I followed him as he walked the length of the longhouse to the opposite end. “The shaman?”

“Yeah, she lives past those manioc fields, a little ways into the jungle.”

“All by herself?”

He nodded. “She’s Tatinga, but a long time ago she married an Ayachero man who brought her here and left her. Just took off for La Paz. But the Tatinga think of you as dead if you leave the tribe. So she couldn’t go back, even though she was their most powerful shaman.”

“Can’t she live in the village?”

He shrugged. “The villagers are stubborn, too.” He lowered his voice. “They feel superior to the tribes. I think they’re afraid of her.”

“Are you afraid of her?”

“When she first came here, she was pretty angry about being cut off from both communities. Word was she did some nasty stuff to people, but nobody could prove it. People are suspicious, afraid, looking to blame someone for everything bad that happens. That’s the kind of thinking I didn’t miss in Cochabamba, I have to tell you.”

“But are you afraid of her?”

He shook his head no, but I wasn’t convinced. “I’d stay away from her, Lily.”

“I think I saw her this morning. Down at the beach. There was a family of people who looked like they had some bad disease.”

“She must be looking after the lepers.” He shook his head. “I know the Frannies wouldn’t do it. No one else would do it. They don’t really need that much help. They work the fields, get water, they can even fish. They just can’t hunt, so Beya helps them with their traps.”

“Son!” The middle-aged woman I’d seen embrace Panchito yesterday stepped up to Omar, hands on hips, long gray braids swinging behind her. She didn’t look at me. I expected her to throw her arms around her eldest and welcome him home, but all she said was, “Breakfast is ready.”

A corner of the main room was dedicated to cooking: ersatz pots and pans, blackened and misshapen, hung on hooks over tins of cheap cooking oil. Hovering over an oven topped by an iron grate, her face sweating with steam, she stirred a vat of long white vegetables: yucca, before sifting out a few pieces with a tin fork and sliding them on a cracked porcelain platter.

Omar took two plates and two tin forks from a wooden shelf resting on a row of nails jutting from the wall, and gestured for us to sit on a low bench.

“Lily, this is my mother, Doña Antonia.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” I said as humbly as I could manage.

She took a seat on a stool, eyes narrowing in her flat brown face, chin stubborn and set. I tried to put an age on her: forty-five, fifty, sixty? Impossible to tell. On the railing behind her, an orange-and-green toucan with a foot-long banana-colored beak flapped its wings and barked a few times. Its perfectly round black eye observed me. With a coughing sort of call, it flapped up and away, dipping with the weight of its beak before rallying skyward as it drifted over the huts.