Ways of Going Home

LITERATURE OF THE CHILDREN

I left home at the end of 1995, just after I turned twenty, but throughout my adolescence I yearned to leave these overly clean sidewalks behind, to get away from the boring streets where I grew up. I wanted a full and dangerous life, or maybe I just wanted what some children always want: a life without parents.

I lived in boardinghouses or small rooms and worked wherever I could while I finished university. And when I finished university I kept on working wherever I could, because I studied literature, which is what people do before they end up working wherever they can.

Years later, however, already approaching thirty, I got a job as a teacher and managed to establish myself to a certain extent. I practiced a calm and dignified life: I spent the afternoons reading novels or watching TV for hours, smoking tobacco or marijuana, drinking beer or cheap wine, listening to music or listening to nothing — because sometimes I sat in silence for long stretches, as if waiting for something, for someone.

That’s when I went back, when I returned. I wasn’t expecting to find anyone, I wasn’t looking for anything, but one summer night, a night like any other when I went out walking with long, sure steps, I saw the blue facade, the green gate, and the small square of dry grass just in front. Here it is, I thought. This is where I was. I said it out loud, incredulity in my voice. I remembered the scene exactly: the bus trip, the woman’s neck, the store, the harrowing return trip, everything.

I thought of Claudia then, and also of Raúl and of Magali; I imagined or tried to imagine their lives, their destinies. But suddenly the memories shut off. For a second, without knowing why, I thought they must all be dead. For a second, not knowing why, I felt immensely alone.

In the following days I went back to the place almost obsessively. Intentionally or unconsciously, I directed my steps to the house and, sitting in the grass, I stared at the facade as night fell. First the streetlights would come on, and later, after ten, a small window on the second floor would light up. For days the only sign of life in that house was that faint light that appeared on the second floor.

One afternoon I saw a woman open the door and take out bags of garbage. Her face seemed familiar and at first I thought it was Claudia, although the image I still held of her was so remote that I could extrapolate many different faces from the memory. The woman had the cheekbones of a thin person, but she had gotten possibly irremediably fat. Her red hair formed a hard and shiny fabric, as if she had just dyed it. And in spite of that conspicuous appearance she seemed bothered by the simple fact that someone was looking at her. She walked as if her gaze were stuck to the sidewalk cracks.

I hoped to see her again. Some afternoons I brought a novel along, but I preferred books of poetry, since they allowed more breaks for spying. I was ashamed, but it also made me laugh to be a spy again. A spy who, once again, didn’t know what he wanted to find.

One afternoon I decided to ring the bell. When I saw the woman coming to answer I panicked, knowing I had no plan and I didn’t even know how I should introduce myself. Stuttering, I told her I had lost my cat. She asked me his name, and I didn’t know how to answer. She asked what the cat looked like. I said he was black, white, and brown.

“Then it’s not a he, it’s a she,” said the woman.

“It’s a he,” I answered.

“If it’s three colors it can’t be a he. Tricolored cats are females,” she said. And she added that in any case she hadn’t seen any stray cats in the neighborhood recently.

The woman was going to close the door when I said, almost shouting: “Claudia.”

“Who are you?” she asked.

I told her. I told her we had known each other in Maipú. That we had been friends.

She looked at me for a long time. I let myself be looked at. It’s a strange sensation, when you’re waiting for someone to recognize you. Finally she told me: “I know who you are. I’m not Claudia. I’m Ximena, Claudia’s sister. And you’re that boy who followed me that afternoon, Aladdin. That’s what Claudia called you, we always laughed when we remembered you. Aladdin.”

I didn’t know what to say. I precariously understood that yes, Ximena was the woman I had followed so many years earlier. Raúl’s supposed girlfriend. But Claudia had never told me she had a sister. I felt a weight, the need to find some opportune phrase. “I’d like to see Claudia,” I said, in a small voice.

“I thought you were out looking for a cat. A girl cat.”

“Yes,” I answered. “But I’ve often thought, over the years, about that time in Maipú. And I’d like to see Claudia again.”

There was hostility in Ximena’s gaze. She was silent. I talked, nervously improvising, about the past, about the desire to recover the past.

“I don’t know what you want to see Claudia for,” said Ximena. “I don’t think you’d ever understand a story like ours. Back then people were looking for missing persons, they looked for the bodies of people who had disappeared. I’m sure in those years you were looking for kittens or puppies, same as now.”

