Rudy went travelling. Nard and Jaime are busy with their dissertations and classes. Juleen and Sami are focused on work; maybe she’ll finally be able to fix up her posada. Jaime is an intense guy and always has a lot to say; he spouts an endless stream of words and his conversations feel like interviews. He’s better company than Roberto, at least in the benevolent force of novelty and our shared fascination with San Andrés. I haven’t seen anyone lately. Maybe I’ve been avoiding them all; the lines I add to my mental map get darker and darker with each piece of new information.

Sometimes I feel like an introverted teenager again, turning my back on the world. My own island has expanded, there’s no question about it, but San Andrés has filled my entire mind again: there’s nothing else. Which isn’t true, I try to remind myself: this is just a piece of the world, there are other less traumatised places out there. But then I quickly remember that anywhere else has – whether more or less visible, more or less personal – its own sorrows. I’ve got a map of scars in my soul; I’ll take it with me wherever I go. That’s just how it works. I think of the guy who killed himself. When the music stops and the vertigo lets me, I find myself troubled by a bad feeling, an intimate hope for the worst. Let something come, let something terrible save us – because even after death I’ll carry my questions into the next life, wherever we’re reborn. Let the end reach us, let it catch up with the cheerful reiteration of selfishness. That’s how I imagine the light now, the warm, quintessentially Caribbean light, the dusk of disaster.

The roof creaks like my brain under the weight of these thoughts. Rrrrsh, rrrsh. In Mexico, the city was my fever dream; here it’s the island. I think about the day I received Torquel’s will. Over the days I spent shut away at home, days of sleeplessness and silence, I figured out that whatever makes the roof groan shows up around midnight, and five a.m. is the latest it produces the mysterious dragging sound.

Yesterday I took the ladder out of the utilities room and set it up in the master bathroom. I put on long pants and a long-sleeved shirt, as if the place weren’t already an oven, and went up through the open skylight.

I poked the broomstick through first, as if it were a battle flag. There was a lot of light streaming in through the plastic sheeting, which now looked caramelised, sun-melted. Then I peeked my head up and saw a couple of boxes coated thickly with dust. Who knows how long they’ve been disintegrating here, in the backstage of the house, a still-unconquered place of exposed brick, bare wood and foundry temperatures.