“The traps find me. That’s why you went away from me, right?” he asked, kissing me gently on the cheek. His lips were cracked. “Because deep down, you knew that kind of life was impossible with me, and you wanted to try it alone. Because you knew that with me, the gods will always come first.”
“Can you forgive me?”
“There’s never been anything to forgive. I’m glad you did it.”
I curled up against him. I took his hands and placed them on my neck, my stomach. I wanted him to feel the movement of my belly as I breathed. His eyes looked too dead.
“Go on, my love. Leave me. I can’t go, but you can, you can escape me, and them. There is nothing, Rosario, it’s just fields of death and madness, there’s nothing, and I am the doorway to that nothing and I’m not going to be able to close it. There’s nothing to find, nothing to understand.”
“I’m never going to leave you. Ask me for something else.”
“If you won’t leave me, don’t leave me alone. Not even if you die. Follow me as a ghost, haunt me.”
“Of course,” I answered. “I’d do anything for you.”
Florence asked that the Ceremonial be held quickly and Juan agreed: he understood that she needed to see in order to believe. She had almost fainted when we told her there was a Place of Power on Cheyne Walk. It’s not possible, she kept repeating. In Chelsea? You would have sensed it. He looked for it and he found it, I told her. We never told her exactly how or why Juan had found it. We’d forbidden ourselves from talking about the Other Place. It was ours. What for, we still didn’t know, but it belonged to us.
The Initiates lit the candles. It looked so much like a Christian vigil: it had the same tenuous and sinister beauty as those streets lit with amber light, the village churches and the murmuring faithful. It was dangerous to do it in London, Florence said, and so she had asked everyone to come dressed for a party. They arrived wearing masks and silk dresses, exquisite cravats and vertiginous high heels. Some people kept their clothes on. Others, like Stephen, waited in the nude. I envied the scars on his back. I wanted them too, but it wouldn’t be possible that night. Juan had asked me not to participate. The scribes settled in to one side, as always. There wasn’t enough room for many Initiates. Graciela was relocated to another house nearby. Because she was the medium’s doctor, she wasn’t allowed to attend the Ceremonial. My uncle never missed one. It was unwise, but he was of blood.
Juan lifted up his arms in the room we’d chosen for his preparations. He would descend the stairs and preside over the Ceremonial. My mind strayed to Laura and I thought: if only she could be the one to receive Juan’s scars tonight, his medals; she deserves them. I dressed him, covered him with a beautiful tunic of black lace that obscured his face and draped over his chest. My mother was present among the Initiates, her nearly bald scalp visible through her sparse gray hair, her horrible, withered body with its meager fat distributed in all the wrong places. I took Juan by the neck without any delicacy—it wasn’t needed—and I could feel his pulse in the palm of my hands. Do not die today, I ordered him, and I looked into his eyes that were a little green and a little yellow. Don’t die, and if you can, take my mother.
Ready now, he took my hand and placed it on the scar on his arm, the burned imprint of another hand, the left hand of the Darkness. Do not die tonight, I repeated, though he wasn’t listening anymore. I watched him go, down the hallway, the stairs, and I caressed the caburé feather that Juan had handed me before going, the payé I gave him long ago and that he never brings to the Ceremonials, where the small spells of this world are worth nothing. Alone, listening to the screams of the Initiates as they were mutilated and eaten, locked in with the implacable Darkness, I was coming to understand the power of a secret. You walk among others but are not one of them. Some—I suppose Florence, for example—must feel that they walk above the rest, but not me. I feel I walk along passages of colors no one else knows; I feel like the others are lit by a weak little bulb, while I am lit by a blinding light. It’s strange I would think of light, because it was always explained to me that we are for the darkness.
After the Ceremonial, which by Florence’s standards had been a success, Juan decided we would go a few months without entering the Other Place, and I would dedicate that autumn to starting my thesis. It already had a title: “Bone Worship among the Mbyá People: Origin and Urban-Migratory Redefinition: The figure of San La Muerte in the creole culture of the Littoral.” I was missing much of the fieldwork and interviews, of course. I was planning a trip to Misiones exclusively to gather testimonies: Tali had promised to help me, and had already put me in touch with a Paraguayan anthropologist who knew more than anyone about Guaraní religions. Juan wanted to study with Laura, and she was entranced. The house filled up with circles and the two of them were like kids, locked in the bedroom or strolling the cemeteries of London, as if dealing with spirits were a game. Stephen and Juan were perfect as magical androgynes: the double current, as the ritual sexual encounter is called, worked to perfection between them. They took my breath away: they were capable of convoking several entities in a single day, and they did it with such carelessness and abandon that my scrupulous nature made me resist. I was the girl of books and lists: though I would take risks, I also liked order. One day I refused to draw the circle and seal because, I told them, this is all just fun and games to you, and I’m sick of it. Juan picked me up, laughing, and promised that as soon as he learned of a suicide, he would get me that Hand of Glory I was so obsessed with. And he told me to quit being so serious. He told me that.
Plus, during those days, Laura and Stephen and Juan had managed to communicate in secret. Laura called it pishogue. They couldn’t use it often, and never without Juan, because it emanated from him: it was the result of the seal he had drawn on his scalp in the Other Place, when he’d requested the capacity to have secrets. It had to do with altering other people’s perception so they would see and hear whatever he wanted them to. A blinking of reality. They spoke, and other people heard something else. They did it right in front of me, with no consideration at all, and it was infuriating. Juan had taught me the method in detail, but it just didn’t work for me, though we tried many times, for hours, until I got fed up and locked myself in the bathroom to cry. I couldn’t do it, nor could I get pregnant and guarantee the continuation of the blood. Stephen couldn’t have children, and Eddie was still missing, and I couldn’t or didn’t know how to acquire any ability aside from the same old chalk circles. I didn’t feel like studying. All I wanted to do was go to the Other Place and take one of the dead hands clutching the tree trunks in the forest. But Juan refused to go with me. I was frustrated and furious. I even said to him, what if it’s you who’s impotent? But he wasn’t offended in the slightest. It’s possible, he said. We’ll have to ask Jorge to examine us.
The thing is, my dear friend, it’s not like riding a bike, Stephen told me. It’s like playing the piano. Take Juan out of the conversation, because he’s different from us. If you don’t learn certain things when you’re little, you’ll never reach the level you need for this. Laura and I received instruction as children. You did too, but of another kind. You should thank your father, because it’s not right to use kids like that. Mercedes always accused me of being useless and sterile, and she was right, I said. Your mother is never right. You will be a mother, Rosario. And Juan loves you. I have my scars, sure, but they’re all I have.