Ways of Going Home: A Novel

by Alejandro Zambra

  Claudia’s eyes brighten: she gets her laughter back, her beauty. I offer her some cheese and I open a bottle of wine. We talk and drink for hours. I like how she moves around the house. She occupies the space as if recognizing it. She changes one chair for another, she stands up, suddenly she sits on the floor and stays for a while with her hands on her ankles.

  I tell her it seems incredible that Ximena threw her out.

  “She didn’t throw me out, really,” she answers. “We had a bad argument, but I could have stayed at the house. I wanted to leave, it’s really hard for me to live with her.”

  I ask her if Ximena was always like that. She tells me no, that their father’s illness changed her. That in his last years she gave up everything to take care of him. “Now that my father is gone she doesn’t know what to do, she doesn’t know how to live. But I guess it’s more complicated than that,” says Claudia, and she stares fixedly at the lamp in the living room, as if following the movement of a moth.

  I ask her why she went to the United States. “I don’t know,” she answers. “I wanted to go, I wanted to leave. My father wanted me to go too, he was already sick by then, but he wanted me to go,” says Claudia, taking on a confessional tone again. “He supported me, above all, during Ximena’s attacks. But Ximena wanted me to go, too. In some way she fantasized about that ending: her taking care of my father to the end and me rushing back, full of guilt, for his funeral.

  “I don’t know when, years ago,” Claudia adds, “Ximena constructed the story that I was the evil sister who wanted to take everything from her. And maybe it’s too late to make peace now. Because Ximena is right, in a way. She stayed because she wanted to stay. But she stayed,” says Claudia. “In some way my father had to choose which of his daughters’ lives to fuck over. And he chose her. And I was saved.”

  I ask her if she is really full of guilt.

  “I don’t feel guilty,” she answers. “But I feel that lack of guilt as if it were guilt.”

  “Are you going to go back to the States?”

  Two weeks earlier, the afternoon of our reencounter, Claudia told me she had completed a master’s in environmental law in Vermont, and she would rather look for work there, and that she had been living with an Argentine boyfriend for a long time. But now she pauses before answering.

  “Sometimes I doubt it,” she says finally. “Sometimes I think I should come back to Chile for good,” she says. It seems to me that she doesn’t know why she says it. I don’t believe her. I don’t think Claudia is seriously considering the possibility of staying. I think Claudia is simply looking for something, and as soon as she finds it she will go back to the United States.

  She looks tired and relieved at the same time. And she is a bit drunk. As we have sex she smiles, showing her teeth a little bit. It’s a beautiful and strange gesture. I think I will remember it. That I will miss it.

  We sleep little, only two or three hours. Then the noise of cars, of voices, starts up. People leave for work, for school. We make orange juice, and while we eat breakfast she looks at her e-mail on my computer. She finds a message from Ximena. I’m not going to sell the house, don’t incist, it says, and Claudia can’t believe it: “It says incist, with c, really.” For a millisecond she thinks it’s terrible that Ximena would make that kind of mistake and right away she is ashamed, because it’s even worse that, under the circumstances, she would care about something so stupid as a spelling mistake.

  The house is not for sale, Ximena continues. It’s my house now. Now more than ever, she says.

  I’m not going to insist, thinks Claudia: it doesn’t make sense. Deep down she understands why Ximena is attached to the house, though she thinks it would be better to sell it and split the money. She thinks that being so close to the past isn’t good for anyone. That the past never stops hurting, but we can help it by finding a different place.

  “But maybe it’s too soon to talk about pain,” she says to me while I look at the traces of wine on her lips. Suddenly she seems very young to me: twenty-five, twenty-six, definitely no more than thirty.

  I go to the university, teach a not-so-good class, go home. I had imagined the scene, but it still surprises me to open the door and see Claudia stretched out in the easy chair. “Your beauty does me good,” I say to her, without thinking about it much. She looks at me cautiously and then lets out a guffaw, but she comes over, puts her arms around me, and we end up screwing standing up in a corner of the kitchen.

