“Of course not. They’ll test the kid once a year, or whenever they consider it necessary. They haven’t told me how they’ll do it, but come on, you can’t refuse them that.”
“I’ve just asked Tali to keep Gaspar blocked, and you have to help her.”
Stephen sighed.
“Look, I know that right now caution could not matter less to you, but having this conversation here is crazy.”
“Will you help her?”
“Of course I will. And now that’s enough.”
Stephen took Juan’s hands. Like Tali had done, he caressed the wound in one of the palms. “I’ll go get Gaspar for you,” he said.
When Gaspar came into the garden with Stephen, sleep still in his eyes, he was very serious until he saw his father, and then he ran over and climbed up on the sofa, and hugged him so hard that Tali had to look away, toward the night and its storm, the lights from the guesthouse, the white orchids that hung over the moss on the trees.
Juan and Gaspar slept together and spent the morning together: they had dinner and breakfast in bed, and watched TV. Juan felt the peculiar disconnection that always followed a Ceremonial: an excessive sensitivity mixed with tiredness and a certain bewilderment.
Gaspar didn’t mention the tests that his grandmother, Florence, and Anne had subjected him to. Juan didn’t want to ask anything. Could he have thought they were a game? He would talk eventually. In the exhaustion of the hours after regaining consciousness, Juan preferred this interlude. But he knew his son well enough to know that if he wasn’t talking about what had happened, it was because he was still mulling it over. And when Gaspar kept quiet in order to think, it was because something had bothered him, and he still hadn’t found the words to talk about it. He needed time, and Juan was willing to give it to him. But his son did talk about other things. About the zoo he’d gone to with Marcelina. It’s to take care of the animals, he said, because people hunt out of cruelty. Out of cruelty. Juan smiled: he had copied that expression from someone. He could clearly sense the work Tali and Stephen had done on his son. Juan, though, could still tell what the boy was feeling, and could still talk to him without uttering words. What he no longer perceived was the vibration that had been intensifying since the night the two of them had seen the ghost of the pregnant woman at the hotel. A tense and throbbing vibration, like a headache. Gaspar was better off without that burden.
Bradford had come in several times during the night to be sure Juan was all right. So had Dr. Biedma. Gaspar had slept so peacefully beside him that he didn’t even wake up any of the times Bradford had checked Juan’s blood pressure. It was such a relief to pull up the sheet, to sit in bed and look out the window at the night, to leave behind the spattered blood, the hands aching from their transformation, the sight of the sacrifices, their blindfolded eyes and gaping mouths.
And above all, it was a relief to take in a new certainty. He had not opened the Darkness for Rosario. No one else could open it, and he hadn’t done it for her. Thus, she could not be there. The demon had confused him. He wasn’t immune to its suggestions, much as he’d like to have believed otherwise. What arrogance. It was a relief to know, in any case, that Rosario wasn’t in the forests of hands, the fields of torsos, the bone-filled desert that she had considered a temple. Or in the valley of the hanged, where men and women were strung up by their feet, and where Eddie was spending his eternity—Eddie, Stephen’s younger brother, the boy who had been trained as a medium and who had failed. There were never living beings in those wastelands, though. Only human remains. Or could there actually be someone else in the Order who was capable of opening the Darkness? Had Mercedes found a medium among the abducted people she held prisoner? Wouldn’t he sense it if she had?
No, he said aloud. He couldn’t keep ruminating, he’d drive himself mad. The hours after the Ceremonial were the hardest when it came to maintaining his sanity.
After breakfast, Juan took Gaspar to the wooden walkway that hung over the treetops and descended in a steep staircase to an empty beach, from where they could see the main dock of Puerto Reyes. Juan sat on the thick, dark sand and watched as Gaspar entertained himself with branches, fish bones, and his toy cars, or splashed about in the water. He had asked that no one go with him except the bodyguards, who were different from the ones in Buenos Aires, and who kept their distance. The river was nervous, swollen by the rains, brown and opaque. Marcelina had given Gaspar a plastic bucket the day before, and the boy filled it with jacaranda flowers that fell to the ground, red ceiba flowers, and all kinds of green leaves. Juan wanted to swim, but he didn’t feel physically strong enough. When he extended his arms, his hands still trembled.
He might improve as the days passed, or he might not. Bradford had explained it to him: from a medical perspective, there was nothing more to be done. His heart was enlarged and failing, and it was irreversible. There was medication, and there were therapeutic advances and other palliatives. What was most likely, however, was that he would decline irrevocably until his death, in months, in a few years, in a second.
The sun made his head hurt.
“I’m gonna climb the tree!” shouted Gaspar.
Juan regretted not having brought something to drink: he was thirsty. He didn’t want to ask anything of the bodyguards. He watched how nimbly his son climbed the twisted trunk of a tree, negotiating the branches until he sat mounted on a low-hanging one like a horse. He must have learned that on outings with his mother, when the two of them went hiking and left him alone and prostrate. Juan had never climbed a tree as a child. A grasping envy filled his mouth with a metal taste and he recognized the danger of the feeling, what it meant for Gaspar, for him, for what remained of his sanity.
He sensed Stephen’s footsteps about a hundred meters away, on the catwalk. There was a clinking sound: he was bringing a drink, with ice. He watched Stephen gingerly balance the glasses as he descended the steep steps, and he accepted the glass with a smile. It was iced tea: Stephen detested tereré and yerba mate in general, but he greatly enjoyed the Misiones tea, much more than its hardworking cultivators ever did.
“Good morning,” said Stephen as he sat on the sand. Juan downed the tea in two gulps, and the cold drove a sharp pain into his left eye. “They want to talk to you today. Of course, they’ll respect your decision if you’d rather put off the meeting.
“No,” said Juan. “The sooner the better.”
Stephen complained about the heat and took off his dark shirt. He hadn’t seen the sun in a while, and the thick, freckle-dotted skin on his shoulders was pale, though his forearms were tanned, like a truck driver’s. On his back, twin scars began below his shoulder blades and extended to his waist, thick and protruding. Juan caressed them with his fingertips: he had opened and closed those wounds himself.
Stephen had first traveled to Misiones with his mother. He had been fifteen, and Florence had judged him old enough to attend. Juan was twelve at the time, tall and thin, and in those first Ceremonials he still hadn’t understood that feeling in his hands, that desire to mark. Stephen showed him the way when he knelt down before him, turned around, and offered his back. Later he’d told Juan that the cut had been fast and painful: Juan remembered how his golden nails had collided with Stephen’s ribs. Stephen hadn’t screamed or trembled, just clutched at the grass with his hands. He had also later described the relief he’d felt when Juan’s hands closed the wound, the nails like a caress. Juan remembered how Florence had cried with joy. She considered it a blessing. She felt a little envious, she’d admitted. Oh, she would have worn scars from the golden claws with pride. Florence knew the mark was a commitment between Stephen and Juan, a scar of fidelity. The idea that her oldest son’s allegiance was divided between the medium and the Order wasn’t entirely gratifying, but Florence respected the decisions of the Darkness and didn’t question them. It was an honor that the Darkness had touched her older son, and a misfortune that it had spurned Eddie, her younger son, the greatest failure of her life. And it was a shame it hadn’t chosen her.