I didn’t understand her cruelty; it seemed excessive, unnecessary. All the same, Ximena took down my phone number. “When she gets here I’ll give it to her,” she said.

“And when do you think she’s going to come?”

“Any minute now,” she answered. “My father is about to die. When he dies, my sister will come from Yankee-land to cry over his corpse and ask for her part of the inheritance.”

It struck me as ridiculous and juvenile to refer to the United States as Yankee-land, and at the same time I thought about that conversation with Claudia, in the Maipú Temple, about flags. Ultimately, fate took her to that country she disparaged as a child, I thought, and I also thought that I should leave, but I couldn’t help but ask one last, polite question:

“How is Don Raúl?” I asked.

“I don’t know how Don Raúl is. I’m sure he’s fine. But my father is dying. Bye, Aladdin,” she said. “You don’t understand, you’ll never understand anything, huevón.”

I walked around the neighborhood several more times, but I looked at the house from far away; I didn’t dare get closer. I often thought about that bitter conversation with Ximena. Her words pursued me somehow. One night I dreamed I ran into her at the supermarket. I was working, promoting a new beer. She passed by with her cart full of cat food. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. She recognized me but avoided saying hello.

I also thought about Claudia, but it was like thinking of a ghost, like thinking about someone who, in some way that is irrational yet nonetheless concrete, accompanies us. I didn’t expect her to call. I couldn’t imagine her sister giving her my number, telling her about that unexpected visit, Aladdin’s strange apparition. But that’s how it went: some months after that conversation with Ximena, early one morning, just before nine, Claudia called me. She was friendly. “It would be fun to see each other again,” she said.

We met one November afternoon, at the Starbucks in La Reina. I’d like to remember each of her words now, with absolute precision, and write them down in this notebook with no additional commentary. I’d like to imitate her voice, to raise a camera to the gestures she made as she dived, fearlessly, into the past. I’d like someone else to write this book. For her to write it, perhaps. I’d like her to be at my house, right now, writing. But it’s for me to write and here I am. And here I’ll stay.

“You weren’t hard to recognize,” says Claudia.

“You either,” I answer, but for long minutes I’m distracted as I search for the face I have in my memory. I don’t find it. If I’d seen her in the street I wouldn’t have recognized her.

We go up to get our coffees. I don’t usually go to Starbucks, and I’m surprised to see my name scrawled on the cup. I look at her cup, her name. She’s not dead, I think suddenly, happily. She’s not dead.

Claudia’s hair is short now and her face is very thin. Her breasts are still meager and her voice sounds like a smoker’s, though she smokes only when she’s in Chile. “It seems like in the United States they don’t let you smoke anywhere anymore,” I say, suddenly content for the conversation to be simply social, routine.

“It’s not that. It’s weird. In Vermont I don’t feel like smoking, but when I get to Chile I smoke like crazy,” says Claudia. “It’s like Chile is incomprehensible or intolerable unless I smoke.”

“As if Chile were incendiary,” I say, joking.

“Yes,” says Claudia, without laughing. She laughs later. Ten seconds later she gets the joke.

At first the conversation follows the shy course of a blind date, but sometimes Claudia speeds up and starts to talk in long sentences. The plot begins to clear up: “Raúl is my father,” she says with no lead-up. “But his name was Roberto. The man who died three weeks ago, my father, was named Roberto.”

I look at her astonished, but it isn’t a pure astonishment. I receive the story as if expecting it. Because I do expect it, in some way. It’s the story of my generation.

“I was born five days after the coup, September sixteenth, 1973,” says Claudia in a kind of outpouring. The shadow of a tree falls capriciously over her mouth, so I don’t see her lips moving. It’s disturbing. I feel like a photograph is talking to me. I remember that beautiful poem “The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.” But she moves her hands and life returns to her body. She isn’t dead, I think again, and again I feel an immense happiness.

Magali and Roberto had Ximena when Roberto had just entered law school at the University of Chile. They lived separately until she got pregnant again and then, at the beginning of 1973, they got married and decided to live in La Reina while they looked for a place of their own. Magali was older. She had studied English at the Pedagogical Institute and she belonged to Allende’s party, but she wasn’t active. Roberto, on the other hand, was a committed activist, though he wasn’t involved in any dangerous situations.

