The Other Place had also changed me. Walking naked with its breath on my skin left me with a kind of shell. And, though it wasn’t easy, Juan and I were able to recover our intimacy. Now we shared a secret. Now, we were both marked. We had sex with sweetness and frenzy, and more frequently than ever before. I lost my pregnancies and didn’t tell him. I would sit looking at the thick, untimely blood floating in the water of the toilet or bathtub. The moment would come. My child would be conceived at Puerto Reyes. There, as well, Juan’s black depression would lift, and a permanent anger would replace it: I could never rid him of it. He feared for our child. He was afraid of being unable to take care of him or of not knowing how, or of dying before he met him; of loving him too much or being indifferent to him. I don’t know what I should feel, he told me once.
You will feel what you need to feel, I told him.
3
“I think Marcelina buried my knife. I can’t stand that mania of hers anymore.”
Tali ran a hand through her long hair. It was hot, but there was a wind that augured rain and moved the trees, cooling the back patio of Puerto Reyes, just in front of the garden, and beyond that the park, the guesthouse, and the rest of the property that blended with the jungle. After settling in on the cushions, she poured a mate and handed it to me. We didn’t drink it cold, even in summer. Juan was still recovering from the Ceremonial in the infirmary-bedroom, and we were near him but outside: it was unbearable in that room, with the doctors, the noisy machines, the waiting. Most of the Initiates had gone back to where they came from, and only family remained at Puerto Reyes. My father, sleeping off the alcohol on the beach. The three women, locked in with the scribes for days now. Stephen, who did stay with Juan; he was the most faithful, much more faithful even since Eddie’s death. Gaspar was at my feet, crawling around and trying to eat leaves, flowers, bugs.
“Did you take the baby in to him? It does him good.”
“Him, yes, but not Gaspar. Today he realized Juan was suffering and it took me hours to calm him down.”
“Angá, you didn’t tell me that.”
“It was just this morning.”
Tali took a jacaranda flower from Gaspar’s mouth. He was crazy about them and ate them like candy.
“I really liked that little knife.”
“Ask her where it is and she’ll give it to you. The Guaraní love to bury things, she got that habit from her grandmother.”
“When Juan gets better, we have to go back to Asunción. We can take the baby. All four of us could go.”
We were collaborating on a folk art exhibit at the Regional Museum of Asunción, and we had gotten the director to let us use a whole room for the collection of San La Muerte statues. My father had protested, but he didn’t have any authority anymore: most of the time he was so drunk he couldn’t even remember what it was he wanted. Of course, we weren’t donating the statues: the collection was simply on loan for an indeterminate period. And the most important statues would remain in Tali’s temple, in Corrientes. She would never part with the powerful ones.
I’d finished my dissertation at Puerto Reyes and gone by myself to defend it at Cambridge. I was only in England for a week, and I went to visit Laura’s grave every day. Later, I published the dissertation in anthropology journals in several countries. Soon, I would start teaching classes at the University of Buenos Aires, and I needed a home in the capital that was not in my family’s building, which I didn’t want to go back to. Juan, meanwhile, took care of Gaspar, studied and read, and, with Stephen, looked for a door, a passage to the Other Place. They hadn’t found anything yet: Juan thought that Puerto Reyes could hold a portal, but it wasn’t in his reach, he only sensed it. But if not there, where else to look? Stephen had an idea: near the hospital where Jorge had operated on him and where the Darkness had first come to Juan. They traveled often to Buenos Aires with any excuse, though they were no longer asked for so many explanations. In the new phase of the Order, after Eddie’s disappearance and the massacre, many things had changed.
Others hadn’t changed at all. After some explosive arguments, Florence agreed to monitor Gaspar in an accepted ritual, simple and effective, that I proposed. Twice a year he had to be brought to Juan’s Place of Power, and the women would draw a blood circle around him. Arterial blood, which is the kind that seeks and finds, as Laura taught me—blood offered by the Initiates themselves. They also used Olanna’s ruby-encrusted skull. At two years old, Gaspar had already been in the circle several times, and each time he had crawled around and looked at the expectant members of the Order with a mixture of curiosity and worry, never with fear. He didn’t give a single sign of understanding what was happening or of being in contact with any energy that arose from the Place of Power. Juan and I were always present. Gaspar was a normal baby, perhaps more clingy with his father than was usual for his age. He slept a lot, cried little, and sometimes sat looking at some insect, or the TV, with too much concentration.
We fought a lot about Gaspar, Juan and I. A lot, and every day.
“If he manifests, I know how to avert it,” he’d tell me. “There are a lot of ways to nullify his power, and you know them.”
I didn’t like that.
“Gaspar has the right to be part of the Order, if he wants. I have power, too. They’re not going to do just anything with him.”
“I trust you, but I don’t trust them. I can keep him from being part of the Order, if I want.”
I didn’t like arguing, but if it wasn’t with him, I didn’t have anyone to talk to about my son and what awaited him. Before he was born, I wanted the unlikely to happen: for him to inherit his father’s abilities. I really believed it could happen, and that Gaspar would be a different kind of medium. I had conceived him on the correct date and under the correct signs. Juan hadn’t opposed it, at least not actively. My pregnancy was incredibly easy. I only had nausea and discomfort during the first month. After that, it was as if I’d been injected with light. I worked every day; I was so full of energy. Ideas, writing, interviews in the jungle, even fights with my father over the yerba fields. Along with Tali and Betty, who was totally dedicated to politics and sometimes visited us—her partner Eduardo was a leftist militant who felt enormous contempt for our family—we had practically forced the yerbatal to formalize its workers. They earned a pittance now, but at least they earned something. And that’s how it was every day, from then on: I didn’t even feel tired, just ferociously hungry. I was fat and I cried about being fat, which made Juan laugh. But I was never unhappy: my excitement wouldn’t allow it.
Juan smoked now. It made my uncle desperate, but no one could convince him to change any of his habits. He smoked more when we had our shouting matches. The Darkness had dictated the way to preserve consciousness: we had to transfer it from one body to another. Transmigrate, they would call it in other traditions. I called it occupation, because that’s what it was: stealing a body. It was a repulsive method, because it meant hijacking another life and another identity. What they didn’t know yet were the details of the method: who would be the receivers of consciousness? Could they be chosen or did they have to be marked, or discovered? The Darkness still had to dictate the steps that must be followed, and, as usual, it was hermetic and capricious. According to Juan, there was nothing true in the dictates: the Order would never achieve the transfer of consciousness because it was interpreting the words badly, or making them up, imagining things. The arguments started because I didn’t agree with him on that. I didn’t distrust the dictates like he did, or like Laura had. I believed. Didn’t the Darkness emerge from Juan, didn’t it cut and wound? Didn’t his hands turn into claws—and wasn’t that impossible, too? The difference of opinion, though, didn’t come between us. We spent nights awake, talking, and none of our fights were wholly bitter, even if they ended in slamming doors and shouting. Certainty was impossible and disbelief was impossible, because there was physical proof. It was impossible to trust, because everything was blurry. And there we were, in a place that seemed like the end of the world, full of secrets and doubts.