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told him no. “Well, then you’re a turd.”
    I knew it was a joke; he only said it for the rhyme. Then Mauricio’s brother gave me a class on Chilean and Latin American history that I wish I could recall to the letter, but all I remember is the feeling of becoming bewilderingly and uncomfortably aware of my own ignorance. I knew nothing about the world, nothing. The brother left and Mauricio and I went to watch TV in his bedroom; we fell asleep or half asleep. We started to grope each other, to touch each other all over, without kissing. Throughout all our years of friendship, we never did that again, nor did we mention it.
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    I arrived home just after dark. I wasn’t in the habit of praying, but that night I did, for a long time—I needed God’s help. In just one day I had accumulated two tremendous sins, although I was more worried about my false Communion than my dalliance with Mauricio.
    My grandmother saw me there, kneeling in front of a portrait of Christ that we had hanging in the living room, and she couldn’t hold back her laughter. I asked her what she was laughing at, and she told me not to exaggerate, that one “Our Father” was quite enough. My grandmother never went to Mass: she said the priests ogled too much, but she did believe in God. “I don’t need to say prayers,” she explained to me that night. “It’s enough to have a conversation with Jesus, freely, before I go to sleep.” I thought that was strange, or at least intimidating.
    Although I went to a Catholic school, I didn’t associate anyreligious sentiment with what went on there. I didn’t like it when they made us go to Mass at school, or to those tedious sessions in the church that was contiguous to the main building, where they prepared us for our First Communion—those stupid lists of questions, as if we were memorizing traffic rules. But at recess the next morning, I felt so guilty that I decided that even though I hadn’t had my First Communion yet, I needed to confess, or at least talk to a priest about those sins of mine. I headed for Father Limonta’s office, where I found him absorbed in an account book, maybe balancing some figures. When he raised his head he gave me a severe look, and I froze stiff. “I already know what you’re here about,” he told me, and I started trembling, imagining the priest kept up some kind of express communication with God. I went blank, felt dizzy. “It’s not going to happen,” said Limonta finally. “All the boys come in here and ask the same thing, but you’re still too young for the band.” I ran out, relieved, and went back to class.
    I think it was that same day that the head teacher and a priest whose name I don’t remember brought us to a home for mentally challenged children. The goal of the visit was to show us just how fortunate we were, and there was even a script to increase the drama: one by one the home’s children would approach the teacher in order to receive her encouragement and affection, though she didn’t touch or hug them. “You mean so much to us, Jonathan,” she would say, while a boy with a twisted mouth, skewed eyes, and snot hanging from his nose mumbled something incomprehensible in response. Each case was more heartrending than the last, and the final person to be paraded out was Lucy, a forty-year-old womanwith a little girl’s body, who seemed paralyzed but would turn her head when the priest rang a bell. I remember I thought about Dante then, who was normal compared to these kids, even though in our neighborhood they called him the Mongoloid.
    Up until then, my idea of suffering had been associated with Dante and the handicapped children on the telethon, which was an inexhaustible fount of fears and nightmares. Every year my sister and I, like nearly all children in Chile, would watch the entire program until we were falling-down tired, and then we would spend weeks imagining what it would be like to lose our arms or legs.
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    “This is