They spent the first years of the dictatorship terrified and ensconced in that house in La Reina. But toward the end of 1981 Roberto reconnected: he started circulating around certain places he had avoided up to then, and he quickly took on responsibilities, at first very minor ones, as an informant. Every morning he waited — on the steps of the National Library, on a bench in the Plaza de Armas, and even a few times at the zoo — for his contacts, and then he went back to work in a small office on Moneda Street.

Soon afterward Magali rented the house in Maipú and she went to live there with the girls. It was the best way to protect them, far away from everything, far from the world. Roberto, meanwhile, did take risks, but he changed his appearance constantly. At the beginning of 1984 he convinced his brother-in-law Raúl to leave the country and give him his identity. Raúl left Chile over the mountains and went to Mendoza, with no definite plan but with a bit of money to begin a new life.

It was then that Roberto took the house in Aladdin Street. Again, Maipú seemed like a safe place, where it was possible to not awaken suspicion. He lived very close to his wife and daughters and his new identity allowed him to see them more often, but caution came first. The girls almost never saw their father and Claudia didn’t even know he lived close by. She only found out that night, the night of the earthquake.

Learning to tell her story as if it didn’t hurt. That was, for Claudia, growing up: learning to tell her story precisely, bluntly. But it’s a trap to put it like that, as if the process ever ended. “Only now do I feel I can do it,” says Claudia. “I tried for a long time. But now I’ve found a kind of legitimacy. A drive. Now I want someone, anyone, to ask me out of nowhere: Who are you?”

I’m the one asking, I think. I’m the stranger who’s asking. I was expecting a meeting heavy with silences, a series of disconnected phrases that later on, like when I was a child, I would have to put together and decipher. But no, on the contrary: Claudia wants to talk. “When I was on the plane coming here,” she says, “I looked at the clouds for a long time. It seemed like they were drawing something faint and disconcerting but at the same time recognizable. I thought about a kid scribbling on paper or the drawings my mother made when she was on the phone. I don’t know if it happened once or many times, but I have this image of my mother scribbling on paper while she talked on the phone.

“Then I looked,” says Claudia, “at the flight attendants smoothing their skirts while they talked and laughed at the back of the aisle, and at the stranger dozing next to me with a self-help book open on his chest. And then I thought how my mother had died ten years ago, how my father had just died, and instead of silently honoring their deaths I felt an imperative need to talk. The wish to say: I. The vague, strange pleasure, even, of answering: ‘My name is Claudia and I’m thirty-three years old.’”

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.

She looks tired and relieved at the same time. And she is a bit drunk. As we have sex she smiles, showing her teeth a little bit. It’s a beautiful and strange gesture. I think I will remember it. That I will miss it.

We sleep little, only two or three hours. Then the noise of cars, of voices, starts up. People leave for work, for school. We make orange juice, and while we eat breakfast she looks at her e-mail on my computer. She finds a message from Ximena. I’m not going to sell the house, don’t incist, it says, and Claudia can’t believe it: “It says incist, with c, really.” For a millisecond she thinks it’s terrible that Ximena would make that kind of mistake and right away she is ashamed, because it’s even worse that, under the circumstances, she would care about something so stupid as a spelling mistake.

The house is not for sale, Ximena continues. It’s my house now. Now more than ever, she says.

I’m not going to insist, thinks Claudia: it doesn’t make sense. Deep down she understands why Ximena is attached to the house, though she thinks it would be better to sell it and split the money. She thinks that being so close to the past isn’t good for anyone. That the past never stops hurting, but we can help it by finding a different place.

“But maybe it’s too soon to talk about pain,” she says to me while I look at the traces of wine on her lips. Suddenly she seems very young to me: twenty-five, twenty-six, definitely no more than thirty.

I go to the university, teach a not-so-good class, go home. I had imagined the scene, but it still surprises me to open the door and see Claudia stretched out in the easy chair. “Your beauty does me good,” I say to her, without thinking about it much. She looks at me cautiously and then lets out a guffaw, but she comes over, puts her arms around me, and we end up screwing standing up in a corner of the kitchen.

Afterward, we make noodles and put together a sauce with a little cream and some scallions. The sauce turns out a bit dry and the truth is neither one of us is hungry.

“Sometimes, when I look at the food on my plate,” says Claudia, “I remember that expression, the answer my mother and grandmother would always give me: Shut up and eat.” They’d made something new, some unfamiliar stew that didn’t look good, and Claudia wanted to know what it was. Her mother and grandmother would answer in unison: Shut up and eat.

