Diego Zúñiga (born 1987) is a Chilean author and journalist. He is the author of two novels and the recipient of the Juegos Literarios Gabriela Mistral and the Chilean National Book and Reading Council Award. He lives in Santiago de Chile.
Megan McDowell's translations include books by Alejandro Zambra, Arturo Fontaine, Lina Meruane, and Mariana Enriquez, and have been published in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Tin House, and McSweeney's, among others. She lives in Santiago, Chile.
Diego Zúñiga (born 1987) is a Chilean author and journalist. He is the author of two novels and the recipient of the Juegos Literarios Gabriela Mistral and the Chilean National Book and Reading Council Award. He lives in Santiago de Chile.
Megan McDowell's translations include books by Alejandro Zambra, Arturo Fontaine, Lina Meruane, and Mariana Enriquez, and have been published in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Tin House, and McSweeney's, among others. She lives in Santiago, Chile.
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Overview
Diego Zúñiga (born 1987) is a Chilean author and journalist. He is the author of two novels and the recipient of the Juegos Literarios Gabriela Mistral and the Chilean National Book and Reading Council Award. He lives in Santiago de Chile.
Megan McDowell's translations include books by Alejandro Zambra, Arturo Fontaine, Lina Meruane, and Mariana Enriquez, and have been published in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Tin House, and McSweeney's, among others. She lives in Santiago, Chile.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781566894609 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Coffee House Press |
| Publication date: | 03/07/2017 |
| Pages: | 128 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.90(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Megan McDowel is a Spanish language literary translator from Kentucky. Her work includes books by Alejandro Zambra, Arturo Fontaine, Lina Meruane, Mariana Enriquez, Álvaro Bisama, and Juan Emar. Her translations have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney's, Words Without Borders, Mandorla, and Vice, among others. She lives in Santiago, Chile.
Read an Excerpt
Camanchaca
By Diego Zúñiga, Megan McDowell
COFFEE HOUSE PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Diego ZúñigaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-56689-460-9
CHAPTER 1
My father's first car was a 1971 Ford Fairlane, which my grandfather gave him when he turned fifteen.
His second was a 1985 Honda Accord, lead gray.
His third was a 1990 BMW 850i, navy blue, which he killed my Uncle Neno with.
His fourth is a Ford Ranger, smoke colored, which we are driving across the Atacama Desert.
My parents separated when I was four years old. I'm twenty now. I live with my mother in Santiago. My father stayed in Iquique with his new family. Sometimes we see each other when he travels for business. He takes me clothes shopping or asks me to go pick up some boxes with him and his new wife. I get into his truck, put my headphones on, turn on my music, and go with him.
Now he tells me we have to go to Tacna or I could lose my teeth — he knows a dentist who will help me save them. He explains this, and his ten-year-old son, who is riding in the backseat of the truck, bursts out laughing and says something I don't catch. He laughs, and my father's wife tells him, "Eddie, be quiet," but he doesn't stop laughing.
My mother lost all her teeth. She had to get a dental plate. Sometimes she goes to the kitchen and opens the drawer where she keeps the special cream, then she turns her back to me and adjusts the upper denture. I look at her face reflected in the kitchen window and say nothing. Then she turns back around, and there she is, her upper teeth in place. She doesn't use the bottom part. She says it hurts, and she can't sleep when she wears it.
My father's wife is named Nancy. My mother says Nancy used to walk Thompson Street, and that's where she met my father. Sometimes I get the urge to ask her. Right now, for example, as she's offering me a cup of soda, I look at her in the rearview mirror and think about asking her if it's true she worked Thompson Street. I look at her. She smiles at me. She flashes me her perfect smile, and I shake my head no. Then I put on my headphones and turn my eyes toward the highway.
