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DIEGO'S DIARY

Volume I

 

 

I. The beginning

(2004–2011)

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When Mary arrived at the ranch, she came to work. She cleaned, cooked, helped wherever she was needed. I had already been there for years. The ranch already existed. The main house had been built, the work was running, and my life in Peru had a structure in place, built with effort and time.

 

Mary came from the village. She had a young daughter, Melany. The father never assumed any responsibility. He was not present, did not contribute, showed no interest. In time, Mary moved in with me at the ranch together with her daughter. Life reorganised itself without grand declarations. Things simply fell into place.

 

I was forty-eight years old. Mary was twenty-two. The age difference was obvious, and I did not ignore it. I thought about it. I doubted. I asked myself questions. I believed I could handle it with honesty and responsibility, that stability would compensate for that imbalance. Today I know that I underestimated its real weight and its consequences.

 

We did not marry. At the time, I did not see that as a problem. I believed commitment was measured in actions, not in paperwork.

 

In May 2005, Gaia was born. I remember that moment clearly: a mixture of joy, responsibility, and a deep sense of entering another stage of life. I took that role seriously—perhaps too seriously from a practical point of view, from obligation, from the idea of holding things together.

 

During the first years, life was stable. Not perfect, but orderly. The ranch set the rhythm. The animals, the clients, the seasons. I lived focused on keeping everything running, on anticipating problems, on solving what was concrete. I thought that was what caring meant.

 

The girls grew up surrounded by routine, nature, and presence. There was never a lack of food, nor attention, nor daily structure. I trusted that environment. I trusted the order we had built. I believed it was enough.

 

That trust was real. It was not naïve in its origin, but it was incomplete.

 

And with time—much later—I would understand that it was also one of my deepest mistakes.

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II. The calm years that seemed solid

(2011–2013)

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For a long time, life seemed to settle. Not in any spectacular way, but with that quiet solidity one learns not to question too much once one has worked hard to achieve it.

 

The ranch functioned. Work was constant. The horses were well. Clients came. The seasons followed one another with a regularity that brought reassurance. I felt tired, yes, but also satisfied. I had the feeling—perhaps too comfortable—that I had built something that sustained itself.

 

Mary was there. Present, though often silent. Melany was growing up. Gaia too. I tried to pay attention to everything, but I cannot say I was a light man. I lived very much in doing. In solving. In anticipating practical problems. I thought that was caring.

 

For some years we decided to live in Arequipa. It was not an escape from the ranch nor an abandonment of the valley. It was a decision made around the girls. I wanted them to attend a good private school. I never trusted public education, neither in the valley nor in the country in general. Not out of disdain, but from experience. I preferred to invest money in education rather than regret shortcomings later.

 

I rented a comfortable, bright house. Arequipa offered other possibilities. Meanwhile, I travelled frequently between the city and the valley. I organised horseback expeditions along the Arequipa desert coast and, at the same time, kept the ranch running. It was exhausting, but possible. I lived with the sense of holding many things at once—and of doing it well.

 

In time, Mary wanted to return to the valley. To the house. To the ranch. There was no major argument about it. I agreed. It seemed reasonable to me. The ranch had always been the centre of everything.

 

Before that happened, we reviewed different educational options. We visited schools. We asked questions. We compared. Finally, we decided to enrol the girls at Tilkapata. It was a small private school, with a Montessori-style approach, run by a German woman. It seemed a good choice. More conscious. More respectful. Closer.

 

I thought we were choosing well.

 

During the school years 2012 and 2013, Melany and Gaia attended Tilkapata. I watched them leave each morning. Return in the afternoon with drawings, homework, scattered comments about the day. Sometimes they talked about trivial things. Sometimes they complained about a boring class. Nothing seemed out of place.

 

With time, however, we began to notice something that troubled us. We did not see solid progress in the basics. Reading, writing, mathematics. Everything seemed to revolve around feeling well, singing, talking about nature, expressing emotions. But the essential foundations were not taking hold.

 

There was no specific alarm. No suspicions. Just a growing sense that it was not the right place for what they needed.

 

For that reason, after two full school years, we decided to change schools. It was a pedagogical decision, not a reactive one. The girls moved to another private institution. Tilkapata remained behind as a closed chapter.

 

For more than a year, nothing else was spoken of.

 

And here is where I pause, because writing this now forces me into an uncomfortable honesty.

 

If there were signs, I did not see them.
If there were meaningful silences, I mistook them for shyness.
If there were changes, I attributed them to growing up.

 

At that time, their world seemed safe to me. Not because I had checked everything, but because I trusted the environment we had chosen. I trusted the idea that a private school, with a carefully constructed discourse, offered protection.

 

That trust was real.

 

And precisely because of that, when it broke, it did so brutally.

 

But in those years—2011, 2012, 2013, even 2014—I did not live with suspicion. I lived with a calm, almost unconscious certainty that things were under control.

 

Today I know they were not.

 

Then, I did not.

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III. May 2015 — The day something was unleashed

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There are days that are never forgotten because they cannot be placed in memory without pain.

 

It was in the afternoon.

 

I entered the house and saw them sitting at the large dining-room table. Mary was there, and the two girls were sitting opposite her. They were not playing. They were not eating. There was a strange stillness, one of those that cannot be explained but that the body recognises before the mind does.

 

Mary asked me to sit down.

 

She did not raise her voice. She did not dramatise. She said it as if it were a simple instruction. Now I think that was the most unsettling thing of all.

 

I sat down.

 

The girls began to speak.

