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Stale, muggy air. That was the first thing I noticed on entering my mother’s house. The windows were closed with the curtains drawn, the hallway was plunged in darkness and in the dining room a lone lamp shining on a wilted bunch of flowers completed the grim effect of studied dilapidation.

Paloma followed me to the table, sat down at my usual place and began to talk easily, as if the only thing that had been making her feel uncomfortable was the warm hug my mother had just given her. Paloma had gone in for a stony pat on the back, a reserved and formal ‘Hello, Consuelo’, but my mother had clutched her in a tight embrace the moment we’d walked in the front garden (tensed shoulders, tart berries, feet tapping against the floor). Only after a minute had my mother pulled away from a half-irritated, half-dumbfounded Paloma to peer at her with the same disappointed look she had so often given me; as if I were a hopelessly broken thing.

‘Identical,’ she declared, releasing Paloma’s chin from her grip. ‘Apart from the eyes, you’re identical to Ingrid,’ (and by ‘eyes’ she meant ‘hollow, vacant eyes’).

Now having recovered from this greeting, with a glass of wine on the table in front of her and my mother a few blessed metres away, Paloma seemed cheerier, perhaps even glad to be able to use her Spanish, which was becoming less rusty by the minute. She reeled off a list of cities where she’d lived as a child: Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Berlin (and I hated her for all those adventures, for having left so many times). She spoke about Ingrid, about their numerous relocations, about what life out there had been like (out where? I wasn’t sure).

‘Her dream was always to come back to Chile,’ Paloma told my mother, who shuffled back and forth from the kitchen to the dining room with water and wine, feigning indifference. ‘And I don’t know why she didn’t, because she never stopped going on about you all,’ she went on, inspecting the palms of her hands as if a belated and heartfelt apology might be hiding there.

I sat down opposite her, in Felipe’s place from back when we were kids, and it was from this new vantage point that I noticed a change in the room. The dozens of tiny nails in the wall were no longer there, nails that used to remind me of the pictures my mother had taken down because of the tremors, the earthquakes. ‘Who knows when the next one’s going to hit, Iquela. Take them all down, I’m begging you,’ she’d said, and all the walls had been left riddled with scars, which to me had become a kind of blueprint for the house. Now, in their place, hung unfamiliar landscapes: a bird glowing against a grey sky, a forest in the foothills of a mountain range.

My mother left the house more often than she was prepared to admit, and she let me know by leaving little clues like these new paintings, or those drooping roses on the table: foreign flowers from out there, roses that my mother had got without my help. So much for her declaration that she would never leave the house again: ‘I’m only safe indoors,’ she’d said, gnawing the skin around her nails. She no longer went to parties or invited anyone over. Except me, and I visited her three or four times a week, like clockwork, to appease her, to tell her ‘nothing’s going to happen out there, Mother’ (although accidents happened, mistakes happened, and time passed).

And so, with perfect composure, my mother set the table for our meal, her body immune, as ever, to the heat. She had done herself up and her grey bob hung neatly just above her collarbones. Clearly, she was relishing having us – a captive audience – at home. Her lips were almost trembling with the effort of containing her smile, a strange smirk which I tried and failed to read: it was neither happy nor serious, genuine nor fake. It was as if a face behind her real face were happy, or as if her younger face, Consuelo’s face, had reappeared from nowhere to welcome her friend Ingrid, not Paloma.

Now seated at the table, draping a napkin across her knees, my mother lectured Paloma for having let too much time pass. Her voice was full of reproach, and she over-pronounced each syllable to make sure that Paloma had understood what she had said; as if she hadn’t just heard Paloma’s fluent tales of various relocations; as if Paloma hadn’t learnt a word of Spanish since 1988. And it was this presumption that made her adjust her voice, eking out the words until they broke into meaningless syllables: to-oo-mu-cha-time-ma. Paloma seemed pleased with her Spanish. Her only slips were a few set phrases that she left floating in the air. Like when she told us she and her mother had decided not to ‘come back’ to Chile (she meant ‘come back for good’). Her Spanish was correct but old-fashioned, the kind you might still hear in parts of Sweden, Berlin, Canada, but which to me sounded hollow, or perhaps hollowed out.

