However, I couldn’t avoid the scandal. Marcos, an attractive boy, became my friend. Since I have brought psychedelic posters from the United States, he always told me why we don’t invite some friends from Guadalupe (a middle-class district within San José), but I wasn’t interested in them.
Days later, while Jenny (The President of Colegio de Señoritas), Carlos (a boy that was striking beautiful), and I were studying for the high school exams, Marcos called me in a state of great nervousness and asked me to read the newspaper La Prensa Libre. When I bought it, I saw a scandalous headline: “Drugs in secondary schools” and an even worse subtitle: “Dens of vice in residential neighborhoods.” But if this scared me, there was more: it narrated the story of two young girls from Anastasio Alfaro, another girls’ school, who were invited by a student from the Liceo de Costa Rica named Marcos and another named Jacob to smoke marijuana and have an orgy in their psychedelic room.
The case reached the Teachers’ Council to study the punishments. After all, we had ruined the reputation of the Liceo.
In discussions with the Administration, we came to an interpretation of the facts: Marcos invited the two girls to come to my house because Los Yoses. was nicer than Guadalupe. He made up the marijuana thing to tempt them, and they reported it to their principal. The woman called the police, and considering the possibility of a scandal involving Jews, she passed the 76
information to the press. The police and the journalists agreed with the girls to accept the invitation and catch us red-handed. Marcos, upon arriving at Parque Morazán, tried to call, but I wasn’t there. He told them
- then - to go to his house, thus ruining the possibility of ending up in Los Yoses. The police then chose to catch them right there. According to what the teachers told me, Marcos swore that the police planted the marijuana.
The harassment from the press woke me up from the dream of the end of anti-Semitism because if I hadn’t had that last name, La Prensa Libre wouldn’t have been interested in me.