I haven’t run into Rudy or Nard for weeks, although we text each other occasionally, trying to define our positions on what happened with the water blockades, for example. The protests spread to other neighbourhoods, although they never managed to block a major road; that is, no road with an impact on tourism or trade. No activity yet in this part of the North End, except for the fact that someone in a working-class neighbourhood stole the keys to the controls that direct water into each sector. For a fleeting moment, this someone became a terrorist of climate change, something like that. This anonymous person could have left the hospital without water, the airport, the hotel area, to protest the living conditions of the island’s poorest. Probably they had no idea how the hell to do it. They don’t know anything.

The negotiations forced the government to install two desalination plants, both designed to service native neighbourhoods – but how much do they think the water bills will amount to, then? I asked my friends once. They’ll be expensive, like the ones we’re racking up now, although at least they’ll experience the thrill of opening the tap and having clean water come out every time. Now that I think about it, I tell the activists, that’s likely why the government allowed the blockades to go on – they needed the media opportunity, a declaration of emergency, so they could rope some high-level friend into the purchase of an unnecessarily expensive plant. If things turn out the same as they did with the solid residue incineration plant and the wastewater treatment plant, then it’ll never even start working; it’ll just rot into a costly pile of scrap.

If those machines should ever come, if they actually work, if what usually happens – nothing – doesn’t happen, then we’ll still be able to bemoan our dependency: that a water shortage is a crisis of overexploitation, a matter of excess consumption caused by an economic system that doesn’t distribute its surplus, but whose risks are shouldered by those who know nothing. It’s expensive to be poor in any city; it was liveable here. Not anymore. You need money to pay the highest cost of living in the country, you need to steal. And everything starts all over again.