My Documents Read online

  McSWEENEY’S

  SAN FRANCISCO

  Copyright © 2015 Alejandro Zambra

  Cover and interior illustrations by Sunra Thompson.

  Some of this work appeared in different form in Harper’s, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Tin House, and Vice. The author gratefully acknowledges these publications.

  All rights reserved, including right of reproduction in whole or in part, in any form.

  McSweeney’s and colophon are registered trademarks of McSweeney’s, a privately held company with wildly fluctuating resources.

  ISBN 978-1-940450-57-5

  10987654321

  www.mcsweeneys.net

  For Josefina Gutiérrez

  CONTENTS

  PART 1

  My Documents

  PART 2

  Camilo

  Long Distance

  True or False

  Memories of a Personal Computer

  PART 3

  National Institute

  I Smoked Very Well

  PART 4

  Thank You

  The Most Chilean Man in the World

  Family Life

  Artist’s Rendition

  MY DOCUMENTS

  For Natalia García

  1

  The first time I saw a computer was in 1980, when I was four or five years old. It’s not a pure memory, though—I’m probably mixing it up with other, later visits to my father’s office, on calle Agustinas. I remember my father explaining how those enormous machines worked, his black eyes fixed on mine, his perpetual cigarette in hand. He waited for my awed reaction and I faked interest, but as soon as I could, I went off to play near Loreto, a thin-lipped secretary with bangs framing her face, who never remembered my name.

  Loreto’s electric typewriter struck me as marvelous: its small screen where the words accumulated until a powerful salvo carved them into the paper. It was a device that was perhaps similar to a computer, but I never thought of it that way. In any case, I preferred the other machine at her desk, a conventional black Olivetti, a model I was very familiar with because we had one just like it at my house. My mother had studied programming, but she’d abandoned computers and opted instead for that lesser technology, which was still current then, since the proliferation of computers was still a ways off.

  My mother didn’t get paid for any of her typing work: the texts she transcribed were songs, stories, and poems written by my grandmother, who was always entering some contest or working on a project that would, she thought, finally pull her out of anonymity and into the spotlight. I remember my mother working at the dining-room table, carefully inserting the carbon paper, painstakingly applying Wite-Out when she made a mistake. She always typed very quickly, using all of her fingers, without looking at the keyboard.

  Maybe I can say it like this: my father was a computer and my mother was a typewriter.

  2

  I soon learned how to type my name, but I preferred to imitate, on the keyboard, the drumrolls of military marches. Back then, being a part of the marching band was the greatest honor we could aspire to. Everyone wanted to join, including me. By mid-morning, during classes, we would hear the far-off booming of the snare drums, the whistles, the breathing of the trumpet and the trombone, the miraculously sharp notes of the triangle and the bells. The band practiced two or three times a week: I was always impressed by the sight of them marching off toward the open field that lay at the edge of the school grounds. The most eye-catching of all was the drum major, who performed only at important events, because he was an alumnus of the school. He wielded his baton with admirable finesse, in spite of the fact that he had only one eye: his other eye was glass, and legend had it that he’d lost it due to a badly timed baton maneuver.

  In December, we would make a pilgrimage to the Maipú Votive Temple. It was an endless, two-hour walk from the school, the marching band in front and the rest of us following behind, in descending order, from the thirteenth grade (because it was a technical high school) down to the first. People came out to greet us; some of the women gave us oranges to ward off exhaustion. My mother would appear at certain points along the way: she’d park somewhere, find me at the end of the formation, then go back to the car to listen to music, smoke a cigarette, and drive another stretch to catch up with us farther on, to wave at me again. With her long, shiny brown hair, she was hands down the most beautiful mother in my class, which was something of a problem for me, because my classmates liked to tell me that she was too pretty to be the mother of someone as ugly as me.

  Dante would also come out to support me; he belted my name at the top of his lungs and embarrassed me in front of my classmates, who made fun of him, and me. Dante was an autistic boy, older than me, maybe fifteen or sixteen. He was very tall, around 6'2", and he weighed over 220 pounds, as he himself, for a time, would tell anyone he met, always giving the exact figure: “Hi, today I’m weighing 227 pounds.”

  Dante used to spend the day wandering around the neighborhood, trying to figure out which children belonged to which parents, and who was whose sibling, or friend, which, in a world where silence and distrust reigned, couldn’t have been easy. He would follow along behind his interlocutors, who tended to start walking faster, but Dante would speed up too, until he was facing them and walking backward, nodding his head sharply whenever he understood something. He lived with an aunt; apparently his parents had abandoned him, but he never said that—when you asked him about his parents, he just gave you a disconcerted look.

  3

  I went on hearing military music once I got home, in the afternoons, since we lived behind the Santiago Bueras Stadium, where the kids from other schools came to practice, and where, every once in a while, maybe every month, they held a marching-band competition. So I listened to military marches every day; you could say that they were the music of my childhood. But that would be only partially true: many kinds of music were important to my family. My grandmother had been an opera singer as a teenager, and her greatest disappointment in life was that she’d had to stop singing when she was twenty-one, when the earthquake of 1939 cut her life in half. I don’t know how many times she told us about that experience: swallowing dirt, and waking up suddenly to find her city, Old Chillán, destroyed. The inventory of the dead included her father, her mother, and two of her three brothers. It was that third brother who rescued her from the rubble.

