I go over to the little shelf holding the old family photo albums. That’s what these albums are for, I think: to make us believe we were happy as children. To show ourselves that we don’t want to accept how happy we were. I turn the pages slowly. I show Claudia a very old picture of my father getting off a plane, with long hair and very thick lenses blurring his eyes.
“Go back to the table,” Claudia says, or requests. “I want to be alone for a few hours.” She doesn’t say for a while or for a bit. She says she wants to be alone for a few hours.
My mother reheats the food in the microwave while my father tunes the radio in search of a classical music station—he’s never liked it but he thinks it’s the appropriate music for dinner. He stands there, turning the dial; he is upset and he doesn’t want to look at me. “Sit down, Dad, we’re talking,” I say with sudden authority.
While we eat I ask my parents if they remember the night of the 1985 earthquake, if they remember our neighbor Raúl. My mother gets the neighbors and their families confused, while my father remembers Raúl perfectly. “I understand he was a Christian Democrat,” he says, “although it was also rumored he was something more than that.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know, it seems he was a Socialist, or a Communist, even.”
“Communist like my grandfather?”
“My father wasn’t a Communist. My father was a worker, that’s all. Raúl must have been something more dangerous. But no, I don’t know. He seemed peaceful enough. Anyway, if Piñera wins the elections, the party’s over for Raúl. I’m sure he’s lived high on the hog off those corrupt and chaotic governments.”
He says it to provoke me. I let him talk. I let him say a few simplistic and bitter phrases. “They’ve had their hands in our pockets all these years,” he says. “Those Concertación people are a bunch of thieves,” he says. “A little order will do this country good.” And then comes the feared pronouncement I’d been waiting for, the line that I can’t, that I will not, allow to be crossed: “Pinochet was a dictator and all, he killed some people, but at least back then there was order.”
* * *
I look him in the eyes. At what moment, I think, at what moment did my father turn into this? Or was he always like this? Was he always like this? I think it forcefully, with a severe and painful theatricality: Was he always this way?
My mother doesn’t agree with what my father has said. Really, she more or less agrees, but she wants to do something to keep from spoiling the evening. “The world is much better now,” she says. “Things are good. And Michelle is doing the best she can.”
I can’t help asking my father if in those years he was a Pinochet supporter. I’ve asked him that question hundreds of times, since I was a teenager; it’s almost a rhetorical question, but he’s never admitted it—why not admit it? I think. Why deny it for so many years, why deny it still?
My father sits in sullen, deep silence. Finally he says that no, he wasn’t a Pinochet supporter, that he learned as a child that no one was going to save us.
“Save us from what?”
“Save us. Give us food to eat.”
“But you had food to eat. We had food to eat.”
“It’s not about that,” he says.
* * *
The conversation becomes unbearable. I get up to go check on Claudia. I stare at her intensely, but she goes on turning pages as if she doesn’t notice I’m there. By now she’s gone through half the albums. Her gaze absorbs, devours the images. Sometimes she smiles, sometimes her face becomes so serious that a sadness descends on me. No, I don’t feel sadness: I feel fear.
I go back to the table; the vanilla ice cream is melting on my plate. I tell them in a low but very fast voice, so fast that the details become unintelligible, that Claudia was Raúl’s daughter but for years she had to pretend she was his niece. That Raúl was really named Roberto. I don’t know what I am hoping for by telling them. But I’m hoping for something, looking for something.
* * *
“It’s a complicated story, but a good one,” says my father, after a not very long silence.
“Are you fucking with me? A good story? It’s a painful story.”
“It’s a painful story, but it’s over now. Claudia is alive. Her parents are alive.”
“Her parents are dead,” I say.
“Were they killed by the dictatorship?”
“No.”
“And how did they die?”
“Her mother died of a cerebral hemorrhage and her father of cancer.”
“Poor Claudia,” says my mother.
“But they didn’t die for political reasons,” says my father.
“But they’re dead.”
“But you’re alive,” he says. “And I bet you’ll use such a good story in a book.”
“I’m not going to write a story about them. I’m going to write about you two,” I say, with a strange smile on my face. I can’t believe what has just happened. I hate being the son who recriminates his parents, over and over again. But I can’t help it.
I look straight at my father and he turns his face away. Then I see in his profile the shine of a contact lens and his slightly irritated right eye. I remember the scene, repeated countless times during my childhood: my father kneeling down, desperately searching for a contact lens that has just fallen out. We would all help him look, but he wanted to find it for himself and it was an enormous effort.
Just as Claudia wanted, we stay at my parents’ house. At two in the morning I get up to make coffee. My mother is in the living room, drinking mate. She offers me some, I accept. I think how I’ve never drunk mate with her before. I don’t like the taste of sweetener but I suck hard on the straw; I burn myself a little.
“I was afraid of him,” my mother says.
“Who?”
“Ricardo. Rodolfo.”
“Roberto.”
“That’s it, Roberto. I could tell he was mixed up in politics.”
“Everyone was mixed up in politics, Mom. You, too. Both of you. By not participating you supported the dictatorship.” I feel that there are echoes in my language, there are hollows. I feel like I’m speaking according to a behavior manual.
