My Documents Read Free

him and the priest and told them I wanted to be an acolyte. The priest looked at me with distrust and inspected me up and down before finally accepting me. I was happy. I wouldn’t sing at Mass, but I would have an even more prominent role. I wouldn’t wear the white pants of the marching band, but I’d have the white robe with its stiff cord tied firmly around my waist. Mauricio could lend me the clothes. I didn’t tell anyone at home that I was going to be an altar boy, I don’t really know why. Maybe I just didn’t want them to go see me.
    8
    The first time I served at Mass, I spent the first few minutes looking out of the corner of my eye with a fierce sense of vengeance toward the blond woman, who just sat there, refusing to notice my triumph. It was hard for me to concentrate on the rituals that I normally respected and believed in, but which, just then, up onstage, I barely seemed to remember. There were moments of glory, like when we rang the bells or seconded the priest in the sign of peace. But then the dreaded crossroads came: it was my turn to receive Communion. My plan had been to tell the priest before Mass that I couldn’t take Communion because I’d gone too long without confessing, but I’d forgotten, and now it was too late. I tried to make a gesture that communicated all of this, a gesture that would hopefully be imperceptible to the faithful behind me, but I couldn’t—the priest stuffed the host into my mouth, and it tasted the way it does to everyone: bland. But, at that moment, I didn’t care about the taste—I felt like I was going to die right there, struck down by a bolt of lightning or something. I walked home with Mauricio and I planned to confess my sin to him, but he was so happy, congratulating me over and over again on my performance at Mass, that I didn’t mention it.
    When we got to Mauricio’s house, which was close to Mater Purissima, his older brother invited me to have lunch with them. There was no one else in the house. We ate charquicán and listened to Pablo Milanés, who I knew for his song “ Años, ” which I thought was funny, and also for “ El breve espacio en que no estás, ” which I liked. Using a double tape deck, they had recorded each songthree times in a row on a ninety-minute tape, or maybe it was a hundred-and-twenty-minute tape (“They’re so good you want to listen to them again right away,” Mauricio explained to me).
    The brothers sang along in horrible voices while they ate; they yelled the lyrics unabashedly, even with their mouths full, and I liked that. When someone sang out of tune in my grandmother’s presence, she would say quietly, as though she were telling a secret (but loud enough so that everyone could hear her), things like: “It’s clear that we aren’t at the opera” or “We don’t always wake up well tuned” or “Does this soprano have a mustache?” But my grandmother wasn’t there to keep those brothers from singing with utter abandon, with ease: you could tell they had sung those songs an infinite number of times, that the music meant something important to them.
    While we spooned our ice cream, I started paying attention to the lyrics of “ Acto de Fe ”: “ Creo en ti… I believe in you / and my belief grows / with the pain and suffering / as I look around.” The end of the song struck me as disconcerting: I thought it was a love song, but it ended with the word revolution . The brothers sang it with all their hearts: “I believe in you / revolution.”
    Although I was a boy who liked words, that was the first time, at eight years old—or maybe by then I’d turned nine—that I heard the word revolution . I asked Mauricio if it was a name, because I thought it might be the name of the beloved woman: Revolution González, for example, or Revolution Arratia. They laughed, looked at me indulgently. “It’s not a name,” Mauricio’s brother clarified. “ Revolution ? You really don’t know that word?” I