Our families are joined by history and by a friendship that has lasted hundreds of years, but hers is the one that leads the Order. I’ve asked my grandfather many times why that privilege is hers. According to him, in Europe they were much more consistent with the Cult of the Shadow than we were. Plus, Argentina is very far. Far from what? I asked. It’s the ass-end of the world, he’d reply. We can’t participate in the organization the same way they can. Still, at crucial moments, there has always been a Bradford present. We are important, though secondary at times. Money is a country where some cities are more prosperous than others, but they are all rich, he told me.

What I learned over the years is that the nation of affluence is monotonous. The properties, the land, the companies that others manage for us, the old, dark houses and the new, luminous ones, the leathery skin of women who spend summers in the south of France or Spain or Italy, the silver, the Gobelins tapestries, the paintings, the art collections, the gardens, the people who work for us about whom we know nothing. Doesn’t matter if it’s Buenos Aires or London. It doesn’t matter either that our families are founders of the Order. Being rich makes us like all rich people. Being founders of the Order differentiates us from the whole world.

It was my grandfather who told me the story of the Order. The descendants of the original families are called blood children, and we all learned our history thanks to the stories of the elders. My grandfather, Santiago Bradford, sat us down—me and my cousin Betty, his two granddaughters—in the yard at Puerto Reyes. Of all our properties that’s my favorite, my beloved house in Misiones, uncomfortable and hot and absolutely beautiful. It’s the house my mother hates, because she hates everything beautiful and wants to destroy it; that is her true faith and her nature.