Ways of Going Home

110 Pages·2011·0.58 MB·English

by  Alejandro Zambra

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For Andrea
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs

Secondary Characters
Literature of the Parents
Literature of the Children
We’re All Right

A Note About the Author
A Note About the Translator
Also by Alejandro Zambra
Copyright
Now I know how to walk; I can no longer learn to walk.
—W. Benjamin
Instead of howling, I write books.
—R. Gary
SECONDARY CHARACTERS
Once, I got lost. I was six or seven. I got distracted, and all of a sudden I
couldn’t see my parents anymore. I was scared, but I immediately found the way
home and got there before they did. They kept looking for me, desperate, but I
thought that they were lost. That I knew how to get home and they didn’t.
“You went a different way,” my mother said later, angry, her eyes still
swollen.
You were the ones who went a different way, I thought, but I didn’t say it.
Dad watched quietly from the armchair. Sometimes I think he spent all his
time just sitting there, thinking. But maybe he didn’t really think about anything.
Maybe he just closed his eyes and received the present with calm or resignation.
That night he spoke, though: “This is a good thing,” he told me. “You overcame
adversity.” Mom looked at him suspiciously, but he went on stringing together a
confused speech about adversity.
I lay back on the chair across from him and pretended to fall asleep. I heard
them argue, always the same pattern. Mom would say five sentences and Dad
would answer with a single word. Sometimes he would answer sharply: “No.”
Sometimes he would say, practically shouting: “Liar.” Sometimes he would even
say, like the police: “Negative.”
That night Mom carried me to bed and told me, perhaps knowing I was only
pretending to sleep and was listening, curious and attentive: “Your father is
right. Now we know you won’t get lost. That you know how to walk in the street
alone. But you should concentrate more on the way. You should walk faster.”
I listened to her. From then on, I walked faster. In fact, a couple of years later,
the first time I talked to Claudia, she asked me why I walked so fast. She had
been following me for days, spying on me. We had met not long before, on
March 3, 1985—the night of the earthquake—but we hadn’t talked then.
She was twelve and I was nine, so our friendship was impossible. But we were
friends, or something like it. We talked a lot. Sometimes I think I’m writing this
book just to remember those conversations.
The night of the earthquake I was scared but I also, in a way, enjoyed what was
happening.
In the front yard of one of the houses, the adults put up two tents for the
children to sleep in, and at first it was chaos because we all wanted to sleep in
the one that looked like an igloo—those were still a novelty back then—but they
gave that one to the girls. So we boys shut ourselves in to fight in silence, which
was what we did when we were alone: hit each other furiously, happily. But then
the redhead’s nose started bleeding, so we had to find another game.
Someone thought of making wills, and at first it seemed like a good idea; after
a while, though, we decided it didn’t make sense, because if a bigger earthquake
came and ended the world, there wouldn’t be anyone to leave our things to. Then
we imagined that the earth was like a dog shaking itself so people fell off like
fleas into space, and we thought about that image so much it made us laugh, and
it also made us sleepy.
But I didn’t want to sleep. I was tired like never before, but it was a new
tiredness that burned my eyes. I decided to stay up all night and I tried to sneak
into the igloo to keep talking to the girls, but the policeman’s daughter threw me
out, saying I wanted to rape them. Back then I didn’t know what a rapist was but
I still promised I didn’t want to rape them, I just wanted to look at them, and she
laughed mockingly and replied that that was what rapists always said. I had to
stay outside, listening to them pretend that their dolls were the only survivors;
they mourned their owners, crying spectacularly when they realized they were
dead, although one of them thought it was for the best, since the human race had
always seemed repellent to her. Finally, they argued over who would be in
charge. The discussion seemed long to me, but it was easily resolved, since there
was only one original Barbie among the dolls: she won.
I found a beach chair among the rubble and shyly approached the adults’
bonfire. It was strange to see the neighbors all gathered together, maybe for the
first time ever. They drowned their fear in cups of wine and long looks of
complicity. Someone brought an old wooden table and threw it casually on the
fire. “If you want, I’ll throw the guitar on, too,” said Dad, and everyone laughed,
even me, though I was a little disconcerted because Dad didn’t usually tell jokes.
That’s when our neighbor Raúl returned, and Magali and Claudia were with him.
“These are my sister and my niece,” he said. After the earthquake he had gone to
look for them, and now he was coming back, visibly relieved.