“The Rite requires preparations I don’t need to go into here, and in any case your father didn’t need to perform them because he was an extraordinary medium. We put the two of you on altars. And he was able to transfer his consciousness into your body. Oh, it was marvelous! Remember, Flo? We stood in a circle around you, it was sacred. Your body’s eyes opened and it was Juan who looked out. But then came the resistance. The receiving body always resists. Never, however, have I seen resistance like that. I don’t know about the rest of you.”
Florence said she had attended all the Rites and, truthfully, she couldn’t remember any other resistance being as violent. They described it: when he opened his eyes and everyone saw Juan’s gaze, he had tried to run away. The Recipient cannot be tied down during the Rite. We think that is foolish, but unlike Juan, we follow the rules of the Darkness as they are dictated, because whenever we haven’t, oh, what disasters, right, Esteban? You were there for some of them. They’re like abortions. That’s what Florence always says.
“Like losing a child,” Florence said, in English.
“And we have both lost children, it feels exactly like that. Though when it came to your mother, she was better lost than found. Well then! You struggled so much to get your father out of you that we all had to pitch in to stop you. You bit poor Esteban here in the neck. Florence’s son, the younger one, used to bite too. At one point when we were trying to stop you, to get you to quit hurting yourself—because that’s one of the unfortunate collateral effects of the Rite, the Recipients get desperate and will damage themselves in order to get the Occupant out—we threw you to the floor and you hit your head.”
“Oh, that was dreadful,” said Florence, again in English.
“We thought we had ruined your body. But no. They say you’re epileptic? What nonsense.”
Gaspar closed his eyes, trying to process the information. So the accident hadn’t happened. His injuries were the result of this madness, this forced transmigration that he found absolutely incredible and stupid, but that they believed in, no doubt about it. Maybe not Esteban, who was silent.
“You want me to give you my body? Take it, I don’t care.”
“No,” interrupted Florence, and she went on, alternating between English and Spanish. “We need a medium, and you are one. You will tell us how to continue. We cannot complete the Rite and we are old. We cannot die, we must not die. The messages stopped because of your father, who unilaterally decided to cut off contact. We will continue with you.”
“I don’t know how to do it.”
“You’ll learn. You’re young.”
Gaspar tried to stand up, but a dizzy spell stopped him short. He was eating little to nothing, wasn’t taking his medication, and his knees shook weakly. But that wasn’t it, he realized, or at least that wasn’t the only reason. The dizziness knocked him off balance and he toppled from the chair. He heard his grandmother say: “He’s having convulsions, looks like, maybe it really is just epilepsy,” but no one touched him. He tried to tell her he had never had fits before, and then the memory flooded him, and he recalled that Rite they were talking about in full detail. He had sat up and opened his eyes and seen all those people around him, most of them naked, some wearing sheets or tunics, it was dark, and he had to expel something, a parasite inside him, and then he got up and ran because he’d seen the door, and they grabbed him by the legs and arms, why do they want to keep me who are they what’s wrong with them I have to get out of here, help me! I can’t help you now, but fight them, said his father’s voice, tired and thick, that voice he missed so badly. He started to cry as he lay on the floor but the memory kept going, implacable. There are a lot of them, where are we? Fight. There’s an awful old lady, what are they? Get up. Run. The others were trying to keep him where he was, they couldn’t, and in the struggle, in the attempt to get him back and lay him down, they dug in their nails, squeezed his ribs, and when he screamed, the shared body had a voice that was both of theirs, his and his father’s. They got him back on the board, the altar, his grandmother had called it, and when they did, they hit his head violently, a dull sound, and then a moment of silence. Gaspar thought the memory would end there, that his body, now, in the freezing room in Misiones, was going to stop shaking, but it kept going. It’s a monster grabbing my feet, kick its face, make another effort and kick its face, I’ll help you, and Mercedes received the precise kick in the neck, she had to retreat, choking, but she came right back and twisted his ankle until the ligament nearly snapped, she was smiling, winning, you brought me here, why? The blood from Esteban’s neck when he tried to escape again, I’d better get out, and then the sudden ending when his father withdrew. My father could have stayed inside me, he left because he wanted to, he told me to fight, Dad, you should have told me everything, it all would have been different, maybe I never would have come here, maybe your brother would still be alive. Gaspar felt Esteban’s hands as he gently helped him sit up and offered him a glass of water, but the memory granted him one more image: other hands that rocked him, his father’s hands, but enormous, with golden nails like misshapen claws. He looked at Esteban, who didn’t insist with the glass of water.
“He tried to protect me?”
“He would never have taken your body. Never.”
Gaspar couldn’t reply.
“This one’s not going to die, is he? Let’s see if we can make him eat, he’s emaciated. One fuck-up after another.”
They visited him every afternoon in the room they’d reserved for him. He had a view of the garden and not much more. It was the ground floor, so he couldn’t jump out the window. In any case, the window had bars. There were the two women and a man the same age as them, who spoke to him in English. The women would leave him alone with the man. He explained techniques. Death posture. Inhale the sigil. He laid Gaspar on the bed and taught him to breathe. If he resisted, the guards were there to persuade him with some form of pain. The man sometimes frowned or scowled: maybe he didn’t agree with the methods, but the women dominated him, and so did something else, something that, like Betty said in the article, lived in the jungle. My family has worshipped it for centuries. His family. The man believed that Gaspar could establish contact with the thing that lived in the jungle, just like his father had. Gaspar didn’t want to talk to them and he didn’t know if he was even allowed to, or if it would mean more beatings, more prodding, more fingernails yanked out, more submerging of his head in water. But he did tell the man in English: I can’t give you what you want. I am not my father.
The man insisted as if his life depended on it. Maybe it did. Shut the lid of your unconscious. You know how to do this, I’m sure your father taught you.
The same thing every day. Gaspar had started to enjoy the old man’s visits. He was teaching him a kind of meditation that allowed him to think less. And after the old man left, he went back to his usual method, the same one he used to try to sleep. The letter A. A poet’s last name. The first line, or whatever he remembered, of a poem by a poet named A. If it was in English, translate it. Example: A. Ashbery. “Alone with our madness and favorite flower.” How appropriate. Solos con nuestra locura y nuestra flor favorita. B. Blake. His father’s favorite. Or one of them, at least. The other: Keats. “He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.” Aquel cuyo rostro no de luz nunca se convertirá en una estrella. C. Cendrars. “It is my star / It is in the shape of a hand.” D. A difficult letter. There weren’t many D’s, or he didn’t know many. D’Annunzio. He couldn’t remember any lines. Darío. Obviously. “La princesa está triste . . . qué tendrá la princesa?” E. Eliot. More than one line. “。 . . fiddle with pentagrams / Or barbituric acids, or dissect The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors— To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams.” Tombs and dreams. Messages, pentagrams. His father’s copy of Eliot was almost illegible from so much underlining.