The Days of the Rainbow (13 page)

I hear the tip of the principal’s pen scratching the piece of paper. The three of us are there, dancing to a silence. Just like when someone dies and they call for a moment of silence. A bus with a broken exhaust pipe passes by and goes away. And there’s silence again. Blown up.

“I …,” Lieutenant Bruna begins.

He doesn’t say more.

He comes to me and hugs me. Then he moves away and shows me his face. He looks sad.

Lieutenant Bruna’s very sad. My knees are shaking. I want to ask what’s going on, but no sounds come out of my throat.

My father
, I think.

The officer blows his nose and regains his composure. He opens the door and asks the receptionist to go to the classroom and bring my jacket.

“A black one. Leather,” I add.

“Black. Leather,” he says as well.

Outside, there’s a jeep waiting with its engine on. The driver’s a soldier in combat uniform. Camouflage, like in the movies.

I zip up my jacket. I feel the cold on my chin. The jeep is a convertible. I have a history test tomorrow. I won’t be able to study. My high school average is pretty low. I get by in English, philosophy, and Spanish. The art teacher likes me.

At the corner streetlight, the jeep stops. It cannot be true. There they go, Patricia Bettini and Laura Yáñez, crossing the street, arms around each other. They look happy. They know nothing about what’s happening to me. I wonder if Santiago has always been this sad. I don’t call them. There’s no way I’ll call them. They’d die if they saw me in this military jeep.

Lieutenant Bruna rubs his face. The cold hits hard.

We go up Recoleta, then take Salto, and end up in a neighborhood with vacant lots.

The jeep arrives in an area cordoned off by military vans. There are also two photographers with their credentials in plastic holders hanging around their necks. A priest is drinking coffee from a plastic cup. People are leaning against the walls of their houses, or sitting on the doorsteps. In the distance, a helicopter’s propellers are in motion. The privates lift the white-and-red ribbons as they see Lieutenant Bruna coming.

He doesn’t greet them. They point at a lamppost a few yards away. Cold metal. Tall. The light is off. There are many white clouds and a stripe of black turbulence here and there.

We arrive at the lamppost. With a rough gesture, a plainclothes police official with a sort of rosette on his lapel points at the thick mat that lies on the ground covering something. With a gesture of his chin, Lieutenant Bruna signals him to lift it. The officer pulls the mat fully off. It’s the body of a man.

Professor Paredes.

His eyes are closed, and around his neck there’re one or more sheets stained with blood.

“They slit his throat,” the man with the rosette says to Lieutenant Bruna.

I’m unable to say anything. I can’t breathe. I feel a flow running down my legs. I double up with pain and fall on my knees.

Lieutenant Bruna runs his hand over my hair.

“I did everything I could, my boy,” I hear him saying. “You asked me for it, and God knows that I did everything I could.”

HE FELT SOMEHOW CLOSE
to the group of the “detained”: a drunk man lying on a wooden bench, a student bleeding after being hit with a police club, a street vendor of unlicensed merchandise, a handcuffed union delegate.

Two hours had passed and not a single officer had begun any proceedings. Once in a while, an officer peeked in, took a look at the group, and disappeared into some back room. Jail is always like this. The feeling of an endless, unproductive time. A prelude to uncertainty. An intermission blown up by desperation. The humiliating wait. Time to imagine your loved ones worrying about your absence. The guard in uniform typing on an old Remington some report that a local judge would probably read a few months later.

The last time that he was taken prisoner, the cops wanted to teach him a good lesson. In a street demonstration against the rise of the public transportation fares, he tried to rescue a girl who was being dragged to a police van by some undercover cops.

He wasn’t even participating in the march. He only followed the impulse of his heart. That’s why, when questioned by the police, he couldn’t give names or addresses of the rioters who had organized the protest, simply because he didn’t know them.

Sometimes his damn heart made him act recklessly before his head could stop him.

On another occasion, he let his mouth run off, saying whatever he held true. Even though he knew there would be consequences. All those times it was he, only his own body, that was at stake. But now everything could result in a catastrophe that could affect a lot of people. If the images of the
No
campaign fell into the hands of the minister of the interior, he would have not only put at risk the people who had lent their faces to sing and fight against the dictator but also reveal the nature of his campaign to his rivals—the people working for the
Yes
to Pinochet, who would be now able to design an antidote and create a strategy to nullify whatever improbable advertising merits his naïve oeuvre might have.

He felt like a traitor for having had alcohol at the embassy, knowing that he’d have to carry the videotape in his car.

It was understandable, because he was nervous, irritated, insecure. He was going to show for the first time his masterpiece to the political delegates for the
No
, and he feared their verdict. He was so brutally out of practice. How the hell did he succumb, against all logic, to the vanity of assuming the temptation of … saving Chile? He corrected that pathetic idea. Chile hadn’t been saved by the martyrs of the resistance movements, or by the disciplined activists, or by the hundreds of thousands of freedom lovers who had confronted the repression here and there. And he, the pope of all fools, had agreed to be the leader of a campaign that, instead of leading him to glory, would take him to hell.

