Ways of Going Home: A Novel Page 3

  Night fell over that forbidden neck as I looked at it ever more fixedly, as if staring would free me from that flight, as if watching her intensely would protect me. By that point the bus was starting to fill up and one woman looked at me, expecting me to give her my seat, but I couldn’t risk losing my place. I decided to act like I was mentally retarded, or the way I thought a mentally retarded boy would act—a boy who looked straight ahead, entranced and completely absorbed by an imaginary world.

  Raúl’s supposed girlfriend got off the bus suddenly and almost left me behind. I barely made it to the door, elbowing my way out. She waited for me and helped me down. I kept moving like a retarded child, though she knew full well that I wasn’t a retarded child but rather Raúl’s neighbor who had followed her, who seemed resolved to follow her all night long. There was no reproach in her gaze, though—only an absolute serenity.

  I ventured with pointless discretion into a maze of streets that seemed big and old. Every once in a while she would turn around, smile at me, and speed up, as if it were a game and not an extremely serious matter. Suddenly she started to trot and then took off running, just like that, and I almost lost her; then I saw her go into a shop far ahead. I climbed a tree and waited several minutes for her to finally come out, assuming I would be gone. Then she walked just half a block farther, to what had to be her house. I waited until she had gone in and I went closer. The fence was green and the facade was blue, and that caught my attention, because I had never seen that color combination before. I wrote the address in my notebook, happy to have gotten such exact information.

  I had a hard time getting back to the street where I had to catch the return bus. But I remembered the name clearly: Tobalaba. I got home at one in the morning, and I was so frightened that I couldn’t even outline a convincing explanation. My parents had gone to the police, and the affair had leaked to the neighbors. I finally told them I had fallen asleep in a plaza and had only just woken up. They believed me, and later they even made me see a doctor who checked me for sleep disorders.

  Emboldened by my discoveries, I arrived at our Thursday date firmly intending to tell Claudia everything I knew about Raúl’s supposed girlfriend.

  But things didn’t turn out that way. Claudia arrived late to the meeting, and she wasn’t alone. With a friendly gesture she introduced me to Esteban, a guy with long blond hair. She told me I could trust him and that he knew the whole story. I tensed up, disconcerted, not daring to ask if he was her boyfriend or cousin or what. He must have been seventeen or eighteen years old: a little older than Claudia, a lot older than me.

  Esteban bought three marraquetas and a quarter of a kilo of mortadella at the supermarket. We didn’t go to the temple. We stayed in the plaza to eat. The guy didn’t talk much, but that afternoon I spoke even less. I didn’t tell Claudia what I had discovered, maybe as a form of revenge, since I wasn’t prepared for what was happening; I couldn’t understand why someone else was allowed to know what I was doing with Claudia, why she was allowed to share our secret.

  I acted like the child I was and missed our meetings after that. I thought that was what I should do: forget about Claudia. But after a few weeks I was surprised to get a letter from her. She summoned me urgently, asking me to come see her anytime; she said it didn’t matter if her mother was home or not.

  It was almost nine at night. Magali opened the door and asked my name, but it was obvious she already knew it. Claudia greeted me effusively and told her mother that I was Raúl’s neighbor, and Magali made excessive gestures of delight. “You’ve grown so much,” she said, “I didn’t recognize you.” I’m sure they were performing a rehearsed introduction, and the questions the woman directed at me were entirely studied in advance. A bit bewildered by the situation, I asked if she was still an English teacher, and she answered with a smile that yes, it wasn’t easy to stop, overnight, being an English teacher.

  I asked Claudia to tell me what had happened: How had things changed so much that now my presence was legitimate?

  “It’s more like things are changing little by little,” she told me. “Very slowly, things are changing. You don’t need to spy on Raúl anymore, you can come and see me whenever you want, but you don’t have to make any reports,” she repeated, and all I could do was leave, brooding over a deep disquiet.

  I went to Claudia’s one or two more times, but I ran into Esteban again. I never found out if he was her boyfriend or not, but in any case I detested him. And then I stopped going, and the days went by like a gust of wind. For some months or maybe a year I forgot all about Claudia. Until one morning I saw Raúl loading up a white truck with dozens of boxes.

  Everything happened very quickly. I went up to him and asked where he was going, and he didn’t answer: he looked at me with a neutral and evasive gesture. I took off running to Claudia’s house. I wanted to warn her, and as I was running I discovered that I also wanted her to forgive me. But Claudia wasn’t there anymore.

  “They left a few days ago,” said the woman next door. “I don’t know where they went, how should I know that?” she said. “To another neighborhood, I guess.”

  LITERATURE OF THE PARENTS

  I’m advancing little by little in the novel. I pass the time thinking about Claudia as if she existed, as if she had existed. At first I questioned even her name. But it’s the name 90 percent of the women of my generation share. It’s right that she should have that name. I never get tired of the sound, either. Claudia.

  I like that my characters don’t have last names. It’s a relief.

  * * *

  One of these days this house will start to refuse me. I wanted to start to inhabit it again, organize the books, rearrange the furniture, fix up the yard a bit. None of that has been possible. But a few fingers of mescal are helping for now.

