THE LITTLE MAN who rang the doorbell of the house, making more noise than a train driver, had a head of coarse hair that made him look three inches taller and wore eyeglasses with a thick frame. His mustache fell disheveled over his lips, as if no two hairs rhymed with each other. His outfit didn’t look any better—a black suit polished by the years that shone here and there, in contrast with a few wine and ketchup stains, something that Magdalena de Bettini didn’t notice at first sight.
“Sir?” Magdalena inquired tentatively, surprised by the man’s puzzling appearance.
“Is this Adrián Bettini’s home?”
“Yes, it is.”
“The great advertising agent Adrián Bettini’s?”
“So they say.”
The little man bent forward in an old-fashioned bow.
“I need to talk to him.”
“What about?” she asks, trying to push the door a little so that the man, on his tiptoes, can’t see her husband in the back of the living room.
“It’s confidential.”
“I’m his wife. You can talk to me in all confidence.”
“Confidential, madam, confidential.”
“Could you at least tell me on behalf of whom you come …?”
The man cleared his throat while wiping his forehead with a gray handkerchief. Or a handkerchief that had once been white. Another thing that was difficult for her to discern.
“I come on behalf of young Nico Santos. My password is ‘Nicomachus.’ For more details—the Aristotelian ethics. May I come in now?”
The woman opened the door and the little man slipped in like a lizard. In no time, he was in front of Bettini, who replied to the man’s Versaillesque bow with a discreet movement of his neck.
“Mr. Bettini, I presume?” the man said, with a smile that raised his thick mustache up to his nose.
“Yes,” the ad agent said.
“It’s my pleasure meeting you, sir. My name is Raúl Alarcón, but my friends call me Little Kinky Flower. I’m five-and-a-half feet tall, and I’m a poet and a composer.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Nico Santos sent me. You know him—Nicomachus.”
“Well, what is it?”
“Yesterday at school, Nico told me that you’re going to undertake the ad campaign for the No with a joyful approach, that you’re going to tell us all that when the No wins, joy will come back to Chile.”
Bettini made eye contact with his wife and saw her put a finger to her temple, signaling that their surprising guest had a loose screw.
“That’s what I’d like to do. But up to now, I haven’t gotten too far. I don’t even have the campaign jingle.”
“That’s the reason why Nico—Nicomachus—sent me to see you. I have the jingle for the No that you’re looking for.”
“Did you compose it?”
“Oh, no. Johann Strauss did. But I wrote the lyrics.”
“Sing it, please.”
Alarcón moved his head in different directions like pecking the living room with his eyes.
“Piano habemus?”
“Habemus,” Bettini said, sensing that his face had suddenly gone pale.
He led the man to his studio, opened the lid of the baby grand, and invited his guest to sit on the stool. Before sitting, the little man cleaned the plush of the bench with the sleeve of his jacket. He glided his fingers in a pair of scales and inhaled deeply before hitting the keys again in a thundering chord.
There followed a spirited interpretation of “Blue Danube.” Then the man stopped abruptly and fixed his gaze defiantly on his host.
“D’ya feel the melody?”
Despite the paleness that was growing on his face, Bettini couldn’t help smiling at the colloquial “d’ya feel …,” so improper coming from someone who looked like a character from the Spanish Golden Age picaresque.
“I feel it,” he said cautiously. “Strauss’s ‘Blue Danube.’ ”
“Can you think of a single man or woman in this country who couldn’t sing this tune?”
“I doubt it. It’s a pretty catchy tune.”
Alarcón cheerfully struck his thighs. “Catchy. Exactly. It’s very catchy.”
“I’m curious to know what all of this is leading up to.”
The little man’s eyes lit up. “Dude, you’re getting into it, aren’t you?”
If, awhile before, Bettini couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw Little Kinky Flower in his timeless outfit, now he couldn’t believe his ears hearing such broad anthology of Chilean slang.
“I’m getting into it, Alarcón. Very much so.”
“Now, feel this,” he said. He cleared his throat and licked his lips. “Excuse my voice, sir.”
“Go ahead.”
After a brief and florid piano introduction, Raúl Alarcón, aka Tiny, also called Little Kinky Flower by his friends, delivered the following verses to the tune of Strauss’s “Blue Danube.”
We start to hear now “No, no. No, no”
all over Chile, “No, no. No, no.”
There they sing “No, no.”
Here they sing “No, no.”
Women sing “No, no”
and the youth sing “No, no.”
“No” means freedom.
Let’s sing together, “No, no, no.”
For life—“No.”
To hunger—“No.”
To exile—“No.”
To violence—“No.”
To suicide—“No.”
Let’s dance together,
to this “No.”
No, no.
No, no.
No, noooo.
No, no, no.
No, no.
No, noooo.
No, no.
No, no.
No, no.
Let’s dance together
to this “No.”
No, no.
No, no—
“May I interrupt you for a moment, Mr. Alarcón?”
“Sure, Mr. Bettini.”
“I have to make a phone call right now.”
“No problem.”
“I’ll be back in a second.”
