Chapter 1: The unexpected death
Listen carefully to what I'm about to tell you. Look me in the eyes and don't look away for even a second because the question I'm about to ask is a direct hit to your conscience. Do you honestly believe that simply being a good person, a hard worker who doesn't get into trouble guarantees you a place in heaven? I'm Roberto. I'm 45 years old. And I thought exactly the same thing until my heart exploded inside my chest like a blown engine.
What I saw on the other side wasn't a white light or smiling relatives. It was an abyss of ash where history exacts its price with blood and fire, face to face with the real physical and eternal torment of men like Hitler and Stalin. But the true terror wasn't seeing the dead. It was seeing empty burning iron thrones waiting for world leaders who are still alive today breathing the same air as you and me. Get ready.
Hold on to your seat because what you're about to hear isn't a roadside story. It's an urgent warning that burns my bones. There was no light at the end of the tunnel. That's the first lie I want to debunk before you continue listening. When my heart stopped, no singing angels or green vipers appeared. There was only silence, a heavy, dense, metallic silence as if my ears had been plugged with molten lead.
And then the fall. My name is Roberto. I've lived my whole life surrounded by grease and tools in a mechanics shop on the outskirts of the city in an industrial area where the sun beats down on the sheet metal. My life has nothing mystical about it. I'm not in the newspapers. I don't have a prestigious surname and my hands are always black with burnt oil and callous from rubbing against the steel.
I'm a mechanic and a blacksmith. I've been one since I was 15 when my father taught me to weld a beam without looking at the ark of the light. I've spent three decades piecing together scraps of metal, repairing engines that others had given up for dead, straightening twisted chassis, and forging bars for people who wanted to protect themselves from thieves. That was always my world. the deafening roar of the grinder, the pungent smell of gasoline and solvent, the heat of the forge, and the cold touch of the wrenches.
I thought I knew life because I listened to the stories of drugs and laborers while I fixed up their old trucks. They told me their sins, their cheating, their fears, and their vices, as if I were a confessor with a dirty rag in my hand. I just nodded while tightening a nut and thought that because I was a hard-working, honest man who charged a fair price and never stole a penny from anyone. I had nothing to fear from death. I thought that God, if he existed somewhere up there among the clouds and the smoke from the factories, would have respect for a man who earned his bread by the sweat of his brow.
How wrong my logic was. Ignorance is the sweetest poison we tough men drink, and I drank it to the dregs. It was a Tuesday afternoon. I remember the heat was brutal. One of those humid days that makes your overalls stick to your body and makes the air feel like mercury. I was working on an urgent job. Repairing the drive shaft of a cargo truck, a solid, heavy, treacherous piece of steel. My strength was no longer that of a 20-year-old, and the week's accumulated fatigue was taking its toll.
But I pushed my body, my muscles. to avoid wasting time. I wanted to finish. I wanted to get paid. I wanted to get home and crack open a cold beer. I was so focused on the metal, on the material, on what could be hammered and welded that I didn't feel when death entered the workshop. It didn't knock on the metal shutter. It didn't ask
Chapter 2: Entering the abyss
permission. Suddenly, the wrench slipped from my hands. The metallic sound as it hit the concrete floor was sharp, violent, and the instant the metal struck the floor, I felt something explode inside me, my rib cage. It wasn't a sharp pain at first. It was as if someone had put a hydraulic press inside my chest and started squeezing my heart with a pressure of 1,000 tons. I released the axle, tried to breathe, but no air would come in.
My throat closed as if a screw was stuck in it. I wanted to scream, to call my assistant, who was in the yard. But not even a whisper came out of my mouth. The pain spread quickly. Like boiling oil spilled on skin. It shot up my neck, down my left arm, numbing it instantly. I felt a terrible fear. It wasn't the fear of leaving death or the fear of what would happen to the workshop. It was an anim animalistic terror, a primal instinct.
