When I was little, Florence Mathers used to stay on Libertador only long enough to recover from her trip, and then she’d accept our invitation to stay at the house in Chascomús. I don’t know how many properties she has in the pampa, but it must be a lot: she raises horses and livestock. She likes the Argentine countryside, its emptiness and its sad sunsets, the perpetual smell of burning leaves in autumn and the smoke from the grill night and day.
Our families are joined by history and by a friendship that has lasted hundreds of years, but hers is the one that leads the Order. I’ve asked my grandfather many times why that privilege is hers. According to him, in Europe they were much more consistent with the Cult of the Shadow than we were. Plus, Argentina is very far. Far from what? I asked. It’s the ass-end of the world, he’d reply. We can’t participate in the organization the same way they can. Still, at crucial moments, there has always been a Bradford present. We are important, though secondary at times. Money is a country where some cities are more prosperous than others, but they are all rich, he told me.
What I learned over the years is that the nation of affluence is monotonous. The properties, the land, the companies that others manage for us, the old, dark houses and the new, luminous ones, the leathery skin of women who spend summers in the south of France or Spain or Italy, the silver, the Gobelins tapestries, the paintings, the art collections, the gardens, the people who work for us about whom we know nothing. Doesn’t matter if it’s Buenos Aires or London. It doesn’t matter either that our families are founders of the Order. Being rich makes us like all rich people. Being founders of the Order differentiates us from the whole world.
It was my grandfather who told me the story of the Order. The descendants of the original families are called blood children, and we all learned our history thanks to the stories of the elders. My grandfather, Santiago Bradford, sat us down—me and my cousin Betty, his two granddaughters—in the yard at Puerto Reyes. Of all our properties that’s my favorite, my beloved house in Misiones, uncomfortable and hot and absolutely beautiful. It’s the house my mother hates, because she hates everything beautiful and wants to destroy it; that is her true faith and her nature.
He told us the first story near the orchid garden, lit by a lamp that lent his dark eyes a yellowish gleam. My grandfather Santiago was born in Argentina and inherited all the fields and yerba plantations and sawmills and ships from the family, which had gotten rich in the nineteenth century. How did they get rich? The usual: looting, partnerships with other powerful people, understanding what side to take during the civil wars, and allying with powerful politicians. The first Bradfords came to Buenos Aires in 1830 or 1835, versions differ, but that date isn’t the important one. Our year zero is 1752. My great-grandfather, William Bradford, was a bookseller and owner of a printing press back in England, and his best friend, Thomas Mathers, was a landowner. The social difference between the two was important—I think that origin continues to mark the positions of our families—but they became friends because they shared a passion for folklore and occultism. In their free time they traveled the country together, buying books and collecting the stories that interested them. They were educated men, researchers and collectors of stories and testimonials of people with magical abilities, people who were gifted or cursed.
They found the Darkness, and the first medium, in Scotland. They didn’t just come across it; they weren’t searching blindly. They had read oblique references to a spirit that manifested as a black light, and that had capacities of prophecy and divination. Those references, very brief, said that certain people could contact it and make it speak. In its words there was knowledge, and in the contact, the possibility of obtaining its favor. It is clear, said my grandfather, that they were not searching for the Darkness specifically, but for some reason it did catch their attention, maybe because of the mention of how those capable of contact would undergo a physical metamorphosis in some part of the body, especially the tongue or the hands.
The medium was the son of a peasant: he predicted the future using the scapula of a sheep, a detail that always made me laugh because of the precision in the choice of bone. The boy alerted his community about useful matters like how they should care for the livestock, how much money they would earn or lose in the next harvest, when a storm was coming, if they were in danger in a time of political violence. I liked the name of the method and the way my grandfather pronounced it: silinnenath.
Where in Scotland? Beatriz always asked. Near Inverness, said my grandfather. Far to the north. The town was called Tarradale, but if you look for it on a map, it will be called Muir of Ord, because they changed the name. The town was isolated by two rivers: it was hard to get there, but they managed it, fortunately, because they wanted to meet the seer.
The two friends frightened the youth, who was weak, thin, and had eyes that Thomas described in his journals as “like codfish eyes.” They convinced him to go with them to London. It was a period of rebellion in Scotland and they insisted he would die in the conflict if he stayed because, with his build and sickly constitution, he wasn’t a fighter. They offered to take care of him. It wasn’t hard to take him from the village: his parents trusted the elegant English gentlemen. And the locals, though they appreciated his prophetic ability, also feared him. The most religious among them believed his gift had come from the Devil.
They brought him to Thomas Mathers’ house, and they didn’t have to wait long for the first manifestation. He showed them the black light in a nearby field. In those days the ritual was done differently. The boy had to be lying down on the ground when he summoned the light, which, they say, didn’t wound back then. It was less savage, or it was asleep. “We touch it, and it’s cold and wet to the touch, like rain,” wrote Thomas Mathers in his diary. “The boy is Dee’s black mirror. He’s a medium, like Kelly.”
It’s because of those words that we refer to those who bring the Darkness as mediums, though technically they should be called something else, maybe priests or shamans. That young man, like Juan, experienced a metamorphosis in his hands. Thomas Mathers described claws like a cat’s. The boy spoke in the trance, pronouncing the words of the Darkness. That’s different now too: the Darkness speaks, but not in the medium’s voice.
Once, when Grandfather was telling us the story—he repeated it regularly, so we wouldn’t forget: he would even question us about the details—I asked him what the boy’s name was. I must have been eight years old. Grandfather had to admit they hadn’t recorded his name. The diaries just called him “the Scottish youth.” That is also what it is to be rich: that contempt for the beautiful and the refusal to even offer the dignity of a name.
The Scottish youth’s trances occurred almost daily and always in the field. He floated in a dark halo and spoke with his eyes closed. After two months he suffered, according to the doctor who attended him （and in the terminology of the period）， an apoplexy. That is: a brain hemorrhage. He survived, but he had another attack days later from which he didn’t wake up, and he died without ever recovering consciousness. They had forced him to summon almost every day, sometimes twice a day. After one of the trances, the youth had threatened to kill them, and one night he managed to get out of the room and bite Thomas Mathers on the neck. He didn’t wound him seriously, though in those years before antibiotics, dental germs from a bite could be deadly. They tied him up. The restraints probably caused the clot that killed him. He hadn’t gone crazy, as the diary claimed: they had driven him mad. His words held instructions, very complex ones, on how to summon the Darkness without a medium. There were also other methods, brutal and dangerous ones, to ask for favors.