It was hard to keep calm when the arrivals door opened. Juan looked weak and exhausted; he wasn’t carrying a single bag and he needed to lean on Graciela Biedma, the doctor who would be with him from then on. My uncle was already in London preparing the team of surgeons. Brown Oxfords, white shirt, and blond hair almost down to his shoulders; he was already six foot five, and he wasn’t at all awkward like other tall boys. He was elegant and slow, regal, as the British would say, and he had the air of a giant cat. He let go of the doctor to hug me: he could cup my whole face in his hand, his fingers tangled in my hair, his palm on my cheek, wrist at my chin. He’d lost any remaining trace of adolescence, and he was all aggressive cheekbones, a chin so cleft it looked wounded, darkened eyes. Not even his smile of recognition was the same: Juan used to smile with a touch of shyness, and now it was a dry, sideways expression, which only I could perceive as happy or relieved, because I knew him so well. I buried my face in his chest, smelled his sweaty shirt. I don’t know if he had a fever, I suppose he did, because I could feel him breathing with difficulty, his heart beating fast and irregular, always the same, so many nights spent sleeping at his side, next to that body. He bent down to kiss me, and I put my arms around his neck and received his breath that was heavy with the hours of confinement and the ordeal of flying, his soft lips and the ferocity of the beard that was already growing in like a man’s. He was about to turn eighteen years old; he looked twenty-five, at least. I caressed his forehead with my thumbs so he would stop frowning: his head hurt. He caressed my back under my shirt. I closed my eyes; Juan’s hand on my back reminded me of a claw. I forced myself to pull away from the hug because if I didn’t, someone else would break it up for us, possibly my uncle or Florence, who were waiting anxiously.
We went by car to the house in St. John’s Wood. Juan would wait there for the operation, and there he would recover once he was discharged. The doctors checked him over in the bedroom, while I waited outside. My uncle came out wringing his hands, clearly displeased.
“The surgeon who is supposed to operate has a cold, and we have to postpone until he’s better. This is very bad news.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. Juan will have to go to the institute every morning this week, for tests. I’m not going to hospitalize him; I don’t want him to be stressed. He had a difficult flight and he needs to sleep, but he wants to see you. Go on, before the tranquillizer kicks in. Then we need to talk about your behavior in the airport. You went there to mark your territory, like a cat. Like a whore.”
I felt my eyes fill up with tears at the insult and the contempt behind it, but I said nothing. There was a simmering feud between us. Outside, the rain had started to pour, so hard it didn’t seem like just past noon, with the gray sky so dark and a tree lashing the window. There was a green blanket covering Juan’s legs. The room was heated, and now he was wearing only a white cotton T-shirt. Despite his paleness and his heavy eyelids, he looked powerful against the pillows. He was only fragile because he was sick. Fragile like relics, ancient ruins, sacred bones that had to be cared for and protected because they were incalculably valuable, because their destruction would be irreparable.
His recovery from the surgery was very slow. I was allowed to visit him in the hospital, but my presence did him no good. He was unconscious, on a ventilator, unrecognizable. He was losing weight, and no more tubes could fit in his arms. Once he could leave the hospital he would finish recuperating at Florence’s house, with me. Stephen had fought with his mother because he thought it was wrong for Juan to have to spend his convalescence under the same roof as Eddie, Stephen’s brother. Eddie hated Juan because he thought he had usurped him, Stephen told her, and he’s capable of anything. And he has a gift for escaping. Don’t you remember when he was little and he could get into any house, at night, and he’d move things around, smear dirt in the beds, wake up sleeping people by biting their legs? Anne found him slithering around like an eel not long ago. He can get into Juan’s room if he wants.
