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

suddenly confessed his weakness, his vulnerability.
    “I, on the other hand, only saw my father smoke one time,” says Claudia as we wander through the park. “One day I got home early from school and he was in the living room talking to my mother. I was so happy to see him. I lived hoping to see him. My father hugged me and maybe it was a long hug, but I felt like he let go of me quickly, as if we weren’t allowed to have that contact, either. Then I realized he had a lit cigarette in his right hand. It unsettled me. It was like he really was a different person. As if Roberto wasn’t smoking, Raúl was.”
    “He also smoked the night of the earthquake, with my dad,” I remind her. “I think my dad offered yours a cigarette and they smoked together, and talked.”
    “Really?” asks Claudia, incredulous, as she fixes her hair. “I don’t remember that. But I remember you,” she says.
    “Were you really looking for someone to spy on your father?”
    “No,” she says. “I didn’t know my father lived there. It was a very ambiguous situation. The night of the earthquake I was alone with my mother, because Ximena had gone to my grandmother’s. Back then Ximena spent a lot of time with Grandma, she practically lived with her. A brick wall fell and broke the big front window, so we couldn’t sleep there. I remember we were desperate, we went out walking and I didn’t know we were looking for my dad, and that he was also looking for us. I don’t know if we took different routes or if we passed each other by. When we finally saw him on a corner I couldn’t believe it. I had a little flashlight, a toy, which they’d given to me years before. I remember I shined it on his face and saw his eyes were a little wet. We hugged and then he brought us to the fire. Before dawn the three of us left for the house in La Reina, in his car.”
    “The Fiat 500,” I say.
    “The Fiat 500, yes,” she answers.
    It affected Claudia a lot to find out that her father lived close by. She was sick of secrets, and at the same time she intuited numerous dangers, huge and imprecise dangers. She liked seeing me there, with the adults around the fire. “You stayed quiet, you observed. I was like that too, silent. I started following you without a clear purpose, and little by little I came up with a plan.”
    Neither did Claudia know exactly why she was spying, what she wanted to find out. But when she learned, through me, that Roberto was hiding people in the house, she wasn’t surprised.
    “And did you think your father had a lover?”
    “I didn’t know what to think. When we talked that time I lost it, the truth is I knew very little about my father. Then I thought it had to be Ximena. I didn’t figure you would follow her like that, but it made me so mad to know she saw my father more than I did. She and my father, we said later, half joking, were the revolutionaries. My mother and I, on the other hand, were the reactionaries. We could joke about it, but it still hurt and I guess it even hurts now.”
    When Ximena saw that a boy, that I, was following her, she had no doubt that her sister had sent me. Claudia found herself obliged to confess that she was the one who had asked me to spy on her father. They scolded her, emphatically at first and then lovingly. An argument began in which everyone blamed someone else. “I didn’t want to be responsible for those shouting matches, but I was,” says Claudia, and then there is a long and uncertain pause. For ten minutes it seems like she is about to speak, but she can’t bring herself to. Finally, she says: “I really feel like eating some chocolate ice cream.”

 
     
    We haven’t seen each other for a week but I call her every day, and I have the impression Claudia waits for those calls. One night, very late, she’s the one who calls me. “I’m outside,” she says. “Ximena threw me out. She says the house is hers. She called me a foreigner and a whore.”
    Claudia cries