Ways of Going Home: A Novel (8 page)

The thing she most wished for during that long trip to Santiago was for the stranger traveling next to her to wake up and ask: Who are you, what’s your name? She wanted to answer him quickly, cheerfully, even flirtatiously. She wanted to tell him, like they do in novels: My name is Claudia, I’m thirty-three years old, and this is my story. And then begin to tell it, finally, as if it didn’t hurt.

By now it is night, and we are still sitting on the cafe terrace. “You’re tired of listening to me,” she says suddenly. I deny it with a sharp shake of the head. “But later I’m going to listen to you,” she says. “And I promise that when I get tired of listening to you, you won’t realize it. I’ll pretend really well,” she says, smiling.

Claudia arrived when the wake was just about to start. She accepted people’s condolences with something like boredom: she preferred silent hugs, without those terrible phrases ready-made for the occasion. After the funeral she unpacked her suitcases in what had once been her room. She thought how she was, after all, coming home; how the only space she had ever really felt comfortable in was that small room in the house in La Reina, although that stability hadn’t lasted long, barely a few years toward the end of the eighties when her grandmother, her mother, and her father were all still alive.

As if she had cruelly guessed Claudia’s thoughts, as if she’d spent a long time waiting to pronounce certain sentences, Ximena came in suddenly and said: “This isn’t your house anymore. You can stay here a few weeks, but don’t get used to it. I took care of Dad, so the house is mine; I’m not going to sell it, don’t even think about it. And it would be a lot better if you found a hotel.”

Claudia agreed, thinking that as the days passed her sister would regain her calm, her senses. She lay on the bed to read a novel; she wanted to forget that bitter conversation and be carried along by the plot, but it was impossible, because the book was about parents who abandoned their children or children who abandoned their parents. Ultimately, that’s what all books are about, she thought.

She went to the living room, where Ximena was watching TV, and sat down next to her. Gregory House was in the middle of saying something crude to Dr. Cuddy, and Claudia remembers that she and Ximena laughed in unison. Then she made tea and offered Ximena a cup. She thought her sister had the face of someone who had suffered not just a day or a week but all her life. “I’m sorry,” said Ximena as she took the tea. “You can stay here as long as you like, but don’t ask me to sell the house. It’s all I have, all
we
have.”

Claudia was about to reply with some opportune, empty phrase: we have each other, we’ll get through this together, something along those lines. But she held back. It wouldn’t have been true. It had been a long time since they’d been able to live together without animosity. “Let’s talk about the house later,” she said.

We walk without a destination but I don’t realize it, I simply accompany Claudia, thinking we’re going somewhere. It’s very late now, the movie theater is closed; we stop to look at the movie posters as if we were a couple out looking for something to do.

“It’s good to live close to a cinema,” she says, and we start talking animatedly about movies. We discover coincidences that inevitably bring us back to real life, to our youth, to childhood. Because we can’t, we don’t know how to talk about a movie or a book anymore; the moment has come when movies and novels don’t matter, only the time when we saw them, read them: where we were, what we were doing, who we were then.

While we walk silently I think about those names: Roberto, Magali, Ximena, Claudia. I ask about her grandmother’s name. “Mercedes,” Claudia answers. I think they are serious names. Even Claudia suddenly seems like a serious name. Beautiful, simple, and serious. I ask her what year her grandmother died. “In 1995, a year before my mother,” says Claudia. And she talks about another death as well, of someone important, someone she never met: her father’s cousin Nacho, the doctor. Nacho was arrested and he never came back. Roberto and Magali always talked about him as if he were alive, but he was dead.

They told her when she was little, and later—for many years—they continued telling her the story of the fever, which wasn’t even a story. It was merely a moment, the last one, although no one knew it would be the last one: in 1974, when Claudia had been alive for eleven months, Nacho went to see her because she had been sick for too many hours. The fever broke immediately. “It’s a miracle,” said the adults that afternoon, laughing. And that’s what it became, a slight, insignificant miracle: to lower a little girl’s fever, only that, on the afternoon when they saw him for the last time—for they never saw him dead, his body never appeared.

