Ways of Going Home: A Novel Read Free Page A

that. Each house was a kind of miniature fortress, an impregnable bastion. I myself wasn’t allowed to invite friends over; my mother always said the house was too dirty. It wasn’t true, the house sparkled, but I thought that maybe there was some kind of dirt that I simply couldn’t see, and that when I grew up maybe I would see layers of dust where now I saw only waxed floors and shining wood.
    Claudia’s house seemed fairly similar to my own: the same horrible raffia swans, two or three little Mexican hats, several minuscule clay pots and crochet dishcloths. The first thing I did was ask to use the bathroom, and I discovered, astonished, that the house had two bathrooms. Never before had I been in a house that had two bathrooms. My idea of wealth was exactly that: I imagined that millionaires must have houses with three bathrooms, or even five.
    Claudia told me she wasn’t sure her mother would be happy to see me there, and I asked if it was because of the dust. She didn’t understand at first but she listened to my explanation, and then she chose to answer that yes, her mother didn’t like her to invite friends over because she thought the house was always dirty. I asked her then, without thinking about it too much, about her father.
    “My father doesn’t live with us,” she said. “My parents are separated, he lives in another city.” I asked her if she missed him. “Of course I do. He’s my father.”
    In my class there was only one boy with separated parents, which to me was a stigma, the saddest situation imaginable.
    “Maybe they’ll live together again someday,” I said, to console her.
    “Maybe,” she said. “But I don’t feel like talking about that. I want us to talk about something else.”
    She took off her sandals, went to the kitchen, and came back with a bowl filled with bunches of black, green, and purple grapes; this struck me as odd, because in my house we never bought such a variety of grapes. I took advantage of the chance to try them all, and while I compared the flavors, Claudia filled the silence with general, polite questions. “I need to ask you something,” she said finally, “but not till after lunch.”
    “If you want, I’ll help you fix the food,” I said, though I had never cooked in my life, or helped anyone else cook.
    “We’re already having lunch,” said Claudia, very seriously. “These grapes are lunch.”
    It was hard for her to get to the point. She seemed to speak freely, but there was also a stutter to her words that made it difficult to understand her. Really, she wanted to keep quiet. Now I think she was cursing the fact that she had to talk in order for me to understand what she wanted to ask me.

 
     
    “I need you to take care of him,” she said suddenly, forgetting all her strategy.
    “Who?”
    “My uncle. I need you to take care of him.”
    “Okay,” I answered immediately, so reliable, and in a split second I imagined that Raúl was suffering from some horrible disease, a disease maybe even worse than solitude, and that I would have to be some kind of nurse. I imagined myself walking around the neighborhood, pushing him in his wheelchair and blessed for my selflessness. But evidently that wasn’t what Claudia was asking me for. She spilled out the story all at once, looking at me fixedly, and I agreed quickly but at the wrong time—I agreed too quickly, as if confident that I would figure out later on what Claudia had really asked of me.
    What I eventually understood was that Claudia and her mother couldn’t or shouldn’t visit Raúl, at least not often. That’s where I came in: I had to watch over Raúl; not take care of him but rather keep an eye on his activities and make notes about anything that seemed suspicious. We would meet every Thursday, at the random meeting point she had chosen, the supermarket bakery, where I would give her my report and then we would talk for a while about other things. “Because,” she told me,