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

sooner or later I am going to die of cancer.”
    My mother let out a deep sigh and slowly shook her head. Then she said something astonishing: “No one in my life has ever made me laugh as much as you. You are the funniest person I’ve ever met. But you’re also serious, and that was always disconcerting, it is disconcerting. You left home very young, and sometimes I wonder what life would be like if you hadn’t left. There are kids your age who still live with their parents. I see them go by sometimes and I think of you.”
    “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