‘Well, in those days they hit you for anything! Huh! Pfff!’ Her torso sways. She seizes the ends of her long dress and shakes them, trying to fan herself in the heat. ‘And lots of people still do!’

‘I guess that’s true,’ I say in neutral English.

‘A daughter of Lynton,’ she remarks to herself. I hear frogs croaking, an eruption of gospel in the distance.

‘But that’s what it was about, right? Keeping people from speaking Creole…’

I think of Colombia, of myself, of the shyness I felt and still feel when someone speaks Creole and I can’t follow.

‘Did you know your great-great-grandfather signed in support of the island becoming an Intendancy?’ She pronounces the last four words theatrically, as if conducting an orchestra. ‘Miss Becca, his wife, di sad wuman… They say she wouldn’t let her daughters near him, because he was an obiá’ – I look puzzled and she stops – ‘…gyal, an obiaman, a witchdoctor.’ She falls silent. I feel my body jolt and open my eyes as if I’ve heard an explosion.

An image leaps to mind, an undulation of hazy images, jars of herbs and oils, strange insects, black faces in a trance-state, blood trickling into cooking pots set to boil – a rush of scenes that vanish as soon as I hear a dramatic crunch of dry leaves.

‘So old Jerry Lynton was a witchdoctor,’ I repeat. She nods eagerly. ‘But what do obiás do, Miss Josephine?’

‘Dem kian watch unu!’ she says with such solemnity that it feels rude to doubt her. ‘Jeremiah worked in the attic and old Rebecca set it on fire the day before she left with her six children. Obiás see people inside, in the past, in the future, and they make wishes come true.’ She dances in place, arms waving back and forth, clapping her thick hands. ‘Jerry was a salesman, he had the only shop on the whole island. Everyone bought from your grandfather, yeh’ – she shifts from Spanish to Creole – ‘old Jerry Lynton… I still have a Rubinstein Coin somewhere,’ she says, forming a circle with thumb and forefinger. ‘Not a hundred years after we joined Colombia, the schooners were bringing in other kinds of money, dollars, trading with Panama, Grand Cayman, Jamaica…’

‘A Rubinstein Coin? That was the name of a currency?’ I’ve heard the surname before – a pianist, famous for his interpretations of Beethoven. ‘But that’s a Jewish name, isn’t it?’

‘Jewish, yes! This Rubinstein made his own kind of money. There wasn’t any of it here. He was your grandfather’s competition,’ Josephine grins, and I picture another man like Jeremiah, wearing a pale suit and white bow tie.

‘So Jeremiah signed to make San Andrés and Providencia an Intendancy,’ I say, sighing a little, unwittingly starting to imitate her in my gestures.

She laughs gently. ‘Yeh, mamita.’