For one hour the bus moves forward jumping and sticking desperately to the foothills, like a gravely injured deer battling with all its might not to fall into the bottom of the canyon that the Spaniards called La Argentina: "land of silver". The colder we get, the more I think about Lilia. -Lilia, how do I go to the Gringos’ farm? -Take the bus to Popayan and drop off after crossing the guerilla’s camp. But don't do it. -Why? -Because of the guerilla! They could kill you. Lilia is not my mother, but I am her son. She raised me and did it while telling me thousands of stories about her childhood. Remembering is her favorite hobby. And her memories were the threads of my swaddle. My favorite one is about a Gringo family that showed up out of nowhere from the Central Andes jungle. -Besides, it is located too high in the mountains--you could catch a cold! Perhaps the story of this family was just a fable. Though Lilia’s memories are always accurate, Colombia’s topography is not. I don’t dare to look to the right; I know perfectly that La Argentina has no silver to offer on that side of the bus, just a mile deep trench commencing just beside the wheels. The left side occasionally shows valleys packed with coffee, some of them abandoned and some reclaimed again by the cloud forest. An hour above Lilia’s hometown there is nothing but fog and moss. I perceive no sign of the guerrilla camp, and this makes me doubt of Lilia’s story: again. Only the moaning of faraway waterfalls sounds in her favor, hammering as the bells of a cathedral made for the condors. 5-years-old Lilia and her sisters used to be guests in the Gringo-style wooden house with the excuse of bathing in these waterfalls, but genuinely for having Hansel-and-Gretel dinners. Neither she nor her sister wondered why their hosts could freely decide to move to such a moorland, with no more acquaintances than the cougars, the spectacled bear and the rabbit-deer that sometimes prowled among the moss -so licentiously and shy as the family itself. The fog retires and the jungle unveils grasslands. I see sheep and Normande cows. I remember that Lilia told me the Gringos made pasturelands for animals never seen before. As soon as the first house arises, I jump off, stretch out my battered hips and legs and proceed to walk straight towards my trophy of confirmed reality, an iron gate with the following statement: "Welcome to Meremberg Reserve, founded in 1945." This name looks German, but not as much as the set of four houses in front of me; they are nothing but a typical Bavarian "Vieelbau". The window´s ornate aprons even have German-style flowerpots except that the flowers are not geraniums but heliconia and red-yellow-purple-lantanas, typical of the Colombian countryside. I look through one of the panes and glaring back is a library with German titles evanescing through the glass. How did a German family end up here, in this unfathomable nowhere? I think in the year, 1945--no Germans were moving to Colombia. Were they Nazis looking for a hiding place in a wrong Argentina? According to the sign at the door, Mr. Meremberg was a botanist… this forest must have been an ideal Argentina for all the biologists, independent of being Nazi, or pilgrim, or both! The Gringos lived on this scenery for four decades, until Mr. Meremberg´s wife disappeared shortly after having an argument with an indigenous visitor. She was trying to persuade him to not hunt the rabbit-deers. Lilia remembers Doña Mati to be the first person she ever heard talking about protecting the native animals, especially the rabbit-deer. After a month of a criminal investigation, a superintendent got the scoop thanks to a local boy: Doña Mati was laying somewhere under the moss. Not her, but her body, or the remains of the body after being slaughtered by a machete. The murderer: the boy’s father, the deer hunter. I found the graves of Gunther and Machthilde Meremberg under a giant Kalok tree whose roots endanger to break them. Before leaving I put some heliconia there, in Lilia’s name.