Bettini dialed Nico Santos’s number as if he were stabbing him.
“Nico?”
“Don Adrián!”
“He’s here, in my house. Alarcón, I mean.”
“Tiny?”
Bettini looked at the man, who made a friendly gesture at him with his hand.
“Yes, Tiny.”
“And what do you think?”
“I think that if you ever send me another mad man like him, I won’t let you walk into my house again. And I’ll forbid Patricia from seeing you.”
“But what’s the matter, Don Adrián?”
“You know what’s wrong? That in this country there’s no room for more foolishness. And you sent the king of fools to my place.”
“So?”
“So what?”
“Didn’t you want joy, Don Adrián? There it is. ‘No, no, no, no, no, noooooooooo …’ I find it awesome!”
Bettini hung up with a somber expression, and with his head hanging down, he walked toward Alarcón, who was eagerly waiting for him.
“So, Mr. Bettini? What do you think about my ‘Waltz of the No’?”
The ad agent let each syllable drop like a stone from his mouth: “Awesome, Mr. Alarcón. Awesome.”
“Thank you. But I only take credit for half of the work. The other half comes from Strauss’s talent.”
“Alarcón and Strauss.”
“A winning duo.”
“Strauss and you make a great team.”
“Like identical twins.”
“As thick as thieves.”
“Exactly.”
Bettini grabbed the man by his neck and without much effort lifted him off the piano stool. Keeping him up in the air, he took the man to the door and gave him a final push.
“Get out!”
Only then did he realize that Patricia B
ettini, holding the key in her hand, had just witnessed the unusual scene.
IN GYM CLASS we are jumping over a pommel horse, rolling over the mat, and then running back to the end of the line to start all over.
We’re wearing white T-shirts and shorts, and the exercise is not enough for us to overcome the cold weather. We rub our thighs and forearms. The teacher blows a referee whistle every time he wants us to change the pace of our jumps and somersaults. He should be feeling warm in his blue sweatshirt. Next to him, there’s a boy about our age. The teacher makes him watch everything we do. After a while, he asks me to make room for him before me in the line.
“He’s a new student,” the teacher explains to me. “A Chilean who just came back from Argentina.”
The student is warming the palms of his hands by breathing into them.
“Where did you come from?” I ask him.
“From Buenos Aires. My old man was exiled there and now he was allowed to come back. They removed the L from his passport.”
“What’s your name?”
“Héctor Barrios.”
“And how do they call you? Tito?”
“No. The Chilean.”
“Well, start looking for another nickname, because we’re all Chilean here.”
We run together to the pommel horse, but before jumping he freezes and looks at the teacher in distress.
“What happened, Barrios?”
“I don’t know, sir,” he says, with a strong Argentine accent. “When I got to the thing there I thought I wouldn’t be able to jump over it, I thought.”
“The thing there is perfectly designed for an eighteen-year-old young man. Go back to the line and jump.”
I go back with him to the starting point.
“I jumped one of those once, and I broke my wrist,” he says.
“Okay. Forget it. I’ll tell the teacher.”
“Thank you. What’s your name?”
“Nicomachus. But they call me Nico.”
“In Buenos Aires I had a classmate whose name was Heliogabalus.”
“And what did they call him?”
“Gabo.”
“Like García Márquez.”
“Right.”
I get a running start, keep running, and neatly jump over the leather bar and roll gently on the mat. Then I go toward the teacher.
“What’s wrong with Che?”
“The wrist, teacher. He fractured it pretty badly.”
“In Argentina?”
“Poor guy,” I confirm.
“You’re kidding!” the teacher says to me, and makes a hand gesture asking Barrios to come.
“I spare you this time, Che. In the name of San Martín and O’Higgins’s hug.”*
Barrios pokes my chest with his finger.
“I knew that in Chile I was going to be called Che.”
* A reference to the “hug” between Latin American liberators Bernardo O’Higgins (Chilean) and José de San Martín (Argentine), which took place on April 5, 1818. The battle fought that day against the Spaniards would determine the independence of Chile.
PATRICIA SAW THE MAN, without even shaking the dust off his jacket, stand up from the sidewalk and leave like a dog with its tail between its legs.
“My God, Dad, what have you done?”
Bettini walked into the house, turning his back to Patricia while she was talking to him.
“I’m trying to write the jingle for the ad campaign, and that fool comes to my house to sing ‘No, no, no, no’ to the tune of ‘Blue Danube.’ ”
“Did you kick Tiny out?”
“Tiny, but with a foolishness that is inversely proportional to his height!”
“But, Daddy. He sang that song at the Scuola Italiana yesterday. And it’s a catchy tune. Today, all the students in my class were singing it.”
Bettini stopped abruptly. “All the ‘undecided’ students?”
“Everyone. That waltz is awesome, Dad.”
They walked into the studio and the ad agent cleaned the keyboard with the sleeve of his shirt as if he wanted to erase Alarcón’s fingerprints.
“Awesome! That’s what your boyfriend Nico Santos told me a few minutes ago.”
