He crossed his legs and I noted that he had on the same maroon boots I had seen him in the year before. We would have the opportunity, he said, of speaking about this matter somewhere else when I would feel less ill at ease.

We shook hands in the lobby of the hotel. This time I didn't see Gustavo Castañeda, the agent from State Security, nor did I care if he was checking on us. I took a taxi to the old American embassy, where Pablo Armando Fernández was waiting for me. He introduced me to Wayne Smith, the head of the U.S. Interest Section in Havana.Just then the telephone rang and Smith picked it up. It was Jan Kalicki from Senator Kennedy's office, informing him that the State Department had approved my departure for the United States, via Canada.

"Everything is all set," Smith told me. "Kalicki suggests that you go through Montreal. He will be waiting for you at Kennedy with an overcoat and some cash which Bob Silvers wants you to have when you arrive."

With the help of a now cooperative Castañeda, all the paperwork and arrangements for the flight were taken care of in three days. I was exhausted. The afternoon before I left, I went to the beach as if performing an obligatory ritual, and swam out toward the horizon, floating as I contemplated the fiery sky with the sun about to set. All the tension that had built up in recent days vanished mysteriously as I swam. Then I walked up the beach and over to a club where I used to take Belkis and the children. The bar was about to open. I asked for a beer and sat down on the terrace for the last time.

Once again I heard the words Fidel Castro had spoken to me:" . . .Even though you will never admit it publicly, I know that this revolution will grow in your memory . . ." And, in fact, a month after I left I found the Revolution growing in my memory, but in a horrific way. More than 100,000 Cubans, taking advantage of a flukish happenstance, sought asylum in the Peruvian embassy in Havana, and a while later 120,000 were able to leave the island. The streets were full of police swinging iron clubs with orders to pummel and kill anyone who "got in the way." The fervent disciple of Robespierre once again learned his lesson: "We must be hard, inflexible, severe; sin by excess, never by default."

Fidel is an old man now, gray hair and beard, thick glasses, and constantly darting eyes. He is the grandfather of that young man who wrote from Batista's prison a few sentences that might well be taken as his epitaph:

There is a year in a man's life which he should never go beyond, and that is the year when his life begins to decline, when the flame which lit his most luminous moments goes out, when the physical powers which drove his steps along in his maturity begin to wane-then you see such survivors whimpering and repentant like renegades, sinking into the quicksand of abjection.

At the airport, the last copy of my novel-the original, in fact-was saved by a miracle. Five copies of the manuscript had been discovered by State Security, but this one remained unscathed in a wicker satchel, invisible among toys, letters, and bric-a-brac. The customs inspector's hand was suspended in midair (just as in a detective novel) when his superior, satisfied with the plunder recovered, ordered an end to the inspection of my possessions.

I had brought the manuscript to the airport concealed in that satchel, which contained the hundreds of letters my wife had sent me from the United States during our year of separation. I showed Gustavo the satchel, saying that I wanted to keep the letters with me. Of all the people who were seeing me off at the airport, only my friend Alberto Martínez Herrera knew exactly where the last copy of the manuscript was hidden. He was tense and pale, and he seemed to grow more and more anxious with every passing second. The plane for Montreal was unusually late. I paced up and down the waiting room under Gustavo's watchful eye. His blue safari jacket only barely concealed his pistol. I had the impression that he was still looking at my luggage with marked interest, but Fidel Castro had given the order to let me go. What would he accomplish by searching it again?

In an effort to ease the tension of the wait, I remarked to him on the items the tourists-mostly French-speaking Canadian girls-were buying. I saw the rum bottles lined up for sale, and I said to Gustavo that I was going to buy one, but the cashier told me that they could be bought only with dollars. Gustavo heard this and turned pale. He said he was going to the washroom, and when he came back, he offered to buy me a beer. Minutes afterwards, from a corner of the waiting room, someone signaled him. I pretended that I hadn't noticed; I went to the washroom myself. The plan was to leave in a few minutes, and I would be the first person on board, I had been told. Gustavo led me through a side door and we walked across the tarmac toward the boarding steps already nudged up against the plane with its door wide open. I saw a man approaching us with a package; it was a bottle of rum.

"Our gift to you. Send us a picture when you drink a toast in the United States," Gustavo said. "No hard feelings, I hope." As a matter of fact, I had none. He was my natural enemy, he had orders to be just that-to dog my steps, to learn my thoughts, to make veiled threats over the telephone whenever a foreign visitor expressed an interest in seeing me. In retrospect, his impassivity whenever I screamed at him to his face now seems admirable. He never lost his composure, not even when he tried to prevent García Márquez from speaking to me.

He was a short man with a pale complexion, lank blond hair, and light eyes. Sometimes he weighed a lot, sometimes not, depending on the ups and downs of his kidney disease; that last time I saw him, he was in a bad way. He had been divorced and remarried, and was trying to make a more pleasant life for two little girls, his own child and his new wife's. His brother had committed suicide in his office at the Department of Philosophy at the university. But Gustavo loved his job, took enormous pride in what he was doing, and indeed the truly great tragedy of his life was not being able to show off at the Ministry of Culture or the Writers' Union the major's uniform that was his glory.

I got on the plane and sat next to a window. I could see the airport I had freely passed through to go in and out of Cuba for so many years, and which, on a certain day, had been forbidden me on the decision of one man. Now, thirteen years later, that same man had decided to open it for me again. The observation deck was full of people waving goodbye to those who, like me, had been set free. I saw it all with a sensation of growing unreality. Still standing a few yards from the plane, Gustavo contemplated the scene. I saw him for the first time not from a moral but from a physical height; he was below, down there, like the now dead time of my past troubles.

And in the plane I thought again of wretched Gustavo, whose shouts I was beginning to miss, as the silence of solitude heightened my desolation. I was about to leave all that back there, where he was standing. I held on to the satchel with Belkis's letters and my manuscript. The plane's engines began to sputter. At last we were rolling down the runway, and Gustavo disappeared from view. The plane took off. I heard the stewardess telling us to continue observing the "No Smoking" sign. The plane climbed and leveled off. I looked out the window at the great brilliant expanse-that vivid frieze of greenness and luminosity that is Cuba.

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