar was one of the few people my mother wanted to see, and I was almost glad she was in the hospital.

When my mother could not visit, Marimar wrote letters from her bed on the hospital stationery:

Hello Mary! How are you?

Mary you are on my heart, and you have helped me so much, you are like a spiritual mother to me and a great friend who has always helped me through all the difficult times I have gone through. But now it is you who is going through great pain and I want to share it with you and tell you that I love you and that you are a great woman with a great ministry and don’t forget that a lot of people need you.

I am here in the hospital and it gives me much time to think and pray and this morning I thought of something I wanted to share with you.

You know that sometimes I already feel as if I had lost my daughters. I see them so distantly and I have such little strength to raise them.

I do not want make you sad, Mary, but just wanted to cheer you up and say that the Lord is the only one who can heal our pain. Mary, let him comfort you. There are times when I feel I’ve already lost Clara and Maria, until the Lord gives me new strength, and I think that if I go to be with the Lord, I hope they will be looked after. You know Mary, there are many times when I can’t wait to hug my daughters in desperation. Mary the Lord can console us and we can feel his love in our hearts.

My daughters are precious to me. We both have the heart of a mother and God knows it and he has a special love for us.

I know God is with you.

With much love,

M Mar

(Forgive my handwriting, my pulse is not very good.)

Psalm 88:2 Lord, my God, I call out by day; at night I cry aloud in your presence.

One evening my mother told us about her visit to Marimar in the hospital earlier that day. “Marimar smiled and was happy when we talked, even though she had needles and tubes going into her body. But at the end of our conversation she cried. She cried when she talked about Clara and Maria. And she told me, ‘It’s normal for parents to die before their children. But I do not want to die. At least not now. I’m still young and Clara and Maria are only eight and four years old. It’s not natural.’ And do you know, when she told me that I couldn’t think what’s worse, having your kids die too young or dying before them.”

She left the table as she quietly cried. My father, David, Peter and I sat there in silence. No one wanted to touch his food.


Marimar died a few weeks later. My mother wrote a note so that David, Peter and I could get out of school and attend her memorial service. At noon we walked over to Betel’s auditorium and saw Clara and Maria weeping. They clutched Carlos’s arm and refused to let go. I struggled to say something to them and choked on my words. On the walk back to school, I thought it was probably best that way. Nothing I could have said or done would change anything for Clara and Maria.

About a week after Marimar died, on a grey winter day I accompanied my mother to run some errands, buy groceries and carry them home. It had been seven months since Timothy died. We walked to the local farmacia to buy some cough medicine. Pharmacies were fortified like banks because addicts held them up for the supplies of tranquis like Valium, Buprex, or Rohypnol to calm them down when they could not get heroin. The floors smelled of antiseptic fluid, and a saleswoman stood behind a thick glass partition while I ordered through a microphone.

As we walked away, my mother asked me, “Jonathan, how many sleeping pills do you think I’d have to take to die?”

“Shut up. We don’t need another death in the family,” I said. “Don’t you ever say that again.” We did not speak for the rest of the shopping trip.

The thought of finding her overdosed in her room was too terrifying to even discuss. As we walked home, I hid my growing sense of panic. Was her question the hairline crack in the glass of sanity? Was this how the small break spread before everything shattered? I did not want to go through her drawers regularly and search for pills. I would have to search her room when she was out shopping.

There were days when I also wanted to go to sleep and never wake up. The thought of suicide lurked in my mind, but I did not have the courage to talk about it with anyone. Yet angrily and self-righteously I looked down on my mother’s struggle; it is always our own weaknesses that we most despise in others.

Only years later would I find out that David too had thought of killing himself. In the end he could not bear to: he did not want my parents to lose another son.

My mother began corresponding with mothers in the United States who had lost a child. A friend had put her in touch with an organization for bereaved parents. She sat back in her room, reading and writing for hours. I did not understand how she could write so much to women she never had met and yet speak so little to us. They did not know her, and perhaps because of that they did not judge her.

I never asked what she wrote to her new friends. Did she blame God? Did she blame David for driving? Did she blame my father for letting David drive? I wondered if she would have been any different if she had been with us in the accident. If she had been there, she would have seen what a freak accident it was.

My mother had retreated from us and from Betel. She stopped leading the Tuesday evening Bible study for the mothers in Betel. She stopped leading the singing of hymns at church. She no longer visited mothers and gave comfort to them when they had lost a son to an overdose.


My mother would not go to the women’s meetings, but there was a strange symmetry as Pilar and the mothers from church came to see her. From the hallway I could see through the open living room door that my mother was leaving her life ajar so others could enter. I hoped Pilar could help. Most of the older women from church had children who were on drugs, and many had lost sons to overdoses, AIDS, and violence on the streets. In San Blas it was the lot of mothers to suffer in life. Pilar was a close friend of my mother’s, and when I was a child, I heard her story many times, but I had never understood. All the details of her story had merged into the story of every other mother, and in the end it meant little to me.

As a child I had gone with my mother to Pilar’s apartment and could not help feeling virtuous, thinking how thoughtful and kind we were for calling on her in her suffering. I had seen the picture of José’s first communion on her mantelpiece. As I looked back, however, the visits became faintly embarrassing. At Timothy’s funeral my father said that he had consoled many parents in San Blas when they had lost a son to violence or an overdose, but had not fully understood their pain — until now.

My mother had continued to write letters to her new friends in the United States for months. I did not know that she had given permission to one of her friends to include her story in a book on women’s suffering. One day the galley proofs arrived at our home. My mother examined it and gave it to us. For the first time, we read her thoughts, the anger and grief that she had suppressed.

My mother stood at the podium and held the pages that her friend had written. She read the words with a clear, strong voice:

Once she was back in Spain her letters came in an avalanche, sometimes two a day. There were days when I thought Mary would lose her mind or end her life. And I feared that, in anger, she might push me away too and move onto a sea of isolation, letting no one, not even God, touch the pain.

Nearly a year would pass before Mary started to walk in cautious steps back toward the light. And at that time, only one thing would warm her heart — the unconditional acceptance of friends who allowed her the right to grieve.

...

One morning Mary opened the door to an elderly Spanish woman from the neighborhood. She, too, had lost a child. With no mask to uphold, the woman wrapped Mary in her arms and sobbed with her.

That Sunday my mother spoke at church for the first time since Timothy died. It was all more than she had ever told David, Peter, Dad or me. Everyone at church heard about Timothy’s death and her struggle with God.

When she finished speaking, the older mothers in the front row stood up. Even though the service was not over, they walked to the front of the church and embraced her. Many had lost sons. No one said anything; they simply cried and hugged each other.


A Betel worker giving out flyers in Los Pitufos

16: THE GARDEN OF DELIGHTS

EL JARDÍN DE LAS DELICIAS

And he said to me: "This miserable way

Belongs to the sad souls of those

Who lived without infamy and without praise.

"They are mixed with that craven crew

Of Angels who were neither rebellious

Nor were loyal to God, but were for themselves.”


It was an odd time to be living in Spain. We were still grieving, but all around us the country was euphoric from the feeling of being at the center of the world. Barcelona was hosting the summer Olympic games in 1992. Sevilla was home to the futuristic pavilions of the European Expo. High-speed trains were at last connecting Spain’s cities. Time, Newsweek, The Herald Tribune and other magazines from all over the world put the “new Spain” on their front covers. The world could not get enough of the country.


Downtown Madrid was cleaner, and few yonquis or alcoholics cluttered the sidewalks outside the imposing movie theatres of Gran Via. Lavapiés and La Latina had been run down neighborhoods of the old city center, but they got facelifts. No tourists would go away with a bad impression of Madrid’s drugs and violence. No one would be embarrassed by human suffering as they walked the streets after an evening show. Madrid was wealthier and looked better, but under the surface little had changed and San Blas was getting worse.

The problems in San Blas had been slowly festering. The city government had erected walls around the Gypsy camp as if it were an infection that could be contained. Construction workers bulldozed some of the shacks to make way for the wall. The neighbors had hoped for more and waited anxiously for the mayor to lance the boil and raze the entire village. Drug taxis had replaced the lines of donkey-drawn carts that I had seen as a child. The cabbies ferried addicts from all over Madrid to San Blas to get their fix. They waited patiently and once the yonquis were high they drove them back. All fares were paid up front in cash. Police cars guarded the two points of entry to the ghetto, but they merely stood as a barrier between the neighbors who regularly protested the muro de la vergüenza, the wall of shame, and the yonquis who came and went as if nothing had changed.

The problem of heroin did not go away — it just moved. When we arrived in Madrid, San Blas was the main drug dealing point of the city. The Gypsies in Los Focos had supplied most of the heroin for the neighborhood. However, as the city government and the police continued their never-ending building campaigns, the major points of supply for heroin shifted further south and west. The neighborhood of Vallecas sat on the other side of the circular roads that divided Madrid into concentric spheres. Vallecas was home to Los Pitufos; it was known as the Smurfs because the Gypsies there lived in low blue and white houses. When I had entered the Gypsy camp in San Blas, it was an adventure to go with my father as guide, but when I visited Los Pitufos, everything seemed heightened and more real.

My father parked alongside the highway. We got out and walked across the small paved road that divided the Spanish apartment blocks from the small Gypsy houses. He gave me some Betel flyers with the directions to our main office, and we went out to talk to the yonquis and invite them to the center. The first almost imperceptible shades of gray had crept into my father’s hair, while I had turned sixteen and was finally taller than him. It was hard to believe we had been doing this for over nine years since we first went to the streets of San Blas.

Even though a bed of needles and blood stained syringes covered the ground, my father wore just sandals in the summertime. He walked around as if it were our living room. In fact, I often recognized some of the addicts who had been in our home or stayed in many of Betel’s houses. We had first met them years ago when they were buying heroin at Torre del Campo and Parque del Paraíso in San Blas. Back then we talked to Raúl, Luis Pino, Jambri, Majara and Veneno. Now they were all part of Betel, and some of their friends were still out on the streets. They recognized us and gave us a nod or a wave, and walked on in a hurry, enraptured in their search for heroin. Some yonquis were new and I had not seen their faces before. We freely talked to the people who were shooting up, selling or buying heroin; they never threatened us or told us to leave. They were too busy trying to get high, but they knew of my father and Betel and knew that if they ever needed help we would take them in without asking any questions.


Most of the cars entering Los Pitufos were old vehicles with missing bumpers, broken lights, and cracked windows, but even chauffeured cars rolled in alongside them. As a child I believed the stereotype of the poor, haggard addict. Heroin knows no class. The luxury cars were driven by well-dressed users who believed that they had their habit under control and would never stoop to the level of the forlorn souls around them. They were doing drugs “recreationally.” They bought their drugs and left. But if you spent enough time there, you could see how the wealthy were slowly swallowed in the mire like everyone else. Like colors, both ends of the social spectrum met and bled into each other.

As I walked around with my father, I could see the addicts who had been hooked for a while crowded into the old vehicles as they shot up together or sat around in the cars smoking their heroin, trying to trap the smoke and extend their high, if only for an instant.

When I was a child I never saw anyone smoking or snorting heroin — the high was less intense than injecting — but the fear of AIDS was changing the way people used. Some addicts used new needles for each use or cleaned their old ones with bleach. But many could not be bothered.

Rats scurried among the thousands of small plastic bleach bottles that littered the roads and open fields. The government provided free needles and bottles of bleach to help the yonquis shoot up hygienically. They gave out over a hundred fifty thousand needles a month, but it was a losing struggle against HIV. Even if an addict was using clean needles nine out of ten times, he was still using dirty needles a few times a week. Nearby was a clinic whose goal was to get people to stop being heroin addicts and, presumably, become methadone addicts instead. If the government could not cure heroin addiction, at least they could try to reduce the harm. Social services had become a pusher, and every day a bus drove up to the camp and the doctors and nurses gave out thousands of doses of methadone a day. Most addicts, though, were poly-drug users, supplementing their heroin habit with amphetamines, coke and marijuana. I did not know why the social workers thought the yonquis would not do the same with methadone.

Few outside agencies dared to enter the wasteland of shacks, abandoned vehicles, and garbage. The police drove in with their Jeeps if there had been a murder or a stabbing, but otherwise they had no interest in what went on there. The pushers were allowed to deal freely, and the yonquis went about their business oblivious to the occasional patrol car full of young policemen who looked anxious to get out of the place.

My father and I made our way across the field and met couple of men from Betel. They were welcomed in Los Pitufos because they came bearing gifts. Every day Eduardo, a leader in Betel, came with a van full of cookies, yogurts, sandwiches and containers of fruit juices. The heroin addicts needed it. Those who had lived for a while were emaciated. Their ribs showed beneath their tank tops during the summer time, and in winter, their coats and jackets hung from their bones. Their faces were sunken, their cheekbones jutted out, showing the jagged edges of their skull. My parents’ motto was Erasmus’s quote, “If I have money, I buy books. If I have any left over I buy food.” For the yonquis if they had money they bought heroin and if they had any left over they bought more heroin. When Eduardo opened the back of the van, addicts swooped on the food from all directions. They ate quickly, like vultures devouring carrion. Betel offered them most of what they would eat all day.


In Madrid, where there were drugs there were Gypsies. Los Pitufos was a marketplace and a rubbish dump, a Gypsy camp and a place of escape. Gypsies lived there permanently and built their homes along a dirt road at the far end of the camp. They had small stores where besides selling heroin they sold tin foil for smoking heroin, coffees and snacks, as well as small cafés where one could order a cortado or a café con leche. When addicts did not have enough money to buy a papelina of heroin, they resorted to buying micras. The doses were too small to have a strong effect, but it was better than nothing. If they became too weak to steal, they offered themselves as machacas to the Gypsies. It then became their job to stand guard at the door and alert them to the presence of police, and also swept and cleaned the insides of the shacks. Near the stores Gypsy children ran around unkempt, buzzing down the narrow lanes with their motor bikes. They played fútbol amid the detritus and piles of garbage accumulating in the open fields. The old Gypsy laws were breaking down, and many of the kids were using drugs as well as selling them. It was hard to imagine children growing up there.

Even though I grew up right next to the Gypsy camp and saw yonquis shoot up all the time as a kid, going in with my father was always an experience. Things I paid little attention to as a child now struck me as odd, and I wondered if I had become used to seeing people shooting up and had not given thought to their suffering. It was as if going in again had reawakened my senses after a long slumber. Did my father ever get used to it? Did he ever lose a sense of sadness at seeing the misery around him? As I thought about him, I looked around and could not find him.

My father was standing by a shack talking animatedly with two yonquis. They had aluminum foil folded behind their ears, and were getting ready to smoke some heroin together. One of them was tall and skinny; he had a T-shirt hanging over his right shoulder. He was tanned from spending his days out in the sun. His friend was short with a beard and time had recorded itself in the grooves and cuts on his face. I had seen my father do this hundreds of times before at Torre del Campo and Parque del Paraíso when I was a little kid. He looked older than when we arrived in Spain, but he was still just as eager to invite addicts to Betel as when he used to go out with Lindsay and Raúl, perhaps even more so now.

He entreated, cajoled and argued with them. “Why not just enter Betel today and give it a chance?”

The tall yonqui did not like my father’s question. “I’m fine. I can get off drugs whenever I want to.”

“Have you looked at yourself in the mirror?” He had heard all their arguments before and he was not going to let them off that easily.

“I don’t need anything or anyone.” He looked over at his friend, and pointed towards the open field, “Come on. Let’s go. I want to shoot up.”

“Why do you look so tired? Why does your friend look so hungry?”

His short friend glanced over at my father, “You know... Esto, esto no es vida. This, this isn’t life.”

“You know as well as I do that people here die of overdoses all the time. You don’t even know if you’ll still be around next week.”


They looked away but did not leave.

“Come in today.” He took out a flyer for Betel and handed it to them. “We’ll be by that white van over there. See the one with the dove and a broken needle on it right by the main road? We’re leaving in half an hour, but if you want to come, we’ll see you there.”

Both addicts asked if they could go smoke their heroin first and then said they would meet him. They’d give Betel a try. My father told them to go smoke and then come back. We would be waiting.

I was puzzled, “Dad, if they want to get high, clearly they’re not interested in getting off drugs. Why did you tell them we’d wait for them?”

“Trust me, they’ll be there,” he said.

Betel had grown over the years, and my father did not have to go to the dump. He could have left it entirely to the men in the center. Raúl had started a Betel center in Barcelona, Jambri in Cuenca, Lindsay in Valencia, and we had centers in many other cities. My father could have spent his time overseeing his regional leaders and preaching at church on Sunday morning.

My father and I waited by the Betel van we used to distribute food. I chatted with the men in Betel, but I noticed that my father was staring off into the distance, lost in his thoughts as he often was at the dinner table when he read.

“Dad, is everything O.K.?”

“I should have been a better father. I...” Tears were welling up in his eyes. “I should have driven that day.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I miss Timmy... I do.”

I awkwardly embraced him. He was probably right, but I did not know what to say.

