Multiple Choice

“To be married?” I asked him.

“No — to be married in a country where you can’t get divorced.” I told him not to be an ass, but he kept going. He told me his interest was genuine. I didn’t want to look at him, but he went right on filming me. “Why all the celebration,” he insisted, not letting up, “when you’re just going to separate in a couple of years? You’ll call me yourself. You’ll come see me in my office, begging me to process your annulment.”

“No,” I answered, uncomfortable.

Then the bride sat up and rubbed her immense green eyes, caressed my hair, smiled at Farra, and said lightly, as if she’d spent some time thinking about the matter, that as long as divorce wasn’t legal in Chile, we wouldn’t separate. And then I added, looking defiantly into the camera: “We will stay married in protest, even if we hate each other.” She hugged me, we kissed, and she said that we wanted to go down in the nation’s history as the first Chilean couple to get divorced. “It’s a stupendous law. We recommend that everyone get divorced now,” I said, playing along, and she, looking at the camera too, now with unanimous laughter in the background, seconded the opinion: “Yes, it’s an absolutely commendable law.”

“Chile is one of the few countries in the world where divorce isn’t legal,” someone said.

“It’s the only one,” someone else clarified.

“No, there are still a few left,” said another.

“In Chile,” Farra continued, “the divorce law will never pass. They’ve been arguing over it for years and nothing’s happened, especially with the whole rotten Catholic lobby against it. They even said they’d excommunicate any representatives on the right who voted for it. So the world will just go right on laughing at us.” Then someone said that the divorce law was not the most urgent thing to be fixed in the country, and then that sluggish conversation turned into a collective debate. As if we were filling up another drum, this time with our complaints or our wishes, almost all of us had something to contribute: the urgent thing is for Pinochet to go to jail, to go to trial, to go to hell, the urgent thing is to find the bodies of the disappeared, the urgent thing is education. The really urgent thing, said one guy, is to teach Mapudungún in schools, and someone asked him if he was, by chance, Mapuche (“more or less,” he replied). The urgent thing is health care, said someone else, and then came another, then others: the urgent thing is to fight capitalism, the urgent thing is for Colo-Colo to win the Copa Libertadores again, the urgent thing is to fuck Opus Dei up, the urgent thing is to kick Iván Moreira’s ass. The urgent thing is the war on drugs, added one of the bride’s distant cousins, getting everyone’s attention, but right away he clarified that it was a joke.

“We live in the country of waiting,” the poet said then. There were several poets at the party, but he was the only one who deserved the title, because he tended to talk like a poet. More precisely, he spoke in the unmistakable tone of a drunk poet, of a drunk Chilean poet, of a young, drunk, Chilean poet: “We live in the country of waiting; we live in wait for something. Chile is one giant waiting room, and we will all die waiting for our number to be called.”

“What number?” someone asked.

“The number they give you in waiting rooms, dumb-ass,” someone said. Then there was complete silence, and I took the opportunity to close my eyes, but I opened them again right away because everything was spinning.

“Goddamn, you talk nice,” Maite told the poet then. “I could really be into you. The only problem is how small your dick is.”

“And how do you know that?” asked the poet, and she confessed she had spent hours hiding in the bathtub, looking at the penises of the men who went to piss. Then the poet said, with a slight but convincing scientific intonation, that the size of the penis when pissing was not representative of the penis in an erect state, and there was a general murmur of approval.

“Let’s see, then — show it to me erect,” said Maite, all in.

“I can’t,” said the poet. “I’m too drunk to get it up. You can try going down on me if you want, but I’m sure I won’t get hard.” They went to the bathroom or to the poet’s house, I don’t remember.

“I’m sorry,” Farra said to us later, I suppose regretfully, the camera now turned off. “I don’t want you two to separate. But if one day you do, you know you can count on me, both of you: I’ll handle the separation for free.” I don’t know if we smiled at him — now I think we did, but it must have been a bitter smile. The guests left one by one, and it was night by the time we were alone. We collapsed into bed and slept for about twelve hours straight, our arms around each other. We always slept in an embrace. We loved each other, of course we did. We loved each other.