Free The Days of the Rainbow by Antonio Skármeta

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.

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.
    “If you allow me to make a suggestion,” the bearded man says, “I’d recommend that when I stick out my tongue with the
No
, you play the sound of a lion’s roar.”
    “Okay,” Bettini says, trying to understand why everything seems wrong.
    Then Magdalena asks the second candidate to appear on the TV campaign to come in.
    This time, it’s a firefighter.
    In a firefighter suit.
    And a firefighter helmet.
    He says hello to Bettini by gently striking his forehead, and solemnly says, “We, Chile’s firefighters, are for the
No
.”
    Unable to think of anything more sophisticated, Bettini asks the man in what way he thinks a firefighter could be of help to the
No
campaign. The man gets a glass of water from behind him, raises it as if to toast and, imitating the sound of the siren of a fire engine, sings, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, noooooooooooo.”
    When he finishes, he smiles and takes a sip of water from the glass he’s still holding in his hand.
    Bettini hasn’t had even a drop of alcohol in the entire day, but he feels as if he were drunk. He walks to the wall at the back of the set, and there he sees his daughter’s boyfriend, Nico Santos, the instigator of all this, trying to memorize some lines from a book.
    “Are you volunteering to appear on the TV ad, too?”
    “No, Don Adrián. I’m studying for Professor Paredes’s test on Shakespeare.”
    “And what are you reading?”
    “Macbeth.”
    “Have you memorized any part of it?”
    “I have.”
    “Let me see.”
    Instead of standing up to recite, the young man lies down on a blue mat and, with his chin resting on his left hand, lets Macbeth’s speech flow:
    Blood hath been shed ere now, i’ the olden time
,
    Ere humane statute purged the gentle weal
.
    Ay, and since too, murders have been perform’d
    Too terrible for the ear
.
    The times have been
,
    That, when the brains were out, the man would die
,
    And there an end
.
    But now they rise