Slum Virgin - Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

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The cameras continued filming, the videos began to circulate and Cleopatra enjoyed the attention. With her hair swept back like Evita, champion of the downtrodden, and a bounce in her step like Susana, the queen of TV, and as blonde as both of them, the ‘transvestite saint’, surrounded by a court of pimps, prostitutes, thieves in training and other transvestites, preached with one arm around the statue of the Virgin a grateful workman had erected for her on the field inside the shantytown. The Virgin’s head was rather too large, and so was her nose. She was a bit rickety, with a cross in her right hand and a heart in her left. But Mary presided over the gatherings with her eyes turned skyward and a look of ecstasy on her face. ‘Like she’s being done from behind,’ in the words of Jessica, Cleo’s niece, who evidently thanked the heavens every time she had that experience. ‘One night,’ Cleopatra said, recounting the story of the Virgin’s first miracle for her followers, ‘the pigs raided the flat I was working in.’ She’d done karate when she was a boy so she was able to knock down a couple of the cops in self-defence. Then she was taken to the police station. They cut the cables on the cameras and, with shouts of ‘You goddam faggot, now you’re going to see what it means to be a man’, they beat her and gang raped her. The other prisoners joined in as well, clear evidence of the democratisation of the police force ever since they started making them go through police academy. Choking on her own blood and the semen of the entire police station, Cleo had a vision: the Virgin. ‘She was divine, blonder than Susana, and dressed all in white. She looked like she was wearing a silk tunic. She wiped my face with a tissue she got from I don’t know where, I think she had it up her sleeve, well, how should I know where she had it, enough with the stupid questions. So anyway, she sat me on her knee and told me not to worry, she was going to take care of me now and they weren’t going to kill any more of her children, and who did they think they were. I had to change my life, she told me. It wasn’t good for me to go around “copulating”, which means screwing, all day long, and I had to take care of myself. Since she was speaking so properly she sounded like Queen Sofía of Spain, and I thought it was funny. She asked me what I was laughing at and I told her and she’s so good that she didn’t get mad, she just laughed too and gave me a kiss on the forehead. She told me I was very sweet and she wanted me to marry her son, who’d take care of me like she would. And she started to tell me things that were going to happen and things that had already happened to me. It felt like she’d known me my whole life, as if we’d gone back in time and she’d been with me from when I was little, from when my dad almost killed me, and she cured me of everything, I didn’t even have the limp any more when I woke up. The cops almost fainted: they’d left me for dead and I’d just got up like nothing had happened and told them to repent, that Jesus and the Virgin were going to forgive them if they repented. And so they came into the cell where they’d thrown me and saw everything all clean and perfect and me looking dazzling, like I’d spent the night on a feather bed with satin sheets. There I was eating the breakfast the Virgin had left me, tea with milk and sugar and pastries. They were shocked when they opened the door and saw me stand tall and waltz out like a queen, not a mark on me, like I was ready to step in front of the camera and appear on TV that very morning.’

      6. Quity: ‘The morning after’

      The morning after we watched the video, Dani and I rushed to the slum. He wanted to take a Kirlian photo of Cleo and I wanted to write the story of the year. I liked to drive north of the city, to see the river even if only in glimpses, to smell the water, to slow to the rhythm of the landscape as we got close to the Delta. But that day we didn’t make it all the way to the river. We exited the motorway as soon as we saw the shantytown. It was built on the lowest ground: everything sloped gently downwards the closer you got to it, except the quality of life, which didn’t slope but rather dropped off sharply in the last few inches before the wall – a wall whose advertising potential the municipality hadn’t overlooked. The wall served as a mirror for the wealthy neighbours, their last line of protection: instead of seeing the slum, they saw only themselves in the ads plastered to the wall, people on top of the world with their expensive mobile phones, cars, perfumes and holidays.

      Shame all those images of prosperity had to be interrupted by the grimy gates of poverty. The archway over the entrance was charming, with colourful letters that read ‘Welcome to El Poso’ and some painted cement doves, intended, I suppose, to be holding the sign up with their beaks, but looking more like they’d flown into a window. Little balls with wings plastered to the corners of the sign. On each side of the entryway was a security booth that bore various layers of decoration. The first layer was the requisite dark blue of all the booths; the second included the rooster of the Buenos Aires Police Department’s shield; the third, redheaded mermaids, a yellow submarine, the baby Jesus walking on a blue puddle, green fish and water lilies, all with eyes and smiling out from the dark blue background. The other layers of decoration consisted of graffiti, little cocks for everyone, including the baby Jesus. If it hadn’t been for the cocks and the smell of shit, you’d have had the impression you were entering a Catholic preschool in a poor neighbourhood. The security guard looked like just another decoration, a surprised octopus poking his head out of the booth’s window. Intelligence and press, the badges Daniel and I carried, gave us right of passage.

      ‘Go ahead, sir. Have a nice day, sir.’ The octopus respected hierarchy even though he was dying of curiosity.

      ‘Are you coming to see the Sister, sir?’

      ‘What’s your name, Officer?’

      ‘John-John Galíndez, Inspector.’

      ‘Are you the artist, Galíndez?’ Dani asked, mischievously nodding toward the elaborately painted booth.

      ‘Negative, sir. That would be Jessica, the Sister’s niece. Would you care for a drink of mate, young lady?’

      ‘Yes, thanks, John-John. Busy day?’

      ‘No, not really… Ever since the Virgin’s been around, the slum’s been pretty quiet. Very quiet. The only problems we have now are with the Condors, the private security paid for by the rich neighbours. Even the cokeheads get up early to listen to the Sister, she’s a comfort to us all. It’s pretty incredible. You’d never know it, Inspector, but, and my apologies to the young lady here, the Sister used to be a bit of a bitch. She worked in a whorehouse here in San Isidro, near the cathedral. She was expensive. For the posh set, you know.’ Galíndez lowered his voice and looked from side to side before continuing, ‘They say she was the bishop’s lover.’

      ‘Isn’t she a bit old for the bishop’s tastes, Officer?’

      ‘Well… I don’t know, I’m not a reporter, you’d know better than me. But that’s what they say around here, and you never know, there’s an exception to every rule, isn’t there?’ the officer answered. ‘Besides, Cleopatra was young before she was old.’

      ‘And before she was Cleopatra…’, Daniel ventured and the cop chuckled, warming up and almost certainly thinking: ‘This is my kind of guy.’ Then he started talking nonstop. He’d worked this precinct for eight years, and although he hadn’t been at the station on the day of the miracle, he’d witnessed other ones. ‘The Sister forgave us all,’ he repeated over and over, shocked that a victim could forgive such terrible things as the ones he’d done. He was right that any self-respecting person would consider these violations unforgivable, but Cleopatra says I’m bitter and that if everyone thought like me we’d all end up killing each other. The officer continued with his story: ‘It’s unbelievable, but I saw the miracle too. Cleopatra used to have one leg shorter than the other from when her father had beaten her to a pulp. Just imagine, he was a police officer, Sergeant Ramón Lobos, though later he was sacked for keeping more than his share of a payoff. When his son turned out like that – different, let’s say – he wanted to kill him. There’s still a lot of prejudice in the force.’

      I think it was a November morning, like I said, but I remember it being cold. We stepped inside John-John’s booth and he carried on serving mate and explaining the prejudices of the force: ‘In the academy they give us classes on human rights. In the test everyone writes that it’s bad to discriminate against the poor, the fags, the Jews, the Bolivians, and then, as soon as they can

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