Ways of Going Home

LITERATURE OF THE PARENTS

I’m advancing little by little in the novel. I pass the time thinking about Claudia as if she existed, as if she had existed. At first I questioned even her name. But it’s the name 90 percent of the women of my generation share. It’s right that she should have that name. I never get tired of the sound, either. Claudia.

I like that my characters don’t have last names. It’s a relief.

* * *

One of these days this house will start to refuse me. I wanted to start to inhabit it again, organize the books, rearrange the furniture, fix up the yard a bit. None of that has been possible. But a few fingers of mescal are helping for now.

This afternoon I spoke, for the second time in a long time, with Eme. We asked about the friends we have in common, and then, after more than a year of separation, we talked about the books she took with her or accidentally forgot. It seemed painful to go over the list of losses in such a civilized way, but in the end I even roused myself to ask for the books by Hebe Uhart and Josefina Vicens that I’ve missed so much.

“I read them,” she said. For a second I thought she was lying, even though she never lies about things like that; she never lied about anything, really. That was exactly our problem, we didn’t lie. We failed because of the desire to always be honest.

Then she told me about the house where she lives — a mansion, really, some twenty blocks from here, which she shares with two girlfriends.

“You don’t know them,” she told me, “and they aren’t really my friends, but we make a good group: thirty-year-old women happily chatting about our frustrations.” I told her I could go see her and bring the books she needed. She said no. “I want to come over myself, one of these days, after Christmas. You can give me a cup of tea and we’ll talk,” she said.

“Since we’ve been separated,” she added suddenly, forcing or searching for a natural tone, “since we’ve been separated I’ve slept with two men.”

“I haven’t been with any,” I answered, joking.

“Then you haven’t changed all that much,” she told me, laughing.

“But I’ve been with two women,” I told her. The truth is that it’s been only one. I lied, maybe to even the score. Still, I couldn’t go on with the game. “The mere idea of you with someone else is unbearable,” I said, and we had a hard time, after that, filling the silence.

I remember the day she left. It’s supposed to be the man who leaves the house. While she cried and packed her things, the only thing I managed to say to her was that absurd sentence: “It’s supposed to be the man who leaves the house.” In some ways I still feel that this space is hers. That’s why it’s so hard for me to live here.

Talking to her again was good and perhaps necessary. I told her about the new novel. I said that at first I was keeping a steady pace, but little by little I had lost the rhythm, or the precision.

“Why don’t you just write it all at once?” she advised, as if she didn’t know me, as if she hadn’t been with me through so many nights of writing.

“I don’t know,” I answered. And it’s true, I don’t know.

The thing is, Eme — I think now, a little drunk — I’m waiting for a voice. A voice that isn’t mine. An old voice, novelistic and solid.

Or maybe it’s just that I like working on the book. That I prefer writing to having written. I’d rather stay there, inhabit the time of the book, cohabit with those years, chase the distant images at length and then carefully go over them again. See them badly, but see them. To just stay there, looking.

* * *

As is to be expected, I spent the whole day thinking about Eme. It’s thanks to her that I found the story for the novel. It must have been five years ago, when we had just moved into this house. We were still in bed at noon and were telling anecdotes from our childhoods, as lovers do who want to know everything, who cast about for old stories to exchange with the other person, who also searches: to find themselves in that illusion of control, of surrender.

She was seven or eight years old, in the yard with other little girls, playing hide-and-seek. It was getting late, time to go inside; the adults were calling and the girls answered that they were coming. The push and pull went on, the calls were more and more urgent, but the girls laughed and kept playing.

Suddenly they realized the adults had stopped calling them a while ago and night had already fallen. They thought the adults must be watching them, trying to teach them a lesson, and that now the grown-ups were the ones playing hide-and-seek. But no. When she went inside, Eme saw that her father’s friends were crying and that her mother, rooted to her seat, was staring off into space. They were listening to the news on the radio. A voice was talking about a raid. It talked about the dead, about more dead.

“That happened so many times,” Eme said that day, five years ago. “We kids understood, all of a sudden, that we weren’t so important. That there were unfathomable and serious things that we couldn’t know or understand.”

The novel belongs to our parents, I thought then, I think now. That’s what we grew up believing, that the novel belonged to our parents. We cursed them, and also took refuge in their shadows, relieved. While the adults killed or were killed, we drew pictures in a corner. While the country was falling to pieces, we were learning to talk, to walk, to fold napkins in the shape of boats, of airplanes. While the novel was happening, we played hide-and-seek, we played at disappearing.

