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

don’t matter, only the time when we saw them, read them: where we were, what we were doing, who we were then.
    While we walk silently I think about those names: Roberto, Magali, Ximena, Claudia. I ask about her grandmother’s name. “Mercedes,” Claudia answers. I think they are serious names. Even Claudia suddenly seems like a serious name. Beautiful, simple, and serious. I ask her what year her grandmother died. “In 1995, a year before my mother,” says Claudia. And she talks about another death as well, of someone important, someone she never met: her father’s cousin Nacho, the doctor. Nacho was arrested and he never came back. Roberto and Magali always talked about him as if he were alive, but he was dead.
    They told her when she was little, and later—for many years—they continued telling her the story of the fever, which wasn’t even a story. It was merely a moment, the last one, although no one knew it would be the last one: in 1974, when Claudia had been alive for eleven months, Nacho went to see her because she had been sick for too many hours. The fever broke immediately. “It’s a miracle,” said the adults that afternoon, laughing. And that’s what it became, a slight, insignificant miracle: to lower a little girl’s fever, only that, on the afternoon when they saw him for the last time—for they never saw him dead, his body never appeared.
    “In my family there are no dead,” I say. “No one has died. Not my grandparents, not my parents, not my cousins, no one.”
    “You never go to the cemetery?”
    “No, I never go to the cemetery,” I answer with a complete sentence, as if I were learning to speak a foreign language and I’d been instructed to answer that way.
    “I have to go, I’d rather get back early to my father’s house.” A gesture of her lips gives her away immediately: it’s not her father’s house anymore, now it’s hers and Ximena’s. I go with her, hoping she’ll invite me in for coffee, but she says goodbye at the gate with a bright smile and a hug.
    On the way back home I remember a scene in college, one afternoon when we were smoking weed and drinking a sticky wine with melon. I’d spent the afternoon with a group of classmates, and we were exchanging family stories in which death appeared with urgent insistence. Of all those present I was the only one who came from a family with no dead, and that realization filled me with a strange bitterness: my friends had grown up reading the books that their dead parents or siblings left behind in the house. But in my family there were no dead and there were no books.
    I come from a family with no dead, I thought as my classmates told their childhood stories. At that moment I had a strong memory of Claudia, but I didn’t want or didn’t dare to tell her story. It wasn’t mine. I knew little, but at least I knew that: no one could speak for someone else. That although we might want to tell other people’s stories, we always end up telling our own.

 
     
    I want to let a few days go by before I call her and suggest getting together again. But I’m impatient and I do it right away. She doesn’t seem surprised. We arrange to meet the next morning, in Intercommunal Park. I get there early but I see her from far away, sitting on a bench and reading. She looks beautiful. She is wearing a jean skirt and an old black shirt with big blue letters that say LOVE SUCKS .
    Some kids playing hooky come over to ask for a light. “I didn’t smoke at that age,” Claudia says to me.
    “I did,” I answer. I tell her that I started smoking at twelve. Sometimes when I was walking with my father and he lit a cigarette, I would ask him to put it out, saying it was bad for him and he was going to die of cancer. I did it to trick him, so he wouldn’t suspect that I smoked too, and he would look at me apologetically and explain that smoking was a vice and that vices were the signs of human weakness. I remember how I liked it when he