Despite the tragedy of the caged ones, now that we were together we could have fun: we were young. In the afternoon we played with the colored panes of the window in the entrance hall. A blue hand, a green eye, a yellow foot. We moved so the light would paint us. Many years later I remembered those games when I moved my hands and the LSD made a rainbow between my fingers.

In Buenos Aires, when I got back, my mother screamed: if that fucking kid doesn’t make himself useful soon, I’m kicking him on to the street. I told her she’d have to throw us both out and she hit me on the back with her cane. I had trouble breathing for days. It was possible she cracked a rib, but she forbade my uncle from taking X-rays. That same night I went down the stairs, and from then on, I lived in the apartment with Juan and Jorge. And although later we spent some years apart, really, we never left each other’s side again.

I would like to say that I fell in love with Juan before any other man, that I loved him from childhood, but the truth is that my first love was George Mathers, the man who found the medium Olanna. I even had his photograph, and I kept it in my little-girl’s purse: I’d asked Florence for it once, and she sent me a copy from London by mail. George Mathers had the face of a romantic hero, with high cheekbones and round, guileless eyes; his hard, hominid jaw made him look strong and virile. He was perfect.

Florence was the Order’s current leader, and George Mathers had been her great-uncle. He found Olanna when the National African Company, where he worked, established itself in Ibadan, a British protectorate that in the future would be Nigeria. His whole story is told in detail in his diaries: I saw the originals when I went to London, with their beautiful pencil drawings preserved by the Order’s conservation experts, but when I was little, I read the facsimile edition that all Initiates receive. It was my favorite book. George loved the region, the beauty of the tall, thin natives, the white clothes, the forest, and even the food, which the other British people hated. He was the one who communicated the most and the best with the natives, and soon he was chosen to negotiate with the chiefs. In a few months he was receiving invitations to banquets and witnessing local dances. He was interested in the native rites and religion; he saw something profound in their sophisticated simplicity, something that from England and its salons, where the Order’s members wore tunics and used swords and flasks, was unimaginable.