Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zambra

Author:Alejandro Zambra [Zambra, Alejandro]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780374286644
Amazon: 0374286647
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2013-01-08T05:00:00+00:00

One afternoon I decided to ring the bell. When I saw the woman coming to answer I panicked, knowing I had no plan and I didn’t even know how I should introduce myself. Stuttering, I told her I had lost my cat. She asked me his name, and I didn’t know how to answer. She asked what the cat looked like. I said he was black, white, and brown.

“Then it’s not a he, it’s a she,” said the woman.

“It’s a he,” I answered.

“If it’s three colors it can’t be a he. Tricolored cats are females,” she said. And she added that in any case she hadn’t seen any stray cats in the neighborhood recently.

The woman was going to close the door when I said, almost shouting: “Claudia.”

“Who are you?” she asked.

I told her. I told her we had known each other in Maipú. That we had been friends.

She looked at me for a long time. I let myself be looked at. It’s a strange sensation, when you’re waiting for someone to recognize you. Finally she told me: “I know who you are. I’m not Claudia. I’m Ximena, Claudia’s sister. And you’re that boy who followed me that afternoon, Aladdin. That’s what Claudia called you, we always laughed when we remembered you. Aladdin.”

I didn’t know what to say. I precariously understood that yes, Ximena was the woman I had followed so many years earlier. Raúl’s supposed girlfriend. But Claudia had never told me she had a sister. I felt a weight, the need to find some opportune phrase. “I’d like to see Claudia,” I said, in a small voice.

“I thought you were out looking for a cat. A girl cat.”

“Yes,” I answered. “But I’ve often thought, over the years, about that time in Maipú. And I’d like to see Claudia again.”

There was hostility in Ximena’s gaze. She was silent. I talked, nervously improvising, about the past, about the desire to recover the past.

“I don’t know what you want to see Claudia for,” said Ximena. “I don’t think you’d ever understand a story like ours. Back then people were looking for missing persons, they looked for the bodies of people who had disappeared. I’m sure in those years you were looking for kittens or puppies, same as now.”

I didn’t understand her cruelty; it seemed excessive, unnecessary. All the same, Ximena took down my phone number. “When she gets here I’ll give it to her,” she said.

“And when do you think she’s going to come?”

“Any minute now,” she answered. “My father is about to die. When he dies, my sister will come from Yankee-land to cry over his corpse and ask for her part of the inheritance.”

It struck me as ridiculous and juvenile to refer to the United States as Yankee-land, and at the same time I thought about that conversation with Claudia, in the Maipú Temple, about flags. Ultimately, fate took her to that country she disparaged as a child, I thought, and I also thought that I should leave, but I couldn’t help but ask one last, polite question:

“How is Don Raúl?” I asked.

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