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nothing,” my grandmother said after the 1985 earthquake, hugging me. We went back to school some months later, and they switched us to an improvised classroom they’d constructed behind the gym, where we stayed for the rest of the year.
    We had a new teacher, too. The first thing he told us was his name, Juan Luis Morales Rojas, and he repeated it in a quiet voice, in a neutral tone, two, three, twenty times. “Now you all repeat it,” he told us. “Juan Luis Morales Rojas.” We started to repeat the name, with growing confidence, increasing our volume, trying to understand if there was a limit to how loud we could be, and after a while we were shouting and jumping while he moved his hands like an orchestra director, or like a musician who was enjoying listening to the audience sing along to the chorus of one of his songs. “Now I know you’re never going to forget my name” was all hesaid when we got tired of shouting and laughing. In all my years at that school, I don’t remember a happier moment than that one.
    Weeks later, or maybe that same day, Juan Luis Morales Rojas told us what elections were, what the president’s duties were, and what the vice president, the secretary, and the treasurer all did. In one of the first Class Council sessions, the two-hour meetings we would have on Mondays, Rojas asked us to make a list of all the problems we had, and at first we couldn’t think of anything, but then someone mentioned how fourth graders weren’t allowed in the band. The idea arose to make a list of all the names of kids who wanted to be in the band, and then to go and talk with Father Limonta. I was going to raise my hand, but I hesitated for a second. Then I realized, quite clearly, that no, I didn’t want to be in the band.
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    After a while, my mom ran into a woman who was sure she had seen me serving at Mass. “That’s impossible,” my mother replied. But then someone else told her the same thing, and she asked me about it again. I told her the person was wrong, but that I had also seen someone who looked surprisingly like me acting as altar boy. “I just have a very common face,” I told her.
    When I finally did go to confession with Father Limonta, it didn’t even occur to me to tell him that I had already taken Communion, or about my erotic experience with Mauricio. Later I received my First Communion at school—which by then was my thirtieth or fortieth—and I could finally take Communion legitimately atMass. My parents were there and they gave me presents, and I think that was when I first felt the true weight of my double life. I went on serving at Mater Purissima without my parents’ knowledge until maybe the winter of 1985, when, after a tense and sloppy Mass, the priest criticized us harshly: he told us we distracted him, that we were too shrill, that we had no rhythm. His comments hit me hard, maybe because I was precariously coming to understand that the priest was acting, that it wasn’t all enlightenment or whatever you call that sacred calling, that spiritual dimension. I decided to quit and, at that very moment, I stopped being Catholic. I suppose that’s also when my religious feeling began to be quashed. I never had, in any case, those rational meditations on the existence of God, maybe because that was when I started to believe, naively, intensely, absolutely, in literature.
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    After the attempt on Pinochet’s life, in September of ’86, Dante started asking everyone in the neighborhood if they belonged to the right or the left. Some of the neighbors reacted uncomfortably, others laughed and started walking even faster, and still others asked him what he understood of the left and the right. But he never asked us kids, only the adults.
    I stayed friends with Mauricio and we still listened to Milanés at his house, but more often to Silvio Rodríguez, Violeta Parra, Inti-Illimani, and Quilapayún, and I got lessons from him and his brother about revolution and community