 

It was not an orderly account. It was not a story with a beginning and an end. It was disconnected phrases, interrupted sentences, words that seemed far too large to come out of their mouths. They spoke of an adult at the school. Of a teacher. Of situations that did not belong in a school, nor to the age they were.

 

I listened and felt something inside me coming apart, piece by piece, silently.

 

I asked questions. Many.

 

What happened?
Where?
When?
Once or more than once?

 

I asked because I needed to understand. Because I could not accept what I was hearing. Because part of me was still searching for an explanation that would make it all unreal.

 

They spoke. At intervals. Until at one point they said:

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—Dad, we don’t want to talk about it any more.

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They stood up and went to their room.

 

There were no slammed doors. No shouting. They simply left. As if they had already given everything they could.

 

I remained seated for a few seconds more. I don’t know how many. Time stopped working in its usual way. I stood up and left the house.

 

Mary followed me.

 

We were outside. I could not speak. I could not think clearly. I felt my body hot, tense, as if something were pushing from inside, looking for a way out. I looked around without knowing exactly what I was looking for. I saw a wooden stick. I picked it up.

 

I don’t remember thinking about it. I simply picked it up.

 

I got into the car and drove away.

 

If I try to return mentally to Tilkapata—and I am doing so now, as I write—I still find it difficult to reconcile the image with what happened.

 

Tilkapata did not look like a “normal” school. That was precisely what had attracted us. There were no large buildings or traditional classrooms. There were small structures, adobe and wooden cabins scattered among trees, with a rustic, “natural” air. Everything was designed to convey closeness, freedom, an absence of hierarchy.

 

There was much talk of expressing emotions. Of listening to the inner child. Of being in contact with the earth. Of respecting personal rhythms. There were songs. There were discourses about Mother Earth. About being authentic. About growing up without repression.

 

The teachers did not dress like teachers. They seemed more like members of an alternative community. Walter Machuca fit perfectly into that environment. He was an older man, with almost no hair on top and a long ponytail at the back. An “old hippie”, as one might have said without malice. The kind of person one associates with the alternative, the harmless, with someone who talks about peace and sensitivity.

 

He never triggered a direct alarm in me. And that, today, hurts to write.

 

Some of the cabins had a second level. It was not obvious from the outside. They were small, raised spaces, accessed by an internal ladder. In one of those classrooms, I later learned, there was a bed.

 

A bed.

 

Even today I find it hard to write that word without stopping. No one was ever able to explain to me why there was a bed in a school. In a place where children spent their days. There was no pedagogical reason. No clear justification. Only evasions.

At that moment, as the girls were speaking, all those images began to overlap in my head. The “alternative” discourse. The cabins. The bed. The teacher who spoke of feelings and energy. Everything that had once seemed harmless began to turn sinister.

 

I left the ranch with a single idea in my head.

 

I am not going to write that word.
There is no need.

 

Only someone who has daughters can understand that mental state. It is not rational. It is not moral. It is not defensible. It is something that takes control of the body before the mind has time to intervene.

 

I did not have his address. I did not know where he was.

 

I went to the school.

 

I spoke with the head. He told me that the man no longer worked there. That he had left when my daughters left the school. That perhaps he was at another school. He knew nothing more.

 

I got back into the car. I went from school to school. I asked. I said his name. No one knew anything. Or no one said they did.

 

At some point I spoke with a police officer I knew. Not as a formal complaint. Man to man. He explained the procedures. The timelines. The examinations. The special camera. He explained that more than a year had passed. That the process would be long. That it would be hard on the girls.

 

I spoke with Mary again. We talked about it many times. We decided not to pursue that path. Not because what had happened did not matter, but because we did not want to expose the girls again to something that could break them once more.

 

But I did not stop.

 

I paid people to look for him. I called contacts. I moved everything I had within reach. I was not thinking about laws or consequences. I was thinking about finding him.

 

Weeks passed. Months.

 

One day I learned that he was working in a theatre in Lima.

 

I remember precisely the moment that information reached me. I felt a dangerous clarity. As if everything had suddenly aligned. I was about to act.

 

Two days later, I was told that he had died.

 

Cancer.

 

I don’t know exactly what I felt. It was not relief. It was not satisfaction. Nor was it sadness. It was something harder to name. A mixture of emptiness, disbelief, and a question that had no answer.

 

Coincidence?
Fate?
The hand of something I do not understand?

I don’t know.

 

Today, as I write this, I can see more clearly the trap that existed in that entire scenario. How a discourse of freedom, of care, of “being happy”, can become a perfect mask. How the alternative can disarm suspicion. How one lowers one’s guard when one believes oneself to be in a safe place.

 

At that moment, I did not see that.

 

I was only a father in shock, trying not to lose control.

 

And that, too, is part of the truth.

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IV. The arrival of maruja and rubén

(August / Septembre de 2015 – 2016)

 

After what had happened with the girls, the house was no longer the same. There were no constant arguments, but there was something worse: a dull, permanent tension that found no outlet. I was focused on maintaining routine, on keeping things running. The ranch could not stop. The horses required daily attention. The routes continued. Commitments to clients continued.

 

Mary, by contrast, seemed increasingly absent, even when she was physically present. She did not speak much. She spent long stretches in silence. I interpreted this as mourning, as a different way of processing what had happened. I did not think it was dangerous. I thought it simply needed time.

 

It was in that context that, around August or September 2015, Maruja arrived at the ranch.

 

She did not arrive alone.

 

She came with Rubén.

