You will never forget that August afternoon. You were fourteen years old and in your last year of junior high school. Your father had died before you could remember; your mother worked in a travel agency. She always woke you up at seven o’clock. You would leave behind a dream of battles along the coast, disembarkments on enemy islands, attacks on jungle forts. And you would slowly enter the day, therein to live, eat breakfast, go to school, grow up, painfully grow up, abandon your childhood.

At night, when your mother returned from the agency, you would eat dinner together in silence, and then you would close yourself up in your room to study, listen to the radio, read novels from the Bazooka collection: stories about World War Two through which you experienced a heroic era replete with silent battles without defeat.

Because of your mother’s work, you always ate lunch at her brother’s house. He was a surly man who never showed you any affection and demanded monthly payments for feeding you. Every day you had to put up with an aridity you never bargained for, a conversation that freed you, by excluding you, from having to talk about the same topics again and again, from having to repeat sentences and postures gleaned from movies and television. Forced to accept you, they made no effort to relieve the discomfort of the involuntary intruder.

Nevertheless, Julia’s presence compensated for everything. Julia, your first cousin, your unattainable first cousin who turned twenty that August afternoon. Julia studied chemistry and was the only one who paid any attention to you, but not out of love as you then imagined. Perhaps she felt pity for a child, an orphan who had no rights at all.

Julia helped you with your homework, she let you listen to her twenty records, music that will always make you think of her. One time, Julia took you to the movies; another, she introduced you to her boyfriend, the first of her boyfriends who was allowed to visit her at home.

And you never hated anyone as much as you hated Pedro—Pedro, who was irritated by your cousin’s compassion for you; Pedro, who thought of you as a witness, a pest, perhaps never as a rival.

Julia turned twenty that August afternoon. After the birthday lunch was over, Pedro invited her to go to the movies or drive around the outskirts of the city. You did not hear her response. But you did obey the order to accompany them. You got into Pedro’s car. You sank deep down into the back seat.

And Julia leaned her head on Pedro’s shoulder while Pedro steered with his left hand so he could embrace Julia, and the music vibrated on the radio, the afternoon sizzled away in that city of stones and dust,

until you saw the last houses and the barracks and the cemeteries disappear from the window. Then (Julia kissed Pedro and let him caress her; blinded by the sun, you did not exist) cypresses, oyameles, and tall pine trees fragmented by the summer light came before your eyes and stopped you from crying.

Pedro parked the car in front of the walls of the convent hidden in the mountain’s desolation. They asked if you wanted to get out, and the three of you walked through deserted corridors, hallways full of echoes without memory,

and they found a staircase that led down to a dark basement, and they talked to each other and listened (they, not you) to the acoustics of the chapel walls, and while Julia and Pedro rambled through the gardens of the convent, you—who do not have a name and are nobody—scrawled her name and the date on the walls.

They left the ruins and walked toward the humid jungle and the mountainous vegetation. They descended to where the forest is born, to the cold stream that was smaller than a ridge between furrows, all the way to the sign that read don’t cut the flowers or disturb the animals (the jungle was a national park and offenders would be fined and imprisoned and humiliated without mercy).

The sharp, free air came to you and revived your dreams. You touched nature’s freedom and thought you were a hero, all the heroes of the last war, the vanquishers and the vanquished at Tobruk, Narvik, Dunkirk, Ardennes, Iwo Jima, Midway, Monte Cassino, El Alamein, Warsaw,

you saw yourself fighting in the Afrika Korps or with the Polish Mounted Guards in suicide attacks against German tanks; you, a soldier capable of every and any warlike action because he knows that a woman is going to celebrate his deed and the enemy is going to lose, surrender, die.

And then Julia found the squirrel, the gray squirrel at the top of the tree, and she said how much she would like to bring it home, and Pedro answered that squirrels never let themselves be caught, and there were a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand rangers to protect the park and the squirrels. Then you said I’ll get it,

and you climbed the tree before Julia could say no. (The pine bark cut your hands; you slipped on the resin.) Then the squirrel climbed to the highest point in the tree, and you followed it until you were standing out on a single branch. You looked down and saw the park ranger approaching and Pedro beginning to talk to him and Julia trying not to look at you,

but nevertheless she saw you, and Pedro did not say anything about you to the ranger, and the ranger did not look up, and Pedro kept talking to him, thus prolonging your humiliation,

your broken victory,

because ten minutes had already gone by and the branch was beginning to give.

You were afraid of falling and dying and failing in front of Julia, and losing face in front of her because the ranger was going to arrest you,

wounded and arrested and defeated in front of Julia,

nevertheless the ranger did not leave, and the squirrel teased you from just a half a yard away and scurried down and ran across the grass and disappeared into the jungle,

while Julia cried, far from the ranger and the squirrel, but further still from you and impossible.

And the ranger said good-bye to Pedro and finally you could come down from the tree,

pale, awkward, humiliated, in tears,

nevertheless Pedro laughed and Julia did not cry: she criticized him and called him stupid.

They got into the car again, and Julia did not let Pedro embrace her, and nobody said a word about anything.

You got out near your house and walked for hours and told your mother what had happened in the forest,

the end of your adventure and your painful innocence.

And you burned your Bazooka collection

and you never forgot that August afternoon,

that afternoon,

the last

in which you saw Julia.