Antonio Skarmeta: The Days of the Rainbow

THE PAY PHONEon 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 WAYand 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.”