Ways of Going Home: A Novel (7 page)

and in his orphanhood has something

of what eldest means. As though

they too had died

those impossible younger brothers.

When we write we act like only children. As if we had been alone forever. Sometimes I hate this story, this profession that I can no longer leave. That now I’ll never leave.

*   *   *

I always thought I didn’t have real childhood memories. That my history fit into a few lines. On one page, maybe. In large print. I don’t think that anymore.

The family weekend has crushed my will. I find consolation in a letter that Yasunari Kawabata wrote to his friend Yukio Mishima in 1962: “Whatever your mother says, your writing is magnificent.”

*   *   *

Just now I tried to write a poem, but I managed only these few lines:

Growing up, I meant to be a memory

But now I’ve had as much as I can bear

Of forever seeking out the beauty

In a tree that’s been disfigured by the wind

The part I like is the beginning:

Growing up, I meant to be a memory.

LITERATURE OF THE CHILDREN

I left home at the end of 1995, just after I turned twenty, but throughout my adolescence I yearned to leave these overly clean sidewalks behind, to get away from the boring streets where I grew up. I wanted a full and dangerous life, or maybe I just wanted what some children always want: a life without parents.

I lived in boardinghouses or small rooms and worked wherever I could while I finished university. And when I finished university I kept on working wherever I could, because I studied literature, which is what people do before they end up working wherever they can.

Years later, however, already approaching thirty, I got a job as a teacher and managed to establish myself to a certain extent. I practiced a calm and dignified life: I spent the afternoons reading novels or watching TV for hours, smoking tobacco or marijuana, drinking beer or cheap wine, listening to music or listening to nothing—because sometimes I sat in silence for long stretches, as if waiting for something, for someone.

That’s when I went back, when I returned. I wasn’t expecting to find anyone, I wasn’t looking for anything, but one summer night, a night like any other when I went out walking with long, sure steps, I saw the blue facade, the green gate, and the small square of dry grass just in front. Here it is, I thought. This is where I was. I said it out loud, incredulity in my voice. I remembered the scene exactly: the bus trip, the woman’s neck, the store, the harrowing return trip, everything.

I thought of Claudia then, and also of Raúl and of Magali; I imagined or tried to imagine their lives, their destinies. But suddenly the memories shut off. For a second, without knowing why, I thought they must all be dead. For a second, not knowing why, I felt immensely alone.

In the following days I went back to the place almost obsessively. Intentionally or unconsciously, I directed my steps to the house and, sitting in the grass, I stared at the facade as night fell. First the streetlights would come on, and later, after ten, a small window on the second floor would light up. For days the only sign of life in that house was that faint light that appeared on the second floor.

One afternoon I saw a woman open the door and take out bags of garbage. Her face seemed familiar and at first I thought it was Claudia, although the image I still held of her was so remote that I could extrapolate many different faces from the memory. The woman had the cheekbones of a thin person, but she had gotten possibly irremediably fat. Her red hair formed a hard and shiny fabric, as if she had just dyed it. And in spite of that conspicuous appearance she seemed bothered by the simple fact that someone was looking at her. She walked as if her gaze were stuck to the sidewalk cracks.

I hoped to see her again. Some afternoons I brought a novel along, but I preferred books of poetry, since they allowed more breaks for spying. I was ashamed, but it also made me laugh to be a spy again. A spy who, once again, didn’t know what he wanted to find.

One afternoon I decided to ring the bell. When I saw the woman coming to answer I panicked, knowing I had no plan and I didn’t even know how I should introduce myself. Stuttering, I told her I had lost my cat. She asked me his name, and I didn’t know how to answer. She asked what the cat looked like. I said he was black, white, and brown.

“Then it’s not a he, it’s a she,” said the woman.

“It’s a he,” I answered.

“If it’s three colors it can’t be a he. Tricolored cats are females,” she said. And she added that in any case she hadn’t seen any stray cats in the neighborhood recently.

The woman was going to close the door when I said, almost shouting: “Claudia.”

“Who are you?” she asked.

