The Days of the Rainbow by Antonio Skármeta

and end up in a neighborhood with vacant lots.
    The jeep arrives in an area cordoned off by military vans. There are also two photographers with their credentials in plastic holders hanging around their necks. A priest is drinking coffee from a plastic cup. People are leaning against the walls of their houses, or sitting on the doorsteps. In the distance, a helicopter’s propellers are in motion. The privates lift the white-and-red ribbons as they see Lieutenant Bruna coming.
    He doesn’t greet them. They point at a lamppost a few yards away. Cold metal. Tall. The light is off. There are many white clouds and a stripe of black turbulence here and there.
    We arrive at the lamppost. With a rough gesture, a plainclothes police official with a sort of rosette on his lapel points at the thick mat that lies on the ground covering something. With a gesture of his chin, Lieutenant Bruna signals him to lift it. The officer pulls the mat fully off. It’s the body of a man.
    Professor Paredes.
    His eyes are closed, and around his neck there’re one or more sheets stained with blood.
    “They slit his throat,” the man with the rosette says to Lieutenant Bruna.
    I’m unable to say anything. I can’t breathe. I feel a flow running down my legs. I double up with pain and fall on my knees.
    Lieutenant Bruna runs his hand over my hair.
    “I did everything I could, my boy,” I hear him saying. “You asked me for it, and God knows that I did everything I could.”

HE FELT SOMEHOW CLOSE to the group of the “detained”: a drunk man lying on a wooden bench, a student bleeding after being hit with a police club, a street vendor of unlicensed merchandise, a handcuffed union delegate.
    Two hours had passed and not a single officer had begun any proceedings. Once in a while, an officer peeked in, took a look at the group, and disappeared into some back room. Jail is always like this. The feeling of an endless, unproductive time. A prelude to uncertainty. An intermission blown up by desperation. The humiliating wait. Time to imagine your loved ones worrying about your absence. The guard in uniform typing on an old Remington some report that a local judge would probably read a few months later.
    The last time that he was taken prisoner, the cops wanted to teach him a good lesson. In a street demonstration against the rise of the public transportation fares, he tried to rescue a girl who was being dragged to a police van by some undercover cops.
    He wasn’t even participating in the march. He only followed the impulse of his heart. That’s why, when questioned by the police, he couldn’t give names or addresses of the rioters who had organized the protest, simply because he didn’t know them.
    Sometimes his damn heart made him act recklessly before his head could stop him.
    On another occasion, he let his mouth run off, saying whatever he held true. Even though he knew there would be consequences. All those times it was he, only his own body, that was at stake. But now everything could result in a catastrophe that could affect a lot of people. If the images of the
No
campaign fell into the hands of the minister of the interior, he would have not only put at risk the people who had lent their faces to sing and fight against the dictator but also reveal the nature of his campaign to his rivals—the people working for the
Yes
to Pinochet, who would be now able to design an antidote and create a strategy to nullify whatever improbable advertising merits his naïve oeuvre might have.
    He felt like a traitor for having had alcohol at the embassy, knowing that he’d have to carry the videotape in his car.
    It was understandable, because he was nervous, irritated, insecure. He was going to show for the first time his masterpiece to the political delegates for the
No
, and he feared their verdict. He was so brutally out of practice. How the hell did he succumb, against all logic, to the vanity of assuming the temptation of … saving Chile?