Ways of Going Home: A Novel

by Alejandro Zambra

  It’s night and I’m writing. That is my job now, or something like that. But as I write cars go by on Echeñique Avenue, and sometimes I get distracted and start counting them. In the past ten minutes fourteen cars have passed, three trucks, and one motorcycle. I can’t tell if they turn at the next corner or if they keep going straight. In a vague, melancholy way I think I would like to know.

  I think about the old Peugeot 404. My father used to spend weekends fixing it up, though it never actually broke down—he would say himself, with the particular love men have for cars, that it behaved well and had few problems. All the same, he spent his days tuning it up, changing its spark plugs, or reading until late from some chapter in Apunto, the Automotive Encyclopedia. I have never seen anyone as concentrated as my father was on those nights of reading.

  I thought it was ridiculous for him to spend so much time on the car. Even worse, he made me help him—which consisted of waiting, with infinite patience, for him to finally say: “Pass me the crescent wrench.” Then I had to wait for him to pass it back to me, and also listen to long explanations of mechanics that didn’t interest me in the least. It was then I discovered there was a certain pleasure in the act of pretending to listen to my father or to other adults. In nodding my head and holding back the half smile of knowing I was thinking about something else.

  The Peugeot’s fate was a horrible one. An old truck going against traffic crashed into it, and my father almost died. I still remember when he showed me the mark the seat belt left on his chest. He was talking to me then about prudence, about the wisdom of rules. Suddenly he opened his shirt to show me the reddish mark that was drawn clearly on his dark chest. “If I hadn’t put my seat belt on I’d be dead,” he said.

  The Peugeot was left in pieces and he had to sell it as scrap. I went with my father to the junkyard. Since then, every time I see a Peugeot 404 I remember that unsettling image. And also that mark, which I saw when we went to the pool or the beach. I didn’t like to see my father in a bathing suit. I didn’t like to see that mark cleaving his chest, that evidence, that horrible band that stayed on his body forever.

  * * *

  It’s strange, it’s silly to attempt a genuine story about something, about someone, about anyone, even oneself. But it’s necessary as well.

  It’s four in the morning, I can’t sleep. I get through the insomnia by counting cars and putting together new phrases on the refrigerator:

  our perfect whisper

  another white prostitute

  understand strange picture

  almost black mouth

  how imagine howl

  naked girl long rhythm

  That last one is nice: naked girl long rhythm.

  * * *

  I arrived half an hour early, sat on the terrace, and ordered a glass of wine. I wanted to read while I waited for Eme, but some children were running dangerously around the tables, and it was hard to concentrate. They should be in school, I thought, but then I remembered it was Saturday. I saw their mothers at the corner table, caught up in their trivial chatter.

  She got there late. I noticed she seemed nervous, because she gave me a long explanation for the delay, as if she had never been late before. I thought she didn’t want to talk about the novel, so I decided to ask her right away what she had thought of it. She searched a long time for the right tone. She stuttered. She tried to make a joke I didn’t understand. “The novel is good,” she said, finally. “It’s a novel.”

  “What?”

  “I said, it’s a novel. I like it.”

  “But it isn’t finished.”

  “But you will finish it and it’ll be good.”

  I wanted to ask for more details, about some passages in particular, about certain characters, but it wasn’t possible because one of the women from the corner table came over and greeted Eme effusively. “I’m Pepi,” she said, and they hugged. I don’t know if she said Pepi or Pepa or Pupo or Papo, but it was some nickname like that. She introduced us to her children, who were the loudest of the group. Eme could have cut the conversation off there, but she chose to keep on talking with her old classmate about what a huge coincidence it was to run into each other at that restaurant. It didn’t seem like such a big coincidence to me. Pepi or Pupi or Papi lives in La Reina just like Eme. The strange thing is that they hadn’t run into each other sooner.

  I felt bad. I thought Eme was drawing out the conversation on purpose. That she was grateful for that encounter because it let her put off the moment when she would have to give me a real opinion about the manuscript. Then she said she was sorry and she had to go. I went home frustrated, angry. I tried to go on writing, but I couldn’t.

  * * *

  When I was a child I liked the word blackout. My mother would come get us and bring us into the living room. “In the past, people didn’t have electricity,” she would say as she lit the candles. It was hard for me to imagine a world without lamps, without outlets in the walls.

  Those nights, they let us stay up talking for a while and my mother used to tell the joke about the candle that couldn’t be extinguished. It was long and boring, but we liked it a lot: the family tried to put out a candle so they could go to bed but they all had crooked mouths. Finally the grandmother, who also had a crooked mouth, put out the candle by wetting her fingers with saliva.

  My father laughed at the joke, too. They were there so we wouldn’t feel afraid. But we weren’t afraid. They were the ones who were afraid.

  That’s what I want to talk about. Those kinds of memories.

  * * *

  Today my friend Pablo called me so he could read me this phrase he found in a book by Tim O’Brien: “What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end.” I kept thinking about that and stayed awake all night. It’s true. We remember the sounds of the images. And sometimes, when we write, we wash everything clean, as if by doing so we could advance toward something. We ought to simply describe those sounds, those stains on memory. That arbitrary selection, nothing more. That’s why we lie so much, in the end. That’s why a book is always the opposite of another immense and strange book. An illegible and genuine book that we translate treacherously, that we betray with our habit of passable prose.