My mother asked after Hans: ‘Why didn’t he come to bury Ingrid?’, ‘What are you doing here on your own?’, ‘Why isn’t he helping you?’, and Paloma explained that her parents had separated, they’d lost contact after the divorce and his remarriage. And then my mother, cutting straight to the chase, leant forwards in her seat and asked: ‘And why didn’t you ever come back to Chile?’ (and she, too, meant why hadn’t you ‘come back for good’). Paloma didn’t answer and barely said a word for the rest of the meal. She had come to listen, and listen she did, attentively, as she munched her way through the thick artichoke leaves in front of her, taking them one by one, inspecting them, drawing each one to her mouth, sucking delicately on that greyish flesh before putting them back on her plate in a perfect circle. My mother, by contrast, took bunches at a time which she plucked greedily from the heart, glancing sideways at my full plate and telling me between mouthfuls that I’d never finish at that rate (‘eat up, Iquela, drink your milk, eat what’s been placed in front of you, there are starving people in the world, people suffering, suffering terribly and you so glum, my girl, go on, crack a smile, show me those white teeth of yours’).

Paloma topped up her glass and I did the same, fantasising about how we might sneak off again, like that time we’d gone around minesweeping leftover drinks. But my mother had us cornered with her tales of Ingrid and Hans and the day they’d sought asilo – asylum – in the embassy. Paloma put down her glass, leant forward and spelt out each letter of asilo with a look I hadn’t seen before: the look of someone coming to the painful realisation of how little they knew.

My mother used the opportunity to reprimand Paloma for not knowing something so important about Ingrid, ‘something so key’, she said, and she asked me to explain to Paloma in English what asilo meant.

‘You translate, don’t you, Iquela? Explain asilo to her.’

It seemed young Paloma didn’t speak such perfect Spanish after all. It was a key detail. But ‘key’ meant one thing for my mother and something else entirely to me: key … something locked up, something secret. And an asylum was a place with padded walls where they sent crazy people. Paloma’s problem wasn’t the language, but the weightlessness of that word. That’s why I didn’t respond, and, faced with my silence, it was Consuelo who finally spoke (because it was Consuelo, not my mother, who would talk about those times: ‘her day’). And I switched off again, trying to avoid falling under the weight of those sentences, convinced, as I had been as a little girl, that we don’t live for a set number of years, but rather that we’re assigned a set number of words that we can hear over the course of our lives (and some words were light, like ‘swing’ or ‘illusion’, and others were heavy, like ‘rank’, ‘scar’ and ‘tracked’). Each of my mother’s words was worth a hundred, a thousand regular ones, and killed me quicker. Perhaps that’s why I’d learnt another language: to buy myself more time.

I went to the kitchen for some more water, missing the start of the story. She’d no doubt been telling Paloma about the darkness: about how those days (back in ‘her day’) were longer and darker. About how she would walk along the streets waiting for the worst, already knowing what would happen. Those were the words that came with my mother: ‘waiting’ and ‘knowing’. As a child I would beg her to tell me this very story, which was full of characters that we knew in real life. I would ask her not to spare any details and she would oblige, telling the story in the present tense with a faraway look in her eyes, travelling back to that place where it had all happened: ‘I can still see the wall right in front of my eyes,’ she would say. I heard Paloma ask her to start from the beginning, not to skip any parts.

‘How did you meet?’ she asked, and I shut the kitchen door behind me.

On top of the fridge, the television was still on but with the volume turned down. Grey letters were racing across the screen: CAR BOMB IN MIDDLE EAST. SUDDEN FALL IN DOW JONES. RECORD TEMPERATURES IN CENTRAL CHILE. Two bottles of wine were waiting on the table next to a Chilean salad, not yet tossed, which would go with the second course. My eyes began to water and I decided to pick out the onion – so much more raw, sliced onion than tomato – and boil it to take the edge off. Fragmented sentences filtered in from the other side of the door – obstinate lines, determined to reach me.

‘How old were you?’ Paloma’s voice sounded deeper, or perhaps older now. My mother was talking about the day she and Ingrid met.

‘We were so young,’ she said, describing in minute detail that emotional, revolutionary, key meeting. That’s where they’d first laid eyes on each other: on the other side of that black-and-white photo that still hung on the wall. A dog-eared wooden frame with faded edges, and inside, still frozen there, an army of men and women standing before a podium, listening avidly to a speech and all facing the only sign of an escape from this image: a blurred, moving finger. Everything else was static: hundreds of soldierly figures, slogans set in stone and a dead tree in one corner. Maybe Paloma would decide to capture that old photo with her vintage camera, choose a frame, get it into focus and capture it (and I would be left with the remains, with everything around the image).

