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Chapters (14)
  1. Salt Crystals
  2. I. THE DAMNED CIRCUMSTANCE
  3. II. NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN
  4. III. DIVISIONS
  5. IV. LICKLE GOUGH
  6. V. BOWIE GULLY
  7. VI. THE PAPERS OF TIME
  8. VII. NORTH END
  9. VIII. SALT CRYSTALS
  10. IX. IGUANAS ON THE ROOF
  11. X. THE SOUTHWESTERN CARIBBEAN
  12. XI. CREOLES AND RAIN
  13. XII. OTTO
  14. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

VII. NORTH END

VII. NORTH END

It’s early November and the island is swarming with tall, blond, blue-eyed tourists. Visits to the North End beach are a sort of cultural exchange. I’ve saved phone numbers with country codes I’d never seen before: +90, +42, +45, +46.

A few weeks ago, a Norwegian guy struck up a conversation with me on the beach. He was traveling alone and had an initially unpronounceable name that means ‘god of the wind’. After wandering all over Latin America, he’d settled on calling himself ‘Kevin’, the phonetically closest name. He was a psychiatrist and had studied the emergence of dementia as a symptom of an ailing society. He spoke perfect Portuguese, English and Spanish with a marked Iberian accent. I became a willing tour guide for this vanilla-blond man. We drove around the island on his rented scooter and I bought him crab empanadas at Sound Bay. He was staying in my neighbourhood, in some flats that couldn’t possibly have been registered with the national tourism department. It was all very convenient, although it wasn’t until the last day of his visit that I learned the god of thunder kissed with an almost unimaginable softness for someone with such a deep voice, such a tall and finely structured body. After the first of those kisses, in my living room the next morning, the Norwegian gradually revealed a dominant spirit that led me, among subtle probes of his tongue, into more assertive touching and suggestive words. We would have gone much farther, but his flight was scheduled to leave in an hour and neither of us wanted to rush something so explosive.

I fantasised about the Nordic god for a few nights. Several days passed, and then, at the grocery store, I met a German guy on his first trip to Latin America. He too was travelling alone. With him, after several outings to the beach, several dinners out, my prudence evaporated and I decided to eat him alive. And the man from my past, the cheater? He doesn’t exist. I’d forgotten the meaning and the vital importance of good sex. I started thinking about Europe, the metropolis, the imaginary ideal of us, the colonised. I remember the clarity of those two men, their well-argued conversation, the tenderness behind their wild dominance. Those days and nights with the German guy had the vulnerable tinge that all real encounters do. And tears. Pleasure comes with fluids, the best orgasms with tears; they can melt the coldest nature. We were astonished to have found each other this way. On the Friday we said our goodbyes, we laughed into a deep, long kiss, smouldering in a cloud of hormones. He texted me that same morning and I’m still daydreaming incurably. I think this may be one of the effects of the Caribbean’s exoticism: the sudden storms, the thrill of receiving them, passion as a weapon against monotony.