The first notebook begins in the Central Visayas, on an island that people in Cebu warned him not to go to.
That detail is the one Christian Anjos returns to obsessively in his early pages — not the island itself but the refusal. He had hired three fixers before he found one who would board the ferry with him. The others made excuses about family, about work, about the crossing. He wrote it down as evidence. They believe, he underlined. Which means there is something to believe in.
He was thirty-four, a photographer with two published books and a third that had not sold, and he had come to Siquijor because it is known throughout the Philippines as a place of mangkukulam — practitioners of kulam, a form of Filipino witchcraft. He had read that they cast spells and incantations to bring harm. He had read less carefully the part about what else they do: sell love potions, sell remedies, sell justice to people who have been wronged and have no other court to bring it to.
What he found in his first week disappointed him, and the disappointment is legible in his handwriting, which gets smaller and angrier.
He photographed a folk healer burning charcoal with healing plants, the smoke folded into a cloth and held against a woman’s arm — the tu-ob, a medicinal ritual, performed by a woman whose mother and grandmother and great-grandmother had performed it before her. He photographed altars. And on nearly every altar he found a crucifix, candles, a saint’s picture curling in the humidity. The sorcerers prayed before they worked. They lit candles to the church’s God and then turned to the older business at hand.
Anjos hated this. He wrote that it was contamination. He wrote that he had come a very long way for something pure.
It is the first sign, reading it now, that he had misunderstood the assignment so completely that no correction was ever going to reach him.
On the eleventh day he found a man who would let him photograph a skull. It sat in a shallow wooden box, and the man rested both palms on it while he spoke the words he used to lay a curse on people. Anjos made forty exposures. Afterwards he asked — through the fixer, who did not want to translate it — whether the man would teach him the words.
The answer, recorded in the notebook without any apparent understanding of what it meant, was: He says you are not owed anything here.
He was in Haiti by Easter, which is not a coincidence; anyone can look up when the festival at Souvenance falls.
Vodou is an official religion of Haiti. More than eight million people practise it. It developed between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries out of the African diaspora, and it rests on the understanding that everything is spirit, and that human beings exist to serve those spirits through devotional rites and prayer. During the rituals, people are mounted by the spirits — they enter trance, they eat and drink, they dance, they divine, they perform cures.
Anjos wrote none of this down in his own words. He copied it, almost verbatim, from a guidebook, and then he wrote underneath it:
So it can be entered.
That is the whole sentence. There is nothing after it for two pages.
The people he met in Haiti were, by his own account, generous with him. He was fed. He was allowed to photograph the drumming, which he described as the most alive sound he had ever stood inside of. A woman named in the notebook only as Ma D. told him — and he recorded this in full, which suggests it stung — that he was welcome to watch for as long as he liked, and that watching was all he would ever be doing, because service is not a thing you visit. You serve for years. You serve when there is nothing in it for you. The spirits know the difference between a servant and a tourist, she said, and so does everybody in this yard.
He asked her whether there was a shorter way.
She laughed at him. He wrote that she laughed at him. He wrote it three times on the same page, in three different sizes.
The last notebook is the thin one, and it is mostly lists.
He had gone to the outskirts of Bucharest, where a well-known coven of Roma witches lives and works — women who exist at the margin of European society and make a living performing rituals for clients who want money, or love, or a sufficient punishment for someone who has wronged them. He had read about the colours. Every kind of spell has its palette, and he had copied the scheme down neatly, like a man memorising a recipe:
Red for love. Yellow for abundance and richness. White for blessing. Black for the powerful black magic rituals.
Underneath, he had written: Black. Obviously black.
The women would not work for him. This is the part of the notebook that reads, finally, like fear. He offered money and was refused. He offered more and was refused again, and one of the older women — he does not name her — told him something he transcribed carefully, because by then he had begun to suspect he was being told the truth:
That none of the recipes are written down. That they are not in any book, anywhere, and never have been; they pass from a mother’s mouth to a daughter’s ear and nowhere else. That a thing which lives only in people can only be given, never taken. And that a man who tries to take it is not stealing power. He is only proving that he has no one to give him anything.
The last dated entry is four lines long.
They think I need permission. I don’t need permission, I need the words, and I have the words from three countries now. I have written them all down in one place. Tonight I’m going to say them in the order I’ve arranged them.
I’ve paid for this in years.
Nobody has ever asked what I would be willing to give.
Let’s see who’s listening.
Here is what can be established, as opposed to what has been said.
Christian Anjos rented a flat in Sector 5 and paid two months in advance. He was last seen buying candles at a shop that sells candles to everyone, for everything, all year round. His cameras were in the flat. His passport was in the flat. His notebooks were stacked on the table in the order he had filled them, first to last, which is the tidiest thing he had done in three years.
The floor had been swept. There were no marks on it. Whatever people have since claimed to have found there — a circle, a black smear, a smell — was invented later by people who wanted the story to have a better ending than it has.