My Documents (2 page)

I liked the language of Mass, but I didn’t understand it very well. When we got to the part where we asked for forgiveness and said, “Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous
fault,” I mistook the word
fault
for
thought
, and that strange insistence on the evils of thinking impressed me, stayed with me. Then there was the sentence “I am not worthy to receive you,” which I said once to my grandmother while opening the door. “I am not worthy to receive you in my house” was how I repeated the joke later to my father, who answered right away, with a sweet and severe smile: “Well thank you, but this house is
mine
.”

At Mater Purissima there was a chorus of six singers and two guitar players that had a starring role in the Mass, because even the “Let us give thanks to God” and the “We praise you, Lord” and the “Hear us, Lord, we beg you” were all sung. My ambition was to join that choir. I was only eight years old, but I could play the little guitar we had at our house reasonably well: I strummed with a sense of rhythm, I could play scales, and though a nervous tremor overcame me when it was time to play a barre chord, I still got an almost-full sound out of it, only slightly impure. I guess I thought I was good, or good enough that I could, one morning after Mass, guitar in hand, approach the members of the chorus. They looked down at me, perhaps because I was very small, or maybe because they were a fully functioning mafia, but they neither accepted nor rejected me. “We have to give you a tryout,” said a blond woman with dark circles under her eyes who played an extraordinarily large guitar.

“Let’s do it now,” I proposed. I had some songs I’d practiced, among them the “Our Father,” which was often sung to the tune of “The Sounds of Silence,” but she refused.

“Next month,” she told me.

5

My mother had grown up listening devotedly to the Beatles, and to a repertoire of Chilean folk music, and then she had moved on to hits by Adamo, Sandro, Raphael, and José Luis Rodríguez, which was more or less what you listened to on AM stations at the beginning of the eighties. She had stopped looking for music that was new—or new to her—until she came across the live recording of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s reunion concert in Central Park. Her life changed then, I think forever: overnight, and with remarkable speed, the house filled with albums that were difficult to acquire, and she took up studying English again, maybe just so she could understand the lyrics.

I remember her listening to the BBC English course—which came in binders that held dozens of cassette tapes—or to the other course we had in the house, The Three Way Method to English: two boxes, one red and the other green, each with a notebook, a book, and three LPs. I’d sit beside her and listen distractedly to those voices. I still remember some fragments, like the man who would say, “These are my eyes,” and the woman who would reply, “Those are your eyes.” The best part was when the masculine voice asked, “Is this the pencil?” and the woman answered, “No, this is not the pencil, but the pen,” and then, when the man asked, “Is this the pen?” she answered, “No, this is not the pen, but the pencil.”

I tend to think that every time I came home, some song by Simon and Garfunkel, or Paul Simon solo, was playing in the living room. When
Graceland
appeared, in 1986, my mother was
definitely already Simon’s most fervent Chilean fan, an expert on the singer’s life events, like his failed marriage to Carrie Fisher and his bit part in
Annie Hall
. My father was surprised that his wife had so suddenly become a fan of this music that he—who back then was listening exclusively to Argentine zambas—didn’t like at all. “I should have my own room,” I heard my mother saying one night, sobbing, after an argument that started after she hung up some posters and photos in the master bedroom, provoking the ire of my father, who, in the end, had to resign himself to those images of other men looming over his marital bed.

6

On weekends in the spring, and even sometimes in the summer, I went with my aunts and uncles and cousins to fly kites on Hill 15. It was all very professional: my father had moved on from hanging the kite string between two trees and treating it with crushed glass, like he did when he was a kid, to hooking two big spools up to a motor to construct a complex machine for home-treating string. He also made his own kites. Though I’m sure that back then he was also solving arduous computing dilemmas, when I think of my father at work, I always see an image of him on those nights, endeavoring to create the perfect kite.

I didn’t dislike kite flying, but I preferred to do it with regular string; I was incapable of handling the treated kite string without destroying my fingertips, even though they were already a little hardened from strumming the guitar. But we had to use treated
string because that’s what it was all about: you got the kite up in the sky and faced down your opponent. While my cousin Rodrigo sawed vigorously away, cutting down dozens of kites every afternoon, I usually struggled just to keep my kite aloft, and I regularly lost control of it. I went on trying, even though, pretty soon, no one held out much hope for me.

We always brought along a box holding dozens of splendid kites, the ones my dad made plus others we bought from a friend of his who made kites for a living. I always tried to find a spot as far away as possible from my family. Sometimes, instead of flying my kite, I would take the kite and spool and spend a couple of hours stretched out in the grass, smoking my first cigarettes, while I watched the capricious trajectories of the cut kites as they fell. “How much for that kite?” someone asked me on one of those afternoons. It was Mauricio, the altar boy. I sold it to him, and soon I was selling others to his brother and his brother’s friends.

Mauricio was so freckled it was funny just to look at him, but it had still taken me a moment to recognize him without his white robe. In my confusion, in my ignorance, I had thought that altar boys were very young priests, and that they all lived together in a cloister or something. He clarified that no, they did not, and he told me that he preferred to be called an acolyte rather than an altar boy. He asked me if I wanted to serve at Mass, because the other acolyte was going to quit. He wanted to know if I’d had my First Communion, and for some reason I said I had, which was completely false—I was just starting the preparations at school. I wasn’t even sure it was a requirement for being an altar boy, but
instinctively, like so many other times in my life when I have been faced with doubt, I lied. Then I told him that I’d think about it, I wasn’t sure. When I went back to where my dad and my uncles were, I learned that they had discovered my kite-selling business, but no one scolded me.

7

I was still waiting for the baggy-eyed woman to give me a tryout, but every time I asked her about it, she only made excuses. I remember I said, trying to impress her, that the English version of “Our Father” was better. “It’s impossible for anything to be better than the word of our lord Jesus Christ,” she replied. But I must have piqued her curiosity, because when I was leaving, she asked me if I knew what the lyrics in English were about. “They’re about the sounds of silence,” I told her, with utter certainty.

I got tired of waiting, and one or two weeks after running into Mauricio on Hill 15, I approached 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 song
three 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 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.

9

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 any
religious 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 woman
with 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.