“What a stupid day that was, for us at least. Your father tricked us. Did he erase your memory, is that why you remember nothing? Or does that mark on your arm also give you amnesia? It’s a very good mark, I’m surprised. You know that’s why he cut you, I suppose. To keep you away from us. Well: we carried out the transfer of your father into your body at the Chascomús house. That place is very special to me because it belongs to my mother’s family, not like this jungle monstrosity my father liked, and my husband when he had some brains left, and everyone else. There is nothing like the emptiness of the pampa. I’m getting distracted. I’m old, I need a new body, now. It’s my right and you’re going to give it to me. We brought you both out there to Chascomús. There is something you need to know about the Rite. We have achieved the transfer of consciousness many times; what we cannot yet do is keep it in the new body. That’s why we believed your father.”

Gaspar listened to her closely. She was talking about the accident at Chascomús, the time he had woken up wounded, in an unfamiliar bed, with the horrible certainty that his father had hurt him. He remembered his twisted ankle, the blow to the head that had supposedly caused his epilepsy, that lazy summer beside the pool with Tali and Esteban.

“The Rite requires preparations I don’t need to go into here, and in any case your father didn’t need to perform them because he was an extraordinary medium. We put the two of you on altars. And he was able to transfer his consciousness into your body. Oh, it was marvelous! Remember, Flo? We stood in a circle around you, it was sacred. Your body’s eyes opened and it was Juan who looked out. But then came the resistance. The receiving body always resists. Never, however, have I seen resistance like that. I don’t know about the rest of you.”

Florence said she had attended all the Rites and, truthfully, she couldn’t remember any other resistance being as violent. They described it: when he opened his eyes and everyone saw Juan’s gaze, he had tried to run away. The Recipient cannot be tied down during the Rite. We think that is foolish, but unlike Juan, we follow the rules of the Darkness as they are dictated, because whenever we haven’t, oh, what disasters, right, Esteban? You were there for some of them. They’re like abortions. That’s what Florence always says.

“Like losing a child,” Florence said, in English.