Her life hadn’t been easy, but since they met he had a sense he might corrupt Elena with the pain of his past, so he hid it from her, providing only essential components, enough so she could feel she understood him though he kept so much more opaque. To start, she believed Mauro had been raised in La Candelaria when the truth was he lived with his mother farther south in El Pesebre, a few blocks from Avenida Caracas in a small green apartment block with a slanted metal roof.

His father left soon after he was born. Sometimes Mauro’s mother claimed abandonment. Other times she said she’d chased out her husband armed with scissors and a broom. He’d lost the family apartment in a card game, but she persuaded his opponent to forgive the debt. His mother had overlooked rumors that her husband had another woman and child in San Benito, but gambling away their home was too much to accept.

Mauro had his father’s face. Something his mother never let him forget. When he was mischievous she blamed his genetics with disgust—esos ojos mentirosos, esa quijada de salvaje—throwing shoes at his back, shaving his head to cull his inheritance of curls. She locked Mauro in the closet for hours. Sometimes all night. She withheld food when she didn’t want him in the house and brought men home who also felt free to push him around. People in the neighborhood called her la loca, but Mauro defended her the way he wished somebody would defend him.

The year Mauro turned ten was one of Colombia’s bloodiest. It was also the year his mother decided he wasn’t a good enough student to deserve to stay in school, what with the cost of uniforms and books, and sent him to live with her sister, Wilfreda, in the western sabana near Bojacá. To earn his keep, he was ordered to dig graves at a roadside cemetery with Wilfreda’s companion, a limping ex-soldier named Tiberio.

They started in the morning when it was still dark. Marking grave lines for the day’s freshly dead, stabbing soil with their shovels. Mauro hated his mother for shipping him off, forcing him into this kind of labor, but Tiberio explained it was safer out there in the sabana. He’d been in the army until discharged for a bullet in the thigh—a present from heaven, Tiberio proclaimed, otherwise he surely would have been killed in warfare like so many of his friends. “I used to be strong till they sent me to fight,” Tiberio said. “Now look at me, half crippled and bald as the moon.”

Tiberio also said most people only knew the Colombia of campo tears and urban shame, of funerals and outcry, of corruption and displacement. It was not the land the gods intended. The real Colombia, he insisted, was a thing of majesty beyond their valleys and cordilleras. There were jungles, snowcapped sierras, and black- and white-sand beaches on different ends of the country; rivers that nourished the Amazon, the life force of the Americas; cloud forests and altiplanos; the tabletop mountains of Chiribiquete, and La Guajira, where honeyed desert kissed the Caribbean Sea. Birds and beasts so powerful they could tatter this nation’s most treacherous men with their claws and teeth.