He stood up. Juan’s body, thin and tall, was surrounded by what looked like insects, lots of beetles or black butterflies, buzzing, darker than the darkness of the jungle. He did something very simple when the blackness started to surround him: he reached out his arms and brought his hands together, palm against palm at the height of his chest, as if he were about to dive into the water. The silence was absolute: Osman was still, and there wasn’t an insect, not a leaf or the wind or the distant river, nothing, just the silence and that dark blur that silhouetted Juan, a line of shadow around him, and it all let me know that something was changing and the change was terrible and wonderful.

His body was alone and floating in the blackness, and then I stepped backward, because I knew the Darkness could leap, cut, wound.

Just then the men arrived with the heat of their breath and the flare of their lights. My grandfather raised his kerosene lamp and we saw that the Darkness covered the trees like a heavy, impenetrable curtain. He fell to his knees and backed up, like a Christian pilgrim. The silence was broken by the noise of the Darkness, which was marine and voracious, the sound of water. It didn’t have an odor. I never did smell it. Some people smell decomposition; others, freshness. It’s different for everyone. My father’s mouth hung open like an idiot’s, but my uncle was crying and he rushed toward Juan, he lunged at him with his arms extended, he cried out, I don’t remember what he said or I didn’t understand it; my grandfather tried to stop him and he did, but not before Jorge’s left hand touched the open Darkness. Then he fell to the ground, his hand bloody: several fingers were gone. He was screaming, but we ignored him. We were looking at Juan, whose head was hanging down, his hair over his face, and he looked dead. He hung suspended for a few more seconds until the Darkness seemed to reenter his body. (I still believe that’s what happens: he takes out the Darkness and then recovers it.) When he raised his head, I didn’t recognize his eyes. They still weren’t his. He walked upright and sure out of the clearing in the trees, and the shadow followed him, surrounding him like smoke, and he knelt down beside my uncle, who stopped howling when he saw him. Juan touched the wound with his enormous hands and it was cauterized. But first, blood spattered his naked body.