“Jonathan, one day this world will fade away in the light of eternity.” He let go of me and dried his eyes. “We’ve got to reach them before they overdose. We’ve got to...”

“Dad, what if there isn’t a heaven. What if we never see Timothy again?”

“Do you really believe that? Do you have doubts?”

“I’m just asking. What if ?”

“Do you remember when I read Lewis’s The Silver Chair to you as a boy? Jill and Scrubb and Puddleglum had just freed Prince Rilian, the true heir of Narnia, and the Queen of the underworld comes back and tries to cast a spell on them. Remember what Puddleglum said about Narnia and Aslan?” My father quoted the entire passage from memory:

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things — trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that , in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty


poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm on Alsan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as long as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.

“What if, you ask? Even if it weren’t true, I’m a Narnian.”

Once again, I did not know what to say to my father. He always had a better answer than I did.

We waited for half an hour for the two men to show up. The short man with a beard came, but his friend did not. The tall one said he would enter Betel the next week, but he was fine for the moment. I never saw that yonqui again, and I do not know what became of him.

My father and I said goodbye to the men in Betel and drove home. I changed clothes and caught the Metro downtown for a pilgrimage I tried to make every Saturday to the Prado. The museum was less than a few miles from Los Pitufos, but it was a world away. Stray dogs did not bark, motorcycles did not zip around lanes, people did not argue over drug deals. At the Prado everything was eerily, hermetically silent. All I could hear were careful footsteps as people shuffled quietly from one painting to the next, and the occasional purring of air conditioning that kept the paintings at a constant temperature.

Most visitors were drawn to Velázquez’s Las meninas, Goya’s Las majas or El Greco’s The Adoration of the Shepherds, but I went to see the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Every Bosch in the Prado was a gem that shone from no matter what angle you looked at it, but the greatest was the triptych The Garden of Delights. It is named for the garden in the central panel, which is filled with frolicking nudes, fantastic animals and ripe fruits of every kind. The painting progresses from the original sin of Adam and Eve on the left panel to the torments of hell on the right. The central panel depicts a world enjoying sinful pleasures.

Bosch’s paintings depict the fall of man and the state of an evil world. Ghouls, demons, snakes and creatures of his imagination run wild, devouring sinners. He did not flinch from showing man’s depravity, and his paintings were a call to repentance. Bosch lived on the fringes of artistic life in Europe. His style was supremely original, borrowing from no one. He believed in God and heaven and hell, yet despised the hypocrisy of the church, and his work was conflicted, deeply conservative and yet intensely reformist. Critics have wondered what nightmares could have inspired Bosch to paint as he did. I did not know his influences, but I could imagine. If ever anything like his vision of hell existed, San Blas and Los Pitufos would come close. Men fought and stole for heroin, huddled in packs, shot up into their arms and legs, and wandered about dazed.

My father said he had hung The Garden of Delights and Gustave Doré’s illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy on his wall while he was living on a commune as a student at Harvard. He studied the painting and stared at it for hours while he took LSD. I wondered if Bosch’s creatures were the ones that had come to life when he had his vision on the bridge in Boston. Was it this metaphor that had called him and sent him on his journey? For years my father had probably viewed the world as a garden suspended


between heaven and hell, between eternal life and damnation, but after Timothy’s death the task to save others grew ever more urgent.


Brick masons in Betel

17: WOODWORM AND SCRATCHES

CARCOMA Y RASGUÑOS

To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

Work in the center was an antidote to heroin. If you were busy restoring furniture, fixing a car, or painting an apartment, you did not have time to think about drugs. My parents knew if work in Betel could give yonquis a sense of purpose and responsibility, perhaps there was hope for David, Peter and me. When summer came we could choose to work with the painters, plumbers, mechanics or brick masons, but we had to work and we had to learn a trade in earnest. It had been almost a year since Timothy had died; and that summer I was happy for manual labor; I did not want to think.

A fleet of vehicles transported over a hundred and fifty men and women living in the program in Madrid, ferrying them to work and to the farms every day. The dilapidated wrecks still rattled as they spewed diesel fumes, and they broke down more often than they worked. It was not uncommon to begin journeys with a prayer, asking not in jest that the Almighty extend the life of the vehicle by at least one more trip. Mechanics in Betel were prized above all other tradesmen. When a yonqui entered the center, if he knew the


slightest thing about cars the central office immediately sent him to the garages. Peter worked and lived with the mechanics in Betel on the farms near the garages and repair pits. They worked constantly, performing miracles by repairing transmissions, engines, and carburetors. Dressed in their blue overalls and covered in grease, they leapt in and out of the pits, passing wrenches and parts, joking and telling stories the entire day. As a child Peter had taken things apart for amusement, but now at the age of fifteen he was fixing things that mattered. His coveralls were dusty and his hands and fingernails blackened from the grease and oil, but he beamed with happiness whenever he resuscitated a motor and heard it come back to life.

Two summers in a row I had worked as a sign painter with Seamus, an Irishman and former alcoholic, although he thought that saying ‘Irish alcoholic’ was redundant. Every day as we worked, he kept a liter of milk nearby. Milk, he said, was a fundamental human right — on par with free speech and liberty — and no one should go without it. He had a bald head with a curly blond beard and moustache that he stroked when he was pensive or about to say something. He drank the Tetra Paks of milk the way borrachos drank wine, holding the carton high above his head and aiming the thin jet towards his mouth. When he was done and the drops of white hung on his moustache, he would lick them in the same slow, satisfied way a cat laps the drops from its whiskers.

Seamus painted signs for Betel’s many businesses, taking me on as his apprentice. What a mess I made of things in those early days: confusing enamel and acrylic paints, using water as a thinner when I should have used turpentine, not drying brushes thoroughly. I was a dreadful assistant, and Seamus was rightly infuriated by my mistakes. He treated me with the same care he showed the yonquis and did not give up on me, patiently teaching the meticulous process of drawing, drafting, and lettering in different fonts. We measured distances finely with a compass and drew sketches with a pencil stub he tucked behind his ear. He taught me how to mix the colors, searching carefully for the right hues, unsatisfied until we found the perfect intensity and shade. Sign painting was a craft: precise and beautiful.

While we painted sign after sign, I pieced together snippets of Seamus’ story. I was fascinated by him. He grew up in Dublin and moved with his family to Birmingham, England when he was sixteen. His first memories were of his mother spending hours putting make up on before she went to church so the priest would not notice how her husband had bruised her face. Seamus left home at the age of eighteen and got a girlfriend, but he left her with three children and a little bit of money. He ran away to wander. It was a habit he got used to, and he left two more women after having children with them. Seamus became a traveling alcoholic, sustaining himself by painting when he needed money. He traveled around Greece, France, and Spain for years as a drunk, boarding trains without tickets until they kicked him off, begging for food at restaurants, sleeping on park benches. When he arrived in Madrid, some drunks stole his bags. He had no passport, no money, nothing, only the clothes he was wearing on that winter day. He had the shakes bad and was cold and sick, coughing and pissing blood. He wanted to call someone for help, but he had lost touch with his family, lovers and friends. That day someone took him to Betel.

We worked together day after day in the summer months. He was the master; I was the apprentice. My early embarrassing mistakes stuck with me, and I did not make them twice. Whenever he taught me a lesson, I filed it away, adding another trick to the many


techniques he had taught me. He told me to pay attention. If I was good, perhaps one day I would have an apprentice myself.

It was not easy saying goodbye to Seamus. Betel had opened a center in Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, New York. Seamus was one of the few addicts in Madrid who spoke English, so he was sent as part of the first team. He had taught me much about work; I hoped one day I would see him in New York.

I was on my own, but Seamus had taught me well. I was sixteen and, like all the men who stayed in the center, had acquired a trade. I could earn a living with my hands. The summer after he left, I spent hours at our stores across the city high on a scaffold lettering and painting:

RASTRO BETEL

ANTIQUES AND USED FURNITURE: GREAT PRICES!

Jambri came by wherever I was working to say hello. He usually caught me perched high on a ladder. My feet precariously sought balance as I leaned against the rungs with my chest and held the paint can in one hand and a brush in the other. He had painted cars and learned lettering before he robbed banks, so he dispensed painting tips freely. I drew the deep blue dove and broken needle of Betel everywhere, even on the old rastro on Calle Esfinge where I had bothered Jambri as a boy.

Every trade has its hierarchy, and Seamus taught me we were sign painters not pintores de brocha gorda, painters of a fat brush. Half-way through the summer I had finished all the signs that needed painting, and the men told me that from then on I would work with Betel’s painting business. I did not want to be demoted to the rank of an ordinary painter. House painting had less artistry than sign painting, but it was just as meticulous and far more tiring. The Madrid summer turned the rooms into hothouses, filling them with the pungent fumes of paint. The sweat streamed in rivulets down my forehead and stung my eyes. By the time lunch came, I was tired and needed a siesta. Unless we were working right next to the center’s offices, we just brought along bocadillos and cold Cokes. After sweating all morning, I lay on the cold floor, the heat flowed out of me and the tiles whispered in my ear as I fell asleep.

The hardest part was not treating the walls for water damage or mixing the paint to the right consistency. Working with the leader of the painting team to make sure the new men were not running off and smoking was far more difficult. I worried when I sent them on errands. Were they bumming cigarettes and asking for cold beers to drink? Were they buying heroin to take back to the farm? Most of the time I was paranoid and needlessly fearful, but one time we found a small marijuana garden on a terrace in an apartment we were supposed to paint. We felt the situation was even greater than when Jesus was tempted by Satan in the desert. That was the fastest job we ever did.

When I worked with the men, I almost always took a camera with me. In the drug center, we often received donations of things that no one wanted. One day someone donated a Russian Zenit camera that did not work. I fixed it by using black tape to keep the light from exposing any film and started shooting. I was not good at first, but then


read everything I could about photography. Betel became my subject. I loved living in Betel’s residences on weekends in summer and photographing the men and their daily lives. Beauty was in everything — most often where least expected. Through the dim flicker of the orange tungsten lights, I snapped pictures of men feeding the chickens on our farms. I used a wide angle lens to capture the bent, tattooed arms of brick masons repairing a sidewalk outside one of our stores.

Self-portrait

My photographic trips were an excuse to live with the new addicts and hear their stories. The tale of every yonqui was unique, and as we worked I pieced them together the same way I had with Seamus. I was surprised at how many told me they had stolen their parents’ life savings and spent all the money on heroin. They could not imagine ever being forgiven by their family. Others spoke with anguish about their children they could no longer see because they had lost them through neglect or abuse. Their wives or grandparents got custody and they rarely saw their own kids. Most of my friends had become infected by shooting up with HIV, and even if they got off heroin, there was nothing they could ever do to be healthy again.

The men had tattoos of everything: Che Guevara, the Rolling Stones, the Virgin Mary, Playboy models, spiders, “I love Mom” and swastikas. While we painted, Victor, one of the men on my painting team, taught me how they tattooed themselves with a needle and a ball point pen in prison. The needle could be just a paper clip or a guitar string, and an empty ballpoint pen held the needle. You could get as good a tattoo in jail as outside, and prison tattoo artists were true craftsmen. Each tattoo told the story of another stay in el talego.

Victor was my encyclopedia. The lessons he taught were better than any science class. He had a Fu Manchu moustache, big scars that interrupted his right eyebrow and tattoos on his arms. It was impossible not to take his word when he talked about knife fights or stays in prison. You couldn’t argue with cuts and tattoos.


When Victor spoke you could see his mind leave the painting job and you could sense his glee in remembering past thrills. He rubbed his hands and the sheer enjoyment spread across his face. And then he would return from the reverie to enlighten me, “Making crack is simple, and it’s not bad business either. You use cocaine and dissolve it in water and baking soda or ammonia, but you really want to avoid ammonia, because it stinks. But if that’s all you’ve got round the house, that’s what you have to go with. You heat it, the water boils, and it makes a wonderful cracking sound. That’s when you know it’s ready, when you got beautiful white rocks.”

As it turned out, he was not much of a dealer; he smoked all the crack he made on his own.

I was fascinated, but still conscious my duty was to steer the conversation back to painting. I was afraid his mind would leave the painting job and he would never come back, like so many of my friends who left the center. But it did not stop me from asking Victor to go on more often than not. It was a subject that I came back to over and over again, the way my tongue would return to a loose tooth when I was a child.

As a child the yonquis I saw on the streets aroused my curiosity, but not the drugs they used. What interested me were the telltale signs: the track marks, the burnt fingers, the sun-burnt skin, and rotting teeth. As a teenager, though, the stories of smoking weed, making crack, and shooting up possessed my thoughts. What was it like for the caballo to enter the bloodstream? What experience could be so overwhelmingly powerful, so intensely pleasurable that it could curse someone to a life on the streets like a stray dog?

It was Victor who told me that anyone who said that drugs make you feel bad had never tried them or was lying. “It’s not drugs; it’s the life of drugs that is bad. Drugs are amazing. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is as good as the first rush of heroin. Every junkie will tell you that because it’s true.” I had to take his word for it.

He could still remember the first time he shot up. A friend sucked all of the caballo into the syringe and tapped it with his index finger to get rid of the air bubbles. He methodically examined Victor’s outstretched arm to find a working vein and avoid the muscle. The first time he got a heroin flash was “like the euphoria of scoring a goal, like winning the lottery, like an orgasm with a girl you actually love, but a thousand times more powerful.” When he shot up, his body melted. He felt his chest on the ceiling as the room turned and turned and turned. The sensation slowly faded until he felt wrapped in a tingling warmth. The hunger and pain were gone.

As Victor said, “With heroin I didn’t have to think about my problems any more.”

How could something like that be bad? I envied my father and Raúl. Living life as an obedient, studious and hard working son, I was cut off from thousands of experiences that I craved. I was entranced by their stories of drug use. They were prodigal sons who had come home. Theirs was the best of both worlds — the thrill of the experience and the comfort of redemption. They understood the addicts in a way I could not. Perhaps if I tried heroin only once as my own private experiment then I would know what it was like. At last I would experience exactly what they felt. It could even be a wise decision and make me better able to help the addicts.

I knew who sold heroin, where it was sold, how to prepare it and how to shoot up. The only thing I did not know was the most important thing of all – what it felt like. I


wanted to shoot up, but what if the camello knew Betel and my father? What if one time was not enough? What if I died of an overdose or became HIV positive or got Hepatitis C? It was more fear than wisdom that kept me from trying heroin. I was disappointed and convinced that the knowledge of what it felt like would forever elude me.

Victor had told me that after shooting up, he injected his girlfriend and then they had sex and that became their habit. Soon, though, the needle replaced the sex, and all they thought about was shooting up, but it did not matter. Heroin was better than sex, he said. I had to take his word for that too. I did not know what sex felt like — although I thought about it often enough.

I knew many ex-prostitutes but had never had a girlfriend. The girls at school were just girls compared to the women in the drug center. Talk of herpes, syphilis and gonorrhea in Betel was like talking about mumps and measles, but sex itself was rarely mentioned.

The first time I went downtown without my parents, Peter and I went to see a movie together. We told a friend from church to meet us at Gran Via. We had been there before with Mom and Dad. That was where the buildings stretched and strained against the sky and bright neon lights exploded in greens, yellows and reds against the deep blue evening sky. Peter and I boarded the subway car by ourselves and felt the thrill of traveling alone to Gran Via for the first time. We wanted to be with the masses of people scurrying down the street, to watch the cars speed by us. On the Metro, we saw a boy reading a German book on the subway. We exchanged knowing glances, conscious that we foreigners were interlopers in the city.

When Peter and I arrived at the stop we saw that it had many exits. We had no idea one stop could have so many entrances on different streets. I waited by the main entrance near a McDonalds on Gran Via and told Peter he should wait around the corner on Calle de la Montera. As he came out on the other street, a middle aged woman wearing next to nothing approached him, “Little blond boy, want to buy me a juice?”

“No. I’m waiting for a friend.”

“You don’t know what you’re missing, kid.”

It was clear that we did not know downtown. As long as anyone in Madrid can remember, La Montera had been the center of prostitution in the center of the city. Sex shops lined the street, all the surrounding buildings were used as brothels and the hotels charged rooms by the hour. No one came out of the Gran Via station on La Montera’s side unless they wanted sex.

Out of curiosity, I sometimes went out at the wrong exit to see what the prostitutes looked like, and the only thing I ever felt was sadness. None were sexy. I wondered: did they have a greater chance of getting HIV by sleeping around or by shooting up? The women just looked hungry and sick, and you could see the track marks in their arms from a distance. I wondered if one day they might become my friends in Betel.

The hookers did not look like the naked women in yoghurt commercials whose svelte bodies were covered in water drops as they showered – the ones who came to my mind at the worst possible moments in school and gave me embarrassing erections that I tried to hide by holding my books close to my body. They did not look like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, that lovely lie that made girls at school want to be hookers so they could meet


their very own prince charming. The women of La Montera were the opposite of the erotic with their varicose veins, sagging skin and missing teeth. Their customers looked lonely and afraid, loitering on the other side of the street as they tried to work up the courage to cross. I often wondered: did the prostitutes put the grown men at ease by asking if they wanted a juice?

