Ways of Going Home: A Novel Read online

  I didn’t get to the end of the route, but I did almost reach the neighborhood where I live now. The trip took over an hour and when I got back they yelled at me a lot. That was what I wanted. I was happy to have my parents back. And I had also discovered a new world. A world I didn’t like, but a new one.

  That route doesn’t exist anymore. Today I came by metro and then bus and I got to Maipú by way of Los Pajaritos. I’m always surprised at the number of Chinese restaurants on the avenue. For years now, Maipú has been a small big city, and the stores I frequented as a child are now bank branches or fast-food chains.

  Before I got to my parents’ house I took a detour to pass by Lucila Godoy Alcayaga. The street was closed off with an eye-catching electric gate, as was the passage Neftalí Reyes Basoalto. I didn’t feel like asking anyone going by to let me in. I wanted to see Claudia’s house, which in reality was, for a time, my friend Carla Andreu’s house. I headed, then, for Aladdin. The neighborhood is full of attics now, second floors that look out of place, ostentatious roofs. No longer is it the dream of equality. Just the opposite. Lots of houses have been abused, and others are luxurious. Some of them look abandoned.

  There were changes as well in my parents’ house. I was struck most of all by the sight of a new bookshelf in the living room. I recognized the automotive encyclopedia, the BBC English course, and the old books put out by Ercilla magazine, with its collections of Chilean, Spanish, and world literatures. On the middle shelf there was also a series of novels by Isabel Allende, Hernán Rivera Letelier, Marcela Serrano, John Grisham, Barbara Wood, Carla Guelfenbein, and Pablo Simonetti, and closer to the floor were some books I read as a child for school: The Löwensköld Ring by Selma Lagerlöf, Alsino by Pedro Prado, Michael Strogoff by Jules Verne, El ultimo grumete de la Baquedano by Francisco Coloane, Fermina Márquez by Valéry Larbaud. Well. I wish I’d kept them myself, but I’m sure I forgot them in some box my parents found in the attic.

  It was discomfiting to see those books there, hastily ordered on a red melamine shelf, flanked by posters of hunting scenes or sunrises and a faded reproduction of Las Meninas that has been in the house forever and that my father still proudly shows visitors: “This is the painter, Velásquez; the painter painted himself,” he says.

  “Thanks to that library, your mother has started reading and I have too, though of course I’d rather watch movies,” said my father, and he turned on the TV right on time for the game. We celebrated goals by Mati Fernández and Humberto Suazo with a big pitcher of pisco sour and a couple bottles of wine. I drank much more than my father did. I’ve never seen him drunk, I thought, and for some reason I said it out loud to him.

  “I did see my father drunk, many times,” he answered abruptly, with a barely contained look of sadness.

  “Stay over, your sister is coming to lunch tomorrow,” my mother said. “You can’t drive in the state you’re in,” she added, and I reminded her of something she always forgets: I don’t have a car. “Oh,” she said. “That’s right. All the more reason you can’t drive,” she laughed. I like her laugh, especially when it comes suddenly, when it happens unexpectedly. It is serene and sweet at the same time.

  * * *

  I left home fifteen years ago, but I still feel a kind of strange pulse when I enter this room that used to be mine and is now a kind of storage room. At the back there’s a shelf full of DVDs and photo albums jumbled in the corner next to my books, the books I’ve published. It strikes me as beautiful that they’re here, next to the family mementos.

  * * *

  A little while ago, at two in the morning, I got up to make coffee and I was surprised to see my mother in the living room, drinking mate with a beginner’s graceful movements.

  “This is what I do now when I feel like smoking,” she said with a smile. She smokes very little, five cigarettes a day, but since my father quit he doesn’t let her smoke inside, and it’s too cold to open the window.

  “I’m going to smoke,” I said. “Let’s smoke. Dad can’t stop you from smoking, you’re too old for that now,” I said.

  “He only denies me cigarettes. I deny him lots of things—saturated fats, too much sugar. It’s only fair.”

