He dons his dark glasses and the plane lands. A land, any country, is always, when seen from the sky, much greener than when one actually gets there. While dust clouds and the choking shrieks of braking still enclose them in waves, the less green surroundings rush in a smear of speed past the windows. The show is over. The luxury of air-conditioning and saloon cocktails now seems commonplace, dusty, artificial. By the gangway they later walk down to where some small buses are awaiting the arriving passengers on the airstrip, blue blowflies at the exhaust pipes. With feet on the earth the bodies are heftier. Each person settles for the most convenient position to sit or to stand, fingers his tie or inserts the fingers in a shoulder bag. Now it must happen, he thinks. What must be, must be. Not that he is resigned to his lot. He will simply say that he is a political refugee and they will have to comprehend this. Isn’t it true, strictly speaking? He doesn’t come with false pretences after all. But will they ever believe him? And if they question his bona fides? To his utter amazement the buses do not stop at the airport building but continue, with neither delay nor control, in the direction of the city. It doesn’t mean anything yet, he cautions himself — the problems are just being postponed till later. As soon as they leave the fenced-in area of the airport a rainshower comes (like thwatting grey flags in the rain) to veil the road and the bushes to either side. Behind the rain-flags you vaguely espy the movements of rank tropical plant life; the fleshy leaves, the tendrils and plant-tatters and milky ropes, the ferns and bamboos and palm trees and sugar cane and mango trees and banana plantations — everything heavy and glistening with water. Rain is liquefying silver, it is vanishing colour. They enter the city which seems all deserted. Would it be only because the rain has forced people to stay indoors? But it doesn’t look as if the houses are inhabited at all, or could even be used: many are dilapidated with broken roofs, others have their jalousies tightly bolted or grass shoots coming like wrinkles through the window apertures or chinks and slits in the walls. At measured distances, on street corners and at the intersections where the traffic lights are dead and not a single vehicle is to be seen, soldiers with green berets from which the water is pouring are posted. Each soldier has a drooping long red moustache. The moustaches are curly and so long that it appears, when the soldiers worry them with humid fingers, that they may be plaited. The buses traverse the entire city without the voyagers being able to catch by eye a single civilian, private conveyance, tram, trolleybus, chicken, pig or messenger. The tyres hiss with a sweeping sound over the asphalt, a bubbling as of eggs fried in a pan. They are a busload of cooped-up moths. Beyond the built-up zone they again penetrate the worn-out countryside. Here however it has stopped raining, in places maybe no rain at all has fallen, for the leaves are a dusty grey. In cleared areas in the ash-green bush they sometimes pass the ruin of a humble farmstead. Clouds, like the teased stuffing of a chair, curl and roll in all directions. What a dreary day, he thinks, and looks over his fellow passengers, their heads drawn into the shoulders, the wings folded, the antennae thick and without any feeling. They drive ever deeper into the interior, not in the direction of Mesa de Mariel or of Guanabacoa, but along the road past Santiago de las Vegas and Benjucal (with the Cordillera de los Organos to the right) till beyond Batabano where the road bifurcates — to Cajio and Guanimar on the one hand and Rosario and Tasagava on the other. Gradually the road becomes more untraversable because of potholes and gullies and mudpits and the obstacles of larger rocks and tree trunks. After some time the buses stop and they get out, dull and muzzy, to stretch the limbs and reactivate the circulation. The guide — the chauffeur of the first bus, with green beret and a wet red moustache — leads them away from the road through the vegetation to a marshy strip. They slosh through pools of stagnant water until they reach the edge of what appears to be a vast blue lake, certainly less deep than it would seem. Down the length of the watery surface, on high stilts of concrete, runs a modern highway; but this speedway (or what was intended as such) stops not far from where they are placed, high on its foundations, smack in the middle of the pan, as if the construction was abandoned right there. Rusted iron rods which were to reinforce the concrete now protrude everywhere. The road might as well have originated nowhere to reach this spot and remain suspended without destination ’twixt heaven and earth. Now you can see why it is so difficult to effectuate the necessary traffic connections in our country, the guide explains: this water before you has an exceptionally high salt content and contains apart from that a lot of sulphur too (our island is basically vulcanic); it erodes and finally destroys the pillars and the very road surface when it is built too low. And it is nearly impossible to provide for drainage because this water appears so to say overnight and can start welling up in the most unforeseen places and form a dam there. (True, the water must have arrived here rather suddenly, for the pan has no reeds, nor are any birds’ nests to be seen.) And there — he points out with an imperious movement of the hand — that there was to be our destination. Across the lake they see, as indicated by the guide, the broken-down walls of a few houses. It is not so much a case of decayed constructions, however, as that of buildings which were never completed. The walls fallen into disrepair are white with a crust of salt right up to the empty window frames. During this explanation his fellow passengers observed everything around them with mouths all black with surprise and interest (and confusion?). One man wanted to take souvenir photos and was furious when it became evident that his spouse had forgotten their camera somewhere — in the bus, the aircraft, or perhaps even in the second drawer from the bottom of the bedside cabinet in the hotel room of the hotel of another country. The fellow with the black face, the blue eyes and the distinguished temples fills his lungs completely with air and then starts to intone with his heavy voice: Bluewater! Bluewa-a-a-ter. . Then: It’s a firstclass day for screwing goats, screwing goats, s-cr-ew-ing g-o-a-t-s!