He couldn’t find her. He could see that poor pregnant woman at the hotel, he could see hundreds of murder victims every day, and yet he couldn’t reach her. He had said to her once when she was alive, as a joke, imitating a character in a novel, Please don’t leave me alone, haunt me. He’d said it in English, “haunt me,” because there were no words in Spanish for that verb, not embrujar, not aparecer, it was haunt. She had laughed it off. He was supposed to die first—it was the most logical thing. It was ridiculous he was even still alive.
Sometimes he thought Rosario was hiding. Or that something was keeping her from reaching him. Or that she had gone too far away.
“What now?”
“Now put your head underwater. But without holding your nose.”
“I’ll drown.”
“You definitely won’t drown.”
They practiced holding their breath above water. Gaspar filled his cheeks with air, and Juan started to feel the unmistakable pain in his temples. Too much time in the sun. But he wasn’t going to leave the river until the boy learned to hold his breath.
Back under the tree, he poured cold soda into a cup and added some of the ice cubes that by now were floating in the cooler. He swallowed two pills and closed his eyes, lying back against the exposed roots until the pain retreated a little. His head was still pounding, but at least it now throbbed in a regular, slow rhythm.
“I didn’t drown,” Gaspar said suddenly.
“See? Swimming is easy, you’ll learn fast.”
“Are you going to wake up?”
“I’m not sleeping, I’m resting.”
“Want a sandwich?”
“No, we’ll eat later. And tonight, we’ll see Tali.”
“Can I make a sandwich for me?”
The best way to get one’s bearings on the way to Tali’s house was to keep a lookout for an old, rusty iron bridge by the highway; it had fallen out of use and had been overtaken by the unstoppable vegetation of the Argentine littoral region, with its lianas and flowers. Once you passed the bridge, you’d see the old Chapel of the Devil appear, and then you just had to go straight along a dirt road that became impassible if it was muddy. The chapel was the formal entrance to Colonia Camila. Tali loved living there, in that town of two hundred people and two corner stores.
Tali was Juan’s half-sister-in-law. She was the daughter of Rosario’s father, Adolfo Reyes, and his Corrientes lover, Leandra. Leandra was a middle-class woman who had gone off to live in the country, had founded a temple to San La Muerte, and become famous in the region as both a healer and a great beauty. Tali’s mother had died young—Juan and Rosario knew that although she’d fallen ill, her death had been far from natural—and Adolfo Reyes, who had truly loved Leandra and was also a collector of effigies of the saint （that’s how they’d met, in fact）， had preserved her temple. Tali saw her mother as a “guardian” or “promesera,” and now she continued her mother’s legacy. She and Rosario had established a room dedicated to San La Muerte at the Museum of Popular Art in Asunción, part of the permanent collection; it was recognized as the best in Paraguay, in the region, and probably in the world.
For years, semiclandestine ceremonies had been held at Tali’s shrine. Colonia Camila was far away from any city, near the river but strangely isolated from any beaches or docks: it was a place where one could, with relatively little fear, follow a cult that displeased the Church and provoked alarm and distrust among laypeople. More recently, Tali had kept her sanctuary discreetly silent. She had heard about military raids where soldiers destroyed household altars and sometimes kidnapped their owners, holding them at a station for a few nights just as a show of power. Tali was the daughter of a rich, well-connected man, and no one was going to touch her, but it didn’t hurt to be careful.
Adolfo Reyes had also bought several hectares around his daughter’s temple and house, because on that land stood the Chapel of the Devil, built by Don Lorenzo Simonetti. A church constructed by an Italian immigrant that, oddly, had never been consecrated. Tali cleaned it at night by the light of a kerosene lamp. Many people had seen the glare through the windows and rumors spread about what happened behind those walls, but none of them were true. Juan had confirmed as much with both Tali and her father more than once: although the church was strange, it wasn’t a visited place. But Adolfo Reyes liked to have fun, and he hadn’t stopped there: he had invented his own rumors, added to the stories, so many that now it was almost impossible to separate the fiction from the simple historical facts of that chapel and its forgotten town.
Lorenzo Simonetti had come to Corrientes from Italy, widowed and with eight children in tow. In 1904, a year after settling in Colonia Camila, he started to build the chapel without asking permission from the ecclesiastical authorities. It was handmade: he carved the Virgin from native urunday wood and tried to imitate the features of his wife, who had died in childbirth. He did everything else—laying the bricks, building the wooden benches, installing the precarious stained-glass windows—with the help of the locals. A compatriot brought the bells over from Italy. The altar had tin flowers and plant motifs. A church of the jungle and the border, close to both Brazil and Paraguay.
Simonetti had poured all his artistic zeal into the sacristy wall. That was where he had mounted his masterpiece, which incited the locals’ fear and was possibly the reason the church had not been accepted by the curia. The carvings were well preserved despite the passage of time and their somewhat faded colors. They depicted a vision of hell, a tableau of warning: children with disproportionately large heads and twisted legs performed ritual dances around bonfires, frolicking with dragons and snakes. Naked women’s waists were chained by serpents. There were shocked faces, round eyes ever open, and more reptiles, especially frogs—there was a true obsession with frogs, in reference to the second plague of Egypt. This scene of the Last Judgment was finished off with the figure of a man sitting with a book, observing the horrible scenes of suffering with an impassive face.
Once he had finished, Simonetti tried to donate the church to the curia, but after two priests came to visit it, his gift was rejected. There were more negotiations, and more rejections, supposedly for bureaucratic reasons, but everyone refused to believe that explanation. It was said that the tableau represented the Salamanca, the meeting between wizards and the Devil, the criollo Witches’ Sabbath, and people claimed that Simonetti had participated in those ceremonies. He died trying to convince the priests that his work was sacred. Perhaps honoring a promise, he made the sacrifice—although he wasn’t old, he was ill—of walking from Colonia La Camila to Goya, where he met with a church authority. When he returned, he lay down to rest, and by the next morning he was dead.
In the larger of Colonia Camila’s grocery stores, the one that had a modest bar, it was said that people had seen Don Lorenzo’s ghost dressed in black, walking toward Goya. There were also stories about a dark congregation that turned its back to the altar and knelt before the tableau of the Last Judgment.
She heard him before she saw him, at six in the evening, when the sun was lighting the sky with a yellow flame and the palm trees in the distance looked like shadows. Tali went running out in a white dress that smelled of jasmine soap brought from Paraguay, and in her hurry, she forgot to put on shoes. She couldn’t be sure as long as she could only hear him, but her doubts were dispelled when she looked down the small hill on which her house and temple were built, and there he was. His blond hair was tinged orange by the late-afternoon sun, and his black shirt took on a crepuscular blue shade. Even when he laughed like that, mouth open and dimples showing, even with the endearing way he bent his long legs as he slid in the mud, even when he reached out his arms to his son and said “Come on” and the boy took little running steps beside him—even in that simple family scene, it was easy to understand why he was known as the Golden God, his arms with veins that looked like cables under the skin and his hands too large, with their slender fingers and long, wide palms.