“Look,” she says, scrunching up her nose a little bit and pointing at the hills. “If you want to know me better, I’m like them.”
“What do you mean?”
“The hills and all that.”
“You’re like them.”
“I was just saying, silly. Me,” she says, tapping her chest, as if to mark the beating of her heart, “I’m this. I mean … if someone painted me and I were a landscape, I’d have many colors …
“Look here now. What do you see?”
“Many things.”
“Roofs, roof tiles, yellow, green, purple, blue, red, brick-red walls, chimneys, seagulls, pelicans, stairs, steps, cables within easy reach, overhead tramways like small houses climbing onto the rails, stray dogs, kites, and everything remains there, as if someone had put it that way, thoughtlessly, leaving everything for later.”
“And that’s how you are? You left yourself for later?”
“I mean, all those things that have happened to me in my life have a meaning. They’re here, with the same strong emotion that I felt at that moment, d’you know?”
“One of the things I like the most about you is that you almost never say d’you know? It’s interesting, because I see you …”
I stop. I kiss her naked shoulder and breathe in deeply the smell of her neck. Going over her skin helps me find the exact word …
“How do you see me?”
“Harmonious, tanned. Elegant, Patricia Bettini. That’s why I’m surprised to hear you comparing yourself with a carnival.”
She turns toward me, and with two fingers she gently caresses my eyelids.
“Maybe,” she says, smiling with her eyes but not with her lips, “it’s the typical post-virginity-lost trauma. Do you know where my harmony comes from?”
“I talked about it with your father.”
“Do you talk about me with my father!? What does he say?”
“That that’s your ‘Italian touch,’ an internal commotion but a clear expression.”
“Harmonious.”
“Exactly, as if you had made a fair copy of yourself.”
“And Laura Yáñez?”
“Laura Yáñez is a draft. Did you ever see the calligraphy notebook of a messy child?”
“Twisted letters, blots. But she saved your father, Nico!”
“I love her because of that. But I don’t know if she’ll be able to save herself.”
Patricia looks suddenly serious. Almost grave. She signals me with her chin to look again at the road.
“Everything ends in the sea.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re always there and, at the same time, the infinite is there, too. If you’re near the ocean, you put all those tiny everyday things in the infinite.”
I exaggerate a yawn. “You should discuss these topics with Professor Santos. My old man is a fan of Aristotle and Anaximander.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Anaximander is the oldest philosopher of all. Only a small fragment of his work remains.”
“What is it about?”
“I know it by heart. ‘Things perish into those things out of which they have their being, according to necessity.’ And the dude became famous just with that tiny bit of philosophy.”
Patricia walks to the table and takes her half-empty glass of rum and Coke. She tastes it and makes a funny face. It’s warm.
“Shall I order some ice?”
“Just leave it. It’s time for us to go back to Santiago. My old man must be looking for me to kill me. I left a note for him, attached with pins on his pillow.”
Right after she says that, we hear a police siren, very close to the motel.
“That’s him.” She laughs.
“What kind of note was it?”
“One that, unfortunately, he’ll know very well how to decipher. Three words: “Virginity, Valparaíso, Freedom.”
She opens her thin lips in a charming smile. Oh, my God! I love her so much! I feel that I want her again.
“Do you like me?”
I shake my head.
“Not even a little?”
I nod. I don’t like her at all. I frown my lips scornfully.
“Do you find me ugly?”
I nod enthusiastically. I find her hor-ren-dous.
Patricia Bettini draws the curtain completely. She shows her breasts to Valparaíso and sings at the top of her lungs.
E che m’importa a me
se non sono bella
se ho un amante mio
che fa il pittore
che mi dipingerà
come uns stella
e che m’importa a me
se non sono bella.
“Let’s go back to Santiago,” I say.
“Are you afraid?”
“A little bit. I don’t think that Don Adrián would kill you. He’s Italian and sentimental, so he would feel bad committing a filicide, but he wouldn’t have the same scruples with me. At this very moment, I might be the number-one candidate on his hit list.”
She opens her arms with a wild yawn accompanied by a deep “Ahhhhh.” When she’s done, she raises a didactic finger, like a rural teacher.
“Then I think that we’ll all go back to the sea. I mean it, for Anaximander.”
The rum is warm but I don’t care. I drink it in one gulp.
“The No has driven us all crazy,” I say while closing the window and taking a last look at the sea. “He’s out of himself, he says yes, he says no, and no and no, he says yes in blue, in foam, in a gallop, he says no and no.”
“Neruda?”
“The great Neruda. Or, as your dad would say, the fucking Neruda.”
44
PROFESSOR SANTOS has never seen his son wearing a tie. They’re going to walk together to the graduation ceremony. Before leaving the apartment, he checks if he put a pack of black tobacco in the inside pocket of his jacket, along with the Ronson lighter, which has survived life’s vicissitudes, and which he refills every Saturday in a cigarette and locksmith stand on Ahumada Place.
He then checks the knot of the green tie with blue polka dots that Nico has borrowed from his friend Che.
The event is taking place in the afternoon, but neither the father nor the son changes his morning routine. They leave the apartment and, before getting off the elevator, the philosophy teacher lights his cigarette, takes Nico’s arm, and smokes while walking the two blocks to the gate of the National Institute.
There they will perform what is usually a routine practice, except that today it has special relevance: Nico Santos will graduate from high school with a more than acceptable average.
He was able to survive the turbulence of the dictatorship; he remained cautiously quiet, obeying not just his father’s advices but also his strict orders. He’s spoken out very few times, sometimes not so well, and sometimes okay, and sometimes very well, but in this last case he was prudent enough to do it in English. “To be or not to be.” His son had opted for the be, and Professor Santos thanked his late wife for it. Certainly, the not to be would’ve ended up destroying him.
Then, with a histrionic gesture that reminds Nico of Professor Paredes’s irony, he throws the cigarette butt on the ground, and bowing to his son, tells him that the prince may proceed to crush it with his shoe.
Nico Santos obeys with boundless joy. A triviality that he’s happy to comply with. He draws his own conclusions, “The No won.”