I I have always wanted to write the story the photographer told me, but I could not have done so without her permission or her collusion: other people''s stories are inviolable territory, or that''s how it''s always seemed to me, because often there is something in them that informs or defines a life, and stealing them in order to write them is much worse than revealing a secret. Now, for reasons that don''t matter, she has allowed me this usurpation, and in return has only asked that I tell the story just as she told it to me that night: without tweaks, embellishments, or pyrotechnics, but also without muting anything. "Begin where I begin," she said. "Begin with my arrival at the ranch, when I saw the woman." And that''s what I intend to do here, and I''ll do so fully aware that I am the way she has found to see her story told by someone else and thus to understand, or try to understand, something that has always escaped her. The photographer had a long name and two long surnames, but everyone always called her Jay. She had become something of a legend over the years, one of those people others knew things about: that she always dressed in black, that she wouldn''t have a sip of aguardiente even to save her life. Everyone knew she talked unhurriedly with people before taking her camera out of her bag, and more than once journalists wrote their articles based on material she remembered, rather than what they had managed to find out; it was known that other photographers followed her or spied on her, thinking she didn''t notice, and tended to stand behind her in a futile attempt to see what she saw.

She had photographed Colombian violence more assiduously (and also with more empathy) than any other photojournalist, and the most heartrending images of our war were hers: the one of an old lady weeping in the roofless ruins of a church that guerrillas had blown up with a gas cylinder; the one of a young womanÕs arm with the initials, carved with a knife and already scarring, of the paramilitary group that had murdered her son in front of her. Now things were different in certain fortunate places: violence was retreating and people were getting to know something like tranquility again. Jay liked visiting those places when she could, to relax, to escape her routine, or simply to witness firsthand those transformations that would once have seemed illusory. That''s how she reached Las Palmas. The ranch was what was left of the ninety thousand hectares that had once belonged to her hosts. The Gal++ns had never left the province of Los Llanos, nor did they have plans to renovate the old house, and they lived there contentedly, walking barefoot on the dirt floor without startling the hens. Jay knew them because she''d visited the same house twenty years before. Back then the Gal++ns had rented her the room of one of their daughters, who had gone to study agronomy in Bogot++, and from the window Jay could see the mirror of water, which was what they called a river some hundred meters wide and so calm it looked like a lagoon; the capybaras swam across the river without being pushed off course by the current, and in the middle of the water sometimes a bored black caiman surfaced, floating perfectly still.

Now, on this second visit, Jay would not sleep in that room full of someone else''s things, but in the comfortable neutrality of a guest room with two beds and a nightstand between them. (She would use only one bed, and even had a hard time deciding which one.) Everything else was the same as before: there were the capybaras and the caimans, and the calm water, the stillness of which had been increased by the drought. Most of all, there were the people: because the Galáns, maybe due to their reluctance to leave the ranch except to buy supplies, had managed to get the world to come to them. Their table, an enormous wooden board next to a coal-burning stove, was invariably full of people from all over, visitors from the neighboring ranches or from Yopal, friends of their daughters with or without them, zoologists or veterinarians or cattle ranchers who came to talk about their problems. That''s how it was this time too. People drove two or three hours to come and see the Galáns; Jay had driven seven, and she''d done so with pleasure, taking time to rest when she stopped for gas, opening the windows of her old jeep to enjoy the changing smells along the road. Some places have a certain magnetism, perhaps unjustified (that is, made up of our mythologies and our superstitions).

For Jay, Las Palmas was one of those places. And that''s what she was looking for: a few days of quiet among spoonbills and iguanas that climbed down from the trees to eat fallen mangoes, in a place that in other times had been a territory of violence. So the night she arrived, there she was, sitting under a tube of white light, eating meat and chunks of fried green plantain with a dozen strangers who were obviously strangers to one another as well. They were talking about whatever-how the region had been pacified, how there was no longer extortion, and how cattle were rarely stolen anymore-when she heard the greeting of a woman who had just arrived. "Buenas y santas," she said. Jay looked up to say hello, as everyone did, and heard her apologize without looking at anyone, and saw her pull up a plastic chair, and felt something akin to recognition. It took a few seconds to remember or discover that she''d met her right there, at Las Palmas, twenty years earlier. She, however, did not remember Jay.

Later, when the conversation had moved over to the hammocks and rocking chairs, Jay thought: better this way. Better that she hadn''t recognized her. II Twenty years earlier, Yolanda (that was the woman''s name) had arrived as part of a retinue. Jay had noticed her from the start: the self-restraint of a guarded prisoner, the tense steps, that way of moving as if she were in a hurry or carrying out an errand. She wanted to appear more serious than she actually was, and most of all more serious than the men in the group. During breakfast on the first day, when the table was moved to the shade of a tree from which mangoes fell with the dry thud of a bocce ball (and yes, there was the waiting iguana), Jay watched the woman and listened to her speak, and watched the men and listened to them speak, and learned they were coming from Bogot++ and that the man with the mustache, to whom the others spoke with meekness and even reverence, was a second-tier politician whose favors the region''s landowners sought. They called him Don Gilberto, but in the use of his first name, for some reason, Jay detected more respect than if they''d called him by his surname or his position. Don Gilberto was one of those men who spoke without looking at anyone or using anyone''s name, but everyone always knew to whom his words or suggestions or orders were directed.

Yolanda had sat beside him with her back straight, as if she were holding a notebook ready to write things down, receive instructions, or take dictation. As she took her place on the bench (outside there were no chairs, just a long bench made of planks of wood that all the diners comically had to pick up at once in order to sit on it), she had moved her plate and cutlery away from the man''s: five centimeters, no more, but Jay had noticed the gesture and found it eloquent. In the light that opened between them, in her painstaking wish that they not touch, something was happening. They talked about the upcoming elections; they talked about saving the country from the communist threat. They talked about a dead body that had floated down the river in recent days, and everyone agreed that he must have done something: things like that don''t happen to people with nothing to hide. Jay didn''t mention the house she''d visited that morning, a half hour''s drive away, where a schoolteacher had been accused of indoctrinating the children, found guilty, and decapitated as a lesson to his adolescent pupils; nor did she mention the photographs she''d taken of the pupil whose fate it had been to find the head on his teacher''s desk. She did talk, however, of the music of the plains: one of the men at the table turned out to have written several songs; Jay had heard one of them, and surprised the rest (and surprised herself) by reciting the chorus, some lines with galloping riders and an evening sun the color of a pair of lips. She felt she had called attention to herself, perhaps improperly.

She also felt that she''d eased things for Yolanda; that the men''s gazes on Yolanda became lighter. She felt her wordless gratitude. Before the last cup of coffee, Señor Galán said: "This afternoon there are horses for anyone who wants to ride. Mauricio will show you around and you can see the property." "And what is there to see?" asked the politician. "Oh," Galán said, "you can see everything here." Jay let the hours slip by in a green hammock, alternating between beer and sugary aguapanela, taking catnaps and reading a book by Germán Castro Caycedo. At the agreed time, she approached the stables.

There they were: four saddled horses looking at the same point on the horizon. The man who was going to guide them was wearing rolled-up trousers and a knife on his belt; Jay noticed the skin of his bare feet, cracked and split like desiccated earth, like a dried-up riverbed. The man was tightening girths and lengthening reins as the guests mounted their horses, but he never looked anyone in the face, or he had the kind of features that gave that impression: hard cheekbones, grooves instead of eyes. He pointed Jay toward a horse, off o.