 

Maruja was introduced as someone who could help in the house and in the kitchen. Mary knew her from before. I did not. She was older than Rubén, apparently calm in manner, with a soft, almost maternal way of speaking. From the outset she spoke of “energies”, of “things one can feel”, of problems that are not always visible. I did not attach importance to it. In the valley, that kind of language is not unusual.

 

Rubén, by contrast, was young. Quiet. Correct. He began working as a driver during the multi-day horseback rides. He transported equipment, helped with logistics, did whatever was asked of him without argument. The ranch was growing, and any help seemed necessary.

 

At that moment, nothing struck me as strange.

 

Rubén worked for between six and eight months. Then he disappeared. There was no clear farewell and no concrete explanation. He simply stopped coming. I assumed it was just another instance of people passing through the ranch. It was neither the first nor the last time someone left without much explanation.

 

Today it surprises me how little I questioned that.

 

At the time, I did not know that Maruja knew—from the very beginning—that Mary and Rubén had begun a secret relationship. Not only did she know: she encouraged it. Rubén confessed this to me many years later, only at the beginning of 2024, when he learned of the false complaints filed by Mary at the end of 2023.

 

In 2015 and 2016, I knew none of this.

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V. Signs I did not know how to read at the time

(2014–2016)

 

There are memories that return not as scenes, but as questions. For years I believed that what occurred between 2014 and 2016 had been a series of misunderstandings, normal tensions, human errors. Today I know that many of the signs were already there. They were not clear. They did not shout. But they were there.

 

Huaypo

 

Lake Huaypo was, for me, a simple place. I went there with the dogs so they could run, swim, burn off energy. Sometimes I went alone. Sometimes with one of the girls. Sometimes with all of them. There were no rituals. No secrets. Just air, cold water, happy dogs.

 

In 2014 I took Melany there once. I have photographs from that day. The dates do not lie: she was twelve years old. I remember nothing special about that outing. For me it was just another afternoon, one of many.

 

That is why, years later, when that place began to appear laden with insinuations, it disoriented me. Huaypo began to be mentioned by Mary during arguments, always in the same way, always under the same label: inappropriate touching. Not as a memory being recounted, but as an accusation already formulated, repeated without context or detail.

 

At the time I did not understand what was happening. I thought they were words spoken out of anger. I did not imagine that something was being planted.

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My sister's visit

 

In 2016 my sister came to visit me from the Netherlands. At some point she spoke alone with Mary. I was not present.

 

Later, Mary would describe that conversation as a “woman-to-woman” dialogue. She said she had sought advice, opinion, guidance. She spoke about our relationship. She said she was not sure whether she truly loved me, that she needed time to discover it. I learned that part later, from my sister. At that moment I did not know that Mary had already begun a secret relationship with Rubén.

 

During that same conversation, Mary introduced another subject.

 

She told my sister that Melany had told her that, during an outing with me to Lake Huaypo, I had touched her on the chest and that she had not liked it.

 

My sister’s reaction was immediate and clear. She said she had known me her entire life. That before accepting something like that as true, one had to understand the context. That she should ask her daughter how it had happened, under what circumstances, whether it had been accidental or intentional. And that if, after speaking with her, she was still convinced that it had been deliberate, then she should report it immediately—even if it concerned her own brother.

 

The conversation ended there.

 

There was no report.
There was no attempt to clarify matters with me.
There was no effort to understand.

En 2016 mi hermana vino a visitarme desde Holanda. En algún momento habló a solas con Mary. Yo no estuve presente.

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The word that begins to live on its own

 

From then on, that expression—inappropriate touching—began to circulate. Not as a narrated fact, but as a formula. It appeared in arguments. In reproaches. In insinuations. Always the same words. Always without a scene.

 

I did not understand what was happening. I had no memory whatsoever of anything that could explain such an accusation. And yet the word remained there, floating, as if it did not need to be supported by anything.

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The formal accusation and the void

 

Years later, when there was finally a formal accusation, Huaypo appeared again.

In the police statement, Melany mentioned the lake. She said that serious things had happened. And then, in the middle of the account, something broke. She said—or it was left said—that she did not remember what had happened afterwards. That she could not explain the sequence. That she could not continue.

 

That phrase—“I don’t remember”—stayed with me for another, more unsettling reason. It was not a spontaneous forgetting. It was an interruption.

Lake Huaypo had been mentioned for years, repeated again and again by Mary during arguments, as a fixed label: inappropriate touching. Not as a memory recounted, but as an accusation already formed.

 

When the moment came to give a statement, Huaypo had to be there, because it was part of the learned script. But when it became necessary to move forward, to turn the word into a scene, the account fell apart. There was no lived sequence of its own to sustain it.

 

The story stopped where there was no longer lived memory, only repetition. And at that point confusion appeared: I don’t remember.

 

It was then that I understood I was not listening to a memory that was failing, but to a narrative that, when demanded as real experience, was left without substance.

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What I felt at the time

 

At that moment I did not know what to think. I did not want to think. I felt vertigo. Something profoundly unjust and disordered was happening, but I did not have the tools to name it.

 

I could only see how a word, repeated again and again, was gaining weight without ever having been told.

 

Meanwhile, life together was deteriorating. Mary became more aggressive, more provocative. Arguments increasingly took place in front of the girls. I tried not to react. I thought silence was protection. I did not know it could also be used against me.

 

Today I know that those scenes were the beginning of something larger. But at the time I only felt that something did not fit.

 

And that, somehow, Lake Huaypo kept returning without ever having existed.

