His thoughts were also taking an illogical turn, but led in the opposite direction from Drew’s. He felt curiously at home in Cuba, repatriated rather than expatriated from the somber cold of New England skies. The island’s venereal soil and seductive climate, its aura of magic and mystery, were incarnate in Elvira. She was earth and sea, fire and air; she was moist with a fecundity beside which the girls he’d known in Boston seemed made of sand, corseted in the whalebone of barren proprieties. He’d begun to court the idea of staying in Cuba with Elvira as his wife and was seized by images of them living together in a bohío all their own, or in one of the pastel brick-and-plaster cottages in the center of town. They would eat arroz amarillo and frijoles negras and pollo arrosto in the shade of a porch or inner patio, and in the drowse of siesta, retire to the bedroom and make love till nightfall, while humid sea breezes blew through shuttered windows. They would get drunk on love. He felt drunk thinking about it. Savory creole dishes, the perfume of herbs, shuttered rooms, sultry air, bright sun, pagan spirits, Elvira’s black eyes and lush brown flesh—it all blended in his mind into an intoxicating brew.

For three days, he walked to Rosaria’s bohío for his herbal bath not because those immersions were doing any good beyond effecting a temporary respite from pain, but because it offered his only chance to be near Elvira. Her movements, as she changed his wraps, were a flowing of skin and muscle, and when she stood and the light, piercing the chinks in the walls, passed through her shift, the silhouette of her body was so erotic that he lost his breath. He yearned for her lips, her breasts, and to plunge so deeply into her that he would lose himself; but she was hardly ever out from under Rosaria’s gaze. Evidently, there were proprieties in Cuba as stringent as those in Boston, but where the latter suppressed desire, the other inflamed it. It was exquisite torture to be close to her and not be able to touch her.