Before we left for the trip, my mother gave me a list of things to buy: jacket, pants, tennis shoes, shirts, underwear, and socks. She told me to insist that my father buy me brand-name things so they'd last all year. She emphasized that part. And when I called her from Coquimbo, where we were spending the night, she reminded me again to tell him he had to buy me those things. And I said O.K., picturing myself at the Iquique mall buying whatever I could find that fit, asking my father if I could have this hoodie, if I could have that shirt, and then hearing no, too expensive, pick something else. And me going into the dressing room and trying to fit into the sale shirts, figuring if I lost a few pounds when I got back to Santiago, I might be able to button those two-for-one pants.
My father's son is named Elias. That's how my grandmother introduced him to me, even though everyone calls him Eddie. He was born when I was ten years old. My mother says he's not my father's son, that the woman had an affair with another man. That's what she heard, and she believes it because the kid doesn't look anything like my father, my mother says, the kid only looks like the woman. And I look in the side mirror while he's playing some kind of Game Boy my father gave him for Christmas, and I think yes, it's true, he doesn't look much like my dad.
My mother hasn't worked since the day we arrived in Santiago. She stopped going out altogether, except when we do the grocery shopping the first week of each month. She always asks me to go with her. My grandfather sends her money, we go to the supermarket, and she buys food for the month. She also buys hair dye, but she never knows which one looks best on her, so she asks for my opinion. I look at the boxes, and I don't understand the difference between an ash blond and a matte blond. Still, I look at the woman on each box and then at my mother, and I give my opinion. Sometimes she takes my advice, but usually she doesn't, and then she leaves the hair dye aisle and goes on with the month's shopping.
My father says we're close to Antofagasta. He explains that one must respect the desert and the highway, that not just anyone can drive there. I nod, taking my headphones off. I turn my head to look at him, and he says that someday he'll teach me to drive, there's nothing to it. And I nod again. And then he puts his right hand on my thigh and says that I should lose a little weight, that if I don't lose weight something could happen to me. And I nod and put my headphones back on.
My mother and I used to play a game where we told stories before bed. We'd turn off the Tv, and we had to make them up in the dark. We just started doing it, it wasn't planned, but we really enjoyed those moments. We would laugh in total darkness, in that double bed my grandfather had given us. When we came to Santiago, we decided we would sleep together. Although really, it was my mother who made the decision. She told me there was no money for gas, we couldn't have a heater, and it would be best for us to sleep in the same bed, like when I was a kid and we still lived in Iquique. Of course I didn't question it. I just grabbed a few things and moved into her room, our room.
My father beats his fingers on the steering wheel as if he's playing the drums. The woman and her son are sleeping, but he doesn't care. I turn down the volume on my Mp3 player. He goes on pounding the wheel to the rhythm of drums and a guitar. It's Pat Metheny. He looks at me, a smile on his face. I take off my headphones. He's still smiling. He asks if I know this music. I nod. He drums harder on the steering wheel. When the song is over, he tells me about the time he saw Pat Metheny live at the Chile Stadium, when he took Nancy. Then he tells me that if Metheny ever comes back, he'll take me. I don't say anything. I look out the right-hand window. A man, walking in the desert. I watch him for a few seconds before we leave him behind and he vanishes among the hills. I see him and I imagine being him, crossing the desert, getting lost. An empampado: swallowed by the pampa. I like that word. Empampado. We leave him behind. Another Pat Metheny song comes on, and my father again starts drumming on the wheel.
It was one of those nights, in total darkness, when my mother told me what happened to my Uncle Neno. She said there was a lot I didn't know, that it hadn't been her idea to lie to me, but she'd made an agreement with my grandparents. And she told the story. In complete detail. Full of silences. A few days after that, we'd never mention Uncle Neno again. A few days after that, there'd be another story nobody would want to tell.
We get out at a gas station. My father buys a couple of sodas and something to eat. I stay next to the truck, watching the woman and her son flip through some magazines while they wait for my father. I think about my last trip to Iquique. My grandmother dead. Her eyes closed and a thread of blood running from her mouth, a thread that appeared just before they closed the coffin. Then, the cemetery. They buried her with my Uncle Neno. I think that morning they had to compact my uncle's remains so she would fit in the same niche. My father didn't want to see him. My grandfather had to go instead. He said my uncle's body was mummified. My father said nothing.