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VI. Isolation

 

At the beginning of 2016, life together began to deteriorate in a way that could no longer be attributed solely to exhaustion or a passing crisis. Something had changed in the way Mary related to me. It was not an isolated argument. It was a permanent state of confrontation.

 

Mary began to provoke me constantly. She accused me of almost everything: of not loving the girls, of ruining her life, of being responsible for any problem that arose. She sent messages to former ranch workers, spoke badly of me outside the house, and inside it the atmosphere became increasingly aggressive, more hostile, more unpredictable.

 

The girls began to be present in almost all the arguments. Comments made in front of them. Insinuations. Distorted accounts. At the time I did not have the language to name it, but today I know that this was where a process of alignment and erosion of the bond between them and me began. Back then I only felt that something was breaking, and I did not understand why.

 

I tried to remain calm. Not to respond. Not to raise my voice. Not to escalate the situation. I believed silence was a form of protection. I did not understand that, in that context, even silence could be used against me.

 

Shortly after Rubén’s arrival—and Maruja’s apparent departure—Mary left the main bedroom and began sleeping in a small hut next to the ranch’s entrance gate.

 

It was a small, old structure, separate from the house. It was not comfortable. It was not visible. It was not a logical place for someone seeking calm within a shared life.

 

It was a very small and very old building, previously used as a storage room. It was far from the main house. It lacked all basic comfort.

 

What made that gesture even stranger was that next to the main house there was a fully equipped guesthouse: spacious, warm, with a fireplace, and designed precisely to offer peace and rest.

 

Mary did not choose that place.

 

She chose the hut furthest away, the least visible from the house, the closest to the exit.

 

At the time I thought it was emotional distance. Today I know it was not an affective decision, but a practical one.

 

Years later I learned what that location allowed: night-time departures without being seen, discreet encounters, hidden visits. I learned that Rubén would pick her up, or that she would go to the village, where he rented a room. I learned that Maruja also entered at night, even after having been dismissed.

 

None of that was part of my understanding then.

 

All I could see was that Mary was becoming different. More irritable. More aggressive. Provocative. Suggesting false events. Seeking conflict where there had once been conversation. Tensions accumulated. The house ceased to feel like a safe place, although I could not explain why.

 

At some point in 2016, one of those conflicts crossed a threshold. It was not an isolated episode, but the result of months of provocations, shouting, insults, and constant pushing. The arguments were no longer only verbal. I felt cornered, pushed to the limit, driven to react.

 

After that episode—which marked a before and an after for me—there was a reconciliation.

 

It is difficult to write that word without discomfort, but it is the truth. There was a reconciliation. Not because the conflict had been resolved, but because almost at the same time something appeared that changed my understanding of what was happening.

I found the first concrete proof of infidelity.

 

It was not a suspicion or an intuition. It was a message that appeared in the ranch’s email. A message that was not addressed to me, but that clearly said: “I love you very much too, Mary.” There were more exchanges. They were not ambiguous. They were not open to interpretation.

 

That discovery did not fix anything, but it explained many things: the aggression, the emotional withdrawal, the constant provocations, the radical change in attitude. For a time it produced a fragile truce, sustained more by shock than by any true rebuilding.

 

It was in that atmosphere that another episode occurred which, years later, would take on a different meaning.

 

During an argument, Mary threw at me a specific and extremely serious accusation: she claimed that I had said a phrase to Melany that was entirely false, an insinuation that never left my mouth and that, merely by existing as an accusation, crossed a line I could not accept.

 

It was not a misunderstanding.
It was not a poorly interpreted phrase.
It was a direct imputation.

 

I remember the physical impact of hearing it. It was not fear. It was disbelief followed by indignation. The sensation that the ground beneath my feet was no longer ground.

 

My reaction was immediate and brief. I did not enter into a long exchange. My voice rose, yes—but for a clear reason: I was being accused of something morally inadmissible.

 

I told her to leave.
To get out of the house.

 

Nothing more.

 

At that moment I did not know—there was no way I could know—that this scene was being secretly recorded.

The audio exists. Years later it was extracted, fragmented, and reused out of context, without the prior accusation that had provoked it. Presented as proof of psychological aggression, as an arbitrary expulsion.

 

When I heard that fragment years later, everything began to fall into place.

 

The provocations.
The arguments in front of the girls.
The recorded scenes.
The patient accumulation of “material”.

 

Only at the beginning of 2024, when Rubén confessed everything to me, did I understand that what I had experienced as a succession of crises had not been an accidental drift.

 

There had been a plan.

 

A plan devised by Maruja and sustained by Mary to make my life miserable, manipulate the girls, remove me from the house, and appropriate everything.

 

In 2016, that idea did not exist for me.

 

I was only trying to understand what was happening to the woman with whom I had built a life—and why, suddenly, everything seemed to be turning against me.

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VII. November 2018 — The journey  that was not a journey

 

For a long time I thought that trip had been nothing more than an uncomfortable anecdote. Unpleasant, yes, but not decisive. Today I know that was not the case. Today I know it was a turning point. But at the time, I had no way of knowing.

 

In November 2018 I was in the Netherlands. I had travelled to be with my mother. She was not hospitalised. She spent her final week at home. My sisters and I took turns being with her. No one wanted her to be alone. There was a quiet, contained sadness, the kind that needs no words because everyone knows exactly what is happening.

 

I was there physically and emotionally exhausted. I slept little. I thought little beyond the immediate present. My world, at that moment, was very small: a house, a bed, a farewell that was approaching.

 

It was in that context that Mary told me she would travel for a few days with the girls “so they could get to know their own country better”. That was how she explained it. There were no details. No names. Nothing that raised suspicion. At the time, it did not seem strange to me.