  Finally I convinced her and we shut ourselves up in a sort of small room they had built to house an immense new washing machine. She smoked with the same movement as always, so markedly feminine: the cigarette tilted downward, her hand palm out, very close to her mouth.

  “What will I do,” she said suddenly, “if tomorrow your father realizes we were smoking?”

  “Tell him we didn’t smoke. That if it smells it’s because I smoke a lot. I smell like cigarettes. Tell him that. And then change the subject, tell him you’re worried because you think I’m smoking too much, and I’m going to die of cancer.”

  “But that would be a lie,” she said.

  “It wouldn’t be a lie,” I answered, “because sooner or later I am going to die of cancer.”

  My mother let out a deep sigh and slowly shook her head. Then she said something astonishing: “No one in my life has ever made me laugh as much as you. You are the funniest person I’ve ever met. But you’re also serious, and that was always disconcerting, it is disconcerting. You left home very young, and sometimes I wonder what life would be like if you hadn’t left. There are kids your age who still live with their parents. I see them go by sometimes and I think of you.”

  “Life would have been worse,” I said. “And those big babies are spoiled brats.”

  “Yes. It’s true. And you’re right. Life would be worse if you lived here. Before you left, your father and I used to fight a lot. But after you left, we didn’t fight as much. Now we hardly ever fight.”

  I wasn’t expecting that sudden moment of honesty. I sat there thinking, disheartened, but right away she asked me, as if it were relevant: “Do you like Carla Guelfenbein?”

  I didn’t know how to answer. “I think she’s pretty. I’d go out with her, but I wouldn’t sleep with her,” I said. “Maybe I’d kiss her, but I wouldn’t sleep with her, or I’d sleep with her but I wouldn’t kiss her.” My mother pretended to be scandalized. The gesture looked beautiful on her.

  “I’m asking if you like her writing.”

  “No, Mom. I don’t like it.”

  “But I like her novel. The Other Side of the Heart.”

  “The Other Side of the Soul,” I corrected her.

  “That’s it, The Other Side of the Soul. I identified with the characters, the book moved me.”

  “And how is it possible for you to identify with characters from another social class, with problems that aren’t and could never be problems in your life, Mom?”

  I spoke seriously, too seriously. I knew it wasn’t appropriate to speak seriously, but I couldn’t help it. She looked at me with a mixture of anger and compassion. With a little annoyance. “You’re wrong,” she said finally. “Maybe it’s not my social class, I agree. But social classes have changed a lot, everyone says so, and when I read that novel I felt that yes, those were my problems. I know what I’m saying bothers you, but you should be a little more tolerant.”

  It seemed very strange that my mother would use that word, tolerant. I went to sleep remembering my mother’s voice saying: You should be a little more tolerant.

  * * *

  After lunch my sister insisted on driving me home. She got her license a year ago but she really learned to drive only last month. She didn’t seem nervous, though. I was the nervous one. I chose to surrender, close my eyes and open them only when she shifted gears and the car stuttered too much. In moments of silence my sister accelerated, and when the conversation flowed she slowed down so much that other cars overtook us, horns sounding.

  “I feel bad about what happened with your marriage,” she told me, soon after we left the highway.

  “That was a long time ago,” I replied.

  “But I hadn’t told you that.”

  “We got back together recently.” My si
ster’s expression is something between incredulous and happy. I explain that for now it’s all fragile, tentative, but that I feel good. That we want to do things better this time. That we’re not living together again yet. She asks me why I didn’t tell our parents. “That’s exactly why,” I say. “It’s still too early to tell them.”

  Then she asks me if I’m going to write more books. I like the way she frames the question, since it implies the possibility that I could simply say no, enough already; and that’s what I do think, sometimes, at the end of a bad night: Soon I’ll stop writing, just like that, and someday I’ll have a distant memory of the time when I wrote books, the same way others remember the season they drove a taxi or worked selling dollars in Paseo Ahumada.

