Multiple Choice Read online

  I asked him if now, as a Metro conductor, he earned more money. “Twice as much,” he replied. I asked him if he believed in God now, and he answered that yes, now more than ever, he believed in God. I’ll never forget his gesture then: with a lit cigarette between his index and middle fingers, he looked at the back of his hand as if searching for his veins, and then he turned it over, as if to make sure that his life, head, and heart lines were still there.

  We said good-bye as if we were or had once been friends. He went into the cinema, and we headed down Bulnes toward Parque Almagro to smoke a few joints.

  __________

  I never heard anything more about Segovia. Sometimes on the Metro, when I get into the first car, I look toward the conductor’s booth and imagine that our teacher is in there, pressing buttons and yawning. As for the Covarrubias twins, they’ve gained a certain amount of fame, and as I understand it, they never separated again. They became identical lawyers; I hear it’s hard to tell which is the more brilliant and which the more corrupt. They have a firm in Vitacura, and they charge the same rate. They charge what such good service is worth: a lot.

  Exercises:

  67. According to the text, the Covarrubias twins’ experience in their new school:

  (A) Marked their final break with the values their parents had instilled in them.

  (B) Was traumatic, because it forced them to make rash decisions and separated them for good.

  (C) Gradually shaped them into productive individuals who contributed to Chilean society.

  (D) Transformed two good and supportive brothers into unscrupulous sons of bitches.

  (E) Marked the start of a difficult period, from which they emerged stronger and ready to compete in this ruthless and materialistic world.

  68. The best title for this story would be:

  (A) “How to Train Your Twin”

  (B) “To Sir, with Love”

  (C) “Me and My Shadow”

  (D) “Against Lawyers”

  (E) “Against Twin Lawyers”

  69. Regarding multiple-choice tests, the author affirms that:

  I. They were regularly used at that particular school in order to prepare students for the university entrance exams.

  II. It was easier to cheat on those tests, any way you looked at it.

  III. They did not require you to develop your own thinking.

  IV. With multiple-choice tests, the teachers didn’t have to make themselves sick in the head by grading all weekend long.

  V. The correct choice is almost always D.

  (A) I and II

  (B) I, III, and V

  (C) II and V

  (D) I, II, and III

  (E) I, II, and IV

  70. The fact that Mr. Luis Antonio Covarrubias divided his name between his twin sons indicates that he was:

  (A) Innovative

  (B) Ingenious

  (C) Unbiased

  (D) Masonic

  (E) Moronic

  71. One can infer from the text that the teachers at the school:

  (A) Were mediocre and cruel, because they adhered unquestioningly to a rotten educational model.

  (B) Were cruel and severe: they liked to torture the students by overloading them with homework.

  (C) Were deadened by sadness, because they got paid shit.

  (D) Were cruel and severe, because they were sad. Everyone was sad back then.

  (E) The kid next to me marked C, so I’m going to mark C as well.

  72. From this text, one infers that:

  (A) The students cheated on tests because they lived under a dictatorship, and that justified everything.

  (B) Cheating on tests isn’t so bad as long as you’re smart about it.

  (C) Cheating on tests is part of the learning process for any human being.

  (D) The students with the worst scores on the university entrance exams often become religion teachers.

  (E) Religion teachers are fun, but they don’t necessarily believe in God.

  73. The purpose of this story is:

  (A) To suggest a possible work opportunity for Chilean students who perform well academically but are poor (there aren’t many, but they do exist): they could take tests for students who are lazy and rich.

  (B) To expose security problems in the administration of the university entrance exams, and to promote a business venture related to biometric readings, or some other system for definitively verifying the identities of students

  (C) To promote an expensive law firm. And to entertain.

  (D) To legitimate the experience of a generation that could be summed up as “a bunch of cheaters.” And to entertain.

  (E) To erase the wounds of the past.

  74. Which of Mr. Segovia’s following statements is, in your opinion, true?

  (A) You weren’t educated, you were trained.

  (B) You weren’t educated, you were trained.

  (C) You weren’t educated, you were trained.

  (D) You weren’t educated, you were trained.

  (E) You weren’t educated, you were trained.

  TEXT #2

  I suppose we were happy on my wedding day, though it’s hard for me to imagine it now; I can’t fathom how during such a bitter time any sort of happiness was possible. This was September 2000, fourteen years ago, which is a lot of time: 168 months, more than five thousand days.

  The party was memorable, that’s for sure, especially after that soulless, torturous ceremony in our apartment. We’d done a thorough cleaning the night before, but I think our relatives still whispered about us as they left, because there’s no denying that those threadbare armchairs and the wine-stained walls and carpeting didn’t give the impression of a place that was fit for a wedding.

  The bride—of course I remember her name, though I think eventually I’ll forget it, someday I will even forget her name—looked lovely, but my parents just couldn’t understand why she would wear a black dress. I wore a gray suit so shiny and shabby that an uncle of the bride’s said I looked more like an office gofer than a groom. It was a classist and stupid comment, but it was also true, because that was precisely the suit I’d worn when I worked as an office gofer. I still associate it, more than with the wedding, with those endless days I spent walking around downtown or waiting in line at some bank, with humiliatingly short hair and a cornflower blue tie that could never be loosened enough.

  Luckily, the official from the civil registrar left straightaway, and after the champagne and modest hors d’oeuvres—I remember with shame that the potato chips were all crushed—we had a long lunch, and we even had time to take a nap and change clothes before our friends began to arrive, bringing, as we’d requested, generous alcoholic contributions instead of gifts. There was so much booze that pretty soon we were sure we wouldn’t be able to drink it all, and because we were high that seemed like a problem. We debated the issue for a long time, although (since we were high) maybe it wasn’t really that long.