* * *

Instead of writing, I spent the morning drinking beer and reading Madame Bovary. Now I think the best thing I’ve done in recent years has been to drink a lot of beer and reread certain books with dedication, with an odd fidelity, as if something of my own beat within them, some clue to my destiny. Apart from that, to read morosely, stretched out in bed for long hours and doing nothing to soothe my burning eyes — it’s the perfect pretext for waiting for night to fall. And that’s what I hope for, nothing more: that night will come quickly.

I still remember the afternoon when the teacher turned to the blackboard and wrote the words quiz, next, Friday, Madame, Bovary, Gustave, Flaubert, French. With each letter the silence grew, until finally only the sad squeak of the chalk could be heard.

By that time we had already read long novels, some almost as long as Madame Bovary, but this time the deadline was impossible: we had less than a week to confront a four-hundred-page novel. We were starting to get used to those surprises, though: we had just entered the National Institute, we were eleven or twelve years old, and we understood that from then on, all the books would be long.

I feel sure that those teachers didn’t want to inspire enthusiasm for books, but rather to deter us from them, to put us off books forever. They didn’t waste their spit talking about the joy of reading, maybe because they had lost that joy or they’d never really felt it. Supposedly they were good teachers, but back then being good meant little more than knowing the textbook.

After a while we learned the tricks that were passed down from one generation to the next. They taught us to be cheaters, and we were fast learners. Every test had a section of character identification, which included only secondary characters: the less relevant the characters, the more likely we would be asked about them, so we memorized names resignedly, though with the pleasure of guaranteed points. It was important to know that the errand boy with a limp was named Hipólito and the maid was Félicité, and that the name of Emma’s daughter was Berta Bovary.

There was a certain beauty in the act, because back then we were exactly that: secondary characters, hundreds of children who crisscrossed the city lugging denim backpacks. The neighbors would test the weight and always make the same joke: “What are you carrying in there, rocks?” Downtown Santiago welcomed us with tear gas bombs, but we weren’t carrying rocks, we were carrying bricks by Baldor or Villee or Flaubert.

Madame Bovary was one of the few novels we had in our house, so I started reading that very same night, but I grew impatient with all the description. Flaubert’s prose simply made me doze off. I had to resort to the emergency method my father taught me: read the first two pages and then the last two, and only then, only after knowing how the novel begins and ends, do you continue reading in order.

“Even if you don’t finish, at least you already know who the killer is,” said my father, who apparently only read books that had killers.

So the first thing I ascertained about Madame Bovary was that the shy, tall boy from the first chapter would ultimately die, and that his daughter would end up as a laborer in a cotton factory. I already knew about Emma’s suicide, since some of the parents had complained that suicide was too harsh a subject for children of twelve, to which the teacher replied that no, the suicide of a woman hounded by debt was a very contemporary subject, one that children of twelve could understand perfectly well.

I didn’t get much further in my reading. I studied the summaries my deskmate had written, and the day before the test I found a copy of the movie in the Maipú video store. My mother tried to keep me from watching it, saying it wasn’t appropriate for my age; I thought so too — or rather, I hoped so. Madame Bovary sounded pornographic to me; everything French sounded pornographic to me.

In that sense, the movie was a disappointment, but I watched it twice and filled in the required worksheets on both sides. I got only a 3.6 after all that, and for some time I associated Madame Bovary with a 3.6, which I also tied to the name of the film’s director, written with exclamation points by my teacher next to my bad grade: Vincente Minnelli!!

* * *

Now I look for Berta in the novel. I remembered only the moment, in Chapter Five of the second part, when Emma looks at Berta and thinks, surprised, Look how ugly the girl is. And the terrible scene of Charles’s death, when Berta thinks her father is pretending: “Thinking he was playing a joke on her, she gave him a little push. Bovary fell to the floor. He was dead.”

I like to imagine Berta prowling about the yard while her mother is in bed, convalescing: from her room, Emma hears the sound of a carriage, and she approaches the window with difficulty to look down at the now deserted street.

I like to imagine Berta learning to read. First, Emma is the one who tries to teach her. After her great disappointment, she has decided to rededicate her life and become a woman of pious occupations. Berta is still very small and surely doesn’t understand the lessons. But during those days or weeks or months her mother has all the patience in the world: she teaches her daughter to read and mends clothes for the poor and even reads religious books.

