Our Share of Night: A Novel

by Mariana Enriquez, Pablo Gerardo Camacho, Megan McDowell

Genres: Hispanic & Latino; Gothic

Synopsis

“A masterpiece of supernatural horror.”—The Washington Post
“An enchanting, shattering, once-in-a-lifetime reading experience.”—The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)

GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK • ONE OF TIME, ESQUIRE, AND BOOKRIOT’S BEST BOOKS OF 2023 (SO FAR) • A woman’s mysterious death puts her husband and son on a collision course with her demonic family in the first novel to be translated into English by the International Booker Prize–shortlisted author of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed—“the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time” (Kazuo Ishiguro).

“A magnificent accomplishment.”—Alan Moore, author of Watchmen
“A masterpiece of literary horror.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review (Best Books of the Year)
“One of Latin America’s most exciting authors.”—Silvia Moreno-Garcia

A young father and son set out on a road trip, devastated by the death of the wife and mother they both loved. United in grief, the pair travel to her ancestral home, where they must confront the terrifying legacy she has bequeathed: a family called the Order that commits unspeakable acts in search of immortality.

For Gaspar, the son, this maniacal cult is his destiny. As the Order tries to pull him into their evil, he and his father take flight, attempting to outrun a powerful clan that will do anything to ensure its own survival. But how far will Gaspar’s father go to protect his child? And can anyone escape their fate?

Moving back and forth in time, from London in the swinging 1960s to the brutal years of Argentina’s military dictatorship and its turbulent aftermath, Our Share of Night is a novel like no other: a family story, a ghost story, a story of the occult and the supernatural, a book about the complexities of love and longing with queer subplots and themes. This is the masterwork of one of Latin America’s most original novelists, “a mesmerizing writer,” says Dave Eggers, “who demands to be read.”

Release date: February 7, 2023

Publisher: Hogarth

Print pages: 582

Sample

There was so much light that morning and the sky was so clear, its warm blue marred by a single white smirch, more like a plume of smoke than a cloud. It was already late and he needed to go and that hot day was going to be just like the next: if it rained and he was hit with the river’s humidity and the stifling Buenos Aires heat, he would never be able to leave the city.

Juan swallowed a pill dry to stave off the headache he wasn’t feeling yet and went into the house to wake up his son, who was sleeping under a sheet. We’re leaving, he said as he shook him gently. The boy woke up right away. Do other children have such shallow, vigilant sleep? Wash your face, he said, and carefully cleared sleep from the boy’s eyes. There was no time for breakfast, they could stop on the way. He loaded the already-packed bags, and debated a while among various books until he decided to add two more. He saw the airplane tickets on the table: they were still a possibility. He could lie down and wait for the date of the flight, some days later. To ward off inertia, he tore up the tickets and threw them in the trash. His long hair made his neck sweat: it was going to be unbearable under the sun. He didn’t have time to cut it now, but he got the scissors from the kitchen drawer and stashed them in the same plastic box where he kept his pills, the blood-pressure monitor, the syringe, and some bandages, basic first aid for the trip. Also, his sharpest knife, and the bag full of ashes he would use later. He packed the oxygen tank: he was going to need it. The car was cool; its leather hadn’t absorbed too much heat during the night. He loaded the picnic cooler, filled with ice and two bottles of cold soda, into the front seat. His son had to ride in the back; Juan would have preferred to have the boy beside him, but it was illegal, and he couldn’t risk any problems with the police or the army, who kept a brutal watch over the highways. A single man alone with a child could be suspicious. The repressive forces were unpredictable, and Juan wanted to avoid any incidents.

Gaspar, he called, without raising his voice too much. When he received no answer, he went inside to look for the boy. He found Gaspar trying to tie the shoelaces of his sneakers.

“You’re making a mess of it,” he said, kneeling down to help. His son was crying, but Juan couldn’t console him. Gaspar missed his mother—she had done these things automatically: trimmed his nails, sewn his buttons, washed behind his ears and between his toes, asked if he’d peed before leaving, taught him how to tie his shoelaces in a perfect bow. Juan missed her too, but he didn’t want to cry with his son that morning. You have everything you want? he asked. We’re not going to come back for anything, I’m warning you.

He hadn’t driven so far in a long time. Rosario always insisted that he drive at least once a week, just so he didn’t get out of practice. The car was too small for Juan, like almost everything: pants were too short, shirts too tight, chairs uncomfortable. He checked to be sure the Auto Club’s guide was in the glove box, and they set off.

“I’m hungry,” said Gaspar.

“Me too, but we’re going to stop for breakfast at this great place I know. In a while, okay?”

“If I don’t eat, I’ll throw up.”

“And my head hurts when I don’t eat. Be strong. It’s just a little while. Don’t look out the window or you’ll get even dizzier.”

He himself felt worse than he wanted to admit. His fingers were tingling, and he recognized the erratic palpitations of arrhythmia in his chest. He adjusted his sunglasses and asked Gaspar to tell him the story he’d read the night before. At six years old, the boy already knew how to read quite well.

“I don’t remember it.”

“Yes, you do. I’m in a bad mood, too. Let’s try to change it together. Or are we going to be all pissy for the whole trip?”

Gaspar laughed at Juan’s use of the word “pissy.” Then he recounted the story of the jungle queen who sang while she walked through the trees. Everyone liked to listen to her. One day some soldiers came and she stopped singing and became a warrior. The soldiers caught her and she spent a night locked up, and then she escaped, but to escape she had to kill the guard keeping watch over her. No one could believe she was strong enough to have killed him because she was very thin, so she was accused of being a witch and they burned her at the stake—tied her to a tree and set fire to it. But in the morning, instead of a body, they found a red flower.

“A tree of red flowers.”

“Yeah, a tree.”

“Did you like the story?”

“I don’t know, it scared me.”

“That tree is called a ceiba. There aren’t many around here, but when I see one, I’ll show you. There are a lot of them near your grandparents’ house.”

In the rearview mirror he saw Gaspar frown.

“What do you mean there are a lot?”

“That story is a legend. I’ve explained what a legend is.”

“So the girl isn’t real?”

“Her name is Anahí. Maybe she did exist, but the story about the flowers is told to remember her, not because it really happened.”

“So did it really happen or not?”

“Both. Yes and no.”

He liked to see how Gaspar got serious and even angry, how he bit the side of his lip and opened and closed a hand.

“Do they burn witches now, too?”

“No, not anymore. But there aren’t very many witches now.”

It was easy to get out of the city on a Sunday morning in January. Before he knew it the tall buildings were behind them, and then so were the low houses and tin lean-tos of the shantytowns on the city’s outskirts. And suddenly the trees of the countryside appeared. Gaspar was asleep by then, and Juan’s arm burned in the sun just like any regular father’s on a weekend of pools and picnics. But he wasn’t a regular father, and people could tell just by looking into his eyes or by talking to him for a while. Somehow, they recognized the danger: he couldn’t hide what he was. It wasn’t possible to hide something like that, at least not for long.

