I’ve been busy these past few weeks, trying to keep up with long business meetings in Mexico, household chores, and of course visits from neighbours on the block. None are native. Some have stopped in to say hello, having seen me sweeping the steps and fixing up the garden. As the days have passed, they’ve come to tell me stories about my parents, occasionally bringing me to tears. My dad when he was a radio enthusiast and repaired antennas in La Loma. My mum when she was a Rotarian, tennis lessons at the Club Náutico, horseback rides, boat trips to Cayo Bolívar, Christmas banquets. Or my dad as a radio commentator on a Saturday salsa programme: ‘Salsa is the genre. Guaguancó, chachacá, son bolero, those are all salsa rhythms.’ The woman who lives on the corner reminded me of our Sunday visits to the San Judas church: Saint Jude, ‘patron of lost causes’, as my mum always said. The lady recalled her delicious ajiaco, admiring how quickly it always vanished at Holy Week bazaars, and the years when my parents ran their business. The sedan was always parked out front, the only one of its model for a long time; on the terrace, behind the white gate, was my dad’s Harley Davidson. The long-widowed woman next door, another who’d watched me grow up, called out to me with a kind of sleepy impatience when I emerged before seven one morning to take out the trash and cut some aloe leaves for a balm. She was barefoot and in pyjamas. ‘Are you going to stay here? Don’t stay,’ she blurted from her fern-filled yard. She apologised, broom in hand. ‘It’s just that there’s no future here.’ Caught off guard, I only managed to say yes.

Maybe she was right. What there is in San Andrés is sheer present. I thought of the ridiculous Mexican radio announcer I was listening to the day I nearly died in traffic. She could have been my mum, that lady: wringing her hands because some domestic employee had jumped ship, fed up with the burden of keeping house on her own. It doesn’t feel like much to me, in spite of everything.

The house is so empty that I can almost hear my own laments echoing around one of the three bare, sweltering bedrooms. I still hear, of course, my parents’ voices, their footsteps on the stone stairs, their hands on the railing. Now that the house is in decent shape, what I have is time to do nothing, to fill entire days and nights with whatever I can, with the palliation of questions, mental stories, the lies I tell myself, these chaotic notes.