The Vocation 1. I was seventeen years old and my days, and I mean all of them, were a continual shuddering. I had no distractions; nothing could dissipate the anxiety that kept building up inside me. I was living like an interloping extra in scenes from the passion of St. Vincent. St. Vincent—deacon to Bishop Valero, tortured by the governor Dacian in the year 304—have pity on me! 2. Sometimes I talked with Juanito. Not just sometimes. Often. We sat in armchairs at his place and talked about movies. Juanito liked Gary Cooper. Elegance, temperance, integrity, courage, he used to say. Temperance? Courage? I knew what lay behind his certitudes, and would have liked to spit them back in his face, but instead I dug my fingernails into the armrests and bit my lip when he wasn’t looking and even closed my eyes and pretended to be meditating on his words. But I wasn’t meditating. Not at all: images of the martyrdom of St. Vincent were flashing in my mind like magic lantern slides.