“But it’s true! He also went to our school and played it for the students. He goes from high school to high school, from college to college, singing that song. Students help him hide when the cops arrive.”
“It wouldn’t be necessary. He’s so short that if he wore a uniform, he would pass for a student.”
Bettini sat at the piano. He pushed the pedal down for emphasis and played the most emblematic melody of Allende’s years: The people united will never be defeated.
“I have to come up with a harmony capable of bringing together Liberals, Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Radicals, leftist Christians, Greens, Humanists, Reborn Christians, Communists, Centrists … What a cacophony!”
Patricia stayed with her father until he gently closed the lid of the piano, putting an end to his defeat.
“Don’t be so old-fashioned, Dad! If you want to encourage people to vote No with joy, you have to compose something really cheerful.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do. But nothing comes to me.”
“A tune with good vibes!”
“Like rock and roll?”
“Sure! Why not? Something light, like the Beatles’ music. You have to make people feel that it’s cool to say No!”
Patricia imitated the neck movement with which Paul McCartney used to follow the beat, shaking his head.
“She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah …”
“Which, in my case, would be, ‘She loves you, no, no, no …’ What the heck will I do with this damn No?”
“Something youthful, cute, amusing. Something with a little whoop at the end: ‘No, oh, oh …’?”
Bettini rubbed his eyes, trying to erase the image of this nightmare.
“No, oh, oh …?”
“That’s it, No, oh, oh …”
“Good-bye, Patricia!”
“Are you leaving?”
“Nope. You are!”
LAURA YÁÑEZ is now at my place. She’s Patricia Bettini’s close friend and, at the same time, the complete opposite of her. While Pati’s a good student and has thin lips, small breasts, and straight brown hair that she wears in a ponytail that she tightens with a barrette, Laura has dark, messy curls that shine with gel. Even in the middle of winter, her skin is copper colored, as if she had just come back from the beach. Her purse is covered with stickers with the images of the new pop stars, and her fleshy lips are enhanced with a vibrant lipstick that she puts on as soon as she leaves the school. Her chest busts out from the uniform shirt, and she unbuttons it enough for us to see the vertiginous curves of her smooth breasts. Her easy smile shows perfect teeth, and she constantly moves her hips as if she were listening to tropical music.
About her school life she says only, “I’m a lioness in a cage.” This motto’s confirmed by her report card, where, by the end of the semester, the grades in red look like a cherry festival.
I make her some tea and don’t ask what brings Laura Yáñez by herself to my place, because I prefer not to know. Her contribution to “teatime” is a pack of Triton cookies, the round chocolate ones with white cream filling. After the first sip, she tells me she came to ask me for a favor.
She has arrived at the conclusion that even if she burns the midnight oil studying from now on, she’ll never be able to make up for those red grades, so she’ll have to repeat the year.
“Just imagine,” she tells me, “the effect that would have on my mood. All of my girlfriends are going to college, or they’re going to start dating so they can get married, and I’d have to stay in that cage, but with the young girls in the lower grade, whom I can’t stand. And that’s the best-case situation, because my parents already told me that they don’t have any more money to keep paying for the Scuola Italiana. They’re tired of making so many sacrifices. They told me th
at if I get held back, they would send me to a technical school or to the Culinary Institute, and I’ll end up as a cook in a hotel.
“In conclusion,” she says between melancholy bites of a cookie, “I’ve decided to drop out of school right away and start working and make money to buy the things I like.”
My tea tastes bitter without sugar, but I keep drinking it in silence.
I know what Laura likes: older guys, being the queen of the disco when she dances salsa, polo shirts two sizes too small so that the fabric makes her breasts even more noticeable, jeans chiseled on the curves of her hard bottom, and watching soap operas dreaming that someday she’ll meet a producer who will discover her and give her a part, and she’ll become famous and rich.
On the other hand, Laura doesn’t give a damn about Aristotle or Shakespeare. The only scene she likes from Hamlet is when Polonius asks him what he’s reading and he answers, “Words, words, words.” For Laura, world culture is expressed in words, and words are a bad check. According to her, everybody talks too much about democracy, but we should take a look at what’s happening in Chile. Her philosophy—live intensely today, because you could be killed at any moment.
Conclusion—she wants to drop out of school right away and get a job.
She stares at me as if she had lit a bomb and was now waiting for it to explode.
But I don’t say a word because I’m thinking about what I’m seeing, and what I’m seeing in my mind, like on a movie screen, is what life holds for her if she drops out of school.
I shove half a cookie in my mouth and make it crunch as I chew it just so I don’t have to talk. She raises her brows and asks me what I think. I know very well what I think, but I also know very well I’m nobody to start giving my opinion. Deep inside, what bothers me is knowing why Laura comes to me with her story instead of going to, for instance, Patricia Bettini.
“So you want to know my opinion?” I ask her.
“Actually no, Santos. I’ve already made my decision.”
She takes a makeup case out of her purse and checks the corner of her mouth in the oval mirror. Then she runs her tongue over a small wound that surely stings.
“Did you tell Patricia?”
The Days of the Rainbow Page 5