because they smoked and talked so self-confidently; and I seemed a right idiot next to Rabbit and Andrés, my eyes trying to take everything in, searching the crowd of strangers for the girl who would be mine: I wanted her to be oliveskinned, long-haired, with great legs, a looker but no slut, nor someone too ladylike to wash my clothes on school trips to the country or else too ladylike, so that I always had to worry about getting laid and so on, after all I wasn’t looking for a wife; all the better if she was from La Víbora or Santos Suárez, those people threw terrific parties, and I wasn’t going to go back to Párraga or Lawton and wasn’t impressed by what the barrio had on offer, they weren’t lookers, let alone hookers, and went to parties with their mothers. My girl had to fall in my set: there were more females than males on the register, almost double, I did a quick count and came up with 1.8 per male, a whole one and another headless or titless, remarked Rabbit, perhaps that slant-eyed creature, but she’s from Varona and they already have their dudes; and then the bell rang, and on 1 September 1972 the high school gates opened in La Víbora, where I would experience so much.

We were all almost enthusiastic about entering the cage, ah the first day at school; as if there weren’t enough space, some ran – mostly girls, naturally – towards the playground where wooden posts carried numbers to indicate where each group should line up. I was in number five, and only Rabbit joined me from our barrio, and he’d been with me since fifth grade. The playground filled up. I’d never seen so many people at the same school, I really hadn’t, and I started to look at the women in our group, to start preselecting a likely candidate. Reviewing them made me forget the sun, which was fucking burning it down, and then we sang the national anthem, and the headmaster climbed on the platform that was beneath the arch in the shade and began to speak into the microphone. First