Ways of Going Home: A Novel (6 page)

I went home a bit humiliated, with the same antiflu medicines as always, thinking about those families in far-off Careno, about what my face would be like white, washed-out, or about my distant desire, once upon a time, to study medicine. I imagined that same doctor, older than me in medical school, answering emphatically, annoyed: no, we’re not related.

*   *   *

Parents abandon their children. Children abandon their parents. Parents protect or forsake, but they always forsake. Children stay or go but they always go. And it’s all unfair, especially the sound of the words, because the language is pleasing and confusing, because ultimately we would like to sing or at least whistle a tune, to walk alongside the stage whistling a tune. We want to be actors waiting patiently for the cue to walk onstage. But the audience left a long time ago.

*   *   *

Today I made up this joke:

“When I grow up I’m going to be a secondary character,” a boy says to his father.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you want to be a secondary character?”

“Because the novel is yours.”

*   *   *

I’m writing in my parents’ house. It’s been a long time since I’ve been here. I prefer to see them in town, at lunchtime. But this time I wanted to watch the Chile-versus-Paraguay game with my father, thinking I could also refresh some details for the story while I was here. It’s the trip in the novel, the frightened protagonist’s trip home at the end of the long evening when he follows Raúl’s supposed girlfriend. I wrote that passage thinking about a real trip I took more or less at that age.

One afternoon, after lunch, I was getting ready to go out when my father said no, I had to stay home and study English. I asked why, since I was getting good grades in English. “Because it isn’t prudent for you to go out so much.” He used that word,
prudent
, I remember exactly. “And because I am your father and you have to obey me,” he said.

It seemed brutal to me, but I studied, or at least I pretended to. At night, before going to sleep, still angry, I told my father that it made me so mad to be a kid and to have to ask permission for everything, that it would be better to be an orphan. I only said it to annoy him, but he gave me a sly look and went to talk to my mother. I could tell by her gestures as they approached that they didn’t agree on the measure they were about to announce to me, but that I would have to abide by it anyway.

Before speaking to me they called my sister to witness the scene. My father addressed her first. He told her they had been living a lie. That until then they had believed she was the older sibling, but that they had just discovered she wasn’t. “So, we’re going to give your brother the keys to the house—you can go out and come home whatever time you want, from now on you’re in charge of yourself,” he told me, looking me in the eye. “No one will ask you where you’re going or if you have homework or anything else.”

So it was. I enjoyed those privileges for several weeks. They treated me like an adult, with only a few traces of irony. I grew desperate. I told my mother I was going very far away and she answered that I shouldn’t forget to take my suitcase with me. I didn’t take a suitcase, but one afternoon I anxiously boarded a random bus, prepared to stay on until the end of its route and with no plan for when I got there.

I didn’t get to the end of the route, but I did almost reach the neighborhood where I live now. The trip took over an hour and when I got back they yelled at me a lot. That was what I wanted. I was happy to have my parents back. And I had also discovered a new world. A world I didn’t like, but a new one.

That route doesn’t exist anymore. Today I came by metro and then bus and I got to Maipú by way of Los Pajaritos. I’m always surprised at the number of Chinese restaurants on the avenue. For years now, Maipú has been a small big city, and the stores I frequented as a child are now bank branches or fast-food chains.

Before I got to my parents’ house I took a detour to pass by Lucila Godoy Alcayaga. The street was closed off with an eye-catching electric gate, as was the passage Neftalí Reyes Basoalto. I didn’t feel like asking anyone going by to let me in. I wanted to see Claudia’s house, which in reality was, for a time, my friend Carla Andreu’s house. I headed, then, for Aladdin. The neighborhood is full of attics now, second floors that look out of place, ostentatious roofs. No longer is it the dream of equality. Just the opposite. Lots of houses have been abused, and others are luxurious. Some of them look abandoned.

