With the fantastical fragrance of coconut, mint and
conch and the cheerful reggae lilt, the thinkin’ was officially done for the night. After the final verdict –
something about how true autonomy can’t be seized but represented – a transcendental silence fell, broken only by the call to serve the rundown stew. I watched the whole process. First, wielding his enormous ladle, the commander dished up the white pieces of fish, soft conch meat and ‘pig tiels’, a meaty, cylindrical little bone that has always made an impression on me; I’ve never tried it. Even more people showed up when it was time to eat. Kent methodically placed a piece on every single plate so that they were all fully served at once, complete with flour dumplings, potatoes and cooked breadfruit. Plastic Coke bottles and some fifteen plates, maybe more, were lifted from the ground in the hands of three girls in shorts, their hair in braids; I didn’t even notice when they arrived.

I hadn’t learned any local history at school. As far as I was concerned, politics was something that happened in ‘Colombia’. Now I have so many questions I can’t put them in order; last night they felt even more chaotic. The whole thing is unbelievable to me. Jaime the cachaco ambled over – I noticed he had two cartilage piercings in one ear – as the others ate and I gazed up distractedly at the starry sky. Before starting in on the stew of ideas, I’d calculated roughly three units of insulin.

‘So are you from here or Providencia?’

Lots of people think I’m from Providencia, but no: my mum was cachaca and my dad was half Arab. But my grandmother was from San Andrés, daughter of a cachaco man and an island woman, granddaughter of a Jamaican man with an Irish surname who married an island woman. I didn’t eat much, pushing my spoon into the last thick grey bits of stew. I tried to explain it to him, gesturing this way and that; I looked at him and laughed. He asked if I’d grown up on the island. ‘Ah, so the women are the islanders in your family, it sounds like,’ he said with a chuckle. I hadn’t noticed that before, hadn’t linked my two grandmothers together this way, but it’s true, I answered: ‘All those adventurous men fell in love with the Caribbean…’ The music had got a little louder; I heard a song by some descendant of Bob Marley. Juleen was engrossed in her bowl of stew, eagerly processing the pig tail from my plate. I smiled at the cachaco and excused myself; the beers had been pressing at my bladder for quite a while now.