I remember the day and night of the revelation perfectly: plus, over the years, I’ve had to tell the story to various Initiates. I was tired from swimming and from the sun; I was also a little dizzy from the boat. Tali had gotten sunstroke a few days before and she was with Marcelina, the woman who took care of us and of the house. That was the only reason she wasn’t there that night. I hid the revelation from her until my father decided it was time to initiate her. Tali isn’t of blood, and the timeline was different for her. She never reproached me for it.

That winter, my uncle had agreed to let Juan travel north for the first time. He brought him by plane himself. Juan and I had spent the day together, and I went with him to his room that night: he wasn’t all that tired after a full day of boating, or maybe he was so excited by the novelty of it all that he wasn’t sleepy. I told him quit fooling around and shut your eyes, if they catch us awake and talking, they’ll kill us.

I went up to my room, turned on the fan, and lay down with my blue notebook. I remember I was wearing the silk nightgown my grandfather had brought me from Paris, lovely, cool, with delicate details on the straps. I remember I wrote with a Parker pen that had a gold-plated lid, another gift from my grandfather, which I’ve since lost. My father also gave me beautiful gifts: every year, for example, a piece of jewelry with a different stone. That year he’d given me a Lalique ring. The girls in my class were all pining after Vendôme rings, but I preferred the ones my father gave me, much stranger and more expensive—museum pieces.

I opened the notebook and added two new beings. Guachu Ja Eté. I wrote: they call him “the ruler of the deer,” and he whistles. He also changes people who steal into deer. That’s what Marcelina told me, but she didn’t say what shape this particular whistler has. There are many whistlers and screamers. The scariest screamer is the Mbogua, which is identical to the Irish banshee. It screams to announce a tragedy, but only the person the tragedy will befall can hear the scream. I traced the correspondence with an arrow: banshee, and “keening,” the name of its howl. Marcelina was teaching me a little Guaraní. I dreamed of writing books about the local mythology, like the ones I read in English about the beings from the British Isles.