“Me neither,” Nathaniel said. “But I’m not falling for her.”

WHEN THE SHUTTERS were closed that night, the bohío felt like the inside of a safe on a hot day, and the boys slept fitfully, sweating through the coarse bedsheets. When Drew flung the shutters open, mosquitos came in by the squadron and kept everyone from sleeping at all. Hadn’t these people heard of window screens? Drew complained, closing the shutters again. A few strips of cheesecloth would have been sufficient to allow the cool night air in and keep the bugs out. The house had other inconveniences—among them, no privy—and the boys peed and defecated in the bushes behind the yard, a lair of snakes and scorpions. Drew expected hardships at sea, but he found such backwardness ashore inexcusable, and as one day wore into two, two into three, he found himself disliking Cuba and Cubans. He hated the dirt and dust and the intemperate heat that built until late afternoon, when black clouds marshaled in the southeast and rain fell as if an immense water balloon had burst in the heavens. He hated, most of all, being among strangers whose language he could not understand and whose lives were a mystery. Will had passed on what he’d learned from that strange old lady, Rosaria—that the religion here was a little bit Catholic and a whole lot heathen mumbo jumbo. It came from Africa, Will had said at supper, and that tall colored girl he was sweet on told them that the rag doll in the cabinet—the thing that was called a canastillero—commemorated her dead father. Not a photograph or a portrait, but a doll! What kind of superstitious nonsense was that? Drew wondered, his empirical mind offended. By the end of the third day in Cárdenas, he was desperate to escape, his longing for home and all its familiar comforts subverting the reign of logic in his thoughts. He lay sweating in his bed, listening to Will’s bed creaking as he committed a sin—thinking about Elvira, no doubt—and schemed to hijack a boat. He laid plots to steal an oxcart and drive it to Havana himself.

There used to be, and perhaps still is (writes Sybil in another of her marginal comments), a type of patrician Anglo-Saxon who felt at odds with what he was. He fancied himself possessed of a dusky, sensual, and passionate soul imprisoned within pallid skin, of a heart Latinate and tropical, beating in opposition to the hymnal rhythms of the stern Protestant virtues. He was drawn to the sun, dark-skinned women, and exotic landscapes, where he imagined his true nature, liberated at last, would blossom in all its brilliant hues. Willard Terhune was of that romantic type.