The first night, while Javiera was brushing her teeth, I picked up the book of fables, and when she came back I told her I’d finished it. “The whole thing?” she asked in surprise. I nodded, smiling, and I showed her the morals highlighted in purple squares at the end of each fable. “Clever!” she said. “But you skipped the stories.”

“But the part in the squares is the most important,” I argued. “The rest is just filling.” She laughed and said that the moral depended on the story, you couldn’t understand them separately. “I understood everything,” I assured her.

“Mmmm . . . really, I guess it’s a brilliantly practical method . . . But that’s not what reading is about . . . you have to waste a little time.” And she opened the book for me to start reading from the beginning.

Practical. I like to think about the boy I was then as a practical person. I guess to a certain extent I was; I didn’t sweat things, my world didn’t collapse when there were problems. I adapted, I think that’s the best word. I didn’t complain, and I adapted. But nor would it be true to say that I didn’t care about things, or that they didn’t affect me. Giving the appearance of adapting—that was the way to keep safe, it was the bulletproof vest I wore under my clothes. “Clever,” Javiera called me. “Naughty,” others had said before. “Liar,” I knew.

Javiera changed my relationship to books. They had passed through my hands before—we had required readings every two months at school—but this was a different kind of obligation. I was a very good reader for my age, at least compared with my classmates. It was easy for me, though I found it boring. So at first, to make it fun, I put on the voices of the characters the way I imagined them, or I read in a singsong voice, following or forcing a certain musicality in the words. Javiera laughed, but the jokes weren’t enough for her, and at the end of every reading session she asked me a series of questions that I couldn’t answer because I’d retained only the sound of the words. So then I had to make an effort and concentrate on the meaning of each of the sentences. I had to chew them, not just taste their flavor. In reality, I didn’t do it so much for the money, but because it seemed important to Javiera, and I didn’t want to disappoint her. I wanted her to keep seeing me as a clever boy.