It was a joke, of course, a wise one, even. But that’s how Claudia felt as a child: that strange things were happening and they were living with the pain, they struggled with a long and imprecise sadness, and nonetheless it was better not to ask questions. To ask was risking that they would answer the same way: Shut up and eat.

Later the time for questions came. The decade of the nineties was the time of questions, in her opinion, and right away she says, “I’m sorry, I don’t want to sound like those quack sociologists you see on TV, but that’s how those years were: I sat down and talked to my parents for hours, asked them for details, I made them remember, and I repeated those memories as if they were my own.” In some terrible, secret way she was seeking her place in their story.

“We didn’t ask in order to know,” Claudia says to me as we collect the plates and clear the table: “We asked in order to fill an emptiness.”

“Sometimes Ximena reminds me of my mother,” says Claudia over cups of tea. “It’s not a physical resemblance, really. It’s her voice, the tone of her voice,” she says.

She thinks about those moments when her mother had no other recourse but to talk. She called the girls to her, she took her time over her words, as if tuning in little by little to a sweet, calm tone — a careful tone, artificial. Then, as if conducting a ceremony, she spoke clearly. She modulated. She met their eyes.

One afternoon in 1984 she spoke to them separately. First she called Ximena into the kitchen and closed the door. It was strange for the conversation to take place in the kitchen. She had asked her mother about it shortly before her death. “Why did you want to talk to us in the kitchen that afternoon?”

“I don’t know,” said her mother. “Maybe because I was nervous.”

The conversation with Ximena didn’t last long. She quickly reemerged and ran outside, and Claudia couldn’t see her face. In light of the circumstances, the five-year difference between the sisters became an insurmountable distance. Ximena was argumentative and irascible, but in the end she was always on the adults’ side, while Claudia only understood things halfway.

“Then it was my turn,” says Claudia, and she pauses in a way that seems dramatic. I think she’s about to break down, but no, she just needed that pause. “I don’t remember her words very well,” she continues. “I guess she told me the truth, or something like the truth. I understood that there were good people and bad people, and we were good people. That good people were sometimes persecuted for thinking differently. For their ideas. I don’t even know if I knew what an idea was back then, but in some way, that afternoon I found out.”

Her mother talked to her in a soft, generous intonation: For a while you can’t call your father Dad. He’s going to cut his hair like your uncle Raúl’s, he’s going to shave his beard so he’ll look a little more like your uncle Raúl. Claudia didn’t understand, but she knew she had to understand. She knew that everyone else, including her sister, understood more than she did. And it hurt her to have to accept that. She asked her mother how long she would have to stop calling her father Dad. “I don’t know. Maybe a short time. Maybe a long time. But I promise you that you’re going to be able to call him Dad again.”

“Do you swear?” said Claudia unexpectedly.

“Catholic families swear, in our family we only promise,” said her mother. “But I promise you.”

“I want you to swear it,” the girl said.

“All right, I swear to you,” her mother conceded, and she added that Claudia would always know that the man she called uncle was her father. That was enough. That was the important thing.

At the beginning of 1998, Claudia’s father got his identity back. It was the party’s decision. With the referendum coming up, they needed activists who were publicly committed to practical tasks. Magali went to the airport with her two daughters. The situation was absurd. A week earlier Roberto had left for Buenos Aires with Raúl’s identity and now he was returning as Roberto. He had cut his hair and sideburns a little and he was soberly dressed in blue jeans and a white shirt. He smiled a lot and at one point Claudia thought he seemed like a new man.

They didn’t have to pretend so elaborately, but her mother insisted: the same way she used to look at Claudia reproachfully when she called her father Dad, now she urged her, to an almost ridiculous extent, to say “Dad.” On the plane there were people who actually had been in exile. Claudia remembers having felt a certain bitterness at seeing the families hug, crying in those long, legitimate embraces. For a moment she thought, and was immediately ashamed for thinking it, that the others were also faking. That what they were regaining was not the people but their names. They were undoing, at last, the distance between bodies and names. But no. There were real emotions around her. And when they got home, she felt that her emotion was real as well.

“It’s a terrible story,” I tell her, and she looks at me, surprised.

“No,” she answers, and she says my name several times, as if I had been asleep for a long time and she wanted to wake me up little by little. “My story isn’t terrible. That’s what Ximena doesn’t understand: our story isn’t terrible. There was pain, and we’ll never forget that pain, but we also can’t forget the pain of others. Because we were protected, in the end; because there were others who suffered more, who suffer more.”

