PROFESSOR PAREDES comes in late to class with his raincoat all wet. He carries a paper bag with mortadella, bread, and a bottle of mineral water. He hasn’t had lunch. He says that he’s late because in a private school in the province there’s an English teacher who’s undergoing chemotherapy and he’s substituting for him, so that his colleague could keep getting paid. All six feet of Paredes are full of solidarity. On Mondays he has to spend half the day on a bus to go to Rancagua and come back. He spends part of his own salary on transportation, but at least he prevents the teacher’s family from dying of hunger while he applies for a subsidy from the Teachers’ Union for his sick colleague. What he doesn’t mention is something we all know — that the president of the Teachers’ Union is in jail.
Meanwhile, Professor Paredes hurries to do his own things. He already got the plane tickets to go to the filming in Portugal, and he doesn’t want to leave the play we have been rehearsing half done. So one day next week, at noon, we’ll have the dress rehearsal, something that will make us, the actors, appear as heroes, because all the students will be allowed to skip class to attend the performance. And skipping classes is what we like the most at school. The brats don’t know squat about theater, but they’ll pack the auditorium just to free themselves from physics or chemistry.
The play’s Cervantes’s short farce The Cave of Salamanca. It’s a funny story in which a husband says good-bye to his wife to attend his sister’s wedding in another town. As soon as the man leaves, the lady of the house and her maid get ready for an orgy with their lovers — the barber and the sacristan of the village.
Well, I play the sacristan.
The wardrobe stylist has brought me a purple robe and some medallions to hang from my neck. When we’re in the height of the feast with the maid and the wife, the husband comes back. So a guest who had arrived earlier to the house, a student from Salamanca, makes the scorned husband believe that barber and I are ghosts. The cuckholded man is satisfied with the magic from Salamanca, and we all end up happily toasting like good friends. The principal, the entire school faculty, and Lieutenant Bruna, who’s in charge of our school, will all attend the premiere. Lieutenant Bruna’s a big supporter of students participating in extracurricular dramatic and literary activities so that they stay away from political turmoil.
Lieutenant Bruna doesn’t know that, when the school’s security guard leaves, he gives us the keys, and our rehearsals of The Cave of Salamanca come to an end. Then two professional actors come in to rehearse with Professor Paredes a very “daring” play by Tato Pavlovsky called Mr. Galíndez. That’s a whole different thing. The play’s about two torturers who, while waiting for their next political victims, torture two whores sent to them by their boss, Mr. Galíndez.
Che Barrios brought Pavlovsky’s play hidden inside a copy of Treasure Island.
Because of these kinds of things, my old man thinks that his colleague Paredes should take his vacation in Portugal immediately. Even though Mr. Galíndez will be performed clandestinely and only in underground theaters, there are snitches everywhere who may rat on him.
Several actors have received death threats. Last week, the very popular actor Julio Junger celebrated his birthday, and a messenger arrived at his place with a gift for him — a funeral wreath. Junger and Professor Paredes acted together a few years ago in Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker.
I’m safe playing the cunning sacristan. But you never know, because last week the minister of education banned a play by Plautus written two thousand years ago. He said it was blasphemous. Of course, the title of the play was The Braggart Soldier. It seems that Pinochet took it personally.
I’d rather be in Mr. Galíndez than The Cave of Salamanca, but my father would die three times over if he ever found out. Besides, there are two big shots playing in it, two actors who’re not allowed to perform in soap operas. Here the entire TV network belongs to Pinochet. Anyone who admits to not being a supporter of Pinochet is shown handcuffed and is accused of being a terrorist.
Patricia Bettini wants to leave the country as soon as she graduates from high school. She says that this country’s hopeless. I would leave, too, but I can’t leave my old man alone.
He doesn’t have anyone else to take care of him. I miss him a lot.
It seems as if nothing is changing and Chile is going to rot with Pinochet. A couple of months ago they laid an ambush for him. The car he travels in was shot at. But of course nothing happened to him; the bullets shattered against the bulletproof windows. That night, Pinochet was on TV showing how the bullets had damaged the windows. He said it was a miracle that he was alive — indeed, the bullets’ impact had drawn the face of the Virgin Mary on the glass. It wouldn’t be a surprise if he now asked the pope to canonize him.
That shooting made the military very nervous. In retaliation, they immediately went out into the streets to kill people. I don’t think that my dad had anything to do with that. He’s a pacifist. He says that violence only brings more violence. But I’m not sure. Everything I’ve studied at school shows that history progresses through acts of violence — the revolt of the slaves, the French Revolution, the world war against the Nazis. But Chile is so small!
Who cares about what happens to us?
If Patricia Bettini leaves Chile, I’ll lose any will to live. She studies at the Scuola Italiana, and I study at the Nacional. We share Professor Paredes.
He teaches English in both schools and directs plays in both places. Here, Cervantes (and Pavlovsky in parentheses), and there, Ionesco.
With me he directs Cervantes. With Patricia Bettini, Ionesco.
She has an Italian grandfather in Florence. She doesn’t have any problem understanding Italian movies. She can watch them without reading the subtitles.
She sings Modugno’s songs and knows a Leopardi poem by heart—“Fratelli, a un tempo stesso, / Amore e morte ingenero la sorte” (Children of Fate, in the same breath / Created were they, Love and Death).
I get goose bumps, because that happens so often! We study Romeo and Juliet with Professor Paredes, and it’s exactly the same.
Actually, it would be better if Patricia left for Italy. She wants to do something for my father. Who knows the mess she can get into. But if she leaves, I’ll slit my wrists.
Nicomachus in Verona.
24
THE CAST OF VOLUNTEERS that Magdalena brings together as the producer of the TV campaign for the No includes the following specimens whom Adrián Bettini — not yet used to the hustle and bustle of the eccentricities created by Alarcón, the angelorum—watches with fear.
A bearded university student stands in front of him and asks Bettini to pose a question to him.
“What kind of question?”
“Ask me what I would say to a dictator.”
“Okay,” Bettini says. “Sir, what would you say to a dictator?”
The young man looks to the right, then to the left, and to the front, and then sticks out a huge tongue with a drawing of a rainbow on it, and on top of it, the word No. Then the man anxiously awaits for the ad agent’s reaction.
“It’s fine,” Bettini says, meaning something else.
Actually, he wanted to say that he was sliding into a pit of nonsense, as if the whole country were using a drug that was unresponsive to any antidote.