“Yes,” says Claudia, without laughing. She laughs later. Ten seconds later she gets the joke.
At first the conversation follows the shy course of a blind date, but sometimes Claudia speeds up and starts to talk in long sentences. The plot begins to clear up: “Raúl is my father,” she says with no lead-up. “But his name was Roberto. The man who died three weeks ago, my father, was named Roberto.”
I look at her astonished, but it isn’t a pure astonishment. I receive the story as if expecting it. Because I do expect it, in some way. It’s the story of my generation.
“I was born five days after the coup, September sixteenth, 1973,” says Claudia in a kind of outpouring. The shadow of a tree falls capriciously over her mouth, so I don’t see her lips moving. It’s disturbing. I feel like a photograph is talking to me. I remember that beautiful poem “The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.” But she moves her hands and life returns to her body. She isn’t dead, I think again, and again I feel an immense happiness.
Magali and Roberto had Ximena when Roberto had just entered law school at the University of Chile. They lived separately until she got pregnant again and then, at the beginning of 1973, they got married and decided to live in La Reina while they looked for a place of their own. Magali was older. She had studied English at the Pedagogical Institute and she belonged to Allende’s party, but she wasn’t active. Roberto, on the other hand, was a committed activist, though he wasn’t involved in any dangerous situations.
They spent the first years of the dictatorship terrified and ensconced in that house in La Reina. But toward the end of 1981 Roberto reconnected: he started circulating around certain places he had avoided up to then, and he quickly took on responsibilities, at first very minor ones, as an informant. Every morning he waited — on the steps of the National Library, on a bench in the Plaza de Armas, and even a few times at the zoo — for his contacts, and then he went back to work in a small office on Moneda Street.
Soon afterward Magali rented the house in Maipú and she went to live there with the girls. It was the best way to protect them, far away from everything, far from the world. Roberto, meanwhile, did take risks, but he changed his appearance constantly. At the beginning of 1984 he convinced his brother-in-law Raúl to leave the country and give him his identity. Raúl left Chile over the mountains and went to Mendoza, with no definite plan but with a bit of money to begin a new life.
It was then that Roberto took the house in Aladdin Street. Again, Maipú seemed like a safe place, where it was possible to not awaken suspicion. He lived very close to his wife and daughters and his new identity allowed him to see them more often, but caution came first. The girls almost never saw their father and Claudia didn’t even know he lived close by. She only found out that night, the night of the earthquake.
Learning to tell her story as if it didn’t hurt. That was, for Claudia, growing up: learning to tell her story precisely, bluntly. But it’s a trap to put it like that, as if the process ever ended. “Only now do I feel I can do it,” says Claudia. “I tried for a long time. But now I’ve found a kind of legitimacy. A drive. Now I want someone, anyone, to ask me out of nowhere: Who are you?”
I’m the one asking, I think. I’m the stranger who’s asking. I was expecting a meeting heavy with silences, a series of disconnected phrases that later on, like when I was a child, I would have to put together and decipher. But no, on the contrary: Claudia wants to talk. “When I was on the plane coming here,” she says, “I looked at the clouds for a long time. It seemed like they were drawing something faint and disconcerting but at the same time recognizable. I thought about a kid scribbling on paper or the drawings my mother made when she was on the phone. I don’t know if it happened once or many times, but I have this image of my mother scribbling on paper while she talked on the phone.
“Then I looked,” says Claudia, “at the flight attendants smoothing their skirts while they talked and laughed at the back of the aisle, and at the stranger dozing next to me with a self-help book open on his chest. And then I thought how my mother had died ten years ago, how my father had just died, and instead of silently honoring their deaths I felt an imperative need to talk. The wish to say: I. The vague, strange pleasure, even, of answering: ‘My name is Claudia and I’m thirty-three years old.’”
The thing she most wished for during that long trip to Santiago was for the stranger traveling next to her to wake up and ask: Who are you, what’s your name? She wanted to answer him quickly, cheerfully, even flirtatiously. She wanted to tell him, like they do in novels: My name is Claudia, I’m thirty-three years old, and this is my story. And then begin to tell it, finally, as if it didn’t hurt.
By now it is night, and we are still sitting on the cafe terrace. “You’re tired of listening to me,” she says suddenly. I deny it with a sharp shake of the head. “But later I’m going to listen to you,” she says. “And I promise that when I get tired of listening to you, you won’t realize it. I’ll pretend really well,” she says, smiling.
Claudia arrived when the wake was just about to start. She accepted people’s condolences with something like boredom: she preferred silent hugs, without those terrible phrases ready-made for the occasion. After the funeral she unpacked her suitcases in what had once been her room. She thought how she was, after all, coming home; how the only space she had ever really felt comfortable in was that small room in the house in La Reina, although that stability hadn’t lasted long, barely a few years toward the end of the eighties when her grandmother, her mother, and her father were all still alive.
As if she had cruelly guessed Claudia’s thoughts, as if she’d spent a long time waiting to pronounce certain sentences, Ximena came in suddenly and said: “This isn’t your house anymore. You can stay here a few weeks, but don’t get used to it. I took care of Dad, so the house is mine; I’m not going to sell it, don’t even think about it. And it would be a lot better if you found a hotel.”
Claudia agreed, thinking that as the days passed her sister would regain her calm, her senses. She lay on the bed to read a novel; she wanted to forget that bitter conversation and be carried along by the plot, but it was impossible, because the book was about parents who abandoned their children or children who abandoned their parents. Ultimately, that’s what all books are about, she thought.
She went to the living room, where Ximena was watching TV, and sat down next to her. Gregory House was in the middle of saying something crude to Dr. Cuddy, and Claudia remembers that she and Ximena laughed in unison. Then she made tea and offered Ximena a cup. She thought her sister had the face of someone who had suffered not just a day or a week but all her life. “I’m sorry,” said Ximena as she took the tea. “You can stay here as long as you like, but don’t ask me to sell the house. It’s all I have, all we have.”
Claudia was about to reply with some opportune, empty phrase: we have each other, we’ll get through this together, something along those lines. But she held back. It wouldn’t have been true. It had been a long time since they’d been able to live together without animosity. “Let’s talk about the house later,” she said.
We walk without a destination but I don’t realize it, I simply accompany Claudia, thinking we’re going somewhere. It’s very late now, the movie theater is closed; we stop to look at the movie posters as if we were a couple out looking for something to do.
“It’s good to live close to a cinema,” she says, and we start talking animatedly about movies. We discover coincidences that inevitably bring us back to real life, to our youth, to childhood. Because we can’t, we don’t know how to talk about a movie or a book anymore; the moment has come when movies and novels don’t matter, only the time when we saw them, read them: where we were, what we were doing, who we were then.