We walk along Grecia Avenue past the College of Philosophy, and then I remember a story or hundreds of stories from that time, but I feel a little stupid, it seems like anything I could talk about would be trivial. We reach the National Stadium. The largest detention center in 1973 was always, for me, no more than a soccer field. My first memories of it are happy, sportive ones. I’m sure that I ate my first ice cream in the stadium’s stands.

Claudia’s first memory of the stadium is also happy. In 1977 it was announced that Chespirito, the Mexican comedian, would bring the entire cast of his show to perform at the National Stadium. Claudia was four years old then; she watched Chespirito’s show and she liked it a lot.

Her parents refused to take her at first, but finally they gave in. The four of them went, and Claudia and Ximena had a great time. Many years later Claudia found out that for her parents that day had been torture. They had spent every moment thinking how absurd it was to see the stadium filled with laughing people. Throughout the entire show they had thought only, obsessively, about the dead.

Every once in a while Claudia suggests that she look for a hotel or go to a friend’s house, but I insist on keeping her here. I can’t offer much, but I want this time to continue at any cost. Some days aren’t as good, but an agreeable routine starts to emerge. In the morning I go to the university while Claudia goes out walking or stays home thinking, mostly about the future. In the afternoon we have sex or watch movies, and night catches us by surprise, talking and laughing.

Sometimes I think she wants to stay, that she wants life to consist only of this, no more. It’s what I want. I want to make her desire a life here. I want to entangle her again in the world from which she fled. I want to make her believe that she fled, that she forced her story in order to lose herself in the conventions of a comfortable and supposedly happy life. I want to make her hate that placid future in Vermont. In short, I behave like an asshole.

It’s better to understand that time like one understands a brief summary in the TV guide: after twenty years, two childhood friends randomly reencounter each other and fall in love. But we aren’t friends. And there is no love, not really. We sleep together. We screw wonderfully well and I’ll never forget her dark, warm, firm body. But it isn’t love that unites us. Or it is love, but love of memory.

We are united by a desire to regain the scenes of secondary characters. Unnecessary scenes that were reasonably discarded, and which nonetheless we collect obsessively.

Claudia insists that we go to Maipú. She says she wants to meet my parents. She wants to walk down those streets again. I don’t think it’s a good idea, but in the end I agree.

In the plaza she recognizes some monuments, some trees, the long stairs leading to the public pool, but not much more. Where the supermarket used to be, there is now something that looks like a municipal building.

We head now for the neighborhood where she used to live. They’ve closed off the passages with an eye-catching electric gate. Lucila Godoy Alcayaga and Neftalí Reyes Basoalto look like more exclusive streets now, at least exclusive enough to share in the paranoia about crime. There are many cars parked inside.

We manage to slip in behind some children on bicycles. Claudia looks at the house in silence for a moment, but then she rings the bell. “We’re looking for a cat,” she tells a man who comes out with his shirt untucked, as if he had been undressing. Claudia explains that it’s a white cat with black spots. The man looks at her curiously; I’m sure he finds her desirable.

“I haven’t seen a black-and-white cat, I see in color,” he says, and I think how it’s been many years since I heard such a lame joke. We laugh anyway, nervously.

The house is now a strange apricot color and instead of Persian blinds there are horrible flowered curtains. But it was never a pretty house; “It wasn’t even a real house,” says Claudia, with a calm sadness.

We decide to go, but we can’t get out — the electric gate is locked. We buzz again but the man doesn’t answer. We stay there for a while, like melancholy prisoners caressing the bars. In the meantime I call my parents. They’re waiting for me. For us.

I’m surprised to see a bookshelf in the living room. It’s overflowing. “Thanks to that library your mother has started to read and I have too, although you know I’d rather watch movies,” says my father. He doesn’t look at Claudia, but he is extremely polite, cautious.

The afternoon passes in a slow conversation that, at certain moments, takes on shape to the rhythm of the pisco sours we are drinking. We plan to leave, but my mother starts to make dinner with slices of meat, duchess potatoes, and a vegetarian alternative.

“I’m not vegetarian,” says Claudia when my mother asks her.

“How odd, my son has always liked vegetarians,” says my mother. I start to get mad, but I let it pass when Claudia laughs naturally, warmly.

In spite of that joke, my parents avoid asking about the details of our relationship. I told them on the phone only that I would be bringing someone. I guess it seemed interesting or pleasant that I would want to introduce a girlfriend to them. It annoys me that the situation could be seen that way: the son introducing a girlfriend. It isn’t that, we didn’t come for that. I don’t know what we did come for, but we didn’t come for that.

