It was the kind of thing that drove Andrea crazy, because it was right on target.

“What the fuck does that mean? What does burning ambition mean? Who has a mission in life? This is the kind of work I want to do. It interests me, and I think I’ll enjoy it.” He stopped and corrected himself immediately, to keep from jinxing himself. “I would enjoy it. And it would be a chance to do something useful.”

“Same for me. I think the only way you can change society, change the world, is from the inside. I believe that if you work as a magistrate-if you do a good job, of course-you can help change the world. Cleanse it of corruption, crime, and rot,” Sergio said.

It was his words that stuck in my memory, and when I think back on them I feel something ambiguous, a mixture of tenderness and horror, at how those naive aspirations were swallowed whole by the voracious crevasses of life.

I was about to deliver a rebuttal, but then I thought I really had no right. I was an interloper in their dreams. So I shrugged and turned up the sound on the tape deck, just as Billy Joel’s voice faded and the opening guitar riff of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” played. Outside, a massive thunderstorm had just ended.

The civil service test involved three written examinations: civil law, criminal law, and administrative law. The order in which the tests were administered was assigned randomly each year.

That year, the first exam was on administrative law. That was a subject I knew absolutely nothing about, and so I withdrew from the civil service exam after three hours, renouncing my secret and irrational hopes. The sliding door that leads to the world of adulthood wasn’t destined to open for me just then, so I went to sit in the waiting room. I would remain in that waiting room for quite some time to come.

There have been times, in the years since, when I’ve wondered what my life would have been like if, by some fluke, I had passed that exam.