La Region, talking about the explosions, the bulletins, to perceive, in flashes, like someone coming upon zones, crossing them, and finally leaving them behind, stable, the violence. Now I jump down from the barge, at the entrance to El Rincón; my feet, flexing, stick firmly on the asphalt and I straighten up to contemplate the water covering, with a reddish tinge, the wide, straight road, on whose edges the abandoned houses, made of concrete or adobe, vivid in the sun, still high in the sky, stand half submerged in water. The sun at four, pale, sparkles weakly in a green sky. There is within us, despite the canoes that wait on the shore, against the embankment, despite the tents scattered along the road, around which human figures move, despite all of this and because of the silence, now that the motorboat has stopped and the few voices that can be heard fade away almost instantly, diffused, a sense that, rather than standing before an abandoned town, we have arrived, for the first time and being, moreover, the first ever, in a virgin place, without fauna, submerged in blind water where life has not yet formed. The man from the canoe, who rows in front of me along the submerged road, toward the center of town, swaying back and forth rhythmically, with a cigarette between his lips that has gone out, turning his head every so often to look at the patios entombed underwater, asks me, after a moment of rowing in silence, above the regular splash of his oars that has been the only sound flowing out into the green air before his voice, if I have been in the city or if I have only come from La Guardia, and if I have come just to buy a bottle of gin and go back. I tell him that I’m coming from the city. You got here quick, he responds, incredulous. Then he says they shouldn’t have blown away the road: that the soldier had told him yesterday afternoon that the army was preparing the explosions and that he hadn’t believed him until he heard them; that he was sleeping in a tent and that he had not only heard the noise but felt, both times, the tremor of the ground where he was lying. He himself, he says, is not from the town but from up north, beyond Leyes, where there’s practically no dry land left at all. To San Javier, from the city, he says, you have to go by boat; they’ve filled in the embankment with sandbags, but the water gets through anyway. Now he is quiet; we proceed through deserted streets, and the oars, hitting the water, bring up a weak crest that opens out toward the shores, more every time, and crashes against the sidewalks, against the fronts of houses; where there are no buildings, the little crest goes through the tissue of wires and loses itself, silently, at the end of patios, among the tree trunks. Turning onto a cross street, I see, through the wide-open door of a house, the water running over the legs of the furniture, and on the wall, beside another door that leads to a room further inside, a mirror, and over it, on the blue wall, a large oval portrait. After turning two or three times, in complete silence, at the height of twilight, toward the outskirts of town, asleep more because of the water and the time of day than because of the rhythm of the oars, not anxious, not euphoric, divided, over the head of a man who leans forward, straightens up a moment and then leans back, growing, coming closer, the only dry point in town even though it is built on the banks of the stream, over the ravine, vivid, compact, its windows open, human vigor emanating from it even though no one is yet visible, separated from the water by many yards of dry land, on a slope, a bit strange to me because of its savage contrast to the landscape, elevated, in the middle, white, enormous, the house. In the cold it looks even whiter, more arid. In front of the door there are some canoes that tremble in the wake that grows larger as we approach the shore and dock. Pushing in the half-open door, I hear, muffled, the slow tapping of a typewriter. Now that I have passed through the first room I see, immediately, by the light of the kerosene lamp, rigid on his chair, contemplating the paper in the typewriter with his hands elevated, about to hit the keys, the figure of Washington, whose white head moves brusquely toward me, unperturbed. He regards me for a moment, fixed, without blinking, as I advance toward the center of the sphere of clarity diffused by the lantern. I thought it was Cat, Washington says, offering me a bony, dry hand, which he takes back in a moment. I ask how he is. You can see for yourself, he says. From the patio comes the cry of a child, a laugh. It’s Don Layo’s family, Washington says. Cat has left them behind, the same as him: they didn’t want to stay at home and had gotten some tents from the army. We’ll lose everything this time, he says, because the whole island is underwater. He’s silent. The disappointment of discovering that it is me and not Cat must have mixed itself within him with the feeling that I am an intruder, simply because, to his eyes, my love, my veneration, which may have been, in other times, greater than Cat’s, have the defect of not being Cat’s. He lowers his eyes, playing with the cold