Ways of Going Home: A Novel Page 6

  I also thought about Claudia, but it was like thinking of a ghost, like thinking about someone who, in some way that is irrational yet nonetheless concrete, accompanies us. I didn’t expect her to call. I couldn’t imagine her sister giving her my number, telling her about that unexpected visit, Aladdin’s strange apparition. But that’s how it went: some months after that conversation with Ximena, early one morning, just before nine, Claudia called me. She was friendly. “It would be fun to see each other again,” she said.

  We met one November afternoon, at the Starbucks in La Reina. I’d like to remember each of her words now, with absolute precision, and write them down in this notebook with no additional commentary. I’d like to imitate her voice, to raise a camera to the gestures she made as she dived, fearlessly, into the past. I’d like someone else to write this book. For her to write it, perhaps. I’d like her to be at my house, right now, writing. But it’s for me to write and here I am. And here I’ll stay.

  “You weren’t hard to recognize,” says Claudia.

  “You either,” I answer, but for long minutes I’m distracted as I search for the face I have in my memory. I don’t find it. If I’d seen her in the street I wouldn’t have recognized her.

  We go up to get our coffees. I don’t usually go to Starbucks, and I’m surprised to see my name scrawled on the cup. I look at her cup, her name. She’s not dead, I think suddenly, happily. She’s not dead.

  Claudia’s hair is short now and her face is very thin. Her breasts are still meager and her voice sounds like a smoker’s, though she smokes only when she’s in Chile. “It seems like in the United States they don’t let you smoke anywhere anymore,” I say, suddenly content for the conversation to be simply social, routine.

  “It’s not that. It’s weird. In Vermont I don’t feel like smoking, but when I get to Chile I smoke like crazy,” says Claudia. “It’s like Chile is incomprehensible or intolerable unless I smoke.”

  “As if Chile were incendiary,” I say, joking.

  “Yes,” says Claudia, without laughing. She laughs later. Ten seconds later she gets the joke.

  At first the conversation follows the shy course of a blind date, but sometimes Claudia speeds up and starts to talk in long sentences. The plot begins to clear up: “Raúl is my father,” she says with no lead-up. “But his name was Roberto. The man who died three weeks ago, my father, was named Roberto.”

  I look at her astonished, but it isn’t a pure astonishment. I receive the story as if expecting it. Because I do expect it, in some way. It’s the story of my generation.

  “I was born five days after the coup, September sixteenth, 1973,” says Claudia in a kind of outpouring. The shadow of a tree falls capriciously over her mouth, so I don’t see her lips moving. It’s disturbing. I feel like a photograph is talking to me. I remember that beautiful poem “The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.” But she moves her hands and life returns to her body. She isn’t dead, I think again, and again I feel an immense happiness.

  Magali and Roberto had Ximena when Roberto had just entered law school at the University of Chile. They lived separately until she got pregnant again and then, at the beginning of 1973, they got married and decided to live in La Reina while they looked for a place of their own. Magali was older. She had studied English at the Pedagogical Institute and she belonged to Allende’s party, but she wasn’t active. Roberto, on the other hand, was a committed activist, though he wasn’t involved in any dangerous situations.

  They spent the first years of the dictatorship terrified and ensconced in that house in La Reina. But toward the end of 1981 Roberto reconnected: he started circulating around certain places he had avoided up to then, and he quickly took on responsibilities, at first very minor ones, as an informant. Every morning he waited—on the steps of the National Library, on a bench in the Plaza de Armas, and even a few times at the zoo—for his contacts, and then he went back to work in a small office on Moneda Street.

  Soon afterward Magali rented the house in Maipú and she went to live there with the girls. It was the best way to protect them, far away from everything, far from the world. Roberto, meanwhile, did take risks, but he changed his appearance constantly. At the beginning of 1984 he convinced his brother-in-law Raúl to leave the country and give him his identity. Raúl left Chile over the mountains and went to Mendoza, with no definite plan but with a bit of money to begin a new life.

