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

“That is very generous of you, señora,” the young nun said haltingly. “Beyond generous, even. Pardon my impertinence, but wouldn’t it best for you to discuss this intention with Senator San Martín first, only to ensure that he is of the same mind? I’d be happy to return with Fernando tomorrow or at your earliest—”

“That will not be necessary,” María Luisa said, with an imperiousness which brooked no further question.

After escorting the nun back

Fernando’s golden days with Carmencita were few and far between. Golden or not, his days with her were altogether numbered. He was eight years old when she died. Had she not been the type to leave him to his own devices for long stretches at a time, he might have worried at her being gone from the apartment for a day and a night together. As it was, he was merely puzzled when the policía showed up at the door, to tell him that his missing mother had been found drowned to death and washed-up

If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.

—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

I

Fernando was a bastard, but a lucky one. His father’s name was Juan Francisco Aurelio de San Martín,