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what he was going to do on Saturday. Maybe even ten of the guys are dreaming about that movie, and after seeing all those women in panties, all those legs and bellies and all, maybe they’ll want me to write them some little stories, but they won’t pay in advance and how can I write them if the chemistry exam is tomorrow, I’ll have to pay the Jaguar for the questions unless Vallano whispers the answers to me if I promise to write some letters for him but who can trust a Negro. Maybe they’ll want some letters but who can pay right off at this time of the week because it’s only Wednesday and everybody’s spent his last centavo in “La Perlita” or the poker games. I could get twenty soles to spend if the guys who’re confined to the grounds ask me to buy cigarettes for them and I could pay them back with letters or stories, or it’d be even better if I could find twenty soles in a wallet somebody lost in the mess hall or the classrooms or the latrine, or right now I could sneak into the barracks where the Dogs are and go through the lockers until I found twenty soles but it would be better to take fifty centavos from each one so it wouldn’t be so obvious and I’d only have to open forty lockers without waking anybody up but I’d have to find fifty centavos in each one, or I could go to one of the noncoms or a lieutenant and say, lend me twenty soles, I’m a man now and I want to go see Golden Toes, and who’s that shit that’s yelling like that…
    It took Alberto a moment or two to identify the voice and to remember he was away from his post. Then louder: “Where the hell is that cadet?” This time his whole being reacted. He raised his head and could see the walls of the guardhouse, the soldiers sitting on a bench, the statue of the hero defying the fog with his drawn sword, all of them spinning around him as if in a whirlwind, and he could picture his name written out on the punishment list, and his heart was beating wildly, he was in a panic, his tongue and his lips were moving imperceptibly, Lt. Remigio Huarina was standing less than five yards away from the bronze hero, looking over at him with his hands on his hips.
    “What are you doing here?”
    The lieutenant came up to Alberto, who gazed over the officer’s shoulder at the splotches of moss on the stone base that held up the hero’s statue, or rather he saw them in his mind because the lights of the guardhouse were dim and far away, or else he invented them, it was possible that on that same day the soldiers on duty had scraped and scrubbed the pedestal.
    “Well?” the lieutenant asked. “What’s going on?”
    Alberto stood motionless, his right hand held rigid to his cap, all of his senses alert as he faced that short dark figure. The officer also stood motionless, his hands still on his hips.
    “I’d like to ask you for some advice, Sir,” Alberto said. I could tell him I’m dying of a bellyache, I’ve got to have an aspirin or something, my mother is seriously ill, somebody killed the vicuña, I could even ask him to…“What I mean is, personal advice.”
    “What the hell are you mumbling about?”
    “I’ve got a problem,” Alberto said, still standing at attention. I could tell him my father is a general, a rear admiral, a marshal, and for every point I’m docked he’ll lose a year of promotion, and I could… It’s…it’s personal.” He stopped, hesitated a moment, then lied: “The colonel told us once we could ask advice from our officers. I mean, about personal problems.”
    “Name and year,” the lieutenant said. He had dropped his hands from his hips and now he looked even smaller, even more fragile. He took a step forward and Alberto could look down at him more closely. At his pouting lips. At his scowling, froglike eyes, though without the life of a frog’s. At his round face, contracted in an expression that was meant to be implacable and was only pathetic, the same expression he put on when he ordered the