The Days of the Rainbow

by Antonio Skarmeta

  The car was never moved. It was always there. Permanently. Without the license plates.

  The two men used to bring paper bags from the market on Irarrázabal Street. They’d peel oranges and throw the skin on the ground.

  One smoked. The other didn’t.

  The guys in the night shift didn’t smoke.

  In the morning, a motorcyclist came with a thermos of coffee and sandwiches for them.

  At five in the morning, Patricia came in bringing the international press wires. The Italian consul had gotten them for her. He came in with the girl, his teeth chiseled with toothpaste, his hair still wet from an early shower, a decoration on his lapel, and some Parmesan cheese and prosciutto.

  He gave Patricia the honor of reading the wire from Le Monde. She got the meaning of the text in a few blinks and mentally translated it.

  Relatives and friends had collapsed on the carpet and armchairs like exhausted warriors.

  “Le Monde: ‘There are few precedents to judge what has happened and is still happening in Chile. The most authoritarian and repressive regime in the history of the nation has become a magma of hesitation, impotence, and shock.’”

  Patricia looked at her father and told him in a solemn tone, “Dad, now I want you to stand up.”

  Adrián obeyed her, smacking the air, because he expected a joke. But Patricia was serious. He had never seen her so grave. So respectable. She seemed to have grown up in just a few hours. As if the feast, the wine, the tiredness, the excitement had made her become a grown woman, far beyond her eighteen years.

  “And this is El País, from Spain, Dad: ‘Fifteen minutes were enough to put an end to fifteen years.’ ”

  Bettini estimated that in the last few weeks there hadn’t been a single night he didn’t feel about to have a heart attack. Not now, please, he ordered his fucking heart. He swallowed saliva and, without even a smile, said to his audience, “El País, from Spain! Se non è vero, è ben trovato”

  “MR. FERNÁNDEZ. What an honor, Minister!”

  “Former minister, Bettini. I’ve just gave my resignation, and I’m putting all my documents together to go home.”

  “Life takes many turns, Dr. Fernández.”

  “Sure. But don’t think that this is the end of the story. You were able to make sixteen cats and dogs agree to support one candidate, some Mr. No. But now you’ll have to make them agree on nominating one presidential candidate. They’ll rip each other’s eyes out.”

  “In this campaign we learned how to work together.”

  “Together? With duct tape and glue, Bettini. The real winner of this plebiscite is Pinochet, because the forty-something percent of the votes he got are for him alone. On the contrary, you’ll have to divide your fifty-something percent among sixteen parties. With his forty percent, my general can do whatever he likes.”

  “Another coup d’état, like the one in 1973 against Allende?”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t think so, Minister.”

  “Former!”

  “I don’t think so, Former Minister. This time he can’t count on the armed forces, or the support of the United States. And there’s something else he had in 1973 that he doesn’t have now.”

  “What is that, Bettini?”

  “Someone to overthrow! Or will he be kind enough to overthrow himself?”

  “My general will be remembered as a great democratic man. Tell me, what other ‘dictator’ called a plebiscite, and when he lost it, went home? Don’t rest on your laurels, my friend. This little country needs to be managed with authority, not with silly songs like, ‘It feels so good to say No.’”

  “Why did you call me, Mr. Former Minister?”

  “Ah, you’re right. With so much nonsense, I forgot to tell you. Look, Bettini. Take a look out the window. You’ll see a gray car without license plates …”

  “Yes. I see it.”

  “Well, they’re my boys.”

  “Yes, it’s clear that they’re your boys.”

  “How many are there?”

  “Three, four … Perfect attendance. Gala day.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “They’re standing outside the car. One is smoking and the other ones are drinking water from plastic glasses. It’s boiling hot around here.”

  “Well, please go and tell them they can leave. Tell them there was a change of plans.”

  “Actually, I don’t have the slightest wish to leave home right now.”

