Ways of Going Home: A Novel (2 page)

Now I don’t understand that freedom we enjoyed. We lived under a dictatorship; people talked about crimes and attacks, martial law and curfew, but even so, nothing kept me from spending all day wandering far from home. Weren’t the streets of Maipú dangerous then? At night they were, and during the day as well, but the adults played, arrogantly or innocently—or with a mixture of arrogance and innocence—at ignoring the danger. They played at thinking that discontent was a thing of the poor and power the domain of the rich, and in those streets no one was poor or rich, at least not yet.

One of those afternoons I saw Raúl’s niece again, but I didn’t know if I should say hello. I saw her again several times in the following days. I didn’t realize that she was actually following me.

“I just like to walk fast,” I answered when she finally spoke to me, and then came a long silence that she broke by asking me if I was lost. I answered that no, I knew perfectly well how to get home. “It was a joke, I want to talk to you, let’s meet next Monday at five in the supermarket bakery.” She said it like that, in one sentence, and left.

The next day my parents woke me up early because we were going to spend the weekend at Lo Ovalle Reservoir. Mom didn’t want to go and she dragged out the preparations, confident that lunchtime would come and the plan would have to change. Dad decided, however, that we would have lunch at a restaurant, and we left right away. Back then, it was a real luxury to eat out. I sat in the backseat of the Peugeot thinking about what I would order, and in the end I asked for a steak
a lo pobre
. Dad warned me that it was a big dish and I wouldn’t be able to eat it all, but on those rare outings I was free to order whatever I wanted.

Suddenly, that heavy atmosphere prevailed in which the only possible topic of conversation is the lateness of the food. Our order took so long that finally Dad decided we would leave as soon as the food came. I protested, or I wanted to protest, or now I think I should have protested. “If we’re going to leave, let’s go now,” said Mom resignedly, but Dad explained that this way the restaurant owners would lose the food, that it was an act of justice, of revenge.

We continued our journey ill-humored and hungry. I didn’t really like going to the reservoir. They wouldn’t let me wander very far by myself and I got bored, though I tried to have fun swimming for a while, fleeing from the rats that lived among the rocks, looking at the worms eating the sawdust and the fish dying on land. Dad settled in to fish all day, and Mom spent the day watching him, and I watched Dad fish and Mom watch him and it was hard for me to understand how that was, for them, fun.

Sunday morning I faked a cold because I wanted to sleep a little longer. They went off to the rocks after giving me endless superfluous instructions. A little while later, I got up and turned on the tape player so I could listen to Raphael while I made breakfast. It was a cassette of all his best songs that my mother had recorded from the radio. Unfortunately, my finger slipped and I pressed “
REC
” for a few seconds. I ruined the tape right in the chorus of the song “Que sabe nadie.”

I was desperate. After thinking a bit, I decided the only solution was to sing over the chorus, and I started practicing the lyric, disguising my voice in a way that seemed convincing to me. Finally I decided to record. I listened to the results several times, thinking, somewhat self-indulgently, that it was good enough. I was a little worried, though, about the lack of music during those seconds.

My father would yell at me, but he didn’t hit. He never hit me, it wasn’t his style; he preferred the grandiloquence of phrases that were impressive at first, because he said them seriously, like an actor in the final episode of a soap opera: “You’ve disappointed me as a son, I can never forgive you for what you’ve done, your behavior is unacceptable,” et cetera.

Nonetheless I harbored a delusion that someday he would beat me almost to death. I have a persistent childhood memory of an imminent beating that never came. Because of that fear, the return trip was excruciating. As soon as we set off for Santiago, I declared I was tired of Raphael, and that we should listen to Adamo or José Luis Rodríguez.

“I thought you liked Raphael,” said Mom.

“Adamo’s lyrics are better,” I said, but then it was out of my hands—I accidentally opened up a long discussion about whether Adamo was better than Raphael. Even Julio Iglesias was mentioned, which in any case was absurd, since no one in our family liked Julio Iglesias.

