Alejandro Zambra - Ways of Going Home

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.”

This afternoon Eme finally agreed to look at the manuscript. She didn’t want me to read it out loud, the way I used to. She asked me to print the pages out and she covered herself with the sheet to read them in bed, but suddenly she changed her mind and started to get dressed. “I’d rather go home,” she said. “I’ve been here a long time, I want to sleep in my own bed tonight.”

I imagine her reading it now, in bed, in that house she has never invited me to visit. In that bed I don’t know. My bed is hers as well, we picked it out together. And the sheets, the blankets, the comforter. I said as much to her before she left, but I wasn’t expecting her answer: “For this to work,” she said, “sometimes you have to pretend we’ve just met. That we’ve never shared anything before.”

I was struck by the slightly forced restraint in her voice. She spoke to me the way one speaks to a man who complains unfairly in the supermarket line. “We’re all in a hurry, sir. Be patient, wait your turn.”

I’ll wait for my turn, then. Sentimentally, respectfully.

* * *

At twenty years old, when I had just left home, I worked for a time counting cars. It was a simple and badly paid job, but in some ways I enjoyed sitting on my assigned corner and recording on the chart the number of cars, trucks, and buses that went by every hour. Most of all I liked the night shift, although sometimes I got sleepy and I’m sure I made an absurd picture: a young, distracted, haggard guy on a corner of Vicuña Mackenna, waiting for nothing, watching out of the corner of his eye as other young people returned home, boasting about their drunkenness.

It’s night and I’m writing. That is my job now, or something like that. But as I write cars go by on Echeñique Avenue, and sometimes I get distracted and start counting them. In the past ten minutes fourteen cars have passed, three trucks, and one motorcycle. I can’t tell if they turn at the next corner or if they keep going straight. In a vague, melancholy way I think I would like to know.

I think about the old Peugeot 404. My father used to spend weekends fixing it up, though it never actually broke down — he would say himself, with the particular love men have for cars, that it behaved well and had few problems. All the same, he spent his days tuning it up, changing its spark plugs, or reading until late from some chapter in Apunto, the Automotive Encyclopedia . I have never seen anyone as concentrated as my father was on those nights of reading.

I thought it was ridiculous for him to spend so much time on the car. Even worse, he made me help him — which consisted of waiting, with infinite patience, for him to finally say: “Pass me the crescent wrench.” Then I had to wait for him to pass it back to me, and also listen to long explanations of mechanics that didn’t interest me in the least. It was then I discovered there was a certain pleasure in the act of pretending to listen to my father or to other adults. In nodding my head and holding back the half smile of knowing I was thinking about something else.

The Peugeot’s fate was a horrible one. An old truck going against traffic crashed into it, and my father almost died. I still remember when he showed me the mark the seat belt left on his chest. He was talking to me then about prudence, about the wisdom of rules. Suddenly he opened his shirt to show me the reddish mark that was drawn clearly on his dark chest. “If I hadn’t put my seat belt on I’d be dead,” he said.

The Peugeot was left in pieces and he had to sell it as scrap. I went with my father to the junkyard. Since then, every time I see a Peugeot 404 I remember that unsettling image. And also that mark, which I saw when we went to the pool or the beach. I didn’t like to see my father in a bathing suit. I didn’t like to see that mark cleaving his chest, that evidence, that horrible band that stayed on his body forever.

* * *

It’s strange, it’s silly to attempt a genuine story about something, about someone, about anyone, even oneself. But it’s necessary as well.

It’s four in the morning, I can’t sleep. I get through the insomnia by counting cars and putting together new phrases on the refrigerator:

our perfect whisper

another white prostitute

understand strange picture

almost black mouth

how imagine howl

naked girl long rhythm

That last one is nice: naked girl long rhythm.

* * *

I arrived half an hour early, sat on the terrace, and ordered a glass of wine. I wanted to read while I waited for Eme, but some children were running dangerously around the tables, and it was hard to concentrate. They should be in school, I thought, but then I remembered it was Saturday. I saw their mothers at the corner table, caught up in their trivial chatter.

She got there late. I noticed she seemed nervous, because she gave me a long explanation for the delay, as if she had never been late before. I thought she didn’t want to talk about the novel, so I decided to ask her right away what she had thought of it. She searched a long time for the right tone. She stuttered. She tried to make a joke I didn’t understand. “The novel is good,” she said, finally. “It’s a novel.”

“What?”

“I said, it’s a novel. I like it.”

“But it isn’t finished.”