  This afternoon I spoke, for the second time in a long time, with Eme. We asked about the friends we have in common, and then, after more than a year of separation, we talked about the books she took with her or accidentally forgot. It seemed painful to go over the list of losses in such a civilized way, but in the end I even roused myself to ask for the books by Hebe Uhart and Josefina Vicens that I’ve missed so much.

  “I read them,” she said. For a second I thought she was lying, even though she never lies about things like that; she never lied about anything, really. That was exactly our problem, we didn’t lie. We failed because of the desire to always be honest.

  Then she told me about the house where she lives—a mansion, really, some twenty blocks from here, which she shares with two girlfriends.

  “You don’t know them,” she told me, “and they aren’t really my friends, but we make a good group: thirty-year-old women happily chatting about our frustrations.” I told her I could go see her and bring the books she needed. She said no. “I want to come over myself, one of these days, after Christmas. You can give me a cup of tea and we’ll talk,” she said.

  “Since we’ve been separated,” she added suddenly, forcing or searching for a natural tone, “since we’ve been separated I’ve slept with two men.”

  “I haven’t been with any,” I answered, joking.

  “Then you haven’t changed all that much,” she told me, laughing.

  “But I’ve been with two women,” I told her. The truth is that it’s been only one. I lied, maybe to even the score. Still, I couldn’t go on with the game. “The mere idea of you with someone else is unbearable,” I said, and we had a hard time, after that, filling the silence.

  I remember the day she left. It’s supposed to be the man who leaves the house. While she cried and packed her things, the only thing I managed to say to her was that absurd sentence: “It’s supposed to be the man who leaves the house.” In some ways I still feel that this space is hers. That’s why it’s so hard for me to live here.

  Talking to her again was good and perhaps necessary. I told her about the new novel. I said that at first I was keeping a steady pace, but little by little
I had lost the rhythm, or the precision.

  “Why don’t you just write it all at once?” she advised, as if she didn’t know me, as if she hadn’t been with me through so many nights of writing.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. And it’s true, I don’t know.

  The thing is, Eme—I think now, a little drunk—I’m waiting for a voice. A voice that isn’t mine. An old voice, novelistic and solid.

  Or maybe it’s just that I like working on the book. That I prefer writing to having written. I’d rather stay there, inhabit the time of the book, cohabit with those years, chase the distant images at length and then carefully go over them again. See them badly, but see them. To just stay there, looking.

  * * *

  As is to be expected, I spent the whole day thinking about Eme. It’s thanks to her that I found the story for the novel. It must have been five years ago, when we had just moved into this house. We were still in bed at noon and were telling anecdotes from our childhoods, as lovers do who want to know everything, who cast about for old stories to exchange with the other person, who also searches: to find themselves in that illusion of control, of surrender.

  She was seven or eight years old, in the yard with other little girls, playing hide-and-seek. It was getting late, time to go inside; the adults were calling and the girls answered that they were coming. The push and pull went on, the calls were more and more urgent, but the girls laughed and kept playing.

  Suddenly they realized the adults had stopped calling them a while ago and night had already fallen. They thought the adults must be watching them, trying to teach them a lesson, and that now the grown-ups were the ones playing hide-and-seek. But no. When she went inside, Eme saw that her father’s friends were crying and that her mother, rooted to her seat, was staring off into space. They were listening to the news on the radio. A voice was talking about a raid. It talked about the dead, about more dead.

  “That happened so many times,” Eme said that day, five years ago. “We kids understood, all of a sudden, that we weren’t so important. That there were unfathomable and serious things that we couldn’t know or understand.”

  The novel belongs to our parents, I thought then, I think now. That’s what we grew up believing, that the novel belonged to our parents. We cursed them, and also took refuge in their shadows, relieved. While the adults killed or were killed, we drew pictures in a corner. While the country was falling to pieces, we were learning to talk, to walk, to fold napkins in the shape of boats, of airplanes. While the novel was happening, we played hide-and-seek, we played at disappearing.

  * * *

  Instead of writing, I spent the morning drinking beer and reading Madame Bovary. Now I think the best thing I’ve done in recent years has been to drink a lot of beer and reread certain books with dedication, with an odd fidelity, as if something of my own beat within them, some clue to my destiny. Apart from that, to read morosely, stretched out in bed for long hours and doing nothing to soothe my burning eyes—it’s the perfect pretext for waiting for night to fall. And that’s what I hope for, nothing more: that night will come quickly.

  I still remember the afternoon when the teacher turned to the blackboard and wrote the words quiz, next, Friday, Madame, Bovary, Gustave, Flaubert, French. With each letter the silence grew, until finally only the sad squeak of the chalk could be heard.

  By that time we had already read long novels, some almost as long as Madame Bovary, but this time the deadline was impossible: we had less than a week to confront a four-hundred-page novel. We were starting to get used to those surprises, though: we had just entered the National Institute, we were eleven or twelve years old, and we understood that from then on, all the books would be long.

