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boy with whom she’d shared her tobacco. They docked on a quay in Triana, past the shrimp boats’ port, to unload some goods destined for that part of town.
    “You get off here, darkie,” ordered the captain of the tartan.
    The boy smiled at Caridad. They had smoked together a couple more times over the voyage. Under the tobacco’s influence, Caridad had even answered the boy’s questions, mostly in timid monosyllables. He had heard many of the rumors swirling around the port about that distant land. Cuba. Was it really as wealthy as he’d been told? Were there a lot of sugar factories? And slaves, were there as many as they said?
    “Someday I will travel on one of those big ships,” he claimed, letting his imagination run rampant. “And I’ll be the captain! I will cross the ocean and see Cuba for myself.”
    Once the tartan was docked, Caridad, just as in Cádiz, stopped and hesitated before the very narrow strip of land between the riverbank and the first line of buildings in Triana, some of them so close that theirfoundations were exposed by the movement of the Guadalquivir’s waters. One of the porters shouted at her to move out of the way so he could unload a large sack. The shout attracted the captain’s attention, who shook his head from the gunwale. His gaze briefly met the cabin boy’s, who was also watching Caridad; they both knew where she was headed.
    “You have five minutes,” he conceded to the boy.
    The boy thanked him with a smile, jumped onto land and tugged at Caridad. “Run. Follow me,” he pressed. He knew that the captain would leave him on land if he didn’t hurry.
    They passed the first line of buildings and reached the church of Santa Ana; they continued two blocks further from the river, the cabin boy nervous, pulling Caridad along, dodging the people who looked at them curiously, until they were in front of La Cava.
    “These are the Minims,” indicated the boy, pointing to a building across from La Cava.
    Caridad followed the boy’s finger: a low, whitewashed building with a modest church; then she directed her gaze to the old defensive moat that stood in her way, sunken, filled with refuse at many points, precariously level in others.
    “There are some places where you can cross,” added the boy, imagining what was going through Caridad’s head. “There’s one in San Jacinto but it’s a bit far away. People cross wherever they can, see?” He pointed to some people who were going up or down the sides of the trench. “I have to get back to the boat,” he warned Caridad when she didn’t react. “Good luck, Negress.”
    Caridad didn’t say anything.
    “Good luck,” he repeated before heading off as fast as his legs could carry him.
    Once she was alone, Caridad looked at the convent, the place Don Damián had told her to go to. She crossed the trench along a small open path among the rubbish. There were no dumps on the plantation, but there were some in Havana; she’d had the chance to see them when her master had taken her to the city to deliver the tobacco leaves to the warehouse in the port. How could white people throw away so many things? She reached the convent and pushed on one of the doors. Locked. She knocked and waited. Nothing happened. She knocked again, timidly, as if she didn’t want to be a bother.
    “Not like that,” said a woman passing by, who, almost without stopping, pulled on a chain that made a small bell ring.
    Soon a latticed peephole opened in one of the doors.
    “May the peace of Our Lord be with you,” she heard the caretaker say; from the voice, she was an elderly woman. “What brings you to our house?”
    Caridad removed her straw hat. Although she couldn’t see the nun, she lowered her gaze. “Don Damián told me to come here,” she whispered.
    “I don’t understand you.”
    Caridad had spoken rapidly and incoherently, the way newly arrived blacks in Cuba do when addressing white men. “Don Damián …” she struggled, “he