I told her. I told her we had known each other in Maipú. That we had been friends.

She looked at me for a long time. I let myself be looked at. It’s a strange sensation, when you’re waiting for someone to recognize you. Finally she told me: “I know who you are. I’m not Claudia. I’m Ximena, Claudia’s sister. And you’re that boy who followed me that afternoon, Aladdin. That’s what Claudia called you, we always laughed when we remembered you. Aladdin.”

I didn’t know what to say. I precariously understood that yes, Ximena was the woman I had followed so many years earlier. Raúl’s supposed girlfriend. But Claudia had never told me she had a sister. I felt a weight, the need to find some opportune phrase. “I’d like to see Claudia,” I said, in a small voice.

“I thought you were out looking for a cat. A girl cat.”

“Yes,” I answered. “But I’ve often thought, over the years, about that time in Maipú. And I’d like to see Claudia again.”

There was hostility in Ximena’s gaze. She was silent. I talked, nervously improvising, about the past, about the desire to recover the past.

“I don’t know what you want to see Claudia for,” said Ximena. “I don’t think you’d ever understand a story like ours. Back then people were looking for missing persons, they looked for the bodies of people who had disappeared. I’m sure in those years you were looking for kittens or puppies, same as now.”

I didn’t understand her cruelty; it seemed excessive, unnecessary. All the same, Ximena took down my phone number. “When she gets here I’ll give it to her,” she said.

“And when do you think she’s going to come?”

“Any minute now,” she answered. “My father is about to die. When he dies, my sister will come from Yankee-land to cry over his corpse and ask for her part of the inheritance.”

It struck me as ridiculous and juvenile to refer to the United States as Yankee-land, and at the same time I thought about that conversation with Claudia, in the Maipú Temple, about flags. Ultimately, fate took her to that country she disparaged as a child, I thought, and I also thought that I should leave, but I couldn’t help but ask one last, polite question:

“How is Don Raúl?” I asked.

“I don’t know how Don Raúl is. I’m sure he’s fine. But my father is dying. Bye, Aladdin,” she said. “You don’t understand, you’ll never understand anything,
huevón.
”

I walked around the neighborhood several more times, but I looked at the house from far away; I didn’t dare get closer. I often thought about that bitter conversation with Ximena. Her words pursued me somehow. One night I dreamed I ran into her at the supermarket. I was working, promoting a new beer. She passed by with her cart full of cat food. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. She recognized me but avoided saying hello.

I also thought about Claudia, but it was like thinking of a ghost, like thinking about someone who, in some way that is irrational yet nonetheless concrete, accompanies us. I didn’t expect her to call. I couldn’t imagine her sister giving her my number, telling her about that unexpected visit, Aladdin’s strange apparition. But that’s how it went: some months after that conversation with Ximena, early one morning, just before nine, Claudia called me. She was friendly. “It would be fun to see each other again,” she said.

We met one November afternoon, at the Starbucks in La Reina. I’d like to remember each of her words now, with absolute precision, and write them down in this notebook with no additional commentary. I’d like to imitate her voice, to raise a camera to the gestures she made as she dived, fearlessly, into the past. I’d like someone else to write this book. For her to write it, perhaps. I’d like her to be at my house, right now, writing. But it’s for me to write and here I am. And here I’ll stay.

“You weren’t hard to recognize,” says Claudia.

“You either,” I answer, but for long minutes I’m distracted as I search for the face I have in my memory. I don’t find it. If I’d seen her in the street I wouldn’t have recognized her.

We go up to get our coffees. I don’t usually go to Starbucks, and I’m surprised to see my name scrawled on the cup. I look at her cup, her name. She’s not dead, I think suddenly, happily. She’s not dead.

Claudia’s hair is short now and her face is very thin. Her breasts are still meager and her voice sounds like a smoker’s, though she smokes only when she’s in Chile. “It seems like in the United States they don’t let you smoke anywhere anymore,” I say, suddenly content for the conversation to be simply social, routine.