The kettle let out a sigh followed by a shrill whistle, which drowned out the conversation going on in the dining room. I felt my shoulders and neck relax, and left the kettle there on the stove: a deafening screech, a moment’s respite in which to think about nothing. But when I turned off the hob all those words came flooding back, uninvited.

In the photo you could make out Ingrid standing at the back of a crowd (although the correct term wasn’t ‘crowd’, but ‘faction’, ‘masses’, ‘front’). The tips of her fair hair were lightly grazing the collar of her blouse, which looked white, although it might just as well have been yellow or cream. Colours didn’t exist in that photograph. There were only differing shades of white, greys that were more or less grey, and a lot of black. She was the only one not looking at the man giving the speech. Felipe’s parents – even if my mother refused to acknowledge them, even if she’d do anything to block them out of the story, as if that way she could erase their bodies, and, with it, the pain – seemed particularly disciplined, captured in the final moment of devoted attention. Ingrid’s face, by contrast, was gazing in the opposite direction, into the camera; Hans was there, on the other side of the lens, twisting it back and forth, in and out of focus. Hans with Paloma’s camera, I suddenly realised. And further back, behind everyone else, wearing those black-framed glasses that chopped his face in two, leaning against the wall and his body still in one piece, there was Rodolfo (or rather, my dad, or Víctor, because he used to be Víctor and my mother Claudia, not Consuelo). That was the only surviving photo from that time, and the only one in which he seemed like a different person. There was something unfamiliar about his expression: the beaming face, the serene, radiant gaze. In that inescapable photo – contemplated at every breakfast and every dinner for years, at every single meal from my childhood – my dad seemed more alive than ever, and yet, at the same time, on the brink of death. It was a photo my mother loved. She loved it as only she could love a photo; in a way that made me at once sad and wildly frustrated.

I filled a jug with water and went back to the dining room. My mother had got to the part about the cell (cells without mitochondria, nuclei or membranes). They had formed a cell in preparation for the struggle, for the dark days they knew were coming (terrible days spent waiting and knowing). And all of a sudden, we’d reached that part in the story: the clandestine days were upon us, and I stood up and left the dining room, my glass brimming with a wine that, this time, wasn’t pink, but unmistakably red.

I wandered around the house hoping to find an open door, an escape route. The wine was turning my legs to jelly, and once again I found myself staggering along a hallway. Paloma wanted to know more about the cell. ‘Who else was in it?’ ‘Which faction were you in, Consuelo?’ ‘How many died during the early days?’ ‘What exactly happened?’ She wanted the details. The truth.

I came to the guest room where Felipe had slept as a boy and which, some time later, had been used by my father (my sick father, the one with all the tubes, syringes, dressings). I stopped in front of the door, and, in spite of my fear (a fear I couldn’t understand, because he was already dead, ‘your father’s dead, Iquela, don’t be so silly’), I turned the handle. The darkness escaped from beneath the door and a vinegary smell seeped right into my skin, hit me smack in the middle of my other face, the one that only came out when I was in that house. I had stomached every last drop of that old smell: the fusty stench of illness, the sickly-sweet taste that promised a pain which, for me, never came.

Even from the hallway I could still make out voices in the dining room. My mother’s solemn tone told me where the conversation was heading, just in the same way that, in that house, I knew exactly where the floor would creak beneath my feet. Her memory took no shortcuts (disciplined, obedient, militant, that memory of hers). The things she remembered weren’t arranged according to the decades or seasons. And hers wasn’t like my memory, which fixated on colours and textures. My mother’s memory functioned like a topography of her dead, and there it was, laid out before Paloma for her to navigate freely.

I stumbled back to the kitchen and turned up the volume on the TV set. The weatherperson was forecasting another day of infernal heat. The onions were floating limply in the boiling water. I drained them, mixed them with the tomatoes and, now testy and drunk, rejoined the others at the table.

Consuelo had reached the part about the embassy. The part when everyone, apart from her, decided to leave. The part when Hans, Ingrid and my father (Víctor, she meant Víctor) hatched a plan to flee Chile, an idea that she had considered cowardly (she had wanted to fight, to resist). My mother glanced at me when I sat back down.

