Today, after weeks of trusting chance, I decided to visit the only library on the island. I went downtown on a mototaxi I struggled to flag at the corner of my house; I even argued with the guy when he tried to charge me double. I went up the stairs of the white building and find myself now in a hall that’s smaller than the first floor of my flat, crammed with open-mouthed boxes, a couple of rectangular tables, unruly shelves. Two little boys wheel around the room, shouting. ‘We’re here just temporarily, it’s quieter in the mornings,’ apologises the woman at the front desk. She’s slender and has freckled, pecan-coloured skin; her eyes are wide and her thick straight hair is a natural dark blonde. She helps me herself, addressing me formally in unaccented Spanish. I ask for books on the history of the archipelago as an image of the German guy appears on the screen of my mind. She takes out a pile of books. ‘Do you read in English?’ she asks, and it becomes an entire pillar. She says that when the director arrives she’ll ask permission to show me some books kept in the office.

I want to immerse myself in the archipelago, satisfy my hunger to understand the noisy guests inside me. I want family trees; I want to study the large branches of the early settlers and see if I can connect my hallucinations to the improbable chain of events that brought me back to this shore, to sit in this chair. Among all these historical documents, maybe I can finally assemble something like that perfect pyramid of breadfruit I saw once, a Lego construction of complicated rules and regulations far-removed from the individual acts of will that ultimately gave birth to me, centuries later.

Since the 1600s (as the famous salsa song goes), there’s been a lot of water under the bridge. I should have started in my first year at university – fifteen years ago – so I could properly digest all this information. OK, I’m exaggerating a little. I’m feeling the same vibe as the dreamlike party that night, when I had the inexplicable experience of flying through at least three hundred years, when I saw myself dancing in black and white, cutting down coconuts. Reality strikes me as more and more uncertain, malleable, indeterminate. Turning these pages, I dismantle Colombian history as recounted from the cold, criollo, elitist, Andean mountain range. At this table, scribbled on by children like the one I used to be, I move towards an unknown piece of the fifteenth century, the one that puts us on the maps unfurled on desks of the coveted old continent.