During that time, in the spring of 1967, while we kept an eye on the papers and TV to follow the trial of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and their friends, who had been caught with drugs at a country house in Sussex, I talked to Juan again, over the phone. And we started calling each other every day. At any hour. He was usually at the apartment on Libertador; when he went to Reyes, he let me know. Sometimes I heard his agitation even over the static on the line; every time I talked to him, I imagined cables under the water, along the ocean floor, bitten by blind fish with enormous teeth. Jorge had told him that his surgery would be performed in London. He was afraid of dying. Tali helped him with his night terrors, but no one could help him like I did. He was devastated because Florence had told him that when they died, mediums were claimed by the Darkness, they spent eternity there, like in the Christian myths. One night he cried until he fell asleep and he didn’t hang up until the early morning, or someone hung up for him, maybe my uncle. He didn’t talk about those things with Tali, which gave me a vague feeling of pride.
They’re all such shits, I said to Stephen. Why do they scare him like that, talking about an eternity with the gods? Because they want to keep him from leaving any way they can, Stephen replied. A professor at the Warburg had explained to me that alchemy was never a technique meant to multiply riches. It was and is a mystical exercise. The search for gold is the attempt to find the substance of immortality. Juan opened the path toward that substance. They would never leave him alone, never say, enough, his body can’t give anymore.
I still dream about the wallpaper in my room, the way it morphed into spiders and dancers; I still remember how my hand, when I reached it out toward the sun, would be wrapped up in the colors of the rainbow. Also the rituals where we danced until our bodies disintegrated into particles of light, and how Laura opened the belly of a hare over my chalk circle in Florence’s house. Juan, over the phone, talked interchangeably about Tali and my grandfather, whom it was sometimes necessary to go searching for in the jungle where he hid out, naked and drunk and terrified. In the jungle, under a tree, he finally shot himself. I was still in London, and I didn’t go to his funeral. One night, Juan talked to me about doors he could open and houses that looked one way from the outside, but inside were completely different. What are you doing? I whispered. Nothing, he replied, it just happened. I passed by the door of a house that seemed strange, and when I opened it, I found that it wasn’t a house at all. Don’t tell anyone, and don’t go in, I warned him. I told Laura about those doors: I was thinking about liminal spaces, and she suggested we not mention the doors over the phone anymore, in case someone was listening, and they almost certainly were. If there was a new path opening up, I had to protect Juan. That was a horrible morning in London, when the sky looked like wet sugar and the people, who in general were used to it, ran down the street under umbrellas to escape the freezing rain. We need to protect him, Laura told me. I have a bad feeling, she said, and I’m never wrong.
We used to go to a club in Soho called Hive. It was beside some ruins that still hadn’t been rebuilt after the Blitz. It was a place for gay and queer people that closed in early 1969. David played there once, as did several others of our musician friends. To get in you had to knock on a small green-framed door on a short street, and an eye on the other side of the peephole would ask if we were members, though there was no membership, Hive wasn’t White’s, and that was just a strategy to avoid the police. A dirty mirror on the wall, feather boas, cheap high heels, tall men teetering atop platform shoes, and the best music in the city. For a time, I gave Tarot readings at a little table near the bar. One night, when I was drunk, a blue-eyed boy asked for a reading. He was so thin he looked sick with TB, and so beautiful he looked like a girl from Carnaby Street. In fact, it took me a minute to decide whether he was male or female. Unable to hold back, I told him all about the theory of androgynous magic: solve et coagula and why Baphomet has the torso of a man and the breasts of a woman. I explained about the number 11, the number of homoerotic magic, which represents the double phallus. I taught him that all magical instruments must be doubles, two swords, two wands, two cups, two pentacles, and why occultists should all be homosexual. He thought it was funny. He wasn’t interested in what I was saying. He listened to me as if to a madwoman. The boy spoke Polari with astonishing ease and I told Stephen to please take him home, please let me see them together, but Stephen likes masculine men and I had to content myself with staring at him until he left. Quit recruiting, Stephen told me, annoyed.
At Hive, Stephen made crude, vulgar jokes and knew almost everyone there, because he’d slept with half of them and gone to school with the other half. Once, I led Laura by the hand to the bathroom and we ended up screaming, me holding on to the sink and Laura on her knees, and we made such a scene that some queens getting high in a corner applauded and asked for an encore. We used to lose Stephen, and Tara too, when they went to Regent’s with their occasional lovers, or took them back to Cheyne Walk. But Laura and I would walk until dawn, taking different routes each time. We’d end up at Hawksmoor’s church in Spitalfields, the area where Jack the Ripper committed his crimes. When she met Juan, Laura spent hours explaining Hawksmoor’s churches to him, and he took photos for his brother Luis and mailed them with a long letter. Laura designed alternative cartographies. Lines on maps that were an underground text capable of divination and prophecy. You had to traverse those alternative paths without thinking, draw the seals standing up, and finally the way would be revealed. Like in alchemy, I told her: they seem like regular walks, but they’re a process. The meaning lies in the time spent on the process, not in the result: the discipline of repetition. That’s it, she replied, enlightened boredom. One night I told her about how Mercedes had made me feed the children she kept locked in cages, how Juan had lightened the task, how Mercedes beat me every day to let me know that I may have found Juan, but she was still the boss; also how Juan let me sleep beside him after the beatings and promised to kill my mother, but hadn’t done it. To defend me, though, he told Mercedes that if she laid another finger on me, he was going to take an overdose of his medication. It’s easy for me to die, he shouted at her, and you’ll lose everything. Mercedes didn’t hit me after that.
He’s faithful, Laura said. I really love him, I replied, and I miss him. We sat down on the grass and I heard squirrels skittering along branches. Laura handed me a bottle of wine she’d bought at Hive. Who took your eye? I whispered into her ear. I liked the oily smell of her hair, and also the color it shone with when it was so dirty. Your mother, she said. She did it at Florence’s house. Without anesthesia, but I didn’t faint from the pain. You’re strong, I told her. No, I was just surprised.
Someday, we’re going to get rid of her, I assured her. If Juan doesn’t do it, someone else will.
Juan came to London in the summer of 1969. His health had deteriorated after the Ceremonial earlier that year. The surgery that they had been planning—because the one when he was little had only been palliative, or at least had become obsolete as he grew up—was set for the month of July. It would be at the Heart Hospital, where my uncle had studied and was regularly invited to give classes, though he rarely accepted because he couldn’t bear to be away from Juan. He wasn’t going to perform the operation himself, of course, because the Darkness had taken his fingers. He was even more legendary after the mutilation—attributed publicly to a hunting accident—or maybe thanks to it. It was going to be a long and risky operation.