The Days of the Rainbow (10 page)

He teaches English in both schools and directs plays in both places. Here, Cervantes (and Pavlovsky in parentheses), and there, Ionesco.

With me he directs Cervantes. With Patricia Bettini, Ionesco.

She has an Italian grandfather in Florence. She doesn’t have any problem understanding Italian movies. She can watch them without reading the subtitles.

She sings Modugno’s songs and knows a Leopardi poem by heart—“Fratelli, a un tempo stesso, / Amore e morte ingenero la sorte” (Children of Fate, in the same breath / Created were they, Love and Death).

I get goose bumps, because that happens so often! We study
Romeo and Juliet
with Professor Paredes, and it’s exactly the same.

Actually, it would be better if Patricia left for Italy. She wants to do something for my father. Who knows the mess she can get into. But if she leaves, I’ll slit my wrists.

Nicomachus in Verona.

THE CAST OF VOLUNTEERS
that Magdalena brings together as the producer of the TV campaign for the
No
includes the following specimens whom Adrián Bettini—not yet used to the hustle and bustle of the eccentricities created by Alarcón, the
angelorum—
watches with fear.

A bearded university student stands in front of him and asks Bettini to pose a question to him.

“What kind of question?”

“Ask me what I would say to a dictator.”

“Okay,” Bettini says. “Sir, what would you say to a dictator?”

The young man looks to the right, then to the left, and to the front, and then sticks out a huge tongue with a drawing of a rainbow on it, and on top of it, the word
No
. Then the man anxiously awaits for the ad agent’s reaction.

“It’s fine,” Bettini says, meaning something else.

Actually, he wanted to say that he was sliding into a pit of nonsense, as if the whole country were using a drug that was unresponsive to any antidote.

“If you allow me to make a suggestion,” the bearded man says, “I’d recommend that when I stick out my tongue with the
No
, you play the sound of a lion’s roar.”

“Okay,” Bettini says, trying to understand why everything seems wrong.

Then Magdalena asks the second candidate to appear on the TV campaign to come in.

This time, it’s a firefighter.

In a firefighter suit.

And a firefighter helmet.

He says hello to Bettini by gently striking his forehead, and solemnly says, “We, Chile’s firefighters, are for the
No
.”

Unable to think of anything more sophisticated, Bettini asks the man in what way he thinks a firefighter could be of help to the
No
campaign. The man gets a glass of water from behind him, raises it as if to toast and, imitating the sound of the siren of a fire engine, sings, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, noooooooooooo.”

When he finishes, he smiles and takes a sip of water from the glass he’s still holding in his hand.

Bettini hasn’t had even a drop of alcohol in the entire day, but he feels as if he were drunk. He walks to the wall at the back of the set, and there he sees his daughter’s boyfriend, Nico Santos, the instigator of all this, trying to memorize some lines from a book.

“Are you volunteering to appear on the TV ad, too?”

“No, Don Adrián. I’m studying for Professor Paredes’s test on Shakespeare.”

“And what are you reading?”

“Macbeth.”

“Have you memorized any part of it?”

“I have.”

“Let me see.”

Instead of standing up to recite, the young man lies down on a blue mat and, with his chin resting on his left hand, lets Macbeth’s speech flow:

“I’m confident that Professor Paredes will give me a B now,” Nico Santos says, trying to hide a yawn. “What are you thinking about, Don Adrián?”

Bettini rubs his eyes and strongly presses the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “About reality. Where’s reality, Nico? In Shakespeare, or in all those fools there on the set?”

Nico Santos stands up, looking at the other side of the studio, where he sees a group of girls in leotards, carrying a rainbow made of papier-mâché.

LAST NIGHT
we went to a Prisioneros concert. Well, it was not exactly a concert. It was a “toccata.” When a rock band plays, they call it “toccata.” Except that the one last night was “toccata and fugue,”
^*
because as soon as we left the premises in Matucana, we saw several vans parked at the door and the cops waiting for us.

At the beginning they were not taking anyone, but this fool shouted at the cops, “Fuck you and your horse!” So the cops took out their clubs and started to hit us on the head. We had to run. The owners of the nearby bars, as soon as they saw the cops coming, closed the metal gates, and it was impossible for us to find a place to hide.

