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

would like to sing or at least whistle a tune, to walk alongside the stage whistling a tune. We want to be actors waiting patiently for the cue to walk onstage. But the audience left a long time ago.
    *   *   *
    Today I made up this joke:
    “When I grow up I’m going to be a secondary character,” a boy says to his father.
    “Why?”
    “Why what?”
    “Why do you want to be a secondary character?”
    “Because the novel is yours.”
    *   *   *
    I’m writing in my parents’ house. It’s been a long time since I’ve been here. I prefer to see them in town, at lunchtime. But this time I wanted to watch the Chile-versus-Paraguay game with my father, thinking I could also refresh some details for the story while I was here. It’s the trip in the novel, the frightened protagonist’s trip home at the end of the long evening when he follows Raúl’s supposed girlfriend. I wrote that passage thinking about a real trip I took more or less at that age.
    One afternoon, after lunch, I was getting ready to go out when my father said no, I had to stay home and study English. I asked why, since I was getting good grades in English. “Because it isn’t prudent for you to go out so much.” He used that word, prudent , I remember exactly. “And because I am your father and you have to obey me,” he said.
    It seemed brutal to me, but I studied, or at least I pretended to. At night, before going to sleep, still angry, I told my father that it made me so mad to be a kid and to have to ask permission for everything, that it would be better to be an orphan. I only said it to annoy him, but he gave me a sly look and went to talk to my mother. I could tell by her gestures as they approached that they didn’t agree on the measure they were about to announce to me, but that I would have to abide by it anyway.
    Before speaking to me they called my sister to witness the scene. My father addressed her first. He told her they had been living a lie. That until then they had believed she was the older sibling, but that they had just discovered she wasn’t. “So, we’re going to give your brother the keys to the house—you can go out and come home whatever time you want, from now on you’re in charge of yourself,” he told me, looking me in the eye. “No one will ask you where you’re going or if you have homework or anything else.”
    So it was. I enjoyed those privileges for several weeks. They treated me like an adult, with only a few traces of irony. I grew desperate. I told my mother I was going very far away and she answered that I shouldn’t forget to take my suitcase with me. I didn’t take a suitcase, but one afternoon I anxiously boarded a random bus, prepared to stay on until the end of its route and with no plan for when I got there.
    I didn’t get to the end of the route, but I did almost reach the neighborhood where I live now. The trip took over an hour and when I got back they yelled at me a lot. That was what I wanted. I was happy to have my parents back. And I had also discovered a new world. A world I didn’t like, but a new one.
    That route doesn’t exist anymore. Today I came by metro and then bus and I got to Maipú by way of Los Pajaritos. I’m always surprised at the number of Chinese restaurants on the avenue. For years now, Maipú has been a small big city, and the stores I frequented as a child are now bank branches or fast-food chains.
    Before I got to my parents’ house I took a detour to pass by Lucila Godoy Alcayaga. The street was closed off with an eye-catching electric gate, as was the passage Neftalí Reyes Basoalto. I didn’t feel like asking anyone going by to let me in. I wanted to see Claudia’s house, which in reality was, for a time, my friend Carla Andreu’s house. I headed, then, for Aladdin. The neighborhood is full of attics now, second floors that look out of place, ostentatious roofs. No longer is it the dream of equality. Just the opposite. Lots of houses have been