This neighbourhood was founded by a Jewish hotelier. My parents sometimes talked about it over lunch: poor people streamed in from remote settlements and became the guy’s voting strength. The strength of his sector, rather. It’s a key stop for candidates during campaign season: they precipitously pave roads and throw parties with drinks and sancocho soup included. Except for those years, there’s thirst in the summer, floods in the winter. Lately just thirst. That and the highway ripped open by a construction project that was abandoned years ago, never finished.

I take in my surroundings now that the maestro has gone quiet; he’s focused on avoiding an accident, dodging other motorcycles and the potholes that riddle the road. A few blocks further on, I study the houses on both sides and the shape of the street and feel like I’ve crossed a border, a wall. The scenery changed at some point along the way, though I couldn’t say exactly where. Now we’re riding through a native area along a steeper, less ravaged road. I can see the squat, jumbled roofs of the invasion. There’s a large, fresh-faced woman in jean shorts and a horizontally striped shirt; there’s a skinny woman in a yellow dress, her body looking improbably long, her limbs drawn over themselves to paint her toenails, seated in a chair on the terrace of an unpainted wooden house hiked up on concrete pillars. There are crisscrossed boards over windows that don’t open anymore, young guys with lanky legs sitting barefoot in unfenced yards right along the road. Grannies with their hair in curlers peer through doors that open outward. Men drink under low trees, watching women pass by, and I swivel my head like the hummingbird in my yard and catch myself looking for their eyes on me, like before. We climb further up; we’ve reached the fork in the road at Mount Zion, a Baptist church.

‘And this is where that man got killed – what day was it?’ the maestro says, breaking the silence. I don’t know what he’s talking about. ‘Two, three days ago. His name was Saulo, a pastor. They killed him by mistake, I think. A botched job.’ He shook his head reproachfully.

‘Botched? With a gun?’

‘Yeah, they shot him in the leg and he bled to death – they were trying to rob him and he fought back. He was just getting home.’

It won’t be long before we reach the church, not long enough to tell him what I think. Such a nice guy, really. The guide on a high-risk tour.