We talk about a recent series of robberies in the neighborhood. It’s rumored that the thief lives around here. That it’s one of the kids who grew up in our neighborhood. One who didn’t succeed. One who was always something of a thief. “I’ve never stolen anything,” says my father, suddenly. “Not even when I was little. We were very poor, I sold vegetables at a stall in the market.” He looks at Claudia, conscious that he has told the story of his childhood a thousand times. He says that not even at the height of desperation would he steal. That back then he had friends who stole: “They were my friends, I loved them, but I hope they’ve ended up in jail,” he says. “Otherwise society wouldn’t function.”

At what moment, I think, did my father change so much? Upon thinking this I immediately question it: I don’t know if he has actually changed or if he was always like this. “I’ve stolen, I’ve stolen a lot,” I say, to annoy him. At first my father laughs.

“Sure, you took money from my wallet, but that’s not stealing.”

“That is stealing,” I answer seriously, sententiously. “Stealing from your father is still stealing. And I’ve also stolen books. One week I stole eighteen books.” I say eighteen so it will sound excessive but still true, but really it was three and I felt so guilty I never went back to that bookstore. But I stand behind what I said, I don’t take it back, and my father looks at me severely. He looks at me the way a father would look at a thieving son — a son already lost to him, in jail, on visitors’ day.

My mother tries to ease the tension. “Who hasn’t stolen at some time in their life?” she says, and slips into some anecdote from her childhood, looking at Claudia. She asks if she has ever stolen anything. Claudia answers that she hasn’t, but if she was desperate maybe she would.

Claudia says that her head hurts. I ask her to go lie down. We go to the room that was mine as a child. I make up the sofa bed and hug Claudia; she lies back and closes her eyes, her eyelids trembling slightly. I kiss her, I promise her that as soon as she feels better we will leave. “I don’t want to leave,” she says unexpectedly. “I want to stay here, I think we need to sleep here tonight, don’t ask me why,” she says. I discover then that she isn’t sick. I feel confused.

I go over to the little shelf holding the old family photo albums. That’s what these albums are for, I think: to make us believe we were happy as children. To show ourselves that we don’t want to accept how happy we were. I turn the pages slowly. I show Claudia a very old picture of my father getting off a plane, with long hair and very thick lenses blurring his eyes.

“Go back to the table,” Claudia says, or requests. “I want to be alone for a few hours.” She doesn’t say for a while or for a bit. She says she wants to be alone for a few hours.

My mother reheats the food in the microwave while my father tunes the radio in search of a classical music station — he’s never liked it but he thinks it’s the appropriate music for dinner. He stands there, turning the dial; he is upset and he doesn’t want to look at me. “Sit down, Dad, we’re talking,” I say with sudden authority.

While we eat I ask my parents if they remember the night of the 1985 earthquake, if they remember our neighbor Raúl. My mother gets the neighbors and their families confused, while my father remembers Raúl perfectly. “I understand he was a Christian Democrat,” he says, “although it was also rumored he was something more than that.”

“How so?”

“I don’t know, it seems he was a Socialist, or a Communist, even.”

“Communist like my grandfather?”

“My father wasn’t a Communist. My father was a worker, that’s all. Raúl must have been something more dangerous. But no, I don’t know. He seemed peaceful enough. Anyway, if Piñera wins the elections, the party’s over for Raúl. I’m sure he’s lived high on the hog off those corrupt and chaotic governments.”

He says it to provoke me. I let him talk. I let him say a few simplistic and bitter phrases. “They’ve had their hands in our pockets all these years,” he says. “Those Concertación people are a bunch of thieves,” he says. “A little order will do this country good.” And then comes the feared pronouncement I’d been waiting for, the line that I can’t, that I will not, allow to be crossed: “Pinochet was a dictator and all, he killed some people, but at least back then there was order.”

* * *

I look him in the eyes. At what moment, I think, at what moment did my father turn into this? Or was he always like this? Was he always like this? I think it forcefully, with a severe and painful theatricality: Was he always this way?

My mother doesn’t agree with what my father has said. Really, she more or less agrees, but she wants to do something to keep from spoiling the evening. “The world is much better now,” she says. “Things are good. And Michelle is doing the best she can.”