“It’s not that. It’s weird. In Vermont I don’t feel like smoking, but when I get to Chile I smoke like crazy,” says Claudia. “It’s like Chile is incomprehensible or intolerable unless I smoke.”

“As if Chile were incendiary,” I say, joking.

“Yes,” says Claudia, without laughing. She laughs later. Ten seconds later she gets the joke.

At first the conversation follows the shy course of a blind date, but sometimes Claudia speeds up and starts to talk in long sentences. The plot begins to clear up: “Raúl is my father,” she says with no lead-up. “But his name was Roberto. The man who died three weeks ago, my father, was named Roberto.”

I look at her astonished, but it isn’t a pure astonishment. I receive the story as if expecting it. Because I do expect it, in some way. It’s the story of my generation.

“I was born five days after the coup, September sixteenth, 1973,” says Claudia in a kind of outpouring. The shadow of a tree falls capriciously over her mouth, so I don’t see her lips moving. It’s disturbing. I feel like a photograph is talking to me. I remember that beautiful poem “The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.” But she moves her hands and life returns to her body. She isn’t dead, I think again, and again I feel an immense happiness.

Magali and Roberto had Ximena when Roberto had just entered law school at the University of Chile. They lived separately until she got pregnant again and then, at the beginning of 1973, they got married and decided to live in La Reina while they looked for a place of their own. Magali was older. She had studied English at the Pedagogical Institute and she belonged to Allende’s party, but she wasn’t active. Roberto, on the other hand, was a committed activist, though he wasn’t involved in any dangerous situations.

They spent the first years of the dictatorship terrified and ensconced in that house in La Reina. But toward the end of 1981 Roberto reconnected: he started circulating around certain places he had avoided up to then, and he quickly took on responsibilities, at first very minor ones, as an informant. Every morning he waited—on the steps of the National Library, on a bench in the Plaza de Armas, and even a few times at the zoo—for his contacts, and then he went back to work in a small office on Moneda Street.

Soon afterward Magali rented the house in Maipú and she went to live there with the girls. It was the best way to protect them, far away from everything, far from the world. Roberto, meanwhile, did take risks, but he changed his appearance constantly. At the beginning of 1984 he convinced his brother-in-law Raúl to leave the country and give him his identity. Raúl left Chile over the mountains and went to Mendoza, with no definite plan but with a bit of money to begin a new life.

It was then that Roberto took the house in Aladdin Street. Again, Maipú seemed like a safe place, where it was possible to not awaken suspicion. He lived very close to his wife and daughters and his new identity allowed him to see them more often, but caution came first. The girls almost never saw their father and Claudia didn’t even know he lived close by. She only found out that night, the night of the earthquake.

Learning to tell her story as if it didn’t hurt. That was, for Claudia, growing up: learning to tell her story precisely, bluntly. But it’s a trap to put it like that, as if the process ever ended. “Only now do I feel I can do it,” says Claudia. “I tried for a long time. But now I’ve found a kind of legitimacy. A drive. Now I want someone, anyone, to ask me out of nowhere: Who are you?”

I’m the one asking, I think. I’m the stranger who’s asking. I was expecting a meeting heavy with silences, a series of disconnected phrases that later on, like when I was a child, I would have to put together and decipher. But no, on the contrary: Claudia wants to talk. “When I was on the plane coming here,” she says, “I looked at the clouds for a long time. It seemed like they were drawing something faint and disconcerting but at the same time recognizable. I thought about a kid scribbling on paper or the drawings my mother made when she was on the phone. I don’t know if it happened once or many times, but I have this image of my mother scribbling on paper while she talked on the phone.

“Then I looked,” says Claudia, “at the flight attendants smoothing their skirts while they talked and laughed at the back of the aisle, and at the stranger dozing next to me with a self-help book open on his chest. And then I thought how my mother had died ten years ago, how my father had just died, and instead of silently honoring their deaths I felt an imperative need to talk. The wish to say: I. The vague, strange pleasure, even, of answering: ‘My name is Claudia and I’m thirty-three years old.’”