I reached the port and sat on the stairs to watch some sailors getting ready to embark. Years before, Pancho and I used to come here at dawn to watch the fishing boats set out. We dreamed of being merchant marines. We’d looked at the sailors’ faces, stiffened by the cold and laced with wrinkles, troubled and anxious as they went about their tasks before shoving off. We thought we recognized the faces of strong, tough men. Men who weren’t afraid of anything. But now, at daybreak and with the black sea behind them, the only thing I could see reflected in those sailors’ faces was sadness. A dry sadness that drove into their bones as deeply as the cold on the high seas. My whole life I’d thought that Talcahuano was a tough place, but the truth was, it was just sad. And then I thought of my father in the hospital bed, and I knew why he’d done what he had done. I could finally get a fix on him: my father was a wretched man, but he could still do damage. He could wound, even if it wasn’t his intention. I should have known it sooner, but I didn’t.

When my mother and my sisters arrived several days later, the house was just as they had left it. I had thrown out the wood and the newspapers and mopped up the vomit. Cleaned the house. That was the first thing I ever did for myself, for me. And maybe I did it in the hopes that my luck would change. Those first days I entered a state of numbness, and I became convinced that I had no choice but to think only of myself. It was as if the garbage my father had collected suddenly struck me as dangerous, as if it had me cornered, as if it could take me down with it and I wouldn’t even notice. All the garbage, and the poverty, and the afternoons with the Carrascos—it all suddenly became threatening. Not because of the mission; I wasn’t afraid we would start robbing banks. Most likely we would have gone on being a harmless gang, forever sitting at the foot of the stairs, or on some corner once we were older, dreaming up plans that would never come to fruition. Maybe that was precisely what made them threatening. I thought about how stupid I’d been all that time with the Carrascos, playing and bragging about how sly we were, without understanding what was really happening around us. And then the light that made Pancho shine for being so astonishingly him was extinguished, leaving the shadow of a stubborn, foolish, and insignificant boy.