Ways of Going Home: A Novel Read online

  I’m amazed at the ease with which we forget what we felt, what we wanted. The speed with which we assume that now we want or feel something different. And at the same time we want to laugh at the same jokes. We want to be, we believe we are again, children who are blessed by shadow.

  I’m in that trap now, in the novel. Yesterday I wrote the reunion scene that takes place almost twenty years later. I liked how it turned out, but sometimes I think the characters shouldn’t meet again. That perhaps they should pass each other by many times, walk down the same streets, maybe even talk to each other without recognizing each other, from one side of a counter to the other.

  Do we really recognize someone twenty years later? Can we recognize now, in some luminous sign, the definitive features, irrevocably adult, of a bygone face? I’ve spent the afternoon thinking about that, deliberating that.

  It seems beautiful to me for them to never reunite. To simply go on with separate lives until the present, slowly getting closer and closer: two parallel trajectories that never quite meet. But someone else will have to write that novel. I would like to read it. Because in the novel I want to write they meet again. I need for them to meet again.

  * * *

  “Do they fall in love? Is it a love story?”

  Eme asks this and I just smile. She arrived mid-afternoon; we drank several cups of tea and listened to an entire Kinks album. I asked her to let me read her a few pages of the manuscript and again she refused. “I’d rather read them when you’re further along,” she said.

  “I’m writing about you, the protagonist is a lot like you,” I said bravely.

  “All the more reason,” she answered, smiling, “I’d rather read it when you’re further along. But I’m so happy you’ve started writing again,” she added. “I like what happens to you when you write. Writing is good for you, it protects you.”

  “Protects me from what?”

  “The words protect you. You search for phrases, you search for words, that’s really good,” she said.

  Later she asked me for more details about the story. I told her very little, the minimum. When I talked about Claudia, I started to question her name again.

  She asked me later, half-joking, if the characters stay together for the rest of their lives. I couldn’t avoid a flicker of annoyance. I answered no: they see each other again as adults and they get involved for a few weeks, maybe months, but in no way do they stay together. I told her it couldn’t be like that, it’s never like that.

  “It’s never like that in good novels, but in bad novels anything is possible,” said Eme as she tied up her hair nervously, flirtatiously.

  I looked at her chapped lips, her cheeks, her short eyelashes. She seemed to be sunk into a deep contemplation. Soon after, she left. I didn’t want her to leave yet. But she left. She’s taking serious precautions. I agree, I don’t think it would be good for us to live together again either, for now. We need time.

  Afterward I tried to keep writing. I don’t know which direction to take. I don’t want to talk about innocence or guilt; I want nothing more than to illuminate some corners, the corners where we were. But I’m not sure I can do it well. I feel too close to what I’m telling. I’ve abused some memories, I’ve sacked my memory, and also, in a certain way, I’ve made up too much. I’m starting from scratch again, like a caricature of a writer staring impotently at the screen.

  I didn’t tell Eme how hard it is for me to write without her. I remember her sleepy face, when I went to her very late to read her just a paragraph or a sentence. She listened and nodded or else said, accurately: It wouldn’t be like that, this character wouldn’t answer with those words. Those kinds of valuable, essential observations.

  Now I’m going to write again with her, I think. And I feel happy.

  * * *

  Last night I walked for hours. It was as if I wanted to get lost down some unknown street. To get absolutely and happily lost. But there are moments when we can’t, when we don’t know how to lose our way. Even if we always go in the wrong direction. Even if we lose all our points of reference. Even if it begins to grow late and we feel the weight of morning as we advance. There are times when no matter how we try to find out what we don’t know, we can’t lose our way. And perhaps we long for the time when we could be lost. The time when all the streets were new.

  I’ve spent several days remembering the landscape of Maipú, comparing its image—a world of identical houses, red bricks and vinyl flooring—with the old streets where I’ve lived for years now, where each house is different from the next—uneven bricks, parquet floors—these noble streets that don’t belong to me but that I travel with familiarity. Streets named after people, after real places, after battles lost and won, and not those fantastical streets, that false world where we grew up quickly.

  * * *

  This morning I saw a woman reading, on a bench in Intercommunal Park. I sat down across from her just to get a look at her face, but it was impossible. The book absorbed her gaze completely, and there were a few moments I believed she was aware of it. That holding the book like that—at the exact height of her eyes, with both hands, her elbows resting on an imaginary table—was her way of hiding.

  I saw her white forehead and her almost blond hair, but never her eyes. The book was her disguise, a precious mask.

  Her long fingers held up the book like strong, slender branches. I got close enough at one point to see that her nails were ragged, as if she had been chewing them.

  I’m sure she sensed my presence, but she didn’t lower the book. She held it as if she were meeting someone else’s gaze.

  To read is to cover one’s face, I thought.

  To read is to cover one’s face. And to write is to show it.

  * * *

  Today I watched The Battle of Chile, the documentary by Patricio Guzmán. I’d only seen bits and pieces, mostly from the second part of the film when they showed it once at school, after democracy was restored. I remember how the student president narrated the scenes, and every so often would stop the tape so he could tell us how seeing these images was more important than learning the multiplication tables.

