CHILE: School for Scandal

It was sex, spicy even in vernal Santiago, and Chileans loved it. They snatched copies of the racy tabloid afternooner Ultima Hora as soon as it hit the newsstands, turned immediately to their favorite feature, “Matrimonial Fair.”

There boys just in from the country advertised for a friend to pass the lonely hours, and an aged romancer “with good financial condition but can’t get along with my wife” sought companionship. Most popular part of the Fair: a red-hot sideshow column of lovelorn advice signed by “Professor Voltaire Bonhomme” (a last-minute daily composite of Ultima Hora’s most fertile minds).

One young Ecuadorian student, for instance, complained that, when he came to live in a small Santiago boardinghouse, his “beautiful rich young stepmother,” determined to be his first love, had followed him. She had offered him riches, had declared that she would allow no other woman to be the first. Virgilio, the student, wrote that he had published two ads in the Fair to find someone to frustrate his stepmother’s desires, had had no success. “I’ll publish one more, Professor,” he warned, “and if I fail I’m going to become a priest.”

The professor’s reply: Virgilio was crazy to turn down such an offer, should “hurry and take her up on it at once.”