Ways of Going Home: A Novel (11 page)

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, awkwardly, 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.

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 housemates—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