“My daughter came out of the jungle in one piece. She lost her arm at my aunt and uncle’s house.”

“She had an accident?”

“Do you know what is in this jungle? I don’t either. I never fully understood. It’s big and it’s terrible. Voracious. My family has venerated it for hundreds of years. What lives in this jungle, asleep for now, it took my daughter’s arm and marked her as its own. She was no longer mine. I always wanted to escape from the Bradfords, and when I fell in love with Eduardo, I believed in what he did, because it was a way of getting away from them, and a noble way at that. But they brought me back, and they kept my daughter.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Better for you.”

I thought, then, that she was unstable. But when she left and I was alone in the silence broken only by the splashing of animals in the lake, I felt an irrational dread of the jungle and all that beautiful and hostile landscape, capable of harboring so much suffering and so much death. What did she mean that her family “venerated” something terrible in that wilderness? Was it a metaphor? Was it literal? I was disturbed by that first part of our conversation, by the coincidence and her instability, which was clear from her dark, jumpy eyes, from her hair that, close-up, I saw was fine and brittle, from her ragged, neglected nails. She was an elegant and destroyed woman. I was also disturbed by the insinuation of that voracious monster she’d mentioned, the one she related to her daughter’s disappearance. She went to walk under the sun, without a hat. I didn’t follow her, but instead went back to the hotel to transcribe the recording. I wanted to ask more questions. The list of Operation Itatí’s victims includes Eduardo Álvarez (alias Mono Álvez). Disappeared, husband of (alias) Liliana Falco. She wasn’t lying. The metaphors she used to understand the tragedy of her life moved me, but also shook me, especially those almost mystical ravings about the powers of the jungle. Though I understood why she could go crazy in that regard. If you travel by car along a road through the jungle in Misiones, the bush is a prison with walls on either side, and the red earth is a river of lava. There, near the lake, the jungle seemed more distant. Maybe that was the real reason the family members chose that village—because of its openness. I imagined the bodies in trucks driving down muddy roads to be tossed in a pit, the nocturnal birds hushed by the sound of the motors. Earlier, I had seen an altar to San La Muerte. And the first day, when we arrived by car from Posadas, I’d seen one to San Güesito, a dead, venerated boy—an animita, as they’re called in Chile. I thought of bones left dry by the heat, heat that eats the flesh until nothing is left.