Ways of Going Home: A Novel

by Alejandro Zambra

  It’s hard for me to remember the circumstances in which we saw each other again. According to Claudia, she was the one who sought me out, but I also remember wandering long hours hoping to run into her. However it happened, suddenly we were walking next to each other again, and she asked me to go with her to her house. We took several turns and she even stopped in the middle of a passage and told me we had to turn around, as if she didn’t know where she lived.

  We arrived, finally, at a neighborhood with only two streets: Neftalí Reyes Basoalto and Lucila Godoy Alcayaga. It sounds like a joke, but it’s true. A lot of the streets in Maipú had, and still have, those absurd names: my cousins, for example, lived on First Symphony Way, near Second and Third Symphony, perpendicular to Concert Street, and close to the passages Opus One, Opus Two, Opus Three, et cetera. Or the very street where I lived, Aladdin, between Odin and Ramayana and parallel to Lemuria; obviously, toward the end of the seventies some people had a lot of fun choosing names for the streets where the new families would later live—the families without history, who were willing or perhaps resigned to live in that fantasy world.

  “I live in the neighborhood of real names,” said Claudia on the afternoon of our reencounter, looking seriously into my eyes.

  “I live in the neighborhood of real names,” she said again, as if she needed to start the sentence over in order to go on: “Lucila Godoy Alcayaga is Gabriela Mistral’s real name,” she explained. “And Neftalí Reyes Basoalto is Pablo Neruda’s real name.” A long silence came over us, which I broke by saying the first thing that came into my head:

  “Living here must be much better than living on Aladdin Street.”

  As I slowly pronounced that stupid sentence, I could see her pimples, her pink-and-white face, her pointed shoulders, the place where her breasts should be but where for now there was nothing, and her hair, unstylish because it wasn’t short, wavy, and brown, but rather long, straight, and black.

  We spent a while talking next to the fence, and then she invited me in. I wasn’t expecting that, because back then, no one expected that. Each house was a kind of miniature fortress, an impregnable bastion. I myself wasn’t allowed to invite friends over; my mother always said the house was too dirty. It wasn’t true, the house sparkled, but I thought that maybe there was some kind of dirt that I simply couldn’t see, and that when I grew up maybe I would see layers of dust where now I saw only waxed floors and shining wood.

  Claudia’s house seemed fairly similar to my own: the same horrible raffia swans, two or three little Mexican hats, several minuscule clay pots and crochet dishcloths. The first thing I did was ask to use the bathroom, and I discovered, astonished, that the house had two bathrooms. Never before had I been in a house that had two bathrooms. My idea of wealth was exactly that: I imagined that millionaires must have houses with three bathrooms, or even five.

  Claudia told me she wasn’t sure her mother would be happy to see me there, and I asked if it was because of the dust. She didn’t understand at first but she listened to my explanation, and then she chose to answer that yes, her mother didn’t like her to invite friends over because she thought the house was always dirty. I asked her then, without thinking about it too much, about her father.

  “My father doesn’t live with us,” she said. “My parents are separated, he lives in another city.” I asked her if she missed him. “Of course I do. He’s my father.”

  In my class there was only one boy with separated parents, which to me was a stigma, the saddest situation imaginable.

  “Maybe they’ll live together again someday,” I said, to console her.

  “Maybe,” she said. “But I don’t feel like talking about that. I want us to talk about something else.”

  She took off her sandals, went to the kitchen, and came back with a bowl filled with bunches of black, green, and purple grapes; this struck me as odd, because in my house we never bought such a variety of grapes. I took advantage of the chance to try them all, and while I compared the flavors, Claudia filled the silence with general, polite questions. “I need to ask you something,” she said finally, “but not till after lunch.”

  “If you want, I’ll help you fix the food,” I said, though I had never cooked in my life, or helped anyone else cook.

  “We’re already having lunch,” said Claudia, very seriously. “These grapes are lunch.”