When the painting business did not have much work or the second hand furniture stores were short staffed, I was reassigned to work doing portes. Sometimes I would help the men pick up sofas, tables and dresser drawers as donations. Those jobs were easy because we just had to carry everything downstairs. We had gravity on our side. Other times I would help deliver closets, wardrobes and book shelves after the rastro had made a sale. I finally understood why Jambri would not let me help move things when I was a kid. It was difficult work lifting closets and carrying them up five flights of stairs. The weight I was holding cut off the circulation to my fingers and tore at my skin. By the third floor, I had to take a minute break. My shoulders swayed back and forth while I caught my breath, and slowly my whitened fingers turned pink again.

As I paused between floors, I looked at the closet. It had been a mess in the shop, but the men had done a fine job restoring it. They had sanded down the wood and varnished and lacquered it repeatedly. But as I inspected it more closely, the faint outlines of old scratches hidden beneath the finish became visible. I never noticed it before, but the surface was dotted with faint patches. The furniture had woodworm. The beetles had laid their eggs, and the grubs had burrowed in the wood.

As a child, when Jambri let me work with him, I thought that no matter how broken and scarred by scrapes the pieces were when they entered the store, they could always be fixed and restored. Now, though, I saw something more. The scratches and scars grew fainter, remaining below the surface, but they were never gone. The woodworm could remain hidden for years, but if the wood was infected, nothing could be done. The ravages of time could never fully be reversed.

On the first anniversary of Timothy’s death, I was painting an apartment. I looked at the clock and saw it was quarter to eleven, the exact moment we went off the road. How could I forget? The hands of the minivan’s dashboard clock had frozen at that time. I was painting a house with the men in Betel, and the lines of W. H. Auden came to mind. I wanted to:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone

But time was indifferent. To say the memory of the accident came back as a flood would be a cliché and a lie. It was a scar that never left. Timothy was the first thought in the morning and the last that thing that crossed my mind at night. Like a fault line below the surface, the accident remained hidden from others, but my family could never escape its faint tremors and the vicious aftershocks. It took something as simple and small as finally giving away Timothy’s toys or finding something of his around the house to shake me violently.

Grief was always there with that lingering, ghastly feeling of emptiness and numbness.


The only thing that made the grief go away was study or work. Work had its way of changing me. The rollers and brushes and buckets produced sores that burst and calloused. My skin grew hardened and thick like the hands of the men around me. At the end of each day, particularly as the summer wore on, I stared at my hardened palms and felt a self-satisfied pride in them. None of my friends at school had worked as I had, and the sense of superiority seduced me. But in a way, just as I had played at working with Jambri, the summer months were an amateur rehearsal for a performance that would never be. My parents did not say it because it did not need stating: my brothers and I would not be manual laborers. Medicine, law, and engineering were acceptable career paths, but not manual labor. Working with my hands was a luxury.

A Betel chicken farm

Betel had many chicken farms, and sometimes Peter left his work with the mechanics to help collect chickens for slaughter. When the summer was almost over, I visited him on one of the farms that the center looked after. The chicken farms extended for half a mile, and if you walked in through the door in the evenings, you could see the rows of tungsten lights that hung from the ceiling and extended as far as the eye could see; they all merged into one in the distance. Peter and the men would go into the farms late at night and chase the chickens and grab them by the feet. The ground was covered in sawdust, dirt and chicken droppings. As the men scurried around, the dust rose. The men wore rags to protect their noses and mouths. They tied cloths around their arms to keep their skin from being scratched by the chickens’ claws.

What was most striking about the chicken farm was the highly pungent, overpowering smell of ammonia from the chicken droppings. It was difficult to breathe, and the first time I walked inside, I held my breath and ran back to the entrance. I gasped for breath, my eyes watered, and my nose stung. The smell mysteriously disappeared after a minute and I could smell nothing. The mind suppressed it, the signals buried in the subconscious. That was how the body worked: it shut out anything uncomfortable and just


stopped feeling. It worked well to eliminate burning, painful smells, but it blocked out good things as well.

Was that the way our bodies were with sadness?

Would I one day stop experiencing grief ?

Would the body shut down and the brain suppress all feelings of sorrow?

If the hurt disappeared, then maybe feeling nothing at all would not be so bad.

I could sense it was already happening. The sharp physical pain I had felt at first had given way to the awful feeling of emptiness and then to numbness. Perhaps that was how things worked; the body just looked after itself, and I didn’t mind.


18: RAMÓN Y CAJAL HOSPITAL

EL HOSPITAL RAMÓN Y CAJAL

Hand-holding, counseling, moral support, platitudes, bromides, prognostications, homilies. But I had nothing in the way of a remedy.

Dr. Abraham Verghese, AIDS specialist, My Own Country

“Ready... Set... GO!!”

I burst up the stairs, skipping three or four at a time as I leapt, and pushed myself against the walls at the turns in the stairwell. My father was right behind, keeping the same quick, almost mechanical pace floor after floor. Three... four... five... By the sixth floor, my sides hurt and I was short of breath. Only two more floors to go until the infectious diseases ward, I thought. As we rounded the corner of the seventh floor, I remembered that when I was young my father raced me up the stairwells in the buildings near Torre del Campo. As I reached the landing on the eighth floor ahead of him, the day had arrived. I had finally won.

“Stop!” I gasped. “Let’s wait a minute. We can’t go in there like this. Do you remember what room number it is?”

“We’ll find it.” We caught our breath and then looked for Ángel Veneno.


Veneno was watching television when we found him. We were his only visitors. He was alert and looked just like he had so many years before when he introduced my father to the yonquis in Parque del Paraíso. Right next to his hospital bed was a photograph of his little son Johnny. Johnny had sandy blond hair and dark brown eyes. Ángel’s wife Maria had been a heroin addict as well. She had died of AIDS soon after little Johnny was born. During pregnancy a mother's antibodies to HIV are transferred to the baby. After a year and a half the children shed their mother's antibodies, but Johnny was infected and had developed his own. He stayed at La Paz, the largest children’s hospital in Madrid, whenever he was ill. Johnny was talkative when he wanted to be, and liked it when my parents brought him some of Timothy’s old GI Joes. But sometimes when we visited, he just turned over in his bed, looking the other way, and refused to speak to anyone. He was bright and knew he was sick in a way that was different from other kids.

Some nurses came into the room, and Ángel introduced my father as his father. I looked at the table next to Ángel’s bed again and noticed that he had a photo of my family next to his Bible. He smiled with pride, pointed to David, Peter, Timothy and me in the picture and said we were his brothers.

As television game shows played on in the background of that dimly lit room, my father took out his small pocket-Bible. He prayed for Ángel’s health and speedy recovery and for little Johnny, and then read aloud Psalm 84:

Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere; I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked.

For the Lord God is a sun and a shield; the Lord gives grace and glory; no good thing will He withhold from them that walk uprightly.

O the Lord of hosts, happy is the man that trusts in you.

As a child I found it wearisome on occasions to listen to my parents read Psalms at the dinner table, but it was difficult to be in my father’s presence at Ramón y Cajal and not be deeply moved. He always tried to impart hope. Ramón y Cajal was trapped in the evanescent twilight between life and death, and my father believed that hospitals were an anteroom to eternity, so he entered with a sense of transcendent awe and faith.

As he continued reading the Psalm, I excused myself from the room. I felt sick, but my sickness was not something anyone could cure. Just after Timothy died, the nurses had left me alone in the dark X-ray room. It had felt like an eternity, and I became convinced that only bad things happened in hospitals. The infectious diseases ward at Ramón y Cajal reminded me too much of the sterile, dead room where I sat alone without my brother. The doctors could do little to help Raúl or Jambri, and I thought that one day soon I would again sit alone in a hospital room and weep for them. Every time I entered Ramón y Cajal I felt light in the head, and often had to excuse myself to sit in the hallway and hold my head between my legs. Who was I to encourage Ángel and the addicts in the center when I could not even handle being in a hospital? I felt like a coward.

Hospitals were dreary places, and not just because they were full of the infirm and the dying. The halls and rooms smelled of disinfectant and the cleaning staff were always


mopping, but the floors never looked clean. Perhaps it was the dim flicker of the fluorescent bulbs that made everything look sickly. The walls were a drab tan, and I suspected they had been yellowed and darkened by cigarette smoke. Even though “No Smoking” signs hung everywhere, everyone smoked indoors. The doctors and the nurses were the worst offenders, but I could not blame them for medicating themselves with nicotine.

When Raúl or any of my friends from Betel were sick, they went to the Ramón y Cajal because it was the largest hospital in Madrid and had the best care for AIDS patients. The building was vast and sat on the edge of a hill in the north of the city. The main building extended for almost a kilometer, and three enormous towers jutted out from it like giant teeth from a comb, overlooking the nearby highways and apartment blocks. It was an imposing place; it made me never want to get sick. The eighth floor of one of the wings was the infectious diseases ward, where the doctors put those with tuberculosis, hepatitis and AIDS. That is where we spent our time.

I never worried about getting sick in the ward. The truth was that my friends who were HIV positive had to worry more about me than I did about them. My immune system could protect me from most diseases; theirs barely functioned.

I thought Ramón y Cajal was a lifeless place and did not understand why my friends had to stay there. The doctors were well-meaning but incapable of doing much for them, and every time my friends entered the hospital they simply ended up getting someone else’s infections. I did not think the doctors knew what was making my friends ill, and the drugs only seemed to make them worse.

It was a mystery to me how the nurses and doctors managed to stay sane. Ten years into the epidemic of AIDS and doctors could prescribe intravenous Bactrim and oxygen for pneumocystis carinii and Amphotericin for candida. Retrovir was the great hope, but I knew many who died even though they were taking it. The doctors could treat the symptoms, but they could only offer platitudes for the syndrome itself. Beneath the doctors’ sometimes gruff demeanor many of them suffered. They got to know Raúl, Jambri and my other friends from the drug center, but I imagined that they tried not to be too attached to their patients. My parents spent so much time at Ramón y Cajal’s infectious diseases ward that they became friends with the head of the ward. The doctor who ran the infectious diseases ward at Ramón y Cajal quit, having been diagnosed with clinical depression, and became a research scientist. In the early years the medicines did almost nothing to help and working in a lab was probably the best thing my father’s friend could do. He had been kind to the people from Betel and had the unenviable task of working with people with AIDS when there was no medical hope for them. Every day he embraced his patients and watched their lives slip through his fingers like water.

I felt sorry for him. If doctors left medical school with the idea of curing people, could they ever reconcile themselves to a disease they could not treat, one that forced them to watch patient after patient die?

The old San Blas was sick and dying. When we first moved to the neighborhood, Ángel and the other yonquis came back to my room to play with me and my brothers. One of the men who came back was Manolo Majara. He used to push me around and pinch me. He


was a brute and thought it was funny. Back then his grip was strong, and once he held my hand, he squeezed it so hard I thought that he would pulverize it.

I had known him on the streets since I was eight years old. He entered Lindsay’s apartment when Raúl first invited him to move in but did not stay long. For years after that he had shot up and refused to enter Betel. “I’m fine,” he had said, “If I ever wanted to quit, I can do it without any problem.” Manolo had only entered the center a year before Timothy died, once his health had begun to fail him. When he finally entered Betel, his wife Mari Carmen came in with their kids and they slowly put their lives back together again. On the streets his nickname had been Majara, Crazy, but in the center they called him Chatarra, Junk. Strangely, it was a compliment. He had traded his knife and gun for tools and could do anything with a blowtorch and scrap metal.

Manolo had AIDS and was becoming weak. As he lost weight, his skinny fingers fit into my hand as mine had into his when I was a child. But I was seventeen, and his grip could no longer crush my hand. One day I went with my mother to visit him in the hospital. I do not know what came over me that day as we greeted each other. We shook hands and I held his and did not let go. “Remember how you used to squeeze until it hurt and I begged you to stop and how you just used to laugh? If things got out of hand, you told on us for not setting a Christian example. What’d you say if I crushed your hand now?”

A look of fear flashed across his eyes. Manolo looked at me gently, “I’ve changed, Johnny, and I hope you can forgive me for what I did and who I was.”

I wished that I had not said it. All I could do was apologize.

He reached out to embrace me, “We’re brothers now. Sorry if I hurt you when you were little.”

Visiting my friends in the Ramón y Cajal was difficult. During the weekdays it was impossible to get time off during the school day, and on afternoons my parents insisted I do my homework. On most Saturdays I went to the infectious diseases ward. My mother wrote get-out-of-school notes, but unlike other students, we were not leaving school to take family trips or go back to the United States to visit relatives. We would slip away quietly to attend a funeral or memorial service.

Almost none of the students at ECA had any friends who were HIV positive. The janitor, Salvador Míguez, or Salva as everyone called him, was a former heroin addict and was HIV positive, but he never talked about his health. His brother José had already died of AIDS. Most students did not know because they never asked. Salva was a lanky man with ink black hair that he parted down the middle and a carefully groomed pencil moustache. As he suffered from hepatitis and fevers, he lost weight and became even skinnier. He just wore thicker shirts and heavier sweaters and cleaned the school every day, even when he was sick. He was cheerful and whenever I saw him, he always had a new joke he wanted to try out on me.

“Listen to this one. It is about a Catalan...”

“I’m sure I’ve heard that one before.”


“Come on, give me a chance. You’ll like it. As I was saying, this Catalan goes into a public bathroom and sees a peseta at the bottom of a public toilet and it’s not even flushed. He’s torn. You can tell he wants to grab it, but it’s not really worth putting his hand in a toilet for just a peseta. But he’s a smart guy, so he throws a twenty-five peseta coin in. And then he reaches down, puts his hand in and picks up both coins. He reasons: for a peseta it isn’t worth getting your hand dirty, but for twenty six pesetas, that’s another question entirely.” I had heard it before, but it was just as funny the second time.

As Salva got weaker, even his sense of humor faded. I encouraged him to call in sick and go home and look after himself. Sometimes he complained to me about working too much, but he never took my advice. As he told me, “Working is very, very bad. But not working is even worse.”

One day, I saw him outside of school as he was getting into his car. I had not seen him in a few weeks. I ran towards his car. “Salva, wait! How are you?”

He slowly got out and shut the door. “I’d like to say I’m fine, but I’m not going to lie to you. The doctors don’t think I’ll live long, and I don’t know the answer either. I’ve left instructions for part of the money I’ve saved up to go to Betel. I’ve had a second chance at life since I’ve been clean and I want to give something back.”

He had not gone to Betel and had never talked about it before. I did not know how to respond. “You sure that’s what you want to do?”

“When I die, I want to help others have a second chance too. Tell your parents I admire the work they do. Hope to see you again soon.”

I did not know what to say. My throat tightened, and I tried not to cry in front of him.

“Look after yourself!” he called out as I left.

I did not see Salva again. He died a month later on January 19, 1993.

Raúl drove Peter and me to the funeral. Like so many that we attended, it was simple and solemn. Salva had chosen to have it in the park where he once shot up so his old friends could attend. The ground was frozen hard and the winter wind blew the leafless branches. We braced ourselves against the chill, and I hoped Raúl would not catch a cold.

Few students came to Salva’s service. The teachers knew he was sick, but he had not told everyone and I probably would not have done it either. Strangely, I was like Salva too. David, Peter and I never talked to our fellow students about AIDS. Our lives at school never intersected our lives in Betel. How could I put into words what it was like to see so many friends die? I did not even try.


19: OLD BOOKS AND FADED PAGES

LIBROS ANTIGUOS Y PÁGINAS DESCOLORIDAS

Every man can be the sculptor of his own mind if he sets himself the task

Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Raúl was a natural. He loved being a pastor: greeting all the visitors, talking to the old mothers who sat in the front row next to my mother, listening to people’s problems, and preaching. My father could not have run the drug centers and the church in Madrid without Raúl. And after seven years of working together, he trusted Raúl utterly.

Raúl and Jenny came to our home a few times a week for long dinners to talk about Betel. They came with the leaders of Betel to talk about the businesses, the families in the church and the emergencies that happened so often they were commonplace. In the winter we sat at the dinner table in the living room and drank tea and coffee, and in the summertime we gathered in the patio drinking my mother’s Southern iced tea. My parents and Raúl and Jenny talked late into the night as the sun set over the neighborhood and darkness relieved the painters, brick masons and plumbers of Betel from their toils. Peter and I no longer feigned falling asleep and kept quiet to stay and listen to their conversations. Jenny kept a watchful eye on Ana and Maria who played nearby. Even though Jenny was HIV positive, it was an immense relief that she was almost never sick and Maria had not developed her own antibodies.

But every few weeks, high fevers interrupted Raúl’s work, and Jenny would drive him to Ramón y Cajal. Raúl was always in good spirits, no matter how tired or feverish he was. I did not like going to hospitals, but every time we saw each other he did his best to cheer me. One Sunday afternoon, I walked into his room and saw him sitting in bed. He had an oxygen tank next to his bed and a table next to it covered in books and tapes. He shuffled his tapes and moved his books around, searching for something. “What are you looking for? Have you lost anything?”

