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

TVs. The only breaks were to watch Robotech on Channel Thirteen.”
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    Sick with a bad cold, in bed for days. I self-medicate with high doses of television. Eme’s visits always seem too short. I asked her again to listen to the first pages of the novel and she again said no. Her excuse was poor and realistic: “You’re sick,” she said. A little while ago I insisted and she refused again. It’s obvious that she doesn’t want to read them; maybe she’d rather not resume that part of our relationship.
    Well. I just watched Good Morning , Ozu’s beautiful movie. What greater happiness than to know that movie exists, that I can watch it many times, that I can watch it always.
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    In the morning I gave myself the stupid task of hiding my cigarettes in different corners of the house. Of course I find them, but I don’t smoke much, I smoke less, I struggle to get better once and for all. My illness lasts too long, though, and every once in a while I wonder if I’ve caught the swine flu. Only the fever is missing, although I’ve just read on the Internet that some patients don’t list fever among their symptoms.
    Last night, the emergency room of the Indisa Clinic was full of people with real or imaginary illnesses, but they astonishingly attended to me immediately. There was an explanation. A young, gray-haired doctor appeared and told me, indicating the name tag on his coat: “We’re family.” And it really is likely that we are related in some way. “I bought your books,” he told me, “but I haven’t read them.” He apologized in a humiliating or merely comic way: “I don’t even have time to read the kind of short books you write,” he said. “But a year ago I talked about you to my relatives in Careno.” To amaze the doctor with my ignorance, I asked him where Careno was.
    “It’s in Italy, the north of Italy,” he answered, scandalized. Then he lowered his eyes, as if in forgiveness. He asked me what my father’s name was, my grandfather, my great-grandfather. I answered compliantly but soon got tired of so many questions and told him that there was no point in having this conversation—“My family is definitely descended from some bastard child.” I told him: “We come from some patrón who didn’t take responsibility.” I told him that in my family we’re all dark-skinned—the doctor himself was very white and fairly ugly, with that hygienic whiteness that in some people hardly seems real. Resigned to not finding any sign of encouragement from me, the doctor told me that every year he traveled to Careno, where there are many people with our last name, since historically the family was quite inbred.
    “There are lots of marriages between siblings and between cousins, so the genes aren’t so good,” he said.
    “We don’t have that problem,” I told him. “In my branch of the family we treat our cousins with respect.”
    He laughed, or tried to laugh. I wanted, I’m not sure why, to apologize. But before I could say the sentence I was vaguely trying to formulate, the doctor asked about my symptoms. He was in a hurry now. He spent barely two minutes on my ailment, roundly denying I had the swine flu, as if reproaching me for even thinking it. He didn’t even lecture me about how many cigarettes I smoke.
    I went home a bit humiliated, with the same antiflu medicines as always, thinking about those families in far-off Careno, about what my face would be like white, washed-out, or about my distant desire, once upon a time, to study medicine. I imagined that same doctor, older than me in medical school, answering emphatically, annoyed: no, we’re not related.
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    Parents abandon their children. Children abandon their parents. Parents protect or forsake, but they always forsake. Children stay or go but they always go. And it’s all unfair, especially the sound of the words, because the language is pleasing and confusing, because ultimately we