The first time, there were dark circles under the boy’s eyes, as now, as always. Bradford had just finished his specialization in cardiovascular surgery and had joined the most prestigious team in the country at the Italian Hospital. It was 1957 when they brought the boy to him, a patient at the hospital whose parents couldn’t afford to continue his medical treatment. He was five years old and Bradford decided not to wait to operate. It would be his first surgery on a congenital heart disease, Tetralogy of Fallot. The child had been unforgettable from the first: he was dying, and yet he stared at Bradford defiantly, sitting up despite the urging from his parents, who, if they hadn’t been so hunched over and servile, would have looked like reincarnations of Thor and Freya, but as they were, snivelling and whining about their poor little boy, how they just didn’t have the money, how he’s going to die, Doctor, my sister had heart problems, too—Bradford hated that vulgarity, he saw them as a couple of peasants who deserved every bit of their humiliation. Not the boy, though. His skin was blue, his lips violet, he could no longer walk. He didn’t even notice his parents’ degradation, he seemed focused on breathing, on living, with a will that Bradford found monstrous and that gave him the courage to operate using methods that were the most complex of the time, for both the patient and the surgeons. He relives those methods in his head now, kneeling while the Darkness extends over his head—this happened the last time too, Darkness invading the sky—and they say his power is lessening? It doesn’t feel like it on this night of unbearable heat. Bradford remembers as he waits: horizontal incision from the sternum under the armpit to the third intercostal space, division of second and third cartilage, entrance into the pleural cavity, left lung apparently normal . . . and then he interrupts his own reminiscences, far removed from what is happening around him, the moans and the scribes’ frenetic scribbling—Bradford has never heard the voice of the Darkness before—and he tells himself that is a lie, the boy had never seemed normal inside, it was beautiful in there, beautiful to touch his cold body—the theatre was kept so cool back then that an operation was like an autopsy or an anatomy lesson, except that the organs moved, breathed, bled, throbbed—the boy was abnormal not only because of the heart defect that, once he was opened, proved to be even more intricate than his cardiologists had thought, with several other defects in addition to the Tetralogy—an interatrial communication of some ten millimeters and a quite significant anomaly in the right acute marginal branch of the coronary artery that was going to make surgical correction of the pulmonary stenosis very difficult—how had he even made it to the operating table alive? No, he wasn’t normal, he was beautiful inside, and the experience of touching his laboring, hypertrophic heart had been for Bradford like discovering a nymph in a sacred forest, seeing a golden sunrise or being surprised by a flower blooming at night. The colors of the boy’s insides were more intense, his blood smelled of an unknown, salty metal, his arteries were shaded with grays and blues and reds. Right pulmonary artery identified and cut. Superior vena cava, too small, left subclavian artery identified and cut, transposition of vertebral artery to thyrocervical trunk. Clip on subclavian artery at the distal point to its origin at the aorta. Two clips on left pulmonary artery, the first at the origin, the second at the entrance to the lung. Transverse incision in the wall of the pulmonary artery. Anastomosis performed with silk thread between the end of the left subclavian artery and the side of the left pulmonary artery. Almost no bleeding when the clips are removed.
That body has silk inside, thought Bradford, and he remembered how quickly the boy had recovered, pink and sitting up in bed less than a day later, but strangely, the nurses, who would have been moved in any other case, didn’t really grow fond of their sick little patient—that’s what they called him, el enfermito, how maddening, patients should be called by their names—they pretended to care about him, but it took some doing and no wonder, he was a little beast, furious at his body and at those who wanted to help him and at his parents, and he was only relieved, physically at ease, when he was with his brother, another one of those proud children for whom, Bradford thought, one had to thank Perón, a man he should hate but who inspired only indifference in him, even a little admiration—he didn’t feel class conflict or any economic impact because the members of the Cults of the Shadow are always close to power, and as such are untouched by social fluctuations. So Bradford didn’t care about Perón or his wife—that fascinating, moribund woman—and was secretly grateful for these children so full of hubris who never bowed their heads, children like Juan and his brother Luis, then almost a teenager with aquamarine eyes, the brother who spent more time with Juan than his own parents did—they were always in a hurry, always giving the excuse that they had to work, the buses, the streetcars, putting food on the table, Bradford hated them, they stank of close quarters and smoke, and partly because of that, because he knew they were crammed into a shack on the outskirts of town, he asked for a meeting with his team leader, the hospital director, and the head of cardiology to request that they allow him to keep Juan on permanently in the hospital. He talked about unsanitary conditions in the boy’s home, but also about pioneering procedures that would put the hospital at the vanguard of surgery, not just regionally but worldwide, and he wasn’t exaggerating the child’s good prospects: unlike most congenital heart patients, he wasn’t malnourished, he was a normal size for his age—it was remarkable, he’d always been like that, even if he did lose weight at times—and he had come through the first palliative surgery with flying colors. Bradford wanted to carry out the second, more extensive corrective surgery in a few months. They agreed. The hospital’s vice-director was an intimate friend of Bradford’s family, and also a member of the Order, though peripheral. Gonzalo Biedma. His brilliant daughter would, in the future, be Bradford’s right hand, the hand he now lacked.
That’s how influence worked: he had only to ask for what he wanted, and he got it. For a long time, Bradford had thought that was all it was, influence, alliance, friendly meetings, Freemasonry by another name, with people who drank and sometimes sang around the piano, gatherings where women flaunted their heavy jewels and men shared hunting secrets and a taste for old books, meetings where at some point the conversation turned to the differences between the followers of Vishnu and those of Shiva, and where the hundreds of tantric cults were discussed. For a long time, the fact that his family belonged to a Cult of the Shadow, to the Order, meant only that they moved in an international circle of money, privilege, and relationships.
He understood that the Order was different when he was eighteen years old and about to enter college, and his father had taken him to a ritual in the countryside, not at his family’s estate but at Florence Mathers.” La inglesa, as his family called her—strange, as if they weren’t English themselves, but Bradford supposed they weren’t anymore, not really: he’d been born in Buenos Aires and so had his father. They spoke the language, they’d gone to British schools, but they were English no longer. His father was proud: Me, I’m a good ol” mongrel, he used to say. Bradford didn’t care either way. He was a surgeon and a cardiologist: sick bodies were his nation.