“Where are they, Johnny?” He looked at me with annoyance. “You’ve misplaced them. I know it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“My guns. Where are my guns? Where’d you hide them?”

For a moment, I feared it was the first signs of dementia, until I realized I still didn’t get his sense of humor.

I sat on the side of his bed and we chatted. In hospitals some people only talked about their illness or about Retrovir dosages and the doctor’s last visit. But with Raúl, we usually we talked about almost anything else. Our conversations were rarely serious or


momentous, but were suffused with the beautiful ordinariness and the small things like grace notes adorned our daily lives. Many times we said nothing at all and simply savored each other’s company in a way that is only possible for those who have known each other for a long time.

I saw the bed next to him was empty, but the sheets were wrinkled. “Where’s your roommate?”

“Out in the hall. He’s gone to talk to his family. He used to shoot up too. I’ve been talking to him all day. He can’t get away.” Raúl smiled. “I’ve got a captive audience here.”

“So, how are your studies?” He asked that often.

“Going well. You know...”

“Good. You’re smart, even if you’re a know-it-all... I know. I used to teach you Sunday school.”

He rearranged his books and pens on his nightstand and got up. “Come on. Let’s get some fresh air.” We walked out to the hallway near the stairs where sunlight streamed in through the windows. “I wasted my time with girlfriends and drugs and dropped out of school,” he said. “Concentrate on your studies. Just make sure you do your best. Like your dad.”

Why was he telling me this? I already knew he quit school and took drugs. I knew he and many other close friends in the center never finished high school and almost none went to university. Kids from San Blas as a general rule did not go to university. I could not think of anyone who had, in fact.

We said goodbye and I took the elevators to the first floor. At the entrance, I stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up at a quote above the main doorway to the hospital. The hospital was named after the neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the first Spaniard to win a Nobel Prize in medicine. I had not paid close attention to the words before. They were written in bold, luminous letters:

EVERY MAN CAN BE THE SCULPTOR OF HIS OWN MIND

IF HE SETS HIMSELF THE TASK.

The gold leaf stood out against the grey lintel, and sunlight from the street reflected off every letter. I was transfixed. Was the quote right? Could I make my mind whatever I wanted?

My father had heard from God on a bridge, but in that moment on the steps of Ramón y Cajal at last I heard my own call.

Homer, Seneca, Herodotus, C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot had joined us for breakfast and dinner. Once again books presented themselves as friends, but this time they were ready to kidnap me and steal me away from thoughts of grief. And it did not matter at what time I


read on my own, the writers came like insomniacs and revealed their ideas, speaking patiently, tirelessly until I learned their words by heart. Across time they unknowingly shared themselves with me, and their presence and friendship was a comfort.

My reading was not to find answers; Timothy’s death had convinced me that many questions were unanswerable. On our walks to school we had talked about going to Harvard and getting an apartment in Boston so we could be with each other. After his death, I had put the thought out of my mind, but once again I resolved to go to Harvard. Timothy’s picture rested on my desk, as an ever-present reminder of our quest.

I was going to have to teach myself. ECA lacked the resources for anything but rudimentary science labs, rarely had math or science teachers, could not afford to put on any plays, and had no athletic facilities. The library contained only as many books as my parents had at home. The teachers did the best they could with little. What was remarkable was not that the school failed in many areas, but that it succeeded at all.

David had learned calculus and trigonometry, collected math books, and worked on his proofs all on his own. He was no Srinivasa Ramanujan, the exceptional self-taught Indian mathematician, but he was my older brother and I admired him. David had dreamed of going to Princeton, the Mecca for mathematicians, where John Nash developed game theory and Andrew Wiles would later solve Fermat’s theorem. But Princeton rejected him. David’s graduating class had only seven students. I could not imagine Princeton taking seriously the application of someone who came from a missionary school that provided no advanced math classes but offered courses on Christian living.

Every week I looked forward to receiving David’s aerograms. He wrote on both sides in his neat, precise handwriting, letting me know about the advanced classes he was taking. University was a world where professors wrote their own books, discovered new compounds and developed original proofs. Far away, in colonial redbrick buildings and Tudor Gothic halls, a new universe was waiting for me.

Some old students who graduated from ECA went to colleges with the hardly illustrious names like Nashville Free Will Bible College or Blue Hills Christian College. They were not like the missionary kids I had heard about from my father. In the old days, Henry Luce grew up in Beijing and then founded Time Magazine after leaving Yale; Pearl Buck was raised in China and won a Nobel Prize in literature; Edwin Reischauer played in the streets of Tokyo as a child and became a Harvard professor and American Ambassador to Japan. Those days that we had read about as children were gone.

If Peter and I wanted to learn, we would have to teach ourselves.

David became our accomplice, stealing learning from any source possible. He had gone to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an old state school. And he sent me his textbooks as well as any books I requested. David had taught himself math, and I absorbed economics. He sent me introductory economics course books, John Maynard Keynes The General Theory and Milton Friedman and Ana Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the United States. My father drew graphs and symbols on the napkins at the dinner table With the stainless steel fountain pen he always carried, as he made the complex simple and showed that ideas I thought were plain had hidden intricacies. He was a good teacher, and I wondered how he learned it all if he had spent his time taking LSD on a commune and


reading poetry at Cambridge and Harvard. Perhaps it was possible to do drugs recreationally and not ruin your mind.

What David could not send, Peter and I found by rummaging through book sales. Jambri and the men at the rastros would save the good ones for me. I sat at my desk at home, drinking tea and reading Kant’s The Critique of Practical Reason, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and other philosophical works, which I read and understood less well than I thought at the time. Even so, I had much satisfaction in seeing the books rest on my shelves, fancifully imagining they spoke about what kind of person I was and, more importantly, hoped to become. It did not matter how old the books were, for even if the pages were faded and the spine worn, you could still receive their message. Each book had its own character, its own smell and feel when I held it to my nose and pressed my thumbs against the covers. Even the lightest books had a special weight in my hands. As I held Aristotle’s Poetics, I had to put it down every page to savor the ideas, chew on them, and digest them. Who had read the books before? Had the musty pages spoken the same way to other readers as they were speaking to me? I wanted each moment to last. With an unquenchable thirst, I read book after book but forgot much and in the end my knowledge was nothing more solid than the dregs of whatever I had last read.

As a child I had the same appetite for books as for playing fútbol and dreaming, but now reading had taken the place of all almost everything else. I devoured poetry and novels by W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Some books were honest as mirrors, showing you as you were, and others changed you even as you read them. Hardy was my favorite. In Jude the Obscure, Mr. Phillotson, a country teacher, sent Jude texts in Latin and Greek to learn on his own by candlelight. Jude was a humble brick mason, but he dreamed of attending the University of Christminster, a transparent allusion to Oxford with its gothic spires and towers. Jude worked with his hands, carving the facades, making Latin inscriptions in the stone. He chipped away at Christminster but was unable to enter the rarified world of learning. I vowed not to be like Jude.

Learning was the ultimate escape. With David’s help and his books, I taught myself everything he had studied in his first year at university. Using his physics and chemistry books, I memorized the periodic table, and drew molecules that grew across the page in spidery outlines. I loved learning about odd structures like Buckminster Fullerenes, carbon allotropes shaped like soccer balls. It struck me there were worlds hidden within worlds, and how little of our own did we actually see and know!

As I read late into the night, my mother came to the study, her eyes squinting in the dim light. “Don’t you think you’ve read enough for tonight?”

“I’ll finish soon. Just another hour.”

She left without saying anything. As I continued reading, she returned with a cup of tea. “Just another hour.” She reached out and held my hand. “The books will still be here in the morning.”

Missionary education at ECA at times felt as dated and constricting as a corset. The more I read, the more questions I had. Whether it was memorizing Bible verses by rote or debating the finer points of Calvinism and Armenianism, the discussions at school seemed as useful as a medieval disputation. Did man have free will or not? And if God had


predestined those who would be saved, how could anyone be damned for not believing? It was in those moments that doubts grew like weeds, spoiling faith’s well-tended garden.

Timothy died without reason, suddenly, violently. I had already lost many friends to AIDS at Ramón y Cajal, and it was certain that Raúl and Jambri would be taken as well. I believed that happiness is the exception and pain a certainty, but how could I reconcile that with a loving God? As C.S. Lewis wrote after his wife died, the danger is not of “ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not, ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.’”

How could I think that, though? Surely my parents would reject me if I ever told them I did not believe in their God, the God of our breakfast table devotionals. They had almost infinite love for the yonquis, but I wondered if they would have any love for me if I rejected the family’s beliefs. The worst part would not be rejecting my parents or David, Peter and Timothy, or Raúl and Jambri. The unbearable part would be rejecting myself. My entire identity was wrapped in layer upon layer of belief, offering Christian love to outcasts, and trying to live as Jesus had.

I wished I were a house painter and had skipped school when I was twelve. I would know how to read and write, but I might not be troubled by questions of meaning and belief. King Solomon wrote, “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow.” Perhaps he was right. If only my parents had not taught me how to think, I would not have had the tools to take my own beliefs apart piece by piece.

Who needed stories of the parting of the Red Sea or the multiplication of loaves and fish when my friends were sick? Jesus healed the lepers and raised the dead, but it all seemed like a macabre joke when the men and women in the center were dying with no healing in sight. And what a waste for Raúl to have AIDS! If ever a man could help people leave drugs and turn their lives around, he was the one. And God in his supposed benevolent omniscience allowed him to be sick. I wondered how Raúl could live with it. He once said in a sermon that the most beautiful story anyone can tell is the story of his own life. Raúl did not say that right after getting off drugs and before finding out he was HIV positive. He said it afterwards, after he had lost many friends to overdoses, violence and AIDS, after he had found out that he was HIV positive.

If Raúl could understand and live with faith in a sick, dying world, maybe I could too. But I did not know how.


Raúl 1995

20: MOTH AND RUST

LA POLILLA Y EL MOHO

Man has places in his poor heart which do not yet exist,

and suffering enters so that they might have existence.

Léon Bloy, Pilgrim of the Absolute

It was obvious Raúl was sick. Raúl had been El Tocho in the neighborhood. He was never fat or chubby, just strong and well fed, and he had always had a handsome, round face. But his fevers made him lose weight. The strong, broad-shouldered man I knew when I was eight years old was getting thinner and thinner. He was gaunt, and even though he bought smaller and smaller shirts and pants, his belt always struggled to hold his pants up and his shirts draped over his shoulders. When he came to church, he brought a cushion. The wooden chairs were too uncomfortable. He was just skin and bones.

He had just as much appetite as ever. When he was in Ramón y Cajal, sometimes he would even send Jenny on secret missions to bring him bocadillos and snacks when he felt the nurses did not bring enough food, but he could not gain more weight. Years earlier


when he became ill with tuberculosis of the intestine, he lost a third of his weight but managed to regain most of it. Those days were over.

But I refused to accept it. If only I could do something to arrest the advance of the disease. One day it occurred to me to give Raúl the protein and calorie drinks that I used after lifting weights. I was proud of my idea. Those could help him, I told myself. If they could make me stronger and help me gain weight, at least they could do a little for him. And maybe even just a little would mean a lot.

After a few weeks, he came by our house with Jenny and Ana and Maria for dinner. I offered him some more protein drinks. “Thanks, but I won’t drink them. Please don’t give them to me again.”

“Why not? What’s wrong?”

“They just make me go to the bathroom. My body can’t absorb the calories and proteins.”

“They don’t help even just a little?”

“It’s no use, Johnny.”

I was not the only one who cared about his weight. Some old ladies in the church had far more interest than tact, and they asked how he was feeling incessantly. Raúl was too gracious to get angry or avoid the women and was unfailingly kind to them, but I knew that the distant, pitying whispers bothered him. He hated having his weight scrutinized under a public microscope.

On one occasion, Raúl was torn between anger and disbelief, “Parece que ya quieren echarme tierra. It seems they already want to throw dirt on me.”

“They should leave and find another church,” I said.

“Jesus came to save the lost, Johnny. We must love them, even if it’s hard.”

When Raúl preached a good sermon many members of the congregation wanted to speak to him. This happened often. They felt that God had spoken directly to them through his words. A young Mexican missionary who had just arrived in Madrid approached Raúl after the sermon. The young man turned away and coughed, instinctively withdrawing his hand to cover his mouth with it while his chest heaved. He then rubbed his hand on his jeans, turned back around, and extended his hand towards Raúl.

“You don’t have to shake my hand.” Raúl smiled reassuringly and put his hand on the young missionary’s shoulder. Never before had I seen someone so gracefully decline a handshake.

Raúl was strong without being harsh and humble without being weak. But was I beatifying him prematurely in my own mind? Was my unspoken worry about his health just as wrong as that of the old ladies who asked him too often how he was doing? I desperately hoped not and tried not to think so much about his health.

When we were kids Raúl said we would become the first Americans to play for Real Madrid. There was no chance of that happening. Summers were no longer wholly devoted to playing fútbol from the early hours until the sun set, but we still went with Raúl to the Bernabeu to see el Madrid play. One Saturday evening we bought tickets to see the


most anticipated game of the league. Raúl drove Peter and me downtown, and he parked half a mile from the stadium. We made our way by foot and slipped into the crowds that swarmed like platelets through the arteries of the avenues surrounding the stadium. The Ultra Sur were dressed in their colors and they packed the sidewalks and poured out in every direction. I glanced over at Raúl, trying to make sure people in the throng were not knocking into him. The police lined the streets and stood at attention with their shields and nightsticks. Ahead I saw officers on horses, and between the horses’ legs I could make out a white sheet. An arm protruded from the side, and the sheet slowly became bloodstained. I stopped to look, but felt a bony hand grab my collar.

“Keep on moving.” Raúl said as he held me, “He’s been stabbed.”

As a child I thought anyone who was stupid enough to wear the wrong colors deserved to be beat up. But could anything ever justify what I had seen? The game was a blur, and all I could think about was the white sheet. The game was a dull draw, and the fans took their hoarse fury out to the streets. Many things were matters of life and death; fútbol, though, was not one of them. I did my best to conjure the old, familiar feelings of joy at visiting the Bernabeu, but they were gone. Raúl did not take us to another game.

Whenever Raúl was not sick, he would preach. Growing up as a preacher’s kid, I had heard sermons on almost every passage of the Bible. I was a jaded listener. Sermons were like chess games where you could stay steps ahead of the speaker, and the clumsy speakers always telegraphed their moves in advance and had nothing fresh to say. It was hard to find new ideas in sermons, but when Raúl shared from the Bible, he brought life to passages I had read and heard a hundred times. He preached like my father: calmly and clearly, without ever raising his voice. Raúl had an effortless, intuitive understanding of cadence, repetition and the many rhetorical devices that seminarians can strain for all their lives and never develop.

Years earlier when Raúl stood up on the platform behind the podium he was an imposing physical presence. As he lost weight and became weak, he grew tired speaking and found it difficult to stand for long. But he wanted to preach, and the men in the center brought a soft comfortable arm chair for him. They lowered the microphone stand, and he sat in his arm chair with no podium and spoke. Perhaps it was only foolishness or stubbornness that kept him going, but I did not know what courage and long-suffering looked like before that.

Seeing Raúl preach was deeply humbling. When he spoke the congregation was hushed. Feet did not move. People did not cough. No one got up to go to the bathroom. Everyone hung on his words. The gospel of Matthew said that Jesus spoke with authority, not like the Pharisees, but I understood it when I heard Raúl preach. The day he spoke about Matthew 6 : 19-21 seared itself on my memory. The reading of the verses was punctuated by his frequent dry coughs:

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal.

But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.


To his listeners heaven might have been an empty idea, a place that may or may not exist. But to Raúl heaven was even more real than the world he inhabited. Because of that, he said nothing merely physical could endanger the part of him that ultimately mattered. As I sat in my chair at the church and listened to him speak, I believed.

The sermons in Betel had inevitably become weightier over the years. In the early days violence and overdoses had taken friends, but those losses were rare and random. Death had never been far from us; it had only felt that way. But AIDS changed everything, making death a certainty. Most addicts were infected or sick, and every visit to the hospital served as a reminder of how short life was. My father and Raúl would have failed as ministers if their sermons had not spoken of mortality and eternal hope.

Strangely, as the sermons became more solemn, the music and singing became more boisterous and lively. One summer, Betel held a large camp meeting and centers from all over Spain gathered together with the many different churches. The service started under a large circus tent that had been pitched in a dirt field. Men and women clapped their hands furiously. People danced between the aisles and the dust rose in the air like poor man’s incense. Others stayed by their chairs, closed their eyes and raised their tattooed arms in surrender to God. I stood at the front and looked back at congregation with a faint sense of embarrassment. Some visitors who were used to a more conservative style of worship could scarcely conceal their horror at the unrestrained jubilation of the ex-yonquis dancing. They approached Raúl and politely asked him to do something to control the unruly congregation.

Raúl ascended the makeshift stage at one end of the circus tent and took a microphone in his hand. The dust still hung in the air, but every voice quieted.