He parked in front of a café advertising hot chocolate and croissants. Time for breakfast, he told Gaspar, who woke up immediately and rubbed his enormous, slightly distant blue eyes.

The woman who was cleaning the tables gave the impression she owned the place, and of being friendly and gossipy. She shot them a curious look when they sat down far from the window and near the fridge. A boy with his little toy car and his father, who was two meters tall and had long blond hair down to his shoulders. She wiped their table with a cloth and wrote their order on a notepad, as if the café were crowded with customers whose orders she had to keep straight. Gaspar wanted a hot chocolate and croissants with dulce de leche; Juan ordered a glass of water and a cheese sandwich. He took off his dark glasses and opened the newspaper that was on the table, though he knew the important news never appeared in the papers. There were no articles about clandestine detention centers or nighttime clashes, no pieces on abductions or stolen children. Just stories about the “Little World Cup” being held in Uruguay, which didn’t interest him at all. Sometimes he had a hard time faking normalcy when he was distracted, when he was so hopelessly sad and worried. The night before, he’d tried to communicate, yet again, with Rosario. He couldn’t. She wasn’t anywhere, he couldn’t sense her; she was gone in a way that he found impossible to understand or accept.

“It’s hot,” said Gaspar.

The boy was sweating, his hair wet and his cheeks flushed. Juan touched his back. His shirt was soaked.

“Wait here,” he said, and went out to the car to get a dry shirt. Then he led Gaspar to the café’s restroom to wet his head, dry his sweat, and change his shirt, which smelled a little like diesel.

When they got back to the table, their breakfast and the woman were waiting for them; Juan asked for another glass of water for Gaspar.

“There’s a lovely campground near here, if you want to cool off in the river.”

“Thanks, but we don’t have time,” said Juan, trying to sound friendly. He unbuttoned the top buttons of his shirt.

“You boys traveling alone? My goodness, the eyes on this child! What’s your name, son?”

Juan wanted to say, Gaspar, don’t answer, but the boy told her his name and the woman pounced, asking in an insincere, childish voice:

“And where’s your mommy?”

Juan felt the boy’s pain in his entire body. It was primitive and wordless, raw and vertiginous. He had to clutch onto the table and make an effort to break away from his son and that pain. Gaspar couldn’t answer and looked to his father for help. He’d only eaten half a croissant. Juan thought he would need to teach the boy not to cling like that, not to him or to anyone else.

“Ma’am.” Juan tried to control himself, but it sounded threatening. “What the hell do you care?”

“I was just making conversation, that’s all,” she replied, offended.

“Oh, well, that’s just great. You get mad because you won’t get to have your idiotic conversation, and we have to put up with the stupid prying of a gossipy old lady. You really want to know? My wife died three months ago. She was hit by a bus that dragged her two blocks.”

“I am so sorry.”

“No. You’re not sorry, you don’t feel anything, because you didn’t know her and you don’t know us.”

The woman started to say something else, but then she walked away, sniffling loudly. Gaspar was still looking to Juan, but his eyes were dry. He was a little scared.

“It’s okay. Finish eating.”

Juan himself nibbled his cheese sandwich; he wasn’t hungry, but he couldn’t take his medication on an empty stomach. The woman came back looking contrite, her shoulders hunched forward. She was carrying two glasses of orange juice. On the house, she said, and apologized. I certainly never imagined such a tragedy. Gaspar was playing with his red toy car, a new model with doors and a trunk that opened—a gift from his uncle Luis, sent from Brazil. Juan made Gaspar finish his hot chocolate and then got up to pay at the counter. The woman was still apologizing, and Juan felt drained. When she reached out to take the money, he held on to her wrist. He thought about marking her with a symbol that would drive her mad, that would put the idea in her head to skin her grandson’s feet or cook her dog in a stew. But he held back. He didn’t want to tire himself. Keeping the secret up around this trip with his son was already wearing him out, and there would be consequences. So he left the woman alone.

Gaspar was waiting for him in the doorway, wearing his father’s dark glasses. When Juan tried to take them off him, the boy ran outside laughing. He caught up with him near the car and picked him up: Gaspar was light and long, though he would never be as tall as his father. Juan decided they would find a place to have lunch early, before the long stretch to Entre Ríos.

---

—

The day had been exhausting despite the utter ordinariness of the journey: light traffic, a delicious lunch at a roadside grill, and a nap in the shade of the trees, the banks cooled by a breeze from the river. The grill’s owner had also been curious and tried to make small talk, but since there were no questions about his wife, Juan had decided to chat while he drank a little wine. After his nap and during the whole drive to Esquina he’d felt bad: the heat was extreme. But now, as he asked for a room and tried to make the front desk worker understand that he needed a double bed for him and another single one for his son and money was no object, he realized that it was also possible he would need assistance. He paid up front and let someone else carry the bags up the stairs. Once in the room, he turned on the TV to entertain Gaspar and lay down on the bed. He recognized his symptoms: his arrhythmia was out of control. He could hear the murmur, that sound of effort, and felt the nausea of confused valves. His chest hurt, and it was hard to breathe.

“Gaspar, hand me the bag,” he said.

He took out the monitor and checked his blood pressure; it was low, which was good. He lay diagonally, the only way his feet could fit on the mattress. Before taking his pills and trying to rest—to sleep, if possible—he pulled a sheet of paper from the hotel pad on the bedside table and, using a pen that said on the side “Hotel Panambí—Esquina,” he wrote down a number.

“Son, listen closely. If I don’t wake up, I want you to call this number.”

Gaspar’s eyes widened, and then his face crumpled.

“Don’t cry. This is just in case I don’t wake up, that’s all, but I am going to wake up, okay?”

He felt his heart skip as if it were accelerating with a gear change. Would he be able to sleep? He brought his fingers to his neck. One-seventy, maybe more. He had never wanted to die as much as he did now, in this provincial hotel room, and he had never been more afraid of leaving his son alone.

“That’s your uncle Luis’s number. You have to press nine and then you’ll hear a dial tone, and only then you call your uncle’s number. If I don’t wake up, shake me. And if I still don’t wake up when you shake me, you call him. Him first, then the man downstairs in the lobby, understand?”

Gaspar said yes, and he clutched the number in his fist as he lay down beside Juan—close, but far enough away not to disturb him.

---

—

Juan woke up sweaty from a dreamless sleep. It was nighttime, but the room was dimly lit: Gaspar had turned on the bedside lamp and was reading. Juan looked at him without immediately stirring: the boy had taken his book from the bag and seemed to be waiting, the paper with the phone number on the pillow beside him. Gaspar, he called, and the boy reacted with care: he put the book down, crawled over to Juan, and asked if he was okay. Just like an adult, just like he’d heard so many adults ask him when they took care of him. Juan sat up and waited a minute before answering. His heart had returned to a normal rhythm, or to what was relatively normal for him. He wasn’t agitated, wasn’t dizzy. I’m okay, yes, he said, and he sat Gaspar on his lap, hugged him, caressed his dark hair.

