Free B004QGYWKI EBOK by Mario Vargas Llosa

with me,” Lou shouted proudly.
    Twenty boys surrounded him.
    “To the embankment,” he ordered. “Everybody to the embankment.”
    Arm in arm in a row linking the two sidewalks, the seniors brought up the rear, elbowing our way through, forcing the less enthusiastic ones to speed up:
    A cool breeze that could not even stir the dry leaves of the carob trees or the hair on our heads blew the sand from one side of the embankment to the other, covering the burning hot surface. They had responded. Before us—Lou, Javier, Raygada and I, with our backs to the railing and the endless dunes stretching from the opposite bank of the river—a packed crowd extending the length of the whole block remained quiet, even though from time to time strident, isolated shouts could be heard.
    “Who does the talking?” Javier asked.
    “I will,” proposed Lou, ready to jump up on the railing.
    “No,” I said. “Javier, you speak.”
    Lou checked himself and looked at me, but he wasn’t mad.
    “All right,” he said, and shrugging his shoulders, added: “What’s the difference?”
    Javier climbed up. With one hand he leaned on a twisted, dry tree and with the other he held himself up on my neck. Through his legs, agitated by a slight quivering that disappeared as the tone of his voice grew convincing and forceful, I could see the dry, burning riverbed and thought about Lou and about the Coyotes. A mere second had been enough for him to take over. Now he was in command and they looked up to him, him, a little yellow rat who not six months earlier had been begging me to let him join the gang. The tiniest slip, and then blood pouring down my face and neck; and my arms and legs, immobilized beneath the moon’s brightness, unable now to answer back to his fists.
    “I beat you,” he said, panting. “Now I’m the leader. Let’s get that settled.”
    None of the shadows spread out in a circle over the soft sand had moved. Only the frogs and crickets answered Lou, who was insulting me. Still stretched out on the hot ground, I managed to yell out:
    “I’m quitting the gang. I’ll start another one, better than this one.”
    But I and Lou and the Coyotes still crouched in the shadows knew it wasn’t true.
    “I’m quitting too,” said Javier.
    He helped me get up. We went back into town and while we were walking through the empty streets, I was wiping away the blood and tears with Javier’s handkerchief.
    “Now you talk,” said Javier. He had got down and some of them were applauding him.
    “Okay,” I answered and got up on the railing.
    Neither the walls in the background nor the bodies of my pals cast shadows. My palms were moist and I thought it was nerves, but it was the heat. The sun was in the center of the sky; it was suffocating. My buddies’ eyes didn’t meet mine: they looked at the ground or my knees. They kept quiet. The sun protected me. “We’ll ask the principal to post the exam schedule, just the same as other years. Raygada, Javier, Lou and I will make up the committee. Junior high agrees, right?”
    Most agreed, nodding their heads. A few shouted, “Yes.”
    “We’ll do it right now,” I said. “You’ll wait for us at Merino Square.”
    We started walking. The main door to the school was shut. We knocked loudly; behind us we heard a growing murmur. Gallardo opened up.
    “Are you crazy?” he asked. “Don’t do this.”
    “Don’t get mixed up in it,” Lou interrupted him. “Do you think a hick scares us?”
    “Go in,” Gallardo said. “You’ll see.”

3.
     
    His little eyes observed us closely. He tried to feign irony and a lack of concern, but we knew that his smile was forced and that deep inside his thick-set body were fear and hatred. He knitted his brow and wiped away his scowl as sweat gushed out of his small, purple hands.
    He was shaking.
    “Do you know what this is called? It’s called rebellion, insurrection. Do you think I’m going to submit myself to the whims of a few