Ways of Going Home: A Novel (10 page)

“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.

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.