  It was then that Roberto took the house in Aladdin Street. Again, Maipú seemed like a safe place, where it was possible to not awaken suspicion. He lived very close to his wife and daughters and his new identity allowed him to see them more often, but caution came first. The girls almost never saw their father and Claudia didn’t even know he lived close by. She only found out that night, the night of the earthquake.

  Learning to tell her story as if it didn’t hurt. That was, for Claudia, growing up: learning to tell her story precisely, bluntly. But it’s a trap to put it like that, as if the process ever ended. “Only now do I feel I can do it,” says Claudia. “I tried for a long time. But now I’ve found a kind of legitimacy. A drive. Now I want someone, anyone, to ask me out of nowhere: Who are you?”

  I’m the one asking, I think. I’m the stranger who’s asking. I was expecting a meeting heavy with silences, a series of disconnected phrases that later on, like when I was a child, I would have to put together and decipher. But no, on the contrary: Claudia wants to talk. “When I was on the plane coming here,” she says, “I looked at the clouds for a long time. It seemed like they were drawing something faint and disconcerting but at the same time recognizable. I thought about a kid scribbling on paper or the drawings my mother made when she was on the phone. I don’t know if it happened once or many times, but I have this image of my mother scribbling on paper while she talked on the phone.

  “Then I looked,” says Claudia, “at the flight attendants smoothing their skirts while they talked and laughed at the back of the aisle, and at the stranger dozing next to me with a self-help book open on his chest. And then I thought how my mother had died ten years ago, how my father had just died, and instead of silently honoring their deaths I felt an imperative need to talk. The wish to say: I. The vague, strange pleasure, even, of answering: ‘My name is Claudia and I’m thirty-three years old.’”

  The thing she most wished for during that long trip to Santiago was for the stranger traveling next to her to wake up and ask: Who are you, what’s your name? She wanted to answer him quickly, cheerfully, even flirtatiously. She wanted to tell him, like they do in novels: My name is Claudia, I’m thirty-three years old, and this is my story. And then begin to tell it, finally, as if it didn’t hurt.

  By now it is night, and we are still sitting on the cafe terrace. “You’re tired of listening to me,” she says suddenly. I deny it with a sharp shake of the head. “But later I’m going to listen to you,” she says. “And I promise that when I get tired of listening to you, you won’t realize it. I’ll pretend really well,” she says, smiling.

  Claudia arrived when the wake was just about to start. She accepted people’s condolences with something like boredom: she preferred silent hugs, without those terrible phrases ready-made for the occasion. After the funeral she unpacked her suitcases in what had once been her room. She thought how she was, after all, coming home; how the only space she had ever really felt comfortable in was that small room in the house in La Reina, although that stability hadn’t lasted long, barely a few years toward the end of the eighties when her grandmother, her mother, and her father were all still alive.

  As if she had cruelly guessed Claudia’s thoughts, as if she’d spent a long time waiting to pronounce certain sentences, Ximena came in suddenly and said: “This isn’t your house anymore. You can stay here a few weeks, but don’t get used to it. I took care of Dad, so the house is mine; I’m not going to sell it, don’t even think about it. And it would be a lot better if you found a hotel.”

  Claudia agreed, thinking that a
s the days passed her sister would regain her calm, her senses. She lay on the bed to read a novel; she wanted to forget that bitter conversation and be carried along by the plot, but it was impossible, because the book was about parents who abandoned their children or children who abandoned their parents. Ultimately, that’s what all books are about, she thought.

  She went to the living room, where Ximena was watching TV, and sat down next to her. Gregory House was in the middle of saying something crude to Dr. Cuddy, and Claudia remembers that she and Ximena laughed in unison. Then she made tea and offered Ximena a cup. She thought her sister had the face of someone who had suffered not just a day or a week but all her life. “I’m sorry,” said Ximena as she took the tea. “You can stay here as long as you like, but don’t ask me to sell the house. It’s all I have, all we have.”