Sometime later, Charles takes Berta on a walk and tries to teach her to read using a medical book. But the girl isn’t in the habit of studying, so she gets sad and starts to cry.

There’s a passage where Charles thinks about Berta’s future, and of course he is very wrong when he imagines her at fifteen, strolling in the summertime wearing a big straw hat, as beautiful as her mother. “Looking at them from far away they look like sisters,” thinks Charles, satisfied.

* * *

Eme finally came over. As a Christmas gift she gave me a box of magnets with hundreds of English words. We assembled the first phrase together, which turned out, somehow, to be opportune:

only love & noise

She showed me her recent drawings, but wouldn’t read the first pages of my book. She looked at me with a new expression, one I didn’t recognize.

It’s amazing: the face of a loved one, the face of someone we’ve lived with, whom we think we know, maybe the only face we would be able to describe, which we’ve looked at for years, from up close — it’s beautiful and in a certain way terrible to know that even that face can suddenly, unpredictably, unleash new expressions. Expressions we’ve never seen before. Expressions that perhaps we’ll never see again.

* * *

Back then we didn’t know the names of the streets, of the trees, of the birds. We didn’t need to. We lived with few words and it was possible to answer any question by saying: I don’t know. We didn’t think it was ignorance. We called it honesty. Later we learned, little by little, the nuances. The names of trees, birds, rivers. And we decided that any words were better than silence.

But I’m against nostalgia.

No, that’s not true. I’d like to be against nostalgia. Everywhere you look there’s someone renewing vows with the past. We recall songs we never really liked, we meet up with our first girlfriends again, or classmates we didn’t get along with, we greet with open arms people we used to reject.

I’m amazed at the ease with which we forget what we felt, what we wanted. The speed with which we assume that now we want or feel something different. And at the same time we want to laugh at the same jokes. We want to be, we believe we are again, children who are blessed by shadow.

I’m in that trap now, in the novel. Yesterday I wrote the reunion scene that takes place almost twenty years later. I liked how it turned out, but sometimes I think the characters shouldn’t meet again. That perhaps they should pass each other by many times, walk down the same streets, maybe even talk to each other without recognizing each other, from one side of a counter to the other.

Do we really recognize someone twenty years later? Can we recognize now, in some luminous sign, the definitive features, irrevocably adult, of a bygone face? I’ve spent the afternoon thinking about that, deliberating that.

It seems beautiful to me for them to never reunite. To simply go on with separate lives until the present, slowly getting closer and closer: two parallel trajectories that never quite meet. But someone else will have to write that novel. I would like to read it. Because in the novel I want to write they meet again. I need for them to meet again.

* * *

“Do they fall in love? Is it a love story?”

Eme asks this and I just smile. She arrived mid-afternoon; we drank several cups of tea and listened to an entire Kinks album. I asked her to let me read her a few pages of the manuscript and again she refused. “I’d rather read them when you’re further along,” she said.

“I’m writing about you, the protagonist is a lot like you,” I said bravely.

“All the more reason,” she answered, smiling, “I’d rather read it when you’re further along. But I’m so happy you’ve started writing again,” she added. “I like what happens to you when you write. Writing is good for you, it protects you.”

“Protects me from what?”

“The words protect you. You search for phrases, you search for words, that’s really good,” she said.

Later she asked me for more details about the story. I told her very little, the minimum. When I talked about Claudia, I started to question her name again.

She asked me later, half-joking, if the characters stay together for the rest of their lives. I couldn’t avoid a flicker of annoyance. I answered no: they see each other again as adults and they get involved for a few weeks, maybe months, but in no way do they stay together. I told her it couldn’t be like that, it’s never like that.

“It’s never like that in good novels, but in bad novels anything is possible,” said Eme as she tied up her hair nervously, flirtatiously.

I looked at her chapped lips, her cheeks, her short eyelashes. She seemed to be sunk into a deep contemplation. Soon after, she left. I didn’t want her to leave yet. But she left. She’s taking serious precautions. I agree, I don’t think it would be good for us to live together again either, for now. We need time.

Afterward I tried to keep writing. I don’t know which direction to take. I don’t want to talk about innocence or guilt; I want nothing more than to illuminate some corners, the corners where we were. But I’m not sure I can do it well. I feel too close to what I’m telling. I’ve abused some memories, I’ve sacked my memory, and also, in a certain way, I’ve made up too much. I’m starting from scratch again, like a caricature of a writer staring impotently at the screen.

