The Days of the Rainbow (20 page)

“Look,” she says, scrunching up her nose a little bit and pointing at the hills. “If you want to know me better, I’m like them.”

“What do you mean?”

“The hills and all that.”

“You’re like them.”

“I was just saying, silly. Me,” she says, tapping her chest, as if to mark the beating of her heart, “I’m this. I mean … if someone painted me and I were a landscape, I’d have many colors …

“Look here now. What do you see?”

“Many things.”

“Roofs, roof tiles, yellow, green, purple, blue, red, brick-red walls, chimneys, seagulls, pelicans, stairs, steps, cables within easy reach, overhead tramways like small houses climbing onto the rails, stray dogs, kites, and everything remains there, as if someone had put it that way, thoughtlessly, leaving everything for later.”

“And that’s how you are? You left yourself for later?”

“I mean, all those things that have happened to me in my life have a meaning. They’re here, with the same strong emotion that I felt at that moment, d’you know?”

“One of the things I like the most about you is that you almost never say
d’you know?
It’s interesting, because I see you …”

I stop. I kiss her naked shoulder and breathe in deeply the smell of her neck. Going over her skin helps me find the exact word …

“How do you see me?”

“Harmonious, tanned. Elegant, Patricia Bettini. That’s why I’m surprised to hear you comparing yourself with a carnival.”

She turns toward me, and with two fingers she gently caresses my eyelids.

“Maybe,” she says, smiling with her eyes but not with her lips, “it’s the typical post-virginity-lost trauma. Do you know where my harmony comes from?”

“I talked about it with your father.”

“Do you talk about me with my father!? What does he say?”

“That that’s your ‘Italian touch,’ an internal commotion but a clear expression.”

“Harmonious.”

“Exactly, as if you had made a fair copy of yourself.”

“And Laura Yáñez?”

“Laura Yáñez is a draft. Did you ever see the calligraphy notebook of a messy child?”

“Twisted letters, blots. But she saved your father, Nico!”

“I love her because of that. But I don’t know if she’ll be able to save herself.”

Patricia looks suddenly serious. Almost grave. She signals me with her chin to look again at the road.

“Everything ends in the sea.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re always there and, at the same time, the infinite is there, too. If you’re near the ocean, you put all those tiny everyday things in the infinite.”

I exaggerate a yawn. “You should discuss these topics with Professor Santos. My old man is a fan of Aristotle and Anaximander.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Anaximander is the oldest philosopher of all. Only a small fragment of his work remains.”

“What is it about?”

“I know it by heart. ‘Things perish into those things out of which they have their being, according to necessity.’ And the dude became famous just with that tiny bit of philosophy.”

Patricia walks to the table and takes her half-empty glass of rum and Coke. She tastes it and makes a funny face. It’s warm.

“Shall I order some ice?”

“Just leave it. It’s time for us to go back to Santiago. My old man must be looking for me to kill me. I left a note for him, attached with pins on his pillow.”

Right after she says that, we hear a police siren, very close to the motel.

“That’s him.” She laughs.

“What kind of note was it?”

“One that, unfortunately, he’ll know very well how to decipher. Three words: “Virginity, Valparaíso, Freedom.”

She opens her thin lips in a charming smile. Oh, my God! I love her so much! I feel that I want her again.

“Do you like me?”

I shake my head.

“Not even a little?”

I nod. I don’t like her at all. I frown my lips scornfully.

“Do you find me ugly?”

I nod enthusiastically. I find her hor-ren-dous.

Patricia Bettini draws the curtain completely. She shows her breasts to Valparaíso and sings at the top of her lungs.

“Let’s go back to Santiago,” I say.

“Are you afraid?”

“A little bit. I don’t think that Don Adrián would kill you. He’s Italian and sentimental, so he would feel bad committing a filicide, but he wouldn’t have the same scruples with me. At this very moment, I might be the number-one candidate on his hit list.”

She opens her arms with a wild yawn accompanied by a deep “Ahhhhh.” When she’s done, she raises a didactic finger, like a rural teacher.

“Then I think that we’ll all go back to the sea. I mean it, for Anaximander.”

The rum is warm but I don’t care. I drink it in one gulp.

“The
No
has driven us all crazy,” I say while closing the window and taking a last look at the sea. “He’s out of himself, he says yes, he says no, and no and no, he says yes in blue, in foam, in a gallop, he says no and no.”

“Neruda?”

“The great Neruda. Or, as your dad would say, the
fucking
Neruda.”

PROFESSOR SANTOS
has never seen his son wearing a tie. They’re going to walk together to the graduation ceremony. Before leaving the apartment, he checks if he put a pack of black tobacco in the inside pocket of his jacket, along with the Ronson lighter, which has survived life’s vicissitudes, and which he refills every Saturday in a cigarette and locksmith stand on Ahumada Place.

He then checks the knot of the green tie with blue polka dots that Nico has borrowed from his friend Che.

The event is taking place in the afternoon, but neither the father nor the son changes his morning routine. They leave the apartment and, before getting off the elevator, the philosophy teacher lights his cigarette, takes Nico’s arm, and smokes while
walking the two blocks to the gate of the National Institute.

There they will perform what is usually a routine practice, except that today it has special relevance: Nico Santos will graduate from high school with a more than acceptable average.