“Some people have asked me why we dance at a church service. I’ll tell you why we dance. No one would have given a peseta for us on the streets. We were once worthless, broken and cracked. But now we have been restored. Once we were sad, but now we’re joyful. You ask why we dance? I’ll tell you why we dance. We dance because we cannot fly.”

The celebratory euphoria of the summer camp never failed to raise everyone’s spirits. The circus tent came down like a deflated hope, and the men folded the chairs and packed everything to return to the farms and used furniture stores. It was then that reality stubbornly re-asserted itself.

After the camp my father told us that Trini, the wife of one of Betel’s leaders, was dying. Years before she had barged into our lives. I remembered perfectly the Saturday night when I was thirteen. She went to Betel’s offices late at night and screamed. The neighbors yelled at her and told her to shut up, but that angered her all the more, and she pounded on the metal doors even harder and continued yelling. She was high and drunk, and no amount of reasoning could make her shut up or go away. Like a child, she knew what she wanted, and she wanted it at that very moment. She caused such a scene that the neighbors were forced to call the police to have her taken away. The police, though, had better things to do on a Saturday night than locking her up for disturbing the peace.

One of the hazards of running a drug center is that one never knows when addicts will show up. All too often while our family was sitting down to a warm dinner or when


we were trying to sleep, an addict would show up and bang on the door of the church and demand to enter the center. The easy thing to do would be to send them away and tell them to come back during the office opening hours. Certainly, I would have preferred that. But being a missionary and running a drug rehabilitation center was not a career choice for my parents, it was a calling from God — with no nine to five shifts. My mother was in the middle of cooking dinner, and my father was preparing his Sunday sermon, as he did on Saturday nights. I volunteered to take her out to one of the women’s houses with a guy from Betel. He drove by the church and we picked her up in our little car.

She was short and had curly hair and was brimming with a nervous energy. From a few feet away, I could smell beer on her clothes.

“It’s about time you showed up,” she complained. “I fuckin’ thought you were never going to come. Where were you? I was banging for fucking hours.”

I slowly reached out my hand and speaking softly tried to calm her down, “I’m Jonathan and my father runs the drug center. What’s your name?”

“My name is Trini.”

“Trini. We don’t have many rules in the center, but we’re a Christian center and one of them is no cursing. We don’t encourage it.”

She lowered her head and her voice and extended her hand and shook mine. “Well, I’m sorry. You know, I respect you tremendously for what you’re doing. I really, really do. I’m glad you came to get me,” she said with a sense of genuine gratitude.

“We’re here to help any way we can.” The sudden change in her was startling.

I held her arm and helped her into the car. I had to push her inside to keep her from careening onto the pavement. She fell into the back seat and let out a loud sigh of relief. “Sorry ‘bout the cursing. I promise I won’t do it again. You have my word on that. It’s such a fuckin’ awful habit.”

I said nothing more; she would learn. People were still giving collejas in Betel, just as Raúl had given them to me years before.

Trini went through withdrawal, recovered and became a leader in one of the women’s residences. After two years in Betel she married Tomás, another leader in the center and former addict. They worked with Lindsay and Myk in Valencia, a city on the east coast of Spain. The image of a drunk, high, foul-mouthed girl was stuck in my mind and it was immensely satisfying to see her transformed. She could be loud, voluble and pushy, but she was also caring, gracious and kind.

Trini was HIV positive, like almost all heroin addicts in Betel. Such a high number of yonquis were positive that I simply assumed everyone was unless I knew otherwise. Nearly all the addicts had shared needles, so it was a reasonable assumption. Often friends appeared to be healthy, but they entered the hospital with a fever or some other problem and died within a few days. A few years earlier, a Dutch television crew had interviewed Trini. They asked her where God was in all the suffering. Trini thought that merely surviving was a gift from God, “The last few years are a gift and don’t really belong to me.” When her borrowed time ended Trini deteriorated very quickly. She came back to Madrid from Valencia. Ramón y Cajal was the best place for AIDS patients, even though the doctors could do little to help them.


When I visited her, she was losing her hair, and the little she had left was changing. Her thick, curly hair was now short and thin. She lapsed in and out of consciousness. When she did talk, she whispered and was short of breath. Her liver was failing, and her flushed complexion had faded. The yellow pall of hepatitis had taken over. She was a crushed husk of her former self, her once soft, round face now impossibly thin, her eyes set in hollows.

A few days later, the doctors told my parents they were certain she was about to die. My parents, Raúl and many of the leaders came to visit her. I stood in the back of the room as my father prayed for her and read the Psalms from his little black Bible. Trini was incoherent. She bleated painfully, “Ay, ay, ay,” and mumbled garbled sentences pleading for help. When we spoke to her, she stared off into space, unaware we were all present.

I stepped out of the hospital room to be alone. I sat down against the wall by the brown vinyl chairs in the corridor and wept. Where was God’s justice in Ramón y Cajal? I did not know why my friends had to die. And watching them suffer never got any easier.

As I was crying quietly, Raúl stepped outside of Trini’s room. He stooped down and dried my tears with his hand. He put his hand on my shoulder and helped me back up on my feet.

“I don’t think I can do this anymore,” I told him.

We stood up to walk back to the room, and Raúl struggled for words, “I am not afraid to die. I don’t even mind being sick…” Tears welled up in his eyes. He was El Tocho, the tough guy in the neighborhood, and I had only seen him cry before when Timothy died. “But what I can’t bear is seeing Jenny or my daughters suffer. I don’t know when, but I know I’m going to die…” His voiced trailed away.

I did not want to hear him talk about dying. I could not think of anything to say and all I could do was embrace him. We stood in the hospital hallway; he hugged me as we wept.

“Johnny, please look after my daughters.”

I was seventeen and did not know how I would be able to take care of them, but he was my older brother and I would have done anything he asked.

“I promise.”

Trini died a few days later. Her family arranged a traditional Catholic funeral near her home town. My parents, David, Peter, Raúl and I all drove a long way to the cemetery to bury her. It was a hot, bright day, and all of the Spanish mothers were dressed in black from head to toe. They fanned themselves furiously in the heat while the village priest commended her soul to eternity.

When the grave diggers threw dirt on the coffin, Trini’s relatives wailed loudly and wildly, paying no attention to the priest. I had seen many cry, but never watched anyone mourn so uncontrollably. We had all cried at Timothy’s funeral, but nothing like that. Raúl looked over at me, “We are not like those who have no faith. I have an eternal hope, and one day I’ll see God face to face.”

But would we stand in heaven and see God one day? I craved Raúl’s certainty.


21: A PRINCE HAS FALLEN

UN PRÍNCIPE HA CAÍDO

If we do not surrender, we will conquer.

Raúl Casto

Raúl rummaged through his closet as he looked for something. He found a bag full of long sleeve shirts. He took them out one by one and handed them to me. “Take these. They don’t fit anymore.”

One of the shirts was his favorite, a checkered green shirt that he wore often when he preached. “Are you sure you want me to have this one?”

“Go ahead. I want you to have it.” He handed me the shirts and pulled out a dark green cloth cap that he wore in the winter time.

“This as well?”

“Take it. You’ll need it. It’ll get much colder there than here.” He knew that in two weeks I would go university in the United States and be away for the next four years. “I want you to have them.”

I could not say no to him. While I had my growth spurts in adolescence, Raúl had lost weight and become smaller. I had gotten David’s hand-me-down clothes as a child and worn them not too proudly at school. As Raúl lost weight, his waistline and shoulders shrunk, and I got his hand-me-downs. At first he had to buy new clothes every half year, and as he lost more and more weight, his wardrobe changes became all the more frequent. I was proud to receive Raúl’s shirts and touched he would give them to me. Yet I did not want to take them — I would have given anything to see him strong once again.

Raúl handed me his shirts and cap. They fit, but I knew I could never fill them. As a child I had looked up to him as an invincible, bigger version of David. Then I thought as a child, but now that I was older, I could see his frailty and weakness and admired him all the more. When I had to write my university application essays and discuss the person who had most influenced me, I wrote about Raúl without hesitating. Raúl had none of the advantages that I had. My brothers and I had grown up in San Blas, but we had my mother and father and lived in a world of books, isolated on an island of our own imaginations in the company of Eliot, Shakespeare, and the Apostle Paul. Raúl still made curious spelling mistakes when he wrote, confusing Bs and Vs in Spanish, but he had taught himself theology and apologetics and spoke with eloquence. However, it was his strength and serenity that I admired most.

The thoughts played out in my mind as I had tea with Raúl and Jenny in their living room. I sat awkwardly trying to build up the courage to tell him just how much he meant


to me, to tell him the things I wished I had told Timothy when he was still alive. But I said nothing that mattered. It would have been too final.

I left Raúl and Jenny’s apartment and walked down the hill towards the heart of San Blas. Eleven years had passed since we arrived in the neighborhood, but it felt like many more. I was seven when we arrived, but now I felt old. The streets of San Blas had changed. The open fields that had been littered with discarded bricks and beams were covered by cranes laying foundations for new apartment blocks. The billboards by the construction sites showed pictures of beautiful red brick buildings covered with gleaming windows and large balconies.

In the distance I saw what was left of the Gypsy camp. The government had already cleared many of the dwellings. Powerful bulldozers had belched diesel fumes and roared as they razed the shacks. The makeshift homes offered little resistance. For years the camp had been a part of the neighborhood, and when it disappeared San Blas would never be the same. The Gypsies were not sentimental about it. Most had already loaded their belongings into their new vans and left. Some stood around as if watching a spectacle, throwing stones at journalists. Some residents, though, clung to their doorways and amid shrieks and tears fought the police. The officers wore latex gloves as they wielded batons and removed any recalcitrant Gypsies. Mothers and fathers from San Blas cheered and cried for joy as they watched. Los Focos, the prefabricated houses at the north end of the camp, were still standing, but they were going to disappear as well. Signs near the construction site announced that there would be a centro commercial for the neighborhood. It would have stores of every kind, as well as a movie theatre with many screens and parking lots. People talked about how families from other parts of Madrid would come to shop. They would see that San Blas was different. The neighborhood was going to change.

Everything would change, I told myself. When we arrived in San Blas in 1983, I listened to the short wave radio every day with my father for the latest news about the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1994, though, stories from Bosnia and Rwanda filled the airwaves. The world was changing; why should San Blas be any different? The neighborhood would not look like I remembered it when I came back from university, but it did not matter. Could San Blas ever be the same without the people? The older generation of addicts I had known as a child was dying. Few of the men and women I met while handing out tracts in Parque del Paraíso and Torre del Campo were still alive. The people, not the buildings, were the neighborhood.

Graduation from ECA was a strange end to an education. For years my life had been divided between two worlds that had never met. At school David, Peter and I had labored in our studies, sung in choir, played our instruments in the band, excelled in sports and led the student government. We had won every prize and award the school could give. David had won a scholarship and fellowships at university, and I hoped I would as well. San Blas and Betel had been our life, but it was clear that our studies would become a greater part of who we were, while San Blas would slowly recede. We had never talked about our studies or our hopes to go to Harvard or Princeton with the people of Betel. Few of the ex-yonquis had gone to high school and none to university. The word university itself was an abstraction to them because they had never seen one. No one from Betel came to my


graduation; I had not invited them. The ceremony would be in English, and I did not want them to feel out of place.

None of the plans Timothy and I made worked out, and my guilt returned. Why did he die and not me? The golden letters of Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s words burned brightly within, and I had desperately wanted to make Timothy proud of me by going to Harvard, but failed. I felt that I had let him down. Why had I placed such value on childish hopes? After the thin rejection letter arrived, I settled for the consolation prize of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At least I could be close to David.

I did not feel like much of a student or much of a trumpet player either. Before Timothy died the only music I truly cared for was jazz. But the joyous rhythms and the playful riffs felt out of place in my life, so I traded jazz for classical music. The fiery staccato of Bird and Dizzie gave way to the mournful legato of Barber’s Adagio for strings. I sold my trumpet and turned my back on the mirage. For years I had played my horn every day for hours and polished it with great care. The truth was that I could not have become Dizzy even if I had wanted to. And even if I could have been Dizzy, I am not sure it would have been worth it without Bird.

Saying goodbye to my parents and to Peter at the airport was easy. It was but a brief parting; we would see each other again at Christmas and in the summer. But would I see Raúl and Jenny and all my friends in Betel again? I did not want to leave San Blas. Four years at university in the United States would be too long. There would be no Indian summer, no reprieve from death. I had read enough books and articles to know that a cure for HIV would not be found. The moment scientists found a cure, the virus would change itself and attack with greater ferocity than before. It was pointless to delude myself with naïve dreams. I merely hoped that doctors and scientists might find something to treat the symptoms and at least keep death at bay for a few more years — long enough for me to see them again.

When my brothers and I came to Spain, the TWA stewardesses gave us chocolates, flight wings, and snacks, and even took us up to the cockpit. As a child, I believed the flight to Spain would transport me to another world. As the plane took off from the runway in Madrid for the journey back to the United States, I knew it was happening again.

“I’ll carry them for you,” David said as he took my suitcases. He led my mother and me down the long corridor searching for my dorm room. The room was empty and the faded walls were bare. I would have to fill them with the subway maps of Madrid and the postcards from the Prado I had brought to remind me of home. Better yet, I would not stay, I would move off campus and live with David as soon as I figured out how.

My mother took us to the underground Ratskeller, her favorite restaurant, and told us about her time at Chapel Hill. She spoke in the same reverent tone that my father did when he recalled his days at Cambridge and Harvard. And I wondered if I would ever do the same. When we said goodbye to her after lunch, David led the way and showed me the campus he had come to know so well over the past two years.

As we walked down the streets and walkways, I could see that Chapel Hill was idyllic and could not have been more different from Madrid. San Blas was a noisy, frenetic, insomniac neighborhood of a quarter million people. Chapel Hill was a quiet, clean,


bucolic town of thirty thousand. Franklin Street was the only main street, and nearly all businesses closed at five o’clock. In the parks of San Blas grandparents, parents, children, alcoholics and drug addicts mingled openly. In Chapel Hill there were no children, parents or old people. A handful of alcoholics and homeless people were hidden down side streets of the town, kept at a safe distance by the university police. As far as I could tell, there was just a dull sea of happy young men and women tasting the sweet liberty of being away from their parents for the first time. Many of them wore T-shirts with Greek sorority letters, and I wondered: did they even know the difference between Koine and classical Attic Greek?

The university sat on a gently sloping hill, and the old buildings were draped in ivy and shaded by oak and poplar trees. On Franklin Street quaint shops filled the many red brick buildings. Historic houses and charming cottages were tucked away down quiet lanes. Every corner of the town was green, and the streets were lined with hickories, cedars, and pines. At the foot of the trees were boxwood, azalea, and crape myrtle shrubs. I did not know that because I recognized the varieties of trees or shrubs — there were none in San Blas — but because one of the university orientation booklets told me so.

In Spain I had never been a Spaniard; I always felt too alien, too American. But in the United States, being an American felt like an ill-fitting suit that I wanted to put back on the hanger before even trying it on. Perhaps it would change over time and I would grow into it.

The university orientation did not start out well at Chapel Hill. It included the usual introductions to academic life and presentations on the library, the student union and all the political and artistic groups one could join. Those did not bother me. It was the naïve, crass presentation from the student health clinic that angered me. A beautiful blonde girl arrived and handed out latex gloves to everyone in the room. She then took out thick marker and colored a large, blood-red dot on her palm. She encouraged everyone to shake each other’s hands. And each time that she shook someone’s hand the dot spread to the next person’s white glove. What started with one person quickly spread to the entire room, and soon everyone had the red dot.

“O.K. everyone, y’all have AIDS now! This is how it spreads. It only takes one person to get everyone sick.” The students laughed and amused themselves with the little experiment.

The same lightheadedness that I had felt at Ramón y Cajal returned, and I needed to leave the room. I took off the latex glove and walked to the doorway. The blonde girl pursued me with her anodyne smile and told me I could not leave.

“AIDS is a very real threat to student health and this session is important. You could help save yourself and others if you stay and listen,” she said. “I’m just about to give my talk.”

I made my way to the door and did not respond.

“You cannot leave. This is a required session,” she said, mustering all the forcefulness she could.

I saw that she had a bag of red bows to give everyone at the end. The girl was probably trying to do the right thing, but what did it mean to wear a red bow? On television I had seen the bows on celebrities’ lapels when they collected their statues at the


Oscars. I imagined they wore them as a quick salve for their consciences so they could sip martinis at Chateau Marmont and shop on Rodeo Drive every other day of the year. Had they ever known anyone who was HIV positive? Or the kids at Chapel Hill? Had any of them ever visited anyone in the hospital who had gone blind from Cytomegalovirus or who was suffering from AIDS-related dementia? The bows were just empty gestures of solidarity, a facile shows of support.

Screw her and her red ribbons, I thought.

I wanted to tell her about Ramón y Cajal, San Blas, and my friends who had died, but I did not need or want her sympathy. What was the point? I was not being rational or detached and left without saying anything. I sat outside on the steps of the student union and cried quietly.