I didn’t tell Eme how hard it is for me to write without her. I remember her sleepy face, when I went to her very late to read her just a paragraph or a sentence. She listened and nodded or else said, accurately: It wouldn’t be like that, this character wouldn’t answer with those words. Those kinds of valuable, essential observations.

Now I’m going to write again with her, I think. And I feel happy.

* * *

Last night I walked for hours. It was as if I wanted to get lost down some unknown street. To get absolutely and happily lost. But there are moments when we can’t, when we don’t know how to lose our way. Even if we always go in the wrong direction. Even if we lose all our points of reference. Even if it begins to grow late and we feel the weight of morning as we advance. There are times when no matter how we try to find out what we don’t know, we can’t lose our way. And perhaps we long for the time when we could be lost. The time when all the streets were new.

I’ve spent several days remembering the landscape of Maipú, comparing its image — a world of identical houses, red bricks and vinyl flooring — with the old streets where I’ve lived for years now, where each house is different from the next — uneven bricks, parquet floors — these noble streets that don’t belong to me but that I travel with familiarity. Streets named after people, after real places, after battles lost and won, and not those fantastical streets, that false world where we grew up quickly.

* * *

This morning I saw a woman reading, on a bench in Intercommunal Park. I sat down across from her just to get a look at her face, but it was impossible. The book absorbed her gaze completely, and there were a few moments I believed she was aware of it. That holding the book like that — at the exact height of her eyes, with both hands, her elbows resting on an imaginary table — was her way of hiding.

I saw her white forehead and her almost blond hair, but never her eyes. The book was her disguise, a precious mask.

Her long fingers held up the book like strong, slender branches. I got close enough at one point to see that her nails were ragged, as if she had been chewing them.

I’m sure she sensed my presence, but she didn’t lower the book. She held it as if she were meeting someone else’s gaze.

To read is to cover one’s face, I thought.

To read is to cover one’s face. And to write is to show it.

* * *

Today I watched The Battle of Chile, the documentary by Patricio Guzmán. I’d only seen bits and pieces, mostly from the second part of the film when they showed it once at school, after democracy was restored. I remember how the student president narrated the scenes, and every so often would stop the tape so he could tell us how seeing these images was more important than learning the multiplication tables.

We understood, of course, what he was trying to say, but his example still seemed strange to us, because if we were in that school it was precisely because we had known the multiplication tables for many years. Someone in the last row of the auditorium interrupted to ask if seeing those images was more important than learning to divide decimals, and then someone asked if, instead of learning the periodic table, we could watch those images over and over, since they were so important. No one laughed, though. The student president didn’t want to answer, but he looked at us with a mixture of sadness and irony. Then another representative intervened and said: “There are some things you shouldn’t joke about. If you understand that, you can stay in the room.”

I didn’t remember or I hadn’t seen the long sequence of The Battle of Chile that takes place in the fields of Maipú. Workers and peasants defend the land and argue heatedly with a representative from Salvador Allende’s government. I thought how that land could very well be Aladdin Street. The land where, later on, neighborhoods with fantasy names would appear and where we would live, the new families — with no history — of Pinochet’s Chile.

* * *

School changed a lot when democracy returned. I had just turned thirteen and was belatedly starting to get to know my classmates: children of murdered, tortured, disappeared parents. Children of murderers as well. Rich kids, poor kids, good kids, bad kids. Good rich kids, bad rich kids, good poor kids, bad poor kids. It’s absurd to put it that way, but I remember thinking about it more or less like that. I remember thinking, without pride or self-pity, that I was not rich or poor, that I wasn’t good or bad. But that was difficult: to be neither good nor bad. It seemed to me, in the end, the same as being bad.

I remember a history teacher I had in high school, when I was sixteen, one whom I didn’t particularly like. One morning three thieves who were fleeing the police took cover in the school’s parking lot, and the cops followed them and fired a couple of shots into the air. We got scared and threw ourselves to the floor, but once the danger had passed we were surprised to see our teacher crying under the table, with his eyes squeezed shut and his hands over his ears. We brought water and tried to convince him to drink it, but finally we had to throw it in his face. He slowly managed to calm down as we explained to him that no, the military had not taken over again. That class could continue. “I don’t want to be here, I never wanted to be here,” the teacher repeated, shouting. Then there was complete, compassionate silence. A beautiful and restorative silence.

