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 Bettini, holding the key in her hand, had just witnessed the unusual scene.
19
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.
20
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!”