As the weeks passed, the town became a strange fairy tale — impeccably manicured lawns, colorful leaves floating in the autumn breeze, rain-slicked walkways that reflected lamplights – but also a world I could not escape. My only link to San Blas was the phone. On weekends, I took my blue address book where everyone in Betel’s name and number was carefully notated and biked over to David’s apartment. Together we called my parents and Raúl and Jenny, Jambri and Mari Carmen and friends in Betel. Over the dry, crackling lines I could hear their distant, disembodied voices. Those exceedingly expensive transatlantic phone calls were always too brief.

Winter arrived and the first snows fell. Late at night when I returned from the library, the campus was empty and I followed the brick walkways beneath the trees. I stopped not far from the oldest university building and looked up at a bronze statue of a young Confederate soldier. The silvery white streetlamps cast their light, and the shadows of branches fell on him. He stood alone, broken and defeated after four years of fighting, returning home to a world he did not recognize. I took out Raúl’s green cap from my pocket to keep me warm, put it on and pedaled home through the snow.

All the shaved heads looked the same from a distance in the early summer sun, and no matter how hard I tried, it was impossible to make out which one was Peter’s as the cadets marched on the plain. After high school graduation he had not wanted to follow David and me to Chapel Hill, and it was a mystery how he decided to go to the United States Military Academy at West Point. He was only eighteen, and when my parents and David and I said goodbye to him on his first day at the academy, he was calm and confident up until the last minute. But I sensed the terror before they shaved his head. The place took kids and turned them into part of the long gray line of officers, but first it put them through Beast Barracks and Hell Week. I could only hope he would survive and knew it would be months before we would see him again.

At the end of the summer, I did not think much when I heard the news that Raúl had gone to Ramón y Cajal. He came down with fevers easily and had always gotten better and returned home. I do not know why I thought that pattern would continue forever.

Raúl went into the hospital with an intense fever and pneumonia. His lungs quickly filled with fluid, and the doctors gave him oxygen to help his strained breathing. The pneumonia was more severe than normal, and fluids continued building between his lungs and the rib cage. The doctors tried to insert a drain to relieve the pressure and help him


breathe, but instead they damaged his lungs. Raúl was in agony as his pneumonia got worse.

The doctors put him on morphine to kill the pain from the puncture to his lungs, and told Jenny his situation was grave. Raúl went in and out of consciousness when he received morphine. He asked if people had moved the furniture in his room. He had not been in such a state of delirium since he had stopped doing heroin.

My parents were in the United States visiting the churches that supported them, as they did every four years. I called my father to ask him if he had any news of Raúl. He said that Luis Pino, one of the first addicts in Betel, took his mobile phone to Ramón y Cajal and handed it to Raúl.

My father told me, “I asked Raúl how he was doing, and he said he was in agony. He could not bear the pain anymore and said he was ready to go. But his spirit was still strong. He said, ‘Remember Jenny. Remember my daughters.’ I told him I loved him, and he said he always loved me.”

My father bought a ticket to fly back to Madrid to be with Raúl. I wanted to go as well and hated being in Chapel Hill, so far away from San Blas and Ramón y Cajal. But it was too expensive for all of us to go. I tried in vain to study for my classes. As I sat at my desk, I looked out the window and saw the tangled ivy and the dappled sunlight that fell on the leaves as the branches swayed in the breeze. It was beautiful, and all I wanted was to be in Madrid where I could catch the crowded Metro and make my way to the hospital, walk up the steps below the inscription that I stopped to read at every visit, race up the steps to the infectious diseases ward on the eighth floor and find Raúl’s room.

Jenny stayed by Raúl’s side. She read to him and sang, wondering all the while whether he was listening. One day as she was singing a hymn softly to him, Raúl took off his oxygen mask and said, “Jenny, I think I’m dying.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s true. I could swear that I just heard angels singing,” he said. He smiled at Jenny with a glint of mischief in his eyes and put his oxygen mask back on.

All the ex-yonquis who were now directors of Betel came to Madrid to be with him. As the leaders streamed in to his room, some of them stayed for a day and went back to help run the centers, but others did not leave his side. Raúl received them in his room. He was dressed in his hospital pyjamas, a mask covered his face while the oxygen canister gurgled and slowly whirred. Raúl could not say much, but as they said goodbye and left the room, he often pointed to the ceiling and said, “See you in heaven.”

Raúl had been in the hospital a little over a week when his health deteriorated rapidly. The doctors increased his morphine doses. Jenny was always at his bedside. The leaders of Betel kept vigil in the room. As Raúl drifted in and out of consciousness, he took off his oxygen mask and with great difficulty spoke to all the Betel leaders in the room, “Si no nos rendimos, venceremos. If we do not surrender, we will conquer.”

He died an hour later on September 1st, 1995. He was thirty-seven years old.

My parents had come to Chapel Hill on their way to the airport in Raleigh. My father wanted to return to Madrid as quickly as possible to see Raúl. Jenny called the


apartment that David and I shared to reach them. I picked up the phone, and I asked her how Raúl was.

“Raúl just died, Johnny.”

All I could say was, “I love you all. I loved Raúl very much.”

“And Raúl loved you very much. He loved all of you.”

I handed the phone to my father and went to the hallway. I sat against the wall with my knees pulled up against my chest and wept. I remembered when I sat crying in Ramón y Cajal: Raúl had dried my tears. But he was gone and would never dry them again.

As Raúl had flown from Spain to the United States to be with us and speak at Timothy’s funeral, my father made the reverse journey to speak at Raúl’s memorial service. He flew alone and I stayed at Chapel Hill with my mother, David and Peter. Raúl’s death was not a surprise — we knew he could die at any time — but it did not make it any less painful. I wished I could have been with Jenny, Ana and Maria and the men and women in Betel. The distance only compounded the pain.

The week Raúl died, Peter went on leave. This followed Beast Barracks and Hell Week. When he flew down to Chapel Hill, we were relieved to see him. He had lost weight in the stomach and had gained muscle in the neck and shoulders. He had almost no hair, and David laughed and gave him a colleja on his exposed neck. “You know Raúl would have done that to you...” David said. I would have tried too, but Peter was thicker than me and was no longer my “little” brother.

Never before had I experienced such a strange mixture of sadness and happiness. And I felt guilty laughing at Peter’s shaved head. We talked and struggled to make sense of it all, and at dinner Peter took out a book he was reading and shared the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German minister who was hanged for opposing Hitler. Before he was executed, he wrote:

Joy is rich in fears:

Sorrow has its sweetness.

Undistinguishable from each other

They approach us from eternity,

Equally potent in their power and terror.

My father had read it to us before, but I had not understood it until then.

Raúl had told Jenny he wanted a memorial service that would commemorate his life and affirm his belief in heaven. I had to wait for my father to bring back a tape recording of the service to hear it. I held the tape anxiously, eager to hear what people had said about Raúl, but was unsure if I could bear to listen. What would I hear?


My father gave a brief address. He said that he remembered Raúl as many things: a desperate addict on the street, a transformed young man who had left heroin behind and was eager to help his friends, a leader in the men’s residences, an eloquent preacher, a caring minister, a close friend, a loving husband to Jenny, and as a kind father to Ana and Maria. Most of all, though, my father remembered Raúl as a son and an older brother to David, Peter, Timothy and me. We adored him as children and we loved him still.

“Do you not know that a prince and a great man has fallen?” my father asked as he quoted from King David’s eulogy at the death of General Abner. My father asked who could fill Raúl’s place. Who could stand in the breach as he did? He was unique in his charisma, his joy and his profound humanity. My father doubted Betel would see anyone like him again. As he looked around the church, he saw dozens of men and women who shot up with Raúl near Torre del Campo and Parque del Paraíso. Manolo Chatarra, Ángel Veneno, Luis Pino — all of them entered the center because of Raúl.

Lindsay spoke after my father did. He had been with Raúl from the first days in the apartment and had stood by his bedside when he died. Lindsay had begun as the teacher and had become the student. It was an honor to have been Raúl’s friend and to have learnt from him. Lindsay told Raúl before he died they were like King David and Jonathan, and “the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” My father and Lindsay had helped Raúl change his life when he was a yonqui, but he changed theirs more than he, or they, could have ever imagined.

One by one the leaders of Betel came forward to speak about Raúl. In the early days, Raúl had been their “shadow.” When they wanted to leave the program, he had shown them love and encouragement. Raúl was the first addict in Betel, and in a way he was Betel to everyone.

The small acts of kindness, even strange ones, were the things that people most remembered. Manuel el Vasco had a glass eye, and he remembered how Raúl had nicknamed him. He could have called him One Eye, like some men did, but Raúl simply called him el Vasco because he was Basque. And he was grateful that Raúl’s nicknames were always the ones that stuck. Manuel had resented the collejas and washing dishes for months as punishment for cursing, but he knew Raúl was rubbing off his rough edges and making him a better person. No one had ever loved him or cared for him that way. As I listened to the tape, I could not believe he had made it to Raúl’s memorial service. The last time I had seen el Vasco he was sick and skeletal. I had never seen anyone so thin.

I heard the news repeatedly in the months after Raúl’s death. It came over the rasping and hissing of international phone lines. Manolo Chatarra died a month and a day later. Manuel el Vasco finally succumbed after fighting full-blown AIDS for seven years. Then Ángel Veneno. Then his son Johnny. And many other friends in Betel. I was unable to visit them in the hospital, say goodbye, tell them how much I loved them or even attend their funerals. They had died and nothing could ever again be well.

The grief that had followed me after Timothy died returned – the waves of sharp, piercing pain followed by the same awful emptiness and numbness.

Through my parents’ monthly newsletters I read about my friends and their last days. My father wrote about his last trip to Ramón y Cajal to see Ángel:


Ángel, who brought Raúl to us, is in the hospital on the edge of eternity. Although Ángel has had an up and down, uneven walk with God and is now semi-paralyzed in the last terrible stage of AIDS, he is dying with grace and dignity and a clear testimony before men. Though his speech is much affected, his mind is sharp. I asked him yesterday how he was doing. And he replied, “Fine. I can’t lose. I have a lot to be grateful for. God has given me extra years of life and friends.” I replied, “The only thing I regret about your life is that you did not become a preacher. You would have made a good one.” Ángel smiled and said, “Shortly I’ll get to see Raúl.” I replied, “You certainly caught a big fish, didn’t you?” “No, just brought him to your nets.”

I hoped that wherever there was a heaven, Raúl, Ángel and all the men and women in Betel were together, just like in the old days on the farm, preparing paellas and playing fútbol and keeping each other company. Yet I knew it was a childish thought.

At Raúl’s memorial service, my father had asked: who could take Raúl’s place in Betel, who could stand in the breach? I did not know the answer to that. Maybe one day there would be someone who could take his place in the drug center. What I did know was that no one could take Raúl’s place in my life.

Raúl had decided to be cremated. He did not want his body to be held on display and viewed; he wished to be remembered not as the weak patient he was when he died, but as the strong man he had been almost all of his life.

Jenny took Raúl’s ashes, and Manuel’s wife took his. They went to spread them just as Raúl and Manuel had wanted. They drove to a river in Cuenca not far from where Jambri had started a Betel center. They parked and walked along the grassy shore until they found the right spot. The cold, clear water flowed quickly, and Raúl’s ashes surged towards the jagged stones that would be carried hundreds of miles out to sea.

Raúl always got his way. No one threw dirt on his coffin.


Cotugno nurse and Jambri

22: “AMONG THE DAMNED OF COTUGNO”

«FRA I DANNATI DI COTUGNO»

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

Psalm 23 : 4

I slid the key in and opened my mailbox with anticipation. It had been a few weeks since I had heard from Jambri, and I awaited his letter. He wrote long letters and sent postcards of Naples and the surrounding towns so I could hang them on the bulletin board over my desk and be inspired to learn Italian. My favorite card was the one of the amphitheatre in the town of Pozzuoli. Jambri saw the profound and the banal in every postcard. He noted that the town was famous among Christians and theologians because that is where the Apostle Paul landed after being shipwrecked. Now it was better known for being the town of origin of Sofia Loren.

It was hard to believe Jambri was in Italy. His health was not good, and when he lived in Spain he went in and out of the hospital with a grim, mechanical regularity. Jambri had already built a center in Cuenca that was growing, but he wanted a new challenge. His


doctors advised against going anywhere in his condition, but he volunteered to start a center in Italy. He took Mari Carmen and four recovered addicts to Naples, and they all settled in a large house on the periphery of the city. Jambri and Mari Carmen lived with them for the first few months until they found an apartment. Jambri had dropped out of school when he was twelve, but he found he had a gift for languages. Years earlier he had written to Lindsay, “I know that to be a missionary you have to have studied and I’m very thick, but what I’ve got is a little bit of love and I know that with that God could do something.” Jambri studied Italian day and night and within a few months he was fluent. Mari Carmen had never seen so him so happy since they got married. Like Raúl, Jambri was severe with his men. He hired a tutor for the men in the center and took away all their books and music in Spanish and locked them away in a cupboard. He bought Italian books, magazines and tapes for everyone instead. Within a few months Jambri had set up a mercatino much like his old rastro on Calle Esfinge.

Jambri had fallen in love with Naples. But he was not enamored with the bay that extended in never-ending arc or the brightly colored palazzi. Behind the natural beauty of Naples was a noisy, anarchic city that heaved with life. In Piazza Garibaldi, the central square near the railway station, drug addicts looked for a fix, spacciatori sold heroin, and prostitutes waited for customers. What was once a beautiful if decadent square had become a bus station and parking lot for the cars that clogged Naples’s streets. The families that ruthlessly ran the Camorra in Naples lived there. Most people who arrive take one look at Piazza Garibaldi and catch the next train or bus out of the city. Jambri saw Naples and decided that was where he wanted to work.

When I was in high school in Madrid I wrote to Jambri regularly and we sent each other letters and postcards. He invited me to visit him, and I wanted to see his rastro and the men’s home in Naples. He told me he would help teach me Italian, and I was keen to go. I was able to accompany my father on a trip when I was seventeen.

The day before my father and I had to go back to Madrid, Jambri insisted on taking us to Pompeii. He had showed us the center of the city, the surrounding neighborhoods. We drove to the entrance to Pompeii and marched up the winding stairs towards the Marina Gate, one of the main entries to the old city. It faced away from Vesuvius and towards the sea. Vesuvius is irascible and rouses itself every once in a while, grumbling and filling the air with its fiery spittle. I was enthralled and walked quickly ahead of my father and Jambri, taking photographs of everything I could. The slumbering giant Vesuvius had once flooded Pompeii and Herculaneum with lava and hot ash. The only thing to remind you that anyone lived were the lonely plaster figures crouching, shrieking as they died from poisonous gases and hot ash. Just like Jambri had told me, Pompeii was a ghost town, a city preserved without its people.

My father and Jambri walked slowly and talked about Betel’s businesses, about the new men in the program, and about plans to open up more centers in Italy. I wandered ahead and walked towards the Forum, the center of life in Pompeii. I looked around and could not find my father or Jambri. I retraced my steps and looked to the left. They were in the Basilica, looking at the columns. Their slowness was beginning to annoy me, and I walked around far ahead of my father and Jambri and made my way to the Great Amphitheater, the coliseum of Pompeii. But as Jambri, my father and I left the amphitheatre, my father caught my attention at the top of the steps and he switched into English. My parents never spoke English around our Spanish friends.


“I know you’re excited to see everything and I can understand that, but our friend here is not feeling well. He’s tired and should go home and get some rest. We’ve done enough sightseeing for today.”

I walked over to Jambri. “I apologize for making you walk around all of Pompeii today. We can go whenever you want.”

“I was hoping I wouldn’t get too tired, but I need to stop walking and get to bed. I’m feeling slightly feverish.”

“I didn’t want to drag you here today. We could have come on our own.”

“Jonathan, you didn’t bring me here. I took you here. You won’t see anything like this in San Blas.”

“I’m sorry you weren’t able to get any rest today.”

“Drop it. I’ll get some rest when you’re gone. I wanted you to enjoy your trip.” He smiled, “It’s good to see you again.”

When I was at Chapel Hill, Jambri and I wrote letters to each other in Spanish and Italian. Jambri’s Spanish had childish spelling mistakes because he dropped out of school when he was thirteen. But he could write Italian without any spelling errors. He loved the language passionately, and he did his best to transmit that love to me. He sent me books and recommendations of things to read. I devoured Dante’s Divina Commedia, Boccaccio’s Decamerone, and Ariosto’s Byzantine Orlando Furioso in the original. What he could not send, I found for a few dollars at used bookstores in Chapel Hill. They were musty copies printed in Italy in the 1920s, and the pages looked like they had never been opened.

One day at noon I checked my mailbox before I went to the library. A package in Manila paper and bubble wrap was waiting for me. I anxiously opened it. A small black Bible in Italian with gold-leafed letters on the cover slid out; it could easily fit into my pocket. I held it to my nose and smelled the fresh leather cover, then slowly felt it with the surface of my thumb and delicately sliced open its pages with my fingertips.

