For a while, Beatriz and I didn’t use the elevator and we met up on the stairs instead, our secret place. One night before dinner we were in the stairwell, and she asked me if I really believed in our grandfather’s stories and the Order. I remember her, with her small teeth and big nose, in possession of a truth she was about to throw in my face. It’s all rubbish. My dad told me so, and he doesn’t want me to listen to those stories anymore. The tears burned my eyes and I wanted to hit her, but instead I asked, why they would lie to us? The Englishwoman has them under her control, she replied. I don’t remember what she said after that, but it had to do with the business the two families shared. That was the night Beatriz announced they were moving to her father’s house in San Isidro. We don’t want to participate in this farce anymore, she insisted, a sentence she had taken word for word from her father, because she didn’t talk like that. Are they going to let you go? I asked. Why wouldn’t they? she replied, defiant. That was when I learned that it’s customary in the Order to let members leave without trying to retain them. My mother says they must be allowed to go because they always come back, they come crying back, all beaten down, because the Darkness is a god with claws that sniffs you out, the Darkness catches up with you, the Darkness will let you play, the way a cat lets go of its prey just to see how far it can get.

I still saw Beatriz, but only at school, which she lived close to now. Living in downtown Buenos Aires, I had to be driven there and back by the chauffeur. The same year Beatriz moved away from the building with her family, Uncle Jorge brought Juan to live with him. They didn’t have to tell me anything, but I was so curious and asked so many questions about the boy that they told me part of the truth. He’s your uncle’s patient, Jorge operated on him. He has a very serious cardiac deformation and his parents, who are very poor, can’t care for him. He’s going to live with Jorge. I was little, but I already knew that my family, especially my uncle, were incapable of such generosity. My grandfather added: It’s a case that could change Jorge’s career, because no one in the whole world has successfully carried out the surgeries that this child needs.

I wonder sometimes whether Jorge might have wanted to have a child, after all. I never knew him to have a woman, but he wasn’t homosexual, either; it’s clear he couldn’t reproduce. Families in the Order don’t have many children: it’s a punishment, I think, or a mark. What to do with the Order’s young people is a difficult question to answer precisely because of their scarcity. Training the young should be a priority, but since it’s also dangerous, why risk the future?