Alejandro Zambra - Ways of Going Home

But it wasn’t like that. Calm returned almost immediately. The worst always happened to other people. In that lost corner west of Santiago the earthquake had been no more than an enormous scare. A few shacks fell down, but there was no great damage and no one died. The TV showed the San Antonio port destroyed, as well as some streets I had seen or thought I had seen on rare trips to downtown Santiago. I confusedly intuited that the true suffering happened there.

If there was anything to learn, we didn’t learn it. Now I think it’s a good thing to lose confidence in the solidity of the ground, I think it’s necessary to know that from one moment to the next everything can come tumbling down. But at the time we went back, just like that, to life as usual.

Once we were back in the house, Dad confirmed that the damage was slight: just some plaster fallen from the walls and a cracked window. Mom mourned only the loss of the zodiac glasses. Eight of them broke, including hers (Pisces), Dad’s (Leo), and the one Grandma used when she came to see us (Scorpio).

“No problem, we have other glasses, we don’t need any more,” said Dad, and she answered without looking at him, looking at me: “Only yours survived.” Then she went to get the glass with the Libra sign, and gave it to me with a solemn gesture. She spent the following days a little depressed, contemplating giving the remaining glasses to Geminis, Virgos, Aquarians.

The good news was that we wouldn’t go back to school right away. The old building had suffered significant damage, and those who had seen it said it was a pile of rubble. It was hard for me to imagine the school destroyed, though it wasn’t sadness that I felt. I just felt curious. I especially remembered the bare spot at the edge of the playground where we went at recess, and the wall the middle school kids would scribble on. I thought about all those messages smashed to smithereens, scattered in the ash on the ground — bawdy sayings, phrases for or against Colo-Colo, or for or against Pinochet. One phrase I found especially funny: Pinochet sucks dick.

Back then I was, as I always have been, and I always will be, for Colo-Colo. As for Pinochet, to me he was a television personality who hosted a show with no fixed schedule, and I hated him for that, for the stuffy national channels that interrupted their programming during the best parts. Later I hated him for being a son of a bitch, for being a murderer, but back then I hated him only for those inconvenient shows that Dad watched without saying a word, without acceding any movement other than a more forceful drag on the cigarette he always had glued to his lips.

Around then, the redhead’s father took a trip to Miami, and he returned with a baseball glove and bat for his son. The gift brought about an unexpected break in our routine. For many days we switched from soccer to that slow and slightly stupid game which nevertheless entranced my friends. It was absurd: ours must have been the only neighborhood in the country where the kids played baseball instead of soccer. It was hard for me to hit the ball or throw it straight and I was quickly sent to the bench. The redhead, who had been one of my best friends, suddenly became popular. Now he preferred the company of the older kids who were attracted by the foreign game and had joined our group. And that’s how, because of baseball, I was left friendless.

In the afternoons, resigned to solitude, I would leave the house, as they say, to tire myself out: I walked in wider and wider circuits, though I almost always respected a certain geometry of circles. I exhausted all possible routes, all the blocks, took in new landscapes, though the world didn’t vary too much: the same new houses, built quickly, as if obeying some urgency, but nevertheless solid and resilient. In a few weeks most of the walls had been restored and reinforced. It was hard to tell there had just been an earthquake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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