Free Necropolis by Santiago Gamboa Page B

she went from party to party every day of the week, hitting the pills and coke and acid and washing it all down with Four Roses bourbon, which was what the gang members stole, until after a while she became the girlfriend of a Colombian dealer who took her to Miami and kept her like a queen from the age of fifteen until they killed him, which was a really nasty business, apparently they nailed his tongue to a wooden table and left him there for a while, then they released him by slicing through his tongue with a scalpel, took out one eye with a salad spoon, cut off his balls and penis and threw them to his dog, right there in front of him, and when he was almost dead doused him in gasoline, set fire to him, and shot him seven times in the head, and Jessica actually saw the whole gruesome scene, hiding in a closet, and one of the things that most upset her was that the killer was her boyfriend’s cousin, the same one who had sprung him from prison in Colombia and brought him to Miami and made him his partner, paying his expenses, anyway, it was obviously Satan pulling the strings. She was alone again, but through her disco contacts she met another Mafioso, Brazilian this time, who took her to his mansion in Coral Gables, complete with a jetty, a yacht, six maids, three cooks (one of them specializing in Thai food, her favorite), and two bodyguards, and she lived there with him for more than a year, although she remembers almost nothing about it because she spent all day by the pool, high on pills and booze, drinking bourbon, gambling in the casinos until the morning, doing coke, and fucking her Brazilian, who was very affectionate. After a while, her boyfriend’s brother arrived, who was better looking and who she liked more because he wasn’t a drug dealer but an art student, my friends, in other words, he wasn’t dealing blow, and so Miss Jessica started seeing him, a fuck here and another there, in secret, but as she was always drugged, she forgot to cover her tracks and the Brazilian ended up catching them in flagrante, dancing the dance of Sensemayá the serpent, and then it was all slamming doors and slaps and out on the fucking street, although luckily the Mafioso didn’t shoot them or throw them in the sea with concrete balls on their feet, and he didn’t do it because it was his brother and he really loved Jessica, so she went off with the artist, who if I remember correctly was some kind of graffiti artist, a mixture of Keith Jarrett and Basquiat, for those who know about these things and apologies to everyone else, who thought he was a genius destined to change the perception of art forever and, of course, my friends, like all those who aspire to genius he was really smug and self-centered, convinced he had a key role to play in the contemporary world and crap like that, and spoiled by two rich, alcoholic old women, his patrons, who organized parties for him that inflated his ego, though what he gave them in return nobody was quite sure, because the old ladies already had everything, and so time passed and Jessica started to notice that her artist wasn’t the same anymore, the young man with a brain boiling over with dreams had turned into a pretentious drunk who wore eccentric clothes and ridiculous silk handkerchiefs and told anyone who would listen, with a glass of whiskey or a joint in his hand, how far he was destined to go in the history of art, even though he’d pretty much stopped painting by now, because he’d get up past noon, always with a hangover, and in the evening would go to parties and society dinners. One night, after they had a fight and Jessica told him he was a loser, he hit her and she ran away without taking anything with her, not even her jewelry, or her clothes, and that was when Walter found her, a raw soul exposed to wickedness but ready to be redeemed.
    For Jessica, the hardest part of her new life had been to give some kind of structure to her days,