Florence did not agree. Eddie doesn’t know Juan, he doesn’t even know he exists, she said. Eddie doesn’t talk, Mother, but he’s not an idiot: he listens, he understands, and he perceives so much more than any of us. And you know full well what he wants: to die, after killing the one who took his place. Florence shook her head and insisted that Juan was perfectly safe: Eddie lived in the west wing of the house, where he was guarded by a small army. Stephen abandoned the argument and turned to me. She’s blind, he explained. You know how my brother escaped from the psychiatric clinic? He talked to the nurses and convinced them to inject themselves with an overdose of tranquillizers. She’s the one who trained him, and she knows what he’s capable of, it’s ridiculous that she thinks she’s in control. She owns dozens of houses in London, and Juan could go to any one of them. The arrogance, fuck. She wants to have them both in the same house, who knows why?
I hadn’t seen Eddie in months. The last time, I’d noticed he was missing a little finger. He had chewed it off himself. Eddie was progressively mutilating himself. The pain relieved him, according to Stephen. He had red hair, like his mother, and very light gray eyes; he was color-blind. Sometimes, when he walked in the garden, he saw me in the window and waved, smiling. His teeth scared me. They had been sharpened, and they were pointed and yellow.
I’ve always needed to be well dressed to have serious conversations. With the right clothes, all my insecurity vanishes. I called Sandy and Lucie for a shopping trip. Juan was going to be discharged in a matter of days, barring any complications. My back was hurting from sleeping in a hospital bed beside him. He could walk on his own now, his legs didn’t tremble, and he wasn’t in pain. Managing the pain had been the hardest part, because he could only tolerate light painkillers. It was going to be good for me, as well, to leave the hospital; I’d spent days inside those greenish walls, listening to moans and cries.
Sandy had been crazy about Ossie Clark’s chiffon pants for years, but that was never my style, so I let her try on clothes while I waited. Everything looked good on her. I had to be more careful. I loved the fabrics of Ken Scott, an Italy-based designer I’d met on a quick trip to Rome with Stephen: Lucie took photos of me in a dress of his printed with owl faces, so psychedelic my friends would often ask me to put it on and dance when they were on strong acid. I’d seen a marvelous dress near our house, at the Fulham Road Clothes Shop; black, long, and ample, made of silk and wool, with a V-neck hung with a fringe that had red, yellow, and green beads. It was a little like a tunic, a little ceremonial, a little African. It would be perfect with some high Biba boots made of green suede. I didn’t need anything else. Going to Biba, in Kensington, always gave me a euphoric joy: it was a dark place with a tenuous, golden luminescence, and there were mirrors and peacock feathers in every corner. Their models would swan around the rooms: Biba’s owner herself said they had suffered from malnutrition in the postwar period, and that’s why they were beautiful and thin now. I had been raised as a millionaire in South America, all protein and milk products, and I didn’t look like those kids who wandered around the store and sometimes chatted up the actors and other celebrities. The gossip in those days was that Anita Pallenberg, Keith Richards’s partner—at the time: she’d been Brian Jones’s girlfriend before, and she was so beautiful I didn’t like to look at her—had a Hand of Glory. I don’t know what the girls who chattered about that really understood: all they knew was that it had something to do with black magic. I was dying to have one myself, and I’d asked Laura for one many times; the Order kept theirs in the library, near George Mathers’ statuette of the African god. They used them regularly, though they were precious relics: the left hand of a hanged man that was cut from the cadaver while it was still strung up. The hand was then treated with wax to turn it into a candle. How could Anita have one? She had no ties to the Order, though she did flirt with occultists, like all the rich kids in London. A Hand of Glory, used correctly, could achieve many things: I was most interested in its ability to open doors. Juan and I had already spoken several times about his discovery, about that door he’d found that he could open. I didn’t go in, he said, because the air in the passageway seemed foul and I didn’t feel good. When I get better, he told me, we have to find those passages. I kissed him: his lips were no longer cracked, though his nose still bled sometimes because the plastic tubes had injured the delicate mucous membranes. He’d had a birthday in the hospital, while he was semiconscious and in pain. All my energy, at that time, was directed toward getting him to be able to stay with me, with us, to share our life. I was sure it was possible.