I knew with absolute cold certainty that I was dying. I fell onto the workbench. My forehead hit the vice. I heard the thud. I tasted blood in my mouth when I bit my tongue, but it felt distant, as if it had happened to another man, and then everything went dark. It was as if someone had flipped the main switch for reality. This is where the testimonies often speak of peace. I've heard many over the years, sometimes on the workshop radio while I was working, they talked about floating, about lights, about tunnels.
I hoped for that. In that last second of consciousness, I clung to that cheap hope that all working people go to heaven. But it wasn't like that for me. I found myself standing beside the workbench. The pain had completely disappeared. For a second, I felt immense relief. I thought I had recovered, that it had only been a drop in blood pressure from the heat. I looked at my hands, and they were no longer greasy.
I felt strong, powerful again. But then I looked down and what I saw froze my spiritual blood. I saw a body slumped over the tools. The blue overalls were stained with grease and sweat. His face breast against the cold metal. His mouth slightly open in a grimace of astonishment and pain. A urine stain beginning to darken the pants. It took me a few seconds to understand what I was seeing. That massive still body was me.
That was Roberto the mechanic. That was the shell I had used for 45 years to move metal. And I, the real me, was outside. I tried to touch my shoulder, to shake myself awake, to yell at that lump to get up, but my hand passed through my own back like exhaust smoke. There was no solidity, no matter. And that's when the fear returned. But this time, it wasn't physical. It was spiritual. It was a panic that froze the soul and made you feel naked before the universe.
The workshop began to change. The brick walls with their calendars of women and their shelves full of spare parts began to dissolve. They didn't disappear. They simply ceased to matter. The sunlight streaming through the gate turned gray. All the color in the world was sucked away as if by a giant vacuum cleaner. The truck that seconds before had been a gleaming red machine turned the color of ash.
I waited for the light. I looked up, searching for that famous tunnel. I
Chapter 3: Realizing spiritual truth
desperately searched for a sign, an angel, an outstretched hand. I screamed with all my might, "My God, help me." But my voice didn't resonate in the physical air. It echoed within my mind like a sound in an empty cave. But the silence of the workshop remained unbroken. No one came. Instead of rising, I felt a new gravity, a brutal magnetic force that didn't come from the sky, but from below, from the subs soil, the concrete floor of my workshop.
That floor I had swept so many times, ceased to be a floor, it became transparent like dirty glass, and I could see what lay beneath. And what I saw wasn't earth or foundations or pipes. I saw darkness, a living darkness that moved like an ocean of black Hebrew water, churned by an invisible storm. "No, no, no," I groaned, trying to grab onto the workbench, the crane's chain. Anything, but I was immaterial, and the force pulling me down was irresistible.
It was as if the earth were opening its jaws to swallow me. I began to descend. I wasn't floating upward. I was sinking. I went through the concrete. I went through the earth. I pierced the bedrock. The speed increased. I felt the wind, but it wasn't air. It was a frigid void that cut like razor blades. As I fell, my life didn't flash before my eyes like a romantic movie. I didn't see my birthdays or my barbecues with friends.
What I saw were my justifications. I saw all the times someone talked to me about Christ and I changed the subject with a cynical joke. I saw all the times I walked past a church and felt a pull in my chest to go inside, but I preferred to go to the bar. I saw my pride as a self-sufficient man. That silent pride of believing that I was good, that I didn't need saviors, that my callous hands were my passport to heaven.
I'm a good person, I repeated to myself as I fell into absolute blackness. I fixed cars for the poor. I didn't hurt anyone, but in that darkness, my arguments sounded hollow, ridiculous. It was like trying to pay off a million-doll debt with rusty washes. I understood too late, far too late, that professional honesty isn't a bargaining chip in the spiritual realm. I realized I'd spent 45 years taking care of my body, my workshop, my reputation.