To demonstrate Raphael’s vocal quality, my father decided to put in the tape, and when “Que sabe nadie” came on I had to improvise a desperate plan B. This consisted of singing very loudly right from the start of the song; I figured that when the chorus came my voice would just sound louder. They yelled at me for singing so loud, but they didn’t notice the adulteration in the tape. Once we were home, however, as I was digging a small hole next to the rose garden to bury the tape, they found me. There was nothing I could do but tell them the whole story. They laughed a lot and listened to the tape several times.

That night, though, they came to my room to tell me I was grounded for a week, and couldn’t leave the house.

“Why are you grounding me after you laughed so much?” I asked, angry.

“Because you lied,” said my father.

So I couldn’t keep my date with Claudia, but in the end it was better, because when I told her that story she laughed so much I could look at her without anxiety, forgetting, to some extent, the strange bond that was beginning to connect us.

It’s hard for me to remember the circumstances in which we saw each other again. According to Claudia, she was the one who sought me out, but I also remember wandering long hours hoping to run into her. However it happened, suddenly we were walking next to each other again, and she asked me to go with her to her house. We took several turns and she even stopped in the middle of a passage and told me we had to turn around, as if she didn’t know where she lived.

We arrived, finally, at a neighborhood with only two streets: Neftalí Reyes Basoalto and Lucila Godoy Alcayaga. It sounds like a joke, but it’s true. A lot of the streets in Maipú had, and still have, those absurd names: my cousins, for example, lived on First Symphony Way, near Second and Third Symphony, perpendicular to Concert Street, and close to the passages Opus One, Opus Two, Opus Three, et cetera. Or the very street where I lived, Aladdin, between Odin and Ramayana and parallel to Lemuria; obviously, toward the end of the seventies some people had a lot of fun choosing names for the streets where the new families would later live—the families without history, who were willing or perhaps resigned to live in that fantasy world.

“I live in the neighborhood of real names,” said Claudia on the afternoon of our reencounter, looking seriously into my eyes.

“I live in the neighborhood of real names,” she said again, as if she needed to start the sentence over in order to go on: “Lucila Godoy Alcayaga is Gabriela Mistral’s real name,” she explained. “And Neftalí Reyes Basoalto is Pablo Neruda’s real name.” A long silence came over us, which I broke by saying the first thing that came into my head:

“Living here must be much better than living on Aladdin Street.”

As I slowly pronounced that stupid sentence, I could see her pimples, her pink-and-white face, her pointed shoulders, the place where her breasts should be but where for now there was nothing, and her hair, unstylish because it wasn’t short, wavy, and brown, but rather long, straight, and black.

We spent a while talking next to the fence, and then she invited me in. I wasn’t expecting that, because back then, no one expected that. Each house was a kind of miniature fortress, an impregnable bastion. I myself wasn’t allowed to invite friends over; my mother always said the house was too dirty. It wasn’t true, the house sparkled, but I thought that maybe there was some kind of dirt that I simply couldn’t see, and that when I grew up maybe I would see layers of dust where now I saw only waxed floors and shining wood.

Claudia’s house seemed fairly similar to my own: the same horrible raffia swans, two or three little Mexican hats, several minuscule clay pots and crochet dishcloths. The first thing I did was ask to use the bathroom, and I discovered, astonished, that the house had two bathrooms. Never before had I been in a house that had two bathrooms. My idea of wealth was exactly that: I imagined that millionaires must have houses with three bathrooms, or even five.

Claudia told me she wasn’t sure her mother would be happy to see me there, and I asked if it was because of the dust. She didn’t understand at first but she listened to my explanation, and then she chose to answer that yes, her mother didn’t like her to invite friends over because she thought the house was always dirty. I asked her then, without thinking about it too much, about her father.

“My father doesn’t live with us,” she said. “My parents are separated, he lives in another city.” I asked her if she missed him. “Of course I do. He’s my father.”

In my class there was only one boy with separated parents, which to me was a stigma, the saddest situation imaginable.

“Maybe they’ll live together again someday,” I said, to console her.

“Maybe,” she said. “But I don’t feel like talking about that. I want us to talk about something else.”

