The Days of the Rainbow Read Online Free PDF

taken your father’s position.”
    “Not at all, Mr. Valdivieso.”
    “You know that this is Chile’s best school, and that, for a young teacher, getting to work here’s something to be proud of and an asset in his professional career.”
    “Don’t worry about it.”
    “The thing is that I would rather have gotten here under different circumstances. For example,through a public examination, instead of having been handpicked by the principal.”
    I bring the cup to my mouth and blow on the coffee. It’s still too hot. I put it on the counter and pour the coffee in the saucer back into the cup.
    “If you had not accepted the job,” I say, “someone else would’ve.”
    “That’s the problem, Santos. Before calling me, they had offered the job to Dr. Hughes and Professor Ramírez. Why are you smiling, young man?”
    “Your class on Aristotle, Professor Valdivieso, was really good. My father’s a great fan of the
Nicomachean Ethics
. That’s why he calls me ‘Nico.’ Because ‘Nicomachus’ would be a little too much.”
    The man takes off his John Lennon glasses and rubs his eyes.
    “By the way,” he says, “I’ll see how I can compensate in some way the harm I’m causing you.”
    “No, Professor. I beg you not to worry. I’m okay. I’m great.”
    But when I finally make that phone call, I’m not okay anymore. I’m not great at all.
    The priests don’t know in what cell Professor Santos had been thrown.

IN THE AFTERNOON , Adrián Bettini ended up in downtown Santiago. In that mixture of bank clerks, store managers, financial executives, and secretaries wearing too much makeup and miniskirts so short they provoked long gazes from men, he believed he could feel the truth of a city destroyed by violence.
    From downtown, everyone went back to their neighborhoods, either rich, middle class, or a poor housing area. Downtown offered them the chance to be in physical contact where all the differences of a country so sharply divided seemed to dissolve. At night, there wouldn’t be any amusement for them other than watching TV. There, unless the dictator changed his mind, his own fifteen-minute show would appear, encouraging that defeated mass, wrapped in worn-out coats and frayed scarves, to vote against Pinochet. The way they drank theircoffee, in silence, at Café Haiti, letting their absent gaze slide down the waitresses’ hips, was a good sign of apathy.
    On the front page of
La Segunda
, below the newspaper’s green logo, a headline in red print stood out: OCTOBER 5 PLEBISCITE . But nobody was buying the newspaper. Only he stopped to read a subheading in bold, “The
No
Campaign Is Authorized to Be on TV.”
    He used to run into friends from the advertising industry in that café. Or journalists. Nowadays, most of them had left the country, and all that his lively old-days café friends were doing now was discussing soccer and the ups and downs of the exchange rate. These men would be some of his campaign’s target group. Rather than inscrutable, their faces seemed to be uniformly expressionless. It wasn’t because of fear, but because of their simple daily lives emptied of all hope. They had their coffees in a long ritual designed to delay going back to their offices, where they would stare at their computer monitors with someone else’s numbers and products. Exactly that, like someone else’s, their lives didn’t concern them at all.
    He arrived home late. On his desk, he found Magdalena’s message: “Warm up the stew in the microwave.” There was a bottle of red wine, unopened, and several bread rolls, not so fresh. Hepoured himself a glass of wine and, without knocking, entered Patricia’s room.
    In the semidarkness, he saw his daughter sleeping with an arm around the pillow. He turned on the soft light of the table lamp and stayed there, looking at her for a while. Who could teach him how to make her happy? He regretted the hard years when trying to survive without a steady job made