The little Bible accompanied me everywhere, and in order to improve my Italian I read page after page – in my room, in the many coffee houses on Chapel Hill’s main street, in the campus libraries. My parents had read the Bible to me and my brothers every day at breakfast and dinner, so I had much of it memorized. I did not need to carry around a dictionary for the difficult words in Jambri’s Bible; I already knew what they were in English or Spanish. This worked wonderfully for passages such as Psalm 23, Jambri’s favorite Psalm, “Il signore è il mio pastore, nulla mi mancherà. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” But plenty of times I scratched my head reading it. The book of Leviticus was the worst, “Potete mangiare di ogni animale che ha lo zoccolo spaccato e il piede diviso che rumina. You may eat from every animal that has hoofs and is cloven-footed and chews the cud.” My learning method had its limitations, and I wondered when it would ever be possible to insert the words into conversation.

Whenever I got a chance, I went to the library to watch old, grainy black and white films by Vittorio de Sica, Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti. But my favorite movie was Cinema Paradiso, a new work by the young Sicilian director Giuseppe Tornatore. The heart of the story was an eager apprentice’s childhood friendship with an old man. The


young boy nagged the projectionist for something to do. During the flicker films they shared their work, their lunches and their lives. The movie was powerfully evocative, and I remembered pleading with Jambri for a job at the rastro and how generous he was to let me work with him. I watched the movie over and over, replaying the Italian dialogue in my mind, learning every phrase by heart. And I wrote letters to Jambri with all the new words and expressions.

I had no idea just how sick Jambri was. His letters never gave a hint of what he was going through. He never complained and did not want me to worry.

Jambri had been sick in Spain, but his health deteriorated when he got to Naples. At first he went in and out of the hospital whenever he got sick. By the time he sent me the Bible, he was more or less living in Cotugno Hospital, the hospital for infectious diseases in Naples. He became friends with all the doctors on his ward, and the other patients loved him. Some of them became too protective. One day the nurses accidentally forgot to give Jambri lunch, his roommate, a man connected to the Camorra, let the doctors know that there would be “consequences” if something like that ever happened again. From then on, Jambri did not miss a meal.

I received the little black Bible on April 2nd, 1995. Just a few days earlier, on March 21st, Il Mattino, the main newspaper of Naples, published a story about AIDS patients in Cotugno Hospital. Hundreds of thousands of people read it. The journalists published a photograph of Jambri that covered a third of the page. In the photograph he appeared disturbingly thin and half-dead in his pyjamas as he lay in his bed with his little mobile phone resting by his side. The headline above his photograph read:

AMONG THE DAMNED OF COTUGNO:

This Is How The Sick With AIDS Die

The article recounted how the doctors and nurses were reluctant to work with HIV positive patients, how they did not have enough medicine to dispense. The journalist said that the article was meant to highlight the plight of AIDS patients, but it is hard to see how the headline could have done Jambri any good.

The article could not have painted a more misleading picture of Jambri. Jambri loved running the mercatino just as he had the rastro so many years before. Even though he was confined to his room in the hospital, he kept his telefonino at his side and called to coordinate the inventory checks, the book keeping and the work schedules for the store. The leaders in Betel came in once a day to visit him and give him an account of what was going on in the center. The doctors got used to seeing Betel business meetings in his room and they never complained about him having too many guests at once. He was sick but not damned, and if he was going to die he would keep on working and running his mercatino and the men’s residences as long as he could.

After the article came out things were never the same again for Jambri, Mari Carmen and Isacco, his son who had been born right after they arrived in Italy. Women in the neighborhood stopped talking to Mari Carmen and they even crossed to the other side of the street when they saw her. When she took Isacco to play in the park near their


home, mothers grabbed their children by the arm and led them away. The women and children were afraid of contracting AIDS.

Jambri and Mari Carmen loved Naples, but after the article it appeared their love was unrequited. She felt the scorn of her neighbors and hated the feeling of shame. It was pointless to fight the cold stares she got when she went to buy bread and pasta or the look of fear she saw in her neighbors’ eyes. The men in Betel helped Jambri and Mari Carmen move to another neighborhood.

Six months before Raúl died, he and Jenny had visited Jambri in Cotugno. Raúl was extremely weak and fragile himself, but he had heard that Jambri’s condition was deteriorating. Raúl wanted to see him even if it was one last time. As kids, they had grown up on the same street but had not been friends because Raúl was four years older and had his own gang. In Betel, however, the two had lived together on the farm in Barajas and in the ruins of Mejorada. They had worked alongside each other building new centers outside of Madrid and encouraged each other over the years. They treasured each other’s friendship.

When Raúl and Jenny arrived at Cotugno, they walked into a general doctors and nurses’ strike. They were not allowed to enter, but Raúl would not be deterred from seeing Jambri and he bribed the guards to sneak them into the building. As they walked down the empty corridors, they could see the courtyard. The doctors, nurses and patients had thrown twisted bed frames, torn mattresses with protruding springs, soiled hospital sheets, and unwashed gowns out the windows. Blood covered the walls, and toilet paper streamed onto the ground from the bathroom windows. The only clean rooms were those kept tidy by visiting family members who guarded their dying sons and daughters. Because of a shortage of nurses, a transvestite patient with broad shoulders and long bleached blond hair had volunteered to give Jambri injections. In a whispery, coquettish voice he would say, “Darling, don’t you worry. I was a junkie. I know how to find veins.”

Raul could not believe the stories Jambri told. An African patient lived in the next room over. The rooms had a common doorway and shared the same bathroom, and Jambri got to know him well. During the day when he had enough energy he would walk over to Jambri’s room and they would chat. One night the man came woke Jambri. He thanked Jambri for being a good friend and said goodbye. He said he was leaving the hospital. A few minutes later, Jambri heard sirens in the street and yelling in the corridors. He saw red and blue lights swirling on the walls and ceiling of his room. His friend had jumped out the window. “He had lost hope.” Jambri told Raúl, “I’ll never lose hope.”

Raúl was appalled by the conditions of the hospital. Ramón y Cajal was not the cheeriest of places, but in comparison with Cotugno it was a paradise. He spoke to my father about Jambri; Betel needed to do something. My father became worried and even offered to bring him back to Madrid. There he could preach on Sundays and rest during the week. He would not have to run a mercatino anymore or oversee any of the men’s residences.

Jambri was incredulous and asked my father, “What’s the difference? I can have fevers in Spain just as I can have them in Italy. I’ll stay in Italy and work.” And that is what he did for a few more months.


One never knows when one is going to die with AIDS, but in January of 1996, the doctors were sure that Jambri only had only a week to live and told him to prepare for his death. Jambri did not want to burden Mari Carmen with having to repatriate his body to Spain, so he made the decision to return to Spain to die even though he was too ill to travel.

Jambri did not die in a week as the doctors thought he would. He was right about having fevers in Madrid just as easily as he had them in Italy. In Madrid he rested and did not work, and he went in and out of the hospital. Mari Carmen learned to look after his oxygen supply, give him his pills and inject him with medicines. They lived in an apartment above her parents. He hated being unable to work and could not reconcile himself to not running a rastro. He hated being connected to his oxygen machine and often found himself in arguments with Mari Carmen’s mother. For reasons only he knew, one day he threw his shoe at Mari Carmen’s mother when she came by to visit. Once before he had hit an addict, and again my father and the directors had to intervene and reprimand him. I thought he could be forgiven. Perhaps like saints of old, Jambri could be irascible, even irrational, and make friends and enemies in equal measure.

It was on a trip at the end of a summer that I was able to visit my parents and see Jambri. I saw him at church, sitting on a cushioned chair in the front row with Mari Carmen and Isaacco.

My throat tightened and I could barely speak. It was unbearable to see Jambri like that, and I must have done an awful job of hiding it. I did not know what to say and clumsily asked a question to which I already knew the answer. “How are you, Jambri?” I put my arm around his shoulders.

He spoke softly and deliberately with his ever-so-slight lisp. “Not well. I have not been well for a long time. The doctors gave me a week to live months ago, and time is running out. But don’t worry about me. Don’t feel sorry for me. I know I’m going to die, and I’m ready.”

He paused and calmly continued, “Jonathan, as the Apostle Paul wrote to his young disciple Timothy before he was put to death in Rome, ‘For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. And now there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give me at that day.’ Don’t feel sorry for me.”

Jambri spoke about Naples and about his time in the hospital, and I learned the things he had not told me in his letters. He said he would always love Naples and wished he could have stayed. We switched from Spanish to Italian and I told him about all the Italian books I had read and all the movies I had watched. He was proud of what I had learned and corrected me on occasion. He encouraged me to continue learning Italian and never to give up my studies.

I had not even noticed that the church had filled and the service was about to start. The singing began and after it was done, Jambri walked to the pulpit. Just as Raúl had done, he waited for men in the center to move the pulpit so he could preach sitting down. For the next hour he spoke eloquently. He asked the congregation for forgiveness if his speech was slow and apologized for his dry cough; he was fighting a 100 degree fever. His


doctor had told him to rest, but Jambri said he did not want to miss a meeting when it was his turn to preach. He said he was going to preach even if someone had to prop him up.

As I listened to Jambri preach, I was struck by his words. He told the congregation that in the hospital, he had suffered alone in his room. His roommate fell out of bed every night and cried and talked to himself at all hours. One night Jambri was on the verge of giving up, but he feared he would become like his African neighbor. He knew that he had to fight for hope and joy with every ounce of strength he had. That night as he lay awake in bed and wrestled with his thoughts, he decided that from that moment in Cotugno it would be his choice to be content. Jambri could not change his condition, but he could conquer it by leaving no room for bitterness or unhappiness. He realized then that “everything material can be taken away from us, but only our joy can never be taken away.”

After the church service, we said goodbye. I promised him I would keep up my Italian and that I would write to him as soon as I got back to Chapel Hill. As I was leaving, Jambri told me that his greatest sadness about dying was for his son Isacco. He would have enjoyed seeing him grow up, “Sometimes I think life is too short.” When he said that, it occurred to me that I was only few years older than Isacco when Jambri and I first met.

Jambri preaching

Jambri and I never got a chance to write to each other again. The day I returned to Chapel Hill, my father called in the evening to let me know that Jambri had just died. My father visited him before he passed away. He was lucid up until the end.

My father took his pocket Bible to the hospital, and Jambri asked him to read Psalm 23, his favorite Psalm. Jambri was short of breath and struggled bravely to recite each word, but as my father read, he whispered slowly:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.


He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul.

He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.

Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Jambri closed his eyes to sleep. He died ten minutes later. It was August 14th, 1996, barely a week before his thirty-fourth birthday.

I thought a lot about San Blas after Jambri’s death. When Jambri was in the hospital, he told one of his friends in the center that all of Betel was going to heaven. Raúl, Jambri, Manolo Chatarra, Ángel Veneno, little Jonny, Trini, and many others had died. Everyone Jambri shot up with and knew was either dead or dying. Jambri’s friends were my friends; they were dying, and my neighborhood was dying with them.

When I was a child Jambri said he would never forget me because he could not get rid of me. I just kept coming back. But now that I was twenty, it was the memory of Jambri that I could not get rid of. It was his smile and his thin face that always kept coming back.


23: A BRIGHT FUTURE BEHIND

UN BRILLANTE FUTURO ATRÁS

Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living.

T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards a Definition of Culture

Life at Chapel Hill went on after Jambri and Raúl died, but everything else seemed trivial. I missed them and wanted to disappear and leave all that I was doing. But the thought of doing nothing, of being alone with my grief, was even more awful. The only way I knew how to escape was through books. They had always been my retreat. And I sought refuge in the cloisters of libraries and bookstores. The stacks surrounded me, keeping me safely hidden away from the world. My parents’ books at home had been a bridge to another world, but on my own I stacked them high against the walls, sealing myself in my room.

What I needed most of all was something to strive towards, something to possess me, something to consume me totally. Studies and activities filled my time as they had in high school – the more the better. I convinced myself I had to take my exams, perform in plays, work at homeless shelters, teach English to migrant workers. None of it mattered to me, but anything was better than being alone with my thoughts. Fellowships and scholarships became my obsession. They were the outward signs of academic success, and I hoped that Timothy, Raúl and Jambri would be proud of my accomplishments. I struggled for awards the way a drowning man gasps for breath and fills his lungs with water.

No scholarship was greater than the Rhodes. Writing an essay for the Rhodes application is a daunting endeavor. The first rule of writing is to write about what you know, and all I could write about was San Blas. I got excellent grades and wrote two honors theses – many of the applicants had. I had worked in the United States Senate and the House of Commons in Westminster during my summer breaks — most other students had worked in government as well. I was obsessed with jazz, classical music and art — many people were. Growing up in San Blas, though, that was like being a flawed stamp. To some people it was useless and slightly ugly, but to a collector its flaws made it unique and valuable. Or so I tried to convince myself. I did not want to wear it as some cheap, pathetic, phony badge of honor and thought of not writing about it at all for fear that I would not do it justice. But if one thing shaped my ambitions, fears, and hopes, it was San Blas and my parents’ work. Everything else flowed from there. I loved my parents, Betel and my experiences working in San Blas. Take away all that, and there was not much left to write about.

To my astonishment Chapel Hill nominated me and the Rhodes selection committee for North Carolina invited me for interviews. The Rhodes selection process is a well-choreographed dance. The night before the final interviews candidates and judges


gather informally, milling about in a room chatting casually over soft drinks. Like errant moose in their yearly mating season, the candidates and judges wander in circles, sniffing each other out. The young students know they are being observed and an instant liking or disliking is taking place, while the judges try to do their best to not let on that they are taking stock of everyone. The next morning the candidates run the gauntlet of questions in front of a committee of six judges. Then the deliberations last a few hours.

My interview early in the morning was pleasant. The committee thanked me and sent me away. The judges asked me many questions about foreign policy and politics and did not really discuss my essay. I had no idea what the judges were thinking. Did they like my essay? Did they like me? Were they just being polite? After twenty minutes of answering questions, I had no more idea of my odds than when the interview began. I was dejected and went away to order a coffee, trying not to look at my watch.

The judges said that they would announce the finalists at three o’clock. Before the clock struck three, the state committee called me back to ask me a final question. They asked, “Your essay discusses your family’s drug center and your interest in foreign policy. If you had to choose between working with addicts as your parents do or being Secretary of State, what would you choose?”

I still do not know where my answer came from, but it arrived, “Well, I’m only twenty-one. In an ideal world I’d live long enough to do both, but if I had to choose, I’d follow my father. British history is my specialty, and a figure that comes to mind is Lord Castlereagh, who was Foreign Secretary for over a decade. Besides Lord Palmerston, he was probably the greatest British diplomat of the Nineteenth Century. He was the main British negotiator behind the Quadruple Alliance, the Treaty of Paris, and the Congress of Vienna. He oversaw the resumption of ties with the United States after the Treaty of Ghent in 1813. By any measure, he was an exceptional diplomat. Yet, in spite of all his successes, he developed a paranoia and deep unhappiness and committed suicide in 1822, bringing an end to Lord Liverpool’s first government. What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul? I could be like Lord Castlereagh, achieving everything I wanted as a statesman, and still lose my soul. If forced to choose, I would choose to be like my parents.”

A few minutes later the judges came out and announced that I was one of North Carolina’s nominees.

The state interviews were easy compared to the final interviews, which would be a pitched battle. Six judges sat on the panel, four of them former Rhodes Scholars. Usually they are university professors, accomplished lawyers, celebrated political figures, journalists. They are all well known in their fields. The idea of being interrogated by them is enough to unnerve any candidate. But I enjoyed meeting the judges enormously. Adrenaline is a legal drug, and it was a powerful natural high.

On the night of the informal drinks, one judge stood out among them all. Dr. Benjamin Dunlap, a professor at Wofford College in South Carolina, was a soft-spoken man who was impressive in every imaginable way. After he attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, he received a doctorate from Harvard. He was a man of the world and he had lectured in Asia as a Fulbright Scholar, and in his spare time wrote poems, essays, opera libretti and novels. “He’s the film critic from public TV,” someone whispered to me as he passed. There was little he had not done or did not know. Over soft drinks and dry


snacks, we knew he had measured us and found us wanting. We all believed before we went into the interviews that he was going to tear us to shreds. He told us he had placed the scholarships in a cupboard and asked us not to touch them before the winners were announced. We were evenly divided as to whether he was a mad genius or just a genius.

My interview was at nine in the morning, and I was grateful they had not called me earlier. In my hotel room, I read Jambri’s little Italian black Bible and held it like a talisman. There was nothing more I could do. Professor Gless, a Rhodes Scholar who taught Shakespeare at Chapel Hill, had told me before I left, “If you win, it's not your doing; if you lose, it's not your fault.” He pointed out that everyone who reaches the interview stages is accomplished and intelligent; it is luck that determines the outcome.