The next day I didn't go to class. I don't think it was because of the story about my uncle; I just didn't feel like getting up. I was studying journalism, and I wanted to work in radio. I wanted to have a show about soccer or an interview show. My mother, on the other hand, wanted only for me to study law. She insisted I'd be lost if I studied journalism, I wouldn't have a future, that radio was crap. That's what she said. But that was my dream: some big headphones, the studio, interviewing athletes or hosting a news show. Finally I applied, and I got in. I told my father, and he congratulated me. When I told him about the enrollment fee, he said he didn't have any money. He couldn't pay the monthly tuition either. I had to apply for scholarships. Luckily, I got all of them.
"We'll take the route through the desert," says my father. "It'll take a couple more hours, but we'll get there all right," he says, and I'm left thinking about the beaches we won't see. We pass the turnoff that would have taken us to Antofagasta, and we head deeper into the desert: the coastal route is no longer an option. I've never gone to Iquique through the desert. The sun is starting to go down. My dad's son is paging through the video game magazine he just bought. The woman is looking out the window. My father puts on another Pat Metheny album.
The university also gave me a coupon book with vouchers for food. There weren't many, and I spent them all, without fail, the first week of every month. Sometimes I'd take my mother out for Chinese and pay the bill with vouchers. Otherwise I used them up myself. I'd go to classes, then at lunchtime I'd walk around downtown to see which places would accept the vouchers. One day I made a list of all the restaurants where I could use them. And I started to visit them, in Providencia, downtown, around Central Station. The action never varied much: I'd go in, sit down at an isolated table, and eat. And the vouchers never lasted past the first week of the month.
I imagine the deserted beaches. The sun beginning to set. The red ocean. The orange sky. Those places I'd gone with my family before I had a memory. Before the accident. The images don't exist outside of a few faded photos. But that's how they described it to me. The deserted beaches and my family, camping out for a couple of weeks. My father, my mother, my grandparents, and my Uncle Neno.
I also got a cash stipend. Fifteen thousand pesos a month. Sometimes I would save up for two or three months to buy clothes so I wouldn't need so many things when I went to Iquique. Once, I saved up money to buy a microphone and a tape recorder. And I started recording my voice at night, before I joined my mother in bed. I wanted to be like those espn commentators who did the Champions League when I was little and still living in Iquique. Like the one who reported on the final between Manchester United and Bayern Munich at the Camp Nou stadium. Supposedly he was Chilean, but his accent sounded neutral to me. And at night I used to practice that accent, trying to come up with nicknames for every Chilean player. And I'd remember that final match, that period in Iquique when my mother was working and I spent the days alone, watching the 1999 Champions League games.
The color of the sky: orange, maybe purple at times. The desert: blue, as if a blanket were covering it. There is nothing. My father is listening to another cd, a group I don't know. In the back, the woman and her son are talking in low voices. The desert looks as if it were going to sleep, tucked in under a blue blanket. And in the distance, a village. Some houses. Chacabuco. There's a man at the entrance to the town. He's drinking something from a cup while he watches the cars pass on the highway. Or that's the impression I get, at least. My dad tells me he must be crazy. The town is deserted. There are no lights; there is nothing and no one. Just the man at the entrance and the houses that blend in with the desert. My dad says it again, but I don't reply. I have my headphones on. He says the man hears voices, or that's what they say; his story is well known. I don't take my eyes off the desert. We leave the man behind. My father starts to tell me the story, but I'd rather not listen. And I imagine the man drinking the last sip from his cup and going to sleep in a house lit by a couple of candles. He waits for them to burn out, closes his eyes, and sleeps. "Surrounded by whispers," says my father. "The nightmares and shouts and whispers of all those people," he says, and I close my eyes while night falls in the desert.