  I feel sure that those teachers didn’t want to inspire enthusiasm for books, but rather to deter us from them, to put us off books forever. They didn’t waste their spit talking about the joy of reading, maybe because they had lost that joy or they’d never really felt it. Supposedly they were good teachers, but back then being good meant little more than knowing the textbook.

  After a while we learned the tricks that were passed down from one generation to the next. They taught us to be cheaters, and we were fast learners. Every test had a section of character identification, which included only secondary characters: the less relevant the characters, the more likely we would be asked about them, so we memorized names resignedly, though with the pleasure of guaranteed points. It was important to know that the errand boy with a limp was named Hipólito and the maid was Félicité, and that the name of Emma’s daughter was Berta Bovary.

  There was a certain beauty in the act, because back then we were exactly that: secondary characters, hundreds of children who crisscrossed the city lugging denim backpacks. The neighbors would test the weight and always make the same joke: “What are you carrying in there, rocks?” Downtown Santiago welcomed us with tear gas bombs, but we weren’t carrying rocks, we were carrying bricks by Baldor or Villee or Flaubert.

  Madame Bovary was one of the few novels we had in our house, so I started reading that very same night, but I grew impatient with all the description. Flaubert’s prose simply made me doze off. I had to resort to the emergency method my father taught me: read the first two pages and then the last two, and only then, only after knowing how the novel begins and ends, do you continue reading in order.

  “Even if you don’t finish, at least you already know who the killer is,” said my father, who apparently only read books that had killers.

  So the first thing I ascertained about Madame Bovary was that the shy, tall boy from the first chapter would ultimately die, and that his daughter would end up as a laborer in a cotton factory. I already knew about Emma’s suicide, since some of the parents had complained that suicide was too harsh a subject for children of twelve, to which the teacher replied that no, the suicide of a woman hounded by debt was a very contemporary subject, one that children of twelve could understand perfectly well.

  I didn’t get much further in my reading. I studied the summaries my deskmate had written, and the day before the test I found a copy of the movie in the Maipú video store. My mother tried to keep me from watching it, saying it wasn’t appropriate for my age; I thought so too—or rather, I hoped so. Madame Bovary sounded pornographic to me; everything French sounded pornographic to me.

  In that sense, the movie was a disappointment, but I watched it twice and filled in the required worksheets on both sides. I got only a 3.6 after all that, and for some time I associated Madame Bovary with a 3.6, which I also tied to the name of the film’s director, written with exclamation points by my teacher next to my bad grade: Vincente Minnelli!!

  * * *

  Now I look for Berta in the novel. I remembered only the moment, in Chapter Five of the second part, when Emma looks at Berta and thinks, surprised, Look how ugly the girl is. And the terrible scene of Charles’s death, when Berta thinks her father is pretending: “Thinking he was playing a joke on her, she gave him a little push. Bovary fell to the floor. He was dead.”

  I like to imagine Berta prowling about the yard while her mother is in bed, convalescing: from her room, Emma hears the sound of a carriage, and she approaches the window with difficulty to look down at the now deserted street.

  I like to imagine Berta learning to read. First, Emma is the one who tries to teach her. After her great disappointment, she has decided to rededicate her life and become a woman of pious occupations. Berta is still very small and surely doesn’t understand the lessons. But during those days or weeks or months her mother has all the patience in the world: she teaches her daughter to read and mends clothes for the poor and even reads religious books.

  Sometime later, Charles takes Berta on a walk and tries to teach her to read using a medical book. But the girl isn’t in the habit of studying, so she gets sad and starts to cry.

  There’s a passage where Charles thinks about Berta’s future, and of course he is very wrong when he imagines
her at fifteen, strolling in the summertime wearing a big straw hat, as beautiful as her mother. “Looking at them from far away they look like sisters,” thinks Charles, satisfied.

  * * *

  Eme finally came over. As a Christmas gift she gave me a box of magnets with hundreds of English words. We assembled the first phrase together, which turned out, somehow, to be opportune:

  only love & noise

  She showed me her recent drawings, but wouldn’t read the first pages of my book. She looked at me with a new expression, one I didn’t recognize.

  It’s amazing: the face of a loved one, the face of someone we’ve lived with, whom we think we know, maybe the only face we would be able to describe, which we’ve looked at for years, from up close—it’s beautiful and in a certain way terrible to know that even that face can suddenly, unpredictably, unleash new expressions. Expressions we’ve never seen before. Expressions that perhaps we’ll never see again.

  * * *

  Back then we didn’t know the names of the streets, of the trees, of the birds. We didn’t need to. We lived with few words and it was possible to answer any question by saying: I don’t know. We didn’t think it was ignorance. We called it honesty. Later we learned, little by little, the nuances. The names of trees, birds, rivers. And we decided that any words were better than silence.

  But I’m against nostalgia.

  No, that’s not true. I’d like to be against nostalgia. Everywhere you look there’s someone renewing vows with the past. We recall songs we never really liked, we meet up with our first girlfriends again, or classmates we didn’t get along with, we greet with open arms people we used to reject.