When the door closed, I walked as slowly as I could until I was sure they couldn’t hear me. Then I ran toward the river. I went down the steps so fast that I was out of breath when I got to the beach. I sat down, dried my sweat with my skirt, and dug my big toe into the sand. I had come the long way around the house to get to the beach. I couldn’t go back to Gaspar and Juan yet, or to Tali and Stephen. I had to compose myself. I needed to find out what I thought beyond my first reaction.
I had birthed a replacement for Juan’s body. Maybe I had known it all along.
I looked at the brown water swirled with oil from the boats. The circularity of the process seduced me. It was closure. I had seen the medium summon the Darkness for the first time, in the jungle: I had found him. We had fallen in love. That was inevitable. I had given him a son in the same place he revealed himself to me. Finally, I would offer him that body as a means to remain alive. The Darkness had guided me by the hand every step of the way. I was the real priestess. Not those three crones.
But Juan would never agree. He was capable of killing himself first, and of killing me. And he was right. I accepted his arguments. Never give them a child for the Darkness, he repeated. Don’t let the slavery continue. But I rebelled against that idea now, sitting by the river. It didn’t have to be like that. Gaspar was of blood. Gaspar was not a slave. I thought about my son. I hadn’t loved him instantaneously, hadn’t felt that overflowing love women always talked about. I had protected him and fed him on my own, without any help but Juan’s. I never wanted nannies. And I had watched him sleep every night, trying to fall in love with him. All I felt was a wave of tenderness that I didn’t recognize as love. Until one early morning, when I stayed with him because he had a little cold, and I thought I saw him stop breathing: an effect of the dim light from the hallway made him look completely still. He inherited his father’s illness instead, I thought then. His weak heart had stopped beating before my eyes.
I ran over to the cradle, and in that short run to pick Gaspar up, I wet myself. I soaked my bare legs and left a puddle on the wooden floor, such was my fear when I was confronted with the certainty of my child’s death. I understood. That was love. After the death of one’s child, there was only more death. A blackness with no future.
I was toying with the sand, and down in the wet layer I saw a wooden handle and dug it up. A knife. It could only be Tali’s. I put it in my skirt pocket, and thus armed I went up the stairs: from the beach to the house was less than two hundred meters, but I felt I was traversing kilometers, because I was heading into an endless fight and I was my own main enemy. I had fantasized with pride, with arrogance and joy, about giving a child to cruel gods, because Gaspar was of blood, and Gaspar deserved the possibility of a princedom. And I had thought I deserved all the dominion that a powerful son could give me. I, who had never had abilities, who envied Olanna, Laura, even Tali, had imagined myself crowned in shadows.
And I would imagine it again. I was always capable of betrayal. But whenever I doubted, I clung to the memory of that night when I’d believed my son dead. And the unmitigated joy when I heard him cry.
It was our worst fight, the one that seemed definitive, and I was afraid of it even in advance. It was the first time Juan mistrusted me. I had seen that look and its dark depths of disappointment before, but never directed at me.
“How long have you all known? How long have you been hiding it from me? Why put on that whole farce of having a child if you were just raising him to die?”
I had asked Tali to take Gaspar away from Puerto Reyes: he was in Corrientes with her. I believed that in his fury, Juan would be capable of killing us. What’s more, in Puerto Reyes, near the Place of Power, it would be very easy for him. Finish it all off where it had started. That would be his form of closure.
“They can blackmail me however they want, they can, I don’t know, torture you and kill you, and Tali and Stephen. I will not occupy Gaspar’s body.”
I tried to reason with him, but it was useless. It was never just that he found it unthinkable to take his son’s body. Juan identified with Eddie and with Encarnación, with the Scottish youth, with Olanna: that was his lineage, the line of mediums used against their will. His lineage was not the Order and its exploiters. At the same time, his position in the cult had changed: now, with Gaspar, he was part of the family. I managed to convince him I hadn’t known about the Rite. It was the truth, and Juan was never stupid. What he questioned was whether I would actually refuse to carry it out—and he wasn’t wrong to wonder. The doubt made me scream, the ambivalence kept me awake at night. We were both desperate, and he decided to leave. He was gone for several days, with Stephen. They were capable of escaping together. My mother cursed me, beat me like she had when I was little. You can’t hold on to anything, it’s the only thing you have to do, keep the medium with you, that’s all. She sent for Gaspar, and warned me that if I let someone take him again without her authorization, there would be consequences. He is the medium’s body, she told me. He is valuable. Much more valuable than you.
Florence was more merciful. We can find them easily, they’re not going to escape. We have employees who can find them, and we also have the police. Still, she looked at me with scorn. I was disposable. I had given birth to the heir, and they saw me as disposable. They knew Juan’s temperament and they suspected he would be opposed to the Rite, but they were sure that in the end, they would break his will. They didn’t need me. I was alone. Some nights I let Osman sleep in the room with me: the dog was practically breathing his last, but he still kept me company. He died early one morning before Juan returned, and I cried with all the anguish of our separation, of my son’s uncertain future, of my own doubts.
Juan came back without Stephen, stinking of sex and cigarettes. Ever since then, every time he’s left and come back, the first thing I’ve done is open his shirt, unbutton it, lift it up: I need to touch his skin. The days without him are physically painful for me. Getting him back after that absence made me feel insecure for the first time. He didn’t need me either, and he was capable of leaving me. I had never before imagined that possibility. Such was my arrogance. When he came back, Juan said things like I miss you, I need you, I forgive you, I’d kill you, I can’t be away from you or from Gaspar. I felt his love had hardened, and his need.
That night, the night of his return, we slept together with Gaspar between us. Or more like Gaspar slept, and Juan and I put a record on loud enough that no one could hear us talk. In that giant room, we used to dance with Tali and Stephen while Gaspar clapped: I bought records in Brazil, and Stephen always brought some from Europe. The three of them could talk in secret, but they didn’t do it in front of me anymore. I could never learn. And how could he do it with Tali, who had never been trained? I felt, and was, ever more alone.
Juan gently took Gaspar’s arm and used his index finger to draw a phantom image on his wrist. A large design that almost reached his elbow, on the outside of his arm. Then he touched the scar under his hair.
“I need a specific seal to keep Gaspar far away from the Order when he turns twelve. A sign that will keep them from finding him. I have to ask the Darkness for it: what we know won’t be enough.”