There were changes as well in my parents’ house. I was struck most of all by the sight of a new bookshelf in the living room. I recognized the automotive encyclopedia, the BBC English course, and the old books put out by
Ercilla
magazine, with its collections of Chilean, Spanish, and world literatures. On the middle shelf there was also a series of novels by Isabel Allende, Hernán Rivera Letelier, Marcela Serrano, John Grisham, Barbara Wood, Carla Guelfenbein, and Pablo Simonetti, and closer to the floor were some books I read as a child for school:
The Löwensköld Ring
by Selma Lagerlöf,
Alsino
by Pedro Prado,
Michael Strogoff
by Jules Verne,
El ultimo grumete de la
Baquedano by Francisco Coloane,
Fermina Márquez
by Valéry Larbaud. Well. I wish I’d kept them myself, but I’m sure I forgot them in some box my parents found in the attic.

It was discomfiting to see those books there, hastily ordered on a red melamine shelf, flanked by posters of hunting scenes or sunrises and a faded reproduction of
Las Meninas
that has been in the house forever and that my father still proudly shows visitors: “This is the painter, Velásquez; the painter painted himself,” he says.

“Thanks to that library, your mother has started reading and I have too, though of course I’d rather watch movies,” said my father, and he turned on the TV right on time for the game. We celebrated goals by Mati Fernández and Humberto Suazo with a big pitcher of pisco sour and a couple bottles of wine. I drank much more than my father did. I’ve never seen him drunk, I thought, and for some reason I said it out loud to him.

“I
did
see my father drunk, many times,” he answered abruptly, with a barely contained look of sadness.

“Stay over, your sister is coming to lunch tomorrow,” my mother said. “You can’t drive in the state you’re in,” she added, and I reminded her of something she always forgets: I don’t have a car. “Oh,” she said. “That’s right. All the more reason you can’t drive,” she laughed. I like her laugh, especially when it comes suddenly, when it happens unexpectedly. It is serene and sweet at the same time.

*   *   *

I left home fifteen years ago, but I still feel a kind of strange pulse when I enter this room that used to be mine and is now a kind of storage room. At the back there’s a shelf full of DVDs and photo albums jumbled in the corner next to my books, the books I’ve published. It strikes me as beautiful that they’re here, next to the family mementos.

*   *   *

A little while ago, at two in the morning, I got up to make coffee and I was surprised to see my mother in the living room, drinking
mate
with a beginner’s graceful movements.

“This is what I do now when I feel like smoking,” she said with a smile. She smokes very little, five cigarettes a day, but since my father quit he doesn’t let her smoke inside, and it’s too cold to open the window.

“I’m going to smoke,” I said. “Let’s smoke. Dad can’t stop you from smoking, you’re too old for that now,” I said.

“He only denies me cigarettes. I deny him lots of things—saturated fats, too much sugar. It’s only fair.”

Finally I convinced her and we shut ourselves up in a sort of small room they had built to house an immense new washing machine. She smoked with the same movement as always, so markedly feminine: the cigarette tilted downward, her hand palm out, very close to her mouth.

“What will I do,” she said suddenly, “if tomorrow your father realizes we were smoking?”

“Tell him we didn’t smoke. That if it smells it’s because I smoke a lot. I smell like cigarettes. Tell him that. And then change the subject, tell him you’re worried because you think I’m smoking too much, and I’m going to die of cancer.”

“But that would be a lie,” she said.

“It wouldn’t be a lie,” I answered, “because sooner or later I
am
going to die of cancer.”

My mother let out a deep sigh and slowly shook her head. Then she said something astonishing: “No one in my life has ever made me laugh as much as you. You are the funniest person I’ve ever met. But you’re also serious, and that was always disconcerting, it
is
disconcerting. You left home very young, and sometimes I wonder what life would be like if you hadn’t left. There are kids your age who still live with their parents. I see them go by sometimes and I think of you.”

“Life would have been worse,” I said. “And those big babies are spoiled brats.”

“Yes. It’s true. And you’re right. Life would be worse if you lived here. Before you left, your father and I used to fight a lot. But after you left, we didn’t fight as much. Now we hardly ever fight.”

