Stars and Stripes

I had the chance to return the favour, but that was a few years later, when we were about thirteen. By then my parents had divorced and I had begun trying to go out with girls. There was one, Mily, who had already kissed the entire neighbourhood, at least the boys who played soccer, who always had priority in these matters. When Mily set aside her final defence, nobody wanted to go out with her any more because it made a bad impression.

I was in no way concerned by Mily’s résumé. On the contrary, I thought that, given her record, it would be easier to kiss her. And since she had done it so many times, she could teach me to be a good kisser. For weeks I appeared at all the parties she attended. I was inexperienced and thought that to kiss somebody you had to feel profound things. And so I forced myself to fall in love with her. With practice, I succeeded in thinking about her automatically, until the really complicated issue was forgetting about her and concentrating on my studies and exams.

Finally, after several parties and dancing to a good number of slow songs, I tried to give her a kiss in the kitchen of a friend’s house. But she refused.

‘Don’t come near me,’ she said.

‘Why not? You’ve kissed everybody else.’

‘That’s why. I don’t want people to think I’m easy.’

‘What’s easy about it? I’ve spent weeks trying to do this.’

‘I’ll tell you what we can do. Every afternoon I take my dog for a walk in the park. If you come and keep me company, maybe we’ll kiss one day. But don’t imagine anything else, OK?’

For the whole summer I showed up like a slave to join her on her walks through the park, but she never let me touch her. Her dog, a basset hound with a melancholy face, seemed to laugh at me when I appeared. To humiliate me even more, Mily always asked about Carlitos. She wanted to know what he liked. What games he played. If we saw each other a lot. If I could bring him to the park sometime. I did all I could to ignore what she was trying to tell me, but finally I had to admit that she liked my imbecile neighbour.

It had its own logic. I haven’t said so until now, but Carlitos was very far from being handsome. He was enormous and soft, his teeth were crooked, and he had never shown any interest in girls. That’s probably why Mily liked him, because he was the only boy who never tried to take any liberties with her.

Though Carlitos wasn’t to blame for anything, I was furious with him. Simply put, his company reminded me of my failure with Mily. I stopped seeing him. I didn’t want him to interfere with my difficult progress towards a first kiss. Apparently this served only to make Carlitos want to see me more than ever. He rang my bell six days in a row. He asked my parents about me. He telephoned me at midnight. I never responded. It wouldn’t take me long to regret that. Mily’s kiss never came, but at the end of the summer, I learned from other neighbours about the tragedy that had struck Carlitos’s family while I was ignoring him.

That year his parents had sent his older brother to study in the United States. Manuel – that was his brother’s name – had begun to travel back and forth very frequently, too frequently, but no one thought it strange. After all, Carlitos’s father had been promoted to the rank of admiral. His house was filled with armed bodyguards, and in all probability he earned a great deal of money. Sending the boy back and forth wouldn’t represent a huge expenditure for him.

What did surprise everyone was that the police arrested Manuel at the airport, when he was about to leave on one of his trips. This time Manuel had spent barely forty-eight hours in Lima, going out to discotheques at night and sleeping during the day. His family hardly saw him, and even though they were beginning to suspect what was going on, nobody felt like asking questions. They were probably confident an admiral’s son would not be arrested.