According to Tiberio, Ancestral Knowledge said the jaguar was the original divine possessor of fire and tools for hunting, but the animal took pity on man when he stumbled upon him in the rain forest, wet, cold, and starving, and shared with the hairless two-legged creature its secrets for survival. Man repaid the jaguar by stealing its fire and hunting weapons so that the animal now depended solely on its physical strength and cunning. For this reason, the jaguar waited forever for a chance at revenge.

Tiberio had once seen a wild jaguar when his battalion was sent to patrol the Urabá coast, where mangroves met jungle. As one of the soldiers napped beneath a mango tree, a jaguar leaped from the brush to attack. They wondered: Did the animal know its prey was human? The soldier resisted, the jaguar disappeared into the forest, and the locals told him surviving a jaguar attack made him a magic man.

Mauro thought of this when he went back to Wilfreda’s house that night as rain pecked the roof, and on many nights thereafter when, after years in the sabana, his mother let him return home. Though at fourteen, he looked even more like the man who’d caused her so much anguish, so she banished him again and, as he roamed public parks, struggling to catch sleep under the open sky, he considered how surviving a creature of sacred ferocity was enough to make a person holy.

Mauro went to live with different neighbors until each tired of him. He slept in empty lots and alleys, tunnels and caños, sometimes with other street kids who existed in a bazuco stupor until he met a mugger named Jairo who worked the streets of El Centro. Jairo took pity on Mauro and let him stay with his family in Ciudad Bolívar, the settlement built into cliffs on the southern cerros overlooking the city plateau, where rain turned dirt roads into gushing streams.

With his profits from robbing pedestrians and businessmen, Jairo had been able to move his family from a shack on the upper ridge to a house with brick walls and electricity on the lower edges. Mauro only entered or left the area in Jairo’s company because the local pandilleros came after anyone they believed invading their turf. Everyone respected Jairo because he’d survived the police, who suspected he was in one of the barrio gangs when they captured him. They locked him in a room, stripped and beat him, pinched him with pliers, played at suffocating him with a plastic bag until he fainted. This went on for days, all to get Jairo to give up the names of gang leaders and their hideout locations. Jairo told the police nothing and eventually was released. Those were years when hundreds of teenage boys were murdered on the hills, victims of paramilitary hit men dressed as civilians, vigilante militias carrying out mass murders in the name of social cleansing. People said police only appeared on the bluffs to log the dead.