But I'd never worried about my spirit. I'd left my
Chapter 4: Tyrants in torment
soul naked. And now that nakedness was shameful, the full seemed to last hours, though perhaps it was only seconds. In eternity, there are no clocks. The darkness was total, so thick I could feel it clinging to my spiritual form like dirty, heavy oil. And then, before I saw anything, I smelled it. It didn't smell like a wood fire. It smelled like sulfur, yes, but mixed with something much worse. It smelled like old blood, burnt flesh, stagnant drains, and molten metal.
A smell that was both chemical and organic, setting my conscience ablaze. I landed hard. I didn't break any bones because I no longer had any. But the impact shook my entire being. I lay on the ground, trembling, curled up, hoping to wake up in the emergency room, hoping the doctor would tell me I'd been lucky. "Wake up, Roberto," I whispered. Wake up, you idiot. But when I opened my eyes, I wasn't in the hospital.
I wasn't in my city. I was on an immense plane under a sky that had no sun, no moon, no stars. The sky was a dome of lead and smoke, low and oppressive, like a red hot iron roof, about to crush us. I got up slowly. The ground beneath my feet wasn't earth. It was dust, a fine, gray, dry dust that rose with every movement. Looking closer, I stifled a scream. It wasn't rock dust. It was ash. And among the ash were fragments, bits of things that looked like ground bone.
I was walking on the remains of something that had once been alive. I looked around. The plane stretched as far as the eye could see, monotonous, dead like an industrial desert after a nuclear explosion. There were no trees, no water, no wind, only a terrifying stillness. But if you paid attention, the silence wasn't empty. Beneath the earth, or perhaps in the air itself, there was a constant hum.
Hello, vibrant sound like millions of turbines failing in the distance. "Hello," I asked. My voice came out trembling, small, ridiculous in the midst of that immensity. No one answered, but I felt them watching me. I felt thousands of invisible eyes fixed on my back. The sensation of being observed was so intense that my spiritual skin prickled. Where am I? I asked again, although deep down, that part of me that always knew the truth, but ignored it already knew the answer.
I had heard testimonies. I always thought they were fanatical ramblings to scare people. I thought hell was a state of mind. Or perhaps it was the hard life we already lived on earth, working from sunrise to sunset. But when I felt the heat rising from the ground, a heat that didn't warm the skin, but burned from the inside out, I knew it wasn't a metaphor. This was a place, a real geographical place, tangible, more real than my anvil, more real than steel.
I began to walk aimlessly, driven only by the instinct to flee. My steps made no sound in the ash. In the distance, I saw silhouettes like elongated, deformed shadows moving slowly. I didn't want to approach, but I didn't want to be alone either. Fear drew me toward anything that seemed human. Please, I cried. I need help. I'm a worker. I'm lost. How naive I was to believe my social standing mattered.
The suddenly a figure appeared before me. It didn't walk toward me. It simply appeared as if it had materialized from the gray air. It wasn't a horn demon like those depicted in medieval paintings. It was a tall, imposing being dressed in what looked like a thick linen tunic, but it didn't shine. It had no light of its own. Its face was stern, hard as granite. Its eyes had no pupils. They were pools of cold white light that pierced me without any emotion.
I stumbled backward over my own feet. Who are you? I stammered. You're an angel. Have you come to take me to God? The being looked at me with an indifference that hurt more than hatred. Roberto, it said, its voice soundless. It resonated directly in my head like a hammer blow on an anvil. You have spent 45 years forging metals to protect houses, but you never uttered a single prayer to protect your soul.
I was a good person. I tried to defend myself using the same old excuses. I didn't kill. I worked hard. The being pointed to the horizon toward an area where the gray sky turned a dark red like clotted blood. Human kindness is scum. Here he said, only the blood of the lamb has value, and you despised it like someone who despises an old spare part. Now you will see reality. You will see what the world ignores.
You will see the fate of those who believed themselves masters of history and are now slaves to torment. I don't want to see, I cried, covering my face with my hands. I want to go back to my workshop. I want to finish the job. There's no turning back of your own free will, the guy declared. He walked and against my will. My legs moved. I couldn't resist. He didn't touch me, but his presence pushed me.
