Multiple Choice

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.

E) A much better system existed: annulment. Because when a couple separates, what we really want is to believe that we were never married, that the person with whom we wanted to share our lives never existed. Nullity was the best way to erase the unerasable.

81. Which of the following famous phrases best reflects the meaning of the text?

A) “Marriage is the chief cause of divorce.” (Groucho Marx)

B) “A marriage is no amusement but a solemn act, and generally a sad one.” (Queen Victoria)

C) “A second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.” (Samuel Johnson)