  I think about the beautiful beginning of Family Sayings, Natalia Ginzburg’s novel: “The places, events, and people in this book are all real. I have invented nothing. Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy everything thus invented.”

  * * *

  I’m in Las Cruces, enjoying the empty beach, with Eme.

  In the morning, stretched out in the sand, I read Promise at Dawn, the book by Romain Gary where this precise, opportune paragraph appears: “I don’t know how to speak of the sea. I only know that it frees me for the moment from all my burdens. Every time I look at it I become a happy drowned man.”

  I don’t know how to speak of the sea either, although it was presumably the first landscape I saw. When I was barely two months old my father took a job in Valparaíso and we went to live on Cerro Alegre for three years. But my first memory of the sea is much later, at perhaps six years old, when we were already living in Maipú. I remember thinking, awestruck and happy, that it was a limitless space, that the sea was a place that continued, that kept on going.

  I’ve just tried to write a poem called “The Happy Drowned.” It didn’t work out.

  * * *

  We returned in a car Eme borrowed. I drove so carefully that I think she started to get desperate. Then I went with her, for the first time, to her house. I was struck by seeing her things dispersed in new ways. Recognizable. I don’t know if I liked sleeping there with her. I spent the whole time overwhelmed by the need to take in every detail.

  In the morning we had tea with her friends. It was just as Eme had described it to me. The house is really an immense workshop. While Eme draws, her hou
semates—she has used their names many times but I can never remember them—make clothes and handicrafts.

  When I was about to leave Eme asked me if I was writing. I didn’t know how to answer.

  In any case, last night I wrote these lines:

  It’s better not to be in any book

  for the words not to try to protect us

  A life with no music and no lyrics

  and a sky without the clouds you see there now

  * * *

  My prose turns out odd. I can’t find the humor, the frame of mind. But I come up with some iambic lines and suddenly I let that rhythm take over. I move the lines, reinforce and break the cadence. I spend hours working on the poem. I read, out loud:

  It’s better not to be in any book

  for the words not to try to protect us

  A life with no music and no lyrics

  and a sky without the clouds you see there now

  The clouds—you hardly know if they are coming

  closer or retreating when they alter

  their shapes so often and you’d hardly know

  we weren’t still living in the place we left behind

  before we understood even the names

  of the trees

  before we understood even the names

  of the birds

  When fear was only fear and there was no

  love of fear

  or fear of fear

  and pain was an interminable book

  that we once looked through quickly just in case

  our names might be there in it at the end

  * * *

  I dreamed that I was drunk and I was dancing to a song by Los Ángeles Negros, “The Train to Forgetting.” Suddenly Alejandra Costamagna appeared. “You’re really wasted,” she was saying, “I’d better take you home, give me your address.” But I had forgotten my address and I kept dancing while I tried to remember it. In the dream I was drinking pisco and Coke; in the dream I liked pisco and Coke.

  Alejandra was dancing with me but it was more like her way of helping me. I stumbled around outrageously, I almost fell down in the middle of the dance floor. But it wasn’t the dance floor of a club; it was someone’s living room.

  “We aren’t friends,” I said to Alejandra in the dream. “Why are you helping me if we aren’t friends?”

  “Because we are friends,” she answered. “You’re dreaming and in the dream you think we aren’t friends. But we are friends. Try to wake up,” she said. I tried, but I stayed in the dream and I started to get anxious.

  Finally I woke up. Eme was sleeping next to me. I called Alejandra, told her about the dream. She laughed. “I like that song,” she said.

  She asked how things were going with Eme. “I don’t know,” I answered instinctively. And it’s true, I think now: I don’t know.

  * * *

  There is pain but also happiness when you give up on a book. It’s felt that way to me, at least: first there’s the melodrama of having wasted so many nights on a useless passion. But then, as the days pass, a slight, favorable wind prevails. We start to feel comfortable again in that room where we write without any greater purpose, with no precise goal.

  We give up on a book when we realize that it wasn’t for us. From wanting to read it so badly we believed it was up to us to write it. We were tired of waiting for someone to write the book that we wanted to read.

  I don’t plan to give up on my novel, though. Eme’s silence wounds me and I understand why. I made her read the manuscript, and now I want to make her accept it. And the weight of her possible disapproval makes me wish I hadn’t written it, or to give up on it. But no. I’m not going to give up on it.

  * * *

  I had planned to have lunch with my parents, but the prospect of watching them celebrate Piñera’s victory discourages me. I call them and tell them I won’t be coming out to vote. On the bus I listen to very good songs, but suddenly music, any music, becomes unbearable. I put my headphones away and I start reading Promise at Dawn. I’m transfixed by this line: “Instead of howling, I write books.”

  I vote with a sense of sorrow, with very little faith. I know that Sebastián Piñera will win the first round and I’m sure he will also win the second. It seems horrible. It’s obvious we’ve lost our memories. We will calmly, candidly, hand the country over to Piñera and to Opus Dei and the Legionaries of Christ.

