I think I was crazy during those minutes, touched by the Darkness. If Dad hadn’t given me the well-aimed slap that he did when I got to the house, I wouldn’t have come out of the hysteria. My father always says that everyone in the Order goes crazy in the end; that day, I understood what he meant. Once, the day after a Ceremonial, Dad came in with his whiskey to see me and I asked him: how can we go on after this, how do you all do it, the world is stupid, the people who know nothing are contemptible. And he gave an answer that was so true I sometimes repeat it out loud. The thing is, nothing happens after this, dear. The next day, we get hungry and we eat, we want to feel the sun and we go swimming, we have to shave, we need to meet with the accountants and visit the fields because we want to keep having money. What happens is real, but so is life.
They wanted to keep him from me during the first days, which were full of running feet and cars that sped out of the driveway, throwing up a cloud of red dust. Mercedes came. I tried to get into Juan’s room in a moment of distraction, but she yanked me out by the hair and I ended up on the floor. She smelled of rose perfume, a cheap, disgusting fragrance; she could buy any bottle she liked but she chose that one, because she wanted to stink. They had sent Tali back to Corrientes, where her aunt was taking care of her.
I couldn’t sleep or think or write, and all the doors were shut in my face, but I could listen. My uncle talked about his lost fingers. He said he had felt Juan’s hands to be cold. He was crying as he said it. He mourned the fact that he would never operate again. He was destroyed and happy at the same time, and so was my grandfather. The only one who kept it together was Mercedes. She walked around the house and the gardens in a white shirt and beige high-waisted pants. If she had been a different woman, with her hair down to her shoulders, a little hat to cover the bald spots, and the dark glasses she wore even in the house, I would have said she looked pretty, or at least that she maintained a certain elegance amid the chaos and all the running. But all I could see was smugness and arrogance. She walked with superiority, she mocked the men, she mocked me. She shouted: none of you have enough character to deal with this, you bunch of capons! Capons: that’s what they called the castrated bulls on the estate.
I endured two days without seeing Juan, and then I went looking for my grandfather. I found him sitting in one of the iron chairs, smoking, the skin on his arms irritated from the sun. When he saw me, he motioned for me to come sit with him. Below, in the river, a man and a woman in a rusty boat were tossing white flowers into the water. I asked for permission to see Juan. I found him, I said. I have a right, and plus, he needs me.
My grandfather shook his head no, and added: Florence Mathers is coming tomorrow. She will tell us what to do. And she’s going to explain to you, too, because you’re going to have to take charge of him, you’re the custodian. Like George was for Olanna. You have the primary responsibility.
Is she going to take him away? I asked, and my grandfather’s reaction was surprising. He grabbed me by the shoulders and I saw that his eyes were different, jumpy, as if he thought someone was after him. No, he told me. They’re not going to take him. He came to us. He sought us out. He could have died as a baby but he held on. We waited for him and he came through. Then he started to mumble without much coherence, saying what an honor, the doorway was here, it’s here, where could they take him? I didn’t want to be there with him anymore and I ran to the catwalk. I wasn’t so sure. If they take him, I’m going too, I thought. They’re never going to separate us, Grandfather just said so. The men wouldn’t have found him. Without me, I thought, the medium wouldn’t have appeared.
2
I vomited during the whole flight. The stewardesses thought I was nervous or sick: they kept bringing me bags, napkins, even a towel. They gave me a new seat away from the annoyed, disgusted passenger next to me: I was flying first class and there were several empty spots. The plane shook and the turbulence was constant, but that didn’t matter to me one bit; I wasn’t afraid like the other passengers. Going to study and live in England, leaving Juan for several years—it was the most decisive thing I’d done in my life, and although I was sure about it, I couldn’t stop going back over the goodbye, which had been long and desperate and furious. Juan did everything he could to keep me from going. He swore that he would kill himself if I left him. That he wouldn’t summon in another Ceremonial. That he would never speak to me again. Every time, I stood listening with my arms crossed in the living room of my uncle’s apartment, and every night I let him kiss me soaked in tears, and I always repeated the same thing: I needed to be far away from him, I needed to be someone without him. I had thought it out very well. He had someone who would be with him in the Ceremonial: Stephen, Florence’s eldest son. He could replace me in my ritual duties for a time. I didn’t want to throw myself into an existence dedicated to Juan without first learning what life was like without that obsessive and devotional bond. I was exhausted in every possible way, and scared, because I realized that he and I were going to be together, we were going to be a couple, the Order’s heirs, and I wanted to flee from that certainty. I felt as though if I didn’t make the most of the time, my whole life was going to consist of being his companion. That made him furious: what was wrong with that? He needed my company, he had revealed himself to me because I had to be his companion, and we were in love, something he repeated without knowing what he was saying, because he was only fifteen years old and he had never known another girl, he’d never even liked anyone else, and I didn’t want that for him or for me. I didn’t know if my departure was going to fix things, but my presence certainly wasn’t helping. You can visit me, I told him, which was cruel, because he wasn’t allowed to fly, at least for the moment: his heart was decompensated and would soon have to undergo another operation. In our arguments he also blamed me for his relapse, and I suppose he was right. Between the Ceremonials, which were fairly frequent, four per year at that time, and the anxiety, the symptoms of his heart failure had worsened. Despite his weakness and deterioration, I thought he would be capable of hitting me in one of those arguments. He was so tall and crushing in size and I was so small and clumsy; he desired me with all the rage of a teenager and all the arrogance of a demigod. Only once did he not want to let go of me after our kisses, and I had to shove him brutally, get him off me and accuse him of being a violent, macho idiot. You can abuse your power with everyone else, I shouted at him, but not with me. He spent the night on the other side of my bedroom door, begging forgiveness. That’s what any violent man does, I told him—beg forgiveness. That was the only thing, in our whole awful goodbye, that did any good.
Juan wasn’t the first man I had sex with. Before I left, when he found out, he got one of my grandfather’s shotguns and shot at Mercedes’ crystal glasses and French ceramics. The police came because the neighbors reported the gunshots. It was a few days before Christmas, and we lied and said the fireworks we were storing for the festivities had exploded in the heat. They partially believed it. My first lover was a long-distance runner I’d met at the Regatta Club. He attracted me because he seemed to understand my feeling of haste, of time running out. He had told me that as an athlete, he had a different notion of time. The runner wasn’t very good-looking and I never saw him again, but I think of him often because he talked to me of the importance of seconds, how nothing was more complicated than fighting against them, two or three made all the difference, and at the same time it was so stupid, so futile, to fight every day against thousandths of a second, against something the clocks barely registered, something almost no one else even noticed.