 

Almost at the same time, she asked me for money. Taxes needed to be paid. The car needed maintenance. These were normal expenses. I had always been the main financial support of the ranch. I sent the money without questioning it.

 

Today, when I think about that, I do not feel anger. I feel a strange sadness. Because there was no crude deception. There was something worse: normality.

 

At that time I did not know that the trip was not only mother and daughters. I did not know that Rubén was there. I did not know that Maruja had also been invited, together with her husband. I did not know that the journey included places such as Puerto Maldonado, Abancay, Andahuaylas, Quimbiri, Kiteni and Quillabamba. I did not know that Mary had financed everything.

 

I knew none of that.

 

The girls did not tell me anything afterwards either. When I asked, their answers were brief. Incomplete. They changed the subject. I interpreted that as tiredness, as lack of interest, as children’s things. I did not understand that they could not speak.

 

Years later I learned a detail that even today I struggle to process without something tightening in my chest: during that trip, Gaia saw Mary and Rubén kissing.

 

I do not know exactly where it happened. Nor does it matter. What matters is the image. Because there are images that are never forgotten. And there are images that cannot be spoken about when the person who controls your home, your stability and your world is part of the secret.

 

That trip was not only a betrayal between partners. It was something deeper. It was placing the girls inside a parallel life. Making them witnesses. Making them involuntary accomplices. Teaching them, without saying it, that silence was necessary for everything to keep functioning.

 

At that moment, I was far away. Vulnerable. Saying goodbye to my mother. Thinking that, at least, everything at the ranch was continuing as usual.

 

Today I find it hard not to stop there and ask myself:
What would I have done if I had known?
What signs did I overlook?
What questions did I not ask because it never occurred to me that there was anything to ask?

 

In November 2018, I still believed that the worst was already over.

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VIII. 2019–marzo de 2020 — A discomfort without a name

 

The year began with a strange feeling. It was not an open crisis. It was a constant discomfort. A doubt I did not know how to formulate.

 

There was no concrete event I could point to. No decisive argument or visible rupture. But something was slowly shifting, as if the ground were losing its stability without fully giving way.

 

At that time, I did not know that Mary was continuing to support Rubén financially. I did not know that she had rented him a room in the Hábitat Housing Association in Urubamba and, later, another on Bolívar Street, where they met. I did not know that the money followed a path I was completely unaware of.

 

I learned all of that years later.

 

In 2019, all I saw was a relationship that was becoming increasingly opaque, more contradictory. Suggestive comments. Tensions without a name. Silences that weighed more than words. I was not directly accused, but I was beginning to feel that something was being prepared, even though I could not understand what.

 

Years later, when Rubén showed me WhatsApp messages, many pieces suddenly fell into place. In one of them, dated 15 September 2019, Mary demanded that he return at least “the two thousand”.

Reading that message was disturbing. Not because it explained everything, but because it showed that that money—those two thousand soles—already existed as a conflict at that time, even though it was not yet associated with me.

 

In 2019, I was not accused of anything.
No one said that I had stolen money.
There was as yet no narrative in which I appeared as responsible for a misappropriation.

 

That same year, the relationship between Mary and Rubén ended in a conflictual way. I did not know the details. I did not know that they had exchanged violent messages, reproaches, financial demands. I did not know that the relationship had been far more intense and destructive than I had imagined.

 

Shortly afterwards, Rubén suffered a serious motorcycle accident. He was in a coma for nineteen days.

 

At that time, I had no idea what happened next. I did not know that, while he remained hospitalised, Mary and Maruja had entered his room, taken personal belongings and attempted to erase traces of the relationship. I did not know that Rubén had initiated legal action. I did not know that a court had ordered Maruja to compensate him. I did not know that the lawyer who defended her then would, years later, be the same one who would defend Mary.

 

I learned all of that much later.

 

In March 2020, a few days before I left the country, another episode occurred that at the time I did not know how to read.

 

Mary and our daughter Gaia were at the Urubamba bus terminal. There they encountered Rubén, who had not yet fully recovered from his accident and was working there. There was an argument. That was all Mary told me afterwards.

 

According to her version, the encounter had been accidental. She told me that Rubén was agitated, that he accused me of causing the motorcycle accident, and that she had defended me. She presented the scene as an uncomfortable but brief verbal exchange, of no great importance.

 

I believed her. I had no reason not to.

 

Years later, I saw the police report from that day.

 

I learned then that the confrontation had been violent. Not a verbal argument, but a physical fight in the middle of the bus terminal, with blows, pushing, pulling and shouting, in front of many people. I learned that Mary had physically confronted not only Rubén, but also his mother, who arrived at the scene, and that between the two women there had been insults and aggression until the situation spiralled out of control and required police intervention.

 

I also learned that all of this had occurred in the presence of our daughter.

 

Reading that document was deeply disturbing. Not only because of the violence itself, but because it confirmed something I had still not wanted to face directly: that Gaia had once again been exposed to a brutal, vulgar, unbounded adult conflict, directly linked to the secret relationship that had already marked her childhood.

 

She had not only been a witness to the betrayal. She had been dragged into its consequences.

 

When I think about that episode today, I do not see it as an isolated event. I see it as another layer of a parallel reality I did not know. A scene in which I was not present, but which had consequences. Another episode in which the version I was given did not match what had actually happened.

 

A few days later, on 8 April 2020, I left Peru to travel to the Netherlands, in the midst of the global uncertainty caused by the pandemic.