He was taking me toward the edge of the plane, toward where the terrain broke into deep abysses. As we walked, the worring I had heard earlier grew clearer. It no longer sounded like turbines. It was screams. Millions upon millions of voices screaming at once, creating a single constant note of industrial horror. "What is that noise?" I asked, trembling uncontrollably. "It's not noise," the guide replied.
"It's prayer. It's the repentance of those who arrived late, which now serves us." We reached the edge of a precipice. The heat hit my face like the flash of a smelting furnace as it opens. I looked down and what I saw made me wish I had ceased to exist forever. There was no ordinary fire down there. There was constant movement, a living mass. Look closely, blacksmith, the voice in my mind commanded.
You who spent your life melting metals, look now at how the powerful are melted. I was about to see what no history book tells. I was about to see the true face of evil stripped of uniforms and medals. The edge of the abyss wasn't stone. It was like peering into the mouth of a gigantic furnace that never stops burning. The guide stopped right at the edge where the ash floor crumbled into blackness.
I wanted to back away. My feet, though spiritual and weightless, felt nailed to that cursed dust. The heat rising from below was unbearable. But it wasn't a dry heat. It was a humid, sticky heat. Come closer, the guide ordered. It wasn't an invitation. It was a command my knees couldn't disobey. I peered over and what my breath saw was forever etched in my memory. It wasn't a lake of liquid fire as we sometimes imagine.
It was something far more terrifying for someone like me. Then he knows the texture of things. What covered the bottom of that immense crater? It was a moving mass. It looked like an ocean of pitch. Thick black mud boiling. But the bubbles that rose to the surface weren't air. They were faces, hands, twisted torsos that emerged for a second, screaming something unintelligible, and were sucked back down by invisible claws.
"Here are those who thought themselves gods," said the angel beside me. His voice resonated with an authority that made the air tremble. "Here are the architects of death, those who signed sentences in red ink and thought the earth would forget, but the earth has vomited them up here." The angel pointed to a mound in the center of that lake of filth. It was like an island made of charred bones and rusted metal.
There, separated from the rest of the common souls, were three figures. From that distance, with my human eyes, I would never have known who they were. I'm just a neighborhood mechanic. My reading material consisted of engine manuals and the sports newspaper. I didn't know much about military history, nor did I recognize the faces of the men who lived on the other side of the world before I was born.
But in hell, knowledge isn't learned. It's imposed. It's a torturous revelation. The moment my eyes lay upon them, each name was seared into my mind. I didn't need anyone to introduce me. The very horror they emanated told me who they were. The first was trapped in a kind of vertical trap. It was Adolf Hitler. What I saw bore no resemblance to the black and white photos in documentaries. There was no immaculate uniform, no fanatical pride in his eyes.
He was naked, and his nakedness was the most pathetic thing I've ever seen. His skin didn't look like skin. It looked like melted wax that had hardened again, grayish and covered in open sores that never bled, only oozed a green liquid. I looked at him with my blacksmith's eye and noticed the detail that made my soul want to
Chapter 5: Betrayers of the people
vomit. He wasn't tied with ropes. He was wrapped in a tight net of barbed wire. The wire dug deep into his flesh, disappearing under the skin and reappearing like a macabra stitch made by a sadistic tailor. Every time he tried to breathe, the wire tightened. Every time he opened his mouth to let out that horse broken scream, the barbs dug deeper, tearing muscle and nerve. He wanted purity, the guide told me, reading my disgust.
He wanted a world without stains. Now he lives in eternal filth. He wanted living space. And now he doesn't have an inch to move without pain around his head like a mocking wreath, buzzed fist-sized flies, but they weren't insects. When I looked closer, I saw they were tiny mouths with teeth. minuscule demons that were biting his eyelids and lips, devouring his face again and again. And the most terrifying thing was that his flesh regenerated instantly only to be eaten again.