I ran into the teacher a few days later, during break. I asked him how he was, and he thanked me for asking. “I can tell you know what I lived through,” he said in a sign of complicity. Of course I knew, we all knew; he had been tortured and his cousin was taken prisoner and disappeared. “I don’t believe in this democracy,” he said. “Chile is and will always be a battleground.” He asked me if I was politically active, and I said no. He asked about my family, and I told him that during the dictatorship my parents had kept to the sidelines. The teacher looked at me curiously or disdainfully — he looked at me curiously but I felt that his gaze also held disdain.

* * *

I didn’t write or read anything in Punta Arenas. I spent the entire week defending myself from the weather and talking with new friends. On the return flight I sat next to two women who told me their life stories in detail. All was well until they asked me what I did for a living. I never know how to respond. I used to say I was a teacher, which tended to lead to long and confused conversations about Chile’s crisis in education. So now I say I’m a writer, and when they ask what kind of books I write, I say, to avoid a long and uncertain explanation, that I write action novels; it isn’t exactly a lie, since in all novels, even mine, things happen.

Instead of asking what kind of books I write, though, the woman next to me wanted to know what my pseudonym was. I answered that I didn’t use a pseudonym. That writers hadn’t been using pseudonyms for years now. She looked at me skeptically, and from that moment on her interest in me waned. When we said goodbye she told me not to worry, maybe soon I would come up with a good pseudonym.

* * *

A while ago the poet Rodrigo Olavarría stopped by to see me. We don’t know each other well but there is a sort of prior and reciprocal trust that allies us. I like that he gives advice. Now that I think about it, there was a time when everyone gave advice. When life consisted of giving and receiving advice. But then all of a sudden, no one wanted any more advice. It was too late, we’d fallen in love with failure, and the wounds were trophies just like when we were kids, after we’d been playing under the trees. But Rodrigo gives advice. And he listens to it, asks for it. He’s in love with failure, but he’s also, still, in love with old and noble kinds of friendship.

We spent the afternoon listening to Bill Callahan and Emmy the Great. It was fun. Later I told him about the conversation in the airplane. We decided to get together, one of these days, to choose pseudonyms. “You’ll see, we’re going to find some great ones,” he said.

Rodrigo doesn’t remember exactly when he saw The Battle of Chile for the first time, but he knows the documentary by heart, because back in Puerto Montt in the mid-eighties his parents sold pirated copies to raise money for the Communist Party’s activities. When he was eight or nine, Rodrigo had the job of changing the tapes and stockpiling the new copies in a cardboard box. “I spent the whole afternoon,” he told me, “doing homework and copying that documentary two at a time, with four VHS tapes and two TVs. The only breaks were to watch Robotech on Channel Thirteen.”

* * *

Sick with a bad cold, in bed for days. I self-medicate with high doses of television. Eme’s visits always seem too short. I asked her again to listen to the first pages of the novel and she again said no. Her excuse was poor and realistic: “You’re sick,” she said. A little while ago I insisted and she refused again. It’s obvious that she doesn’t want to read them; maybe she’d rather not resume that part of our relationship.

Well. I just watched Good Morning, Ozu’s beautiful movie. What greater happiness than to know that movie exists, that I can watch it many times, that I can watch it always.

* * *

In the morning I gave myself the stupid task of hiding my cigarettes in different corners of the house. Of course I find them, but I don’t smoke much, I smoke less, I struggle to get better once and for all. My illness lasts too long, though, and every once in a while I wonder if I’ve caught the swine flu. Only the fever is missing, although I’ve just read on the Internet that some patients don’t list fever among their symptoms.

Last night, the emergency room of the Indisa Clinic was full of people with real or imaginary illnesses, but they astonishingly attended to me immediately. There was an explanation. A young, gray-haired doctor appeared and told me, indicating the name tag on his coat: “We’re family.” And it really is likely that we are related in some way. “I bought your books,” he told me, “but I haven’t read them.” He apologized in a humiliating or merely comic way: “I don’t even have time to read the kind of short books you write,” he said. “But a year ago I talked about you to my relatives in Careno.” To amaze the doctor with my ignorance, I asked him where Careno was.

“It’s in Italy, the north of Italy,” he answered, scandalized. Then he lowered his eyes, as if in forgiveness. He asked me what my father’s name was, my grandfather, my great-grandfather. I answered compliantly but soon got tired of so many questions and told him that there was no point in having this conversation—“My family is definitely descended from some bastard child.” I told him: “We come from some patrón who didn’t take responsibility.” I told him that in my family we’re all dark-skinned — the doctor himself was very white and fairly ugly, with that hygienic whiteness that in some people hardly seems real. Resigned to not finding any sign of encouragement from me, the doctor told me that every year he traveled to Careno, where there are many people with our last name, since historically the family was quite inbred.

