So I traipsed around the village repeating my monkey story over and over to anyone who would listen: a monkey stole my backpack with my extra clothes. When they stopped laughing, I finally scored a cushma, this one from a family whose patriarch had died. In the tradition of wasting nothing in the jungle, the garment was going to be handed over to the family of lepers, but they gave it to me. I washed and ironed that thing till you could almost see through it.

Those early days in Ayachero I felt a part and not a part of anything, tasting a flavor of loneliness quite new for me. In this place, it was clear that everyone needed everyone else. I so desperately wanted to be part of this unbroken circle, yet how could I? I had my foot in this new world, but could not possibly bring the whole of me because I was so very other. No matter how much Spanish or Portuguese, Quechua or even Tatinga I learned, I would be this odd one out, this matchstick-colored head walking around in a sea of black ones, thinking different, walking different, dreaming different, being different. Doomed in a way I was sure at the time was unique to me.

But I kept on trying. In late afternoons after siesta, a half dozen villagers would gather around the cooking fires at the longhouse or the Anaconda Bar and drink strong black coffee with lots of molasses-tasting sugar, smoke cigarettes, and tell stories. I’d sit with them and try to understand, even though they never slowed down for me. Paco stayed close by, translating when he was in the mood, but I made sure to laugh when they laughed, or grow serious when they did, to make them think I understood every word, all the slang, every idiom or splash of Tatinga. Mostly the stories were about hunts gone wrong, or soured love affairs, or sometimes about beasts even more fantastical than what already existed: fifty-foot anacondas with horns, five-hundred-pound pirarucu that crawled out of the river and sprouted legs and claws, pink river dolphins that turned into beautiful women and seduced men away into the Encante, the enchanted underworld in the murky depths of the river—especially during the rainy season when the river rose and flooded the forest.

It was during siesta, that blast furnace time of day when everyone but me—who had never been able to nap—went off to rest or sleep or make love, that I broke my promise to Omar that I would never go into the jungle alone. Beya obsessed me. She was the other odd duck in this place. She didn’t seem to fit in anywhere, this person who had bothered to save my life. Why? The more people who fielded my questions about her, like she was a source of embarrassment, shame, or fear—maybe all those things—the more fascinated I became. I’d catch myself pausing at odd times of day, grating manioc, ironing clothes, or getting ready for bed, cocking an ear and listening for the thrill of her words in my head, only to hear the snap of insects, or the crash of rain on the roof.