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that in the shower we men would keep our eyes at face level and no one, under penalty of suspicion of unhealthy curiosity or simple vulgarity, would look at a classmate’s sex. Naturally, this rule was overseen by the one who observed it least: timid, impertinent Father Soler, who would walk up and down the bathroom with the mixed gaze of aneagle and a serpent—very appropriate to our nation—and in his hand a threatening, symbolic rod that he never, as far as we knew, used on the boys’ wet backs and lustrous buttocks.
    Those who are still alive and reading me will agree that I am telling them something as unusual for them as it was for us. Jericó decided that the temptation of our looking at each other naked existed, but the way to overcome it was not by physical effort but by expressing ourselves intellectually. For that, he said, let’s choose two thoughts that are opposite and therefore complementary and invoke them in the shower—which was icy, those who still enjoy their senses should know, for that was demanded by our mentors’ code of physical rigor and aspirations to sanctity.
    It still causes astonishment, as well as sensual delight, to remember that by common agreement, when it was time to shower, standing side by side, not looking at each other, soaking wet and naked, with the incessant drip of delicious water falling on our heads, one would repeat aloud the constituent, formal ideas of Catholic philosophy as if they were at once dogmas and anathemas, while the other recited the theory of their absolute negation. Jericó maintained that the Christian philosophy of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas was the basis of the authoritarian, oppressive system of the Iberian nations. The ancient dispute between Saint Augustine and the British heretic Pelagius in the fourth or fifth century set the pattern. The heretic proclaimed the freedom to approach God by means of our own sensibility and intelligence. Saint Augustine stated that there is no personal freedom without the filter of the ecclesiastical institution. The Church is the indispensable intermediary between individual faith and divine grace. By contrast, the heretic claimed that grace is within reach of everyone. Grace, the saint responded, requires the power of the institution to be granted. From this ancient dispute in ruined oracles between a child of Roman Africa and an obscure northern monk grew, said Jericó in the rain of the shower, first the division between Catholics and Protestants and then the difference between Latin Americans and North Americans: We had the Middle Ages, Augustinian and Thomistic, and they didn’t; they had Pelagianism brought up to date byLuther and the imperatives of capitalism, and we didn’t. For North Americans, history begins with them and the past was invented by Cecil B. DeMille with the help of Charlton Heston. For us, the past is so old that it has to be lived again.
    If enunciating medieval Catholic contentions in the shower was a singular but unifying act between two naked eighteen-year-old boys, it was no less demanding to make the nihilistic argument in its Nietzschean dress (or in this case, nakedness), for it was up to me to allege that there is no freedom if we don’t emancipate ourselves from faith and from every foundation or acquired rationale, lifting the veil of appearances and adopting the impulse toward the truth, whose first step …
    “Is the recognition that nothing is true.”
    I said these words “in the rain,” and I confess I felt desolate and in those moments wanted to possess the certainties enunciated by Jericó, for not only did the stream of water on my head blind me, but so did the grief of the loss of all certainty. Still, my role in this fraternal dialogue, which distanced us from false modesty or unhealthy curiosity, was that of a transformer of values by means of false values, saving my dear, my beloved friend Jericó from Christian culture, which is the culture of