Ways of Going Home: A Novel Read Online Free

They treated him badly and back then I wasn’t sure he deserved it.
    Years later I learned he hadn’t been a good father. He wasted his life gambling away his laborer’s salary, and he lived off his wife, who sold vegetables and washed clothes and sewed. Growing up, it was my father’s duty to go around to the dive bars looking for him, asking for him, knowing that in the best of cases he would find him hugging the dregs of a bottle.

 
     
    Classes started up again and they replaced our head teacher, Miss Carmen, which I was grateful for with all my heart. She had been our teacher for three years, and now I think she wasn’t a bad person, but she hated me. She hated me because of the word aguja , which for her didn’t exist. For her, the correct word was ahuja . I don’t know why one day I decided to take the dictionary up to her and show her she had it wrong. She looked at me in panic, swallowing saliva, and she nodded, but from then on she no longer liked me nor I her. We shouldn’t hate the person who teaches us, for better or for worse, to read. But I hated her, or rather I hated the fact that she hated me.
    Mr. Morales, on the other hand, liked me from the start, and I trusted him enough to ask him one morning, while we were walking to the gym for P.E. class, if it was very bad to be a Communist.
    “Why do you ask that?” he said. “Do you think I’m a Communist?”
    “No,” I said. “I’m sure you’re not a Communist.”
    “And are you a Communist?”
    “I’m a kid,” I told him.
    “But if your father was a Communist, you might be one, too.”
    “I don’t think so, because my grandfather is a Communist and my father isn’t.”
    “And what is your father?”
    “My father isn’t anything,” I answered, with certainty.
    “It’s not good for you to talk about these things,” he told me, after looking at me for a long time. “The only thing I can tell you is that we live at a time when it isn’t good to talk about these things. But one day we’ll be able to talk about this, and about everything else.”
    “When the dictatorship ends,” I told him, as if completing a sentence on a reading test.
    He looked at me, laughing, and affectionately patted my hair. “Let’s start with ten laps around the field,” he shouted, and I started trotting slowly as I thought confusedly about Raúl.

 
     
    Since we had to make up the days we had lost to the earthquake, the school day was extremely long. I got home only half an hour before Raúl, which made my espionage dangerously useless. I decided I had to go deeper, I had to take decisive action, do my job better.
    One night, I was walking along the top of the brick wall and I fell into the bushes. I fell hard. Raúl came out right away, very frightened. When he saw me he helped me up and told me I shouldn’t be doing that, but that he understood, it was his own fault. I tensed up, not knowing what he was talking about, but then he came back with a tennis ball. “If I’d known it was yours I would have thrown it over into the yard,” he said, and I thanked him.
    A little later I heard, clearly, Raúl’s voice talking to another man. Their voices sounded close by, they had to be in the room contiguous to my bedroom. I’d never heard any sounds coming from that room before, although I was in the habit of putting my ear to a glass against the wall and listening. I couldn’t make out what they were talking about. I did notice that they talked very little. It was not a fluid conversation. It was the kind of conversation that happens between people who know each other well or very little. People who are used to living together, or who don’t know each other at all.
    The next morning I got up at five thirty and patiently waited until I could find out if the man was still there. Raúl’s Fiat 500 left at the same time as always. I hung recklessly out the window and saw that he was alone. I faked a stomachache and my parents let me stay home. I