“There are lots of marriages between siblings and between cousins, so the genes aren’t so good,” he said.

“We don’t have that problem,” I told him. “In my branch of the family we treat our cousins with respect.”

He laughed, or tried to laugh. I wanted, I’m not sure why, to apologize. But before I could say the sentence I was vaguely trying to formulate, the doctor asked about my symptoms. He was in a hurry now. He spent barely two minutes on my ailment, roundly denying I had the swine flu, as if reproaching me for even thinking it. He didn’t even lecture me about how many cigarettes I smoke.

I went home a bit humiliated, with the same antiflu medicines as always, thinking about those families in far-off Careno, about what my face would be like white, washed-out, or about my distant desire, once upon a time, to study medicine. I imagined that same doctor, older than me in medical school, answering emphatically, annoyed: no, we’re not related.

* * *

Parents abandon their children. Children abandon their parents. Parents protect or forsake, but they always forsake. Children stay or go but they always go. And it’s all unfair, especially the sound of the words, because the language is pleasing and confusing, because ultimately we would like to sing or at least whistle a tune, to walk alongside the stage whistling a tune. We want to be actors waiting patiently for the cue to walk onstage. But the audience left a long time ago.

* * *

Today I made up this joke:

“When I grow up I’m going to be a secondary character,” a boy says to his father.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you want to be a secondary character?”

“Because the novel is yours.”

* * *

I’m writing in my parents’ house. It’s been a long time since I’ve been here. I prefer to see them in town, at lunchtime. But this time I wanted to watch the Chile-versus-Paraguay game with my father, thinking I could also refresh some details for the story while I was here. It’s the trip in the novel, the frightened protagonist’s trip home at the end of the long evening when he follows Raúl’s supposed girlfriend. I wrote that passage thinking about a real trip I took more or less at that age.

One afternoon, after lunch, I was getting ready to go out when my father said no, I had to stay home and study English. I asked why, since I was getting good grades in English. “Because it isn’t prudent for you to go out so much.” He used that word, prudent, I remember exactly. “And because I am your father and you have to obey me,” he said.

It seemed brutal to me, but I studied, or at least I pretended to. At night, before going to sleep, still angry, I told my father that it made me so mad to be a kid and to have to ask permission for everything, that it would be better to be an orphan. I only said it to annoy him, but he gave me a sly look and went to talk to my mother. I could tell by her gestures as they approached that they didn’t agree on the measure they were about to announce to me, but that I would have to abide by it anyway.

Before speaking to me they called my sister to witness the scene. My father addressed her first. He told her they had been living a lie. That until then they had believed she was the older sibling, but that they had just discovered she wasn’t. “So, we’re going to give your brother the keys to the house — you can go out and come home whatever time you want, from now on you’re in charge of yourself,” he told me, looking me in the eye. “No one will ask you where you’re going or if you have homework or anything else.”

So it was. I enjoyed those privileges for several weeks. They treated me like an adult, with only a few traces of irony. I grew desperate. I told my mother I was going very far away and she answered that I shouldn’t forget to take my suitcase with me. I didn’t take a suitcase, but one afternoon I anxiously boarded a random bus, prepared to stay on until the end of its route and with no plan for when I got there.

I didn’t get to the end of the route, but I did almost reach the neighborhood where I live now. The trip took over an hour and when I got back they yelled at me a lot. That was what I wanted. I was happy to have my parents back. And I had also discovered a new world. A world I didn’t like, but a new one.

That route doesn’t exist anymore. Today I came by metro and then bus and I got to Maipú by way of Los Pajaritos. I’m always surprised at the number of Chinese restaurants on the avenue. For years now, Maipú has been a small big city, and the stores I frequented as a child are now bank branches or fast-food chains.

Before I got to my parents’ house I took a detour to pass by Lucila Godoy Alcayaga. The street was closed off with an eye-catching electric gate, as was the passage Neftalí Reyes Basoalto. I didn’t feel like asking anyone going by to let me in. I wanted to see Claudia’s house, which in reality was, for a time, my friend Carla Andreu’s house. I headed, then, for Aladdin. The neighborhood is full of attics now, second floors that look out of place, ostentatious roofs. No longer is it the dream of equality. Just the opposite. Lots of houses have been abused, and others are luxurious. Some of them look abandoned.

