It’s because of those words that we refer to those who bring the Darkness as mediums, though technically they should be called something else, maybe priests or shamans. That young man, like Juan, experienced a metamorphosis in his hands. Thomas Mathers described claws like a cat’s. The boy spoke in the trance, pronouncing the words of the Darkness. That’s different now too: the Darkness speaks, but not in the medium’s voice.

Once, when Grandfather was telling us the story—he repeated it regularly, so we wouldn’t forget: he would even question us about the details—I asked him what the boy’s name was. I must have been eight years old. Grandfather had to admit they hadn’t recorded his name. The diaries just called him “the Scottish youth.” That is also what it is to be rich: that contempt for the beautiful and the refusal to even offer the dignity of a name.

The Scottish youth’s trances occurred almost daily and always in the field. He floated in a dark halo and spoke with his eyes closed. After two months he suffered, according to the doctor who attended him (and in the terminology of the period), an apoplexy. That is: a brain hemorrhage. He survived, but he had another attack days later from which he didn’t wake up, and he died without ever recovering consciousness. They had forced him to summon almost every day, sometimes twice a day. After one of the trances, the youth had threatened to kill them, and one night he managed to get out of the room and bite Thomas Mathers on the neck. He didn’t wound him seriously, though in those years before antibiotics, dental germs from a bite could be deadly. They tied him up. The restraints probably caused the clot that killed him. He hadn’t gone crazy, as the diary claimed: they had driven him mad. His words held instructions, very complex ones, on how to summon the Darkness without a medium. There were also other methods, brutal and dangerous ones, to ask for favors.

William Bradford’s sons emigrated to the Americas in search of better business opportunities. The one who settled in the United States had a press, like his father, and died young. The one who came to Argentina participated in the Conquest of the Desert and received government land in payment for his military action. The most fertile land in the world. That man, in addition to being a very efficient murderer of natives, was also a researcher of the occult, and he never tired of searching for the Darkness in the pampa. He didn’t find it, never learned to summon it, though he was capable of trying out the cruellest methods without remorse. He died screaming his failure at the Chascomús house, the same one where today we go to rest and ride horses.