He was able to survive the turbulence of the dictatorship; he remained cautiously quiet, obeying not just his father’s advices but also his strict orders. He’s spoken out very few times, sometimes not so well, and sometimes okay, and sometimes very well, but in this last case he was prudent enough to do it in English. “
To be or not to be
.” His son had opted for the
be
, and Professor Santos thanked his late wife for it. Certainly, the
not to be
would’ve ended up destroying him.

Then, with a histrionic gesture that reminds Nico of Professor Paredes’s irony, he throws the cigarette butt on the ground, and bowing to his son, tells him that the prince may proceed to crush it with his shoe.

Nico Santos obeys with boundless joy. A triviality that he’s happy to comply with. He draws his own conclusions, “The
No
won.”

His father is alive. If he dies one day, it will be because of that stupid black tobacco and not the freezing cold of a prison cell.

Besides, his sperm had shot out like a big bang into the womb of the woman he loved. His experience proves that the world was created so that he could live his love with Patricia Bettini.

Today she’s invited to the graduation ceremony. After his triumph with the campaign, Bettini has gotten new clients. The distributors of a French car have already given him their portfolio. At any rate,
Le Monde
had acknowledged his talent.
Ooh-la-la
. He bought his daughter a dress of the finest embroidered satin, open between the thighs like a mineral slash, with beads and Armani’s unruly signature.

He paid more than he had, but he accepts that Pinochet was a genius when he put in circulation the credit card—that’s the only way to get what you cannot afford. After him, the deluge.

Yet Adrián did this on one condition, which the girl humbly accepts—she has to wear the same dress at her own graduation ceremony, which will take place in the Scuola Italiana in three days. She better not dream of changing her wardrobe every two hours, as if she were an international movie star.

By the entrance to the auditorium there is a wreath of white roses, with some green leaves, and a few red carnations. Above, there is black poster
board taped to the wall on which someone has written in yellow, “We don’t forget our martyrs.”

There are five names—two students and three teachers. One of them, Don Rafael Paredes.

As they walk into the auditorium, people pretend not to see the poster board. Since the triumph of the
No
, Lieutenant Bruna decided not to come back to the school. He sent the soldiers in a jeep to pick up his stuff.

The school chorus sings its anthem. Most students and guardians are singing it standing up. “Let it vibrate, comrades, the anthem of the institute, the song of the greatest national school …”

Nico Santos is one of the fifty-five young men who’re graduating. The principal will hand out the diplomas one by one. Fifty-five times the audience will applaud, and the principal will have a picture taken with every student. Afterward, the photographers will be selling them to the relatives as they leave the school.

The students look weird in suit and tie. Their messy hair does not match the formality. Most of them are scratching their neck with their forefinger; others have loosened the knot of their ties. In the second row, Nico Santos and Che seem to argue about the probable outcomes of a soccer game.

Professor Santos and his special guests—Adrián, Magdalena, and Patricia Bettini—are seated in the
third row. On their seats is a label that reads “Faculty member.”

Professor Santos is a faculty member.

Professor Paredes was a faculty member.

In the second row, there is a seat with a card that can be easily read because the seat is empty: “Doña María, widow of Paredes.”

“… which had the astonishing fortune of being the nation’s first spotlight,” Professor Santos sings, without taking his eyes off Nico, who wipes his perspiration with the back of his hand. He’s standing on the same stage where only a few weeks before, still a virgin, he performed in
The Cave of Salamanca
.

Bettini doesn’t know the anthem. Moreover, his attention is now captured by the man who is approaching, resolute, despite the knees that block his way through the row, and walking toward him and gesturing him to make room. When the man gets close to Bettini, he sits with a satisfied sigh and, without looking at him, extends his hand to him.

It’s Minister Fernández.

“How are you, Bettini?” he asks, adjusting the legs of his pants.

“Minister, what are you doing here?”

The man points at a dark-skinned boy with sharp cheekbones who waves at him from the stage.

Fernández answers by lovingly raising the fingers of his right hand, not higher than his neck.

“It’s my grandson’s graduation. My baby. Luis Federico Fernández. And you? What are you doing here?”

Bettini doesn’t know how to respond. He comes up with something vague, “My son-in-law, I mean …”

“I know, your daughter’s boyfriend. That’s it, exactly that, your daughter’s boyfriend. Meaning, Nicolás Santos …”

“No. Nico Santos. How do you know his last name?”

“Don’t you remember, Bettini? The philosophy teacher, Rodrigo Santos … Did everything come out well?”

“Fine, Minister.”

“
Former
minister, don’t forget! And how’s life treating you?”

“Well … I’m alive. Thanks to you, I suppose.”

“Good heavens. You like to exaggerate!”

“I told your men to get the fuck out of there.”

“Wow! How daring of you!”

“Not so much, Dr. Fernández. The construction workers in front of my place were looking at us.”

“Even so.”

Both applauded when the anthem ended and intensified the ovation when the principal came to the front to start his welcome speech.

“And you, what have you been up to lately, Minister?”

“Democracy is coming, my friend. I’m thinking about a position where I could practice my vocation to public service.”

“As a senator?”

“I’d love to. I’m very good at creating projects, laws, all that stuff. Which one of the boys up there is your ‘son-in law’?”

“The hairy one on the left, with a green and blue tie.”

“I see. What’s he going to study?”

“He wants to be either an actor or a writer. And your grandson?”

“Engineer. Like his father. Do you know that my son Basti voted for the
No
in the plebiscite?”

“Your own son?”

Dr. Fernández tapped his knees, cheerfully, with his fists.

“My own son. Democracy is wonderful, don’t you think so?”

“Despite being ‘a statistical exaggeration’?”