  “Don’t be afraid, Bettini. Tell them, ‘Coco orders you to clear out.’ ”

  “Coco orders you to clear out.”

  “Ecco. And everything’s solved.”

  “I really appreciate your generosity. May I ask you why you’re doing this?”

  “When dinner is over, the dishes should be done. You scratch my back, and I scratch yours. We’ll be in touch, Bettini.”

  FERNÁNDEZ HUNG UP the phone as if he were throwing off a stone. On the contrary, Bettini put the receiver back on the hook extremely slowly. Like in a trance. Exorcising something.

  He was home alone. Standing in front of the hallway mirror, he tucked his T-shirt inside his pants. It was the old T-shirt of the Rolling Stones with the drawing of the red tongue sticking out. Moistening his lips, he tied his basketball shoes. It took him an eternity to run the laces through the eyelets.

  “Coco orders you to clear out,” he whispered. “How much longer will this nightmare last?”

  He opened the door wide. The sun fell over his face, blinding him for a second. He held his right hand to his eyebrows, like a visor, and directed his gaze toward the men around the car on the other side of the street.

  The one who was smoking threw the cigarette on the sidewalk and crushed it with his foot.

  Another one put the plastic glass he was drinking from on the chassis.

  The third man threw his cup on the sidewalk and then started to massage his right fist in the curve inside his left hand.

  The last one kept drinking, almost indifferent.

  “Out! Get out of here!” Bettini whispered, walking toward them.

  And once he had them within reach, he stretched out his arm toward the horizon and emphatically told them, “Get out!”

  THE PAY PHONE on the corner is available and I have a coin in my hand, but I don’t make the call. I walk to our apartment thinking that I’m going to fix myself a tuna-stuffed tomato. At the grocery store, I buy some bread and an apple. I like the green ones because they’re acid.

  On the elevator, someone has written with a black marker, “We won, beauty.” And on the other side someone scratched with a knife, “Nora.” I start to open the door of the apartment when someone opens it from the inside. There, in the threshold, I see Patricia Bettini. She’s wearing the uniform of her private school, that is, light blue blouse, blue tie, and plaid skirt with white kneesocks. It’s weird. Every time I feel that something is weird, I pretend that I’m not surprised. I find it cool to be this way. And there are reasons to be surprised—my friend never had the keys to my apartment.

  But Laura Yáñez did.

  And it’s Laura Yáñez who now comes out from the kitchen and surrounds Patricia’s shoulders with her arms.

  She winks at me.

  While I shake the key chain in my hand, two things happen—Patricia Bettini’s mouth opens up in a smile that can’t hide the imperfection of her middle tooth, which is slightly bigger than the others. And Professor Santos appears behind her, holding a cigarette between his lips.

  No.

  I’m telling the story wrong. First a puff of smoke appears and only afterward Professor Santos shows up, with a cigarette between his lips.

  We hug each other in silence, and I probably take longer to release him than he to release me. So I think that he wants to look at me, and I move away a little and my old man asks me how I’m doing. I’m holding the green apple in one hand and the keys in the other, and I give him the same answer that I gave Valdivieso: �
�Still here.”

  In the dining room there are four seats and the starters are already served—ham stuffed in avocado on a bed of lettuce. Dad stretches his hand to put out his cigarette in the ashtray, and I see that his skin is full of burn marks. When he realizes that I notice it, he covers that hand with the other one and then rubs both enthusiastically, as if he were getting ready for a banquet. But I move away one of his hands and look carefully at his sores.

  “There were no ashtrays in jail, and the boys would put out their cigarettes anywhere.” He smiles. “Nothing serious, anyway. Everything as foreseen by the Baroque syllogysm.

  “And you?”

  “I’m great, Dad.”

  “Didn’t you get in any trouble?”

  “Zero problems.”

  “Today’s the last day of the month. Did you go to pick up my check?”

  “I forgot.”

  “It’ll be interesting to know whether or not there’s a check for me. I hope they didn’t have the chance to stop it.”

