Is she going to take him away? I asked, and my grandfather’s reaction was surprising. He grabbed me by the shoulders and I saw that his eyes were different, jumpy, as if he thought someone was after him. No, he told me. They’re not going to take him. He came to us. He sought us out. He could have died as a baby but he held on. We waited for him and he came through. Then he started to mumble without much coherence, saying what an honor, the doorway was here, it’s here, where could they take him? I didn’t want to be there with him anymore and I ran to the catwalk. I wasn’t so sure. If they take him, I’m going too, I thought. They’re never going to separate us, Grandfather just said so. The men wouldn’t have found him. Without me, I thought, the medium wouldn’t have appeared.

2

I vomited during the whole flight. The stewardesses thought I was nervous or sick: they kept bringing me bags, napkins, even a towel. They gave me a new seat away from the annoyed, disgusted passenger next to me: I was flying first class and there were several empty spots. The plane shook and the turbulence was constant, but that didn’t matter to me one bit; I wasn’t afraid like the other passengers. Going to study and live in England, leaving Juan for several years—it was the most decisive thing I’d done in my life, and although I was sure about it, I couldn’t stop going back over the goodbye, which had been long and desperate and furious. Juan did everything he could to keep me from going. He swore that he would kill himself if I left him. That he wouldn’t summon in another Ceremonial. That he would never speak to me again. Every time, I stood listening with my arms crossed in the living room of my uncle’s apartment, and every night I let him kiss me soaked in tears, and I always repeated the same thing: I needed to be far away from him, I needed to be someone without him. I had thought it out very well. He had someone who would be with him in the Ceremonial: Stephen, Florence’s eldest son. He could replace me in my ritual duties for a time. I didn’t want to throw myself into an existence dedicated to Juan without first learning what life was like without that obsessive and devotional bond. I was exhausted in every possible way, and scared, because I realized that he and I were going to be together, we were going to be a couple, the Order’s heirs, and I wanted to flee from that certainty. I felt as though if I didn’t make the most of the time, my whole life was going to consist of being his companion. That made him furious: what was wrong with that? He needed my company, he had revealed himself to me because I had to be his companion, and we were in love, something he repeated without knowing what he was saying, because he was only fifteen years old and he had never known another girl, he’d never even liked anyone else, and I didn’t want that for him or for me. I didn’t know if my departure was going to fix things, but my presence certainly wasn’t helping. You can visit me, I told him, which was cruel, because he wasn’t allowed to fly, at least for the moment: his heart was decompensated and would soon have to undergo another operation. In our arguments he also blamed me for his relapse, and I suppose he was right. Between the Ceremonials, which were fairly frequent, four per year at that time, and the anxiety, the symptoms of his heart failure had worsened. Despite his weakness and deterioration, I thought he would be capable of hitting me in one of those arguments. He was so tall and crushing in size and I was so small and clumsy; he desired me with all the rage of a teenager and all the arrogance of a demigod. Only once did he not want to let go of me after our kisses, and I had to shove him brutally, get him off me and accuse him of being a violent, macho idiot. You can abuse your power with everyone else, I shouted at him, but not with me. He spent the night on the other side of my bedroom door, begging forgiveness. That’s what any violent man does, I told him—beg forgiveness. That was the only thing, in our whole awful goodbye, that did any good.