Once, I got to watch that final between Manchester and Bayern again. And what I did was turn the volume down and start announcing the game. I tried to forget how it ended, though that was impossible. I related the first half calmly, until Bayern went confidently into halftime, ahead by one goal. The second half, as the Chilean announcer would say a few minutes later, was not for the faint of heart. When Lothar Matthäus was subbed out in the eightieth minute, I stood up and started clapping. Just then my mother came into my room and saw me there, in front of the TV with the microphone and recorder, giving a standing ovation. I motioned for her to leave, and she did. Finally, at minute ninety-one, the story began to change. A corner and a goal by Teddy Sheringham. I yelled so loudly my mother came back into the room and stood there watching the scene: I was shouting, trying to articulate a coherent, stirring story. I was on the verge of tears. And then came the end, a minute later, when Ole Gunnar Solskjær, the baby-faced killer, the greatest replacement of all time, blocked a ball in the box and brought glory to Manchester, to England, an entire country watching its team turn that scoreboard around. An epic story, a match for the ages, damn good soccer.
The final stretch. Alto Hospicio. Lights in the darkness. Streets lit with low-intensity bulbs. Two women walking along the edge of the highway. One of them puts out her thumb. My father drives in silence while his family sleeps. When I left Iquique, Alto Hospicio didn't yet exist. There were five houses in the middle of the desert, along with a couple of illegal garbage dumps. Now it's a city, I think to myself, a city with lit streets. My father turns on the radio and manages to pick up an Iquique station. A man is talking about a fire. There are no fatalities, only injured people, the announcer says as we start to descend from the hills into Iquique. Lights that move away from a black stain: the ocean. A few dots scattered in the black stain, around the port. The soccer stadium with its field lit up. The yellow city, us going down, the family awake now, and the man on the radio who leaves us with a song by Amerikan Sound. My father turns off the radio and tells me we've arrived. I nod, thinking I should call my mother; I don't want to.
I also practiced doing an interview program. I asked the questions, and I answered them too. The idea was to put myself to the test, so I tried to give complex responses that might make me draw a blank. I wanted to gauge my ability to react and improvise, the way my professors had recently taught me. It lasted a couple of episodes, then my mother came in and asked me why I didn't interview her.
That was the start of the interviews. That was the start of the stories.
We're in Iquique. We go to my grandpa's house. That's where I'll be staying for summer vacation. It's strange to go inside and not find my grandmother there. The house seems bigger. It smells musty, unaired. My grandpa comes out to greet me. He's wearing an apron. Then he looks me over and tells me I'm very fat, that I need to take care of myself. I don't say anything. I go to the master bedroom. The portrait of my grandmother is still hanging on the wall. I leave and go sit down at the table. My father is telling my grandpa about our trip to Buenos Aires, the wonders of the Buenos Aires trip. Nancy is sitting next to him with her son. They smile while my dad tells my grandpa that he bought me some books. He looks at me, and I smile back and tell him yes, he bought me three books. Then my dad leaves, and I'm alone with my grandpa, in silence.
The interviews happened at night. Sometimes we let Coka come in and keep us company. We'd sit in the living room: two glasses of water, an ashtray, her cigarettes and lighter, the recorder, the microphone, and a radio. It was a classic format: three fifteen-minute blocks with a couple of songs in between. We decided to start with childhood. My mom was obsessed with childhood, her childhood. And there was one image she couldn't forget: the day her mother left. She remembered her mother hastily packing a suitcase, and her sister crying, pleading with her not to go, not to abandon them. And my grandmother, totally silent as she threw clothes into the suitcase.
"Why was she in such a rush?"
"I don't know," replied my mom, and she lit a cigarette. "I guess she thought my dad would be back soon. And I was worried about that, too, about my dad finding her in the house before she left."
"And what did your dad say when he came back and she wasn't there?"
"I don't think he said anything. He just shut himself in his room and started to cry."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Camanchaca by Diego Zúñiga, Megan McDowell. Copyright © 2017 Diego Zúñiga. Excerpted by permission of COFFEE HOUSE PRESS.
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