  But I answer yes, and she asks me to tell her what the new book is about. I don’t want to answer, and she realizes this and asks again. I tell her it’s about Maipú, about the earthquake of ’85, about childhood. She asks for more details, I give them to her. We reach my house and I invite her in; she doesn’t want to come but she also doesn’t want me to go. I know very well what she’s going to ask.

  “Am I in your book?” she finally says.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  * * *

  I’ve thought about it. Of course I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about it a lot. My answer is honest:

  “To protect you,” I say.

  She looks at me skeptically, hurt. She looks at me with a little girl’s expression.

  “It’s better not to be someone else’s character,” I say. “It’s better not to be in any book.”

  “And are you in the book?”

  “Yes. More or less. But it’s my book. I couldn’t not be in it. Even if I gave myself very different characteristics and a life very different from mine, I would still be in the book. I already made the decision not to protect myself.”

  “And are our parents in it?

  “Yes. There are characters like our parents.”

  “And why not protect our parents, too?”

  * * *

  For that question, I don’t have an answer. I suppose it’s their lot, simply, to appear. To receive less than they gave, to attend a masked ball and not understand very well why they are there. I’m not capable of saying any of that to my sister.

  “I don’t know, it’s fiction,” I tell her. “I have to go, sis.” I don’t call her by her name. I call her “sis,” give her a kiss on the cheek, and get out of the car.

  Back home I spend a long time thinking of my sister, my big sister. I remember this poem by Enrique Lihn:

  So the only child’s the eldest of his brothers

  and in his orphanhood has something

  of what eldest means. As though

  they too had died

  those impossible younger brothers.

  When we write we act like only children. As if we had been alone forever. Sometimes I hate this story, this profession that I can no longer leave. That now I’ll never leave.

  * * *

  I always thought I didn’t have real childhood memories. That my history fit into a few lines. On one page, maybe. In large print. I don’t think that anymore.

  The family weekend has crushed my will. I find consolation in a letter that Yasunari Kawabata wrote to his friend Yukio Mishima in 1962: “Whatever your mother says, your writing is magnificent.”

  * * *

  Just now I tried to write a poem, but I managed only these few lines:

  Growing up, I meant to be a memory

  But now I’ve had as much as I can bear

  Of forever seeking out the beauty

  In a tree that’s been disfigured by the wind

  The part I like is the beginning:

  Growing up, I meant to be a memory.

  LITERATURE OF THE CHILDREN

  I left home at the end of 1995, just after I turned twenty, but throughout my adolescence I yearned to leave these overly clean sidewalks behind, to get away from the boring streets where I grew up. I wanted a full and dangerous life, or maybe I just wanted what some children always want: a life without parents.

  I lived in boardinghouses or small rooms and worked wherever I could while I finished university. And when I finished university I kept on working wherever I could, because I studied literature, which is what people do before they end up working wherever they can.

  Years later, however, already approaching thirty, I got a job as a teacher and managed to establish myself to a certain extent. I practiced a calm and dignified life: I spent the afternoons reading novels or watching TV for hours, smoking tobacco or marijuana, drinking beer or cheap wine, listening to music or listening to nothing—because sometimes I sat in silence for long stretches, as if waiting for something, for someone.

  That’s when I went back, when I returned. I wasn’t expecting to find anyone, I wasn’t looking for anything, but one summer night, a night like any other when I went out walking with long, sure steps, I saw the blue facade, the green gate, and the small square of dry grass just in front. Here it is, I thought. This is where I was. I said it out loud, incredulity in my voice. I remembered the scene exactly: the bus trip, the woman’s neck, the store, the harrowing return trip, everything.

  I thought of Claudia then, and also of Raúl and of Magali; I imagined or tried to imagine their lives, their destinies. But suddenly the memories shut off. For a second, without knowing why, I thought they must all be dead. For a second, not knowing why, I felt immensely alone.

