“Life would have been worse,” I said. “And those big babies are spoiled brats.”
“Yes. It’s true. And you’re right. Life would be worse if you lived here. Before you left, your father and I used to fight a lot. But after you left, we didn’t fight as much. Now we hardly ever fight.”
I wasn’t expecting that sudden moment of honesty. I sat there thinking, disheartened, but right away she asked me, as if it were relevant: “Do you like Carla Guelfenbein?”
I didn’t know how to answer. “I think she’s pretty. I’d go out with her, but I wouldn’t sleep with her,” I said. “Maybe I’d kiss her, but I wouldn’t sleep with her, or I’d sleep with her but I wouldn’t kiss her.” My mother pretended to be scandalized. The gesture looked beautiful on her.
“I’m asking if you like her writing.”
“No, Mom. I don’t like it.”
“But I like her novel. The Other Side of the Heart.”
“The Other Side of the Soul,” I corrected her.
“That’s it, The Other Side of the Soul. I identified with the characters, the book moved me.”
“And how is it possible for you to identify with characters from another social class, with problems that aren’t and could never be problems in your life, Mom?”
I spoke seriously, too seriously. I knew it wasn’t appropriate to speak seriously, but I couldn’t help it. She looked at me with a mixture of anger and compassion. With a little annoyance. “You’re wrong,” she said finally. “Maybe it’s not my social class, I agree. But social classes have changed a lot, everyone says so, and when I read that novel I felt that yes, those were my problems. I know what I’m saying bothers you, but you should be a little more tolerant.”
It seemed very strange that my mother would use that word, tolerant. I went to sleep remembering my mother’s voice saying: You should be a little more tolerant.
* * *
After lunch my sister insisted on driving me home. She got her license a year ago but she really learned to drive only last month. She didn’t seem nervous, though. I was the nervous one. I chose to surrender, close my eyes and open them only when she shifted gears and the car stuttered too much. In moments of silence my sister accelerated, and when the conversation flowed she slowed down so much that other cars overtook us, horns sounding.
“I feel bad about what happened with your marriage,” she told me, soon after we left the highway.
“That was a long time ago,” I replied.
“But I hadn’t told you that.”
“We got back together recently.” My sister’s expression is something between incredulous and happy. I explain that for now it’s all fragile, tentative, but that I feel good. That we want to do things better this time. That we’re not living together again yet. She asks me why I didn’t tell our parents. “That’s exactly why,” I say. “It’s still too early to tell them.”
Then she asks me if I’m going to write more books. I like the way she frames the question, since it implies the possibility that I could simply say no, enough already; and that’s what I do think, sometimes, at the end of a bad night: Soon I’ll stop writing, just like that, and someday I’ll have a distant memory of the time when I wrote books, the same way others remember the season they drove a taxi or worked selling dollars in Paseo Ahumada.
But I answer yes, and she asks me to tell her what the new book is about. I don’t want to answer, and she realizes this and asks again. I tell her it’s about Maipú, about the earthquake of ’85, about childhood. She asks for more details, I give them to her. We reach my house and I invite her in; she doesn’t want to come but she also doesn’t want me to go. I know very well what she’s going to ask.
“Am I in your book?” she finally says.
“No.”
“Why not?”
* * *
I’ve thought about it. Of course I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about it a lot. My answer is honest:
“To protect you,” I say.
She looks at me skeptically, hurt. She looks at me with a little girl’s expression.
“It’s better not to be someone else’s character,” I say. “It’s better not to be in any book.”
“And are you in the book?”
“Yes. More or less. But it’s my book. I couldn’t not be in it. Even if I gave myself very different characteristics and a life very different from mine, I would still be in the book. I already made the decision not to protect myself.”
“And are our parents in it?
“Yes. There are characters like our parents.”
“And why not protect our parents, too?”
* * *
For that question, I don’t have an answer. I suppose it’s their lot, simply, to appear. To receive less than they gave, to attend a masked ball and not understand very well why they are there. I’m not capable of saying any of that to my sister.
“I don’t know, it’s fiction,” I tell her. “I have to go, sis.” I don’t call her by her name. I call her “sis,” give her a kiss on the cheek, and get out of the car.
Back home I spend a long time thinking of my sister, my big sister. I remember this poem by Enrique Lihn:
So the only child’s the eldest of his brothers
and in his orphanhood has something
of what eldest means. As though
they too had died
those impossible younger brothers.
When we write we act like only children. As if we had been alone forever. Sometimes I hate this story, this profession that I can no longer leave. That now I’ll never leave.
* * *
I always thought I didn’t have real childhood memories. That my history fit into a few lines. On one page, maybe. In large print. I don’t think that anymore.
The family weekend has crushed my will. I find consolation in a letter that Yasunari Kawabata wrote to his friend Yukio Mishima in 1962: “Whatever your mother says, your writing is magnificent.”
* * *
Just now I tried to write a poem, but I managed only these few lines:
Growing up, I meant to be a memory
But now I’ve had as much as I can bear
Of forever seeking out the beauty
In a tree that’s been disfigured by the wind
The part I like is the beginning:
Growing up, I meant to be a memory.
LITERATURE OF THE CHILDREN
I left home at the end of 1995, just after I turned twenty, but throughout my adolescence I yearned to leave these overly clean sidewalks behind, to get away from the boring streets where I grew up. I wanted a full and dangerous life, or maybe I just wanted what some children always want: a life without parents.
I lived in boardinghouses or small rooms and worked wherever I could while I finished university. And when I finished university I kept on working wherever I could, because I studied literature, which is what people do before they end up working wherever they can.
Years later, however, already approaching thirty, I got a job as a teacher and managed to establish myself to a certain extent. I practiced a calm and dignified life: I spent the afternoons reading novels or watching TV for hours, smoking tobacco or marijuana, drinking beer or cheap wine, listening to music or listening to nothing — because sometimes I sat in silence for long stretches, as if waiting for something, for someone.