I was an optimist. I thought that I, like Hemingway, could weave my influence between countries, live in the welcoming limbo between a government I believed in and one that spoke my language. I stopped trying to return to the United States thirty years ago. I am an airplane steward now. Sometimes I write in imperfect Spanish for a newspaper named after a boat named after a nameless elderly woman half a century dead. I believe every word I write. I am happy.

But the days I spent in the narrow land come back to me every day. They knew I was too close to the man whose head, split like a melon, lolled on a brown couch in a burning palace. They knew I cried manly tears for the fishermen, for the poets, for the port people whose dreams spilled through the streets like wasted egg whites, but never for the peroxide-blond raft people who continue to dog my dreams.