  Afterward, we make noodles and put together a sauce with a little cream and some scallions. The sauce turns out a bit dry and the truth is neither one of us is hungry.

  “Sometimes, when I look at the food on my plate,” says Claudia, “I remember that expression, the answer my mother and grandmother would always give me: Shut up and eat.” They’d made something new, some unfamiliar stew that didn’t look good, and Claudia wanted to know what it was. Her mother and grandmother would answer in unison: Shut up and eat.

  It was a joke, of course, a wise one, even. But that’s how Claudia felt as a child: that strange things were happening and they were living with the pain, they struggled with a long and imprecise sadness, and nonetheless it was better not to ask questions. To ask was risking that they would answer the same way: Shut up and eat.

  Later the time for questions came. The decade of the nineties was the time of questions, in her opinion, and right away she says, “I’m sorry, I don’t want to sound like those quack sociologists you see on TV, but that’s how those years were: I sat down and talked to my parents for hours, asked them for details, I made them remember, and I repeated those memories as if they were my own.” In some terrible, secret way she was seeking her place in their story.

  “We didn’t ask in order to know,” Claudia says to me as we collect the plates and clear the table: “We asked in order to fill an emptiness.”

  “Sometimes Ximena reminds me of my mother,” says Claudia over cups of tea. “It’s not a physical resemblance, really. It’s her voice, the tone of her voice,” she says.

  She thinks about those moments when her mother had no other recourse but to talk. She called the girls to her, she took her time over her words, as if tuning in little by little to a sweet, calm tone—a careful tone, artificial. Then, as if conducting a ceremony, she spoke clearly. She modulated. She met their eyes.

  One afternoon in 1984 she spoke to them separately. First she called Ximena into the kitchen and closed the door. It was strange for the conversation to take place in the kitchen. She had asked her mother about it shortly before her death. “Why did you want to talk to us in the kitchen that afternoon?”

  “I don’t know,” said her mother. “Maybe because I was nervous.”

  The conversation with Ximena didn’t last long. She quickly reemerged and ran outside, and Claudia couldn’t see her face. In light of the circumstances, the five-year difference between the sisters became an insurmountable distance. Ximena was argumentative and irascible, but in the end she was always on the adults’ side, while Claudia only understood things halfway.

  “Then it was my turn,” says Claudia, and she pauses in a way that seems dramatic. I think she’s about to break down, but no, she just needed that pause. “I don’t remember her words very well,” she continues. “I guess she told me the truth, or something like the truth. I understood that there were good people and bad people, and we were good people. That good people were sometimes persecuted for thinking differently. For their ideas. I don’t even know if I knew what an idea was back then, but in some way, that afternoon I found out.”

  Her mother talked to her in a soft, generous intonation: For a while you can’t call your father Dad. He’s going to cut his hair like your uncle Raúl’s, he’s going to shave his beard so he’ll look a little more like your uncle Raúl. Claudia didn’t understand, but she knew she had to understand. She knew that everyone else, including her sister, understood more than she did. And it hurt her to have to accept that. She aske
d her mother how long she would have to stop calling her father Dad. “I don’t know. Maybe a short time. Maybe a long time. But I promise you that you’re going to be able to call him Dad again.”

  “Do you swear?” said Claudia unexpectedly.

  “Catholic families swear, in our family we only promise,” said her mother. “But I promise you.”

  “I want you to swear it,” the girl said.

  “All right, I swear to you,” her mother conceded, and she added that Claudia would always know that the man she called uncle was her father. That was enough. That was the important thing.

  At the beginning of 1998, Claudia’s father got his identity back. It was the party’s decision. With the referendum coming up, they needed activists who were publicly committed to practical tasks. Magali went to the airport with her two daughters. The situation was absurd. A week earlier Roberto had left for Buenos Aires with Raúl’s identity and now he was returning as Roberto. He had cut his hair and sideburns a little and he was soberly dressed in blue jeans and a white shirt. He smiled a lot and at one point Claudia thought he seemed like a new man.

