That’s why I spent almost all day at the Carrascos’ house, where Camilo and Pancho lived. We had the place to ourselves. Their father was a miner in the north—the only dad of our group who had a job—and their mother spent the whole day at the Carrascos’ grandmother’s house with her newborn daughter. Pancho was the younger brother, and my best friend. His barely there neck, broad back, and short legs gave him a rigid look that didn’t correspond in the slightest with the torrent of energy he gave off. Ever since he was little, he’d had a talent for concocting adventures and getting into trouble. Nothing dangerous, just childish mischief.

Pancho and I were both thirteen, but there were seven months between us and I would turn fourteen soon. We lived just a couple blocks apart, and we had spent almost every day of our lives together. The Carrascos’ house was on Pichidegua, which means “Little Mouse,” and I lived on Malal, “Corral.” All the streets in the neighborhood were named in Mapudungun. Years before, Pancho and I and a classmate who was half Mapuche had translated the names of almost all the streets. We harbored the illusion that we were discovering meaningful names for those narrow dirt alleys we lived on—I guess we had the idea that Mapudungun was heroic. In the end they were mostly names of animals common to the region, but we still took a certain pride in our streets, especially if we compared them to the industrial neighborhoods around us, where the streets were numbered.

Talcahuano, “Thundering Sky,” was the only name that lived up to our expectations.