  In the following days I went back to the place almost obsessively. Intentionally or unconsciously, I directed my steps to the house and, sitting in the grass, I stared at the facade as night fell. First the streetlights would come on, and later, after ten, a small window on the second floor would light up. For days the only sign of life in that house was that faint light that appeared on the second floor.

  One afternoon I saw a woman open the door and take out bags of garbage. Her face seemed familiar and at first I thought it was Claudia, although the image I still held of her was so remote that I could extrapolate many different faces from the memory. The woman had the cheekbones of a thin person, but she had gotten possibly irremediably fat. Her red hair formed a hard and shiny fabric, as if she had just dyed it. And in spite of that conspicuous appearance she seemed bothered by the simple fact that someone was looking at her. She walked as if her gaze were stuck to the sidewalk cracks.

  I hoped to see her again. Some afternoons I brought a novel along, but I preferred books of poetry, since they allowed more breaks for spying. I was ashamed, but it also made me laugh to be a spy again. A spy who, once again, didn’t know what he wanted to find.

  One afternoon I decided to ring the bell. When I saw the woman coming to answer I panicked, knowing I had no plan and I didn’t even know how I should introduce myself. Stuttering, I told her I had lost my cat. She asked me his name, and I didn’t know how to answer. She asked what the cat looked like. I said he was black, white, and brown.

  “Then it’s not a he, it’s a she,” said the woman.

  “It’s a he,” I answered.

  “If it’s three colors it can’t be a he. Tricolored cats are females,” she said. And she added that in any case she hadn’t seen any stray cats in the neighborhood recently.

  The woman was going to close the door when I said, almost shouting: “Claudia.”

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  I told her. I told her we had known each other in Maipú. That we had been friends.

  She looked at me for a long time. I let myself be looked at. It’s a strange sensation, when you’re waiting for someone to recognize you. Finally she told me: “I know who you are. I’m not Claudia. I’m Ximena, Claudia’s sister. And you’re that boy who followed me that afternoon, Aladdin. That’s what Claudia called you, we always laughed when we remembered you. Aladdin.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I precariously understood that yes, Ximena was the woman I had followe
d so many years earlier. Raúl’s supposed girlfriend. But Claudia had never told me she had a sister. I felt a weight, the need to find some opportune phrase. “I’d like to see Claudia,” I said, in a small voice.

  “I thought you were out looking for a cat. A girl cat.”

  “Yes,” I answered. “But I’ve often thought, over the years, about that time in Maipú. And I’d like to see Claudia again.”

  There was hostility in Ximena’s gaze. She was silent. I talked, nervously improvising, about the past, about the desire to recover the past.

  “I don’t know what you want to see Claudia for,” said Ximena. “I don’t think you’d ever understand a story like ours. Back then people were looking for missing persons, they looked for the bodies of people who had disappeared. I’m sure in those years you were looking for kittens or puppies, same as now.”

  I didn’t understand her cruelty; it seemed excessive, unnecessary. All the same, Ximena took down my phone number. “When she gets here I’ll give it to her,” she said.

  “And when do you think she’s going to come?”

  “Any minute now,” she answered. “My father is about to die. When he dies, my sister will come from Yankee-land to cry over his corpse and ask for her part of the inheritance.”

  It struck me as ridiculous and juvenile to refer to the United States as Yankee-land, and at the same time I thought about that conversation with Claudia, in the Maipú Temple, about flags. Ultimately, fate took her to that country she disparaged as a child, I thought, and I also thought that I should leave, but I couldn’t help but ask one last, polite question:

  “How is Don Raúl?” I asked.

  “I don’t know how Don Raúl is. I’m sure he’s fine. But my father is dying. Bye, Aladdin,” she said. “You don’t understand, you’ll never understand anything, huevón.”

  I walked around the neighborhood several more times, but I looked at the house from far away; I didn’t dare get closer. I often thought about that bitter conversation with Ximena. Her words pursued me somehow. One night I dreamed I ran into her at the supermarket. I was working, promoting a new beer. She passed by with her cart full of cat food. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. She recognized me but avoided saying hello.