I didn’t like arguing, but if it wasn’t with him, I didn’t have anyone to talk to about my son and what awaited him. Before he was born, I wanted the unlikely to happen: for him to inherit his father’s abilities. I really believed it could happen, and that Gaspar would be a different kind of medium. I had conceived him on the correct date and under the correct signs. Juan hadn’t opposed it, at least not actively. My pregnancy was incredibly easy. I only had nausea and discomfort during the first month. After that, it was as if I’d been injected with light. I worked every day; I was so full of energy. Ideas, writing, interviews in the jungle, even fights with my father over the yerba fields. Along with Tali and Betty, who was totally dedicated to politics and sometimes visited us—her partner Eduardo was a leftist militant who felt enormous contempt for our family—we had practically forced the yerbatal to formalize its workers. They earned a pittance now, but at least they earned something. And that’s how it was every day, from then on: I didn’t even feel tired, just ferociously hungry. I was fat and I cried about being fat, which made Juan laugh. But I was never unhappy: my excitement wouldn’t allow it.

Juan smoked now. It made my uncle desperate, but no one could convince him to change any of his habits. He smoked more when we had our shouting matches. The Darkness had dictated the way to preserve consciousness: we had to transfer it from one body to another. Transmigrate, they would call it in other traditions. I called it occupation, because that’s what it was: stealing a body. It was a repulsive method, because it meant hijacking another life and another identity. What they didn’t know yet were the details of the method: who would be the receivers of consciousness? Could they be chosen or did they have to be marked, or discovered? The Darkness still had to dictate the steps that must be followed, and, as usual, it was hermetic and capricious. According to Juan, there was nothing true in the dictates: the Order would never achieve the transfer of consciousness because it was interpreting the words badly, or making them up, imagining things. The arguments started because I didn’t agree with him on that. I didn’t distrust the dictates like he did, or like Laura had. I believed. Didn’t the Darkness emerge from Juan, didn’t it cut and wound? Didn’t his hands turn into claws—and wasn’t that impossible, too? The difference of opinion, though, didn’t come between us. We spent nights awake, talking, and none of our fights were wholly bitter, even if they ended in slamming doors and shouting. Certainty was impossible and disbelief was impossible, because there was physical proof. It was impossible to trust, because everything was blurry. And there we were, in a place that seemed like the end of the world, full of secrets and doubts.