The Days of the Rainbow by Antonio Skármeta Page A

He corrected that pathetic idea. Chile hadn’t been saved by the martyrs of the resistance movements, or by the disciplined activists, or by the hundreds of thousands of freedom lovers who had confronted the repression here and there. And he, the pope of all fools, had agreed to be the leader of a campaign that, instead of leading him to glory, would take him to hell.
    Lacking any ideas, he had given in to the nonsense of an insignificant being such as Raúl Alarcón, with his “Waltz of the
No
.”
    Now his disastrous video could fall into the enemy’s hands.
    And the bad luck factor! He crashed. Against a police van! With only a little bit of ill will, taking a look at his criminal records, and viewing the videotape with his incendiary “Waltz of the
No
,” the police could turn him in to the intelligence agents, who could apply the Antiterrorist Law to him.
    The other collarbone.
    Or maybe his femur.
    And even that, with luck.
    A higher officer came in from the street. He was clicking Bettini’s car keys like castanets.
    “Bettini,” he called.
    The ad agent stood up with his heart in his throat. Those keys, the sound of those damn keys in the key chain that his daughter, Patricia, had given him a few Christmases ago, was probably the toll of the bell heralding the assault and the knock out that would soon strike him.
    “It’s me, Captain,” he heard himself saying, half coarse, half servile.
    The man in uniform turned toward a low-ranking officer, so young he could have been of the same age as Nico Santos, his daughter’s boyfriend.
    “Search him.”
    The cop approached him. He began to frisk him, putting in a black plastic tray everything Bettini had in his pockets: his wallet, his dearest Montblanc pen, a clean handkerchief, a few hundred-peso coins, a comb with some missing teeth, several mint and lemon candies, and sheets of paper folded into quarters.
    Bettini didn’t recognize those papers. What were they?
    When the cop put the tray in front of the captain, those pieces of paper caught his attention. He unfolded them, read the first one, apparently skipping some lines, and, after smoothing them against the twill of his uniform, gave Bettini a look full of interest.
    “So we caught a big shot.”
    “Pardon me, Captain?”
    The man in uniform dialed a number, slowly and delightedly, and while he waited for an answer, he moved the receiver away from his ear so that he could share the wait with all those present. When the call was answered, without ceasing to watch his detained, he said with a satisfied expression, “This is Captain Carrasco. I need to talk immediately to Minister Fernández. My password is R-S-C-H Carrasco Santiago.”
    His smile got bigger as he took a look at the second piece of paper.
    “Dr. Fernández, I apologize for calling you so late at night, but I’ve got something here that might be of interest to you.”
    “What is it, Carrasco?”
    “We arrested a little guy here”—he looked at Bettini, who was wiping his brow with the sleeve of his jacket—“due to a traffic violation. He’s right here in front of me, quite nervous. We were proceeding with the routine control, when we found inhis pocket some papers that you may want to see. That’s why I took the liberty of calling you.”
    “Well done. Is it anything related to the Department of the Interior?”
    “Shall I read what I have here, Minister?”
    “Please.”
    The captain cleared his throat and, without much emphasis, delivered, flatly, the following lines.
    It feels so good to say “no”
    when the whole country asked you for that
,
    it feels so food to say no
    when you have it in your heart
.
    With the rainbow in the farthest frontiers
    even the deers are going to dance
.
    The
No
is exciting
    and fills the insurrection
    with tons of colors
.
    That’s why, my dear, without hesitation
    we’ll say no, oh, oh
.
    So many times in life I looked for
    a deeply felt word for “liberty,”
    so many times I saw the