That was the first time, as far as I can remember, that I’d ever read an article about us in a national newspaper: an editorial about how the accumulation of methane gas could cause the Magic Garden to explode. The force of the explosion would split the island in two. North San Andrés, South San Andrés? I tried to picture it: would the pañas get the North End, the Raizals the South? Rudy laughed. If so, maybe Congress wouldn’t have to approve the statute to define the Raizal people’s autonomous territory. ‘Let the Turks keep the downtown, then.’ ‘The Turks’: the nickname for anyone of Middle Eastern descent. I didn’t know anything about the Raizals’ actions or who they were or what they wanted. My dad had some opinion or other about the removal of the governor called Newball as the first intendant. Bogotá ousted him when he refused to displace the Raizal protesters from the entrance to the landfill. The district was bankrupt and the whole country was beset by the famous real estate crisis.

The conditions were right, but Bogotá wouldn’t let the pro-autonomy voices get any louder.

‘OK, Rudy, I’ve got a lot of information here’. I rolled my eyes, a bit exasperated. ‘I remember all this, but from my own side, I guess.’

‘Yes, I know you know it, deep down, but you experienced it from a different perspective,’ he answered patiently.

My perspective, when all is said and done, is made of bricks and cement and air-conditioning, a forced imitation of life anywhere else. Which makes me think I’ve been an accomplice to something, to divisive ignorance: Raizals vs. mainlanders vs. champes, and so on.

I was feeling dizzy and very hot by then. I checked my stats: seventy-six and falling. I had to stop and drink my soda or have a bite of sugar cake. ‘We’re close to reception now,’ Rudy said calmly. ‘Would a sugar mango help in the meantime?’ He reached for some little yellow heaps on the ground. I lifted my eyes, holding steady. Sugar mango: we call them by their English name.

The tree was bursting with branches of little green and yellow mangos, as well as the riper red ones with tender skin. Another Lynton fruit. I took a thermos of water from my backpack and Rudy washed two that were half the size of my palm. I’m not sure how to calculate how much glucose there is in a sugar mango, but it did the trick. I bit into the skin at the bottom of the fruit and pulled; it tore so gently and pulpily that I ended up chewing it too. Swallowing, I remembered how torturous it was to eat them with braces. The taste brought back the times when my parents and I would get out of the car and collect them by the pailful on the side of the road.