Excerpt from The Black Cathedral by Marcial Gala, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Every person who is born into the world has the right to education and in return has the duty to contribute to the education of others, Martí said, and I tried to educate those young men, to give them a sense of what morals and ethics are, but I failed, because they were rotten. To the core, they were rotten; something was hiding behind that Christianity their parents paraded about—something.

MARIBEL

So Gringo is in a maximum-security prison in Texas, waiting to be wiped out? Now he can spend twenty years on death row because those yanquis, before they give someone the chair, they need to think about it a hundred times over, it's like they feel sorry for him. But Gringo was evil, evil, he was like a real Cro-Magnon. Do you know what it is to feed human flesh to half of Punta Gorda? I think of it and it turns my stomach, but at least he was considerate enough not to sell it here in the neighborhood; in that respect, he did exercise some control, because, you know, I said to him, "Hey, Gringo, old friend, come on, sell me a little piece and I'll pay you at the end of the month, I don't have anything to sink my teeth into, my molars are going to atrophy if I keep eating soy beef."

"Maribel, that meat's not good for you, you'll be allergic," he said to me the first time, and I kept pushing.

"Come on, old friend, get me a piece."

"Will you suck me off?"

"Sure."

But later he said it was a joke, so …

Gringo had a lot to do with what happened with the Stuarts. Since he was interested in Johannes, he became Christian. I saw him show up one day, dressed in clothes like I'd never seen him in before, a gray pair of dress pants and an ivory-colored woven shirt, waiting for the Stuarts to open the door so he could go to temple with them.

Copyright © 2012 by Marcial Gala

Translation copyright © 2020 by Anna Kushner