“In my family there are no dead,” I say. “No one has died. Not my grandparents, not my parents, not my cousins, no one.”

“You never go to the cemetery?”

“No, I never go to the cemetery,” I answer with a complete sentence, as if I were learning to speak a foreign language and I’d been instructed to answer that way.

“I have to go, I’d rather get back early to my father’s house.” A gesture of her lips gives her away immediately: it’s not her father’s house anymore, now it’s hers and Ximena’s. I go with her, hoping she’ll invite me in for coffee, but she says goodbye at the gate with a bright smile and a hug.

On the way back home I remember a scene in college, one afternoon when we were smoking weed and drinking a sticky wine with melon. I’d spent the afternoon with a group of classmates, and we were exchanging family stories in which death appeared with urgent insistence. Of all those present I was the only one who came from a family with no dead, and that realization filled me with a strange bitterness: my friends had grown up reading the books that their dead parents or siblings left behind in the house. But in my family there were no dead and there were no books.

I come from a family with no dead, I thought as my classmates told their childhood stories. At that moment I had a strong memory of Claudia, but I didn’t want or didn’t dare to tell her story. It wasn’t mine. I knew little, but at least I knew that: no one could speak for someone else. That although we might want to tell other people’s stories, we always end up telling our own.

I want to let a few days go by before I call her and suggest getting together again. But I’m impatient and I do it right away. She doesn’t seem surprised. We arrange to meet the next morning, in Intercommunal Park. I get there early but I see her from far away, sitting on a bench and reading. She looks beautiful. She is wearing a jean skirt and an old black shirt with big blue letters that say
LOVE SUCKS
.

Some kids playing hooky come over to ask for a light. “I didn’t smoke at that age,” Claudia says to me.

“I did,” I answer. I tell her that I started smoking at twelve. Sometimes when I was walking with my father and he lit a cigarette, I would ask him to put it out, saying it was bad for him and he was going to die of cancer. I did it to trick him, so he wouldn’t suspect that I smoked too, and he would look at me apologetically and explain that smoking was a vice and that vices were the signs of human weakness. I remember how I liked it when he suddenly confessed his weakness, his vulnerability.

“I, on the other hand, only saw my father smoke one time,” says Claudia as we wander through the park. “One day I got home early from school and he was in the living room talking to my mother. I was so happy to see him. I lived hoping to see him. My father hugged me and maybe it was a long hug, but I felt like he let go of me quickly, as if we weren’t allowed to have that contact, either. Then I realized he had a lit cigarette in his right hand. It unsettled me. It was like he really was a different person. As if Roberto wasn’t smoking, Raúl was.”

“He also smoked the night of the earthquake, with my dad,” I remind her. “I think my dad offered yours a cigarette and they smoked together, and talked.”

“Really?” asks Claudia, incredulous, as she fixes her hair. “I don’t remember that. But I remember you,” she says.

“Were you really looking for someone to spy on your father?”

“No,” she says. “I didn’t know my father lived there. It was a very ambiguous situation. The night of the earthquake I was alone with my mother, because Ximena had gone to my grandmother’s. Back then Ximena spent a lot of time with Grandma, she practically lived with her. A brick wall fell and broke the big front window, so we couldn’t sleep there. I remember we were desperate, we went out walking and I didn’t know we were looking for my dad, and that he was also looking for us. I don’t know if we took different routes or if we passed each other by. When we finally saw him on a corner I couldn’t believe it. I had a little flashlight, a toy, which they’d given to me years before. I remember I shined it on his face and saw his eyes were a little wet. We hugged and then he brought us to the fire. Before dawn the three of us left for the house in La Reina, in his car.”

“The Fiat 500,” I say.

“The Fiat 500, yes,” she answers.

It affected Claudia a lot to find out that her father lived close by. She was sick of secrets, and at the same time she intuited numerous dangers, huge and imprecise dangers. She liked seeing me there, with the adults around the fire. “You stayed quiet, you observed. I was like that too, silent. I started following you without a clear purpose, and little by little I came up with a plan.”

