Humiliation. Paulina Flores
already had a job.
Since I was little, I’d been used to people imagining my father’s job was something great. The neighbors, my mother’s family, my teachers, and my classmates all treated him with the utmost respect. A respect that was born partly of admiration but mostly of fear—I suppose because of the dictatorship—and it imbued his job with an aura of excitement and mystery. Of course, for his family, his work possessed none of that intriguing darkness. We knew exactly what he did.
Sometimes when I was little I’d go with him to the naval base, and he let me play in a warehouse full of torpedoes while he worked. I entertained myself with a simple game that could keep me captivated all morning long: bounce a plastic ball against the head of the torpedoes. That was it. The torpedo warehouse was the closest his job got to anything warlike or dangerous. As far as I knew, he had never even been out to sea. He’d gone into the service in search of opportunity—something to do—and he ended up working at Talcahuano Naval Base. Some nights as a guard, mostly as a waiter—“steward,” I think was his official title—in the mess hall. He washed and ironed his navy-blue uniform himself, and he wore it under his white waiter’s apron with all the haughtiness of an officer.
I never knew why they laid him off. My sisters said it was because of a dumb accident in the mess hall, something about an altercation with a captain. Whatever it was, starting then, the resolute soldier’s gaze that had captivated so many people became blank and indifferent.
It was the middle of January when Pancho announced his plan to us. That morning, Marquito and I were sitting at the foot of the steps. Marquito was the Carrascos’ cousin. He was twelve, the youngest of the group. He lived close by, on Cahuello (“Horse”), and like me he spent all day at his cousins’ house. At first his mother had sent him there so her sister could watch him while she worked, and then he became one of us.
While we waited for the Carrasco brothers to wake up, we were trying to translate the lyrics of the Smiths’ song “The Headmaster Ritual” into Spanish.
Before the semester had ended, Pancho and I had stolen two English dictionaries from school. The idea was to translate the lyrics of our favorite bands over the summer vacation. Back then we were hooked on the Smiths. There was a music store in Conchester—our nickname for Concepción—and we’d spent so much time there looking and admiring without buying anything, the sales guy had offered to record whatever albums we wanted; we only had to bring him blank cassettes. We whiled away whole afternoons talking to him. He told us that Morrissey had named his band the Smiths because it was one of the most common and unrefined last names in England, and he thought it was time to show the vulgar side of the world. Our eyes shone when we heard stories like this. We wanted to be like Morrissey. We felt just as common and just as superior.
Pancho burst through the front door of his house. “I’ve got it all planned out,” he said.
Marquito and I turned and looked up at him. He was tapping his head with his index finger, repeating, “It’s all right here.” He was just waking up; his hair was tousled and his eyes bloodshot. He sat down beside us and looked straight ahead with that unhinged look he had whenever he was plotting something. Marquito and I put our dictionaries aside and waited for him to tell us what he had in mind, but Pancho said nothing. He just breathed deeply, as if trying to calm his thoughts.
“Where’s Camilo?” he asked suddenly.
“Wasn’t he with you, sleeping in your room?” I asked, and I picked up the dictionary again. I flipped to J to look up the word jealous, from “jealous of youth.”
“What?” asked Pancho, confused. He jumped up and went back inside.
A gust of air whipped up eddies of dust in the street, and I shielded my eyes. The wind never left Talcahuano, no matter the season. Pancho reemerged, this time with wet hair and some slices of watermelon that he handed out.
He took a couple of bites and then declared: “We’re going to steal the church’s instruments. I call dibs on the guitar.”
“I thought the plan was to translate songs,” I said.
“Now we’re going to do both,” he replied, not looking at me as he spat out some watermelon seeds. Pancho always wanted to do everything at once.
“Which church?” asked Marquito.
“Betsabé’s dad’s church,” replied Pancho. He stood up again. He went into the house and put on “The Headmaster Ritual,” the song we were translating. He turned the volume all the way up and started to dance, moving his arms like he was having an epileptic fit, and he took a running leap from inside the house to the street.
Betsabé was the daughter of the pastor of Talcahuano’s evangelical ministry, Blessed to Bless. We had played with her when we were little, until her father really embraced religion and became a pastor. That summer, Pancho had a crush on her. The truth was, we were both trying to woo her, but Pancho was more persistent than I was and he went to the pastor’s meetings—that’s what evangelicals called the kind of masses they held—just so he could see her. He’d gone to a meeting the day before, and that’s where he’d had the idea for the heist.
He told us it was like he’d had a mystical enlightenment while everyone was raising their arms to the sky, shouting Hallelujah and chanting, “He lives, He lives. He returned from the dead. He lives, He lives. We will celebrate.” That was when he started paying attention to the accompanying music played by a band on a small stage to one side of the pastor’s pedestal. According to him, he saw the instruments floating in the air without the musicians who were playing them: guitar, bass, drums, and keyboard. He felt that God was appearing to him and revealing a new mission; basically, God wanted him to steal the instruments. We had decided the year before that God didn’t exist, or that if he did, we weren’t interested in him. But still, it wasn’t strange to hear Pancho say such things. There was something about the evangelicals that just fit with his personality: the ecstacy, the delerium of fanaticism. You could imagine him as a Christian who converted after years of sinning, or as a self-proclaimed prophet who went into mystical trances in the middle of a small-town plaza, surrounded by a small group of loyal followers—people like Marquito and me.
When Camilo appeared, Pancho still hadn’t managed to entirely explain his new plan. Camilo was a year older than Pancho. He was short like his brother, but thinner. He didn’t seem any older physically—or in any of his abilities—but he compensated by being more violent. He was prone to fistfights, especially with Pancho. He was wearing only the pair of sweatpants that he never took off, not even to sleep, and he held a slice of breakfast watermelon in his hand. He greeted us with a raise of his eyebrows and sat on the ground a little away from the three of us. He leaned his head grumpily against the wall of the house, as though to make it very clear he wasn’t at all interested in whatever Pancho was plotting.
With Camilo to one side and the three of us at the foot of the steps, we were finally all assembled. I can see us as the inoffensive gang that we were, each of us playing his role. Marquito the kid, Camilo the troublemaker, Pancho the impulsive agitator, full of crazy ideas, and me, the other side of the coin and his faithful sidekick—serene and quiet, thoughtful. We sit there listening to Pancho, who’s so enraptured with his plans, he stumbles over his own words and can’t finish one sentence coherently before launching into another, just like the surf down below us: before one wave can break, the next is on top of it. Marquito and I interrupt him every once in a while to ask him to get to the point.
The most important thing was that the instruments were stored in the church at night. That’s what the bassist had told Pancho when he went up to compliment the band and pump them for information.
At first, Camilo seemed indifferent to Pancho’s plan and his intensity. But then he asked, suspiciously: “And how are we going to divide up the instruments? Dibs on the guitar.”
That interruption led to a fight between the brothers that lasted, intermittently, until well into the afternoon. They finally agreed that Camilo would play drums, Pancho guitar, Marquito bass, and I would play keys. I liked the idea of playing keyboard. It seemed like an instrument