After a few more meandering conversations, Fernando found himself standing before his grandmother’s home, a thatched-roof, dilapidated shack at the edge of the jungle. Little more than a dirt path had led up to it—a goat path, he saw now. In the bare earthen yard, a wiry, slack-teated nanny and her gaggle of skinny kids milled about, bleating as they grazed.
Around her bristly neck the nanny goat wore a dented little bell, which did not chime. The three kids each were painted so thickly with pale and rust-colored pastes that at first glance Fernando thought them caked with muck—but no, those were crude wavelike designs that streaked their bony flanks. Not knowing what to make of this, Fernando pressed on.
As he approached the mossy, moldering porch step, the kids’ eyes lifted to him. Their sad, square-pupiled glance looked as bleak and forlorn as he felt. Bereft pilgrims all, in this muggy wasteland which seemed home to no one, and yet inexplicably was. From what Fernando had gleaned, his grandmother had lived here on the wild outskirts of town for the better part of a century.
Everything around him faintly reeked and sighed, as though he stood atop the body of a great mildewed beast in slumber. Damp heat rose from the loamy ground, riddled with fetid shit pellets and half-chewed fronds yellowed with goat piss. In the serried gloom beneath the skewed porch, green fiddle-ferns sprawled riotously. Glittering with dew, they furled through the shadows, oozing up through the gaping slats like a botanical octopoid hellbent on strangling the wretched shack into oblivion. Yet for all this—all the overgrown ugliness and rampant decay—the place seemed eerily stalwart, as if it had achieved a peculiar sort of symbiosis with its fiendish surroundings.
Perhaps most eerie of all were the yard ornaments Fernando glimpsed as he passed. A motley assortment of stacked stone altars, ribboned branches, jarred moths furred with mold behind the fogged glass, crude tin and wooden crosses, spiderwebbed clusters of cheap Seven Day candles pitted, cracked and defaced by the elements. Interwoven haphazardly, mixed strands of chipped rosary beads and brittle snakeskins roped the soft splintering porch beams and banisters. A stained blanket of geometric design served as a door hanging. Pushing this curtain aside, Fernando entered, calling out as he did.
“Hola, señora? Está aquí?”
Fernando squinted into the dark room, hazed with woodsmoke. The same morbid, bizarre confusion of pagan and Catholic curios decorated the interior of the shack wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling. But despite the gloom and the clutter, he spied her at once. There at the spindly scrubbed she stood with her back to him, hacking away at something wildly crisp and fragrant.
Stubs of yellow candle studded a dish beside her, emitting a jaundiced, guttering glow. As Fernando’s eyes adjusted to the low light, he made out her slight, shrunken figure in more detail—the antiquated and vaguely indigenous patterns of her long skirt and frock, the wispy, spidersilk shimmer of her hair knotted in a tiny bun high at the back of her head, the many beaded and chained necklaces she wore about her skinny neck, which seemed to weigh down her bowed head even further.
Fernando eyed his maternal grandmother with no small amount of fascination. She did not turn at his address. Just as he was wondering if she was deaf, she spoke.
“Who are you? Why have you come?”
