From my room I could hear him call to me no matter where he was in the house, though in time I learned to recognize the sounds that preceded a question, and before he could even ask, I was there in the doorway. If the telephone rang, it was I who answered it; I who knew whether he was able to talk just then, or whether a message needed to be taken; I who instructed the cook on what was to be prepared for dinner, who helped him to bed when he drank too much, who brought him the first steaming cup of tea in the morning, in the sixteenth-century bowl sent to him by an admirer in Japan; I who handed him his pencil, his hat, his stick, his trowel, his knife; I who came with the first aid kit whenever he cut himself, because he was—our greatest landscape architect and botanist—squeamish at the sight of his own blood.

Things grow in this country, under a sun like this. Under the watchful eye of the generals’ bronze gaze, the imperial palms grew. The giant lily pads grew as large as tables. The giant bamboo grew until it was four or five stories high, and when the breeze blew through it the stalks made a clacking sound, and as they leaned in the wind, they creaked like the sound of braking streetcars, and somehow there was also the sound of horses’ hooves and a braying donkey, even a whole barnyard of animals, contained in that bamboo. There were whispers, and the sound of children playing, or maybe crying, or just singing softly. But Latin America’s greatest landscape architect never heard them, because after construction was complete, and the opening ceremony attended, he had no time to return to the parks and gardens he’d designed during his tenure as director of public gardens—parks, after all, that were visited and enjoyed by the many who came to walk their paths or rest on their benches. Those were busy years for him. I won’t lie: they were mostly good years, too. He had his work. The grotesque incident of the lake was never repeated. And when, after almost fifteen years, some of the generals fled the country, and a few were put on trial, and most retreated behind the tall stucco walls of their mansions to live out the rest of their lives in the peace of their own gardens, no one bothered with our country’s landscape architect; he, too, was left in peace.