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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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