Some of their testimonies were hard to believe, even if in their country it seemed anything was possible. Many of the men were demobilized and reintegrated paras and guerrilleros with telltale awkwardness, agitation as if at any moment they might detonate. They never said so explicitly, but one could tell by their testimonies, which included hazing bordering on torture or being made to transport weapons and survey landmines; a life of discipline with comrades who replaced their families. Drugs and alcohol only came when they rejoined society, where they were shunned and their combat skills proved useless. In their old lives some might have been enemies—and often they were still hunted over old battle scores—but at the meetings, they assumed the tacit pledge to support one another’s sobriety and anonymity.

The antidote to disgrace, according to even the atheists in the group, was humility and prayer. Mauro followed their instructions because they’d kept him clean for nearing a decade. But one day, when another addict started talking about the devil as some grand puppeteer, Mauro remembered when Perla warned him, as she was just starting to let him walk through her front door after years of trying, not to bring any dark energies with him because she’d already gone through the trouble of having the house cleansed of bad spirits. Perla wasn’t worried about evil getting her at that late stage in her life; she’d done it, she said, to protect her grandchild.

When Perla became sick and Mauro moved into the house with her and Talia, when the old woman started talking to him like he could be her son for the first time in both their lives, Mauro asked her as they sipped tintos at the kitchen table if she’d been serious about the cleansing or if it was just a story to keep him in line. Perla had trouble breathing, but she often refused to use her oxygen. Not around Talia because she knew it upset her, but at night after the little girl had gone to sleep, when she and Mauro stayed up talking, she removed the tubes from her nose and pushed the barrel on wheels away from her side. “A lifetime at this altitude and now the air is too thin for me,” she said. “What gives you life eventually takes it.”

Mauro pressed Perla until she admitted that some years before, inexplicable things began happening around the house. During the brightest afternoon hours, the upstairs room, usually the most temperate, felt like an icebox. The water for the lavandería clotted with mire. She’d blamed the old plumbing and the unseasonal chill of winds blowing off the cordillera, but then things started falling from the walls—paintings, photographs—when no earthquakes had been reported. She found a basket of rusty razors on the doorstep, and Talia, who’d barely begun to speak sentences, told her abuela she saw silhouettes in her bedroom and felt them perch on the edge of her bed at night after she’d been tucked in for sleep. Perla called a nun she’d known since childhood, and the sister said the basket of razors was a clear sign of maleficio.