 

I left without knowing that many of the things I did not yet understand were still unfolding.
I left believing that the conflict was domestic, intimate, limited.

 

I did not know that the worst had not yet begun.

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IX. 2020 — When leaving seemed the only way to stay

 

When people first began talking about COVID, no one really understood what it meant. It was a distant word, something happening in other countries. Then, in a matter of days, everything shut down.

 

Peru was one of the first countries to impose a total lockdown. Tourism disappeared overnight. The ranch was left empty. Income, already fragile, evaporated. The animals still needed to be fed. The workers still needed something to live on. The girls still needed stability.

 

I was trapped between two different fears: the fear of staying and being unable to sustain anything, and the fear of leaving and having that interpreted as abandonment.

 

The Dutch embassy began contacting its citizens. They offered repatriation flights. There were not many. We did not know if there would be more. The uncertainty was total.

 

I remember the conversations with Mary at that time. They were not open arguments. They were tense exchanges, charged with an urgency that left little room to think. We reached an agreement: I would travel to the Netherlands to work and send money. From there, at least, I could generate income. At the ranch, without tourism, that was impossible.

 

On 8 April 2020, I took the last flight.

 

I remember the almost empty airport. I remember the feeling of leaving without knowing when I would return. I remember thinking—with a mixture of guilt and conviction—that I was doing the right thing.

 

At that moment, I believed that sacrifice would serve to support everyone.

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X. The distance that was filled with other people's words

(2020–2022)

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When the pandemic began, no one knew how long it would last or what it would destroy first. In Peru, the lockdown was immediate and severe. Tourism stopped overnight. The ranch was left without income. The animals were still there. So were the bills.

 

For weeks we tried to understand what to do. The Dutch embassy began sending notices about repatriation flights. It was not a simple decision. I did not want to leave. I did not want to leave the girls. But the reality was clear: in Peru I would not be able to generate income for a long time. In the Netherlands, perhaps I could.

 

We talked about it. Mary agreed. The idea was simple: I could be more useful from the outside.

 

On 8 April 2020 I took one of the last flights. I left with the feeling that I was doing the right thing, even though it weighed heavily on my body. It was not an escape. It was a survival strategy.

 

In Europe I worked whenever it was possible. I did not choose comfortable jobs or ones that matched my background. I worked wherever I could. Between 2020 and 2022 I sent 47,690 dollars to Mary’s personal account. Regular, documented transfers. Money intended for the house, the girls, the ranch.

 

During that time we spoke. Not always easily, but we spoke. I believed that, despite everything, we were still trying to hold something together.

 

When I returned to Peru, something had changed.

 

Not abruptly. Not with a direct accusation. It began in another way.

 

Mary began by saying that she had received “very little money”. That it had not been enough to cover expenses. She said it as one complains about a miscalculation. I knew it was not true, but I thought it was accumulated tension, exhaustion.

 

Then the wording changed.

 

She began to say that I had hardly supported them during COVID. That it had been insufficient. That she had had to manage on her own. I still did not understand what was happening. The numbers were there. The transfers too.

 

Later, the story shifted again.

 

She said that I had been fine in the Netherlands. That I had had a good life while they were struggling here. That I had enjoyed myself while they endured hardship. I listened to that with a mixture of bewilderment and sadness. None of it matched what I had lived.

 

And then came the final accusation.

 

She told the girls that I had left. That I had abandoned them. That I had been a coward. That I had deserted them during the pandemic. That I had not been there when they needed me most.

 

This did not happen years later. It happened then, after my return, while I was still there, trying to put back together something that no longer held.

 

I did not immediately understand what was happening. I thought they were reproaches, resentment, a clumsy way of expressing pain. I did not see that a story was being installed. A version that was not meant to discuss facts, but to occupy a place in my daughters’ minds.

 

I still believed that conflicts were resolved by talking. I did not understand that, at that point, it was no longer about resolving anything, but about replacing me.

 

During COVID, the distance was physical.
Afterwards, it became something else.

 

And that distance would be far more difficult to cross.

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XI. Returning without returning

(after COVID)

 

When I finally returned, I thought—once again—that presence would put things in order. That seeing each other face to face would allow misunderstandings to be clarified. That distance had been the main problem.

 

I was wrong.

 

The girls looked at me differently. Not with hatred. Not with open rejection. It was something harder to name: caution. As if I were someone who had to be evaluated before being trusted. As if there were a prior story I did not know.

 

Mary was different. Harder. More confrontational. Conversations quickly turned into reproaches. Many of them had no connection to events I recognised.

 

Any attempt at explanation was interpreted as defence.
Any silence, as confirmation of guilt.

 

I lived in a state of alert.

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XII. Rosita

 

I returned to Peru after COVID with the feeling of entering a house I no longer fully recognised. Time had passed. Distance. Accumulated silences. But nothing prepared me for what I saw in the guesthouse.

 

There it was.

 

A human skull.

 

Mary called it “Rosita”.

 

I did not know what to think. For a few seconds I believed I was misinterpreting what I was seeing, as if fatigue or the disorientation of returning were playing tricks on me. But no. It was real. It was there, placed intentionally, not as a forgotten object, but as something that formed part of the everyday life of the house.

 

I did not ask immediately. I remained silent, observing, trying to understand.

 

I know the highlands. I know Andean cosmology. I know that in the mountains there are deep, ancestral beliefs. I have heard of the pishtaco, of Pachamama, of offerings, of rituals that mix popular Catholicism, indigenous memory and superstition. I know there are healers, shamans, practices that seek to protect, to heal, or to explain the inexplicable.

