The ticket arrived in the mail some weeks later, booked for January 4, 1978. As Leonel had suggested, I went to a tropical disease specialist for a gamma globulin shot and quinine pills, but they didn’t think I needed a vaccination against yellow fever. Later that day, an older woman friend, who had enrolled in one of my writing classes at the university, and who had lived in Latin America for fourteen years, asked me if I knew what I was doing. “We’ll talk when you get back,” she said. “You’re going to need to talk then.”
