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Sergio. He had a name that did not suit him. a serene and chaste name, with a touch of the steppe, of fatality and of popishness. He was a boy with piggish eyes who sometimes, while he was up to some mischief, shot out apelike stares — small, sharp, and black. All of him was in his skin: such coldness, such nuance, such smoothness, and an amber light. He was also in his head: a crown of ribbons of curly, chestnut hair over a smooth forehead. I can remember him only as a name that passes quickly through a crowded, squat, fenced-off street, hiding his face in his hurry. He was also in the sound of his heels as he walked, the colorless dry sound of beaten wood. Sergio was in his whole figure. It was impossible to know anything else about him: nobody lied like Sergio, with his entire soul, beyond any truth or likelihood, far beyond. And so it was, always. One day, Sergio became a priest. And nothing was ever heard from him again. Eugenio d’Ors, the distinguished Dominican philosopher, can write his life story — Sergio’s or his own — with the sacred hope of finding out for certain why a boy with the eyes of a pig who lied like nobody else became a priest. And d’Ors could even recount his death to us in advance — Sergio’s — under a crucifix as large and cruel as death itself, hanging from a word as simple as solitude, and a whole morning spent in his treacherous cell. And he could add great subtleties to the simplicity of the death of a priest with a scraggly beard that had once been young and highly sexual. Oh, what a marvelous book Eugenio d’Ors could write about Sergio’s life and death! How fitting for a stupid and unmotivated life is the philosophy — so down to earth, so handsome, so nurturing, so charming, so ingenuous, so damn Catalonian — of this annotator! I seem to be reading: “. and so. But let us examine, Annotator, and may we not be carried away by love. Measure. Compare. ” But, I don’t know why, once in a while I think that Sergio never died; that, at the hour of his death, he pretended to be dead; that he let himself be buried and then dug himself up two days later and returned to Lima to escape from the monastery and begin a new life. If only this were so. But then Eugenio d’Ors’s book could not be written, and I would never learn anything about Sergio.