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Chapters (14)
  1. Salt Crystals
  2. I. THE DAMNED CIRCUMSTANCE
  3. II. NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN
  4. III. DIVISIONS
  5. IV. LICKLE GOUGH
  6. V. BOWIE GULLY
  7. VI. THE PAPERS OF TIME
  8. VII. NORTH END
  9. VIII. SALT CRYSTALS
  10. IX. IGUANAS ON THE ROOF
  11. X. THE SOUTHWESTERN CARIBBEAN
  12. XI. CREOLES AND RAIN
  13. XII. OTTO
  14. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

We must have floated upstairs and into the bed, the thunder ripples hard and conceals our moans, lays down a frenetic beat for us as fingers touch me, make me rain onto them. A shiver thrills through Jaime with this wetness, and I’m excited by the surprise in his wide stare. He stands, showing me how aroused he is; I follow, pressing my back to his chest, when he takes my head into his hands and draws me closer from behind, bites my neck, spins me around, pulling my hair, slips an arm around my waist and dips me lower again, and I feel like no other lover exists. Nothing else does, not the rain that doesn’t belong to me, not any other man. Facing the mirror, we look into each other’s eyes between flashes of lightning. I have to shout, and I shout so hard, the force of the storm can’t suppress how much we want this, looking at each other, unwavering. We keep going until we lose ourselves in the mix of us. We drench it all.

XII. OTTO

XII. OTTO

There’s nothing unusual about an apocalypse. It falls along the normal curve that branches out and ploughs across the set of likely scenes in Caribbean dimensions. All the fantasies are here: the beautiful ones, the terrible ones, the fascination with disaster. This is San Andrés, with a beach straight out of a magazine, a squandered privilege. Here, what’s firm and constant is whittled down like the earth shrinking in winter, as a desolate future takes shape. They’ll discover petroleum again, millions of years from now, yielded by the oil of bones and plastic, vestiges of a fleeting paradisiacal myth that will leave no records behind. We will be, again, as we have always been, a total mystery.

That day, after collapsing into sleep, neither of us ever mentioned the possibility that Jaime would return to the Barrack. In the morning, we rose with sore legs and the novelty of a pond on the whole ground floor. It rained and rained and rained, it rains; the cistern, whose ten thousand litres hadn’t been filled in years, had overflowed in a matter of hours. We mopped for quite a while.

After seeing photos of flooded shops and the owners bailing them out, videos of water cascading down from the roofs, trees uprooted from the ground, I felt grateful that I wasn’t working in insurance here. But I remembered I need new glucose sensors and have no way to get them.