The first to fire his questions at me was Professor Dunlap who asked, “If you can speak Italian, and your father read books such as The Divine Comedy to you when you were growing up, please translate a passage from the Italian and tell me who wrote it and where it came from.“ He quoted from memory:

Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io

Fossimo presi per incantamento

E messi in un vasel, ch’ad ogni vento

Per mare andasse al voler vostro e mio;

At first I stumbled because I could not understand every word of the Italian through his lilting Southern accent, so I asked him to repeat it. The judges leaned forward in their seats. They scented blood, and perhaps a few thought they were going to catch me out exaggerating about my ability to speak and read Italian. I was afraid I would wrongly confirm their view. After having him repeat the passage twice, I ventured that the quote was from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, but I could not remember which Canto and the correct translation was:

Guido, I wish that you and Lapo and I,

Were taken by enchantment and

Placed in a vessel that with each wind

Would travel on the sea wherever our hearts desire;

For an instant, I wanted to be transported by enchantment away from the interview, but I did my best, and my translation was correct. However, the lines were from Dante’s Rime and not The Divine Comedy. Professor Dunlap asked me who Guido was. I guessed correctly that it was Guido Cavalcante.

“Good answer. Who was his father?”

“Cavalcante Cavalcanti.”


“In the sixth Canto of the Inferno, Dante addresses him as voi. What is particular about that?”

“Voi is the archaic formal address, although it was widespread as late as in Mussolini’s time and is still used in some parts of southern Italy. It was used by Dante as a sign of respect for the father of his good friend Guido.”

“Where else is it used in the Divine Comedy?”

“Brunetto Latini was addressed as voi.”

“Good answer. Why was Brunetto Latini in hell? What was his sin?”

“He was un violento contro natura, a sodomite,” I responded.

Professor Dunlap smiled and said, “After a series of answers like that, I have no more questions.” The other judges smiled as well, and I knew that I had made it through the gauntlet of Professor Dunlap’s questions. It was along way from Napolitan slang, but Jambri would have been pleased.

If I could make it through that, no other questions that morning were going to unnerve me. It was fascinating to talk to so many well-informed, interesting people, and I realized it was a game; they volleyed and I did my best to return the ball. The pace picked up, and the other judges fired away questions, ranging from the bureaucratic reform of the State Department to specific decisions by the Supreme Court concerning freedom of speech to questions regarding British political reform movements in the 1830s and 40s.

A British historian who was the Provost of William and Mary concluded the interview. She asked me: what motivated me to have David send me his college textbooks? I answered that I felt like Jude the Obscure. Fictional though Jude was, I identified keenly with his yearning for knowledge and a better life. I was not a brick mason, but had worked with my hands as a painter. Unlike Jude, I did not want to chip away at the walls of learning and hoped to succeed in getting into Oxford.

The committee thanked me for my time answering questions and excused me. The deliberations took only a few hours but they felt interminable. Finally the judges emerged from the room: I had been chosen as a Rhodes Scholar. I was elated to be selected but was afraid that I would not be able to live up to the expectations that would be placed upon me. As one of the older scholars had told me, “A Rhodes Scholar is a young man with a bright future behind him.”

It was late in the afternoon Spanish time, and the first thing I did was make a collect phone call to Madrid. I knew my parents were waiting by the phone. “Mom, Dad, I won! Tell all the people in Betel I got the Rhodes.” With that, the connection mysteriously dropped. I did not know if the line had just gone dead or if they were already calling the people in Betel. It did not matter. I knew all my father’s pontifications at the dinner table were not wasted. I knew all of my mother’s tears were not in vain. They had chosen to live with little, but they had given me so much over the years. I thought that in some small way I could finally repay them and make them proud. The simple truth was that I could do nothing to repay them; they lived in San Blas and worked with addicts simply because that was what they loved.

I said goodbye to the other candidates, thanked the judges, and then drove back to Chapel Hill as fast as possible. I yelped and hollered and cranked up the music in the car as


I sped back to celebrate with David. It is a wonder the police did not stop me for driving while intoxicated. I was very, very high. In that instant winning the Rhodes gave me a rush — a surge of complete, utter euphoria unlike anything I had ever experienced.

That night I could not sleep. Just like Dante wished he could be transported by enchantment with his friends Guido and Lapo, I wished I could have called Raúl and Jambri and shared the moment with them. Raúl would have seen how I sculpted my mind just as Santiago Ramón y Cajal had written. I could still remember the bold, luminous letters perfectly. Jambri would have been amused to know how useful all his letters, books and the little black Bible had been. I wondered if he ever had any idea of what his encouragement had meant to me. He gave me his friendship, opened up Italian culture from Dante to Neapolitan slang, and made my world much larger than I ever could have hoped. I could not help but think of Timothy and would have given anything to share the moment with him. We were never able to go to Harvard and share the apartment in Boston together, but I hoped that somewhere he was proud of me. Raúl, Jambri and Timothy had died, but their presence lingered like a boat’s wake, growing ever fainter but ever wider.

For years I had read books to forget everything around me and had become so engrossed in them that little else mattered. Books had trapped me in a prison of my own making. Perhaps I had hoped my mind would be like a blackboard and by writing and re-writing often enough the sadness and bitterness that had etched itself would blur and be wiped away forever.

For so long studying had been a way of forgetting. Yet strangely now that I had found success, all I could do was hope to remember.

Why was I suddenly ecstatic? The real question, though, was why had I not been happy before? I had not been for years. I had decided not to be. Now I could not help it — I was uncontrollably, unequivocally happy. Winning the Rhodes was an accident, a random, beautiful one that I could not have anticipated.

But from the corner of my mind the ugly guilt, the sickly sweet self-pity that had haunted me so many times before cropped up again: how could I be happy when Timothy was dead as well as Jambri and Raúl? They would not want me to be sad, though. Finally I needed to banish that feeling of guilt. I could not go on living that way.

When I had visited Raúl in the hospital he never failed to cheer me up and dry my tears. Even in the misery and squalor of Cotugno, Jambri had decided to be joyful. He had known that he would die young, but he chose to be happy. That night I finally decided to make the same choice.


EPILOGUE

EPÍLOGO

How natural it all seemed then; how remote and improbable now!

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

If you visit San Blas today, everything has changed. The Gypsy camp was bulldozed years ago, and the Gypsies moved to the south and west of Madrid. In San Blas there are no more make-shift shacks, no more tubs and pipes for sale along Carretera de Vicálvaro, and no more Gypsy children playing in the streets. The Gypsies have not disappeared, however. They just keep moving: from San Blas to la Celsa, then to Los Pitufos, then to la Barranquilla. The bulldozers keep following them. The M40, a six-lane ring road, now cuts across the open fields where the Gypsies once lived between San Blas and the neighboring town of Vicálvaro. There is little to remind me that they ever lived there. The dump behind our old apartment on Calle Butrón is now full of new buildings and public parks that, although they all look the same, do not have the squat, claustrophobic feel of the older buildings. To either side of the highway, there are dozens of billboards and behind them shopping malls where people can buy everything they might want and a good many things that they have no need of. Few stores in the neighborhood are small family-run businesses anymore. Blockbuster opened a clean, brightly-lit video store. Burger King has a new fast food joint in the neighborhood. Starbucks is sure to follow soon.

A few ageing parents of the first men in our drug center still live near Torre del Campo, but it is now a quiet bar where customers are grateful things are not as they once were. San Blas has changed immensely. The old four story red brick buildings are now brightly stuccoed and look nearly new. The dirt lots between the buildings have been paved over and no longer collect garbage. Parque del Paraíso has fewer addicts shooting up and looks like almost any other park in Madrid. There are fewer drug busts in the neighborhood. The latest apartment blocks, shiny stores, and rows of spotless cars could not be further from the place I once knew. The problems are still there, but they are hidden, and I think the government likes it that way.

Betel has gone from being a small group of men living together in a crowded apartment to a large organization with offices and residences in cities around the world. The center’s new international headquarters is perched on a hill in the neighborhood of Carabanchel on the west of Madrid, the opposite side of the city from where we began. Einstein said that God does not play dice with the universe, but I think that God must have a sense of humor. Carabanchel was also home to one of the largest prisons in Spain until it was closed in 1998. Jambri spent five years there for robbing banks, and many of my friends in Betel did time for other crimes.


Today Betel takes care of more than 1,700 recovering addicts in residential programs around the world. In the centers the addicts can recover their strength, their will to live and their joy for life. The church in Madrid is massive and always full; it has a gymnasium for youth groups, classrooms for the children, and dining halls for the men and women. It is hard to believe it all started in my parents’ living room. Today Betel operates hundreds of small businesses, all run by former addicts. Most of them never graduated from school, but they are entrusted with making sure that everything runs smoothly. They make it happen.

My mother and father have reason to be proud of all they have accomplished in the last twenty-two years, but not because of the size of the building or the numbers of addicts in their centers. My parents did not set out to have new buildings or to create a large organization. They set out to show compassion to one drug addict at a time, and over the years a simple act of love has become a project that helps thousands.

My parents still work in Betel, and the center is their life. David runs a rehab center in New York City, and Peter is a student chaplain at St Aldate’s, Oxford. Raúl’s daughters and Jambri’s son are part of our extended family. We smother them with affection and too many books, and they are now preparing to go to university. When I was a child, I thought my father had all the answers and was stronger and smarter than everyone and my mother was always loving and always kind. Now I know for certain they are not perfect, yet their many imperfections and weaknesses make them more human and all the more admirable in my eyes. They are not saints, just people who practice love and empathy in their daily lives.

San Blas is not the same and the center has grown more than I could have ever dreamed it would, but some things do not change. The grief I had for so many years still runs deep; my friends share my sadness. When I return to Madrid, Mari Carmen greets me with a hug and a smile. She once told me that Jambri threw away almost all of his clothes as he lost weight over the years, but he never threw away the green T-shirt I gave him. He liked it so much he even got her to sew up all the little holes he put in it by wearing it too much. I still have Raúl’s green flannel shirt and cap, and I too sew up the holes. When Mari Carmen and I meet we laugh, recounting old stories, but sometimes we hug each other and cry, not saying a word, remembering Jambri, Timothy, and Raúl. We have holes in our hearts, and they will never be stitched. Not in this life.

The old San Blas died years ago, and it died many times over with each friend that passed away. My blue address book is filled with the names of loved ones long gone, and even today I cannot bring myself to erase them. I once started counting my friends who died of AIDS. I stopped counting at twenty-five, suddenly ashamed of what I was doing. They were not statistics; they were my friends, and I loved them.

I often wondered where God was when my friends were dying in San Blas and Ramón y Cajal. My family and I went to the hospital to encourage Raúl, Jambri, Manolo, Ángel, Marimar and others, but it was our friends who encouraged us. I like to think that my friends were refractions and reflections of goodness and love on earth. It was their joy amid suffering that shone brightly and ennobled them and everyone around them. Their happiness was not something that came easily; it was a choice that they made over and over again. It was ultimately a choice that I had to learn to make.


My parents did not know what they were getting themselves into when they moved to our neighborhood. They wanted to go to Spain, but never set out specifically to live in San Blas. If we had settled anywhere else, life would have been unimaginably different. San Blas was not the worst neighborhood I have ever seen. It was a barrio in transformation, at a unique time and place. It was a world where ordinary people lived uneventful lives and tried to eke out a living day after day. But the misery of thousands of yonquis was real. The tears of the mothers who lost sons from overdoses, violence or AIDS were real. Even the fleeting dreams of the young men who are now in prison were real. When my parents moved our family to San Blas, they could not have known how stepping into its closed world would change everything in ours.

In college David majored in mathematics, graduating with highest honors. He wrote a thesis of great originality in analytical geometry on an aspect of chaos theory that fascinated him: fractals and space filling curves. Fractals are beautiful angular patterns based on equations that endlessly repeat themselves, forming smooth, fluid shapes resembling waves, leaves or plants. There is order in the randomness and randomness in the order. If you change a small part of the initial equation, a fractal alters its shape in unpredictable ways, drawing something unexpected. So too the pattern of my life would look nothing like it is now if my parents had settled somewhere else. Today, it is hard for me to see what other patterns might have looked like — nor would I want to imagine what they might have been. If given the chance to trade away the sadness, I would not. Without my parents’ calling, I never would have grown up in San Blas and my life would be all the poorer. San Blas has changed, and it has changed me over the years.

My brothers and I feigned falling asleep at the breakfast table, but the lessons my father and mother imparted will forever be with us. I remember my father’s reading of Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ from his Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

I know that every time I return to San Blas, I discover it again and I rediscover myself. However, it is not that well-known quote, now almost a cliché, that most stands out. Eliot says a few lines later:

And all shall be well and

All manner of things shall be well

When Timothy died, I thought that nothing would ever again be well. The thought repeated itself throughout the years every time a friend died. And I believed I could never


be happy. Now I know that we do have a choice. Life goes on, and surely as sorrow follows happiness, tragedy holds within itself the possibility of joy.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

AGRADECIMIENTOS

I would like to thank Dr. Thomas L. Webber for providing the inspiration to write this book. If I had not stumbled upon Flying over 96th Street: Memoir of an East Harlem White Boy at a bookstore on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I never would have written a page. Dr. Webber wrote eloquently about being a white boy growing in East Harlem because of the Christian calling of his parents. His coming of age story is elegiac, moving and deeply empathetic. He was unfailingly gracious and provided many suggestions, but most importantly, he made me question every aspect of what I wrote.

Humans file away memories imperfectly, and when we call them up – especially from many years ago – we reconstitute them according to patterns we have learned from books, films, and plays. Each time we dredge up a memory, we distort it a bit more in the direction we prefer. Even if memories could be recorded perfectly, we all view the same events from different angles and no two recollections could ever be the same. I would like to thank my parents, my brothers, Lindsay and Myk McKenzie, Kent and Mary Alice Martin, Mari Carmen González and Jenny Almagro, Juan Carlos Matesanz, all the older mothers in Betel and Dr. Benjamin Dunlap for eliminating the distortions of my own memory. They let me rummage through their files, photographs, and newspaper clippings and withstood many interviews and emails. I must thank Peter Tepper, Steve Roberts, Pepe Verdú, Carlos Gutiérrez, and Priscila McKenzie for helping me hunt down tapes, pictures, documentaries and articles to double check dates, facts and statements. If I could have interviewed Raúl and Jambri, they might have set me straight on a few points.

Raúl once said that the most beautiful story anyone can tell is the story of his own life. I do not know if my story is beautiful, but felt compelled to tell it because it is the only one I have. My friends have been a source of encouragement as I wrote. I am in their debt for their criticism and kindness. Special thanks are due to Charles Beckett, Amanda Branson-Gill, Patrick Gray, Dr Darryl Gless, Dr David Halperin, Peter Halvorsen, Grace Kao, Akash Kapur, Jack Kirkland, James Mumford, Turi Munthe, Simon and Tiffany Ponsonby, Daniel Rosen, Gemma Sieff and Daniel Swift. Guy Chevreau wrote We Dance Because We Cannot Fly, a thorough, thoughtful book about Betel. He was helpful as I wrote, and his work often fanned the dying embers of memory. David Mignon let me his apartment in Paris to write during vacations. He was a wonderfully generous host.

Lief Rosenblatt kindly encouraged me and showed me that to be an investor and trader (my day job) one need not abandon decency, civility and culture. Our lunches at Maloney & Porcelli’s in New York were a lifeline. Mark Mahaffey pushed me to finish; he is the kind of boss workers hope for and rarely get.

The men and women of Betel have given me their love and friendship over the years; they are my brothers and sisters. This is their story as much as mine.

I would like to thank Jenny and Mari Carmen for allowing me to write Raúl and Jambri’s stories. Any money from this book will go to a charitable trust for their kids’


educational needs: The Betel Foundation, P.O. Box 1730, Wilmington, NC 28402, USA. Perhaps at last I will be able to fulfill my promise to Raúl in Ramón y Cajal.

Lindsay and Myk McKenzie patiently endured a barrage of questions and read many drafts. They helped start Betel with my parents, and their act of love and courage has changed the lives of thousands of people.

Thanks above all are due to my parents. Without them, there would be no story. My brothers Peter and David have been mis colegas all of these years from the streets of San Blas to Oxford. How I wish Timothy could have been with us! Not a day goes by that I do not miss him. He will always be the other half of my heartbeat.


GLOSSARY OF SPANISH TERMS

GLOSARIO DE TÉRMINOS ESPAÑOLES

Caballo Heroin, Literally, “horse”

Camello Drug pusher

Chaval Kid

Chutarse To shoot up

Colleja A slap on the neck

Facha Fascist

Fútbol Soccer

Gitano Gypsy

Guiri Foreigner

Majara Crazy

Papelina Tin foil containing a dose of heroin

Pasandeo el mono Literally, “passing the monkey”. Going cold turkey

Payo Non-Gypsy

Ponedero A shooting gallery

Talego Jail

Tocho Stocky

Tranquis Anti-depressant drugs used when addicts go cold turkey

Tripi Dose of acid

Veneno Poison

Yonqui Junkie

Shooting Up: A Childhood in San Blas

Documents

Transcript of Shooting Up: A Childhood in San Blas