It was an endless cycle of mechanical destruction. He screamed, but he wasn't shouting orders. He screamed a single word over and over in a German I don't speak, but which I understood perfectly through death's gift of tongues. Fire, fire, fire. He begged for fire to burn the worms. But the fire that purifies him, it only torments him. A little farther on, half submerged in the black mud, was Joseph Stalin.
If Hitler was the image of acute pain, Stalin was the image of crushing weight. He was on his knees, the mud up to his chest. But he wasn't alone. On his shoulders, on his curved back, he carried a mountain of corpses. They were pale skeletal bodies, cold as ice. Hundreds of thousands of them were piled on top of him, forming a human tower that crushed him against the mud. He could hear the cracking of their bones breaking under the pressure.
Their spines burst, their ribs splintered, and in the next instant they magically fused together only to break again. He tried to shake the bodies off, tried to push them away with his large, rough hands, but the bodies clung to him like limpits. They were the souls of those he had starved to death. Those he had sent to the labor camps. The guide made me look at his hands. Look his fingers. Blacksmith, he told me.
I looked. Stalin's hands had no nails. Only his fingers transformed into red hot iron claws that he dug into his own face in his despair. The man of steel, the angel said with terrible irony. He hardened his heart to stone. Now he feels the weight of every life he despised. No one fears him here, Roberto. Here he is, the ground the demons tread. Seeing that man who once had the power to erase entire cities with a signature reduced to a beast of burden, crying like a child sent a chill through me that I cannot describe.
I didn't feel pity. In hell, there is no place for compassion because the presence of God is not the degenerate that feeling. I only felt justice, a cold, terrible mathematical justice. I understood that every tear shed because of him was now a ton of weight on that monster's back. And then I saw the third one. Maong was a little further away in an area where the ground seemed to move as if it had a life of its own.
At first, I thought it was a red carpet. Then I realized it was blood. A thick pool of blood that wouldn't clot. Mao was floating in the center, threadbear and deformed. His body looked like a balloon about to burst. What was happening to him was the most graphic of all. From his own mouth, which was open unnaturally, his jaws dislocated. Thousands of black centipedes poured out. They came out in torance, ran down his chin, covered his neck, and re-entered his stomach, which was ripped open.
The great helmsman, the guide whispered, "The one who starved millions to feed his ideology. Now he is the food. It wasn't just worms that were eating him. It was mouths. The pool of blood was filled with floating heads, faces of peasants, of children, of old people, gnawing at his bloated flesh with an insatiable veracity. He tried to swim, tried to flee, but the blood was thick as glue. Every movement was useless.
I saw him looking at me. For a second his eyes met mine. There was no intelligence in that gaze, only an anim animalistic and eternal panic. I realized that he knew he would never get out of there. Eternity is a concept that frightens us on earth. But down the word always carries a weight that shatters your mind. I brought my hands to my mouth, feeling the urge to vomit, even though I didn't have a physical stomach.
The smell of that place was a mixture of rotten meat and burnt gunpowder. Why? I asked with tears in my eyes. Why are you showing me this? I just fixed cars. I'm nobody. The angel turned toward me. Their light was the only clean thing in that whole nightmarish horizon because the world has forgotten Roberto up there on Earth. Some still wear t-shirts with their faces on them. Some still read their books and call them heroes.
Some young people raise their fists in their name without knowing they are summoning demons. You have to see the truth to tell it. There is no glory and tyranny, no revolution in hell. There is only this shame, pain, and worms that do not die. I looked one last time at the three of them. The German, the Russian, the Chinese, three men who divided the world among themselves, who drew borders and decided who lived and who died.
Now they were fewer. What garbage? They were broken toys in the hands of an evil greater than the one they served. I saw a demon, a shadow shaped like a rabid dog, approach Hitler and tear off a piece of his leg with its teeth. The scream the dictator let out made the ground vibrate beneath my feet. I couldn't bear it any longer. I closed my eyes and screamed, "Get me out of here. Please get me out of here."
