Elijah Manau was a rosy-cheeked man from the capital, and had been living in the village of 1797 for six months when the soldiers came. He was a timid man, and not without reason. To be exiled here to teach in this humid backwater was testament to his consistent mediocrity. He had scored near the bottom on the regional placement exam, well below the cutoff for a job in the city at one of the better schools. The dispiriting results were announced on the radio a few nights after the test, in alphabetical order. It took several hours. His family was neither wealthy nor well connected, and so nothing could be done. He was thirty when he left home. He had never been to the jungle before. He had never left the city.

The town, his new home, was perpetually soggy and heat-swollen. The rains came and brought little relief. He rented a room from a man named Zahir who had lost both hands in the war. Zahir’s son, Nico, was an unwilling student, and he seemed to distrust his teacher and housemate. Sometimes Manau helped them tend their small plot, but in truth he had no skill for it. The earth held no romance for him. Manau longed for concrete and everything else he had left behind. Nico’s crippled father dug holes with his stumps, he carried heavy loads on his back, balancing rucksacks on his broad shoulders with help from his son. The man was a rock. At night Manau listened to the mosquitoes thrumming in the humid air, to the distant cawing and various shrieks the jungle produced, and, with his thin curtain drawn, he checked his naked body for the progress of the sores and rashes that were always afflicting him. It was his daily chore, an exercise in personal hygiene that had devolved into a strange kind of vanity. The pitiable condition of his person played a central role in his sexual fantasies. To be nursed back to health! To be massaged and anointed in fruit essences, in herbal potions! With a cloudy shaving mirror and the kerosene lamp, he examined himself, the car...