Alejandro Zambra - My Documents

1

The first time I saw a computer was in 1980, when I was four or five years old. It’s not a pure memory, though — I’m probably mixing it up with other, later visits to my father’s office, on calle Agustinas. I remember my father explaining how those enormous machines worked, his black eyes fixed on mine, his perpetual cigarette in hand. He waited for my awed reaction and I faked interest, but as soon as I could, I went off to play near Loreto, a thin-lipped secretary with bangs framing her face, who never remembered my name.

Loreto’s electric typewriter struck me as marvelous: its small screen where the words accumulated until a powerful salvo carved them into the paper. It was a device that was perhaps similar to a computer, but I never thought of it that way. In any case, I preferred the other machine at her desk, a conventional black Olivetti, a model I was very familiar with because we had one just like it at my house. My mother had studied programming, but she’d abandoned computers and opted instead for that lesser technology, which was still current then, since the proliferation of computers was still a ways off.

My mother didn’t get paid for any of her typing work: the texts she transcribed were songs, stories, and poems written by my grandmother, who was always entering some contest or working on a project that would, she thought, finally pull her out of anonymity and into the spotlight. I remember my mother working at the dining-room table, carefully inserting the carbon paper, painstakingly applying Wite-Out when she made a mistake. She always typed very quickly, using all of her fingers, without looking at the keyboard.

Maybe I can say it like this: my father was a computer and my mother was a typewriter.

2

I soon learned how to type my name, but I preferred to imitate, on the keyboard, the drumrolls of military marches. Back then, being a part of the marching band was the greatest honor we could aspire to. Everyone wanted to join, including me. By mid-morning, during classes, we would hear the far-off booming of the snare drums, the whistles, the breathing of the trumpet and the trombone, the miraculously sharp notes of the triangle and the bells. The band practiced two or three times a week: I was always impressed by the sight of them marching off toward the open field that lay at the edge of the school grounds. The most eye-catching of all was the drum major, who performed only at important events, because he was an alumnus of the school. He wielded his baton with admirable finesse, in spite of the fact that he had only one eye: his other eye was glass, and legend had it that he’d lost it due to a badly timed baton maneuver.

In December, we would make a pilgrimage to the Maipú Votive Temple. It was an endless, two-hour walk from the school, the marching band in front and the rest of us following behind, in descending order, from the thirteenth grade (because it was a technical high school) down to the first. People came out to greet us; some of the women gave us oranges to ward off exhaustion. My mother would appear at certain points along the way: she’d park somewhere, find me at the end of the formation, then go back to the car to listen to music, smoke a cigarette, and drive another stretch to catch up with us farther on, to wave at me again. With her long, shiny brown hair, she was hands down the most beautiful mother in my class, which was something of a problem for me, because my classmates liked to tell me that she was too pretty to be the mother of someone as ugly as me.

Dante would also come out to support me; he belted my name at the top of his lungs and embarrassed me in front of my classmates, who made fun of him, and me. Dante was an autistic boy, older than me, maybe fifteen or sixteen. He was very tall, around 6'2", and he weighed over 220 pounds, as he himself, for a time, would tell anyone he met, always giving the exact figure: “Hi, today I’m weighing 227 pounds.”

Dante used to spend the day wandering around the neighborhood, trying to figure out which children belonged to which parents, and who was whose sibling, or friend, which, in a world where silence and distrust reigned, couldn’t have been easy. He would follow along behind his interlocutors, who tended to start walking faster, but Dante would speed up too, until he was facing them and walking backward, nodding his head sharply whenever he understood something. He lived with an aunt; apparently his parents had abandoned him, but he never said that — when you asked him about his parents, he just gave you a disconcerted look.

3

I went on hearing military music once I got home, in the afternoons, since we lived behind the Santiago Bueras Stadium, where the kids from other schools came to practice, and where, every once in a while, maybe every month, they held a marching-band competition. So I listened to military marches every day; you could say that they were the music of my childhood. But that would be only partially true: many kinds of music were important to my family. My grandmother had been an opera singer as a teenager, and her greatest disappointment in life was that she’d had to stop singing when she was twenty-one, when the earthquake of 1939 cut her life in half. I don’t know how many times she told us about that experience: swallowing dirt, and waking up suddenly to find her city, Old Chillán, destroyed. The inventory of the dead included her father, her mother, and two of her three brothers. It was that third brother who rescued her from the rubble.

My parents never told us bedtime stories, but my grandmother did. The happy stories would always end badly, because the protagonists invariably died in an earthquake. But she also told us some terribly sad stories that ended happily — maybe that was her idea of literature. Sometimes my grandmother would end up crying, and my sister and I would stay awake, listening to her sobs; other times, even during an especially dramatic moment of the story, some detail would strike her as funny, and she’d burst into peals of contagious laughter, and this would also keep us awake.

My grandmother was always spouting sayings with double meanings, or making impertinent comments that she laughed at herself even before she finished them. She would say “butt of a horse” instead of “but of course,” and if someone voiced the opinion that it was cold out, she would reply, “Well, it certainly isn’t hot.” She would also say, “If we gotta fight ’em, let’s bite ’em,” and instead of simply saying “No,” she was quick to reply “Not at all, as the fish said,” or just “As the fish said,” or simply “Fish,” to summarize this saying: “Not at all, as the fish said when asked how he’d like to be cooked, in the oven or the fryer.”

4

Mass was held in the gymnasium of a convent school, Mater Purissima; people always talked, though, about the church building that was in the works, and it was like they were describing a dream. It took so long to build that by the time it was finished, I no longer believed in God.

At first I went to Mass with my parents, but I started going alone when they switched to the Ursuline school, which was closer and offered a Mass that lasted only forty minutes because the priest — a minuscule bald man who always went around on a scooter — rushed through the homily, delivering it with a pleasant disdain, and even making, quite often, a hand gesture that meant “et cetera.” I liked him, but I preferred the priest at Mater Purissima, a man with a full, indomitable beard that was absolutely white. He spoke as though he were chastising or challenging us, employing many dramatic pauses and that energetic and deceptive friendliness that is so unique to priests. Of course, I also knew the priests at my school, like Father Limonta, the director, a very athletic Italian — it was said he’d been a gymnast when he was younger — who gave us love taps with his ring of keys to keep us firmly in formation, and who otherwise was affable and fairly fatherly. His sermons, however, struck me as disagreeable or inappropriate — perhaps they seemed too pedagogical, not serious enough.