  We understood, of course, what he was trying to say, but his example still seemed strange to us, because if we were in that school it was precisely because we had known the multiplication tables for many years. Someone in the last row of the auditorium interrupted to ask if seeing those images was more important than learning to divide decimals, and then someone asked if, instead of learning the periodic table, we could watch those images over and over, since they were so important. No one laughed, though. The student president didn’t want to answer, but he looked at us with a mixture of sadness and irony. Then another representative intervened and said: “There are some things you shouldn’t joke about. If you understand that, you can stay in the room.”

  I didn’t remember or I hadn’t seen the long sequence of The Battle of Chile that takes place in the fields of Maipú. Workers and peasants defend the land and argue heatedly with a representative from Salvador Allende’s government. I thought how that land could very well be Aladdin Street. The land where, later on, neighborhoods with fantasy names would appear and where we would live, the new families—with no history—of Pinochet’s Chile.

  * * *

  School changed a lot when democracy returned. I had just turned thirteen and was belatedly starting to get to know my classmates: children of murdered, tortured, disappeared parents. Children of murderers as well. Rich kids, poor kids, good kids, bad kids. Good rich kids, bad rich kids, good poor kids, bad poor kids. It’s absurd to put it that way, but I remember thinking about it more or less like that. I remember thinking, without pride or self-pity, that I was not rich or poor, that I wasn’t good or bad. But that was difficult: to be neither good nor bad. It seemed to me, in the end, the same as being bad.

  I remember a history teacher I had in high school, when I was sixteen, one whom I didn’t particularly like. One morning
three thieves who were fleeing the police took cover in the school’s parking lot, and the cops followed them and fired a couple of shots into the air. We got scared and threw ourselves to the floor, but once the danger had passed we were surprised to see our teacher crying under the table, with his eyes squeezed shut and his hands over his ears. We brought water and tried to convince him to drink it, but finally we had to throw it in his face. He slowly managed to calm down as we explained to him that no, the military had not taken over again. That class could continue. “I don’t want to be here, I never wanted to be here,” the teacher repeated, shouting. Then there was complete, compassionate silence. A beautiful and restorative silence.

  I ran into the teacher a few days later, during break. I asked him how he was, and he thanked me for asking. “I can tell you know what I lived through,” he said in a sign of complicity. Of course I knew, we all knew; he had been tortured and his cousin was taken prisoner and disappeared. “I don’t believe in this democracy,” he said. “Chile is and will always be a battleground.” He asked me if I was politically active, and I said no. He asked about my family, and I told him that during the dictatorship my parents had kept to the sidelines. The teacher looked at me curiously or disdainfully—he looked at me curiously but I felt that his gaze also held disdain.

  * * *

  I didn’t write or read anything in Punta Arenas. I spent the entire week defending myself from the weather and talking with new friends. On the return flight I sat next to two women who told me their life stories in detail. All was well until they asked me what I did for a living. I never know how to respond. I used to say I was a teacher, which tended to lead to long and confused conversations about Chile’s crisis in education. So now I say I’m a writer, and when they ask what kind of books I write, I say, to avoid a long and uncertain explanation, that I write action novels; it isn’t exactly a lie, since in all novels, even mine, things happen.

  Instead of asking what kind of books I write, though, the woman next to me wanted to know what my pseudonym was. I answered that I didn’t use a pseudonym. That writers hadn’t been using pseudonyms for years now. She looked at me skeptically, and from that moment on her interest in me waned. When we said goodbye she told me not to worry, maybe soon I would come up with a good pseudonym.

  * * *

  A while ago the poet Rodrigo Olavarría stopped by to see me. We don’t know each other well but there is a sort of prior and reciprocal trust that allies us. I like that he gives advice. Now that I think about it, there was a time when everyone gave advice. When life consisted of giving and receiving advice. But then all of a sudden, no one wanted any more advice. It was too late, we’d fallen in love with failure, and the wounds were trophies just like when we were kids, after we’d been playing under the trees. But Rodrigo gives advice. And he listens to it, asks for it. He’s in love with failure, but he’s also, still, in love with old and noble kinds of friendship.

  We spent the afternoon listening to Bill Callahan and Emmy the Great. It was fun. Later I told him about the conversation in the airplane. We decided to get together, one of these days, to choose pseudonyms. “You’ll see, we’re going to find some great ones,” he said.

  Rodrigo doesn’t remember exactly when he saw The Battle of Chile for the first time, but he knows the documentary by heart, because back in Puerto Montt in the mid-eighties his parents sold pirated copies to raise money for the Communist Party’s activities. When he was eight or nine, Rodrigo had the job of changing the tapes and stockpiling the new copies in a cardboard box. “I spent the whole afternoon,” he told me, “doing homework and copying that documentary two at a time, with four VHS tapes and two TVs. The only breaks were to watch Robotech on Channel Thirteen.”

  * * *

  Sick with a bad cold, in bed for days. I self-medicate with high doses of television. Eme’s visits always seem too short. I asked her again to listen to the first pages of the novel and she again said no. Her excuse was poor and realistic: “You’re sick,” she said. A little while ago I insisted and she refused again. It’s obvious that she doesn’t want to read them; maybe she’d rather not resume that part of our relationship.

