Simonetti had poured all his artistic zeal into the sacristy wall. That was where he had mounted his masterpiece, which incited the locals’ fear and was possibly the reason the church had not been accepted by the curia. The carvings were well preserved despite the passage of time and their somewhat faded colors. They depicted a vision of hell, a tableau of warning: children with disproportionately large heads and twisted legs performed ritual dances around bonfires, frolicking with dragons and snakes. Naked women’s waists were chained by serpents. There were shocked faces, round eyes ever open, and more reptiles, especially frogs—there was a true obsession with frogs, in reference to the second plague of Egypt. This scene of the Last Judgment was finished off with the figure of a man sitting with a book, observing the horrible scenes of suffering with an impassive face.

Once he had finished, Simonetti tried to donate the church to the curia, but after two priests came to visit it, his gift was rejected. There were more negotiations, and more rejections, supposedly for bureaucratic reasons, but everyone refused to believe that explanation. It was said that the tableau represented the Salamanca, the meeting between wizards and the Devil, the criollo Witches’ Sabbath, and people claimed that Simonetti had participated in those ceremonies. He died trying to convince the priests that his work was sacred. Perhaps honoring a promise, he made the sacrifice—although he wasn’t old, he was ill—of walking from Colonia La Camila to Goya, where he met with a church authority. When he returned, he lay down to rest, and by the next morning he was dead.

In the larger of Colonia Camila’s grocery stores, the one that had a modest bar, it was said that people had seen Don Lorenzo’s ghost dressed in black, walking toward Goya. There were also stories about a dark congregation that turned its back to the altar and knelt before the tableau of the Last Judgment.

She heard him before she saw him, at six in the evening, when the sun was lighting the sky with a yellow flame and the palm trees in the distance looked like shadows. Tali went running out in a white dress that smelled of jasmine soap brought from Paraguay, and in her hurry, she forgot to put on shoes. She couldn’t be sure as long as she could only hear him, but her doubts were dispelled when she looked down the small hill on which her house and temple were built, and there he was. His blond hair was tinged orange by the late-afternoon sun, and his black shirt took on a crepuscular blue shade. Even when he laughed like that, mouth open and dimples showing, even with the endearing way he bent his long legs as he slid in the mud, even when he reached out his arms to his son and said “Come on” and the boy took little running steps beside him—even in that simple family scene, it was easy to understand why he was known as the Golden God, his arms with veins that looked like cables under the skin and his hands too large, with their slender fingers and long, wide palms.