  Claudia was about to reply with some opportune, empty phrase: we have each other, we’ll get through this together, something along those lines. But she held back. It wouldn’t have been true. It had been a long time since they’d been able to live together without animosity. “Let’s talk about the house later,” she said.

  We walk without a destination but I don’t realize it, I simply accompany Claudia, thinking we’re going somewhere. It’s very late now, the movie theater is closed; we stop to look at the movie posters as if we were a couple out looking for something to do.

  “It’s good to live close to a cinema,” she says, and we start talking animatedly about movies. We discover coincidences that inevitably bring us back to real life, to our youth, to childhood. Because we can’t, we don’t know how to talk about a movie or a book anymore; the moment has come when movies and novels don’t matter, only the time when we saw them, read them: where we were, what we were doing, who we were then.

  While we walk silently I think about those names: Roberto, Magali, Ximena, Claudia. I ask about her grandmother’s name. “Mercedes,” Claudia answers. I think they are serious names. Even Claudia suddenly seems like a serious name. Beautiful, simple, and serious. I ask her what year her grandmother died. “In 1995, a year before my mother,” says Claudia. And she talks about another death as well, of someone important, someone she never met: her father’s cousin Nacho, the doctor. Nacho was arrested and he never came back. Roberto and Magali always talked about him as if he were alive, but he was dead.

  They told her when she was little, and later—for many years—they continued telling her the story of the fever, which wasn’t even a story. It was merely a moment, the last one, although no one knew it would be the last one: in 1974, when Claudia had been alive for eleven months, Nacho went to see her because she had been sick for too many hours. The fever broke immediately. “It’s a miracle,” said the adults that afternoon, laughing. And that’s what it became, a slight, insignificant miracle: to lower a little girl’s fever, only that, on the afternoon when they saw him for the last time—for they never saw him dead, his body never appeared.

  “In my family there are no dead,” I say. “No one has died. Not my grandparents, not my parents, not my cousins, no one.”

  “You never go to the cemetery?”

  “No, I never go to the cemetery,” I answer with a complete sentence, as if I were learning to speak a foreign language and I’d been instructed to answer that way.

  “I have to go, I’d rather get back early to my father’s house.” A gesture of her lips gives her away immediately: it’s not her father’s house anymore, now it’s hers and Ximena’s. I go with her, hoping she’ll invite me in for coffee, but she says goodbye at the gate with a bright smile and a hug.

  On the way back home I remember a scene in college, one afternoon when we were smoking weed and drinking a sticky wine with melon. I’d spent the afternoon with a group of classmates, and we were exchanging family stories in which death appeared with urgent insistence. Of all those present I was the only one who came from a family with no dead, and that realization filled me with a strange bitterness: my friends had grown up reading the books that their dead parents or siblings left behind in the house. But in my family there were no dead and there were no books.

  I come from a family with no dead, I thought as my classmates told their childhood stories. At that moment I had a strong memory of Claudia, but I didn’t want or didn’t dare to tell her story. It wasn’t mine. I knew little, but at least I knew that: no one could speak for someone else. That although we might want to tell other people’s stories, we always end up telling our own.

  I want to let a few days go by before I call her and suggest getting together again. But I’m impatient and I do it right away. She doesn’t seem surprised. We arrange to meet the next morning, in Intercommunal Park. I get there early but I see her from far away, sitting on a bench and reading. She looks beautiful. She is wearing a jean skirt and an old black shirt with big blue letters that say LOVE SUCKS.

  Some kids playing hooky come over to ask for a light. “I didn’t smoke at that age,” Claudia says to me.