‘You’re drunk,’ she said, her own lips also stained and cracked. ‘I don’t like you drinking so much, Iquela. Just sit still and listen. One day you’ll be telling your children all my stories and you won’t have the first idea. Because these are the stories they’ll want to hear, Iquela. My stories,’ she stressed (and I counted three glasses of wine, nine artichoke leaves and the odd non-existent child).

The plan had been to meet at the corner of the German embassy. At twelve noon, they would all jump the wall and be gone. Paloma knew this hadn’t happened, however: only Ingrid and Hans had gone over. That’s why she looked up suddenly (her vacant eyes, eyes that hadn’t seen enough, distrusted Consuelo). But on my mother went. Now we’d got to the part about the change of guard. A window of opportunity. Four minutes. They’d done their homework, made their calculations. Rodolfo (Víctor, Víctor, Víctor) just had to get there on time. That was all.

In the distance I heard the voices from the television set fade to jingles and then someone introducing a detective series. Paloma’s lips were purple and she was sweating profusely, just like me. Soggy onions mounted up on both her and my mother’s plates – the terrible synchrony of what gets eaten and what gets left. It was a collusion that left me feeling even more alone: my plate spotless and theirs half-full.

In the end, Rodolfo didn’t show. The change of guard finished at noon and there was no time to lose. Ingrid and Hans insisted. ‘Come on, the three of us can get over now,’ they said, ‘it’s our only chance.’ But my mother couldn’t bring herself to leave. She wouldn’t jump over to the other side of that wall without Rodolfo. In other words, my mother would stay. Consuelo would resist. She got back into the car and sped off, mounting the kerb. She drove over a row of shrubs and right up to the wall of the embassy, parking millimetres from the building.

I went back into the kitchen, where I listened to the end of the story (the words embalmed at the edges of her mouth).

‘With the car parked right next to the wall, Paloma, your parents were able to climb onto the bonnet, then the roof, and from there up and over the wall. They were the only ones who got across. That’s what saved them,’ my mother said. ‘I can still see the wall right in front of my eyes.’ (Even I could see it.)

An advert for Mistral pisco came on the television. My mother paused briefly, dividing the story into two neat acts. A pause, followed by one fractious line.

‘We stayed behind to keep up the resistance.’

For some reason, the guard change had happened early that day and four civil guards appeared from around the corner in an unmarked car. Rodolfo, on the other hand, didn’t show.

‘They’d caught up with Rodolfo the night before, but I didn’t find that out till later,’ said Consuelo (my mother, Consuelo, Claudia, the bottle of pisco on the screen). ‘I went underground, but he disappeared for a long time. Eight months with no news, or almost no news. We knew he was still alive because his words left tracks.’ (The tracks of people with two names and two surnames.)

I went back into the dining room, but instead of sitting down I announced that I was leaving.

‘It’s been a long day,’ I said, praying no one would ask any more questions. Paloma also stood up and I noticed that her eyes were red. She looked tired and drawn. I gathered my things, and my mother, trailing me like a shadow, looming over me, asked if I wouldn’t rather stay the night there. She said it was dangerous out on the streets at that hour. She had a bad feeling about it. I was drunk. There she was again. Waiting. Knowing. It was always the same words of warning whenever I left her house: I might have an accident, I should stay alert, I mustn’t trust anyone (‘or anything, Iquela, ever’).

‘People out there are out of their minds. They throw stones now, did you know that, Ique? They go up on flyovers and throw stones down at your windscreen. They’ll kill you,’ she would say, somewhere between scared and incensed (they can kill you with stones shattering your windscreen, or words that shatter your ears). ‘What a way to go. Imagine, after everything.’

Then she would tell me again to keep my wits about me and to call her the second I got in. And I would barely have time to reach the top of the stairs in my building (forty-four steps to be exact) and put the key in the lock before I’d hear the phone ringing on the other side of my front door.

We were all set to leave, my drunkenness and I, when Paloma announced that she was also tired. My mother said no problem, there was a room all made up for her (tubes, syringes, dressings), but Paloma brushed her hand against mine and said decisively that she would go with me, adding that we’d already discussed it in the car. She would sleep at mine that night.

‘Take me,’ she almost pleaded, and I could only nod, but I also stood there thinking about how that phrase had just opened up a crack in her Spanish. For all the diminutives she’d learnt, for all the swear words she’d picked up, and even for that change of pitch from German to Spanish – higher in the latter – she’d adopted, she had given herself away by speaking so openly and directly. So the euphemisms only came later, it turned out, once you’ve truly mastered the language.