  “I’ll go after lunch.”

  “That’s fine.”

  Patricia Bettini goes to the kitchen to get the bottle of red wine and my father takes out a tiny piece of tobacco that was stuck on his lip.

  “She got me out,” Dad whispers to me confidentially, pointing at Laura Yáñez with his chin.

  “How did she do it?”

  “You ask her.”

  “How did you get him out?” I ask without looking at her and hiding a smile while I fill Dad’s glass.

  She rubs her forehead with the cork.

  Patricia strikes the table with her fist.

  “She talked to people, Santos.”

  “With bad people, I suppose.”

  “Leave her alone, Nico,” my father intervenes. “We’re not living in the world of the Platonic ideals. In reality, Good and Evil are mingled.”

  “But in different proportions.”

  “In different proportions, son. Aren’t you happy to see me?”

  “Of course I am, Dad.”

  “Then?”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Let’s eat, then.”

  IN THE AFTERNOON, I go to the payroll office. I wait in line for ten minutes. There’s a check for Professor Rodrigo Santos. I take it and put it in my wallet. I buy the magazine Don Balón and see that it comes with a poster of two of my idols—Rossi and Platini.

  I have philosophy class the following day.

  Professor Valdivieso hands back the tests with his comments in green ink. He writes the grades in huge red letters. My Billy Joel song gets the highest grade, a B.

  When I come back home, Dad asks me about my new philosophy teacher and I tell him that he’s a good guy. I also tell him that he gave me a B for my test on the allegory of the cave. My daddy has a sudden fit of professionalism and wants to see my test. I hand it to him, and when he sees it, he leaves his cigarette on the notch of the ashtray. I take a puff and put the cigarette back where it was.

  “What is this, Nico?” he asks, pale, after reading the Billy Joel song and seeing that the rest of the page is blank.

  I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  “Justice to the extent possible, Dad,” I reply, plucking the poster of Rossi with Platini out of the sports magazine.

  SHE WANTS IT THAT WAY and I’m not going to refuse.

  She asks me not to be insulted, but she will take care of the expenses.

  She wrote a letter to Don Adrián and attached it to his pillow with pins.

  It’s not a matter of her being a silly, romantic girl like the ones in the shiny magazines, but she says that Santiago is wounded by the smog.

  The buses to Valparaíso leave from Central Station.

  I wasn’t able to sleep a wink last night, and I’m afraid to get to the platform with a sleepy face.

  I put a bathing suit and two apples in my backpack.

  There are no clean towels left. If we go to the beach, I’ll grab one from the hotel.

  In the subway, I see Che yawning. I walk up to him and tell him that today I’ll skip class. If they ask about me, he can tell the inspector that I have a cold.

  He wants to know why I’m not going to school.

  I give him a smile that might be contagious because he’s instantly smiling just like me.

  I have tons of sayings that I learned from Dad for this kind of situation—“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.”

  He wants to know if it’s because of a chick.

  It’s not a chick, Che. It’s Patricia Bettini. I’m taking her to Valparaíso.

  I say, “I’m taking her to Valparaíso,” but she’s the one who’s organized everything. She asked Doña Magdalena to advance her allowance and sold all her textbooks in a used-book store. “That’s the advantage of not having younger siblings, Nico. Nobody at home will need those books anymore. I want to detoxify myself of everything—algebra, chemistry, history, physics …

  “And virginity.”

  She said it like that, as if it were a difficult subject. She didn’t say, “I want to detoxify myself of my virginity.” She said, “I want to detoxify myself of virginity.”

  A few times we’ve been close to “breaking the scoreboard,” as Julito Martínez, the sports radio announcer, likes to say. Both of us have read novels and poems that call for free love, and we have touched each other everywhere.

  But she always found an excuse. She puts it this way, “Love is an expansion of a feeling of happiness. As long as a person is not happy, she or he shouldn’t make love.”