Gaspar pointed to Juan’s watch.

“What time is it?”

“You know how to tell time, you tell me.”

“Twelve thirty.”

There wouldn’t be anywhere to eat still open in that town. Sure, he could walk downtown, break into some closed shop or restaurant, and take whatever he wanted—opening locked doors was very simple. But if anyone witnessed him doing it, he would have to deal with them. And all those small acts built up until they became a long and exhausting chain of footprints to erase, eyes to shut, memories to make disappear. He’d been taught this years ago: it was best to try to live as normally as possible. He could do things that were impossible for most people, but every conquest, every exercise of will to achieve what he desired came with a price. In matters of little importance, it wasn’t a price worth paying. Now he just had to convince whoever was working on the night desk to fix them some food. He didn’t feel hungry, and surely Gaspar didn’t either. But the boy hadn’t eaten, Juan had forgotten to take the sodas out of the car, and he had to behave like a father.

However, he needed to have a wash before he could leave the room—he stank. And maybe also cut his hair a little. Gaspar could use a bath too, though it wasn’t as urgent. He got up from the bed with the boy in his arms and carried him to the shower, then turned on the hot water and waited a while until his suspicion was confirmed.

“No way, not with cold water!” cried Gaspar.

“Come on, it’s hot out! No? Okay then, I’ll clean you off with a towel after I’m done.”

Juan got into the shower and Gaspar sat on the toilet lid and told him about what he’d been reading and what he had seen from the hotel window. Juan heard his voice but didn’t pay attention to what he was saying. The showerhead was too low and he had to bend over to wash his hair, but at least the hotel provided shampoo and soap. Then, with a towel around his waist, he stood in front of the mirror: his wet hair came down past his shoulders and there were dark circles under his eyes.

“Bring me the scissors, they’re in the small bag.”

“Can I cut it? Just a little?”

“No.”

Juan stood looking at his reflection, his broad shoulders, the dark scar that ran down the middle of his chest, the burn on his arm. Rosario had always cut his hair, and sometimes shaved him too. He remembered her big earrings that she never took off, sometimes not even when she slept. He remembered how she’d cried once, kneeling naked on the bathroom floor, over the weight she had gained during pregnancy. How she crossed her arms when she heard something she found stupid. He remembered her shouting at him in the street, furious; how strong she was when she hit him with her fists in a fight. How many things did he not know how to do for himself? How many had he forgotten, how many had he never learned because she always did them? He combed his hair and then cut it as neatly as he could. He left one lock longer in front and used the hairdryer to see if it was a disaster. The results seemed acceptable. He had a little stubble, but it was only noticeable because he was so pale. He gathered up the cut hair, which he’d let fall onto a towel, and flushed it down the toilet.

“Let’s go see if we can find something to eat.”

The hotel hallway was very dark and smelled of damp. The room they’d been given was right in the corner next to the stairs. Juan let Gaspar go out first, but instead of heading straight downstairs, the boy took off running down the hall. At first Juan thought he was making for the elevator. But then he realized Gaspar had sensed the same thing he had, though with one big difference: instead of avoiding it—Juan was so used to those presences that he ignored them—he was drawn to it and was going toward it. The thing that was hiding at the end of the hallway was very frightened and wasn’t dangerous, but it was old, and like all ancient things, it was voracious and wretched and covetous.

It was the first time his son had had a perception, at least in his presence. He’d been waiting for this moment; Rosario had insisted it was going to happen soon, and she was usually right about these things. But discovering that Gaspar really had inherited his ability took his breath away, and he felt his throat closing off. He hadn’t held out much hope that his son would be normal, but there in that hallway the little hope he’d clung to had vanished entirely, and Juan felt the dismay tighten like a chain around his neck. An inherited condemnation. He tried to feign calm.

“Gaspar,” he said without raising his voice, “it’s this way. Down the stairs.”

The boy turned around in the hallway and looked at him with a confused expression, as if just waking up in a strange room after sleeping for days. The look only lasted a second, but Juan recognized it. He knew he had to teach the boy how to close himself off to that floating world, to those sticky wells, how to avoid falling into them. And he had to start soon, because he remembered the terrors of his own childhood, and there was no reason Gaspar should go through the same thing.

My son will be born blind, the presence at the end of the hall intoned over and over; it had no hair and wore a blue dress. It didn’t seem like Gaspar could hear it, though perhaps he had seen it. That’s what he had been talking about in the bathroom earlier: a woman sitting in the plaza across from the hotel who stared at his window with her mouth open. Juan hadn’t paid attention because the boy wasn’t afraid as he told the story, and that was good. Gaspar was intuitively right: there was nothing to fear, that woman was nothing but an echo. There were a lot of echoes now. It was always like that in a massacre, the effect like screams in a cave—they remained for a while until time put an end to them. There was a long way to go until that end, and the restless dead were moving quickly, they wanted to be seen. “The dead travel fast,” he thought.

They went down the stairs in silence to keep from waking other guests. A woman who was surely the owner of the hotel was leafing through a magazine at reception. She looked up when they came in, and then she stood; with a single quick movement she smoothed her blouse and her hair, which was dark and somewhat tousled.

“Hello there,” she said. “Can I help you with something?”

Juan walked over to the counter and rested one hand on the phone book that was open beside the lamp.

“Good evening, ma’am. Is there by chance anything open where we could get something to eat?”

The woman cocked her head.

“You might be able to find something at the fisherman’s club grill, but let me call and ask, because it’s a hike to get there.”

A hike, thought Juan. Impossible—in this little town nothing could be very far. He took in the lobby walls with wood paneling halfway up, the brown laminate floor, the keys dangling from a board. Gaspar had gone over to a small tank and his finger was following a little swimming fish. No answer, said the woman, after letting it ring for a while. Okay, said Juan, guess we’ll just go to bed without eating. He smiled, and noticed that the woman—who was young, not yet forty, though she looked older in the sad light of that hushed hotel—was openly staring at him. I fell asleep, he explained. It’s a long drive from Buenos Aires, and I was already tired.

Outside, the silence was total. He saw the blue lights of a patrol car pass by but barely heard its engine. So, they patrolled even this tiny town?

“Excuse my indiscretion,” said the woman, coming out from behind the counter. She was fanning herself, though the ceiling fan was spinning. “Are you in room 201? My front desk clerk told me he thought the guest in 201 wasn’t feeling well. We were worried, but since we didn’t hear anything and you didn’t call, we didn’t want to disturb you.”

“How do you know he was talking about me?”

Somewhere between shy and flirtatious, the woman replied:

“The clerk described a very tall, very blond man with a child.”

“Thanks for your concern, ma’am. I’m feeling okay now, I just needed to rest. I had surgery six months ago, and sometimes I think I’m fully recovered and I end up overexerting myself.”

