They say a dog bite can be cured with the dog’s own hair. By the same logic, they say one love can be paid off with another — that you forget a love by falling in love again.

To me, those are nothing more than Shakespearean tautologies. Old wives’ tales.

When I fall for a flower or a hummingbird, I strip myself of everything. I shake off my impurities, act like a lovesick lunatic, walk around carrying wildflowers, and drift through the clouds as if crossing a floor of eggshells.

I dress in three-piece suits and brightly colored shoes, carry myself like an old-fashioned gentleman with theatrical mannerisms, and as I pass through the whispering streets, I wipe my backside with the opinions of the bad-omen fortune-tellers.

My loves are burning volcanoes: fertile, explosive, alive. Wars in which no prisoners are taken. Nothing halfway about them. Simple, pure, and free as wind.

Which is perhaps why, when I realized I could not live with the woman of my April dreams, I withdrew to the most secret corner of my memory and began eating myself alive — anonymous, solitary, grief-stricken.

The flowers and rose bushes of my flourishing springs withered, their scent gone bitter with the salt of my crystallized tears.

I spent my days curled in the saddest corner of my own life — more than eight months unraveling the tragedy of that bloodied, Wagnerian love, a Tristan and Isolde I had left behind in the “Pearl of the Antilles.”

I had sworn never to fall for another woman. The price of that rupture had been so merciless that neither Hail Marys nor papal mercies could soothe the pain I had put my own irresolute heart through.

To make it worse, the five fox noses my friends had given me to cure the infatuation had vanished somewhere in the battered trunk of my wounded spirit.

My broken heart never understood why I had abandoned that splendid Caribbean woman — the fierce owner of my luxuriant Arabian nights. I had simply thrown her away beside the sea, left her embedded in the wasteland of Havana’s Malecón, abandoned to her fate, gazing toward infinity.

Before I left, I watched her soul die as half of her beloved image slid from her mother-of-pearl body. She closed her eyes, extended her hand, and a melancholy kiss took flight from her fingers and settled forever in the deepest recess of my shipwrecked heart.

My guilty soul dissolved into the void of my own exile. I felt guilty, vile, defeated — half a man, and cowardly. It was a dark, bottomless confinement, crueler than a love that had never been consummated.

I told myself I had left her for something more ethereal — non-corporeal, purely ideal. I had followed the uncertain paths of change and revolution instead, to serve my country and my political commitments.

But time, with its corrosive patience, eventually taught me I had been mistaken, naïve, foolish — that I had trusted men instead of ideas. Worse still: I had traded the sublime for the insubstantial promises of a betrayed revolution.

The Second Love

A long time passed.

One October night, walking home along the same streets and alleyways I always walked, I stopped near the melancholy corner of the central square — the square that had watched me turn from a boy into a man — and looked up at a sky washed clean by the death of the afternoon. I felt the ghost of the coming night grow timid inside my wandering body.

Then a voice called my name through the cracked, fogged-up windows of an old Toyota Jeep.

I crossed to it like a circus acrobat and found six friends and a guitar packed inside. They pulled me in, and we arranged ourselves like sardines in my friend Raúl’s suffocating cabin. I sat in the back seat, facing her.

It was too dark to see her, but I felt her presence. I have no gift for clairvoyance, but from that first moment I knew my life would somehow be bound to hers — this free-thinking, well-traveled citizen of the world.

The night turned into song. Singani flowed through our thirsty throats, and we raised our glasses to the future. We talked about Carpentier, touched briefly on Whitman and Hemingway, hummed a couple of Rolling Stones songs. She was American, in Bolivia as a volunteer with a rural development program.

A week or so later, on the old streets of the Passage of the Illustrious, I ran into her again. She was walking with her almost-red hair loose around her, throwing off small gold flashes with every step. I invited her to lunch, and we found a quiet corner of the central market — a tangle of lettuce, an unleavened loaf from Betanzos, peanut soup from Caranavi, its yellow steam fogging the window of our budding love.

That was the moment I understood the vow I’d made long before no longer held. In this woman with her northern features, I had found the forgotten love of my Caribbean muse again. It seemed true, then, that one love could be forgotten through another — or at least that was what was happening to me.

Still, I stopped at the threshold of my own memory, looked up at the blue infinity, and asked myself whether I was betraying a love that was distant but not gone — or whether this was simply the announcement of something inevitable. It seemed Eros himself had set the missing stone back into the Devil’s Bridge.

As if by magic, the next day dawned earlier than any before it. I felt liberated. The armor I’d sworn to wear against love fell away, and my mind let itself run loose again, unrestrained.