“But we were never, your father and I, either for or against Allende, or for or against Pinochet.”
“Why were you afraid of Roberto?”
“Well, I don’t know if it was fear. But now you’re telling me he was a terrorist.”
“He wasn’t a terrorist. He hid people, he helped people who were in danger. And he also helped pass information.”
“And that doesn’t seem like much to you?”
“It seems like the least he could do.”
“But those people he hid were terrorists. They planted bombs. They planned attacks. That’s reason enough to be afraid.”
“Fine, Mom, but dictatorships don’t fall just like that. The struggle was necessary.”
“What do you know about those things? You hadn’t even been born yet when Allende was in power. You were just a baby during those years.”
* * *
I’ve heard that comment many times. You hadn’t even been born. This time, though, it doesn’t hurt. In a way, it makes me laugh. Just then my mother asks me, as if it were relevant:
“Do you like Carla Guelfenbein?”
I don’t know how to answer. I say no. “I don’t like those books, those kinds of books,” I say.
“Well, we don’t like the same kinds of books. I liked her novel The Other Side of the Soul. I identified with the characters, it moved me.”
“And how is that possible, Mom? How can you identify with characters from another social class, with conflicts that aren’t, that could never be, conflicts in your life?”
I speak in earnest, very seriously. I feel like I shouldn’t speak so seriously. That it isn’t appropriate. That I’m not going to solve anything by making my parents face up to the past. That I’m not going to achieve anything by
taking away my mother’s right to freely give her opinion on a book. She looks at me with a mixture of anger and compassion. With a little exasperation.
“You’re wrong,” she says. “Maybe it isn’t my social class, fine, but social classes have changed a lot, everyone says so. And reading that novel I felt that yes, those were my problems. I understand that what I’m saying bothers you, but you should be a little more tolerant.”
“I just said I didn’t like that novel. And that it was strange that you would feel you identified with characters from another social class.”
“And Claudia?”
“What about Claudia?”
“Is Claudia from your social class? What social class are you from, now? She lived in Maipú, but she wasn’t from here. She looks more refined. You also look more refined than us. No one would say you were my son.
“I’m sorry,” says my mother before I can answer the question, which, in any case, I wouldn’t know how to answer. She gives me more mate and lights two cigarettes with the same match. “We’re going to smoke inside here, even though your father doesn’t like it.” She passes one to me.
“It isn’t your fault,” she says. “You left home very young, at twenty-two.”
“At twenty, Mom.”
“At twenty, twenty-two, it doesn’t matter. Very young. I sometimes think about what life would be like if you had stayed home. Some kids do. That thief boy, for example. He stayed here and became a thief. Others stayed too, and now they’re engineers. That’s life: you become a thief or an engineer. But I don’t really know what you became.”
“I don’t know what my father became,” I say, practically involuntarily.
“Your father has always been a man who loves his family. That’s what he was, that’s what he is.”
“And what would life have been like if I had stayed, Mom?”
“I don’t know.”
“It would have been worse,” I answer.
My mother nods. “Maybe it’s better for us to be farther apart,” she says. “I like how you are. I like that you defend your ideas. And I like that girl, Claudia, for you, even if she isn’t from your social class.”
She carefully puts out her cigarette and washes the ashtray before going to bed. I open the door and sit on the threshold. I want to look at the night, look for the moon, and to finish off in long gulps the whiskey I’ve just poured myself. I lean on my parents’ car, a new Hyundai truck. The alarm goes off and my father gets up. I’m moved by the sight of him in his pajamas. He asks me if I’m drunk. “A little,” I answer in a faint voice. “Just a little.”
It’s very late, five in the morning. I go up to the room. Claudia is sleeping, I lie down next to her; I move, wanting to wake her up. It’s not just a little: I’m drunk. The darkness is almost complete and yet I can feel her gaze on my forehead and my chest. She strokes my neck, I bite her shoulder. “We can’t miss this chance,” she says, “to make love in your parents’ house.” Her body moves in the darkness as the day breaks.
At eight in the morning we decide to leave. I go to my parents’ room to say goodbye. I see them sleeping in an embrace. It’s a weighty image for me. I feel ashamed, happy, and discomfited. I think that they are the beautiful survivors of a lost world, of an impossible world. My father wakes up and asks me to wait. He wants to give me some shirts he’s getting rid of. There are six, they don’t look old; I can tell they’ll be too small for me but I accept them anyway.
We go home and it’s as if we were returning from war, but from a war that isn’t over. I think, We’ve become deserters. I think, We’ve become war correspondents, tourists. That’s what we are, I think: tourists who arrive with their backpacks, their cameras, and their notebooks, prepared to spend a long time wearing out their eyes, but who suddenly decide to go home, and as they do they breathe a long sigh of relief.
A long relief, but a temporary one. Because in that feeling there is innocence and there is guilt, and although we can’t and don’t know how to talk about innocence or guilt, we spend our days going over a long list of things that back then, when we were children, we didn’t know. It’s as if we had witnessed a crime. We didn’t commit it, we were only passing through the place, but we ran away because we knew that if they found us there we’d be blamed. We believe we are innocent, we believe we are guilty: we don’t know.
