“What happened to that woman who was nursing her?” I asked Doña Antonia, who stood waiting for me, hands on hips.

She waved me away like it wasn’t worth her breath to discuss it. “Angelina? She’s away. She’s gone.”

“Where did she go?”

“Why? She’s a friend of yours?”

“No, I just—”

“Now you want to give milk to the pig?” She grabbed her saggy tit and squeezed, cackling.

“I just want to know—”

“Forget it, okay? Everything’s okay.”

“Is she dead?”

She turned to me, took stock of me. “You really want to know, American girl? Okay, so listen. Two days ago, she took off her clothes and ran into the jungle naked. So she’s dead. The jungle ate her. Okay?”

“No one tried to find her?”

“Some of the men went looking, but—she was nowhere. After two days, we stop. We call it off. That’s the rule.”

“But that’s—”

“Come on, come with me.” She handed me some hot cooked yucca wrapped in a banana leaf—my to-go breakfast. I followed her down the stairs, out of the longhouse, and—despite my horror as I imagined what might have happened to Angelina—took tentative bites of the food, fingers burning, craving a bit of salt, some flavor, something I could recognize.

Squealing and making an insane racket considering no one was interfering with her in any way, Charlotte followed at my heels, scruffling across the floor and falling down the stairs, one by one, each step a little calamity and cause for more complaining.

We followed Doña Antonia through the village to a chicken coop where a few dozen scrawny chickens in a wire cage pecked at dried corn. “Every morning and every night you feed them, got it? You take their eggs and you bring them to me. You keep this rooster over here, by himself, away from his women, or he’ll eat them, okay? He’s crazy.” She shook her head. “We need a new mister. This one has run out of brains.” She laughed at her joke as she looped the gate shut behind her with a length of wire. “And this is always closed, okay? Always, always. Or no more chickens, understand?”

I nodded, encouraged in a small way by being given some responsibility, and followed her back to the longhouse. A few of the women, tall woven baskets on their backs held in place by leather straps across their foreheads, were already making their way to the river. Two baskets sat waiting for us, both nearly as tall as Doña Antonia, whose gray head came only to my shoulder. She stood in front of hers, turned, knelt a bit, positioned the strap across her forehead, and stood up, lifting the basket off the ground with ease. She gestured at me and the one that remained.

It looked so easy. I did what she did: faced it, turned, knelt, adjusted the strap across my forehead, and tried to stand. It was like lifting a building. I tried again, straining with everything I had: impossible. I sat on my ass, the strap loose around my knees. A half-dozen spider monkeys watched from their perch in the canopy before screeching some sort of signal to one another; they dropped to the earth and coursed around me in a wave of chattering gray fur like I was a stone in a river. Charlotte was unfazed.