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It’s not a great story, but he sends it off with a clear conscience, and he even has time to drink a pisco sour and eat some yucca a la huacaína before his friends get to the Peruvian restaurant.
It’s not a great story, no. But Yasna would like it.
Yasna would like the story, though she doesn’t read, she doesn’t like to read. But if it were made into a movie, she would watch it to the end. And if she caught a repeat of it and she didn’t remember it, or even if she remembered it well, she would watch it again. She doesn’t often watch movies, in truth, nor does she often recall the writer. She doesn’t even know he is a writer. She did remember him a few months ago, though, when she was walking in the neighborhood where he used to live.
They had declared her father terminally ill, and recommended she give him marijuana to help with the pain. She’d thought of Danilo’s plants, hence that walk through the old neighborhood, which seemed erratic but was not: she enjoyed the luxury of walking around aimlessly, peripherally, even reaching the end of a street and then retracing her steps, as if she were searching for an address. But she knew perfectly well where Danilo lived, still in his family home; she merely wanted to enjoy that luxury, modest as it was. Her father was sleeping more calmly by then, with less pain than on previous days, so she could go out for a walk and take her time.
“I hope you haven’t killed your father,” he said to her when he finally recognized her, and since she didn’t remember her words from that night almost twenty years before, she looked at him with alarm. Then she remembered her plan, the air rifle, and that crazy afternoon. She felt an uncomfortable happiness when she remembered those lost details, as Danilo talked and cracked jokes. She liked that house, the atmosphere, the camaraderie. She stayed for tea with Danilo, his wife, and their son, a dark-skinned, long-haired boy who spoke like an adult. The woman, after looking at Yasna intensely, asked her what she did to stay so thin.
“I’ve always been thin,” she answered.
“Me too,” said the boy. She bought a lot of marijuana, and Danilo also threw in some seeds.
It’ll be a while before the plant flowers. She is watering it now while she listens to the news on the radio. Her father doesn’t rape her anymore, he wouldn’t be able to. She hasn’t forgiven him, she’s reached a point where she doesn’t believe in forgiveness, or in love, or in happiness, but maybe she believes in death, or at least she waits for it. While she moves the furniture around in the living room, she thinks about what her life will be when he dies: it’s an abstract feeling of freedom, maybe too abstract, and for that reason uncomfortable. She thinks of an ambiguous pain, of a disaster, calm and silent.
She hears her father’s complaints coming from the kitchen, his degraded, corrupted voice. Sometimes he shouts at her, berates her, but she pays him no mind. Other times, especially when he is high, he laughs his labored laughter, utters disjointed phrases. She thinks about the will to live, about her father clinging to life, who knows what for. She brings him another marijuana cookie, turns on the TV for him, puts his headphones on for him. She stays awhile beside him, looking at a magazine. “I didn’t believe in God, but only with his help could I overcome the pain,” says a famous actor about his wife’s death. “It’s simple: lots of water,” says a model on another page. “Don’t let public tantrums get to you.” “It’s her second TV series so far this year.” “There are many ways to live.” “I didn’t know what I was getting mixed up in.”
She hears the trash collector going by, the men’s shouts, the dog barking, the whisper of canned laughter coming from the headphones, she hears her father’s breathing and her own breathing, and all those sounds don’t alter her feeling of silence—not of peace: of silence. Then she goes to the living room, rolls herself a joint, and smokes it in the darkness.
Alejandro Zambra is a Chilean novelist and poet. He is the author of three novels: Ways of Going Home, The Private Lives of Trees, and Bonsai, which was awarded Chile’s Literary Critics’ Award for Best Novel. His writing has also appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Tin House, Harper’s, and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, among other places. In 2010, he was selected as one of the Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists by Granta. He currently teaches literature at the Diego Portales University in Santiago.