I can’t help asking my father if in those years he was a Pinochet supporter. I’ve asked him that question hundreds of times, since I was a teenager; it’s almost a rhetorical question, but he’s never admitted it — why not admit it? I think. Why deny it for so many years, why deny it still?

My father sits in sullen, deep silence. Finally he says that no, he wasn’t a Pinochet supporter, that he learned as a child that no one was going to save us.

“Save us from what?”

“Save us. Give us food to eat.”

“But you had food to eat. We had food to eat.”

“It’s not about that,” he says.

* * *

The conversation becomes unbearable. I get up to go check on Claudia. I stare at her intensely, but she goes on turning pages as if she doesn’t notice I’m there. By now she’s gone through half the albums. Her gaze absorbs, devours the images. Sometimes she smiles, sometimes her face becomes so serious that a sadness descends on me. No, I don’t feel sadness: I feel fear.

I go back to the table; the vanilla ice cream is melting on my plate. I tell them in a low but very fast voice, so fast that the details become unintelligible, that Claudia was Raúl’s daughter but for years she had to pretend she was his niece. That Raúl was really named Roberto. I don’t know what I am hoping for by telling them. But I’m hoping for something, looking for something.

* * *

“It’s a complicated story, but a good one,” says my father, after a not very long silence.

“Are you fucking with me? A good story? It’s a painful story.”

“It’s a painful story, but it’s over now. Claudia is alive. Her parents are alive.”

“Her parents are dead,” I say.

“Were they killed by the dictatorship?”

“No.”

“And how did they die?”

“Her mother died of a cerebral hemorrhage and her father of cancer.”

“Poor Claudia,” says my mother.

“But they didn’t die for political reasons,” says my father.

“But they’re dead.”

“But you’re alive,” he says. “And I bet you’ll use such a good story in a book.”

“I’m not going to write a story about them. I’m going to write about you two,” I say, with a strange smile on my face. I can’t believe what has just happened. I hate being the son who recriminates his parents, over and over again. But I can’t help it.

I look straight at my father and he turns his face away. Then I see in his profile the shine of a contact lens and his slightly irritated right eye. I remember the scene, repeated countless times during my childhood: my father kneeling down, desperately searching for a contact lens that has just fallen out. We would all help him look, but he wanted to find it for himself and it was an enormous effort.

Just as Claudia wanted, we stay at my parents’ house. At two in the morning I get up to make coffee. My mother is in the living room, drinking mate. She offers me some, I accept. I think how I’ve never drunk mate with her before. I don’t like the taste of sweetener but I suck hard on the straw; I burn myself a little.

“I was afraid of him,” my mother says.

“Who?”

“Ricardo. Rodolfo.”

“Roberto.”

“That’s it, Roberto. I could tell he was mixed up in politics.”

“Everyone was mixed up in politics, Mom. You, too. Both of you. By not participating you supported the dictatorship.” I feel that there are echoes in my language, there are hollows. I feel like I’m speaking according to a behavior manual.

“But we were never, your father and I, either for or against Allende, or for or against Pinochet.”

“Why were you afraid of Roberto?”

“Well, I don’t know if it was fear. But now you’re telling me he was a terrorist.”

“He wasn’t a terrorist. He hid people, he helped people who were in danger. And he also helped pass information.”

“And that doesn’t seem like much to you?”

“It seems like the least he could do.”

“But those people he hid were terrorists. They planted bombs. They planned attacks. That’s reason enough to be afraid.”

“Fine, Mom, but dictatorships don’t fall just like that. The struggle was necessary.”

“What do you know about those things? You hadn’t even been born yet when Allende was in power. You were just a baby during those years.”

* * *

I’ve heard that comment many times. You hadn’t even been born. This time, though, it doesn’t hurt. In a way, it makes me laugh. Just then my mother asks me, as if it were relevant:

“Do you like Carla Guelfenbein?”

I don’t know how to answer. I say no. “I don’t like those books, those kinds of books,” I say.

“Well, we don’t like the same kinds of books. I liked her novel The Other Side of the Soul. I identified with the characters, it moved me.”

“And how is that possible, Mom? How can you identify with characters from another social class, with conflicts that aren’t, that could never be, conflicts in your life?”

I speak in earnest, very seriously. I feel like I shouldn’t speak so seriously. That it isn’t appropriate. That I’m not going to solve anything by making my parents face up to the past. That I’m not going to achieve anything by taking away my mother’s right to freely give her opinion on a book. She looks at me with a mixture of anger and compassion. With a little exasperation.

