The oil lamp burned with a minimal heart on the window ledge, barely breathing its glow onto the fogged glass, while the fields beyond, beneath the mist of London, looked like a sheet stretched between worlds, it was not yet night but no longer day, that hour when contours dissolve and everything takes on the thickness, whether of dream or of memory, and there, seated in the wicker chair that had belonged to my mother, my feet still soiled with the street’s mud and my hands trembling with a sting that owed nothing to the cold, I understood that the body does not belong to us, not even when it suffers; then I heard, in the whisper of the wind slipping through the crack, the breath of something else, and I knew I was not alone. There was a dampness that came not from the rain but from something more intimate and corrupt, as though the house itself exhaled from its fissures the breath of all its dead.
The Order insists it is a calling, but no one chooses to be a medium, just as one does not choose the father who poisons you with the inheritance of his visions nor escapes the design inscribed in blood like an invisible tattoo that burns at the contact with darkness, in those hesitations I remembered Rosario beneath the bridge, her hands tied with a red thread no one had taught her to fear, her mouth full of words in a language older than fire; and I saw David at the far end of the hall of mirrors, his shadow multiplying like an inverted flower, his ambiguous voice tearing at the walls of memory with a sweetness that hurt. She danced for him without knowing she was already losing her name, like so many before, like I do now, because the body offers itself first with desire, then with faith, finally with weariness, and that is the sequence of all true sacrifice, when flesh begins to loosen from time, one no longer distinguishes between vision and fever, between father and son, between love and possession, so I stopped writing with my right hand, which no longer obeys me, and began to use the left, still clumsy, like a child learning to lie for the first time.
At the last ceremony, the offering trembled like a fawn before the first shot, yet did not scream, which was more disturbing than any howl; the darkness revealed itself without haste, as though it played at appearing human, and at its touch it made him beautiful for a moment, only to then decompose him into shapes no painter could copy without going mad. That last ceremony, I ponder… sometimes I believe God does not exist, but the darkness does, because I have seen it watch me from the bottom of a page, from the lidless eye of a severed head, from the mirror of water into which ancient cities sink; I have also felt it lick my spine with a gesture almost maternal. I wonder if Gaspar, still so small, will know how to recognize that caress when his time comes, if he will know how to resist without breaking inside as I did… I held him in my arms last night and noticed his pulse was identical to mine in childhood, as though the darkness already pulsed within him, asking passage, patient… there is no legacy more faithful than pain passed on with tenderness.
It has been said there are rituals to open portals but no word of those that close them, for no one teaches how to return from the abyss with one’s bones intact, and yet I write as though each word were a threshold, a plank rescued from the wreck to build a boat that will not float, only remember. I would speak of London in the happy years, when the streets smelled of tar and magnolia, when music still had the power to halt time in youthful glances, but even then, within the folds of psychedelic shirts, the seed of disappearance had already taken root, because all beauty bears within it the promise of its own decay, like youth, like the body, like David’s voice that still resonates in my ears deformed by the years, sharp as a bell in an abandoned church; and in my most recent dream, I walked through the damp passageways of the family estate, and turning a corner I saw a childlike figure tearing out its eyelids, one by one, petals from a wilted flower. I woke with the certainty that Gaspar will not be my reflection, I will not repeat the ancestral gesture of sacrifice, I will teach him not to look, not to obey, not to pray.
Outside the wind has changed direction and brings with it a metallic scent, like dried blood or old iron; it is January, yet certain plants bloom that should not, as though the earth itself were preparing for another kind of birth, so I leave this letter unsigned, without address, without recipient. It is neither a testament nor a confession, only a record of the fissure through which the music of the world still filters, that broken yet insistent music that reminds us we have lived, and that it is still possible, for the briefest instant, to live without being devoured.
May silence preserve what has not been spoken and may forgetting, if it comes, do so with mercy, so here I take my leave, not in departure, but ceasing to wait for an answer.
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