On the front steps of the house, a group of people had gathered. Gaspar could see them clearly, the pink light of dusk forming a golden aura around them, a diminished glow. Two old women, one of them elegant in a gauzy Indian dress. The other wore a mask on her face that hid her mouth and jaw, her gray hair cut very short, pants, and a high-necked shirt. Behind were some five or six other people whom he couldn’t distinguish as easily from where he was standing.
Gaspar summoned his strength and shoved Esteban away. He regretted not having thought to bring weapons, but what would be the point when he didn’t know how to use them? He had never fired a gun. Never used a blade. All he could do was fight: he felt weak, but still capable of going up against Esteban. So as Esteban tried to catch his balance, Gaspar rushed him, pinned his arms behind his back, and threw him to the ground. Esteban knew how to fight too, and he managed to get to his feet and remove Gaspar’s arms from his neck with a quick and almost professional movement. Panting, sizing each other up, they faced each other from a meter apart.
The elegant woman left the doorway, came down the steps, and opened her arms in a sign of welcome. She had white hair with orangish streaks. Freckles all over her face. She’d been a redhead. The masked woman followed behind her. She limped. That’s my grandmother, thought Gaspar. She took off her mask before speaking to him. For a person with such a horrible mutilation, what she said could be understood quite clearly.
“I was the one who ordered your uncle’s death. Be still, you’re as savage as your father.”
Gaspar recognized his grandmother’s voice in spite of her slavering diction. Again, he didn’t hesitate and lunged at her, not caring if she was old or a woman or his family. She had just confessed without even being asked. He managed to throw her to the ground, managed to sit on her birdlike hips—it couldn’t be that hard to kill her. Before many hands—how many, he didn’t know—pulled him away from her, he managed to hit her in the face, to feel her nose give way under his knuckles, to hear her curse him. Then, a single expert blow from a bodyguard, a man who really knew how and where to punch, knocked him out, and the last thing he saw was the sun through the trees and a flash of river.
Going up in the lookout tower was one way to go. It might be in good condition, and if the stairs gave way, that was good too. Although falling down a collapsed staircase wasn’t a certain death—they could still rescue him, and he didn’t want to be rescued. They followed him constantly, but he could do it if he was fast. They couldn’t watch him all the time. He could also stop eating. That was another way to die that they couldn’t control. Escaping was impossible. He had tried all the obvious ways, the river, the night, the jungle, and they’d caught him every time. The beatings weren’t so much brutal as they were efficient. They knew how to torture, inflict pain, wound without damaging. He never got far. He couldn’t flee. What they wanted from him was demented, but demented things were possible in that house and with those people. But he couldn’t give it to them.
The women, especially, believed he could. He should stop calling them the women. Florence and Mercedes. His grandmother, Mercedes. The one without lips. Her teeth chattered all the time, as if she were shivering. She didn’t always use the mask, and never in front of him. She wanted him to see her.
Your father did that, Florence said, pointing to Mercedes’ mutilation, her horrible face. Your father also killed my son and never told me where he hid his body. He thought he had arranged your salvation, and his revenge. He also took away the girl, who was of blood. He always had contempt for us, always wanted to destroy us, oh, you could see it in his eyes, those yellow eyes, like a reptile’s. I trust that he is watching, from wherever he is, and he can see that we have done it. We have the medium he wanted to take away from us, we have you in spite of that efficient sign he marked you with. He always was more talented than intelligent. I feel sorry for him. A medium has too much responsibility. They are all dangerous, they all go mad.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” repeated Gaspar.
His grandmother came closer, and the words hissed from between her teeth:
“He didn’t want you to know anything, he hid your inheritance from you. Better that way, better. I think mediums should merely be instruments. Still, I’m going to tell you something, wise you up a little. I can’t stand those puppy-dog eyes of yours.”
Gaspar observed her skull. She was nearly bald. Very short shocks of hair spiked up from a barren desert. And the missing lips. She didn’t look fully human, and maybe because of that he didn’t find her horribly ugly, but rather interesting, like a fantastical animal.
“He never told you this, of course, but what the Order wants, and what you can give us—what you will give us, because we will force you—is immortality. I see you, Florence, shaking your head. Everything has to be exact with this woman. Really, we refer to it as maintaining consciousness on this plane. Keeping consciousness alive. That is achieved, as the Darkness has dictated, by transferring it from one body to another.”
Esteban came into the room as Gaspar stifled a laugh.
“What’s the Darkness?”
“It’s what took Adela,” Esteban answered, and Gaspar stopped laughing, covered his eyes with his hands, murmured you’re all crazy.
“There you go, you heard it straight from your father’s friend. Though your father also lied to you your whole life. We know you can open the Darkness like Juan did, and you’re going to do it for us. The Darkness tells us how to make that transfer and remain alive forever. Your father tried it with you, don’t you remember? It’s like the kid is retarded, don’t you think, Flo? What a shame, my only grandson is an idiot, and on top of that he lost little Adela, who did have promise, now that was a girl with character. Well then.”
Mercedes sat on the leather sofa near the window and turned up the room’s air conditioner with a remote control.
“What a stupid day that was, for us at least. Your father tricked us. Did he erase your memory, is that why you remember nothing? Or does that mark on your arm also give you amnesia? It’s a very good mark, I’m surprised. You know that’s why he cut you, I suppose. To keep you away from us. Well: we carried out the transfer of your father into your body at the Chascomús house. That place is very special to me because it belongs to my mother’s family, not like this jungle monstrosity my father liked, and my husband when he had some brains left, and everyone else. There is nothing like the emptiness of the pampa. I’m getting distracted. I’m old, I need a new body, now. It’s my right and you’re going to give it to me. We brought you both out there to Chascomús. There is something you need to know about the Rite. We have achieved the transfer of consciousness many times; what we cannot yet do is keep it in the new body. That’s why we believed your father.”
Gaspar listened to her closely. She was talking about the accident at Chascomús, the time he had woken up wounded, in an unfamiliar bed, with the horrible certainty that his father had hurt him. He remembered his twisted ankle, the blow to the head that had supposedly caused his epilepsy, that lazy summer beside the pool with Tali and Esteban.