My mother had gone to that shack to perform the rituals that enabled her to get rid of Juan’s mother and Leandra. There are other ways of getting rid of enemies that don’t involve the Darkness. More classical, less exhausting methods that everyone in the Order knows. But she prefers this. The caged ones, some of them, in the trance of their suffering, manage to make the god appear, and then you have to make your request. The apparition is brief, but pleading with it works. Of course, it’s not just about keeping the prisoners locked up, it’s also necessary to practice invocations I had refused to learn; hence this punishment. I know them now, but I don’t perform them. My grandfather and some older members believe it’s not exactly the Darkness that comes, but a figment that resembles it, a shadow, though sometimes it turns an entire room black. It’s not the same indomitable Darkness that the medium summons, the one that speaks and cuts and takes. It’s a copy, the other side of the mirror: it’s false. But it’s very effective in destroying, inexorable and pitiless. In Misiones, my father’s yerbatera company had competition, another very rich family who cultivated tea as well as yerba. There wasn’t room for two. My mother asked the Darkness to get rid of them. The other yerbatera family had a beautiful house, with white neoclassical columns, beside a lake: we went to see it once the destruction was complete. The sky was pink and the palm trees cast long shadows on the water. We didn’t keep the house: when something is touched by that kind of affliction, it’s better to abandon it. The eldest son, who would inherit everything, drowned himself in the lake in front of his jungle palace.
I watched Juan arrive from my bedroom window in Chascomús. My uncle and grandfather had brought him. It was close to Buenos Aires, so they were letting him make the trip. I was eleven that summer, and he was eight. He got out of the car and climbed the stairs slowly; he did everything slowly when he was little. He later changed completely in that respect. I sat on the bed and waited for him. From the doorway he said: I’m not going to leave you alone. I started to cry and reached out my hands, asked him to come in. He rested his head on my bare knees so I would caress his hair. We cried together. He knew about the caged ones. My mother told him, though there was no need to, of course, she just wanted to scare him. After that we did the job together. My uncle stayed to take care of Juan, and Juan went with me every day to the shack. It was easier with him because he could find his way in the dark, and he led me by the hand to each cage. None of them died while he was there.
Despite the tragedy of the caged ones, now that we were together we could have fun: we were young. In the afternoon we played with the colored panes of the window in the entrance hall. A blue hand, a green eye, a yellow foot. We moved so the light would paint us. Many years later I remembered those games when I moved my hands and the LSD made a rainbow between my fingers.
In Buenos Aires, when I got back, my mother screamed: if that fucking kid doesn’t make himself useful soon, I’m kicking him on to the street. I told her she’d have to throw us both out and she hit me on the back with her cane. I had trouble breathing for days. It was possible she cracked a rib, but she forbade my uncle from taking X-rays. That same night I went down the stairs, and from then on, I lived in the apartment with Juan and Jorge. And although later we spent some years apart, really, we never left each other’s side again.
I would like to say that I fell in love with Juan before any other man, that I loved him from childhood, but the truth is that my first love was George Mathers, the man who found the medium Olanna. I even had his photograph, and I kept it in my little-girl’s purse: I’d asked Florence for it once, and she sent me a copy from London by mail. George Mathers had the face of a romantic hero, with high cheekbones and round, guileless eyes; his hard, hominid jaw made him look strong and virile. He was perfect.
Florence was the Order’s current leader, and George Mathers had been her great-uncle. He found Olanna when the National African Company, where he worked, established itself in Ibadan, a British protectorate that in the future would be Nigeria. His whole story is told in detail in his diaries: I saw the originals when I went to London, with their beautiful pencil drawings preserved by the Order’s conservation experts, but when I was little, I read the facsimile edition that all Initiates receive. It was my favorite book. George loved the region, the beauty of the tall, thin natives, the white clothes, the forest, and even the food, which the other British people hated. He was the one who communicated the most and the best with the natives, and soon he was chosen to negotiate with the chiefs. In a few months he was receiving invitations to banquets and witnessing local dances. He was interested in the native rites and religion; he saw something profound in their sophisticated simplicity, something that from England and its salons, where the Order’s members wore tunics and used swords and flasks, was unimaginable.
In one of the ceremonies he attended, the natives let him see Olanna, a distant niece of the Priest-King of Nri. The royal family, it was believed, had descended from a celestial being. The kingdom no longer existed: not long before, in 1911, the British Empire’s troops had forced the king to renounce his ritual and political power. With the help of some priests, Olanna had escaped to Ibadan. She was fifteen years old, fragile, her forehead marked by scars, a maze of inflamed skin forever above her eyes. George Mathers fell in love with her, but at first he could not speak to her, they couldn’t communicate. And Olanna, a priestess from a noble family, would never have touched a white man. The portrait George drew of Olanna, very delicate and retouched several times—you can see the erratic lines, later retraced neatly—shows a teenager with a tired gaze.
They called her She Who Brings the Night. Also, the Serpent of the Moon. With the scant English that his guides and friendly chiefs spoke, plus the little he had learned of the native language and a few more phrases in dialect, George Mathers understood that Olanna was not just a priestess possessed by spirits. She was the one who communicated with the occult gods, the ones who slept underground, in the riverbeds, and between the stars. What his family, who belonged to the Order, referred to as a medium. In the first ritual they let him witness, in a clearing in the woods at night, drunk on palm wine, he watched as Olanna’s body moved with impossible fluidity under the priest’s hand, and how she bled. The women participating bled too; they, unlike Olanna, were clothed. The meaty, metallic smell filled the woods and left him dizzy and excited. After the rituals, Olanna was taken away by the local healers and carried to her spacious hut: she was burning with fever and sometimes refused to drink, which only worsened her condition. When she recovered, she allowed George to take her hand and she told him about other gods, many others, as well as a secret forest. George Mathers learned from her, took notes, sometimes even refused the woman assigned to him as a nighttime companion so he could write alone in his bed, protected by the white mosquito net. The priests told him about Sopona, the deformed god of illness who appeared in the form of mosquitoes and flies; they didn’t understand how he remained untouched by the deity All his companions had suffered some form of illness, and many had died from malaria. George had only gotten a bit thinner and darker since he’d left London. He paid little attention to the business of the National African Company, but no one demanded he tend to the enterprise. He still went to the offices every day, even when he was very tired. He listened to his colleagues talk about the Niger River, the rebel tribes, the country’s riches, and relatives and friends who had been killed in Europe during the Great War.