The following Friday, some friends and I went to Don Lucho’s folk club on Bolívar Street — the usual three covered bottles, something to eat. The group KollaMarka played that night; the notes of their panpipes and charangos, and the mournful pull of their lyrics, became the unwitting soundtrack of our new love. Everyone around us sang and raised their glasses, but she and I heard nothing except the symphony of our own hearts.

Before we left, I wrote her a few lines on the back of one of the band’s flyers: that we didn’t need temporary interpretations or earthly codes. That if anything came of this, it would come through the magic of the spiritual world and the daring of our physical selves.

The Road to Tupiza

A few weeks later I was traveling to Tupiza to inaugurate a community project. Passing through the remote outskirts of the semi-valley, I caught sight of a young woman on the mountain slopes of Cuchu Ingenio — blue backpack, hiking boots, red hair.

I told Flaco Loayza, who was driving, to stop. We pulled over, and I gave a swallow’s whistle. She came to the side of the vehicle, and I could feel her heart spinning like a top at the surprise of it.

Once we were moving again, I put on a Silvio Rodríguez cassette. No lyrics could have fit better:

It all began with surprise, with a chance encounter. But the night is mischievous when chance begins to weave. Without meaning to, an offering is made that strikes a bargain with pain; or an angel passes by, becomes a legend, and turns into love.

If I hadn’t glimpsed her in that fraction of a second on that mountainside, our love might never have happened at all. Others would call it destiny. To me it was proof that true love isn’t something you go looking for — it arrives when you least expect it.

She climbed into the truck, and we drove on toward Tupiza. Around noon we stopped in the empty little square in Cotagaita for lunch — noodles with chili, river uchulurus from downstream, and mocochinchi, a peach drink — and reached Tupiza by three in the afternoon.

The local villagers and authorities had prepared a barbecue of llama, beef, and veal to celebrate the project. They draped garlands around my neck, threw confetti in my hair. I cracked open a cheap bottle of Argentine champagne to bless the project while the curaca sprinkled holy water over it so it would last a thousand years, and I delivered the usual congressman’s speech, praising the government’s generosity.

We ate prickly pears, hominy, corn. We drank chicha and danced a few cuecas. Around midnight we walked to the Mitre Hotel, singing and whistling, hand in hand, surrendering to the blaze of an incandescent love that let me forget, for a while, the madness of the one I’d left behind.

The Land of Tunupa

A few weeks later we set out to explore the lands of Tunupa — that Jupiter-like wilderness of volcanoes and multicolored lagoons, the country of Cora-Cora and Chullima. Flaco drove again; we’d stocked the truck with food and water and left before dawn, disappearing into the mountains.

We crossed the untamed highland plateau, descended through the ranges, and reached Laguna Colorada — a landscape so strange it seemed to belong to another planet, where the silence stretched on forever and the volcanoes breathed clouds of borax over the plains. We splashed the silvery water on our faces, looked at our reflections in that impossible mirror, and kissed beneath the gaze of pink flamingos, with Licancabur rising in the distance.

That night we stayed at a Japanese research station, curled together in one sleeping bag against the cold — the thermometer read minus twenty. We wondered how the flamingos survived the wind and the frost out there at all.

In the morning we started back. Halfway along the road to Uyuni, a colossal snowstorm hit. Within two hours a white wall had swallowed the horizon; if not for the watch on my wrist, we wouldn’t have known day from night. Nothing was visible past two meters. The snow fell like the end of the world.

We shifted into four-wheel drive, but the wheels only spun. Then the engine died, and we were stranded in a sea of white.

Flaco and I climbed out to look at the engine, but the doors had already been buried; we had to crawl through the windows. We got the hood up and started clearing the carburetor by hand.

For the first time, the thought of freezing to death by the roadside felt real. I wasn’t afraid for myself — I was afraid for her. She’d been asleep in the back seat, and when the engine died and the heater cut out, she woke into a white world scoured by a southern wind.

We had no tools, only a hand pump in the back. I worked it into the mouth of the carburetor, blast after blast, the snow fighting its way into every gap. But the gods were merciful: after enough attempts, the engine caught and roared back to life. We let it recharge, engaged the four-wheel drive, and pushed on as fast as we dared.

If you’re ever stranded on that stretch of the Silioli Desert, know this: the odds of rescue are close to none.

After that Quixotic detour, we made it back to the city and decided to live together — a small room a few steps below the América Cinema.

Twenty-five years have passed since that magical adventure. We are still together, still discovering the meaning of life day by day, still moving through this journey — blessed, bewildered, and audacious to the end.