  They didn’t have to pretend so elaborately, but her mother insisted: the same way she used to look at Claudia reproachfully when she called her father Dad, now she urged her, to an almost ridiculous extent, to say “Dad.” On the plane there were people who actually had been in exile. Claudia remembers having felt a certain bitterness at seeing the families hug, crying in those long, legitimate embraces. For a moment she thought, and was immediately ashamed for thinking it, that the others were also faking. That what they were regaining was not the people but their names. They were undoing, at last, the distance between bodies and names. But no. There were real emotions around her. And when they got home, she felt that her emotion was real as well.

  “It’s a terrible story,” I tell her, and she looks at me, surprised.

  “No,” she answers, and she says my name several times, as if I had been asleep for a long time and she wanted to wake me up little by little. “My story isn’t terrible. That’s what Ximena doesn’t understand: our story isn’t terrible. There was pain, and we’ll never forget that pain, but we also can’t forget the pain of others. Because we were protected, in the end; because there were others who suffered more, who suffer more.”

  We walk along Grecia Avenue past the College of Philosophy, and then I remember a story or hundreds of stories from that time, but I feel a little stupid, it seems like anything I could talk about would be trivial. We reach the National Stadium. The largest detention center in 1973 was always, for me, no more than a soccer field. My first memories of it are happy, sportive ones. I’m sure that I ate my first ice cream in the stadium’s stands.

  Claudia’s first memory of the stadium is also happy. In 1977 it was announced that Chespirito, the Mexican comedian, would bring the entire cast of his show to perform at the National Stadium. Claudia was four years old then; she watched Chespirito’s show and she liked it a lot.

  Her parents refused to take her at first, but finally they gave in. The four of them went, and Claudia and Ximena had a great time. Many years later Claudia found out that for her parents that day had been torture. They had spent every moment thinking how absurd it was to see the stadium filled with laughing people. Throughout the entire show they had thought only, obsessively, about the dead.

  Every once in a while Claudia suggests that she look for a hotel or go to a friend’s house, but I insist on keeping her here. I can’t offer much, but I want this time to continue at any cost. Some days aren’t as good, but an agreeable routine starts to emerge. In the morning I go to the university while Claudia goes out walking or stays home thinking, mostly about the future. In the afternoon we have sex or watch movies, and night catches us by surprise, talking and laughing.

  Sometimes I think she wants to stay, that she wants life to consist only of this, no more. It’s what I want. I want to make her desire a life here. I want to entangle her again in the world from which she fled. I want to make her believe that she fled, that she forced her story in order to lose herself in the conventions of a comfortable and supposedly happy life. I want to make her hate that placid future in Vermont. In short, I behave like an asshole.

  It’s better to understand that time like one understands a brief summary in the TV guide: after twenty years, two childhood friends randomly reencounter each other and fall in love. But we aren’t friends. And there is no love, not really. We sleep together. We screw wonderfully well and I’ll never forget her dark, warm, firm body. But it isn’t love that unites us. Or it is love, but love of memory.

  We are united by a desire to regain the scenes of secondary characters. Unnecessary scenes that were reasonably discarded, and which nonetheless we collect obsessively.

  Claudia insists that we go to Maipú. She says she wants to meet my parents. She wants to walk down those streets again. I don’t think it’s a good idea, but in the end I agree.

  In the plaza she recognizes some monuments, some trees, the long stairs leading to the public pool, but not much more. Where the supermarket used to be, there is now something that looks like a municipal building.

  We head now for the neighborhood where she used to live. They’ve closed off the passages with an eye-catching electric gate. Lucila Godoy Alcayaga and Neftalí Reyes Basoalto look like more exclusive streets now, at least exclusive enough to share in the paranoia about crime. There are many cars parked inside.