There were changes as well in my parents’ house. I was struck most of all by the sight of a new bookshelf in the living room. I recognized the automotive encyclopedia, the BBC English course, and the old books put out by Ercilla magazine, with its collections of Chilean, Spanish, and world literatures. On the middle shelf there was also a series of novels by Isabel Allende, Hernán Rivera Letelier, Marcela Serrano, John Grisham, Barbara Wood, Carla Guelfenbein, and Pablo Simonetti, and closer to the floor were some books I read as a child for school: The Löwensköld Ring by Selma Lagerlöf, Alsino by Pedro Prado, Michael Strogoff by Jules Verne, El ultimo grumete de la Baquedano by Francisco Coloane, Fermina Márquez by Valéry Larbaud. Well. I wish I’d kept them myself, but I’m sure I forgot them in some box my parents found in the attic.

It was discomfiting to see those books there, hastily ordered on a red melamine shelf, flanked by posters of hunting scenes or sunrises and a faded reproduction of Las Meninas that has been in the house forever and that my father still proudly shows visitors: “This is the painter, Velásquez; the painter painted himself,” he says.

“Thanks to that library, your mother has started reading and I have too, though of course I’d rather watch movies,” said my father, and he turned on the TV right on time for the game. We celebrated goals by Mati Fernández and Humberto Suazo with a big pitcher of pisco sour and a couple bottles of wine. I drank much more than my father did. I’ve never seen him drunk, I thought, and for some reason I said it out loud to him.

“I did see my father drunk, many times,” he answered abruptly, with a barely contained look of sadness.

“Stay over, your sister is coming to lunch tomorrow,” my mother said. “You can’t drive in the state you’re in,” she added, and I reminded her of something she always forgets: I don’t have a car. “Oh,” she said. “That’s right. All the more reason you can’t drive,” she laughed. I like her laugh, especially when it comes suddenly, when it happens unexpectedly. It is serene and sweet at the same time.

* * *

I left home fifteen years ago, but I still feel a kind of strange pulse when I enter this room that used to be mine and is now a kind of storage room. At the back there’s a shelf full of DVDs and photo albums jumbled in the corner next to my books, the books I’ve published. It strikes me as beautiful that they’re here, next to the family mementos.

* * *

A little while ago, at two in the morning, I got up to make coffee and I was surprised to see my mother in the living room, drinking mate with a beginner’s graceful movements.

“This is what I do now when I feel like smoking,” she said with a smile. She smokes very little, five cigarettes a day, but since my father quit he doesn’t let her smoke inside, and it’s too cold to open the window.

“I’m going to smoke,” I said. “Let’s smoke. Dad can’t stop you from smoking, you’re too old for that now,” I said.

“He only denies me cigarettes. I deny him lots of things — saturated fats, too much sugar. It’s only fair.”

Finally I convinced her and we shut ourselves up in a sort of small room they had built to house an immense new washing machine. She smoked with the same movement as always, so markedly feminine: the cigarette tilted downward, her hand palm out, very close to her mouth.

“What will I do,” she said suddenly, “if tomorrow your father realizes we were smoking?”

“Tell him we didn’t smoke. That if it smells it’s because I smoke a lot. I smell like cigarettes. Tell him that. And then change the subject, tell him you’re worried because you think I’m smoking too much, and I’m going to die of cancer.”

“But that would be a lie,” she said.

“It wouldn’t be a lie,” I answered, “because sooner or later I am going to die of cancer.”

My mother let out a deep sigh and slowly shook her head. Then she said something astonishing: “No one in my life has ever made me laugh as much as you. You are the funniest person I’ve ever met. But you’re also serious, and that was always disconcerting, it is disconcerting. You left home very young, and sometimes I wonder what life would be like if you hadn’t left. There are kids your age who still live with their parents. I see them go by sometimes and I think of you.”

“Life would have been worse,” I said. “And those big babies are spoiled brats.”

“Yes. It’s true. And you’re right. Life would be worse if you lived here. Before you left, your father and I used to fight a lot. But after you left, we didn’t fight as much. Now we hardly ever fight.”

I wasn’t expecting that sudden moment of honesty. I sat there thinking, disheartened, but right away she asked me, as if it were relevant: “Do you like Carla Guelfenbein?”

I didn’t know how to answer. “I think she’s pretty. I’d go out with her, but I wouldn’t sleep with her,” I said. “Maybe I’d kiss her, but I wouldn’t sleep with her, or I’d sleep with her but I wouldn’t kiss her.” My mother pretended to be scandalized. The gesture looked beautiful on her.