  It was hard for her to get to the point. She seemed to speak freely, but there was also a stutter to her words that made it difficult to understand her. Really, she wanted to keep quiet. Now I think she was cursing the fact that she had to talk in order for me to understand what she wanted to ask me.

  “I need you to take care of him,” she said suddenly, forgetting all her strategy.

  “Who?”

  “My uncle. I need you to take care of him.”

  “Okay,” I answered immediately, so reliable, and in a split second I imagined that Raúl was suffering from some horrible disease, a disease maybe even worse than solitude, and that I would have to be some kind of nurse. I imagined myself walking around the neighborhood, pushing him in his wheelchair and blessed for my selflessness. But evidently that wasn’t what Claudia was asking me for. She spilled out the story all at once, looking at me fixedly, and I agreed quickly but at the wrong time—I agreed too quickly, as if confident that I would figure out later on what Claudia had really asked of me.

  What I eventually understood was that Claudia and her mother couldn’t or shouldn’t visit Raúl, at least not often. That’s where I came in: I had to watch over Raúl; not take care of him but rather keep an eye on his activities and make notes about anything that seemed suspicious. We would meet every Thursday, at the random meeting point she had chosen, the supermarket bakery, where I would give her my report and then we would talk for a while about other things. “Because,” she told me, “I’m really interested in how you’re doing.” And I smiled with a satisfaction in which fear and desire also breathed.

  I started spying on Raúl right away. The job was boring and easy, or maybe it was difficult, because I was searching blindly. From my conversations with Claudia I was vaguely expecting to see silent men with dark sunglasses traveling at midnight in foreign cars, but nothing like that went on at Raúl’s house. His routine hadn’t changed: he went out and came back at regular office hours, and he greeted people he met with a stiff and friendly nod that precluded all possibility of conversation. In any case, I didn’t want to talk to him. I was just waiting for him to do something unusual, something that was worth telling his niece.

  I arrived on time or early to my meetings with Claudia, but she was always already there, in front of the pastry case. It was as if she spent the entire day looking at those pastries. She seemed worried about our being seen together, and every time we met she pretended it was coincidental. We walked around the supermarket, peering attentively at the products as if we really were out shopping; we left with nothing but a couple of yogurts that we opened at the end of a zigzagging route that began in the plaza and followed side streets to the Maipú Temple. Only when we sat down on the temple’s long steps did she feel safe. The faithful few who appeared at that hour passed by with lowered gazes, as if getting a head start on their prayers or confessions.

  More than once I wanted to know why we had to hide, and Claudia would only say that we had to be careful, that everything could be ruined. Of course, I didn’t know what it was that could be ruined, but by that point I’d already gotten used to her vague answers.

  However, on a whim one afternoon I told her that I knew the truth: I knew that Raúl’s problems had to do with the fact that he was a Christian Democrat, and she burst out in a long, excessive peal of laughter. She seemed to regret it immediately. She came over, put her hands ceremoniously on my shoulders, and I even thought she was going to kiss me; but that wasn’t it, of course.

  “My uncle isn’t a Christian Democrat,” she told me in a calm and slow voice.

  Then I aske
d her if he was a Communist and she fell into a heavy silence.

  “I can’t tell you any more,” she answered finally. “It’s not important. You don’t need to know everything in order to do your job.” She decided, suddenly, to follow that train of thought, and she talked quickly and a lot: she said she would understand if I didn’t want to help her, and maybe it would be better for us to stop seeing each other. When I pleaded for our meetings to continue, she asked me to just concentrate on watching Raúl in the future.

  To me, a Communist was someone who read the newspaper and silently bore the mockery of others—I thought of my grandfather, my father’s father, who was always reading the newspaper. Once I asked him if he read the whole thing, and the old man answered that yes, when it came to the newspaper you had to read it all.