But this was different.

 

This was not an offering to the earth.
It was not a community tradition.
It was not a shared or symbolic rite.

 

It was a human skull, removed from its rest, used as an instrument.

 

Mary lit candles. She offered it cigarettes. She left it beer. She performed rituals without my presence. Things that were not spoken about, that were done in secret. I felt rejection, but also a deep moral discomfort I did not know how to articulate.

 

To me, that skull belonged to someone. To a person who had lived, who had had a history, a family, a name. Someone who should be allowed to rest in peace. I could not accept that the remains of a human being were taken from their grave to serve the desires, fears or ambitions of others.

 

It seemed to me a desecration.
It seemed to me an absolute lack of respect.

 

But at that moment I did not manage to go beyond that intuition. I thought it was superstition. I thought it was cultural influence. I thought I did not fully understand and that perhaps I was judging from the outside.

 

Years later, everything shifted.

 

When Rubén confessed to me what had happened during the years when I knew nothing, Rosita ceased to be a strange episode and took on a central place in the story.

 

Rubén told me that Mary, in coordination with Maruja, had once sent him to collect earth from the cemetery. Earth from graves. To be used in rituals. He told me that one night he drove them to Cusco, to the house of Mary’s sister. They went inside. He had to wait outside. The ritual lasted all night.

 

At dawn they returned to the Valley. On the way there was a minor car accident. I remember that episode. Mary told me she had had a small accident and that the car had been repaired quickly. At the time I did not attach any importance to it.

 

Years later, everything fell into place.

 

Rosita was not an isolated gesture.
It was not a cultural oddity.
It was part of something much darker.

 

I understood then that Mary had lost any ethical compass. That she no longer distinguished between what is acceptable and what is not. Between respect and desecration. Between limits and their total absence.

 

I also understood Maruja’s role. Not as an anecdotal influence, but as someone who had introduced, reinforced and legitimised a belief system based on rituals, curses, “offerings” and practices intended to control, harm or subjugate.

 

Mary had been poisoned by that world. Not in a metaphorical sense, but an ethical one.

 

Over the years, I saw that same absence of limits repeat itself in other acts. One of the hardest to process was the video Mary recorded of our dog Anton, dying. Skin over bone. Instead of seeking help, she took the time to film him. To record his death.

 

That gesture said everything.

 

It explained how she could use her own daughters as instruments. How she could manipulate them, turn them against me, place false stories in their minds in order to obtain money, power or control.

 

Something fundamental in human behaviour was missing. Something that normally restrains. That prevents crossing certain lines. That marks what is sacred.

 

Rosita was the clearest sign of that.

 

I did not understand it then.
I understood it later.

 

And when I finally understood it, there was no longer any way to see what had happened as a simple relationship crisis.

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XIII. 2023 — The year of the explosion 

 

For a long time I thought that what we were living through was the prolonged aftermath of a deteriorated relationship. Conflict, resentment, manipulation. Nothing healthy, but still within a framework I believed I recognised.

 

In 2023 I understood that it was no longer that.

 

That year began not with an explosion or an immediate violent scene, but with something colder and more dangerous: a series of constant accusations, almost always made in front of the girls.

 

Mary began accusing me of all kinds of things. Invented stories. Insinuations presented as truths. Narratives that were not meant to clarify anything, but to install an image. I listened as a version of me was being constructed that I did not recognise, while my daughters sat there, trapped between two incompatible realities.

 

One of those accusations was that I did not want the girls to study. She repeated it again and again, drawing on something real but distorted: my criticisms of the local school system. I had questioned the excessive workload imposed on pupils, the amount of time spent teaching them to march, while basic English—a key tool for their future—was neglected. That was transformed into the opposite narrative: that I did not want their education, that I did not care about their future.

 

She also began accusing me of having lovers. Not as suspicion, but as assertion. She even claimed that I was having a relationship with the wife of one of my best friends in the village, a former English journalist who is blind. The origin of that accusation was as absurd as it was revealing: she had found some hairs in the family car.

 

A minimal detail became a complete story.
An insinuation turned into certainty.
And that certainty was repeated in front of the girls.

That episode, which began with a single hair found in the car, ended up becoming something much more serious.

 

In 2023, during a conversation that was recorded, Gaia told me something that left me breathless. She said that she had seen—years earlier, during a visit to the house of that friend, the blind English journalist—how his wife and I were having intimate relations in front of her eyes.

 

Hearing that was devastating.

 

Not only because of the accusation itself, but because it was materially impossible.

 

My friend lives in a house adapted to his blindness: a completely open space, without doors or closed rooms except for the bathroom. The areas are shared, visible from almost anywhere, and he also lives with two employees who are always present.

 

In a house like that, it would be impossible for anything even remotely intimate to take place without someone noticing. It is even more absurd to imagine that I would do something like that in front of my own daughter, while visiting one of my closest friends.

 

That was not a memory.
It was a construction.

 

A false memory implanted, repeated, reinforced, until it ended up being lived as real. It was one of the hardest moments for me, because it showed the extent to which Mary’s manipulation had contaminated her own daughters’ perception. What had begun as an absurd insinuation had ended up converted into a fabricated memory.

 

Each accusation was an emotional trap. They did not seek an answer. They sought to erode my image in the girls’ eyes, to force them into taking sides, to wear down the bond silently but relentlessly.

 

That same year another accusation appeared, even more dangerous.

 

Mary accused me of having stolen 2,000 soles from the girls’ room before COVID. She said that this money corresponded to the girls’ “tip savings”. She stated it with certainty, as if it were a proven fact.

