HE FEELS THE HEAT WHEN HE STEPS OUT OF HIS ROOM, ITS force and intensity. The green hurts his eyes. He looks longingly at the river. The water is cool. He dipped his foot in once.

He knocks on Maria’s door. She has her wet hair wrapped in a towel and seems happy that he’s encountering her in a more intimate setting.

Maria warned him about the river. She didn’t mention a reason. Crocodiles? The current? Now he stands facing her and asks.

“It’s so deep, Don José!”

He stares at her in amazement.

“The men say thirty feet in the deepest parts.”

“But I can swim.”

“But it’s so deep.”

So Maria can’t swim, he takes it. She doesn’t know what swimming is.

“It doesn’t matter how deep the river is,” he tells her. “You can drown as soon as you don’t feel the ground beneath you anymore.”

She rubs her hair with the towel and looks at him like he’s pulling her leg.

“Maria, drowning isn’t like falling from a building, where you’re more likely to survive a fall from two meters up than from eight meters.”

“Fine, go give it a try, then.”

* * *

Again and again. Even when Maria has closed the door, he’s still explaining it to her. Again and again. Like the squirrel that keeps looking desperately for a way out of the wire cage. During the day the cage hangs from the terrace awning. When you move closer, it starts shaking violently this way and that.

“It would rather die than be trapped,” he said to Maria yesterday. She doesn’t like hearing it, her mouth a stubborn dash.

He lies back down on the bed, which is small, without bedposts or a headboard, and watches the patient spinning of the ceiling fan. The blades slice through the air and make a thin, high sound. On the floor, the maps. All of Costa Rica is lying around him. To map a country. The mountains, the roads, the rivers, the towns. Colors of light blue, lime green, eggshell white.