And deliberately, theatrically, Juan lightly rested a hand on the dark shirt he wore unbuttoned halfway down his chest, making sure she couldn’t miss his enormous scar.

“Come on,” she said. “I’ll make you some sandwiches, at least. Does the little one eat pasta? We’ll just steam it with a little butter, nothing to it.”

“What’s pasta?” asked Gaspar, who had left the fish tank.

“Noodles, mitaí,” the woman told him, kneeling down. “You like them with butter and cheese?”

“Yeah. With sauce, too.”

“We’ll see what we can do for you.”

“Can I watch you cook?”

“He likes to cook,” said Juan, shrugging his shoulders in bemusement.

An hour later Gaspar had learned to use the can opener, they’d both eaten somewhat sticky pasta with a delicious sauce and had drunk some fresh ice water, and the woman had joined them with a glass of sweet wine and a few cigarettes. When they finished, Juan offered to wash the dishes so she could return to reception, and the woman agreed; Gaspar helped dry. I hope you get well soon, she told Juan before she left. Gaspar thanked the woman with tomato sauce–stained lips, and she gave him a kiss on the forehead in return.

---

—

Gaspar didn’t want to go into the room: as he stood motionless in the doorway, his eyes shone and he seemed scared.

“Daddy, there’s a lady in there,” he said. Juan blinked and attuned his senses: it was the same woman from the hallway earlier.

“Come on in, don’t look at her.” He took Gaspar’s face in both his hands; they were so big they nearly encircled the boy’s head. “Just look at me.”

Then he sat on the floor and turned on the bedside lamp. Luckily Gaspar couldn’t hear what the woman was saying. It was always better to only see. Juan listened for a moment out of curiosity. It was the same desperate and solitary repetition of death, the same echoing of death. Then he shut out her words, but didn’t expel her; his son would have to learn how to do that, and fast. Juan didn’t want him to be afraid a single minute longer.

“Listen to me closely now.”

“Who is it, Daddy?”

“It’s not a person. It’s a memory.”

He rested a hand under his son’s sternum and felt his heart, fast, strong, and healthy. His mouth went dry with envy.

“Close your eyes. Feel my hand?”

“Yeah.”

“What am I touching?”

“My belly.”

“And now?”

With two fingers of his other hand, he found the vertebra behind the boy’s stomach.

“My back.”

“No, not your back.”

“My spine.”

“Now you have to think about what’s between my two hands, like when your head hurts and you tell me it feels like there’s something in it. Okay, think about what’s in here.”

Gaspar squeezed his eyes shut and bit his lower lip.

“Got it.”

“Okay, now tell the lady to go away. Don’t tell her out loud. You can say it in a quiet voice if you want, but tell her as if this part of you that’s between my hands could speak. Understand? It’s important.”

This could take all night, Juan knew.

“I told her.”

Juan looked at the woman, who remained beside the bed, pregnant and openmouthed, surely still talking about her first child, her eyes empty.

“Again. As if you were talking from here, as if you had a mouth inside.”

“Should I say it loud?”

Where did he get that question? The boy deserved an answer worthy of such a pertinent query.

“Yes, today you should.”

The image of the woman vanished slowly, like dissipating smoke. The air in the room seemed cleaner, as though they had opened the windows. The light from the lamp shone brighter.

“Very good, Gaspar, very good.”

Gaspar glanced around the room in search of the woman who had gone. He looked serious.

“And she won’t come back?”

“If she does, you do the same thing you just did.”

Gaspar was shaking, a little from the effort, a little from fear. Juan remembered the first time he had expelled a discarnate: it had been just as easy for him, maybe even easier, given the circumstances. Hopefully this would be the only ability Gaspar had inherited. Hopefully he would never achieve the level of contact Juan was capable of. Rosario had been sure the boy would inherit all his gifts. Suddenly, the memory was so vivid that he felt it, like accidentally touching an insect in the dark: stubborn Rosario sitting on the bed in her white cotton underwear, her hair pulled back in a high ponytail. Gaspar was going to inherit everything, everything that Juan himself bore. He felt his eyes grow hot.

“Now I’m going to go back to sleep, because in a while I’ll need to drive.”

“I want to sleep with you.”

“Don’t be scared. Go to your bed. If you can’t sleep, read your book. The light doesn’t bother me.”

But Gaspar didn’t want to read. He lay faceup and waited for sleep to come with a discipline that was strange for his age. Juan hadn’t lowered the blinds, and the few streetlights dimly lit the room, casting the shadows of tree branches on the walls. Juan waited until Gaspar’s breathing indicated he was asleep, and then went over to look at him: lips parted, small baby teeth, hair plastered to his forehead with sweat.

He could do it sitting in his own bed with Gaspar beside him, but he didn’t want the boy to wake up and see him. The bathroom was as good a place as any. He didn’t need much: just silence, Rosario’s hair, a sharp instrument, and the ashes.

Sitting on the cold tiles, he balled up the lock of Rosario’s hair that he carried with him, stored in a little box. You promised me, he said in a quiet voice. And it had been a serious promise, a promise made in blood and wounds, not in sentimental words.

He took a handful of ashes from the plastic bag and scattered them on the floor in front of him so that he could draw the sign of midnight. He had done this every night since Rosario’s death, always with the same result: silence. A desert of cold sand and dull stars. He had even tried more rudimentary methods, and the reply was always the same: wind blowing over the abyss.

He repeated the words, caressed the lock of hair, summoned her in the virulent language that must be used in the ritual of ashes. With his eyes closed, he saw empty rooms and corners, quenched bonfires, abandoned clothes, dry rivers, but he went on wandering until he returned to the hotel bathroom, to its silence and his son’s distant breathing, and then he summoned her again. Not a touch, not a tremor, not a feint, not even a treacherous shadow. She wasn’t coming and she wasn’t within his reach, and, since her death, he hadn’t received a single sign of her presence.

In the first days, he had made inappropriate offerings. True magic is not done by offering the blood of others, he’d been told. It is done by offering one’s own, and abandoning all hope of recovering it. Juan took the razor blade he had placed beside him and cut the palm of his hand diagonally, vaguely following the line called the mind or the head. It was an unbearable wound that never healed, the worst possible kind, and for that very reason the kind that worked. When he felt the warm blood in the darkness, he pressed his hand onto the sign drawn in ashes on the floor. He said the necessary words and waited. The silence was dizzying. Juan knew it was a symptom of his own loss of power. Whether it was because he was very sick or too depleted, he didn’t know, but the feeling of weakness was undeniable. This kind of summons required hardly any effort: the world of the dead was very near for him, just beyond a lightweight revolving door. If it had been another ritual, almost any other, he could have questioned his ability to perform it. Not this one. This was like stretching his legs.

