Destiny and Desire Read Online Free

stopped interfering with me or my nose and looked for new odious marks to fight, as long as they could isolate the victim and present themselves as an unidentifiable and consequently unpunishable mass.
    Eventually even the famous bald kid approached us with an amusing false piece of news.
    “They’re saying you two are always together because you’re fags. I want to be your friend and see if they dare to say that about me too.”
    He accompanied his words with terrible grimaces of ill will and the torpid agility of a budding champion.
    We asked him with false astonishment if he was safe from all aggression and he said yes. Why? we insisted. Because I’m very richand don’t brag about it. He pointed, his hand perpetually bloodied or covered with scabs, to the street:
    “Do you see a black Cadillac parked there at the exit?”
    Sure. By now it was part of the landscape.
    “Have you seen me get into it?”
    No, we had seen him waiting for the bus at the corner.
    “Well, it’s my father’s car. It comes for me every afternoon. The chauffeur sees me come out and he gets out and opens the door for me. I go to the bus stop and the Cadillac goes home empty.”
    I thought about the useless waste of gasoline but said nothing, thinking that for now the boy deserved all our curiosity. He placed his hands on his hips and looked at us with an appealing—or perhaps pathetic—need for approval. Lacking our applause, he gave in and introduced himself.
    “I’m Errol.”
    Now Jericó and I did smile, and our friendly smile was a request: Explain that to us.
    “My mother has been a fan of Errol Flynn her whole life. Now nobody even remembers Errol Flynn. He was a very famous actor when my mother’s mother was young. She told her she never missed an Errol Flynn movie. She said he was very handsome and “nonchalant,” that’s what they called him in movie magazines. He was Robin Hood, and he swung from tree to tree dressed in green, as camouflage, ready to steal from the rich and give to the poor, an enemy of tyranny. And my mother inherited her mother’s taste.”
    A dreamy look passed over the eyes of the aggressive bald kid who was introducing himself now as Errol Esparza and offering us both his friendship and a summary of his life, the three of us sitting on the steps of the schoolyard during the final year of our secondary education, ready to assume the duties (and the airs) of the preparatory school in this same building, with the same professors and classmates, no longer identical to themselves but to the changing mirror of early youth, when a thousand insistent signs of childhood persist in obstructing the face that struggles to break through and tell us: We’ve grown up. Now we’re men.
    That is why the final year of secondary seemed so long and thefirst of preparatory so uncertain and distant. Not because of essential realities in one or the other level of education, but because of the accidental facts that we were ourselves: chubby-cheeked Jericó, bald Errol, and me, skinny Josué, the three of us surprised at the changes our bodies and souls were experiencing, though all three, each in his own way, pretended to accept the transformations without amazement, with natural dispassion, even with a certain indifference, as if we knew beforehand what we would be in the coming year and remained overwhelmingly ignorant of what we still were.
    Errol suggested the real pitfall. He invited us to his house. It was an invitation made with a strange air of irony mixed with indulgence concealing a poorly disguised embarrassment. Implicitly, he was expecting to be invited to our houses, believing that our friendship would last only if we knew a sixteen-year-old boy’s worst secret: his family. With this trauma overcome, we could move on to the next stage. Being adults and being friends.
    The good Errol’s good faith—not to call it innocence—was beyond any doubt. I knew that everything unsaid by the boy with the shaved head