  Well. I just watched Good Morning, Ozu’s beautiful movie. What greater happiness than to know that movie exists, that I can watch it many times, that I can watch it always.

  * * *

  In the morning I gave myself the stupid task of hiding my cigarettes in different corners of the house. Of course I find them, but I don’t smoke much, I smoke less, I struggle to get better once and for all. My illness lasts too long, though, and every once in a while I wonder if I’ve caught the swine flu. Only the fever is missing, although I’ve just read on the Internet that some patients don’t list fever among their symptoms.

  Last night, the emergency room of the Indisa Clinic was full of people with real or imaginary illnesses, but they astonishingly attended to me immediately. There was an explanation. A young, gray-haired doctor appeared and told me, indicating the name tag on his coat: “We’re family.” And it really is likely that we are related in some way. “I bought your books,” he told me, “but I haven’t read them.” He apologized in a humiliating or merely comic way: “I don’t even have time to read the kind of short books you write,” he said. “But a year ago I talked about you to my relatives in Careno.” To amaze the doctor with my ignorance, I asked him where Careno was.

  “It’s in Italy, the north of Italy,” he answered, scandalized. Then he lowered his eyes, as if in forgiveness. He asked me what my father’s name was, my grandfather, my great-grandfather. I answered compliantly but soon got tired of so many questions and told him that there was no point in having this conversation—“My family is definitely descended from some bastard child.” I told him: “We come from some patrón who didn’t take responsibility.” I told him that in my family we’re all dark-skinned—the doctor himself was very white and fairly ugly, with that hygienic whiteness that in some people hardly seems real. Resigned to not finding any sign of encouragement from me, the doctor told me that every year he traveled to Careno, where there are many people with our last name, since historically the family was quite inbred.

  “There are lots of marriages between siblings and between cousins, so the genes aren’t so good,” he said.

  “We don’t have that problem,” I told him. “In my branch of the family we treat our cousins with respect.”

  He laughed, or tried to laugh. I wanted, I’m not sure why, to apologize. But before I could say the sentence I was vaguely trying to formulate, the doctor asked about my symptoms. He was in a hurry now. He spent barely two minutes on my ailment, roundly denying I had the swine flu, as if reproaching me for even thinking it. He didn’t even lecture me about how many cigarettes I smoke.

  I went home a bit humiliated, with the same antiflu medicines as always, thinking about those families in far-off Careno, about what my face would be like white, washed-out, or about my distant desire, once upon a time, to study medicine. I imagined that same doctor, older than me in medical school, answering emphatically, annoyed: no, we’re not related.

  * * *

  Parents abandon their children. Children abandon their parents. Parents protect or forsake, but they always forsake. Children stay or go but they always go. And it’s all unfair, especially the sound of the words, because the language is pleasing and confusing, because ultimately we would like to sing or at least whistle a tune, to walk alongside the stage whistling a tune. We want to be actors waiting patiently for the cue to walk onstage. But the audience left a long time ago.

  * * *

  Today I made up this joke:

  “When I grow up I’m going to be a secondary character,” a boy says to his father.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you want to be a secondary character?”

  “Because the novel is yours.”

  * * *

  I’m writing in my parents’ house. It’s been
a long time since I’ve been here. I prefer to see them in town, at lunchtime. But this time I wanted to watch the Chile-versus-Paraguay game with my father, thinking I could also refresh some details for the story while I was here. It’s the trip in the novel, the frightened protagonist’s trip home at the end of the long evening when he follows Raúl’s supposed girlfriend. I wrote that passage thinking about a real trip I took more or less at that age.

  One afternoon, after lunch, I was getting ready to go out when my father said no, I had to stay home and study English. I asked why, since I was getting good grades in English. “Because it isn’t prudent for you to go out so much.” He used that word, prudent, I remember exactly. “And because I am your father and you have to obey me,” he said.

  It seemed brutal to me, but I studied, or at least I pretended to. At night, before going to sleep, still angry, I told my father that it made me so mad to be a kid and to have to ask permission for everything, that it would be better to be an orphan. I only said it to annoy him, but he gave me a sly look and went to talk to my mother. I could tell by her gestures as they approached that they didn’t agree on the measure they were about to announce to me, but that I would have to abide by it anyway.

  Before speaking to me they called my sister to witness the scene. My father addressed her first. He told her they had been living a lie. That until then they had believed she was the older sibling, but that they had just discovered she wasn’t. “So, we’re going to give your brother the keys to the house—you can go out and come home whatever time you want, from now on you’re in charge of yourself,” he told me, looking me in the eye. “No one will ask you where you’re going or if you have homework or anything else.”

  So it was. I enjoyed those privileges for several weeks. They treated me like an adult, with only a few traces of irony. I grew desperate. I told my mother I was going very far away and she answered that I shouldn’t forget to take my suitcase with me. I didn’t take a suitcase, but one afternoon I anxiously boarded a random bus, prepared to stay on until the end of its route and with no plan for when I got there.