I wonder what it will be like to experience silence and cold at the same time. At home and in the car, it’s always twenty-one degrees Celsius, so school is my personal hell, especially after break at nine-thirty. I flip through my encyclopaedia in search of Sweden, Russia, wherever there’s snow, different stars, woods to get lost in, pinkish blond kids like Carol and her brother. The house next door has been empty since they left…

I’d forgotten about those neighbours. Cristina, the mum, liked waltzing around naked all day, or maybe she just couldn’t bear the heat. The three of them had to leave the island every six months to renew their temporary permit; they’d go to Panama and come back the same day, and that’s what they did for a couple of years, until the OCCRE – the San Andrés department of control, movement and residency – didn’t let them back in. What would become of their things? No idea. I missed their faces for a while, but then came the strange face of redheaded Justyna, who grew up by the sea in Gdánsk and taught me the nearly unpronounceable word for ‘hello’ in her language, repeating it between her papery lips. There was also Hauke, who’d just arrived from Germany but spoke the perfect Spanish of his Raizal mother, and Tamara, from Vienna, also mixed, whose Spanish was a bit more strained. The Polish girl and I were actually the whitest kids in the classroom. There were no cachacos at all. They would have had a rougher time of it. And the others weren’t exactly islanders; their parents had come from mainland Colombia and only they had been born here. There were just twenty-two of us in class.

The past is important on this island. It’s a constant reference in everyday life. A couple of years earlier, my dad had spent weeks gathering information for our family tree. He called distant relatives I only know by name, thrilled by the ties he discovered. He often reminisced about his childhood over lunch, and on our weekly outing around the island he’d tell stories about his mother’s side of the family, his grandfather, this plot of land, that building. We had our photos taken against a white background in Fotomar and brought our documents to a second-floor office across from the government headquarters. Months later, we returned for our gold-coloured identification cards, now obsolete. At the time, though, they distinguished my dad and me from mere residents – like my mum, for example, who had to enter and exit the island with a silver-coloured card.