Sandy had been crazy about Ossie Clark’s chiffon pants for years, but that was never my style, so I let her try on clothes while I waited. Everything looked good on her. I had to be more careful. I loved the fabrics of Ken Scott, an Italy-based designer I’d met on a quick trip to Rome with Stephen: Lucie took photos of me in a dress of his printed with owl faces, so psychedelic my friends would often ask me to put it on and dance when they were on strong acid. I’d seen a marvelous dress near our house, at the Fulham Road Clothes Shop; black, long, and ample, made of silk and wool, with a V-neck hung with a fringe that had red, yellow, and green beads. It was a little like a tunic, a little ceremonial, a little African. It would be perfect with some high Biba boots made of green suede. I didn’t need anything else. Going to Biba, in Kensington, always gave me a euphoric joy: it was a dark place with a tenuous, golden luminescence, and there were mirrors and peacock feathers in every corner. Their models would swan around the rooms: Biba’s owner herself said they had suffered from malnutrition in the postwar period, and that’s why they were beautiful and thin now. I had been raised as a millionaire in South America, all protein and milk products, and I didn’t look like those kids who wandered around the store and sometimes chatted up the actors and other celebrities. The gossip in those days was that Anita Pallenberg, Keith Richards’s partner—at the time: she’d been Brian Jones’s girlfriend before, and she was so beautiful I didn’t like to look at her—had a Hand of Glory. I don’t know what the girls who chattered about that really understood: all they knew was that it had something to do with black magic. I was dying to have one myself, and I’d asked Laura for one many times; the Order kept theirs in the library, near George Mathers’ statuette of the African god. They used them regularly, though they were precious relics: the left hand of a hanged man that was cut from the cadaver while it was still strung up. The hand was then treated with wax to turn it into a candle. How could Anita have one? She had no ties to the Order, though she did flirt with occultists, like all the rich kids in London. A Hand of Glory, used correctly, could achieve many things: I was most interested in its ability to open doors. Juan and I had already spoken several times about his discovery, about that door he’d found that he could open. I didn’t go in, he said, because the air in the passageway seemed foul and I didn’t feel good. When I get better, he told me, we have to find those passages. I kissed him: his lips were no longer cracked, though his nose still bled sometimes because the plastic tubes had injured the delicate mucous membranes. He’d had a birthday in the hospital, while he was semiconscious and in pain. All my energy, at that time, was directed toward getting him to be able to stay with me, with us, to share our life. I was sure it was possible.