Back home again Claudia looks at the shirts my father gave me. “I didn’t have my own clothes for many years,” she says suddenly. “First I used Ximena’s castoffs, and then my mother’s dresses. When she died we fought over everything, down to the last rag she left, and now I think maybe it was then that our relationship broke down for good. My father’s suits, on the other hand, are still untouched in the closet in his room,” she says.
I kept my father’s shirts in a drawer for months. In the meantime, many things have happened. In the meantime Claudia left and I started to write this book.
Now I look at those shirts, I spread them out on the bed. There is one I especially like, with an oil-blue color. I just tried it on, it’s definitely too small. I look at myself in the mirror and I think how our parents’ clothes should always be too big for us. But I also think I needed it; sometimes we need to wear our parents’ clothes and look at ourselves for a long time in the mirror.
We never spoke honestly about that trip to Maipú. Many times I wanted to know what Claudia had felt, why she had wanted us to stay there, but every time I asked her, she answered me with excuses or stock phrases. Then came some long and silent days. Claudia seemed concentrated, busy and a little tense. I shouldn’t have been surprised when she announced her decision. Supposedly I was expecting the end; supposedly there was no other ending possible.
“I’ve gone back to see Ximena,” she said first, happily. She still hadn’t agreed to sell the house, but they had renewed their relationship and that was much more important to Claudia than the inheritance. She told me they talked for hours, with no animosity of any kind. “Years ago, too many years ago now,” she told me then, changing her tone in a way that seemed painful, “years ago I discovered I wanted a normal life. That I wanted, above all, to be calm. I already lived through emotions, all the emotions. I want a quiet, simple life. A life with walks in the park.”
I thought about that half-casual, involuntary phrase: a life with walks in the park. I thought that my life was also, in a way, a life with walks in the park. But I understood what she meant. She was looking for a landscape of her own, a new park. A life where she was no longer anyone’s daughter or sister. I insisted, I don’t know why, I don’t know for what. “You’ve reclaimed your past on this trip,” I said.
“I don’t know. But I’ve taken the opportunity to tell it to you. I took a trip back to my childhood that maybe I needed. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves. Back then, when we were kids, you spied on my father because you wanted to be with me. It’s the same thing now. You’ve listened to me just so you can see me. I know my story is important to you, but your own story is more important.”
I thought that was hard, it was unfair. That she was saying unnecessary words. Suddenly I was furious, I even felt a hint of resentment. “You’re very vain,” I told her.
“Yes,” she answered. “And so are you. You want me to back you up, to have the same opinions as you, like two teenagers who force coincidences in order to be together, and they narrow their view and lie.”
I accepted the blow, maybe I deserved it. “I get it, you’re leaving,” I said. “Santiago is stronger than you. And Chile is a shitty country that’s going to be run by a tycoon paying lip service to the bicentennial.”
“I’m not leaving because of that,” she said sharply.
“You’re leaving because you’re in love with someone else,” I replied, as if it were a guessing game. I thought of her Argentine boyfriend and I also thought about Esteban, the blond boy who had been with her back then, in Maipú. I never asked if he was her boyfriend or not. I wanted to ask her now, too late, awk
wardly, childishly. But before I could, she answered, emphatically: “I’m not in love with someone else.” She took a long sip of coffee while she thought about what to say. “I’m not in love with anyone, really. If there’s anything I’m sure of,” she said, “it’s that I’m not in love with anyone.”
“But maybe it’s better for you to think of it that way,” she added later, in an indefinable tone. “It’s easier to understand it that way. It’s better for you to think that all this has been a love story.”
WE’RE ALL RIGHT
This afternoon Eme finally agreed to look at the manuscript. She didn’t want me to read it out loud, the way I used to. She asked me to print the pages out and she covered herself with the sheet to read them in bed, but suddenly she changed her mind and started to get dressed. “I’d rather go home,” she said. “I’ve been here a long time, I want to sleep in my own bed tonight.”
I imagine her reading it now, in bed, in that house she has never invited me to visit. In that bed I don’t know. My bed is hers as well, we picked it out together. And the sheets, the blankets, the comforter. I said as much to her before she left, but I wasn’t expecting her answer: “For this to work,” she said, “sometimes you have to pretend we’ve just met. That we’ve never shared anything before.”
I was struck by the slightly forced restraint in her voice. She spoke to me the way one speaks to a man who complains unfairly in the supermarket line. “We’re all in a hurry, sir. Be patient, wait your turn.”
I’ll wait for my turn, then. Sentimentally, respectfully.
* * *
At twenty years old, when I had just left home, I worked for a time counting cars. It was a simple and badly paid job, but in some ways I enjoyed sitting on my assigned corner and recording on the chart the number of cars, trucks, and buses that went by every hour. Most of all I liked the night shift, although sometimes I got sleepy and I’m sure I made an absurd picture: a young, distracted, haggard guy on a corner of Vicuña Mackenna, waiting for nothing, watching out of the corner of his eye as other young people returned home, boasting about their drunkenness.
Ways of Going Home: A Novel Page 8