  I also had a memory of a violent scene, a conversation at my grandparents’ house during independence week. They and their five children were sitting around the main table and I was with my cousins at what they called the kids’ table, when my father said to my grandfather at the end of an argument, almost shouting: “Shut up, you old Communist!” At first everyone was quiet, but little by little they started laughing. Even my grandmother and my mother laughed, and even one of my cousins, who certainly didn’t understand the situation. They didn’t just laugh, they also repeated it, openly mocking: you old Communist.

  I thought my grandfather would laugh too, that it was one of those liberating moments when everyone gives themselves over to laughter. But the old man stayed very serious, in silence. He didn’t say a word. They treated him badly and back then I wasn’t sure he deserved it.

  Years later I learned he hadn’t been a good father. He wasted his life gambling away his laborer’s salary, and he lived off his wife, who sold vegetables and washed clothes and sewed. Growing up, it was my father’s duty to go around to the dive bars looking for him, asking for him, knowing that in the best of cases he would find him hugging the dregs of a bottle.

  Classes started up again and they replaced our head teacher, Miss Carmen, which I was grateful for with all my heart. She had been our teacher for three years, and now I think she wasn’t a bad person, but she hated me. She hated me because of the word aguja, which for her didn’t exist. For her, the correct word was ahuja. I don’t know why one day I decided to take the dictionary up to her and show her she had it wrong. She looked at me in panic, swallowing saliva, and she nodded, but from then on she no longer liked me nor I her. We shouldn’t hate the person who teaches us, for better or for worse, to read. But I hated her, or rather I hated the fact that she hated me.

  Mr. Morales, on the other hand, liked me from the start, and I trusted him enough to ask him one morning, while we were walking to the gym for P.E. class, if it was very bad to be a Communist.

  “Why do you ask that?” he said. “Do you think I’m a Communist?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m sure you’re not a Communist.”

  “And are you a Communist?”

  “I’m a kid,” I told him.

  “But if your father was a Communist, you might be one, too.”

  “I don’t think so, because my grandfather is a Communist and my father isn’t.”

  “And what is your father?”

  “My father isn’t anything,” I answered, with certainty.

  “It’s not good for you to talk about these things,” he told me, after looking at me for a long time. “The only thing I can tell you is that we live at a time when it isn’t good to talk about these things. But one day we’ll be able to talk about this, and about everything else.”

  “When the dictatorship ends,” I told him, as if completing a sentence on a reading test.

  He looked at me, laughing, and affectionately patted my hair. “Let’s start with ten laps around the field,” he shouted, and I started trotting slowly as I thought confusedly about Raúl.

  Since we had to make up the days we had lost to the earthquake, the school day was extremely long. I got home only half an hour before Raúl, which made my espionage dangerously useless. I decided I had to go deeper, I had to take decisive action, do my job better.

  One night, I was walking along the top of the brick wall and I fell into the bushes. I fell hard. Raúl came out right away, very frightened. When he saw me he helped me up and told me I shouldn’t be doing that, but that he understood, it was his own fault. I tensed up, not knowing what he was talking about, but then he came back with a tennis ball. “If I’d known it was yours I would have thrown it over into the yard,” he said, and I thanked him.

  A little later I heard, clearly, Raúl’s voice talking to another man. Their voices sounded close by, they had to be in the room contiguous to my bedroom. I’d never heard any sounds coming from that room before, although I was in the habit of putting my ear to a glass against the wall and listening. I couldn’t make out what they were talking about. I did notice that they talked very little. It was not a fluid conversation. It was the kind of conversation that happens between people who know each other well or very little. People who are used to living together, or who don’t know each other at all.

  The next morning I got up at five thirty and patiently waited until I could find out if the man was still there. Raúl’s Fiat 500 left at the same time as always. I hung recklessly out the window and saw that he was alone. I faked a stomachache and my parents let me stay home. I listened silently for a couple of hours until I heard the pipes. The man had to be in the shower. I decided to take a risk. I got dressed, threw the ball at Raúl’s house, and rang the bell several times, but the man didn’t come out. I waited without ringing again. I saw him leave the house and walk down Odin, so I ran along Aladdin to circle the block and meet him head-on. I stopped him and told him I was lost, and asked if he could please help me get home again.