Lacking any ideas, he had given in to the nonsense of an insignificant being such as Raúl Alarcón, with his “Waltz of the
No
.”

Now his disastrous video could fall into the enemy’s hands.

And the bad luck factor! He crashed. Against a police van! With only a little bit of ill will, taking a look at his criminal records, and viewing the videotape with his incendiary “Waltz of the
No
,” the police could turn him in to the intelligence agents, who could apply the Antiterrorist Law to him.

The other collarbone.

Or maybe his femur.

And even that, with luck.

A higher officer came in from the street. He was clicking Bettini’s car keys like castanets.

“Bettini,” he called.

The ad agent stood up with his heart in his throat. Those keys, the sound of those damn keys in the key chain that his daughter, Patricia, had given him a few Christmases ago, was probably the toll of the bell heralding the assault and the knock out that would soon strike him.

“It’s me, Captain,” he heard himself saying, half coarse, half servile.

The man in uniform turned toward a low-ranking officer, so young he could have been of the same age as Nico Santos, his daughter’s boyfriend.

“Search him.”

The cop approached him. He began to frisk him, putting in a black plastic tray everything Bettini had in his pockets: his wallet, his dearest Montblanc pen, a clean handkerchief, a few hundred-peso coins, a comb with some missing teeth, several mint and lemon candies, and sheets of paper folded into quarters.

Bettini didn’t recognize those papers. What were they?

When the cop put the tray in front of the captain, those pieces of paper caught his attention. He unfolded them, read the first one, apparently skipping some lines, and, after smoothing them against the twill of his uniform, gave Bettini a look full of interest.

“So we caught a big shot.”

“Pardon me, Captain?”

The man in uniform dialed a number, slowly and delightedly, and while he waited for an answer, he moved the receiver away from his ear so that he could share the wait with all those present. When the call was answered, without ceasing to watch his detained, he said with a satisfied expression, “This is Captain Carrasco. I need to talk immediately to Minister Fernández. My password is R-S-C-H Carrasco Santiago.”

His smile got bigger as he took a look at the second piece of paper.

“Dr. Fernández, I apologize for calling you so late at night, but I’ve got something here that might be of interest to you.”

“What is it, Carrasco?”

“We arrested a little guy here”—he looked at Bettini, who was wiping his brow with the sleeve of his jacket—“due to a traffic violation. He’s right here in front of me, quite nervous. We were proceeding with the routine control, when we found in
his pocket some papers that you may want to see. That’s why I took the liberty of calling you.”

“Well done. Is it anything related to the Department of the Interior?”

“Shall I read what I have here, Minister?”

“Please.”

The captain cleared his throat and, without much emphasis, delivered, flatly, the following lines.

Captain Carrasco kept moving his jaw rhythmically as if following the cadence of the poem. Bettini noticed that his face, which had been pale, was now blushing. Listening to the text of his song, which would be broadcast on the last day of the campaign, was like listening to an execution sentence. Every image in those stanzas seemed awful, when only a few hours before—before
all
the disasters—they had seemed brilliant to him, lines that Chileans of all ages, lovers of the sea and the mountains, apoliticals, the undecided, would respond to. Why had he succumbed to his teenage daughter’s poor judgment
when she tried to talk him into singing “It feels so good to say ‘no’ ” even though he had never ever used, as all young Chileans do, the recurrent tag “d’ya feel it?” to ask if they had been understood.

D’ya feel it
?

No, Adrián Bettini, holy father of the naïve, he admitted to himself. He hadn’t
felt
a thing! Hearing the lyrics of his song from the mouth of a cop who was used to giving orders but who was somehow slow when it came to the pronunciation of metaphors, had sunk him in the deepest humiliation. He never imagined that hell always has one more level, deeper, and then another one, Comrade Dante, after which one can keep descending on and on, endlessly.

Carrasco was polite enough to raise the volume of the speaker even more, so that Bettini could hear “live and direct” the minister’s comments to his rhymes. Then, after letting out a nonchalant laugh, the minister of the interior said, “In effect, very interesting material, Carrasco.”

“From the political or the poetic point of view, Minister?”

“Both of them. Tell me, Captain, what’s the name of my Neruda behind bars?”

The man in uniform covered the mouthpiece of the telephone and, lifting his chin, turned to the ad agent.

“What did you say your name was, asshole?”

“Bettini. Adrián Bettini.”

“He says that his name is Adrián Bettini.”

There was silence on the other end of the line, and then cheerful laughter.

“You don’t say! You have Adrián Bettini himself right there!”

“Who’s he, Minister?

“He’s the leading person in the campaign for the
No
to Pinochet.”

“Is he dangerous?”

“Not at all! With those rhymes … he’s not messing with anybody.”

“But in these papers he talks about insurrection. Shall I scare him a little?”