I wasn’t expecting that sudden moment of honesty. I sat there thinking, disheartened, but right away she asked me, as if it were relevant: “Do you like Carla Guelfenbein?”

I didn’t know how to answer. “I think she’s pretty. I’d go out with her, but I wouldn’t sleep with her,” I said. “Maybe I’d kiss her, but I wouldn’t sleep with her, or I’d sleep with her but I wouldn’t kiss her.” My mother pretended to be scandalized. The gesture looked beautiful on her.

“I’m asking if you like her writing.”

“No, Mom. I don’t like it.”

“But I like her novel.
The Other Side of the Heart
.”

“
The Other Side of the Soul
,” I corrected her.

“That’s it,
The Other Side of the Soul
. I identified with the characters, the book moved me.”

“And how is it possible for you to identify with characters from another social class, with problems that aren’t and could never be problems in your life, Mom?”

I spoke seriously, too seriously. I knew it wasn’t appropriate to speak seriously, but I couldn’t help it. She looked at me with a mixture of anger and compassion. With a little annoyance. “You’re wrong,” she said finally. “Maybe it’s not my social class, I agree. But social classes have changed a lot, everyone says so, and when I read that novel I felt that yes, those were my problems. I know what I’m saying bothers you, but you should be a little more tolerant.”

It seemed very strange that my mother would use that word,
tolerant
. I went to sleep remembering my mother’s voice saying: You should be a little more tolerant.

*   *   *

After lunch my sister insisted on driving me home. She got her license a year ago but she really learned to drive only last month. She didn’t seem nervous, though. I was the nervous one. I chose to surrender, close my eyes and open them only when she shifted gears and the car stuttered too much. In moments of silence my sister accelerated, and when the conversation flowed she slowed down so much that other cars overtook us, horns sounding.

“I feel bad about what happened with your marriage,” she told me, soon after we left the highway.

“That was a long time ago,” I replied.

“But I hadn’t told you that.”

“We got back together recently.” My sister’s expression is something between incredulous and happy. I explain that for now it’s all fragile, tentative, but that I feel good. That we want to do things better this time. That we’re not living together again yet. She asks me why I didn’t tell our parents. “That’s exactly why,” I say. “It’s still too early to tell them.”

Then she asks me if I’m going to write more books. I like the way she frames the question, since it implies the possibility that I could simply say no, enough already; and that’s what I do think, sometimes, at the end of a bad night: Soon I’ll stop writing, just like that, and someday I’ll have a distant memory of the time when I wrote books, the same way others remember the season they drove a taxi or worked selling dollars in Paseo Ahumada.

But I answer yes, and she asks me to tell her what the new book is about. I don’t want to answer, and she realizes this and asks again. I tell her it’s about Maipú, about the earthquake of ’85, about childhood. She asks for more details, I give them to her. We reach my house and I invite her in; she doesn’t want to come but she also doesn’t want me to go. I know very well what she’s going to ask.

“Am I in your book?” she finally says.

“No.”

“Why not?”

*   *   *

I’ve thought about it. Of course I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about it a lot. My answer is honest:

“To protect you,” I say.

She looks at me skeptically, hurt. She looks at me with a little girl’s expression.

“It’s better not to be someone else’s character,” I say. “It’s better not to be in any book.”

“And are you in the book?”

“Yes. More or less. But it’s my book. I couldn’t not be in it. Even if I gave myself very different characteristics and a life very different from mine, I would still be in the book. I already made the decision not to protect myself.”

“And are our parents in it?

“Yes. There are characters like our parents.”

“And why not protect our parents, too?”

*   *   *

For that question, I don’t have an answer. I suppose it’s their lot, simply, to appear. To receive less than they gave, to attend a masked ball and not understand very well why they are there. I’m not capable of saying any of that to my sister.

“I don’t know, it’s fiction,” I tell her. “I have to go, sis.” I don’t call her by her name. I call her “sis,” give her a kiss on the cheek, and get out of the car.

Back home I spend a long time thinking of my sister, my big sister. I remember this poem by Enrique Lihn:

So the only child’s the eldest of his brothers