Los Prisioneros’ lyrics are “daring.” But the country is not as daring as their lyrics. That’s what’s cool about rock. It’s as if the songs were more alive than the people. It’s as if the drums and the guitars electrified our veins. It makes you want to leave the toccata and go throw stones at La Moneda. But the truth is that the following day we’re all walking with our heads hanging down, sleepy, trying to read the history chapter in the last minutes before the quiz.

And the teachers teach their classes apathetically, looking at their watches every few minutes, to see how long they have before the bell rings. They’re so poorly paid! In Chile, teachers are despised. Tell me about it—my dad is a teacher.

My favorite song by Los Prisioneros is

Patricia Bettini listens to her old man’s records, like the Beatles and that stuff. She also knows some of Joan Baez’s and Bob Dylan’s songs. She says that it’s one thing to sing that the strength of the eighties is coming, and another for it to actually
ever come. She doesn’t think that rock can overthrow Pinochet. However, her national anthem is John Lennon’s “Imagine,” the most pacifist song of all. She thinks that there’s no way to get rid of Pinochet, so once she finishes high school, she’s leaving for Florence.

I shake when I think about it. Italians are so handsome, they dress like princes, get million-dollar haircuts, and play soccer like gods. As for myself, she says that if I love her, I better start learning Italian.

It sounds similar to Spanish, but that can be pretty deceiving. She gave me a couple of books, and I underline whatever I understand and like. For example, that cool quotation from Dante: “Libertà va cercando, ch’è sì cara, come sa chi per lei vita rifiuta” (He is looking for that freedom so cherished, that for which he even despises life).

Professor Santos would wash out my mouth with soap if he heard me saying something like that. He’s the only one who can be a hero in this house. He doesn’t want me to be involved in anything. The other day I learned by heart some verses from a song with which I left Patricia Bettini stoned a few days ago, “Tu sei per me la più bella del mondo” (To me you are the most beautiful girl in the world).

After school, she was waiting for me. As soon as she saw me, she asked me to hug her, as tightly as
I could, and said that she wanted to die. I dropped my backpack and squeezed her behind the hot dog stand, because everybody was looking at us. She couldn’t stop trembling and her cheeks were burning. I took her to the Indianápolis’s ladies’ room and I splashed cold water on her face.

She had come running from school.

When she arrived that morning, a helicopter was hovering over Apoquindo, and before going to class, she saw a couple of cars without license plates parked near the corner.

It’s not strange that she had considered that to be strange, because in Chile we learn to pay attention to things like these, even if we don’t realize it.

Just as she’s entering the building, she bumps into Professor Paredes. But as she’s greeting him with a kiss, as she always does, three cops come storming out of a car, grab him, drag him, and throw him into the car. The school principal starts fighting with the guys, but they hit him, throw him on the ground, abduct Professor Paredes, and flee with him in the car.

Since then, she hasn’t stopped trembling.

The police came and she told them everything she had seen, about the car without license plates, while the principal is bleeding on the ground. Soon after that, the Italian consul arrived in an official
car. Quickly, he got out of the car and told all the students to go into the school building.

Dante.

Freedom.

I don’t know how, but while I’m hugging her so that she stops trembling, I start trembling, too.

SCREENING NO
. 1
.

Bettini talked the Argentine ambassador into inviting the leaders of the Chilean opposition to attend an homage to the great film director Armando Bo and his favorite actress, Isabel Sarli. A limited number of invitations were sent for the screening of
Flesh
, which would be followed by a tasting of pinot noirs from Mendoza and the launching of a new cabernet sauvignon produced by a Chilean entrepreneur with vineyards in Pirque, whom bankers affectionately called Vial the Democrat.

Bettini wanted the political leaders of the coalition against Pinochet to be there in order to sanctify, once and for all, the TV spot that had caused him so much distress. The attendance of these skillful leaders would give the meeting a
businesslike atmosphere, which would be very helpful, since the film to be shown would actually be the first images of the
No
campaign, not the erotic story starring Sarli—that innocent creature who wonders in the film what is it in her that awakens the lust and savagery of men.

The ambassador, instead of saying “
È arrivato Zampanò
,” as Giulietta Masina introduced Anthony Quinn in
La Strada
, greeted his guests with a conspiratorial
“È arrivato il No.”

Olwyn didn’t want to go to the premiere of the
No
campaign because he knew he was being watched, and he was trying to move around without being noticed. Going to the embassy ran the risk of revealing the mysteries of the
No
campaign to his rivals. The leaders of the parties didn’t go either—only second-rank representatives attended.