  “I did,” I answer. I tell her that I started smoking at twelve. Sometimes when I was walking with my father and he lit a cigarette, I would ask him to put it out, saying it was bad for him and he was going to die of cancer. I did it to trick him, so he wouldn’t suspect that I smoked too, and he would look at me apologetically and explain that smoking was a vice and that vices were the signs of human weakness. I remember how I liked it when he suddenly confessed his weakness, his vulnerability.

  “I, on the other hand, only saw my father smoke one time,” says Claudia as we wander through the park. “One day I got home early from school and he was in the living room talking to my mother. I was so happy to see him. I lived hoping to see him. My father hugged me and maybe it was a long hug, but I felt like he let go of me quickly, as if we weren’t allowed to have that contact, either. Then I realized he had a lit cigarette in his right hand. It unsettled me. It was like he really was a different person. As if Roberto wasn’t smoking, Raúl was.”

  “He also smoked the night of the earthquake, with my dad,” I remind her. “I think my dad offered yours a cigarette and they smoked together, and talked.”

  “Really?” asks Claudia, incredulous, as she fixes her hair. “I don’t remember that. But I remember you,” she says.

  “Were you really looking for someone to spy on your father?”

  “No,” she says. “I didn’t know my father lived there. It was a very ambiguous situation. The night of the earthquake I was alone with my mother, because Ximena had gone to my grandmother’s. Back then Ximena spent a lot of time with Grandma, she practically lived with her. A brick wall fell and broke the big front window, so we couldn’t sleep there. I remember we were desperate, we went out walking and I didn’t know we were looking for my dad, and that he was also looking for us. I don’t know if we took different routes or if we passed each other by. When we finally saw him on a corner I couldn’t believe it. I had a little flashlight, a toy, which they’d given to me years before. I remember I shined it on his face and saw his eyes were a little wet. We hugged and then he brought us to the fire. Before dawn the three of us left for the house in La Reina, in his car.”

  “The Fiat 500,” I say.

  “The Fiat 500, yes,” she answers.

  It affected Claudia a lot to find out that her father lived close by. She was sick of secrets, and at the same time she intuited numerous dangers, huge and imprecise dangers. She liked seeing me there, with the adults around the fire. “You stayed quiet, you observed. I was like that too, silent. I started following you without a clear purpose, and little by little I came up with a plan.”

  Neither did Claudia know exactly why she was spying, what she wanted to find out. But when she learned, through me, that Roberto was hiding people in the house, she wasn’t surprised.

  “And did you think your father had a lover?”

  “I didn’t know what to think. When we talked that time I lost it, the truth is I knew very little about my father. Then I thought it had to
be Ximena. I didn’t figure you would follow her like that, but it made me so mad to know she saw my father more than I did. She and my father, we said later, half joking, were the revolutionaries. My mother and I, on the other hand, were the reactionaries. We could joke about it, but it still hurt and I guess it even hurts now.”

  When Ximena saw that a boy, that I, was following her, she had no doubt that her sister had sent me. Claudia found herself obliged to confess that she was the one who had asked me to spy on her father. They scolded her, emphatically at first and then lovingly. An argument began in which everyone blamed someone else. “I didn’t want to be responsible for those shouting matches, but I was,” says Claudia, and then there is a long and uncertain pause. For ten minutes it seems like she is about to speak, but she can’t bring herself to. Finally, she says: “I really feel like eating some chocolate ice cream.”

  We haven’t seen each other for a week but I call her every day, and I have the impression Claudia waits for those calls. One night, very late, she’s the one who calls me. “I’m outside,” she says. “Ximena threw me out. She says the house is hers. She called me a foreigner and a whore.”

  Claudia cries with the precise movements of someone trying not to sob. I hug her, I offer her tea, and we listen to music while I think about the reasons Ximena might have for calling her a whore. I almost ask, but I keep quiet. I tell her she can stay with me, that there’s only one bed but I can sleep on the armchair. “It’ll just be one night,” she answers. “But I want us to sleep together. That way my sister will be right, I’ll be a whore.”