The news of Encarnación, the teenager found in Figueres, Catalu?a, reached him after the bombings in the winter of 1939. Charles wasn’t afraid of traveling to a country at war, nor of entering a region that was so troubled during that time. He went through France. He found the girl still traumatized, mad from grief and terror: she had lost her whole family in the Francoist attack. He brought the girl to France with the help of the Margaralls, an aristocratic family that belonged to the Order. The chosen city was Perpignan.
The child was raped many times, and I call it rape even though the Order speaks of sexual magic. No kind of sexual magic is required in the Ceremonial or with the medium, and Charles knew it. He let himself get carried away by ambition, he ceded to the perversions of members of the Order who were challenging his power, and he gave in to the demented vortex of war. After months of imprisonment, Encarnación escaped through one of the ground-floor windows, and then she returned to the house, where most members of the Order were sleeping, with a shotgun stolen from a nearby farm. She killed them all. Charles was there with his sons, Florence’s brothers—her father had instructed Florence to stay in London, which saved her life. The Margaralls were there, and all the most important families in the Order, at least the ones who had dared to cross Europe. In addition to killing them, Encarnación used a knife to destroy the genitals of all the Order’s men. She was fourteen years old and pregnant. Stephen showed me a photo of her: a thin child with a headband holding her dark hair back from her face.
Stephen says that the cycle must be halted, the wheel stopped. And he insists that every medium corresponds to their time. A peasant during the Industrial Revolution, a black woman from the British colonies before decolonization, a poor teenager in the war whose butchery went unnoticed amid the general butchery of the time. That’s what we are, he says, and it’s possible that the Darkness feeds off that pain and exploitation. I don’t want that to be true, I told him once, and he replied that I would have the chance to try to make changes if I became leader. But I know he doesn’t think it’s possible.
After killing and mutilating everyone, Encarnación jumped out of the highest window of the house. She died instantly.
Stephen’s father, Pedro Margarall, found her body. He had left the house for a trivial reason: it was cold and they needed supplies: alcohol to start the fire; lightbulbs, because they burned out regularly; plus candles for the blackouts, some of which were related to the electricity system that failed in the war, others to the forces unleashed by the Ceremonials. He found the medium dead on the gravel, the dogs gone mad, and the Order murdered. Pedro Margarall was twenty years old, a student of philosophy and religion, and the son of a marquis: he didn’t know how to resolve absolutely anything. So, he packed his suitcase, took some pictures so he would be believed, and crossed the border before he could be arrested. He reached London with the notes taken by the scribes, because he was a meticulous Initiate even before the disaster. Florence and her mother asked him to stay with them.
Pedro and Florence rebuilt the Order during and after the war. She called a meeting attended by fewer than ten Initiates and announced that she was the new leader. Many spurned her, but others recognized her bravery. A purge had been necessary, she told them. My father was not obeying the Darkness but rather his own ambition, and he dragged us into unnecessary perversions. Florence did everything; Pedro’s help was consistent but minimal. She even personally took over the businesses in England, Argentina, South Africa, and Australia. Stephen says that his father, who is a scholar and a soft, delicate person, totally different from Florence, fell in love with her willpower. And she chose him not just because he was the only living witness of the massacre, but because he was, and still is, the person with the best intellectual training in the Order. Pedro Margarall is alive. I should call him by his title: the Marquis of Margarall. He is locked away at his house in Cadaqués, and refuses to see anyone except Stephen and Florence. He made a mistake with Eddie for which he cannot forgive himself. That willpower he fell in love with ended up destroying him.
My year zero: 1967. Bengalis on the street selling shawls with magical symbols, buskers dressed in Elizabethan costumes, plastic bracelets from Biba, Indian saris that never fit me right and that I ended up mailing to Tali, who was with Juan now but I didn’t care, or I was a little jealous but I understood: he and I needed separate lives so we could find each other again. The boutiques on Walton Street, the thigh-high boots with miniskirts, which were hard for me to wear because you have to have very thin legs for them to look good. A designer on Carnaby Street explained the best options for my body type and style: long skirts or wide-legged pants with high heels, boas, bronze earrings, hair teased when it went limp in the humidity. I bought earrings shaped like pentagrams, big and black, from a girl on the street. I learned to draw the sigils of the Key of Solomon to perfection. I’d started doing them when I was very young, but in London, the Order perfected my technique. I didn’t use the traditional materials; instead, I used chalk. Sometimes blood. Time seemed infinite. I drove my Mustang to Cambridge, went to classes, which I juggled along with the ones at the Warburg, and there were still hours left over for magic and clothes and exploring. Time, suddenly, had stretched out. I knew that’s how it would be: it was what I’d come looking for. The pasta at Alvaro’s place when we were very hungry. Baghdad House, the restaurant where they played maqam music and people smoked hash out in the open. Going with Stephen to King’s Road, where my favorite dress shop was. The 7? Club, where I saw Jimi Hendrix play in a basement so stifling and smoke-filled that the acid closed off my throat and made me cry. The incredible shows at the Marquee. We planned our acid trips to predictable places: the Uffington White Horse, which we stared at from a distance for hours, its stylized chalk shape that was so incredibly minimalistic; the neolithic stones at Avebury, Glastonbury, and Stonehenge, where we always encountered hippies and travelers and the hundreds of neopagans and mystics who populated the country: once, we ran into a “druid” ceremony and my girlfriend Laura, who was tripping and drunk, laughed so hard they kicked us out. You don’t know anything!, she shouted at them. If you only knew!, and Stephen covered her mouth because if Florence found out we were going around insinuating our secret, the punishment could be serious. I liked going to Stonehenge: a lot of musicians visited the circle, and there was nothing I liked more than music. Some of them brought guitars and it was beautiful to sing with them wrapped in a jacket of Afghan leather, smoking hashish. Our outings almost always included Edward James’s house in West Sussex, that surrealist mansion with its forest and its hunting preserve. Years later, Tali would often ask me how we managed to drive while high. How did I manage to study in those conditions? The truth is that you can function under the influence of drugs a lot better than people think, plus, I was so young I could wander around on acid all day, and the next attend several classes and study as many hours as I needed to. We had enviable stamina.
When I say “we,” I’m referring to Stephen and our friends, most of them children of members of the Order: Sandy, who was studying Middle Eastern history at Cambridge; Tara, Stephen’s most stable lover, heiress to a shipping company; Robert, who brought us to the best concerts in the city and helped to organize some of the free festivals; Lucie, who wanted to be a photographer but worked as a model and was horribly jealous of Penelope Tree. But, above all, when I say we, I mean the trio that was me, Stephen, and Laura. It wasn’t a requirement, but the Order encouraged us to live under the premise of the magical androgyne; that is, we could choose lovers of the same sex for rituals and for life, so that that energy would embrace us and aid us in our mystical work. Stephen was nineteen years old, I was eighteen, Laura twenty-two. We were young and bold: we never hesitated to follow the suggestion because almost everyone our age and in our circle lived like that. Acid is a very sexual drug, and under its effect, the idea that sexes should relate only to their opposites seems absurd.