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study. Once, he tried to give me math lessons, but it didn’t work out, and, anyway, I didn’t really need them.Nor do I know if he read much, though I feel like he did. Now I sometimes think, from this suspiciously stable place that is the present, that Camilo was immature. But no. He wasn’t. Or he also had another side, an intuitive, generous, perceptive side.
    He’d been there with us, in front of the TV, when Cóndor Rojas faked his injury in Brazil and the Chilean team walked off the field at the Maracaná. My father and I couldn’t believe what we were seeing, and Camilo was distraught too. “Fucking Brazilians!” I shouted, to see if anyone would scold me, but no one did. My father sank into furious silence. Camilo immediately set off downtown, and he was part of the crowd that protested in front of the Brazilian Embassy. I wanted to go with him, but my parents wouldn’t let me, and I had to swallow my rage.
    One evening, while the subject was still being debated and Cóndor Rojas was still giving interviews in which he proclaimed his innocence, Camilo came over to eat with us and said that he no longer believed that Cóndor was innocent. By then the rumors were already circulating, but my father and I considered them defamatory. My father looked at Camilo with contempt, almost with hatred. “You don’t have the right to an opinion. You don’t know anything about soccer,” he told him. “Do you really think that Cóndor would be stupid enough to do something like that?” When Rojas finally admitted he was guilty, that he really had hidden a razor blade in his glove to fake his injury, we had no choice but to accept it. We apologized to Camilo then, but he said he didn’t think it was at all important.
    Eventually we had to stop admiring Cóndor Rojas, and I also stopped going to my father’s games. Soon after that my fatherbroke his right hand for the second time, and the doctor told him that he should never play soccer again.
    Toward the end of 1990, something marvelous happened: after a decade of requesting a telephone line, we finally got one. We were given the number 557-3317. The morning they came to install it, I was home alone with my mother. The first thing she did was call one of her girlfriends, and then she told me that I should call one of my friends too, so I called Camilo. It was during a period when he had, without explanation, stopped coming to visit. He sounded happy, and I asked him to come see us. He appeared a few days later.
    He told me he wanted to teach me how to talk to girls. I was fourteen by then, I had already kissed a few of them, but my relations with girls were still difficult. Camilo said that he’d recently met a girl called Lorena, and they’d gone out on a date and had slept together. He explained how one should treat a woman in bed (“You have to take her clothes off slowly—you can’t rush it”), and he offered to call Lorena, while I listened in from my mother’s room. “That way you can learn how a guy seduces a woman,” he said. He was not showing off—he really did want to teach me.
    “Hi, Lorena, it’s Camilo,” he said, in a deep voice, when she picked up.
    “Oh, how are you?” Her voice was sweet, sweet and a little hoarse.
    “I’m good, but I need to see you.”
    She was quiet for five seconds, and then she pronounced asentence that I will never forget. “Well, if it’s already a necessity, we’ll just end it here,” she said, and hung up.
    I went to the kitchen, put the kettle on, and made a cup of tea for Camilo. I think it was the first time I ever made tea for someone. I put a lot of sugar in it, which was what I understood you did when making tea for someone who was sad.
    “Thanks,” Camilo said, with a gesture of resignation. “But it doesn’t matter. I’m happy. Next summer something very important is going to happen.”
    “What?”
    “Well, it won’t be summer for me. It’ll be winter.”
    It was a perfect clue, but I