  The man looked at me with barely concealed annoyance, but he went with me. When we arrived he didn’t mention that he had spent the night at Raúl’s house. I thanked him and then I had no other option: I asked him if he knew Raúl, and he answered that they were cousins, that he lived in Puerto Montt, and that he had stayed at Raúl’s house because he had an errand to run in Santiago.

  “I’m Raúl’s neighbor,” I told him.

  “See you later, Raúl’s neighbor,” said the man, and he set off quickly, almost running.

  “It’s possible,” said Claudia, to my surprise, when I told her about the stranger. It was possible that Raúl had a cousin in Puerto Montt? Wouldn’t that cousin, then, be related to Claudia?

  “We have a very big family,” said Claudia, “and there are a lot of uncles in the south I’ve never met.” She serenely changed the subject.

  * * *

  There were five other men at Raúl’s house in the following months, and each time Claudia seemed unaffected by the news. But she had a very different reaction when I told her that a woman had stayed there, and not for one night, as usual, but for two nights in a row.

  “Maybe she came from the south, too,” I said.

  “Could be,” she answered, but she was obviously surprised, even angry.

  “She could be a girlfriend. Maybe Raúl isn’t alone anymore,” I said.

  “Yes,” she answered, after a while. “Raúl is single, it’s entirely possible he could have a girlfriend. In any case, I want you to find out everything you can about that possible girlfriend.”

  She seemed to be struggling not to cry. I looked at her closely until she stood up. “Let’s go inside the temple,” she said. She dipped her fingers into the bowl of holy water and used it to cool her face. We stayed on our feet next to some enormous candelabra with wax dripping from the candles—some new and others about to burn out—that people would bring when they prayed for miracles. Claudia put her hands over the flames as if to warm them; she dipped her fingertips in the wax, and played at making the sign of the cross with her wax-coated fingers. She didn’t know the sign of the cross. I taught her.

  We sat in the first pew. I l
ooked obediently at the altar, while Claudia looked to the sides and identified, one by one, the flags that flanked the statue of the virgin. She asked me if I knew why the flags were there. “They’re the flags of the Americas,” I said.

  “Yes, but why are they here?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “Something about the unity of the Americans, I guess.”

  She took my hand and told me that the prettiest flag was Argentina’s. “Which one do you think is prettiest?” she asked me, and I was going to say the United States flag but luckily I kept quiet, because then she said the United States flag was the ugliest, a truly horrible flag, and I added that I agreed, the United States flag was really disgusting.

  For weeks I waited fruitlessly for the woman to return. Then she appeared, finally, one Saturday morning. She was a girl, really. I figured she was around eighteen years old. She could hardly have been Raúl’s girlfriend.

  I spent hours trying to hear what she and Raúl talked about, but they exchanged barely a few sentences that I couldn’t understand. I thought she would spend the night, but she left that same afternoon. I followed her, absurdly camouflaged by a red cap. The woman walked quickly toward a bus stop and when I got there, next to her, I wanted to say something but my voice wouldn’t come.

  The bus pulled up and I had to decide, in a matter of seconds, whether I would follow her onto it. At that time I already rode the bus alone, but only on the short, ten-minute ride to school. I got on and rode for a long time, a bold hour-and-a-half foray I spent rooted to the seat right behind hers.

  I had never traveled so far from home on my own, and the powerful impression the city left on me is, in some way, the one that still rears up now and then: a formless space, open but also closed, with imprecise plazas that are almost always empty, and people walking along narrow sidewalks, gazing at the ground with a kind of deaf fervor, as if they could only move forward along a forced anonymity.