  We manage to slip in behind some children on bicycles. Claudia looks at the house in silence for a moment, but then she rings the bell. “We’re looking for a cat,” she tells a man who comes out with his shirt untucked, as if he had been undressing. Claudia explains that it’s a white cat with black spots. The man looks at her curiously; I’m sure he finds her desirable.

  “I haven’t seen a black-and-white cat, I see in color,” he says, and I think how it’s been many years since I heard such a lame joke. We laugh anyway, nervously.

  The house is now a strange apricot color and instead of Persian blinds there are horrible flowered curtains. But it was never a pretty house; “It wasn’t even a real house,” says Claudia, with a calm sadness.

  We decide to go, but we can’t get out—the electric gate is locked. We buzz again but the man doesn’t answer. We stay there for a while, like melancholy prisoners caressing the bars. In the meantime I call my parents. They’re waiting for me. For us.

  I’m surprised to see a bookshelf in the living room. It’s overflowing. “Thanks to that library your mother has started to read and I have too, although you know I’d rather watch movies,” says my father. He doesn’t look at Claudia, but he is extremely polite, cautious.

  The afternoon passes in a slow conversation that, at certain moments, takes on shape to the rhythm of the pisco sours we are drinking. We plan to leave, but my mother starts to make dinner with slices of meat, duchess potatoes, and a vegetarian alternative.

  “I’m not vegetarian,” says Claudia when my mother asks her.

  “How odd, my son has always liked vegetarians,” says my mother. I start to get mad, but I let it pass when Claudia laughs naturally, warmly.

  In spite of that joke, my parents avoid asking about the details of our relationship. I told them on the phone only that I would be bringing someone. I guess it seemed interesting or pleasant that I would want to introduce a girlfriend to them. It annoys me that the situation could be seen that way: the son introducing a girlfriend. It isn’t that, we didn’t come for that. I don’t know what we did come for, but we didn’t come for that.

  We talk about a recent series of robberies in the neighborhood. It’s rumored that the thief lives around here. That it’s one of the kids who grew up in our neighborhood. One who didn’t succeed. One who was always something of a thief. “I’ve never stolen anything,” says my father, suddenly. “Not even when I was little. We were very poor, I sold vegetables at a stall in the market.” He looks at Claudia, conscious that he ha
s told the story of his childhood a thousand times. He says that not even at the height of desperation would he steal. That back then he had friends who stole: “They were my friends, I loved them, but I hope they’ve ended up in jail,” he says. “Otherwise society wouldn’t function.”

  At what moment, I think, did my father change so much? Upon thinking this I immediately question it: I don’t know if he has actually changed or if he was always like this. “I’ve stolen, I’ve stolen a lot,” I say, to annoy him. At first my father laughs.

  “Sure, you took money from my wallet, but that’s not stealing.”

  “That is stealing,” I answer seriously, sententiously. “Stealing from your father is still stealing. And I’ve also stolen books. One week I stole eighteen books.” I say eighteen so it will sound excessive but still true, but really it was three and I felt so guilty I never went back to that bookstore. But I stand behind what I said, I don’t take it back, and my father looks at me severely. He looks at me the way a father would look at a thieving son—a son already lost to him, in jail, on visitors’ day.

  My mother tries to ease the tension. “Who hasn’t stolen at some time in their life?” she says, and slips into some anecdote from her childhood, looking at Claudia. She asks if she has ever stolen anything. Claudia answers that she hasn’t, but if she was desperate maybe she would.

  Claudia says that her head hurts. I ask her to go lie down. We go to the room that was mine as a child. I make up the sofa bed and hug Claudia; she lies back and closes her eyes, her eyelids trembling slightly. I kiss her, I promise her that as soon as she feels better we will leave. “I don’t want to leave,” she says unexpectedly. “I want to stay here, I think we need to sleep here tonight, don’t ask me why,” she says. I discover then that she isn’t sick. I feel confused.