Ways of Going Home: A Novel Read Free

harbored a delusion that someday he would beat me almost to death. I have a persistent childhood memory of an imminent beating that never came. Because of that fear, the return trip was excruciating. As soon as we set off for Santiago, I declared I was tired of Raphael, and that we should listen to Adamo or José Luis Rodríguez.
    “I thought you liked Raphael,” said Mom.
    “Adamo’s lyrics are better,” I said, but then it was out of my hands—I accidentally opened up a long discussion about whether Adamo was better than Raphael. Even Julio Iglesias was mentioned, which in any case was absurd, since no one in our family liked Julio Iglesias.
    To demonstrate Raphael’s vocal quality, my father decided to put in the tape, and when “Que sabe nadie” came on I had to improvise a desperate plan B. This consisted of singing very loudly right from the start of the song; I figured that when the chorus came my voice would just sound louder. They yelled at me for singing so loud, but they didn’t notice the adulteration in the tape. Once we were home, however, as I was digging a small hole next to the rose garden to bury the tape, they found me. There was nothing I could do but tell them the whole story. They laughed a lot and listened to the tape several times.
    That night, though, they came to my room to tell me I was grounded for a week, and couldn’t leave the house.
    “Why are you grounding me after you laughed so much?” I asked, angry.
    “Because you lied,” said my father.

 
     
    So I couldn’t keep my date with Claudia, but in the end it was better, because when I told her that story she laughed so much I could look at her without anxiety, forgetting, to some extent, the strange bond that was beginning to connect us.
    It’s hard for me to remember the circumstances in which we saw each other again. According to Claudia, she was the one who sought me out, but I also remember wandering long hours hoping to run into her. However it happened, suddenly we were walking next to each other again, and she asked me to go with her to her house. We took several turns and she even stopped in the middle of a passage and told me we had to turn around, as if she didn’t know where she lived.
    We arrived, finally, at a neighborhood with only two streets: Neftalí Reyes Basoalto and Lucila Godoy Alcayaga. It sounds like a joke, but it’s true. A lot of the streets in Maipú had, and still have, those absurd names: my cousins, for example, lived on First Symphony Way, near Second and Third Symphony, perpendicular to Concert Street, and close to the passages Opus One, Opus Two, Opus Three, et cetera. Or the very street where I lived, Aladdin, between Odin and Ramayana and parallel to Lemuria; obviously, toward the end of the seventies some people had a lot of fun choosing names for the streets where the new families would later live—the families without history, who were willing or perhaps resigned to live in that fantasy world.
    “I live in the neighborhood of real names,” said Claudia on the afternoon of our reencounter, looking seriously into my eyes.
    “I live in the neighborhood of real names,” she said again, as if she needed to start the sentence over in order to go on: “Lucila Godoy Alcayaga is Gabriela Mistral’s real name,” she explained. “And Neftalí Reyes Basoalto is Pablo Neruda’s real name.” A long silence came over us, which I broke by saying the first thing that came into my head:
    “Living here must be much better than living on Aladdin Street.”
    As I slowly pronounced that stupid sentence, I could see her pimples, her pink-and-white face, her pointed shoulders, the place where her breasts should be but where for now there was nothing, and her hair, unstylish because it wasn’t short, wavy, and brown, but rather long, straight, and black.

 
     
    We spent a while talking next to the fence, and then she invited me in. I wasn’t expecting that, because back then, no one expected