“I’ve always been thin,” she answered.
“Me too,” said the boy. She bought a lot of marijuana, and Danilo also threw in some seeds.
It’ll be a while before the plant flowers. She is watering it now while she listens to the news on the radio. Her father doesn’t rape her anymore, he wouldn’t be able to. She hasn’t forgiven him, she’s reached a point where she doesn’t believe in forgiveness, or in love, or in happiness, but maybe she believes in death, or at least she waits for it. While she moves the furniture around in the living room, she thinks about what her life will be when he dies: it’s an abstract feeling of freedom, maybe too abstract, and for that reason uncomfortable. She thinks of an ambiguous pain, of a disaster, calm and silent.
She hears her father’s complaints coming from the kitchen, his degraded, corrupted voice. Sometimes he shouts at her, berates her, but she pays him no mind. Other times, especially when he is high, he laughs his labored laughter, utters disjointed phrases. She thinks about the will to live, about her father clinging to life, who knows what for. She brings him another marijuana cookie, turns on the TV for him, puts his headphones on for him. She stays awhile beside him, looking at a magazine. “I didn’t believe in God, but only with his help could I overcome the pain,” says a famous actor about his wife’s death. “It’s simple: lots of water,” says a model on another page. “Don’t let public tantrums get to you.” “It’s her second TV series so far this year.” “There are many ways to live.” “I didn’t know what I was getting mixed up in.”
She hears the trash collector going by, the men’s shouts, the dog barking, the whisper of canned laughter coming from the headphones, she hears her father’s breathing and her own breathing, and all those sounds don’t alter her feeling of silence — not of peace: of silence. Then she goes to the living room, rolls herself a joint, and smokes it in the darkness.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alejandro Zambra is a Chilean novelist and poet. He is the author of three novels: Ways of Going Home, The Private Lives of Trees, and Bonsai, which was awarded Chile’s Literary Critics’ Award for Best Novel. His writing has also appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Tin House, Harper’s, and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, among other places. In 2010, he was selected as one of the Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists by Granta. He currently teaches literature at the Diego Portales University in Santiago.