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

class.”
    “And Claudia?”
    “What about Claudia?”
    “Is Claudia from your social class? What social class are you from, now? She lived in Maipú, but she wasn’t from here. She looks more refined. You also look more refined than us. No one would say you were my son.
    “I’m sorry,” says my mother before I can answer the question, which, in any case, I wouldn’t know how to answer. She gives me more mate and lights two cigarettes with the same match. “We’re going to smoke inside here, even though your father doesn’t like it.” She passes one to me.
    “It isn’t your fault,” she says. “You left home very young, at twenty-two.”
    “At twenty, Mom.”
    “At twenty, twenty-two, it doesn’t matter. Very young. I sometimes think about what life would be like if you had stayed home. Some kids do. That thief boy, for example. He stayed here and became a thief. Others stayed too, and now they’re engineers. That’s life: you become a thief or an engineer. But I don’t really know what you became.”
    “I don’t know what my father became,” I say, practically involuntarily.
    “Your father has always been a man who loves his family. That’s what he was, that’s what he is.”
    “And what would life have been like if I had stayed, Mom?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “It would have been worse,” I answer.
    My mother nods. “Maybe it’s better for us to be farther apart,” she says. “I like how you are. I like that you defend your ideas. And I like that girl, Claudia, for you, even if she isn’t from your social class.”
    She carefully puts out her cigarette and washes the ashtray before going to bed. I open the door and sit on the threshold. I want to look at the night, look for the moon, and to finish off in long gulps the whiskey I’ve just poured myself. I lean on my parents’ car, a new Hyundai truck. The alarm goes off and my father gets up. I’m moved by the sight of him in his pajamas. He asks me if I’m drunk. “A little,” I answer in a faint voice. “Just a little.”
    It’s very late, five in the morning. I go up to the room. Claudia is sleeping, I lie down next to her; I move, wanting to wake her up. It’s not just a little: I’m drunk. The darkness is almost complete and yet I can feel her gaze on my forehead and my chest. She strokes my neck, I bite her shoulder. “We can’t miss this chance,” she says, “to make love in your parents’ house.” Her body moves in the darkness as the day breaks.

 
     
    At eight in the morning we decide to leave. I go to my parents’ room to say goodbye. I see them sleeping in an embrace. It’s a weighty image for me. I feel ashamed, happy, and discomfited. I think that they are the beautiful survivors of a lost world, of an impossible world. My father wakes up and asks me to wait. He wants to give me some shirts he’s getting rid of. There are six, they don’t look old; I can tell they’ll be too small for me but I accept them anyway.
    We go home and it’s as if we were returning from war, but from a war that isn’t over. I think, We’ve become deserters. I think, We’ve become war correspondents, tourists. That’s what we are, I think: tourists who arrive with their backpacks, their cameras, and their notebooks, prepared to spend a long time wearing out their eyes, but who suddenly decide to go home, and as they do they breathe a long sigh of relief.
    A long relief, but a temporary one. Because in that feeling there is innocence and there is guilt, and although we can’t and don’t know how to talk about innocence or guilt, we spend our days going over a long list of things that back then, when we were children, we didn’t know. It’s as if we had witnessed a crime. We didn’t commit it, we were only passing through the place, but we ran away because we knew that if they found us there we’d be blamed. We believe we are innocent, we believe we are guilty: we don’t know.
    Back home again Claudia looks at the