I also preferred her over my aunt and Camila because she didn’t place demands on me. Not directly, at least. She was uncomfortable when her mother and sister went off on their sermons, and she always tried to change the subject. She gave the impression she didn’t think she was one to give advice to anyone, though that was largely because of how sad she was. Dejected. All I knew about the matter was what I’d heard from my grandmother one afternoon. She said Javiera’s boyfriend had dumped her, and that after she’d been gone for six years, she’d come home “with her tail between her legs.” An image that at the time didn’t seem at all sad to me, but really funny.

Javiera was the first woman to captivate me. Out of nowhere, she’d caress my hair or kiss my cheek, and then she wouldn’t pay any attention to me for the rest of the day—an infallible feminine maneuver that I was experiencing for the first time. It was clear she’d once been a girl who knew all the tricks, but now she was sad. Her mother and younger sister were very close; they slept in the other tent and talked late into the night. Javiera always looked at them as if they had just scolded her. Maybe I identified with her because of that: like me, Javiera seemed leery.

She called me Nicolai or Nicolaia, for the characters in the Chekhov stories she was reading. She asked me if I knew what my name meant, and I, who of course had no idea, shrugged my shoulders. “It’s a glorious name,” she said. “It means victory of the people,” and she added that she’d always thought Chekhov used that name ironically for his characters because of the tsar. Also, that the very fact that the tsar was named Nicolas and ended up as he did was ironic. I went on shrugging, not understanding a word. She’d brought two books for me: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Aesop’s Fables. The fables had illustrations and very little text; the other was what I thought of as a “real” book then, with more than two hundred pages and no pictures. Javiera said she didn’t know which one was more appropriate for my age, so she’d brought them both. My aunt voiced the opinion that a Harry Potter book would have been ideal, and Javiera looked disgusted. She’d studied literature.

We had an agreement: I would read out loud to her every night in exchange for five hundred pesos. A spectacular deal for me, who tended to move around with fifty- and ten-peso coins. Javiera understood how the world worked, and that I wasn’t a boy she could convince with candies. My plan was to save it all and return to Santiago with ten thousand pesos in my pocket.