He told Will that the bohío in which his family lived had lost its roof to the wind, which had also taken down one of their Spanish lime trees, and that the heavy rains had washed away part of their garden, and that the noise of rain and wind had made one of their pigs muy loco, causing it to flee into the countryside, from which it had not returned. His family had known the hurricane was coming, he said, for his madrina was a santera of high repute who spoke to the orishas of Olokun and Shango and could divine their future intentions. On her instructions, his family had slaughtered a rooster and fed it to Olokun with a little rum, in the hopes that the Lord of the Sea would turn the storm aside, but that was not to be. As his madrina had said, Olokun did as he wished.

“Pero, quién sabe? If we had not sacrificed, perhaps the hurricane would have swept us away with our plantanos. Perhaps it would have made us all crazy, like our pig.”

“Sí, Que es posible,” said Will, who wished to be agreeable, although he hadn’t the vaguest idea what the boy was talking about. Olokun, Shango, orisha—what did all that mean?

“Sus amigos—cómo se llaman?”

“Nathaniel, Eliot, Andrew,” Will answered, pointing to each and pronouncing their names slowly. He watched the boy silently mouth the foreign names and then asked his. The boy replied that it was Francisco Casamayor and that the old woman, his aunt as well as his madrina, or godmother, was called Rosaria Balbontín. The young woman was his older sister, Elvira.

Rising to shake hands with the three, Will sucked in a breath as a dull pain shot through his ribs. He was surprised to notice that Elvira was as tall as he in her bare feet. She wore a loose white shift translucent from sweat—apparently she and Francisco and Rosaria had been cutting plants in the forest, for what reason he did not know—and her nipples, her navel, and the fork of her thighs showed through the damp cloth. She neither smiled nor frowned as Will took her hand, but her face was not expressionless; rather, it wore an expression he could not read: an opacity that intrigued. There was something ancient in that look of hers, something profound and penetrating, as though she could see past the surface of an object or a person and know its essence in a glance.

“You have been injured?” asked Rosaria, noticing him flinch when he withdrew his hand from Elvira’s.

“Sí …” Will did not know the Spanish for ribs and so gestured at his side and said, “Huesos … aquí … Mi amigo también”—gesturing at Eliot—“en el mano.”