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

abused, and others are luxurious. Some of them look abandoned.
    There were changes as well in my parents’ house. I was struck most of all by the sight of a new bookshelf in the living room. I recognized the automotive encyclopedia, the BBC English course, and the old books put out by Ercilla magazine, with its collections of Chilean, Spanish, and world literatures. On the middle shelf there was also a series of novels by Isabel Allende, Hernán Rivera Letelier, Marcela Serrano, John Grisham, Barbara Wood, Carla Guelfenbein, and Pablo Simonetti, and closer to the floor were some books I read as a child for school: The Löwensköld Ring by Selma Lagerlöf, Alsino by Pedro Prado, Michael Strogoff by Jules Verne, El ultimo grumete de la Baquedano by Francisco Coloane, Fermina Márquez by Valéry Larbaud. Well. I wish I’d kept them myself, but I’m sure I forgot them in some box my parents found in the attic.
    It was discomfiting to see those books there, hastily ordered on a red melamine shelf, flanked by posters of hunting scenes or sunrises and a faded reproduction of Las Meninas that has been in the house forever and that my father still proudly shows visitors: “This is the painter, Velásquez; the painter painted himself,” he says.
    “Thanks to that library, your mother has started reading and I have too, though of course I’d rather watch movies,” said my father, and he turned on the TV right on time for the game. We celebrated goals by Mati Fernández and Humberto Suazo with a big pitcher of pisco sour and a couple bottles of wine. I drank much more than my father did. I’ve never seen him drunk, I thought, and for some reason I said it out loud to him.
    “I did see my father drunk, many times,” he answered abruptly, with a barely contained look of sadness.
    “Stay over, your sister is coming to lunch tomorrow,” my mother said. “You can’t drive in the state you’re in,” she added, and I reminded her of something she always forgets: I don’t have a car. “Oh,” she said. “That’s right. All the more reason you can’t drive,” she laughed. I like her laugh, especially when it comes suddenly, when it happens unexpectedly. It is serene and sweet at the same time.
    *   *   *
    I left home fifteen years ago, but I still feel a kind of strange pulse when I enter this room that used to be mine and is now a kind of storage room. At the back there’s a shelf full of DVDs and photo albums jumbled in the corner next to my books, the books I’ve published. It strikes me as beautiful that they’re here, next to the family mementos.
    *   *   *
    A little while ago, at two in the morning, I got up to make coffee and I was surprised to see my mother in the living room, drinking mate with a beginner’s graceful movements.
    “This is what I do now when I feel like smoking,” she said with a smile. She smokes very little, five cigarettes a day, but since my father quit he doesn’t let her smoke inside, and it’s too cold to open the window.
    “I’m going to smoke,” I said. “Let’s smoke. Dad can’t stop you from smoking, you’re too old for that now,” I said.
    “He only denies me cigarettes. I deny him lots of things—saturated fats, too much sugar. It’s only fair.”
    Finally I convinced her and we shut ourselves up in a sort of small room they had built to house an immense new washing machine. She smoked with the same movement as always, so markedly feminine: the cigarette tilted downward, her hand palm out, very close to her mouth.
    “What will I do,” she said suddenly, “if tomorrow your father realizes we were smoking?”
    “Tell him we didn’t smoke. That if it smells it’s because I smoke a lot. I smell like cigarettes. Tell him that. And then change the subject, tell him you’re worried because you think I’m smoking too much, and I’m going to die of cancer.”
    “But that would be a lie,” she said.
    “It wouldn’t be a lie,” I answered, “because