  My parents never told us bedtime stories, but my grandmother did. The happy stories would always end badly, because the protagonists invariably died in an earthquake. But she also told us some terribly sad stories that ended happily—maybe that was her idea of literature. Sometimes my grandmother would end up crying, and my sister and I would stay awake, listening to her sobs; other times, even during an especially dramatic moment of the story, some detail would strike her as funny, and she’d burst into peals of contagious laughter, and this would also keep us awake.

  My grandmother was always spouting sayings with double meanings, or making impertinent comments that she laughed at herself even before she finished them. She would say “butt of a horse” instead of “but of course,” and if someone voiced the opinion that it was cold out, she would reply, “Well, it certainly isn’t hot.” She would also say, “If we gotta fight ’em, let’s bite ’em,” and instead of simply saying “No,” she was quick to reply “Not at all, as the fish said,” or just “As the fish said,” or simply “Fish,” to summarize this saying: “Not at all, as the fish said when asked how he’d like to be cooked, in the oven or the fryer.”

  4

  Mass was held in the gymnasium of a convent school, Mater Purissima; people always talked, though, about the church building that
was in the works, and it was like they were describing a dream. It took so long to build that by the time it was finished, I no longer believed in God.

  At first I went to Mass with my parents, but I started going alone when they switched to the Ursuline school, which was closer and offered a Mass that lasted only forty minutes because the priest—a minuscule bald man who always went around on a scooter—rushed through the homily, delivering it with a pleasant disdain, and even making, quite often, a hand gesture that meant “et cetera.” I liked him, but I preferred the priest at Mater Purissima, a man with a full, indomitable beard that was absolutely white. He spoke as though he were chastising or challenging us, employing many dramatic pauses and that energetic and deceptive friendliness that is so unique to priests. Of course, I also knew the priests at my school, like Father Limonta, the director, a very athletic Italian—it was said he’d been a gymnast when he was younger—who gave us love taps with his ring of keys to keep us firmly in formation, and who otherwise was affable and fairly fatherly. His sermons, however, struck me as disagreeable or inappropriate—perhaps they seemed too pedagogical, not serious enough.

  I liked the language of Mass, but I didn’t understand it very well. When we got to the part where we asked for forgiveness and said, “Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault,” I mistook the word fault for thought, and that strange insistence on the evils of thinking impressed me, stayed with me. Then there was the sentence “I am not worthy to receive you,” which I said once to my grandmother while opening the door. “I am not worthy to receive you in my house” was how I repeated the joke later to my father, who answered right away, with a sweet and severe smile: “Well thank you, but this house is mine.”

  At Mater Purissima there was a chorus of six singers and two guitar players that had a starring role in the Mass, because even the “Let us give thanks to God” and the “We praise you, Lord” and the “Hear us, Lord, we beg you” were all sung. My ambition was to join that choir. I was only eight years old, but I could play the little guitar we had at our house reasonably well: I strummed with a sense of rhythm, I could play scales, and though a nervous tremor overcame me when it was time to play a barre chord, I still got an almost-full sound out of it, only slightly impure. I guess I thought I was good, or good enough that I could, one morning after Mass, guitar in hand, approach the members of the chorus. They looked down at me, perhaps because I was very small, or maybe because they were a fully functioning mafia, but they neither accepted nor rejected me. “We have to give you a tryout,” said a blond woman with dark circles under her eyes who played an extraordinarily large guitar.

  “Let’s do it now,” I proposed. I had some songs I’d practiced, among them the “Our Father,” which was often sung to the tune of “The Sounds of Silence,” but she refused.

  “Next month,” she told me.

  5

  My mother had grown up listening devotedly to the Beatles, and to a repertoire of Chilean folk music, and then she had moved on to hits by Adamo, Sandro, Raphael, and José Luis Rodríguez, which was more or less what you listened to on AM stations at the beginning of the eighties. She had stopped looking for music that was new—or new to her—until she came across the live recording of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s reunion concert in Central Park. Her life changed then, I think forever: overnight, and with remarkable speed, the house filled with albums that were difficult to acquire, and she took up studying English again, maybe just so she could understand the lyrics.

  I remember her listening to the BBC English course—which came in binders that held dozens of cassette tapes—or to the other course we had in the house, The Three Way Method to English: two boxes, one red and the other green, each with a notebook, a book, and three LPs. I’d sit beside her and listen distractedly to those voices. I still remember some fragments, like the man who would say, “These are my eyes,” and the woman who would reply, “Those are your eyes.” The best part was when the masculine voice asked, “Is this the pencil?” and the woman answered, “No, this is not the pencil, but the pen,” and then, when the man asked, “Is this the pen?” she answered, “No, this is not the pen, but the pencil.”