“I’m asking if you like her writing.”

“No, Mom. I don’t like it.”

“But I like her novel. The Other Side of the Heart.”

“The Other Side of the Soul,” I corrected her.

“That’s it, The Other Side of the Soul. I identified with the characters, the book moved me.”

“And how is it possible for you to identify with characters from another social class, with problems that aren’t and could never be problems in your life, Mom?”

I spoke seriously, too seriously. I knew it wasn’t appropriate to speak seriously, but I couldn’t help it. She looked at me with a mixture of anger and compassion. With a little annoyance. “You’re wrong,” she said finally. “Maybe it’s not my social class, I agree. But social classes have changed a lot, everyone says so, and when I read that novel I felt that yes, those were my problems. I know what I’m saying bothers you, but you should be a little more tolerant.”

It seemed very strange that my mother would use that word, tolerant. I went to sleep remembering my mother’s voice saying: You should be a little more tolerant.

* * *

After lunch my sister insisted on driving me home. She got her license a year ago but she really learned to drive only last month. She didn’t seem nervous, though. I was the nervous one. I chose to surrender, close my eyes and open them only when she shifted gears and the car stuttered too much. In moments of silence my sister accelerated, and when the conversation flowed she slowed down so much that other cars overtook us, horns sounding.

“I feel bad about what happened with your marriage,” she told me, soon after we left the highway.

“That was a long time ago,” I replied.

“But I hadn’t told you that.”

“We got back together recently.” My sister’s expression is something between incredulous and happy. I explain that for now it’s all fragile, tentative, but that I feel good. That we want to do things better this time. That we’re not living together again yet. She asks me why I didn’t tell our parents. “That’s exactly why,” I say. “It’s still too early to tell them.”

Then she asks me if I’m going to write more books. I like the way she frames the question, since it implies the possibility that I could simply say no, enough already; and that’s what I do think, sometimes, at the end of a bad night: Soon I’ll stop writing, just like that, and someday I’ll have a distant memory of the time when I wrote books, the same way others remember the season they drove a taxi or worked selling dollars in Paseo Ahumada.

But I answer yes, and she asks me to tell her what the new book is about. I don’t want to answer, and she realizes this and asks again. I tell her it’s about Maipú, about the earthquake of ’85, about childhood. She asks for more details, I give them to her. We reach my house and I invite her in; she doesn’t want to come but she also doesn’t want me to go. I know very well what she’s going to ask.

“Am I in your book?” she finally says.

“No.”

“Why not?”

* * *

I’ve thought about it. Of course I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about it a lot. My answer is honest:

“To protect you,” I say.

She looks at me skeptically, hurt. She looks at me with a little girl’s expression.

“It’s better not to be someone else’s character,” I say. “It’s better not to be in any book.”

“And are you in the book?”

“Yes. More or less. But it’s my book. I couldn’t not be in it. Even if I gave myself very different characteristics and a life very different from mine, I would still be in the book. I already made the decision not to protect myself.”

“And are our parents in it?

“Yes. There are characters like our parents.”

“And why not protect our parents, too?”

* * *

For that question, I don’t have an answer. I suppose it’s their lot, simply, to appear. To receive less than they gave, to attend a masked ball and not understand very well why they are there. I’m not capable of saying any of that to my sister.

“I don’t know, it’s fiction,” I tell her. “I have to go, sis.” I don’t call her by her name. I call her “sis,” give her a kiss on the cheek, and get out of the car.

Back home I spend a long time thinking of my sister, my big sister. I remember this poem by Enrique Lihn:

So the only child’s the eldest of his brothers

and in his orphanhood has something

of what eldest means. As though

they too had died

those impossible younger brothers.

When we write we act like only children. As if we had been alone forever. Sometimes I hate this story, this profession that I can no longer leave. That now I’ll never leave.

* * *

I always thought I didn’t have real childhood memories. That my history fit into a few lines. On one page, maybe. In large print. I don’t think that anymore.

The family weekend has crushed my will. I find consolation in a letter that Yasunari Kawabata wrote to his friend Yukio Mishima in 1962: “Whatever your mother says, your writing is magnificent.”

* * *

Just now I tried to write a poem, but I managed only these few lines:

Growing up, I meant to be a memory

But now I’ve had as much as I can bear

Of forever seeking out the beauty

In a tree that’s been disfigured by the wind

The part I like is the beginning:

Growing up, I meant to be a memory.