We tried in vain to hail a taxi, but no one wanted to go to the centre. I understood that we couldn’t wait for the weather to clear up. We needed to take out some cash and stock up on provisions, but no one was going anywhere, no one was answering the phone – because everyone was simply bailing the water out of their houses, water or branches, or collapsed high-tension cables, or animals, dead and alive. We were wrinkled with rain, but had to make use of the waning wind and pedal on. Then we thought the storm would die down, but the gusts still made it impossible for flights to resume. When we found the neighbourhood ATM out of service – hardly a novelty – we skirted lagoons all the way to the airport. The little beach beyond the seawall was gone, as was the seawall itself, and Johnny Cay had vanished behind dark grey clouds. The ocean no longer glittered sapphire and aquamarine, the sun was eclipsed by the onyx of the emperor’s mantle, and now the treasure is made of dark pyrite, a metallic grey flung all the way out to the road. We couldn’t see the offshore platform; maybe it too has broken forever.

What we saw at Rojas Pinilla Airport was shameful. Sheets of cardboard laid out like upholstery on the wet floor for old people in beachwear, rain leaking all over the place, children sprawled out asleep, mothers carrying babies with nowhere to sit. There were hundreds of people, maybe a thousand – or more? The smell of cold vapour, of wet and dried sweat, a humanitarian disaster. ‘All that money you have to spend on a tourist card – where is it now, huh?’ a woman was asking a radio reporter. Several visitors were organising amongst themselves, trying to set up makeshift covering for the roof and take turns cleaning. Jaime and I looked at each other in silence. Some two thousand people come and go from the island every day. How many could there be in this one room? After several days of storms, some of the stranded travellers were taken to hotels and posadas with vacancies. I don’t know how much money the hoteliers lost or how much the government paid them. The hospital was paralysed, functioning with minimal supplies between blackouts. Jaime couldn’t stop berating the powers that be, stunned by the failure of the state fiction to guarantee the normal course of life. ‘It’s true,’ he said, horrified, ‘the state really doesn’t exist in San Andrés. This is unbelievable.’

I can’t take it any more. It’s the same old story.