She took off her sandals, went to the kitchen, and came back with a bowl filled with bunches of black, green, and purple grapes; this struck me as odd, because in my house we never bought such a variety of grapes. I took advantage of the chance to try them all, and while I compared the flavors, Claudia filled the silence with general, polite questions. “I need to ask you something,” she said finally, “but not till after lunch.”

“If you want, I’ll help you fix the food,” I said, though I had never cooked in my life, or helped anyone else cook.

“We’re already having lunch,” said Claudia, very seriously. “These grapes are lunch.”

It was hard for her to get to the point. She seemed to speak freely, but there was also a stutter to her words that made it difficult to understand her. Really, she wanted to keep quiet. Now I think she was cursing the fact that she had to talk in order for me to understand what she wanted to ask me.

“I need you to take care of him,” she said suddenly, forgetting all her strategy.

“Who?”

“My uncle. I need you to take care of him.”

“Okay,” I answered immediately, so reliable, and in a split second I imagined that Raúl was suffering from some horrible disease, a disease maybe even worse than solitude, and that I would have to be some kind of nurse. I imagined myself walking around the neighborhood, pushing him in his wheelchair and blessed for my selflessness. But evidently that wasn’t what Claudia was asking me for. She spilled out the story all at once, looking at me fixedly, and I agreed quickly but at the wrong time—I agreed too quickly, as if confident that I would figure out later on what Claudia had really asked of me.

What I eventually understood was that Claudia and her mother couldn’t or shouldn’t visit Raúl, at least not often. That’s where I came in: I had to watch over Raúl; not take care of him but rather keep an eye on his activities and make notes about anything that seemed suspicious. We would meet every Thursday, at the random meeting point she had chosen, the supermarket bakery, where I would give her my report and then we would talk for a while about other things. “Because,” she told me, “I’m really interested in how you’re doing.” And I smiled with a satisfaction in which fear and desire also breathed.

I started spying on Raúl right away. The job was boring and easy, or maybe it was difficult, because I was searching blindly. From my conversations with Claudia I was vaguely expecting to see silent men with dark sunglasses traveling at midnight in foreign cars, but nothing like that went on at Raúl’s house. His routine hadn’t changed: he went out and came back at regular office hours, and he greeted people he met with a stiff and friendly nod that precluded all possibility of conversation. In any case, I didn’t want to talk to him. I was just waiting for him to do something unusual, something that was worth telling his niece.

I arrived on time or early to my meetings with Claudia, but she was always already there, in front of the pastry case. It was as if she spent the entire day looking at those pastries. She seemed worried about our being seen together, and every time we met she pretended it was coincidental. We walked around the supermarket, peering attentively at the products as if we really were out shopping; we left with nothing but a couple of yogurts that we opened at the end of a zigzagging route that began in the plaza and followed side streets to the Maipú Temple. Only when we sat down on the temple’s long steps did she feel safe. The faithful few who appeared at that hour passed by with lowered gazes, as if getting a head start on their prayers or confessions.

More than once I wanted to know why we had to hide, and Claudia would only say that we had to be careful, that everything could be ruined. Of course, I didn’t know what it was that could be ruined, but by that point I’d already gotten used to her vague answers.

However, on a whim one afternoon I told her that I knew the truth: I knew that Raúl’s problems had to do with the fact that he was a Christian Democrat, and she burst out in a long, excessive peal of laughter. She seemed to regret it immediately. She came over, put her hands ceremoniously on my shoulders, and I even thought she was going to kiss me; but that wasn’t it, of course.

“My uncle isn’t a Christian Democrat,” she told me in a calm and slow voice.

Then I asked her if he was a Communist and she fell into a heavy silence.

“I can’t tell you any more,” she answered finally. “It’s not important. You don’t need to know everything in order to do your job.” She decided, suddenly, to follow that train of thought, and she talked quickly and a lot: she said she would understand if I didn’t want to help her, and maybe it would be better for us to stop seeing each other. When I pleaded for our meetings to continue, she asked me to just concentrate on watching Raúl in the future.