Juan betrays Bando, leaving Samas and Poppy with a lasting grievance

Samas and Poppy’s relationship is an old friendship fractured by betrayal and carried into new lives as an enduring grievance. In the life Samas recounts to Evan Michaels, Samas was Juan de Victoria and Poppy was Bando, a young African stowaway whom Juan rescued. Their bond began in an accidental meeting and grew through recognition of their shared ability to remember earlier lives. At Latsei, however, Juan’s pursuit of wealth took precedence over his promise of loyalty. Bando died, and in her later life as Nez-lah, known as Poppy, she remained hostile to Samas, who understood that hostility as rooted in what he did on their last day together.

An Accidental Meeting and Recognition

Samas tells Evan that he found Poppy by accident, much as Poppy later found Evan. The earlier meeting occurred aboard a ship, where Juan discovered Bando hiding below deck. Juan approached carefully, first trying to establish who the boy was; Bando initially did not answer. Juan identified himself by placing a hand on his chest and giving his name, and the young man responded with his own. Their first exchange was spare, but it began a relationship that would outlast both of their lives.

Juan learned that Bando spoke some Portuguese and had gone several days without food. He gave him bread and watched him eat. The encounter was not only a rescue from immediate hunger: Juan wanted to understand why Bando had travelled so far, while Bando later asked why Juan had saved him. When Juan prompted him to describe his first family, their conversation opened onto the memories that would make their connection unlike an ordinary friendship.

Bando had previously spoken about remembered lives to people who rejected him. He told Juan that elders had made him leave and sailors had laughed at him, but Juan had listened. Juan explained that some people remembered earlier families and lives while others did not, and urged Bando to keep the knowledge secret for their safety. He also promised that death would not necessarily end their friendship: they might meet again in different bodies and remember what they had shared. The promise gave their bond a future beyond the life in which it began, while also making secrecy part of its protection.

A Friendship Built Across Lives

As the two travelled together, Juan treated Bando’s memories as evidence of a kinship that other people could not recognize. On the way toward Latsei, he asked whether Bando remembered how he had died. The question brought their shared understanding into the practical course of their journey: Juan did not regard Bando’s memories as an isolated story, but as part of the identity that connected them across successive lives.

At one point Juan watched Bando experience the vindication of recognizing who he had been. Juan understood the moment as a rare passage from being disbelieved to knowing oneself through memory, and counted Bando as only the fifteenth person to experience it. His account makes that recognition an intimate event between companions: Juan witnesses it, understands its significance, and sees Bando’s remembered identity as confirmation that neither of them is alone.

Their friendship was nevertheless not a simple alliance. Juan looked toward the other remembered people and toward the standing and wealth associated with their world; Bando’s strongest obligations remained with the people he had returned to find. That difference became decisive at Latsei. Juan could offer companionship and a place among others who remembered, but he could not make Bando’s attachment to his people secondary to that invitation.

Latsei: Loyalty, Loss, and the Choice to Stay

At Latsei, Bando returned to a community facing a smallpox outbreak. The disease was latent in both Bando’s and Juan’s bodies, and Samas later explained that Bando believed her search for her people had exposed them to it. Juan did not treat that consequence as proof that she was at fault. He distinguished responsibility from culpability: in his account, the exposure would not have happened in the same way without her return, but that did not make the outbreak a deliberate wrong.

The village’s losses made the difference between the friends’ priorities stark. A dying chief told Bando that he understood why Bando had returned; Bando rejected the idea that he had come to take the villagers’ souls. Juan, meanwhile, believed the sickness would usually kill the old and weak and said that he expected to leave soon. As more people died, he urged Bando to leave with him for Zurich, where they could meet the others Juan had described. Bando refused. The corpses were his people, and he said his place was with them.

Juan pleaded for them to go together and offered to show Bando what he did not yet know about himself. Bando gently removed Juan’s hands and stayed. Juan answered angrily that they would meet again, then left. His words held to the promise of recurrence, but they could not answer Bando’s immediate choice: remaining with the community through its crisis rather than joining Juan’s journey elsewhere.

The Last Day and the Breach of Trust

Juan’s departure did not proceed as a clean separation. As villagers died and a mob pursued Bando, Juan reached Bando’s shop and saw the finished gold pieces there. He hesitated between the gold, the danger, and his companion, then called for Bando to meet him by the horses so that they could leave together. But after Bando ran from the crowd, Juan went back inside and carried away the work from the shop.

He also took jewelry from the dead. He used rugs to gather the pieces and rope found among the bodies to enlarge his makeshift bags, continuing to search for bracelets, a necklace, and a gold collar. This was not a merely symbolic lapse from loyalty: while Bando was at risk, Juan spent time collecting wealth from both Bando’s work and the villagers’ possessions. His account links that urgency to a long-standing desire to compete with the others in wealth, a disparity that had troubled him despite the centuries he had spent seeking their wisdom and refinement.

Teszin’s cry drew Juan’s attention to the cliffs. Bando stood above the village, looking down at Juan, who still held a necklace partly draped around an old woman’s neck. Juan looked back and smiled, then called up to ask whether Bando was ready. Bando stepped forward and fell from the cliff. The scene leaves their promised departure overtaken by an irreversible loss: Juan had called for Bando to join him, but the visible evidence of his choice to take the gold stood between them at the moment Bando looked down.

The Grievance That Returns

In their later lives, the rupture remains present rather than fading into a story safely concluded. Poppy is known to the group as Poppy, but gives Nez-lah as her name during Evan’s welcome. When Evan asks Samas whether the person who found her acted as her advocate during her Ascension, he says she answered no. Samas also acknowledges that she has been hostile to him ever since she came back, and connects that hostility to what he did at Latsei. Their recognition of one another as people who remember does not erase the history between them; it preserves that history alongside their identities.

Samas also believes Poppy carries responsibility for the villagers’ deaths because her search brought them into contact with the latent disease. He insists that responsibility is not the same as fault, yet recognizes that the distinction cannot simply remove the burden she feels. He describes his own position as that of a witness to her responsibility. His reflection reveals a relationship shaped by overlapping, unequal moral burdens: Poppy’s sorrow over the people she returned to, and Samas’s awareness that he betrayed his companion while taking the wealth of the dying community.

Their story therefore tests the promise that remembered friendship can begin again in another life. Juan had told Bando they could meet repeatedly and retain what they had shared. That continuity offers recognition, but it also carries the past forward intact: the rescue, the trust, the refusal to abandon a people, the theft, and the final separation. Poppy’s continuing hostility is not a failure of memory or affection so much as evidence that both survive the return.