  After voting I call my friend Diego. I wait for him a long time, sitting on the grass in the plaza, close to the pool. We take the long walk to the Maipú Temple, and we pass by the place where the Toqui supermarket used to be. Diego is from Iquique but he’s lived in Maipú for ten years. “The deli and the bakery were good,” I tell him, and I describe the supermarket in detail. He listens respectfully, but it’s possible he thinks my interest is ridiculous, since supermarkets are all the same.

  “I’ve never been to the temple before,” says Diego. We go inside in the middle of one of the many Sunday masses. There aren’t many people. We sit near the altar. I look at the little flags, I count them. Afterward we sit on the stairs of the entrance and we can hear the mass over the loudspeaker. We talk while some kids play soccer, and every once in a while they kick the ball close to us. I hurry to kick it back, but suddenly one of them kicks the ball hard and it hits Diego in the face. We expect them to apologize or at least to smile apologetically. They don’t. I sit there holding the ball, the kids come over, they take it from my hands. I’m furious. I want to scold them. To raise them right.

  We talk about Maipú, about the Chilean idea of a villa, so different from the Argentine or Spanish one. The dream of the middle class, but a middle class without rituals, without roots. I ask him if he remembers a soap opera on Channel 13 called Villa Nápoli. Diego doesn’t remember. Sometimes I forget that he is much younger than me.

  We talk about my novel, but also about the novel Diego published recently and that I read a few weeks before. I tell him I liked it; I try to explain why I liked it. I think of one scene in particular. The protagonist travels to Buenos Aires with his father and asks him for a book. The father buys it for him and, to show his approval, he opens it and says, “It’s sturdy.”

  “You didn’t make that up,” I say to him. “That’s the kind of thing you don’t make up.” Diego laughs, shaking his head as if he were dancing to heavy metal. “No, I didn’t make it up,” he says.

  Then we go to the apartment where Diego lives with his mother, in Avenida Sur. His mother’s name is Cinthya. We talk about the results, which by that hour of the afternoon are already clear. Second round, with a huge advantage for Piñera.

  Diego prepares the avocado and adds oil. I tell him avocado doesn’t need oil. “My dad always gets on me for that too,” he says, and laughs.

  “At least your dad has that right,” I answer, and I laugh, too.

  * * *

  “I thought you were joking when you said you were writing about me,” Eme told me in the restaurant. She looked at me as if searching for my face. I felt that she was choosing her words carefully. That she was getting ready to talk. But she stopped at a smile.

  We went to eat sushi at the same place as always. Our order took longer than it should have and I remembered the lunch scene when I was a child—the anguish of leaving with the food on the table. “It’s like in the novel,” I was going to say to her, but she was looking at me with extinguished curiosity. Now I think she was looking at me with compassion. I thought we were approaching that period of the wait when the only possible topic of conversation is the wait. But she began another conversation, with a tone that she seemed to have thought about, that she surely had been practicing at length for days.

  “I haven’t changed that much,” she said. “And neither have you. Some weeks ago I told you we should pretend we have just met. I don’t understand very well what I wanted to say to you. I think that during these months we’ve been laughing at what we used to be. But it’s false. We’re still what we used to be. No
w we understand everything. But we know very little. We know less than before…”

  “But that’s a good thing,” I said fearfully. “It’s good not to know, not to expect more.”

  “No. It isn’t good. It would be good if it were real. We want to be together and so we’re prepared even to pretend. We haven’t changed so much that we can be together again. And I wonder if we’re going to change.”

  I understood what was coming and I readied myself. In arguments I tended to take refuge in a certain optimism, but she would close her face and then even her body to keep me out. I’ll always remember the pain, one night, years ago: in the middle of an argument we started caressing each other and she got on top of me, but in the middle of penetration she couldn’t control her rage and she shut her vagina completely.

  Suddenly, unexpectedly, Eme started talking about the novel. She had liked it, but throughout her reading she couldn’t avoid an ambiguous feeling, a hesitation. “You told my story,” she said, “and I ought to thank you, but no, I think I’d prefer it if no one told that story.” I explained that it wasn’t exactly her life, and that I had only taken some images, some memories we had shared. “Don’t make excuses,” she said. “You left some cash in the safe but you still robbed the bank.” It struck me as a silly, vulgar metaphor.

  The sushi arrived, finally. I focused on the salmon sashimi—I ate voraciously, putting too much soy sauce on each piece and letting the ginger and wasabi burn my mouth. It was as if I wanted to punish myself absurdly while thinking how I loved this woman, how it was a complete love and not a worn-out way of loving. How she wasn’t a habit for me, not a vice that was hard to give up. And nevertheless, at that point I wasn’t, I’m not, willing to fight anymore.

  I ate the sushi, my pieces and hers as well, and when the tray was empty Eme said to me dryly, “Let’s call this off now.” Just then the manager arrived and began a lengthy apology that neither of us wanted to listen to. He offered us free coffee and dessert on the house to make up for the wait. We listened to him absently. We answered mechanically that it didn’t matter, he shouldn’t worry. And we left, each going our separate way.