He washed his hand resignedly and used a towel to clean the blood from the floor. He no longer got angry when the ritual didn’t work. After his first failed attempts he had cursed Rosario, he’d smashed furniture and nearly broken his fingers from punching the floor so much. Now he just calmly cleaned up afterward and placed the lock of hair back in its box. “For the dead travel fast,” he thought again. It was true, in general. He, however, had so far been denied that speed.

Gaspar was still asleep, though a long time had passed: the ritual of the sign of midnight seemed short for whoever performed it, but in reality it took several unnoticed hours. Juan tended to his slashed hand. Dawn was breaking when he poured a little alcohol over the wound that never healed because he had to keep cutting and cutting in the same place, feeding blood to the ashes that brought him nothing but a stillness so suspicious that it made him imagine his wife silenced, her lips sewn shut by someone who wanted to keep her away from him forever.

---

—

The hotel breakfast was served in a dining hall with white walls and tables spread with checkered tablecloths. The décor was piscine: fish paintings, preserved fish mounted behind glass, and another fish tank, larger than the one at reception. Esquina was a sort of fishing capital. Juan had never fished a day in his life. And if the hotel’s recurring theme was of aquatic fauna, he didn’t understand why it was called Panambí, which means “butterfly” in Guaraní. There were no butterflies anywhere, not even in the hotel’s logo. He drank weak tea and spread dulce de leche on slices of toast for Gaspar, who was very quiet.

“What’s wrong?”

“Are you mad at me?”

“No, son, I’m just in a bad mood. When you finish eating, we’ll go swimming.”

Gaspar had cried all morning, until they came down to breakfast. Ever since his mother died, he had cried every day when he woke up. Sometimes he cried just because, sometimes he got angry over some silly thing, sometimes he said his head hurt or he was tired or hot. He dreamed about her, Juan knew; usually, he dreamed that her death had been a dream. Sometimes Juan let him cry alone, sometimes he sat silently beside him, sometimes he splashed cold water on his face, but he never really knew what to do. That morning, when Gaspar had calmed down after a fit of wailing and sobbing, pulling his own hair and even punching his pillow, Juan had suggested that they go to the beach. Gaspar had asked if the water was cold like at Mar del Plata. Juan explained that no, this was a river and rivers were different, more like swimming pools. It was a lie, but it worked. Juan was the one who needed to swim, and it was high time he improved on the very basic technique he’d taught his son. He himself had learned at eight years old, and then only thanks to his brother’s irresponsibility; Luis hadn’t known how to keep his little brother entertained when he took him on outings, and one day he’d brought him to a public pool. Juan knew swimming was forbidden—his doctor, Jorge Bradford, had told him he couldn’t do any intense exercise. Bradford had never found out about the afternoons at the pool, or if he had, he’d played dumb: the doctor always had contradictory attitudes, gestures of extreme generosity alternating with stinginess, and he was often unpredictable.

Bradford had taught Juan how to close himself off when he was six years old and in recovery from a cardiac crisis: many of the most important things in his life had happened in a hospital bed, amid pain, anesthesia, and fear. Doctor Bradford used the same method Juan had taught Gaspar the night before. Doctor Bradford, who had operated on him after he’d been declared a lost cause, who had visited him every day, and who would later adopt him under the pretext of giving him the care he needed. An elegant abduction. A purchase: he had paid money for Juan. It’s a miracle, Bradford had told Juan’s parents, a miracle he’s still alive, and he needs treatments and care that you, unfortunately, in your economic situation, cannot offer him. Juan’s parents had acquiesced.

That night, lying in the hospital bed, Juan hadn’t been able to turn down the volume of the voices; he felt hands touching him all over his body, inside and out, and he saw people around his bed even if he closed his eyes. And Bradford had sat him up, wet his hair with cool water, and told him more or less the same thing Juan had told Gaspar in the hotel room: use the voice between your spine and your stomach, tell them to go and they’ll leave. He clearly remembered how he’d tried several times, guided by that man’s dark, greedy eyes, until the silence came and the intensive therapy room was once again a place full of the wounded and dying. Bradford had stayed with him until he fell asleep. When he woke up in the morning the voices and images came back, and Bradford was still there. Again he told him what to do, and this time Juan managed it on the first try. Then Bradford wanted to know what he saw. And Juan described it all: how he would wake up and see, at breakfast, a cadaver at the table or in bed; the mouths that laughed at him, and the hand that covered his face and wouldn’t let him breathe at night; the birds and insects that attacked him, flying straight at his head when he went out to the patio; the two little faces that peered at him from under the rock his mother used to prop open the door of the back shed. He’d told his parents, but they didn’t seem to understand. Bradford did.

His parents were afraid of him: they tried to soothe him and then changed the subject. His brother Luis was different. He got scared, too, but he tried to help. He told Juan to think about other things. He’d taught him to swim.

Now Juan had to teach his son, too, but first he wanted to swim in the river alone for a while. He drove to the town’s beachfront, which was lovely and clean and practically empty, and he sat Gaspar on the grass under a tree with the cooler beside him. He poured some soda into a plastic cup and told him, Dad’s going to swim now, but if anyone comes near you I’ll know, don’t worry. And don’t go anywhere, because I’ll find you, and you know what happens then.

As he was getting into the water, a couple were making their way out. The woman, pretty in a blue one-piece suit, greeted him; the man shot him an aggressive look and took the woman by the waist. Neither of them could help but stare openly at the scar on Juan’s chest. He didn’t care. He swam for fifteen minutes, not enough to get agitated. He could swim for much longer, but he didn’t want to be tired later when he had to drive. The river looked silvery under the sun but the water was a bit murky. He floated for a while before getting out: he sensed nothing but calm from his son. When the water came up to his knees, he waved at Gaspar and shouted, Come on, you have to learn, take off your shirt and shoes. He lay Gaspar on the water and crouched a little. I’ve got you, he said when he saw the boy struggling, afraid of sinking. Kick, he said, splash me, make noise.

There was something in that hot morning and the boy’s slippery skin in his hands that made him feel Rosario beside him. He remembered her shivering from the cold in the English countryside, remembered her singing him a song that said tonight will be fine, dancing to a Bowie album and complaining that they never played good music on the radio; he remembered her neck, and her breasts, which were large but even so she never wore a bra, not even after Gaspar was born, and the mornings when he woke her up and she protested, Let me sleep, but after a while she returned his embrace, and he lifted up her legs, put them over his shoulders, and caressed her with his tongue and fingers until she was wet.

He couldn’t find her. He could see that poor pregnant woman at the hotel, he could see hundreds of murder victims every day, and yet he couldn’t reach her. He had said to her once when she was alive, as a joke, imitating a character in a novel, Please don’t leave me alone, haunt me. He’d said it in English, “haunt me,” because there were no words in Spanish for that verb, not embrujar, not aparecer, it was haunt. She had laughed it off. He was supposed to die first—it was the most logical thing. It was ridiculous he was even still alive.

Sometimes he thought Rosario was hiding. Or that something was keeping her from reaching him. Or that she had gone too far away.