The guide hadn't even said anything yet. We'd barely begun. The angel took my arm with a force that wasn't physical, but authoritarian. His touch burned, but strangely, it gave me the strength to keep from collapsing on the ashcovered ground. We started walking along the edge of the crater, moving away from the screams of the three great tyrants, which faded into the distance like a cursed echo. But their screams stuck to the skin of my soul, like that workshop grime that won't come off even with the strongest soap.
We walked along a narrow path that snaked into an even deeper darkness. The path was lined with sharp stones, black rock formations that looked like shark teeth sticking out of the earth and slashing at my spiritual feet. Even though I had no blood left, the guide strode forward without looking back like someone who knew every inch of that map of horror by heart, and I followed, dragging my misery along, trying not to look to either side. The landscape changed drastically. We were no longer in that open plane of endless ash where the wind howled.
We entered a kind of gallery, a deep, narrow canyon where the walls seemed made of plates of hot, rusty iron, gigantic sheets of corroded metal that rose kilome upward until they disappeared into the blackness. The air here was different, heavier, more toxic. It didn't smell of rotting meat like back there at the lake. Here it smelled of betrayal. It smelled of lies. It smelled of that stale, sweet perfume the dead wear it wakes to mask decomposition, but mixed with the unmistakable smell of rust and dried blood.
Pay attention, Roberto, the angel told me, stopping in front of a series of open cells that had no bars because the fire itself was the door. You just saw those who wanted to conquer the whole world, those who drew maps with blood. Now you will see those who betrayed their own brothers, those who used their country's flag to hang their people. My heart lurched violently. I am a man of the neighborhood, a worker who loves his land.
And although I never understood much about complex politics, I know what loyalty is. I know what it is to shake a neighbor's hand. And the mere thought of betraying your own people made my stomach churn. The first enclosure was a circular pit of boiling mud, but it wasn't black like the previous one. It was red, a bright, viscous red like fresh oil paint. There, submerged up to his waist, was a burly, bald man with a square jaw that in the old photos in history books always looked defiant and arrogant.
It was Benito Mussolini. I recognized him because my grandfather, who came from Italy, spoke of him with a strange mixture of fear and suppressed rage, but the gentleman I saw there had nothing majestic or leaderike about him. He was hanging but not by his feet as the books say that he died in the public square. He was suspended by invisible hooks that pierced his shoulders keeping him barely above the boiling mud stretching his joints to the point of breaking. The worst part was his mouth.
I am I'm a blacksmith and I know when a job has been done brutally. Mussolini's mouth was sewn shut but not with thread. It was sealed with thick rusty barbed wire. The wire pierced his upper and lower lips, spiring around, squeezing the flesh until it was deformed, turning his face into a mask of mute agony. He tried to speak. You could see in his wild, bloodshot eyes that he wanted to deliver a speech, an order, a justification, but every time he moved his jaw, the wire tightened and tore at the corners of his lips, opening new wounds on top of the old ones.
He loved his own voice, the guide said coldly. He bewitched the crowds with arrogant words from the balconies. Now his punishment is eternal silence. He wanted to be the new Caesar, but here he is just a mute piece of meat. I saw his skin stretch, shiny and sweaty, like cheap fabric ironed too hot and about to burn. Suddenly I heard a mechanical sound, the wiring of giant gears coming from above. I looked and saw a giant boot, a solid, heavy shadow shaped like a military boot falling from the cavern ceiling with the force of a pile driver, slamming him into the boiling mud.
I heard the wet crack of his body breaking. The sound of ribs snapping and skulls giving way, and then slowly, like a sponge absorbing water, his body inflated again, the bones realigned with sickening clicks, ready to be crushed once more. An endless cycle of crushing for the one who crushed his nation's freedom. We continued walking down that corridor of burning metal. My legs trembled not from exhaustion, but from the terror of seeing that divine justice is so creative and so cruel.
