All this took place at the feet of the old buildings, many of which were still occupied, in their higher floors anyhow. The aging building stock gleamed silver, coated in smart Paint, as if they had been wrapped in foil. Beneath the tide marks you could see how the water was working away at the stone and the concrete. Barnacles on skyscrapers, for God’s sake.

In places there were cleared-out swathes, great lanes of rubble over which kids and scavengers swarmed. The tracks of hurricanes, probably, gaps in the urban landscape that would never be filled in. A coast is a place of erosion, uncle George used to say to me, a place where two inimical elements, the land and the sea, war it out relentlessly, and in the end the sea is always going to win. One day all these grand old buildings were going to just subside into the ocean, their contents spilling into great mounds of garbage in the patient water.

In the meantime, life went on. My pilot waved at rivals or friends, cheerfully yelling what sounded like obscenities. Everybody had some place to go, just like always. Despite all the dirty water everywhere it was still the Little Havana I remembered, a place I had always found exciting.

When we reached the coast I had the boat drop me at a small ferry stop a couple of kilometers from my mother’s house. I had decided to walk the rest of the way, my pack on my back.

It was the middle of the afternoon. The road, a northwest drag following the line of the coast, was good enough and had been resurfaced recently with a bright central stripe of self-maintaining silvertop. But you could see that the sea sometimes came up this far: there were bits of dried-up seaweed in the gutters, tide marks around the bases of the telegraph poles. There wasn’t a single car to be seen, not one, and the silence in which I walked was dense.