“What now?”

“Now put your head underwater. But without holding your nose.”

“I’ll drown.”

“You definitely won’t drown.”

They practiced holding their breath above water. Gaspar filled his cheeks with air, and Juan started to feel the unmistakable pain in his temples. Too much time in the sun. But he wasn’t going to leave the river until the boy learned to hold his breath.

Back under the tree, he poured cold soda into a cup and added some of the ice cubes that by now were floating in the cooler. He swallowed two pills and closed his eyes, lying back against the exposed roots until the pain retreated a little. His head was still pounding, but at least it now throbbed in a regular, slow rhythm.

“I didn’t drown,” Gaspar said suddenly.

“See? Swimming is easy, you’ll learn fast.”

“Are you gonna wake up?”

“I’m not sleeping, I’m resting.”

“Want a sandwich?”

“No, we’ll eat later. And tonight we’ll see Tali.”

“Can I make a sandwich for me?”

---

—

The best way to get one’s bearings on the way to Tali’s house was to keep a lookout for an old, rusty iron bridge by the highway; it had fallen out of use and had been overtaken by the unstoppable vegetation of the Argentine littoral region, with its lianas and flowers. Once you passed the bridge, you’d see the old Chapel of the Devil appear, and then you just had to go straight along a dirt road that became impassible if it was muddy. The chapel was the formal entrance to Colonia Camila. Tali loved living there, in that town of two hundred people and two corner stores.

Tali was Juan’s half-sister-in-law. She was the daughter of Rosario’s father, Adolfo Reyes, and his Corrientes lover, Leandra. Leandra was a middle-class woman who had gone off to live in the country, had founded a temple to San La Muerte, and had become famous in the region as both a healer and a great beauty. Tali’s mother had died young—Juan and Rosario knew that although she’d fallen ill, her death had been far from natural—and Adolfo Reyes, who had truly loved Leandra and was also a collector of effigies of the saint (that’s how they’d met, in fact), had preserved her temple. Tali saw her mother as a “guardian” or “promesera,” and now she continued her mother’s legacy. She and Rosario had established a room dedicated to San La Muerte at the Museum of Popular Art in Asunción, part of the permanent collection; it was recognized as the best in Paraguay, in the region, and probably in the world.

For years, semiclandestine ceremonies had been held at Tali’s shrine. Colonia Camila was far away from any city, near the river but strangely isolated from any beaches or docks: it was a place where one could, with relatively little fear, follow a cult that displeased the Church and provoked alarm and distrust among laypeople. More recently, Tali had kept her sanctuary discreetly quiet. She had heard about military raids where soldiers destroyed household altars and sometimes kidnapped their owners, holding them at a station for a few nights just as a show of power. Tali was the daughter of a rich, well-connected man, and no one was going to touch her, but it didn’t hurt to be careful.

Adolfo Reyes had also bought several hectares around his daughter’s temple and house, because on that land stood the Chapel of the Devil, built by Don Lorenzo Simonetti. A church constructed by an Italian immigrant that, oddly, had never been consecrated. Tali cleaned it at night by the light of a kerosene lamp. Many people had seen the glare through the windows and rumors spread about what happened behind those walls, but none of them were true. Juan had confirmed as much with both Tali and her father more than once: although the church was strange, it wasn’t a visited place. But Adolfo Reyes liked to have fun, and he hadn’t stopped there: he had invented his own rumors, added to the stories, so many that now it was almost impossible to separate the fiction from the simple historical facts of that chapel and its forgotten town.

Lorenzo Simonetti had come to Corrientes from Italy, widowed and with eight children in tow. In 1904, a year after settling in Colonia Camila, he started to build the chapel without asking permission from the ecclesiastical authorities. It was handmade: he carved the Virgin from native urunday wood and tried to imitate the features of his wife, who had died in childbirth. He did everything else with the help of the locals—laying the bricks, building the wooden benches, installing the precarious stained-glass windows. A compatriot brought the bells over from Italy. The altar had tin flowers and plant motifs. A church of the jungle and the border, close to both Brazil and Paraguay.

Simonetti had poured all his artistic zeal into the sacristy wall. That was where he had mounted his masterpiece, which incited the locals’ fear and was possibly the reason the church had not been accepted by the curia. The carvings were well preserved despite the passage of time and their somewhat faded colors. They depicted a vision of hell, a tableau of warning: children with disproportionately large heads and twisted legs performed ritual dances around bonfires, frolicking with dragons and snakes. Naked women’s waists were chained by serpents. There were shocked faces, round eyes ever open, and more reptiles, especially frogs—there was a true obsession with frogs, in reference to the second plague of Egypt. This scene of the Last Judgment was finished off with the figure of a man sitting with a book, observing the horrible scenes of suffering with an impassive face.

Once he had finished, Simonetti tried to donate the church to the curia, but after two priests came to visit it, his gift was rejected. There were more negotiations, and more rejections, supposedly for bureaucratic reasons, but everyone refused to believe that explanation. It was said that the tableau represented the Salamanca, the meeting between wizards and the Devil, the criollo Witches’ Sabbath, and people claimed that Simonetti had participated in those ceremonies. He died trying to convince the priests that his work was sacred. Perhaps honoring a promise, he made the sacrifice—although he wasn’t old, he was ill—of walking from Colonia Camila to Goya, where he met with a church authority. When he returned, he lay down to rest, and by the next morning he was dead.

In the larger of Colonia Camila’s grocery stores, the one that had a modest bar, it was said that people had seen Don Lorenzo’s ghost dressed in black, walking toward Goya. There were also stories about a dark congregation that turned its back to the altar and knelt before the tableau of the Last Judgment.

---

—

She heard him before she saw him, at six in the evening, when the sun was lighting the sky with a yellow flame and the palm trees in the distance looked like shadows. Tali went running out in a white dress that smelled of jasmine soap brought from Paraguay, and in her hurry she forgot to put on shoes. She couldn’t be sure as long as she could only hear him, but her doubts were dispelled when she looked down the small hill on which her house and temple were built, and there he was. His blond hair was tinged orange by the late-afternoon sun, and his black shirt took on a crepuscular blue shade. Even when he laughed like that, mouth open and dimples showing, even with the endearing way he bent his long legs as he slid in the mud, even when he reached out his arms to his son and said “Come on” and the boy took little running steps beside him—even in that simple family scene, it was easy to understand why he was known as the Golden God, his arms with veins that looked like cables under the skin and his hands too large, with their slender fingers and long, wide palms.

She had never seen such a man before or after him, and now, seeing him again, he seemed so extraordinarily beautiful that her eyes went hazy. The sight of him was like a surprising sunset, when nature puts its danger and its beauty on vivid display.

“So now you like the mud, chamigo!” she shouted. She hoped her voice would come out firm and it did, ironic and warm at the same time. Juan recognized it immediately.

“Tali, what’s with all this? We’re stuck!”

