Marquito and I turned and looked up at him. He was tapping his head with his index finger, repeating, “It’s all right here.” He was just waking up; his hair was tousled and his eyes bloodshot. He sat down beside us and looked straight ahead with that unhinged look he had whenever he was plotting something. Marquito and I put our dictionaries aside and waited for him to tell us what he had in mind, but Pancho said nothing. He just breathed deeply, as if trying to calm his thoughts.

“Where’s Camilo?” he asked suddenly.

“Wasn’t he with you, sleeping in your room?” I asked, and I picked up the dictionary again. I flipped to J to look up the word jealous, from “jealous of youth.”

“What?” asked Pancho, confused. He jumped up and went back inside.

A gust of air whipped up eddies of dust in the street, and I shielded my eyes. The wind never left Talcahuano, no matter the season. Pancho reemerged, this time with wet hair and some slices of watermelon that he handed out.

He took a couple of bites and then declared: “We’re going to steal the church’s instruments. I call dibs on the guitar.”

“I thought the plan was to translate songs,” I said.

“Now we’re going to do both,” he replied, not looking at me as he spat out some watermelon seeds. Pancho always wanted to do everything at once.

“Which church?” asked Marquito.

“Betsabé’s dad’s church,” replied Pancho. He stood up again. He went into the house and put on “The Headmaster Ritual,” the song we were translating. He turned the volume all the way up and started to dance, moving his arms like he was having an epileptic fit, and he took a running leap from inside the house to the street.

Betsabé was the daughter of the pastor of Talcahuano’s evangelical ministry, Blessed to Bless. We had played with her when we were little, until her father really embraced religion and became a pastor. That summer, Pancho had a crush on her. The truth was, we were both trying to woo her, but Pancho was more persistent than I was and he went to the pastor’s meetings—that’s what evangelicals called the kind of masses they held—just so he could see her. He’d gone to a meeting the day before, and that’s where he’d had the idea for the heist.