  I tend to think that every time I came home, some song by Simon and Garfunkel, or Paul Simon solo, was playing in the living room. When Graceland appeared, in 1986, my mother was definitely already Simon’s most fervent Chilean fan, an expert on the singer’s life events, like his failed marriage to Carrie Fisher and his bit part in Annie Hall. My father was surprised that his wife had so suddenly become a fan of this music that he—who back then was listening exclusively to Argentine zambas—didn’t like at all. “I should have my own room,” I heard my mother saying one night, sobbing, after an argument that started after she hung up some posters and photos in the master bedroom, provoking the ire of my father, who, in the end, had to resign himself to those images of other men looming over his marital bed.

  6

  On weekends in the spring, and even sometimes in the summer, I went with my aunts and uncles and cousins to fly kites on Hill 15. It was all very professional: my father had moved on from hanging the kite string between two trees and treating it with crushed glass, like he did when he was a kid, to hooking two big spools up to a motor to construct a complex machine for home-treating string. He also made his own kites. Though I’m sure that back then he was also solving arduous computing dilemmas, when I think of my father at work, I always see an image of him on those nights, endeavoring to create the perfect kite.

  I didn’t dislike kite flying, but I preferred to do it with regular string; I was incapable of handling the treated kite string without destroying my fingertips, even though they were already a little hardened from strumming the guitar. But we had to use treated string because that’s what it was all about: you got the kite up in the sky and faced down your opponent. While my cousin Rodrigo sawed vigorously away, cutting down dozens of kites every afternoon, I usually struggled just to keep my kite aloft, and I regularly lost control of it. I went on trying, even though, pretty soon, no one held out much hope for me.

  We always brought along a box holding dozens of splendid kites, the ones my dad made plus others we bought from a friend of his who made kites for a living. I always tried to find a spot as far away as possible from my family. Sometimes, instead of flying my kite, I would take the kite and spool and spend a couple of hours stretched out in the grass, smoking my first cigarettes, while I watched the capricious trajectories of the cut kites as they fell. “How much for that kite?” someone asked me on one of those afternoons. It was Mauricio, the altar boy. I sold it to him, and soon I was selling others to his brother and his brother’s friends.

  Mauricio was so freckled it was funny just to look at him, but it had still taken me a moment to recognize him without his white robe. In my confusion, in my ignorance, I had thought that altar boys were very young priests, and that they all lived together in a cloister or something. He clarified that no, they did not, and he told me that he preferred to be called an acolyte rather than an altar boy. He asked me if I wanted to serve at Mass, because the other acolyte was going to quit. He wanted to know if I’d had my First Communion, and for some reason I said I had, which was completely false—I was just starting the preparations at school. I wasn’t even sure it was a requirement for being an altar boy, but instinctively, like so many other times in my life when I have been faced with doubt, I lied. Then I told him that I’d think about it, I wasn’t sure. When I went back to where my dad and my uncles were, I learned that they had discovered my kite-selling business, but no one scolded me.

  7

  I was still waiting for the baggy-eyed woman to give me a tryout, but every time I asked her about it, she only made excuses. I remember I said, trying to impress her, that the English version of “Our Father” was better. “It’s impossible for anything to be better than the word of our lord Jesus Christ,” she replied. But I must have piqued her curiosity, because when
I was leaving, she asked me if I knew what the lyrics in English were about. “They’re about the sounds of silence,” I told her, with utter certainty.

  I got tired of waiting, and one or two weeks after running into Mauricio on Hill 15, I approached him and the priest and told them I wanted to be an acolyte. The priest looked at me with distrust and inspected me up and down before finally accepting me. I was happy. I wouldn’t sing at Mass, but I would have an even more prominent role. I wouldn’t wear the white pants of the marching band, but I’d have the white robe with its stiff cord tied firmly around my waist. Mauricio could lend me the clothes. I didn’t tell anyone at home that I was going to be an altar boy, I don’t really know why. Maybe I just didn’t want them to go see me.

  8

  The first time I served at Mass, I spent the first few minutes looking out of the corner of my eye with a fierce sense of vengeance toward the blond woman, who just sat there, refusing to notice my triumph. It was hard for me to concentrate on the rituals that I normally respected and believed in, but which, just then, up onstage, I barely seemed to remember. There were moments of glory, like when we rang the bells or seconded the priest in the sign of peace. But then the dreaded crossroads came: it was my turn to receive Communion. My plan had been to tell the priest before Mass that I couldn’t take Communion because I’d gone too long without confessing, but I’d forgotten, and now it was too late. I tried to make a gesture that communicated all of this, a gesture that would hopefully be imperceptible to the faithful behind me, but I couldn’t—the priest stuffed the host into my mouth, and it tasted the way it does to everyone: bland. But, at that moment, I didn’t care about the taste—I felt like I was going to die right there, struck down by a bolt of lightning or something. I walked home with Mauricio and I planned to confess my sin to him, but he was so happy, congratulating me over and over again on my performance at Mass, that I didn’t mention it.