Neither did Claudia know exactly why she was spying, what she wanted to find out. But when she learned, through me, that Roberto was hiding people in the house, she wasn’t surprised.

“And did you think your father had a lover?”

“I didn’t know what to think. When we talked that time I lost it, the truth is I knew very little about my father. Then I thought it had to be Ximena. I didn’t figure you would follow her like that, but it made me so mad to know she saw my father more than I did. She and my father, we said later, half joking, were the revolutionaries. My mother and I, on the other hand, were the reactionaries. We could joke about it, but it still hurt and I guess it even hurts now.”

When Ximena saw that a boy, that I, was following her, she had no doubt that her sister had sent me. Claudia found herself obliged to confess that she was the one who had asked me to spy on her father. They scolded her, emphatically at first and then lovingly. An argument began in which everyone blamed someone else. “I didn’t want to be responsible for those shouting matches, but I was,” says Claudia, and then there is a long and uncertain pause. For ten minutes it seems like she is about to speak, but she can’t bring herself to. Finally, she says: “I really feel like eating some chocolate ice cream.”

We haven’t seen each other for a week but I call her every day, and I have the impression Claudia waits for those calls. One night, very late, she’s the one who calls me. “I’m outside,” she says. “Ximena threw me out. She says the house is hers. She called me a foreigner and a whore.”

Claudia cries with the precise movements of someone trying not to sob. I hug her, I offer her tea, and we listen to music while I think about the reasons Ximena might have for calling her a whore. I almost ask, but I keep quiet. I tell her she can stay with me, that there’s only one bed but I can sleep on the armchair. “It’ll just be one night,” she answers. “But I want us to sleep together. That way my sister will be right, I’ll be a whore.”

Claudia’s eyes brighten: she gets her laughter back, her beauty. I offer her some cheese and I open a bottle of wine. We talk and drink for hours. I like how she moves around the house. She occupies the space as if recognizing it. She changes one chair for another, she stands up, suddenly she sits on the floor and stays for a while with her hands on her ankles.

I tell her it seems incredible that Ximena threw her out.

“She didn’t throw me out, really,” she answers. “We had a bad argument, but I could have stayed at the house. I wanted to leave, it’s really hard for me to live with her.”

I ask her if Ximena was always like that. She tells me no, that their father’s illness changed her. That in his last years she gave up everything to take care of him. “Now that my father is gone she doesn’t know what to do, she doesn’t know how to live. But I guess it’s more complicated than that,” says Claudia, and she stares fixedly at the lamp in the living room, as if following the movement of a moth.

I ask her why she went to the United States. “I don’t know,” she answers. “I wanted to go, I wanted to leave. My father wanted me to go too, he was already sick by then, but he wanted me to go,” says Claudia, taking on a confessional tone again. “He supported me, above all, during Ximena’s attacks. But Ximena wanted me to go, too. In some way she fantasized about that ending: her taking care of my father to the end and me rushing back, full of guilt, for his funeral.

“I don’t know when, years ago,” Claudia adds, “Ximena constructed the story that I was the evil sister who wanted to take everything from her. And maybe it’s too late to make peace now. Because Ximena is right, in a way. She stayed because she wanted to stay. But she stayed,” says Claudia. “In some way my father had to choose which of his daughters’ lives to fuck over. And he chose her. And I was saved.”

I ask her if she is really full of guilt.

“I don’t feel guilty,” she answers. “But I feel that lack of guilt as if it were guilt.”

“Are you going to go back to the States?”

Two weeks earlier, the afternoon of our reencounter, Claudia told me she had completed a master’s in environmental law in Vermont, and she would rather look for work there, and that she had been living with an Argentine boyfriend for a long time. But now she pauses before answering.

“Sometimes I doubt it,” she says finally. “Sometimes I think I should come back to Chile for good,” she says. It seems to me that she doesn’t know why she says it. I don’t believe her. I don’t think Claudia is seriously considering the possibility of staying. I think Claudia is simply looking for something, and as soon as she finds it she will go back to the United States.