Memories of his mother cluttered Alfonzo’s dissertation. Each was small—a bauble, a treasure, a joke—but together they formed an overwhelming inheritance. Alfonzo had too many but couldn’t let go. He studied each in the shifting light.

When he was young, Gina had told him bedtime stories. They would sit together in his tiny room while Luis watched baseball or public TV documentaries in the living room downstairs.

Alfonzo’s mother liked folk stories best. There was one about the moon and the sun, who were married yet distant. Another story was about the adventures of King Jaguar. And yet another was a comedy about a family of musical guinea pigs and one foolish toad. In Alfonzo’s favorite stories, camelids were heroes and heroines. It was a llama, according to his mom, who saved all the creatures during the Great Flood. His mother filled his imagination with animals who looked like them and possessed unique tools and quick wit. As he drifted off, his young self conjured mental images of a brown alpaca with curly wool springing along steep, lush mountain paths with a sack full of magical blue gems.

In one of Gina’s stories, the Milky Way of the Southern Hemisphere was a world filled with animal figures. There was astral toad, serpent, fox, mother llama, and baby llama. One of mother llama’s cosmic tasks was to drink up water from the ocean, then redistribute it to the mountains as rain. Sky llama had to drink and pee to keep the world in balance. But then one day the baby llama wandered away and got lost. In her grief, mother llama drank up the whole ocean and then began to cry. She could not stop.

Down on Earth were two alpaca brothers who spent their nights observing the skies. When it began to rain they recognized that this cosmic mother’s grief would wash away life on Earth if they didn’t act. So they raced to the animal villages, sounding the alarm; they ran into the jungle and out to the plains; they circled the lakes and traced the rivers. They gathered up all the animals and led them into the heights. All the while, the tear-waters rose.

Up on the mountaintop huddled all the condors and tapirs, the dogs and pumas, the tamarins and bears, the mountain cats and tinamous and guans, the woolly monkeys and guinea pigs, the dusky-headed parakeets and golden-headed manakins, the butterflies and moths, the ants and spiders, the sloths and night monkeys and chinchillas, the bamboo rats and the elegant rice rats, and the cloud forest grass mice, the lesser bulldog bats and greater bulldog bats, the caterpillars and red and gray brockets, the jaguarundis and the delicate slender opossums, the turtles and beetles, and everyone else. They put aside their ancient squabbles for a time and talked of survival as they watched the waters rise ever higher.