Juan and his son—Gaspar, so grown up now, and so thin—were laughing like crazy. Tali couldn’t believe it. She would have expected to find him just as furious and sad as when she’d seen him just a few months back. And yet here he was outside of her house, bent over laughing with his feet sunk in the mud, telling his son: “It’s the famous Corrientes quicksand!”

“Just give it a try, che; if you fall, you can take a bath later,” she called.

She leaned against the doorway and relaxed, enjoying this unprecedented show: the Golden God having fun with his own clumsiness, pretending to sink, crying out in mock fear. Gaspar, lighter, got through the mud first, and Tali ushered him in. He looked her in the eyes, curious and alert. Hi, Tali, he said. And he turned around to cheer at a slip that almost laid his father out in the road.

“You know, Juancito, the road that comes up on the side is paved.”

“No way.”

“More or less. They put down gravel.”

“Why does that road have gravel? Does it lead to a big estate?”

“No, but this is Corrientes. You can’t ask for logic.”

“I’ll move the car later, then. I hope it isn’t stuck.”

“We can push it.”

Juan leaped to reach a stretch of dry grass, and from there, two long-legged strides carried him easily to the door. Tali could finally look at him close up, and she realized the illusion of the late-afternoon light had been overly reassuring: Juan’s under-eyes were dark and swollen and he had lost weight; those strange eyes of his, with their multicolored irises—flashes of blue, green, and a little yellow—were tired and dazed. But it was Juan’s extreme paleness that let her know the game in the mud was nothing but that, a game.

“If I didn’t know you were alive, I’d say you were a ghost, che. Goddamn you’re pale.”

He pretended not to hear her and hugged her tight, lifting her off the floor. He got her dress dirty, but Tali didn’t care. She was feeling Juan’s body again after so long, firm and fragile; it was reassuring to bury her face in that broad chest, to breathe in the smell of his shirt, heat and gasoline and insect repellent. She felt him take a deep breath of relief. Tali kept her eyes closed as she listened to his breathing and the nighttime insects that were waking up and buzzing. He took her by the hand and she could sense his sadness through his fingertips, as if it emanated from him. She noticed, as well, that he had a dirty bandage over a wound on his palm. You need to change that rag, she told him, and Juan didn’t answer. Gaspar was sitting on the floor, trying to clean his white sneakers.

“Don’t worry, mitaí, I’ll wash them for you,” said Tali, and then she set about resolving various issues. She took Gaspar’s hand, beckoned one of the boys working in the small field behind the house over and told him to move the car onto the gravel, and then served a nice cold tereré on the deck table. “I only have lemon verbena. I’ll bring something for you, mitaí, do you like Coke?”

When she came back with the soda, Juan had stretched out as best he could in the hammock chair and had splashed a little fresh water on his face.

“You could have let me know you were coming, I would’ve had some food ready, gotten the house in order.”

“I didn’t know if I was going to be able to make it there alone, so I hurried a little. And when I realized I was too early, I decided I’d rather visit you first than go straight to Puerto Reyes.”

“Are you okay?”

He didn’t look at her. Instead, he gazed out at the red of the sunset through the trees.

“And the little one, how’s he taking it?”

“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” Gaspar protested. He set the glass of Coke on the table with a frown and crossed his arms.

“He’s right there, ask him yourself.”

“Well, aren’t you something, kiddo. Are you doing okay?”

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I miss my mom, and I get scared when he gets sick.” And with an angry, almost accusatory expression, he pointed at his father.

Tali hugged the boy and sat him on her lap, though Gaspar was already too big to be held. She didn’t know how to respond, since she’d never heard a six-year-old child speak so clearly and sincerely, so she just said, Let’s go change your sneakers, and asked Juan if he’d brought another pair. Sure, he replied, and I also brought him sandals, though around here he can just go barefoot. No, not barefoot, said Tali. Too many bugs.

In the bathroom she washed Gaspar’s legs, changed his shoes and shirt, and listened to him talk about the animals he’d seen on the drive there, including a buck with horns. She thought it was very strange for a stag to be so far from the wetlands, but nothing could really be considered strange when Juan was around.

---

—

Tali had first met Juan in Buenos Aires. Her father had brought her there with the intention of making her study, but Tali would run away from school, throw tantrums on the floor, cry. Rosario had tried to convince her that school wasn’t so bad and the two of them could have fun together. But Tali had replied it wasn’t school she hated: it was the city. So, Adolfo Reyes desisted from trying to educate his younger daughter at the best school in Buenos Aires, as he was doing with Rosario, and he let her return north, to her temple and her herbs and her rural school.

She and Rosario were close friends as well as half sisters. Tali had cried when, at eighteen years old, Rosario left for England to study, telling Tali she was going to the best university in the world and she was happy. Juan had turned fifteen by then, and he’d spent the whole summer that year in Puerto Reyes. He, too, was very sad at Rosario’s departure. When she visited her father’s house, Tali had been astonished to see Juan again in the cool air of the terrace overlooking the river. She had grown up seeing children of immigrants who were tall and blond like this boy: Swedes from Oberá, Germans from Eldorado, Ukrainians from Aristóbulo del Valle. On outings with her father, she sometimes lunched on sausages and admired the orchids on display in the community festivals, and she had been stupidly infatuated with many of those youths with transparent eyes and skin bronzed by the sun. But when Juan stood up from his wicker chair and kissed both her cheeks, all those men and women seemed like the practice sketches of a clumsy painter, tentative versions made by a hand that was learning, until finally it drew Juan and gave him life and said, This is it, this is what I was looking for, the perfect finish. Juan was fifteen, she was seventeen, and yet her ears burned when he sat looking at her in silence. You want to go for a walk? Tali asked him. It’s not so hot out. Sure, Juan replied. They walked through the house’s wild garden. She told him about the Scandinavians of Oberá and asked if his family was also from there. Juan said yes, but that they’d moved to Buenos Aires when he was born because he was very sick. Maybe you still have family around here, Tali said. Who knows, said Juan.

That night, after dining on yacare caiman with fried yuca—the specialty of Reyes’s cook, Rufina—Juan tore out a page from the notebook where he’d been doodling while the others had coffee (he didn’t partake) and gave it to her: it was a drawing of two dogs barking at a moon with rays that made it seem more like a sun, but it was a moon because it had a woman’s face. In the distance he had drawn two low towers, one for each dog, and in front of them a lake or pond with a creature emerging from it that could be a lobster or a scorpion. Underneath the drawing he’d written the words “La Lune,” and Tali immediately recognized one of the cards from the Tarot deck Rosario read—the Moon from the Marseilles Tarot. Her sister had tried to teach her, but Tali preferred the Spanish deck.

“I can teach you, too, now that she’s gone away,” Juan had told her.

“How did you know I wanted to learn?”

“Rosario told me. She said she never could explain it to you well. I’m a better teacher than she is.”

“And what does this card mean?”

“Depends on the interpretation.”