  We were able to discuss all this very calmly when there wasn’t a bed nearby. But alone in my apartment, or even in her bedroom when her parents weren’t home, we’ve almost gotten to the edge of climax.

  Also, of course, there was the issue of sadness.

  Now she shows me a poem that she’s underlined: “People have the right to be happy even if they’re not allowed to.”

  Everything we’ve gone through has changed us a lot. It’s as if we had to mature through blows.

  She feels like living faster.

  I want to caress and be caressed.

  We want to be set free, she says, while filling a glass of grappa for me. Grappa is a drink just like pisco or brandy. But of course it’s Italian. The bottle looks like a glass sculpture. The label reads GRAPPA MORBIDA.

  It burns.

  Che suggests that I stop by a pharmacy to buy rubbers. I’m not sure if I want that. I mean, I want to know what she’s like. I want to feel her. And a rubber … Maybe I’m thinking like an idiot. I’ll do whatever Patricia Bettini decides.

  At the terminal, a voice announces that the next bus to Valparaíso will leave in ten minutes. The driver reads La Cuarta with his legs stretched out. The air from a small fan makes the pages of the newspaper shake. I take a look inside the bus, but I don’t see Patricia.

  I join the passengers saying good-bye to their relatives on the platform. A loader puts an old trunk in the luggage storage. He wears a headband with the drawing of a rainbow.

  I fear that Patricia has changed her mind. For girls, the decision to make love for the first time is like something from a Greek tragedy. Or at least from a soap opera. They put so many things into their heads, both at home and school, that then they go through life walking on their tiptoes, trying not to break eggs.

  And they’re right. Love always leaves a mark on them. Even scars. That’s why it’s weird that Patricia Bettini has decided to be with me. We still have two months left before finishing high school. And Pinochet still has to call for free elections. That will take some time. Like one year, I think. She said to me, “I want to be with you, intimately.”

  But not in Santiago.

  Santiago is the school, the church, Don Adrián’s unemployment, the cars without license plates in front of her house, the tear-gas bombs, Professor Paredes’s absence.

  She wants me to understand.

  It’s fine. To me, loving her is not
a matter of geography. Although I’m the least romantic guy on earth, I also like a place where the eye isn’t always bumping into buildings and TV antennas.

  I feel like being near the sea.

  A sea to see her. Valparaíso.

  But me, what’s really me is downtown Santiago. I’m thrilled that the developers didn’t knock down the colonial church and that they had to create a detour in the Alameda to preserve it.

  “That’s the way to treat a lady,” Professor Santos said.

  When they first announced that it would be demolished, my dad and I went out into the streets to protest along with the Franciscan priests.

  My daddy delivered a speech near the fountain in the Pergola of Flowers.

  He said that the church was the humble and sweet Francis of Assisi and the government of Pinochet was the wolf.

  “Gubbio’s wolf,”* he said.

  I don’t know where he gets those ideas.

  He’s bad at keeping quiet.

  But he barely allows me to breathe.

  So the cops came. First, they threw just a little bit of water at us. One gets used to their water. In the worst case situation, if the hose stream is too strong, it may push you against a wall and you may break your head. The best thing to do is to throw yourself to the ground.

  So they can soak you. So they can leave you there drenched like a dog.

  Professor Paredes used to say, bending down under the stream, “Relax and enjoy it.”

  Tear-gas bombs are a different matter. If one explodes in your face, you can end up blind.

  But I’ve given all my life to downtown Santiago. Eighteen years. Lastarria Street. Villavicencio. The soda stands, with the vendor girls, with as much makeup as cabaret dancers.

  Now the driver shouts that the bus will leave in three minutes.

  I squeeze the hundred-peso coins I have in my pocket and try to see if there’s a pay phone nearby.

  Right at that moment, Patricia Bettini shows up.

  And as she comes closer, running toward me, I feel my heart pumping stronger than ever.