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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

It’s like I’m seeing her. Yes. Feeling the affection she planted all around me. I don’t tell the saleswoman that she’s dead, just that my paña mum hasn’t come back for a while, my mum who arrived with the Free Port. I do look like her, except I don’t have her wavy hair or nylon stockings or a brother-in-law from Tolima who managed the bank that approved the loans to build so much of downtown San Andrés. Some neighbours still offer their condolences, but many people don’t know what happened to my parents. In my third year at university, they left the island, partly because of the crisis that was ravaging trade across the board. The accident in Bogotá was a rumour at first, then the running commentary of their acquaintances, until the novelty blew over. I vanished from the map. I returned briefly to the island, in silence, fleeing the sympathy that was invariably feigned – a product of the natural hypocrisy that seems to distinguish us. I smiled at the saleswoman, said I’d say hello for her; she asked me to make sure to tell my mum that it was her, the girl she’d known from the shop back then.

I step out into the soupy air and pass the New Point building, which was the only mall on the island before the second was built on the corner of the mosque. My parents didn’t live to see the pedestrian street; they never passed through here, insuring shops and businesses. I’m all that’s left of their life on the island, with my sweaty brow and loose hair, with a briefcase containing a notebook and lots of photographs I intend to use to settle a moral debt with this place – and get someone to compensate me for my hardships, too. The Raizal struggle, I think. The struggle for the land. Would Torquel Bowie have called himself a Raizal? If he wasn’t Baptist, didn’t speak Creole and wasn’t from Africa, then what am I? The measure of an ingredient? A jumbled mess?

I pause to rest in a plastic chair outside the hamburger chain. I take notes as I sit. Maybe there’s no use in speculating; maybe I’m doomed to permanent bad luck. Certainties are mere illusions, however intriguing. In my case, there are facts and events that have to take me beyond Arnat and James Bowie, before Torquel’s time, before black people moved among sugar plantations in the Americas. Maybe some ancestor’s ghostly hand can manoeuvre my veins, reprogramme my blood, make way for me to step forward.

VIII. SALT CRYSTALS

VIII. SALT CRYSTALS