Mauro had his father’s face. Something his mother never let him forget. When he was mischievous she blamed his genetics with disgust—esos ojos mentirosos, esa quijada de salvaje—throwing shoes at his back, shaving his head to cull his inheritance of curls. She locked Mauro in the closet for hours. Sometimes all night. She withheld food when she didn’t want him in the house and brought men home who also felt free to push him around. People in the neighborhood called her la loca, but Mauro defended her the way he wished somebody would defend him.

The year Mauro turned ten was one of Colombia’s bloodiest. It was also the year his mother decided he wasn’t a good enough student to deserve to stay in school, what with the cost of uniforms and books, and sent him to live with her sister, Wilfreda, in the western sabana near Bojacá. To earn his keep, he was ordered to dig graves at a roadside cemetery with Wilfreda’s companion, a limping ex-soldier named Tiberio.

They started in the morning when it was still dark. Marking grave lines for the day’s freshly dead, stabbing soil with their shovels. Mauro hated his mother for shipping him off, forcing him into this kind of labor, but Tiberio explained it was safer out there in the sabana. He’d been in the army until discharged for a bullet in the thigh—a present from heaven, Tiberio proclaimed, otherwise he surely would have been killed in warfare like so many of his friends. “I used to be strong till they sent me to fight,” Tiberio said. “Now look at me, half crippled and bald as the moon.”

Tiberio also said most people only knew the Colombia of campo tears and urban shame, of funerals and outcry, of corruption and displacement. It was not the land the gods intended. The real Colombia, he insisted, was a thing of majesty beyond their valleys and cordilleras. There were jungles, snowcapped sierras, and black-and white-sand beaches on different ends of the country; rivers that nourished the Amazon, the life force of the Americas; cloud forests and altiplanos; the tabletop mountains of Chiribiquete, and La Guajira, where honeyed desert kissed the Caribbean Sea. Birds and beasts so powerful they could tatter this nation’s most treacherous men with their claws and teeth.

According to Tiberio, Ancestral Knowledge said the jaguar was the original divine possessor of fire and tools for hunting, but the animal took pity on man when he stumbled upon him in the rain forest, wet, cold, and starving, and shared with the hairless two-legged creature its secrets for survival. Man repaid the jaguar by stealing its fire and hunting weapons so that the animal now depended solely on its physical strength and cunning. For this reason, the jaguar waited forever for a chance at revenge.

Tiberio had once seen a wild jaguar when his battalion was sent to patrol the Urabá coast, where mangroves met jungle. As one of the soldiers napped beneath a mango tree, a jaguar leaped from the brush to attack. They wondered: Did the animal know its prey was human? The soldier resisted, the jaguar disappeared into the forest, and the locals told him surviving a jaguar attack made him a magic man.

Mauro thought of this when he went back to Wilfreda’s house that night as rain pecked the roof, and on many nights thereafter when, after years in the sabana, his mother let him return home. Though at fourteen, he looked even more like the man who’d caused her so much anguish, so she banished him again and, as he roamed public parks, struggling to catch sleep under the open sky, he considered how surviving a creature of sacred ferocity was enough to make a person holy.

* * *

Mauro went to live with different neighbors until each tired of him. He slept in empty lots and alleys, tunnels and ca?os, sometimes with other street kids who existed in a bazuco stupor until he met a mugger named Jairo who worked the streets of El Centro. Jairo took pity on Mauro and let him stay with his family in Ciudad Bolívar, the settlement built into cliffs on the southern cerros overlooking the city plateau, where rain turned dirt roads into gushing streams.

With his profits from robbing pedestrians and businessmen, Jairo had been able to move his family from a shack on the upper ridge to a house with brick walls and electricity on the lower edges. Mauro only entered or left the area in Jairo’s company because the local pandilleros came after anyone they believed invading their turf. Everyone respected Jairo because he’d survived the police, who suspected he was in one of the barrio gangs when they captured him. They locked him in a room, stripped and beat him, pinched him with pliers, played at suffocating him with a plastic bag until he fainted. This went on for days, all to get Jairo to give up the names of gang leaders and their hideout locations. Jairo told the police nothing and eventually was released. Those were years when hundreds of teenage boys were murdered on the hills, victims of paramilitary hit men dressed as civilians, vigilante militias carrying out mass murders in the name of social cleansing. People said police only appeared on the bluffs to log the dead.

Nights, Mauro lay on a mat on the kitchen floor while Jairo and his family slept in the two other small rooms. He felt the tectonic pressure of the hills around him, each sunset walling him deeper into this unmothered and unfathered life. An impulse to run with nowhere to go.

When Jairo left the cerro each day to work the sidewalks near the Hotel Tequendama, Mauro went looking for a job of his own. He tried cafeterías, fast-food chains, and shops with no luck. He started hanging around the market at Paloquemao, trying to befriend vendors until he convinced an old man named Eliseo to let him stack his produce into neat pyramids at half pay if he let Mauro sleep in the stockroom.

Elena came to the market once a week. Mauro looked forward to helping her each time. She chose her fruit carefully while other customers purchased theirs and moved on to other stalls. Lulo and guanabana were her favorites, though she said her mother preferred maracuyá. Mauro packed them for her as if they were gems so she’d find no bruises when she set them into a bowl at home. She said she came all the way to Paloquemao, to this stall in particular, because they had the best selection. She thought Mauro’s father should know and pointed to Eliseo.

“He’s not my father. I just work here.”

He was barely fifteen but somehow felt much older than Elena, who was fourteen, short and slight, almost feline with her long arms and bony hips. She dressed in bright pinks and flowery prints as if she lived by the sea and not their mountain city. Her long-lashed beetle-black eyes, often irritated from the detergents in her mother’s lavandería. Hair pulled into a braid when other girls wore theirs loose so they could touch it all the time. Never jewelry except for her necklace with a gold medal of La Virgen del Carmen. He was self-conscious when he talked to her, making an effort never to use slang or show his ignorance since stopping school. He heard educated people speak on television and read newspapers that shoppers left at the market so he could have things to talk about the next time she came to his stall. He wanted so much for Elena to believe he was worth getting to know.

That April a car bomb detonated near Calle 93. The radio reported many dead and hundreds wounded. Bombazos were nothing new, but this time Mauro thought only of Elena. He didn’t know where she lived. He imagined she could have been nearby. The area was full of shops and cafés. He pictured her hanging out with friends. Then the explosion, and all of them running to save their lives.

Mauro slept on a wooden pallet padded with cardboard, bunched under a cast-off blanket. Through the cold and humid nights, he often only managed to sleep with the help of liquor warming him from the inside. Tiberio once told him the Muisca believed night to be a time of regeneration, when the earth’s energies were most tranquil. But the city was a song of police and ambulance sirens. He could not imagine what it would be like to sleep with silence—as distant a possibility as sharing a bed with Elena.

He counted the mornings until he might see her again. When she reappeared it was all he could do not to take her in his arms. Instead, he watched as she picked her fruit and told her he was happy to know she was safe.

They slowly went from strangers to acquaintances to friends who spent a few hours together each week. He traveled to her neighborhood. Brought her cattleyas from the flower vendors at the market and used the little money he had to invite her to a mango con limón or a cheesy arepa, which they’d eat together on a bench in a park or plaza. Elena always saved her crusts for pigeons. She said it wasn’t their fault they were hungry.

“No,” Mauro said. “It’s none of our faults.”