“You’re wrong,” she says. “Maybe it isn’t my social class, fine, but social classes have changed a lot, everyone says so. And reading that novel I felt that yes, those were my problems. I understand that what I’m saying bothers you, but you should be a little more tolerant.”

“I just said I didn’t like that novel. And that it was strange that you would feel you identified with characters from another social class.”

“And Claudia?”

“What about Claudia?”

“Is Claudia from your social class? What social class are you from, now? She lived in Maipú, but she wasn’t from here. She looks more refined. You also look more refined than us. No one would say you were my son.

“I’m sorry,” says my mother before I can answer the question, which, in any case, I wouldn’t know how to answer. She gives me more mate and lights two cigarettes with the same match. “We’re going to smoke inside here, even though your father doesn’t like it.” She passes one to me.

“It isn’t your fault,” she says. “You left home very young, at twenty-two.”

“At twenty, Mom.”

“At twenty, twenty-two, it doesn’t matter. Very young. I sometimes think about what life would be like if you had stayed home. Some kids do. That thief boy, for example. He stayed here and became a thief. Others stayed too, and now they’re engineers. That’s life: you become a thief or an engineer. But I don’t really know what you became.”

“I don’t know what my father became,” I say, practically involuntarily.

“Your father has always been a man who loves his family. That’s what he was, that’s what he is.”

“And what would life have been like if I had stayed, Mom?”

“I don’t know.”

“It would have been worse,” I answer.

My mother nods. “Maybe it’s better for us to be farther apart,” she says. “I like how you are. I like that you defend your ideas. And I like that girl, Claudia, for you, even if she isn’t from your social class.”

She carefully puts out her cigarette and washes the ashtray before going to bed. I open the door and sit on the threshold. I want to look at the night, look for the moon, and to finish off in long gulps the whiskey I’ve just poured myself. I lean on my parents’ car, a new Hyundai truck. The alarm goes off and my father gets up. I’m moved by the sight of him in his pajamas. He asks me if I’m drunk. “A little,” I answer in a faint voice. “Just a little.”

It’s very late, five in the morning. I go up to the room. Claudia is sleeping, I lie down next to her; I move, wanting to wake her up. It’s not just a little: I’m drunk. The darkness is almost complete and yet I can feel her gaze on my forehead and my chest. She strokes my neck, I bite her shoulder. “We can’t miss this chance,” she says, “to make love in your parents’ house.” Her body moves in the darkness as the day breaks.

At eight in the morning we decide to leave. I go to my parents’ room to say goodbye. I see them sleeping in an embrace. It’s a weighty image for me. I feel ashamed, happy, and discomfited. I think that they are the beautiful survivors of a lost world, of an impossible world. My father wakes up and asks me to wait. He wants to give me some shirts he’s getting rid of. There are six, they don’t look old; I can tell they’ll be too small for me but I accept them anyway.

We go home and it’s as if we were returning from war, but from a war that isn’t over. I think, We’ve become deserters. I think, We’ve become war correspondents, tourists. That’s what we are, I think: tourists who arrive with their backpacks, their cameras, and their notebooks, prepared to spend a long time wearing out their eyes, but who suddenly decide to go home, and as they do they breathe a long sigh of relief.

A long relief, but a temporary one. Because in that feeling there is innocence and there is guilt, and although we can’t and don’t know how to talk about innocence or guilt, we spend our days going over a long list of things that back then, when we were children, we didn’t know. It’s as if we had witnessed a crime. We didn’t commit it, we were only passing through the place, but we ran away because we knew that if they found us there we’d be blamed. We believe we are innocent, we believe we are guilty: we don’t know.

Back home again Claudia looks at the shirts my father gave me. “I didn’t have my own clothes for many years,” she says suddenly. “First I used Ximena’s castoffs, and then my mother’s dresses. When she died we fought over everything, down to the last rag she left, and now I think maybe it was then that our relationship broke down for good. My father’s suits, on the other hand, are still untouched in the closet in his room,” she says.

I kept my father’s shirts in a drawer for months. In the meantime, many things have happened. In the meantime Claudia left and I started to write this book.

Now I look at those shirts, I spread them out on the bed. There is one I especially like, with an oil-blue color. I just tried it on, it’s definitely too small. I look at myself in the mirror and I think how our parents’ clothes should always be too big for us. But I also think I needed it; sometimes we need to wear our parents’ clothes and look at ourselves for a long time in the mirror.

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.”