 

The accusation was false.

 

I never touched that money. There was no basis for it. I denied it immediately. I asked for explanations. There were no proofs. There were no questions. Logic no longer served to verify, but to impose a version.

 

Much later, when reviewing old messages, a key piece appeared. In 2019, after a break-up with Rubén, Mary had written to him demanding that he “at least return the two thousand”. That message, recovered later, revealed something disturbing: the money had existed as a conflict years earlier, but not with me.

 

In 2023, that story was rewritten.
And my daughters were placed at the centre of the manipulation.

 

That was the moment when I truly began to worry about Mary’s mental and emotional state.

Until then I had interpreted many of her behaviours as anger, resentment, or control strategies within a broken coexistence. In 2023 I felt that there was something deeper that I could no longer ignore.

 

I then thought about her family history. I knew that her mother had suffered mental health problems for many years. She had abandoned her family, lived in very precarious conditions and, at some point, received treatment in an institution. I never knew her diagnosis, nor did I seek to know it.

 

I saw her mother only once, at a wedding. She was then living in the house of one of her daughters. I sat next to her during the celebration. She smiled, but did not speak. She remained silent, distant.

 

Some time later, before travelling to the Netherlands during COVID, I spent a night in that same house in Cusco. Her mother was there, but I did not see her. She stayed in her room the entire time. Her presence seemed to be a delicate subject, almost hidden.

 

I drew no medical conclusions. I am not a doctor. But I began to ask myself whether what was happening with Mary went beyond a couple’s conflict.

 

That same year, after multiple episodes of provocation and aggression, I spoke with a close friend. He suggested seeking professional help. I hired a psychologist with the intention of exploring whether there was any civilised way out of our coexistence.

 

Mary refused. She did not want to talk. She did not want to explore any form of orderly closure.

 

I also spoke with a lawyer friend, not to initiate conflict, but to understand the legal framework. He spoke with Mary and explained the situation clearly: we were not married, I was not Melany’s biological father, and legally she would only be entitled to half of what had been acquired during the period of living together. There would be no automatic rights over the ranch.

 

None of this opened any space for dialogue. Mary did not want an agreement. She wanted everything.

 

On the advice of another friend, I hired a psychologist. The situation at home had become unsustainable. I was increasingly convinced that Mary was not well.

 

Her verbal attacks could last more than an hour without interruption. She shouted continuously, her face flushed, sweating, out of control. I remained silent, following professional advice. I recorded the episodes. There are recordings of more than an hour of continuous verbal violence.

 

What was most disturbing was the abrupt change. When it ended, she could go out into the courtyard, stroke the dog, speak gently to him, as if nothing had happened. The shift in register was instant, almost unreal.

 

The psychologist, Danicela, asked my permission to try to speak with Mary. She thought that perhaps a professional conversation might open some space. She endured more than five hours of dialogue until Mary lost control, began shouting at her and threatened to report her.

 

No one could reason with her.

 

That same year another episode occurred that confirmed the situation was no longer contained within the house.

I received an email from one of my best friends in the village, the former blind English journalist. He forwarded me a WhatsApp message from his wife—the same woman Mary had been pointing to with insinuations and unfounded accusations for some time.

 

One morning, while walking along one of the main streets of the village to collect a parcel, she heard shouting. Mary had stopped her pickup truck in the middle of the street, blocking traffic. From there she shouted insults, accusations and offensive remarks at her, even in front of her own daughter. Everyone heard. Everyone watched.

 

It was not the first time. It had already happened weeks earlier. This time it was direct, close, aggressive. The woman felt real fear. She feared that Mary would get out of the vehicle and physically attack her. It was not an exaggeration. It was the logical fear one feels in front of someone who has lost all restraint in public.

 

Hours later, still shaking, she wrote to her husband. Not to dramatise, but to leave a record. She said she felt humiliated, exposed, and that she was now afraid even to go out into the street.

 

Only then did I understand that these were not isolated episodes: the same woman had first been turned into the object of an absurd accusation in front of my daughters, and then attacked publicly in the street, in front of everyone.

 

And it was not the last episode.

 

In 2023 the violence escalated clearly. The shouting could be heard from the gate of the ranch. One day, Mary took a wooden stick and attacked me in front of our neighbour Alejo Ayme, who watched without intervening. I was left injured, with my shirt torn and my arms bleeding. There are photographs.

 

On another occasion I found her in the kitchen in a state of drunkenness, throwing objects, with a vacant stare, insulting me through sobs. She fell to the floor, urinated on herself, and threatened me with a knife.

 

None of this was an isolated outburst.
Nothing was an accident.

 

It was the culmination of chaos sown years earlier. In 2023 I understood that Mary was seeking escalation. She needed to provoke a situation that would place me in the role of physical aggressor.

 

On 27 October 2023 I understood that I could not remain there any longer.

 

That day I travelled to Arequipa and stayed in a hotel for two or three weeks, until I found a small studio flat in a safe area of the city.

 

It was not abandonment.

It was a preventive measure.

 

I left to avoid what she was trying to provoke. I left to protect myself. And also—although I did not fully realise it at the time—to protect the girls from a greater explosion.

 

That was the end of our life together.
And the beginning of everything that would come afterwards.

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FIN TOMO I

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Note:

 

This part was not written for a judicial process.

Legal procedures work with fragments; life does not. Without context, facts are distorted and words lose their meaning.

This diary exists to record that context and to allow the story to be read in full, without cuts.