The Power of Five Oblivion

beating at the same pace as hers. The two of them had become one. The young woman’s illness was sharing itself with him.
    “Pedro!” It was Carla Rivera, calling him from downstairs.
    Pedro opened his eyes. He had done everything he could and he knew that it would be enough. Already there was more colour in the young woman’s face. She was breathing more easily. He had no idea at all what had been wrong with her in the first place. Pedro had barely been to school. He couldn’t read or write. People were sick or people were well … that was as much as he knew and all that mattered to him was that he could turn one into the other.
    He left the room, closing the door behind him, and went downstairs. Carla was waiting for him in the hall and it seemed to Pedro that something had upset her. She smiled when she saw him in his new clothes, but the strain still showed behind her eyes.
    “How are you feeling, Pedro?” she asked.
    “I’m much better, thank you. And thank you for these clothes.”
    “I went out and bought them for you. I didn’t know if I would get the right size.” She smiled, but a little nervously. “Silvio is here. I have told him about you. He wants to meet you.”
    “OK.”
    Pedro followed Carla back into the kitchen, where a man in his mid-thirties was sitting at the table with a mug of hot liquid; judging from the smell of it, some sort of herbal tea. He was wearing a dark suit and a black shirt with a clerical collar – Carla had already told him that her son was a priest. His hair was thick and wavy but it was turning grey. He had a face that looked tired and lined, and the eyes of a man who spent too much time thinking about things but never found a happy answer. The two of them did not look like each other, Pedro thought. There was nothing at all, not even the way they sat, that suggested a mother and son.
    “Good evening, Pedro,” the man said. He also spoke Spanish.
    “Good evening, sir.”
    “Please come and sit down. And you can call me Silvio. Would you like some tea?”
    “Yes, please.”
    Silvio nodded slightly and Carla went over to the kettle. “You may be wondering how it is that we speak your language,” he went on, “My mother and I lived for many years in the city of Barcelona when I was choirmaster at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia. That is why we are both fluent in Spanish. But that is not where you come from…”
    “I am from Lima.”
    “When did you come to Italy?”
    “A few weeks ago.”
    The priest nodded very slightly as if Pedro had just told him a lie, that he knew it was a lie, but was prepared to accept it anyway. “You flew?”
    There was no point in lying. Pedro made the decision even as he began to speak. “No. I was in Hong Kong. I came through a door. It brought me to a church but I don’t know where that was. I was taken prisoner and locked up in a place called Castel Nuovo in Naples.” He hadn’t said anything about Scott. Pedro didn’t want to think about him.
    “That is what Emmanuel told me,” Carla muttered. She had made a second mug of tea and set it down in front of Pedro.
    The priest nodded again, but this time there was a crease of annoyance across his brow. “Are you saying to me, Pedro, that you entered a door in one city and came out of another door here?”
    “Yes.”
    “You know what you are telling me is impossible?”
    “I am answering your questions, Signor Rivera. I am telling you what happened.”
    “Describe the door to me.”
    “I can’t really. I only saw it for a moment. There was a typhoon in Hong Kong. The temple was being destroyed…”
    “The door was in a temple?”
    “All the doors are in sacred places. There was another one in Coricancha, which is where the Incas worship, in Cuzco.”
    “There are no Incas any more, my child. And when they did exist, they had no true religion. They were pagans.”
    Pedro knew full well that the descendants of the Incas had survived to the twenty-first century. He was one of them. And as to their religion, he had personally seen one of their most sacred objects, a gold disc with a portrait of Manco Cápac, son of the sun god, Inti. The face that he had been shown looked remarkably like his own. Nonetheless, he thought it better not to argue with what the priest had just said. “The doors all look the same,” he went on. They’re quite small, made of wood.” Pedro thought for a moment and suddenly remembered. “They have a star printed