My mother had gone to that shack to perform the rituals that enabled her to get rid of Juan’s mother and Leandra. There are other ways of getting rid of enemies that don’t involve the Darkness. More classical, less exhausting methods that everyone in the Order knows. But she prefers this. The caged ones, some of them, in the trance of their suffering, manage to make the god appear, and then you have to make your request. The apparition is brief, but pleading with it works. Of course, it’s not just about keeping the prisoners locked up, it’s also necessary to practice invocations I had refused to learn; hence this punishment. I know them now, but I don’t perform them. My grandfather and some older members believe it’s not exactly the Darkness that comes, but a figment that resembles it, a shadow, though sometimes it turns an entire room black. It’s not the same indomitable Darkness that the medium summons, the one that speaks and cuts and takes. It’s a copy, the other side of the mirror: it’s false. But it’s very effective in destroying, inexorable and pitiless. In Misiones, my father’s yerbatera company had competition, another very rich family who cultivated tea as well as yerba. There wasn’t room for two. My mother asked the Darkness to get rid of them. The other yerbatera family had a beautiful house, with white neoclassical columns, beside a lake: we went to see it once the destruction was complete. The sky was pink and the palm trees cast long shadows on the water. We didn’t keep the house: when something is touched by that kind of affliction, it’s better to abandon it. The eldest son, who would inherit everything, drowned himself in the lake in front of his jungle palace.

I watched Juan arrive from my bedroom window in Chascomús. My uncle and grandfather had brought him. It was close to Buenos Aires, so they were letting him make the trip. I was eleven that summer, and he was eight. He got out of the car and climbed the stairs slowly; he did everything slowly when he was little. He later changed completely in that respect. I sat on the bed and waited for him. From the doorway he said: I’m not going to leave you alone. I started to cry and reached out my hands, asked him to come in. He rested his head on my bare knees so I would caress his hair. We cried together. He knew about the caged ones. My mother told him, though there was no need to, of course, she just wanted to scare him. After that we did the job together. My uncle stayed to take care of Juan, and Juan went with me every day to the shack. It was easier with him because he could find his way in the dark, and he led me by the hand to each cage. None of them died while he was there.