Ways of Going Home: A Novel
Page 10
When I got home I thought about Eme’s words. I thought she was right. That we know very little. That we used to know more, because we were full of conviction, dogma, rules. That we loved those rules. That the only thing we had really loved was that absurd handful of rules. And now we understand everything. We understand, especially, failure.
Alone again (naturally). What hurts the most is that naturally. Let us go, then, you and I, each our separate way.
* * *
A few days ago Eme left a box for me with the neighbors. Only today did I dare open it. There were two shirts, a scarf, my Kaurismäki and Wes Anderson movies, my Tom Waits and Wu-Tang Clan CDs, as well as some books I lent her these past months. Among them there was also the copy of In Praise of Shadows, the essay by Tanizaki, that I gave her years ago. I don’t know if it was out of cruelty or carelessness that she put it in the box.
She never told me she had read it, so I was surprised to recognize in the book, just now, the marks she made with a thick yellow highlighter. I used to berate her for that: her books looked awful after the battle that was her reading. One would think she read with the anxiety of a student memorizing dates for a test, but no, she was just in the habit of marking the phrases that she liked that way.
I speak in the past tense of Eme. It’s sad and easy: she isn’t here anymore. But I should also learn to speak in the past tense about myself.
* * *
I’ve gone back to the novel. I try out changes. From first to third person, from third to first, even to second.
I move toward and away from the narrator. And I don’t get anywhere. I’m not going to get anywhere. I change scenes. I delete. I delete a lot. Twenty, thirty pages. I forget about this book. I get drunk little by little, I fall asleep.
And then when I wake up I write verses, and I realize that was everything: to remember the images fully, no compositions of place, no unnecessary scenes. To find a genuine music. No more novels, no more excuses.
I experiment with erasing everything to allow that rhythm, those words, to prevail:
The table swallowed up in tongues of fire
The scars that showed on my father’s body
The quick confidence amid the rubble
The phrases written on the childhood wall
The sound of my restless drumming fingers
Your clothes in some other house’s drawers
The never-ending sound of passing cars
The warm, steady hope of a return
Without steps or paths of memory
The firm conviction that what we hope for
Is that no one will see in our faces
The faces we relinquished long ago
* * *
Weeks without writing in this diary. The whole summer, almost.
I was awake, unable to sleep, listening to the Magnetic Fields, when the earthquake began. I sat in a doorway and I thought, calmly and with a strange serenity, that it was the end of the world. It’s long, I also thought. I managed to think that many times: it was long.
When it finally ended I went over to check on the neighbors, a married couple and their little girl, who all still had their arms around one another, trembling. “Is everyone okay?”
“We’re fine,” answered the neighbor. “Just a little scared. And how are you two?” he asked.
I answered him, surprised: “We’re fine.”
I’ve lived alone for two years and my neighbor doesn’t know, I thought. I also thought that now I was the single neighbor, now I was Raúl, I was Roberto. Then I remembered the novel. Alarmed, I believed the story would end like that: with the house in Maipú, my childhood home, destroyed. What had made me write about the earthquake of 1985? I didn’t know, I don’t know. I do know, though, that on that long-ago night I thought about death for the first time.
Back then death was invisible for children like me, who went outside, running fearlessly along those fantastical streets, safe from history. The night of the earthquake was the first time I realized that everything could come tumbling down. Now I think it’s a good thing to know. It’s necessary to remember it every second.
Past five in the morning I went out to look around the neighborhood. I walked slowly, waiting for the help lent by flashlight beams bouncing confusedly from the ground up to the treetops, and by headlights that would suddenly fill the night. Children slept or were trying to sleep stretched out on the sidewalk. A masculine voice reassured, from one corner to the next, like a mantra: We’re all right, we’re all right.
I turned on my phone radio. Information was still scarce. The inventory of deaths was slowly beginning. The announcers were faltering, and one even uttered a sentence that, under the circumstances, was comical: “This has definitely been an earthquake.”
Finally, I ended up near Eme’s house, and I stayed on the sidewalk, waiting for some sign. Suddenly I heard her voice. She was talking to her friends; they must have been smoking in the front yard. I was going to go over to them, but then I thought that it was enough for me to know she was safe. I felt her close by, a few steps away, but I decided to leave immediately. We’re all right, I thought, with a strange flicker of happiness.
I returned home at dawn. I was struck by the scene when I went inside. Some days earlier I had organized my books. Now they were a generous ruin on the floor. Same for the plates and two windows. The house had survived, though.
I thought about going immediately to Maipú, but just before nine in the morning I managed to reach my mother.
“We’re all right,” she said, and she asked me not to come see them, saying the trip out there was very dangerous. “Stay home and organize your books,” she said. “Don’t worry about us.”
* * *
But I’m going to go. Early tomorrow I’m going to see them, I’m going to be with them.
* * *
It’s late. I’m writing. The city is convalescing, but little by little the sounds of any other end-of-summer night are resuming. I think naively, intensely, about suffering. About the people who died today, in the south. About yesterday’s dead, and tomorrow’s. And about this profession, this strange, humble and arrogant, necessary and insufficient trade: to spend life watching, writing.
* * *
After the Peugeot 404 my father had a light blue 504 and then a silver 505. None of those models are out on the avenue tonight.
I watch the cars, I count the cars. It’s overwhelming to think that in the backseats children are sleeping, and that every one of those children will remember, someday, the old car they rode in years before, with their parents.
A Note About the Author
Alejandro Zambra is a poet, novelist, and literary critic who was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1975. He is the author of two previous novels, The Private Lives of Trees and Bonsai, which was awarded a Chilean Critics Award for best novel. He was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists and was elected to the Bogotá39 list.
A Note About the Translator
Megan McDowell is a literary translator living in Zurich, Switzerland. She also translated Alejandro Zambra’s The Private Lives of Trees.
ALSO BY ALEJANDRO ZAMBRA
Bonsai
The Private Lives of Trees
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2011 by Alejandro Zambra and Editorial Anagrama, S. A.
Translation copyright © 2013 by Megan McDowell
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2011 by Editorial Anagrama, Spain, as Formas de volver a casa
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2013
A portion of this book originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Granta 113: Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zambra, Alejandro, 1975–
[Formas de volver a casa. Englis
h]
Ways of going home / Alejandro Zambra; translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell. — 1st American ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-374-28664-4 (alk. paper)
1. Families—Chile—Fiction. 2. Chilean literature—Translations into English. I. McDowell, Megan. II. Title.
PQ8098.36.A43 F6713 2013
863'.7—dc23
2012021270
Illustration on title page by Charlotte Strick
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The author and translator wish to thank Neil Davidson for his assistance with the translation.
eISBN 9781466828209