In the north, as well, he bought three thousand hectares for yerba mate plantations. And as he was building his dream house he also founded the town, which he named Puerto Libertad, and which would grow up around the house and along the road that would later become a highway. During that time, Bradford became close friends with another owner of yerba fields, Jose Reyes, a Spanish millionaire and a widowed father of two who shared his passion for hunting. It took them months to recognize each other as members of the Order. Santiago Bradford belonged to the founding family, while Jose Reyes was merely an Initiate. The coincidence astonished them so much that they decided to become partners. In honor of his unexpected friend, Bradford decided to call his estate Puerto Reyes.
The house was ready in 1929, just before the world was plunged into an economic crisis that barely touched the millionaire class. The Bradfords had fed a planet at war, and now they were trading with the Middle East, a different world, so distant that news didn’t reach it about the shocks and falls of the New York stock market.
Santiago Bradford hardly ever went back to Buenos Aires. He loved the river, the sweat of the harvest, the humidity, the settlers’ legends, and the locals’ ghost stories. He loved the house with its fourteen bedrooms, the Olympic pool, the mosaic tiles, the cool verandas, and the central yard, with a fountain and orchids and willows. Some of the windows had stained glass, and, surrounding the house, Charles Blanchard had planted five hundred species of plants, and had cut paths that had to be maintained or the jungle would return, ferocious, to cover everything. His sister requested a conservatory and she had it. He remembered his wife Amanda, dead so young, and how she’d laughed when those butterflies kissed her face, waving their wings of impossible colors when they alighted on her hands or shoulders.
It was hard for Santiago Bradford to believe that a person as glorious as Amanda could have given birth to Jorge and Mercedes, his strange, dark children. Especially Mercedes, ugly and sarcastic, a girl whom no one loved or respected. Clutching at straws, he introduced her to Jose Reyes’ handsome son Adolfo, a youth who was accustomed to life in the jungle and had studied in England. An impossible candidate for his surly daughter. But they understood each other. Adolfo didn’t fall in love with Mercedes Bradford, but he understood that the two families wanted that engagement, and they both obliged their parents. A wife didn’t have to be the woman one loved.
Adolfo used to say that Mercedes wasn’t pretty and definitely was not charming, but she had a kind of madness approaching evil that attracted him: it excited him that she was capable of killing him, or at least of trying. And, most importantly, the Bradfords were high leaders of the Order, not mere members like his own family. They were of blood. The marriage would catapult the Reyes family upward, and the Order liked to unite its members with both blood and money.
By 1945, Santiago had moved almost permanently to Puerto Reyes. I’m tired of the pampa, he would say. It’s all so flat, che. And the hunting is all the same, rodents and buzzards. He only went back to Buenos Aires because business deals were still resolved there, and because occasionally he felt stifled by the heat.
Mercedes and Adolfo were married in 1947, but never by the Church: they could put up with the gossip and didn’t care about appearances. Jose Reyes died that same year, still very young, drowned in the Paraná. He had taken the boat out drunk. Adolfo was left in charge of the yerba business, now the joint property of his family and his wife’s. Adolfo and Mercedes lived in fear that Perón would expropriate their properties, especially Puerto Reyes, but they were lucky: the Bradfords only lost an estate out toward La Plata that they hardly used—it would be turned into a public park. The Reyes family were only forced to improve working conditions for their employees, which they did reluctantly and only for a time: they kept the overseers, the whippings, the minimal food rations, the child labor. In his dreams, Adolfo used to hear cries of “Neike!” It was a word that, to the workers, was far removed from what it really meant in Guaraní: strength. It was the cry used to push the mensú—the yerba plantation worker—to his physical limit. But Adolfo didn’t like to visit the fields. He liked to drink, just as his father had: whiskey, ca?a, wine, more and more, from morning on. He liked blonde women, especially the rustic daughters of the colonists, and he also liked the more delicate creole women. He liked to collect lamps and paintings, pipes and first editions of books—though he rarely read—and handmade Guaraní relics, amulets, talismans; he was a disciple of San La Muerte. In 1949, his sister Nora founded the first zoo in Misiones, near Puerto Reyes. Over the years it would be transformed into an animal sanctuary, a refuge for species in danger of extinction and a mecca for the country’s veterinarians. Nora moved to France, got married, and never returned to Argentina, but she left the zoo in the hands of faithful collaborators, pioneering ecologists. That same year, Adolfo and Mercedes had their only daughter, Rosario.
Adolfo focused on building a guesthouse at Puerto Reyes, and to gladdening Santiago’s old age with another granddaughter, Catalina, whom everyone called Tali. Tali was the daughter of his Corrientes lover, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, half indigenous and half Italian. He spent as much time with her as possible, and dreamed of her on his nights of drunkenness. They got drunk together: they’d traverse the villages looking for handicrafts, Adolfo closing business deals, and they’d try the local drinks, first with Tali as a babe in arms, later when she could walk. Rosario went with them, too: the girls adored each other, played together, and it was very hard to separate them when the vacation ended. Mercedes, who had spent her pregnancy in bed and suffered a risky labor, couldn’t have any more children, and she gave herself over to reading and travel: she tried to go to Europe once a year, where she had intense, secretive meetings in London with the Order. On some days she read about Hecate and the witches of Macbeth; on others she sewed the mouths of horned frogs shut and visited cemeteries. When she was in London she attended all the important ceremonies: her origins were peripheral geographically, but her position in the Order was anything but tangential. She was respected, important, she was of blood. And she wanted more power. Living in Argentina didn’t take away from her importance: money, as the Bradfords often said, is a nation in itself.
Still, not even in her wildest dreams would Mercedes have ever thought that her brother, a gifted doctor and brilliant cardiologist, would come to tell her one night—crazed, agitated, and shouting—that he thought he’d found a medium, a very sick five-year-old boy on whom he had performed high-risk heart surgery, a true feat that would boost his reputation and be a milestone for the discipline on the continent. He was sure, he would tell her, he just knew the boy’s power would flourish. They had to help him, take care of him, raise him. They couldn’t let him die. He’s going to die if he stays with his family, Mercedes, they’re some brutish immigrants who live in Berisso, a filthy port town. They can’t even afford to live in Buenos Aires. Mercedes didn’t want to believe for a long time, not even when the boy—delicate, with sinister eyes—was settled into the family building on Avenida Libertador, in Buenos Aires. She didn’t want to accept it, though Santiago, her own father, did believe—he started teaching the boy magic, educating him in languages, mythology, art. She didn’t want to believe, because she had dreamed of being the one to find the medium: she had worked doggedly on that project after the great disappointment of her daughter Rosario, whom the men in her family had forbidden her from training. Lazy, moralistic men, she thought. The girl didn’t seem to have any ability, but abilities can also be invoked. Bah, she would say, and when the exasperation overcame her, she vented by giving Rosario beatings that left her back purple.