The next niche sent a particular chill through me because this man spoke my language. I saw him and felt an instinctive revulsion. He was short with a thin mustache, and now a black scar appeared above his lip. Francisco Franco was trapped inside a block of dirty ice, but the ice wasn't cold. The ice burned like liquid nitrogen. He was motionless, rigid, like those statues that filled the squares of Spain.
But as I approached, I saw that he wasn't still by choice. He was paralyzed by absolute
Chapter 6: The final judgment
terror. His punishment was horrific in its religious irony. His hands were nailed to his chest, holding a rotten wooden cross that burned without being consumed. The flames of the cross were blue and licked at his chin and nose. He who claimed to defend the faith, who used the name of God to sign death warrants and bomb cities, now had that symbol branded onto his flesh, eternally burning his chest.
Look at him. The angel commanded me. He presented himself as the savior of his nation. He dressed as a crusader, but the blood of his brothers cries out from the earth. I looked into his eyes. They were empty glass eyes. And then I saw what they were doing to him. Small shadows shaped like starving children, specters of the civil war, rose from the ground and tore pieces from his military uniform.
And with the uniform they took strips of skin. He couldn't scream because his throat was filled with sand, dry, rough sand that it was suffocating. The truth can't be buried in ditches. Roberto the guide said, "Here, everything that was hidden comes to light and devours you. But the hardest blow came later. We moved a few more meters and reached an area where the heat was dry, suffocating like the north wind in summer when it stirs up dust.
There, in a kind of electric chair made of sharpened bones and twisted metal, sat a man I knew all too well from television and from the fear of my chilly neighbors, Austo Pino. I remember him as an old man who moved in his bed unpunished, surrounded by his family and protected by human laws. I always thought it was unjust that someone like that should die peacefully. But seeing him there, I understood that God's justice is in no hurry. But it is implacable.
He wasn't wearing his dark glasses. His eyes were open, unprotected, and stared upwards in absolute panic. Above him, suspended in the air, was a gigantic, heavy, rusty sword. Its edge blunted, falling again and again. On his legs, Pinocha's scream was sharp. A shriek that pierced my ears and made me want to tear my head off. The sword cut through his legs. Right where the knees bent with my mechanic's eye, I saw the tissues separating.
I didn't see red, healthy muscles. I saw something black, as if it were filled with tar and corruption. He broke his people, said the angel. He broke the bones of students, workers, and singers in stadiums. Now he is the one broken. But the most terrifying thing wasn't the sword. It was what happened when the sword rose only to fall again. Hands sprouted from the ground. Thousands of spectral hands.
Hands of women searching for their children. hands of missing young men, grasping their shattered ankles, grabbing their uniforms and pulling them down into the darkness of the ground. Pino tried to push them away to strike them. He shouted, "I didn't know. I knew nothing. I lied. Even in hell, I kept lying. He lies." I said aloud, surprising myself. Anger rose in my throat. He knew everything. The guide looked at me and nodded gravely.
Lying is his language, he said. But here there are no bought judges. Here there are no medical privileges. Here there is only reality. I didn't know. I didn't know anything. I lied. Even in hell, I kept lying. He thought he would escape human judgment by feigning illness, by pretending to be a frail old man in a wheelchair. But upon crossing the threshold of death, he found himself before the just judge and before Jesus Christ.
Medals are worthless. Seeing him there so vulnerable, so pathetic, made me understand something profound about salvation. It doesn't matter how many churches you build. It doesn't matter if you go to mass every Sunday or if the priest blesses your weapons, if your heart is rotten with hatred, if your hands are stained with innocent blood. This is your destiny. Pinocha looked at me, recognized me as one of the nobodies, one of those common workers he despised, and in his gaze I saw envy.
He envied me, a mechanic terrified, because at least I had the angel's attention, and he only had torment. Suddenly, his skin began to disintegrate like an old garment washed too many times with acid. His flesh tore open on his chest, and from within, no heart emerged. Coins
