Ways of Going Home: A Novel by Alejandro Zambra, Megan McDowell Read Free Book Online

who were fleeing the police took cover in the school’s parking lot, and the cops followed them and fired a couple of shots into the air. We got scared and threw ourselves to the floor, but once the danger had passed we were surprised to see our teacher crying under the table, with his eyes squeezed shut and his hands over his ears. We brought water and tried to convince him to drink it, but finally we had to throw it in his face. He slowly managed to calm down as we explained to him that no, the military had not taken over again. That class could continue. “I don’t want to be here, I never wanted to be here,” the teacher repeated, shouting. Then there was complete, compassionate silence. A beautiful and restorative silence.
    I ran into the teacher a few days later, during break. I asked him how he was, and he thanked me for asking. “I can tell you know what I lived through,” he said in a sign of complicity. Of course I knew, we all knew; he had been tortured and his cousin was taken prisoner and disappeared. “I don’t believe in this democracy,” he said. “Chile is and will always be a battleground.” He asked me if I was politically active, and I said no. He asked about my family, and I told him that during the dictatorship my parents had kept to the sidelines. The teacher looked at me curiously or disdainfully—he looked at me curiously but I felt that his gaze also held disdain.
    *   *   *
    I didn’t write or read anything in Punta Arenas. I spent the entire week defending myself from the weather and talking with new friends. On the return flight I sat next to two women who told me their life stories in detail. All was well until they asked me what I did for a living. I never know how to respond. I used to say I was a teacher, which tended to lead to long and confused conversations about Chile’s crisis in education. So now I say I’m a writer, and when they ask what kind of books I write, I say, to avoid a long and uncertain explanation, that I write action novels; it isn’t exactly a lie, since in all novels, even mine, things happen.
    Instead of asking what kind of books I write, though, the woman next to me wanted to know what my pseudonym was. I answered that I didn’t use a pseudonym. That writers hadn’t been using pseudonyms for years now. She looked at me skeptically, and from that moment on her interest in me waned. When we said goodbye she told me not to worry, maybe soon I would come up with a good pseudonym.
    *   *   *
    A while ago the poet Rodrigo Olavarría stopped by to see me. We don’t know each other well but there is a sort of prior and reciprocal trust that allies us. I like that he gives advice. Now that I think about it, there was a time when everyone gave advice. When life consisted of giving and receiving advice. But then all of a sudden, no one wanted any more advice. It was too late, we’d fallen in love with failure, and the wounds were trophies just like when we were kids, after we’d been playing under the trees. But Rodrigo gives advice. And he listens to it, asks for it. He’s in love with failure, but he’s also, still, in love with old and noble kinds of friendship.
    We spent the afternoon listening to Bill Callahan and Emmy the Great. It was fun. Later I told him about the conversation in the airplane. We decided to get together, one of these days, to choose pseudonyms. “You’ll see, we’re going to find some great ones,” he said.
    Rodrigo doesn’t remember exactly when he saw The Battle of Chile for the first time, but he knows the documentary by heart, because back in Puerto Montt in the mid-eighties his parents sold pirated copies to raise money for the Communist Party’s activities. When he was eight or nine, Rodrigo had the job of changing the tapes and stockpiling the new copies in a cardboard box. “I spent the whole afternoon,” he told me, “doing homework and copying that documentary two at a time, with four VHS tapes and two