Tali was Juan’s half-sister-in-law. She was the daughter of Rosario’s father, Adolfo Reyes, and his Corrientes lover, Leandra. Leandra was a middle-class woman who had gone off to live in the country, had founded a temple to San La Muerte, and become famous in the region as both a healer and a great beauty. Tali’s mother had died young—Juan and Rosario knew that although she’d fallen ill, her death had been far from natural—and Adolfo Reyes, who had truly loved Leandra and was also a collector of effigies of the saint (that’s how they’d met, in fact), had preserved her temple. Tali saw her mother as a “guardian” or “promesera,” and now she continued her mother’s legacy. She and Rosario had established a room dedicated to San La Muerte at the Museum of Popular Art in Asunción, part of the permanent collection; it was recognized as the best in Paraguay, in the region, and probably in the world.

For years, semiclandestine ceremonies had been held at Tali’s shrine. Colonia Camila was far away from any city, near the river but strangely isolated from any beaches or docks: it was a place where one could, with relatively little fear, follow a cult that displeased the Church and provoked alarm and distrust among laypeople. More recently, Tali had kept her sanctuary discreetly silent. She had heard about military raids where soldiers destroyed household altars and sometimes kidnapped their owners, holding them at a station for a few nights just as a show of power. Tali was the daughter of a rich, well-connected man, and no one was going to touch her, but it didn’t hurt to be careful.

Adolfo Reyes had also bought several hectares around his daughter’s temple and house, because on that land stood the Chapel of the Devil, built by Don Lorenzo Simonetti. A church constructed by an Italian immigrant that, oddly, had never been consecrated. Tali cleaned it at night by the light of a kerosene lamp. Many people had seen the glare through the windows and rumors spread about what happened behind those walls, but none of them were true. Juan had confirmed as much with both Tali and her father more than once: although the church was strange, it wasn’t a visited place. But Adolfo Reyes liked to have fun, and he hadn’t stopped there: he had invented his own rumors, added to the stories, so many that now it was almost impossible to separate the fiction from the simple historical facts of that chapel and its forgotten town.

Lorenzo Simonetti had come to Corrientes from Italy, widowed and with eight children in tow. In 1904, a year after settling in Colonia Camila, he started to build the chapel without asking permission from the ecclesiastical authorities. It was handmade: he carved the Virgin from native urunday wood and tried to imitate the features of his wife, who had died in childbirth. He did everything else—laying the bricks, building the wooden benches, installing the precarious stained-glass windows—with the help of the locals. A compatriot brought the bells over from Italy. The altar had tin flowers and plant motifs. A church of the jungle and the border, close to both Brazil and Paraguay.