Juan slid the pencil into the pocket of his impeccable white shirt. He didn’t look sick, but she knew he was gravely ill. Why have they hidden him from me these past years? she wondered then. She found out soon enough, and it was brutal.

She still had that drawing, that moon, those dogs.

---

—

Gaspar, clean and sleepy-looking, sat down in another of the hammock chairs. It wasn’t going to rain anymore, but night was falling damp and dark. Guillermito, the boy who worked in Tali’s house, turned on the patio and deck lights. Juan unbuttoned his shirt and shook it to dry his sweat a little. I’ll bring you the fan, offered Tali. No, don’t worry, he said.

“They must be looking for you.”

“They can’t find me. It’s harder to keep up the secret now, but I can still do it.”

“Betty isn’t coming this year, either?”

“Nothing has changed regarding her and her daughter. She can’t attend the Ceremonial until they decide what to do with the girl. Things are very convenient for her, for now. We’ll see what happens once they figure out what to do with her daughter, which will probably mean taking her away from Betty.”

“Che, you know they have new dogs there in Reyes. I’m terrified of them, they’re huge, they look like horses. There’s a black one that must be a meter and a half tall, named Nyx.”

“A dog can’t be a meter and a half tall, don’t exaggerate.”

“What’s Nyx?” Gaspar asked suddenly.

“Juancito, this child is dangerous, he hears everything.”

“Nyx is the name of the Greek goddess of night. She is the night.”

“Is that in my book?”

“I don’t think so, she’s a forgotten god. I told you about the forgotten gods. They had very few worshippers and over time they all died out, until finally people stopped telling stories about them.”

“That’s really sad.”

“It is sad, yes. But we do know some things about Nyx. She was married to Erebus, who is darkness, which is not the same thing as night. You can find darkness during the day, for example. And she had two sons, fraternal twins, Hypnos and Thanatos. Hypnos is sleep and Thanatos is death. They look alike, but obviously they’re not the same.”

“And do they all live together?”

“We don’t know that, so imagine whatever you like.”

Juan looked at Tali and told her Gaspar was reading a book on legends. I promised I’d show him the ceiba tree, for Anahí. In a low voice, Tali said, This one’s going to get pretty bored in school.

Guillermito came over to the table. I need you to go find a small mattress for Gaspar, Tali told him. Ask Karina, she’s got tons. A girl hardly older than Gaspar peered around the corner of the hallway. Her knees were muddy and her hair was in two messy braids.

“Hey, Laurita, why don’t you take Gaspar here to play with you a while. You want to go play with her, Gaspar? We’ll call you in for dinner later.”

It took a moment for the kids to warm to each other, but then Laurita told Gaspar about her new puppy and asked if he wanted to see it, and they left. Tali noticed Juan biting his lip as he watched them go.

“It’s okay, Laurita is from here, she knows the place, she’ll take better care of him than you. What you’re feeling is normal.”

“Nothing is normal. I can’t talk to her.”

“To Rosario? Juan, you have a Ceremonial in a few days. You need to focus on that.”

Juan looked at her, his eyes mercurial in the deck’s dim light. He took the bandage from his hand and showed her the wound. Tali looked at it closely: it wasn’t swollen, wasn’t infected.

“I can’t get her to come even with the midnight sign. If I can’t communicate with her using that rite, it means someone is keeping me from reaching her.”

“Can anyone do that?”

“Someone powerful could, or several people working together. I think it’s multiple people.”

“Sometimes we can’t reach our dead, you know that.”

“I don’t think that’s it this time.”

“Do you sense her anywhere?”

Juan looked at Tali and brushed a lock of hair away from his face.

“I feel nothing.”

Now that not even the kids’ voices could be heard, Tali came close to Juan and reached out her hand. Come on, I’ll give you a bath and clean that hand, she said. I bought a giant tub. It’s like I knew I was going to need it. He got up slowly, lazily, and in the hallway that led to the bathroom Tali stood on tiptoes and kissed him and pushed him to her bedroom and closed the door with her back. It was always a little rough with Juan, even when he was trying to be gentle, and now he wasn’t trying; it hurt Tali to open her legs to receive his broad body, it had hurt to fall onto the floor of her room, the wood hurt her back. There was always a moment of loving and delicate breakage, too, a push, a vertiginous slippage when she recognized the hands that grasped her hair and he was moving inside her. And there was always a dangerous moment when she had to somehow ask him to stop what began as a pleasant sensation, one of tremor and fever, and that ended up feeling like the fast advance of a tide, a wave that was warm and too deep and didn’t seem at all like pleasure. He always heard her and stopped: this time he sat up, pushed her away with one hand, and made her look him in the eyes.

Afterward, Juan lay down naked in the bed, on his side, and cried holding Tali’s hand; Tali knew him well enough to listen in silence and wait. Angá, this must be the first time he’s cried for her, she thought, but she didn’t say it out loud because she knew Juan couldn’t stand people feeling sorry for him. She caressed his hair, so fine and light, not darkened with age like so many blond people’s. He pulled away from her carefully. Are you going to find someone, one of these days? he wanted to know. Tali lay down beside him, lit a cigarette, and offered him a drag. He smoked with eyes closed and face damp; he hadn’t dried his tears. No, she said, you’re my man. But I don’t have Rosario’s courage. There are things I wouldn’t do for you.

Juan crushed the cigarette in the ashtray on the bedside table and kissed Tali; behind the nicotine and lemon verbena, she tasted the salt of his tears and the chemical aftertaste of his medication. I’m going to find Gaspar, he said, and he left, barefoot and shirtless, mud still spattered on his legs. After a while Tali heard him talking to Gaspar near the bedroom window. They were still discussing the goddess of night and her twin sons death and sleep, so similar and so different.

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Tali moved over for Juan when he got into her bed that night. He’d left Gaspar asleep in the living room: the kid wanted to put the mattress there and not in a bedroom, and there was no point in arguing, he could sleep where he wanted. Juan had taken a bath, and he had that stand-offish air she knew well, so she didn’t touch him. Soon he was asleep, his back to her. In the semidarkness, she could see the scar that started at his ribs and ended on his back, the mark of one of his childhood operations. The first time she had seen him naked, she’d been so shocked by the scars that she’d almost rejected him; plus, she was older, what was she doing sleeping with a sick teenager? It had been at Puerto Reyes, in one of the mansion’s many guest bedrooms. Tali remembered that first time as a careful thing; he was a virgin, and though he was as hormone-charged as any boy his age, he kept a certain distance, as if he were capable of studying the situation and avoiding adolescent nerves. And, in a way, he was. It was the illness, he’d explained to her later. Each thing he did was a negotiation, a calculation. As if he were tasked with carrying and caring for a delicate crystal treasure that he could never set aside, not even in a safe place, and that had to be moved gingerly so as not to damage or break it. He had to think out every movement in advance, always tiptoeing, always wondering if this jolt would bring the disaster, ...