He patted the ground and said, “Sit.”

“I don’t want to sit, Paco, okay? There’s spiders in there and—”

“Sit!” he commanded.

So I sat down, very slowly and carefully. No spiders this time. Paco stepped behind me. Laying one hand on my shoulder as if to steady me, he reached up with the other to gather a section of my snarled, filthy hair. I closed my eyes and listened to the receding roars of the monkeys.

I didn’t have a clue then, but it wasn’t the pain of him wrestling out the knots in my rat’s-nest hair with the palm-frond comb that made me cry my fucking eyes out, it was the fact that someone was actually bothering to take care of me.

SIXTEEN

From where I hung like a fleshy chrysalis in my hammock, I woke to a little piglet screaming in my face. Her snout quivered and glistened; morning sun set her pink ears aglow. Suddenly she stopped and sat back on her ass, stumpy hind legs splayed out, front hooves planted into the soft wood, and stared at me agape, like I had been the one braying at her.

I reached out and scratched the top of her head. The hair was softer than I thought it would be, still tufty baby hair. She grunted and snuffled, her eyes squeezing shut in ridiculous pleasure. I took one of her front hooves with my other hand and held it for a second, shaking it like you would a dog’s; she seemed to like this, too, but soon she pulled away and moved her head under my hand, as if she preferred the scratching to anything else. I took one of her velvety ears between thumb and forefinger and leaned into it, whispering, “I’m going to call you Charlotte.” The pig’s name in the story was Wilbur, but this pig seemed much more like a Charlotte to me.

Around me drifted the soft sounds of people waking up, speaking in hushed tones, the dull scraping of utensils as breakfast was prepared. The pig and I held each other’s gaze. I missed my backpack like a phantom limb. After years of rambling with it on my back, I felt deeply unmoored without it, as if I might float up and away. At last I placed my unease: I had finally unpacked, and it took a howler monkey to do it.

“Hey, Meessis Gringa, let’s go, time to get up,” Doña Antonia muttered with a little swat of her straw broom at my hammock. “You’re going to wash clothes with the other women, okay? Enough of this sleeping all day like a queen.”

Like that was possible with the jungle already ricocheting with the calls of monkeys, parrots, frogs, all going at it molto vivace, shrieking and squawking as if the world were waking up in pain, the jungle giving birth to itself each morning. I untangled myself from the hammock and netting and got to my feet. Charlotte blinked up at me. I finally recognized her as the same piglet the woman had held to her breast. A dark line of fur encircled one eye; another seemed drawn on one pink flank, like a bull’s-eye.