The old woman’s bony brown hand seized Fernando’s elbow like a claw. It was as if he’d been about to stroll blindly through the gates of hell, the way she was restraining him. If she wasn’t so clearly distraught, Fernando might have laughed at the absurdity of it. Instead, he kept his face calm and neutral.

“I’m just gathering palm fronds, Abuela.”

His grandmother slashed her chin so hard to one side Fernando wondered how her skinny neck didn’t crack. “You should not have

Since Fernando’s grandmother wasn’t keen on him doing her chores for her—and since it hadn’t proved a fruitful tactic in wheedling more information out of her—he took to working on her shack instead. She protested this as well, saying that everything was fine as it was. Fernando ignored this. He needed something to do with his time. And if tacking scrap boards and sheeting onto the walls might mean a few less critters crawling over him at night, then that was all the more incentive.

Fernando

One day Fernando rose well before the sun. In the premorning dark he went about fetching water from the well, milking the ornery old she-goat, and chopping and carrying in wood. At the first light of dawn, his grandmother stirred awake from her deep, death-like sleep, as though waking from a spell. Sitting on the edge of his cot, Fernando peeled and trimmed the last of the dried bulbs. His grandmother frowned at him. Peering around, she shook her shimmery head.

“What am I supposed to do with

Fernando rarely dreamed. Yet here in his grandmother’s jungle shanty, he dreamed without ceasing. Strange muddled half-dreams that felt to him like a delirium, a bizarre paroxysm in which he was paralyzed but still surreally aware. Visions came to him, elusive and chimerical and obscure. Visions of shifting shadows, of half-glimpsed monstrous forms. Voices spoke to him, sibilant and feminine. Voices unknown to his waking mind.

Once he woke to find his grandmother chanting over him. She had been

The old woman’s voice was harsh and low, as though she didn’t use it much. She hadn’t paused in her chopping up of the fibrous, milky mystery vegetable in the slightest. Fernando wondered when she’d last left this shack, or had last had company here, for that matter.

“I’m Carmencita’s son,” he said, “your grandson. I’ve come from Bogotá to see you.”

His grandmother set down her knife. She turned to face him. Fernando’s breath caught as she did. Her eyes glinted in the

After a few more meandering conversations, Fernando found himself standing before his grandmother’s home, a thatched-roof, dilapidated shack at the edge of the jungle. Little more than a dirt path had led up to it—a goat path, he saw now. In the bare earthen yard, a wiry, slack-teated nanny and her gaggle of skinny kids milled about, bleating as they grazed.

Around her bristly neck the nanny goat wore a dented little bell, which did not chime. The three kids each were painted so thickly with

The rest of Fernando’s journey proceeded without much incident. Having lived more or less on the streets as a boy, he knew to travel lightly and inconspicuously. He kept as little in the way of money or valuables on him as possible. Physically, he caught the eye. There was nothing he could do about that.

But he wore his oldest, shoddiest clothes. He didn’t wash much, let alone bother to shave. No one would have guessed he was the son of a wealthy aristocrat. He looked the part—and in some

II

It took Fernando the better part of a week to reach his mother’s hometown from Bogotá. Part of the reason for this delay was that on his first night away from the hacienda, Juan Francisco caught up with him in the town of Granada.

Flush with this small victory against his wife María Luisa—and flush already with drink—the senator proceeded to take Fernando out on the town in a whirlwind approximation of the revels he’d had planned for them. Only narrowly did Fernando avoid being cornered

It was safe to say that no one was more eagerly anticipating Fernando’s ascent to manhood than Juan Francisco. The summer before Fernando was slated to go abroad to university, the senator was walking on air.

For months he’d been planning a grand, bacchanal tour for the two of them and delighting himself with the fantasy of it—he and Fernando, a pair of boisterous Don Juans, roving about the countryside far away from María Luisa’s reproving eye. Horseback riding along the rivera where

Whatever the kindly nun’s reservations about Fernando’s adoption, they were ultimately assuaged. If not by the evidence of him arriving with the family at Mass, well-groomed and well-fed and apparently well-satisfied with the arrangement, then surely by the generous offerings María Luisa made to the church. Fernando was, in fact, reasonably happy with his fortuitous change in circumstance. His earliest years had been so fraught that he probably would have been reasonably happy in almost any