‘I know what’s going to happen anyway, though,’ I said. One day, someday, the sky will clear and people will start to calculate the losses. They’ll attribute the catastrophe to the lack of infrastructure, to the corruption of recent years, to the same corruption as always, to the cavalier attitude of the islanders, and of course to the overpopulation of mainlanders. I’ll also attribute it to our inner weakness, to our finger-pointing habits, to inertia, to our incapacity to move beyond our limits, out of our comfort zone. Juleen appeared in the only open supermarket, looking for tinned goods at the last minute. Fruit, beans, palm hearts, olives, sardines, whatever was left – empty shelves and a police-supervised scuffle to keep order in the queues. There are still some soldiers from the battalion on the streets, but they won’t stick around when things hit rock bottom.

Will Otto’s luminous eye catch up with us? We didn’t think, Juleen insisted, no one thought this day would ever come. She said what everyone says: hurricanes never hit here.

Pastors preach that San Andrés is safeguarded, our location isn’t as risky as that of Dominica, Cuba, or Haiti, nothing like that ever happens on our island. Many people think these floods will be the end of it. Nothing happens here until it does, because it’s not the same world as before, I told Juleen. I hugged her and touched her mahogany face. My fingertips hurt. She said her whole family was at her place and we could join them; she invited us to La Loma, the only safe haven. People have dispersed to churches and schools on high ground. But no, I couldn’t leave my house; my house calls to me, coaxes me, the duppy has made me stay. The hurricane comes from outside, I told her, from the rest of the Caribbean, from the whole world that shakes and shudders; it’ll raze us to the ground in the North End and in the South. Otto doesn’t speak Creole, English or Spanish; he speaks the universal tongue of thunderous endings, a language that sounds like a demand for redemption from uncertainty. His blades will make us tremble and our scant metres above sea level won’t mean a thing. Let come what may; let tragedy come. At last.

Otto has regained strength and is now a category-two storm, says the radio, transmitting through the electrical plant: a razor-sharp fan with winds blowing in at 160 kilometres per hour, some gusts reaching two hundred. The temperature of the ocean is still very high, with the central pressure rising; the eye is moving at twenty kilometres per hour. It will soon shift to category three – but I know some people are still convinced that the storm will be irremediably destroyed by the island’s forcefield as soon as it touches us. Their faith is admirable, stubborn and admirable.