Ways of Going Home: A Novel by Alejandro Zambra, Megan McDowell

hemorrhage and her father of cancer.”
    “Poor Claudia,” says my mother.
    “But they didn’t die for political reasons,” says my father.
    “But they’re dead.”
    “But you’re alive,” he says. “And I bet you’ll use such a good story in a book.”
    “I’m not going to write a story about them. I’m going to write about you two,” I say, with a strange smile on my face. I can’t believe what has just happened. I hate being the son who recriminates his parents, over and over again. But I can’t help it.
    I look straight at my father and he turns his face away. Then I see in his profile the shine of a contact lens and his slightly irritated right eye. I remember the scene, repeated countless times during my childhood: my father kneeling down, desperately searching for a contact lens that has just fallen out. We would all help him look, but he wanted to find it for himself and it was an enormous effort.

 
     
    Just as Claudia wanted, we stay at my parents’ house. At two in the morning I get up to make coffee. My mother is in the living room, drinking mate . She offers me some, I accept. I think how I’ve never drunk mate with her before. I don’t like the taste of sweetener but I suck hard on the straw; I burn myself a little.
    “I was afraid of him,” my mother says.
    “Who?”
    “Ricardo. Rodolfo.”
    “Roberto.”
    “That’s it, Roberto. I could tell he was mixed up in politics.”
    “Everyone was mixed up in politics, Mom. You, too. Both of you. By not participating you supported the dictatorship.” I feel that there are echoes in my language, there are hollows. I feel like I’m speaking according to a behavior manual.
    “But we were never, your father and I, either for or against Allende, or for or against Pinochet.”
    “Why were you afraid of Roberto?”
    “Well, I don’t know if it was fear. But now you’re telling me he was a terrorist.”
    “He wasn’t a terrorist. He hid people, he helped people who were in danger. And he also helped pass information.”
    “And that doesn’t seem like much to you?”
    “It seems like the least he could do.”
    “But those people he hid were terrorists. They planted bombs. They planned attacks. That’s reason enough to be afraid.”
    “Fine, Mom, but dictatorships don’t fall just like that. The struggle was necessary.”
    “What do you know about those things? You hadn’t even been born yet when Allende was in power. You were just a baby during those years.”
    *   *   *
    I’ve heard that comment many times. You hadn’t even been born. This time, though, it doesn’t hurt. In a way, it makes me laugh. Just then my mother asks me, as if it were relevant:
    “Do you like Carla Guelfenbein?”
    I don’t know how to answer. I say no. “I don’t like those books, those kinds of books,” I say.
    “Well, we don’t like the same kinds of books. I liked her novel The Other Side of the Soul . I identified with the characters, it moved me.”
    “And how is that possible, Mom? How can you identify with characters from another social class, with conflicts that aren’t, that could never be, conflicts in your life?”
    I speak in earnest, very seriously. I feel like I shouldn’t speak so seriously. That it isn’t appropriate. That I’m not going to solve anything by making my parents face up to the past. That I’m not going to achieve anything by taking away my mother’s right to freely give her opinion on a book. She looks at me with a mixture of anger and compassion. With a little exasperation.
    “You’re wrong,” she says. “Maybe it isn’t my social class, fine, but social classes have changed a lot, everyone says so. And reading that novel I felt that yes, those were my problems. I understand that what I’m saying bothers you, but you should be a little more tolerant.”
    “I just said I didn’t like that novel. And that it was strange that you would feel you identified with characters from another social