  Then Farra carried in an enormous, empty twenty-five-liter drum he had in his house for some reason, and we started to fill it up, dumping bottles in haphazardly while we half-danced, half-shouted. It was a risky bet, but the concoction—that’s what we called it, we thought the word was funny—turned out to be delectable. How I would love to go back to the year 2000 and record the exact combination that led to that unexpected and delicious drink. I’d like to know exactly how many bottles or boxes of red and how many of white went in, what was the dosage of pisco, of vodka, of whiskey, tequila, gin, whatever. I remember there was also Campari, and anise, mint, and gold liqueurs, some scoops of ice cream, and even some powdered juice in that unrepeatable jug.

  The next thing I remember is that we woke up sprawled in the living room, not just the bride and me but a ton of other people, some of whom I’d never even met,
though I don’t know if they were crashing the party or were distant cousins of the bride, who had—I discovered then—an astonishing number of distant cousins. It was maybe ten in the morning. We were all having trouble stringing words together, but I wanted to try out the ultramodern coffeemaker my sister had given us, so I brewed several liters of coffee and little by little we shook off our sleep. I went to the big bathroom—the small one was covered in vomit—and I saw my friend Maite sleeping in the tub, lolling in an unlikely position, though she looked pretty comfortable, her right cheek pressed against the ceramic as if it were an enviable feather pillow. I woke her up and offered her a cup of coffee, but she opted for a beer instead to keep the hangover at bay.

  Later, at around one in the afternoon, Farra switched on a camera he’d brought with him to film the party but had only just remembered. I was flopped in a corner of the room, drinking my zillionth coffee while the bride dozed against my chest. “Tell me, how does it feel?” Farra questioned me, in the tone of an overenthusiastic small-town reporter.

  “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.

  Two years later, just as Farra had foretold, we went to see him in his office. The divorce law was still stalled in Congress; it was said that its approval was imminent, but Farra told us that in no way was it worth waiting for. He even thought that afterward, once it passed, divorce would be more expensive than annulment. He explained the process to us. We’d already known that the judgment of nullity was ridiculous, but when we learned the details, it also struck us as immoral. We had to declare that neither she nor I had lived at the addresses that appeared on our marriage contract, and we had to find some witnesses who would attest to it.

  “How idiotic,” I told the bride that afternoon, at a café on Agustinas. “How pathetic, how shameful to be a judge who listens to someone lie and pretends not to know they’re lying.”

  “Chile is idiotic,” she said, and I think that was the last time the two of us were in total agreement on something. We didn’t want to get an annulment, but it was fitting, in some sense. Now that I think about it, the best way to summarize our story together would be that I gradually annulled her and she me, until finally we were both entirely annulled.

  __________

  In May 2004, Chile became the penultimate country in the world to legalize divorce, but the bride and I had already gotten our annulment. Maite and the poet, who were a couple by then, were going to be our witnesses, but at the last minute the poet backed out and I had to ask the favor of the woman whom, a few years later, I married. I’m not going to tell that story here; it’s enough to say that with her, things were completely different. With her, things worked out: she and I were able, finally, to divorce.

  Exercises:

  75. The general tone of this story is:

  A) Melancholic

  B) Comic

  C) Parodic

  D) Sarcastic

  E) Nostalgic

  76. What is the worst title for this story—the one that would reach the widest possible audience?

  A) “Five Thousand and One Nights”

  B) “Two Years of Solitude”

  C) “Fourteen Years of Solitude”

  D) “Two Weddings and No Funeral”

  E) “The
Labyrinth of Nullity”

  77. In your opinion, who is the victim and who is the victimizer, respectively, in this story?

  A) The bride / the groom

  B) The poet / Maite

  C) Chile / Chile

  D) Liver / concoction

  E) Liquor / beer

  78. According to the text, at the beginning of the twenty-first century the nation of Chile was:

  A) Conservative in its morality and liberal in its economy.

  B) Conservative in its inebriety and artificial in all things holy.

  C) Innovative in its levity and literal in its tragedy.

  D) Aggressive in its religiosity and conjugal in its wizardry.

  E) Exhaustive in its chicanery and indecisive in its celerity.

  79. The narrator doesn’t mention the bride’s name because:

  A) He wants to protect her. Moreover, he knows that he doesn’t have the right to name her, to expose her. That fear of naming her, in any case, is so 1990s.

  B) He wants to protect the woman’s identity because he’s afraid she might sue him.

  C) He says he’ll eventually forget the woman’s name, but maybe he’s already forgotten it. Or maybe he’s still in love with her. There’s someone I’m trying so hard to forget. Don’t you want to forget someone too?

  D) He’s a misogynist. And a sexist. He’s so vain, he probably thinks the story is about him. Doesn’t he? Doesn’t he?

  E) If you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with.

  80. According to the text, the divorce law wasn’t passed sooner in Chile because:

  A) The Catholic Church lobbied intensely against it, even threatening to excommunicate the congresspeople who supported the bill.

  B) There were other priorities in the areas of health, education, and justice.

  C) The priority was to indefinitely put off any reform that might put the country’s stability at risk.

  D) The priority was to put off indefinitely any reform that might put at risk the interests of corporations and the impunity of those responsible for crimes during the dictatorship, including, of course, Pinochet. In this context, the divorce law was hardly a question of values, and even the right-wing leaders—many of whom “annulled” and remarried—knew it was disgraceful that Chile still hadn’t legalized divorce, but they put the matter off until they needed a powerful distraction that would neutralize the public outcry for justice and radical reforms.