The Soul of a Woman

by Isabel Allende

  Passion at my age is just as intense as in my youth, but now before doing something reckless I think about it for some time—let’s say two or three days. In this way, I let myself be seduced in 2016, when I was seventy-something years old, by a man who crossed my path. It was an impulse of the heart. That was the man who would become my third husband. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Patience—we will get to Roger soon enough.

  My erotic passion is quieter now, and maybe someday it will disappear altogether; I have heard that happens with age. I don’t want to think about that possibility right now. If it happens, I hope that passion can be replaced by humor, tenderness, and camaraderie, as some of my older friends who have partners have said. I wonder what could be done if one lover loses passion and libido before the other. I don’t know. We’ll see if and when the time comes.

  Women’s emancipation is not incompatible with femininity. Quite the opposite: I think they are complementary. A free spirit can be sexy, depending on the eye of the beholder. I modestly admit that despite feminism I have not lacked wooers during my prolonged existence. I passed through menopause three decades ago and I can still be sexy in private, given certain strategies, of course. In candlelight I might be able to fool a distracted guy who has had three glasses of wine, is not wearing his glasses, and is not intimidated by a woman who takes the initiative.

  * * *

  Fortunately, sexuality is no longer subject to as many rules and classifications. My grandchildren assure me that they are nonbinary. When they introduce me to their friends I now ask each one about their preferred pronouns. It’s not easy for me to remember them. I live in California and English is my second language.

  This questioning of pronouns started in the former Yugoslavia, which after terrible wars between 1991 and 2006 was divided into six republics: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia. In that environment of war and hypermasculinity, patriotism was made up of a mixture of nationalism, patriarchy, and misogyny. Masculinity was defined by power, violence, and conquest. Women and girls from one’s own group had to be protected—and impregnated to provide children for the nation. Those on the enemy’s side were systematically raped and tortured, both to impregnate the women and humiliate the men. The most conservative estimate is that twenty thousand Bosnian Muslim women were raped by Serbians, but the number could be much higher.

  At the end of the conflict, young people questioned gender division imposed by ultranationalism, refused to be classified as male or female, and rejected the use of gender-based pronouns in favor of nonbinary ones. This practice arrived in Europe and the United States several years later.

  Language is very important because it can determine the way we think. Words are powerful. Patriarchy benefits from classifying people; it makes it easier to exert control. We automatically accept being placed in categories based on gender, race, age, etc. But many young people are challenging these divisions.

  Apparently traditional male and female roles have gone out of style; now one can choose among several alternatives according to one’s frame of mind. Unfortunately, I am fatally heterosexual and that limits my options. It would be more convenient to be bisexual or lesbian because women my age are more interesting and age better than men. You think this is an exaggeration? Take a look around.

  * * *

  The dark forces, especially those of religion and tradition, deny women the right to exert their sexuality and pursue pleasure. There are many examples of this: hymen obsession, female fidelity, genital mutilation, etc. Sexual women scare men. A man has to control a woman to make sure that she doesn’t have multiple relationships and can’t compare him to others or dispense with him entirely. If she seeks pleasure or variety, he cannot be sure of his paternity.

  In the West, these forces have retreated some, but they continue to stalk us. I grew up in a time of rampant machismo. Sexual desire and promiscuity were the province of men. It was assumed that females were naturally chaste and had to be seduced. We were not to contribute to our seduction; we had to pretend that we gave in very reluctantly, otherwise we would be labeled “loose.” If we relented and the man told others of his triumph, our reputations were stained and we were categorized as a “hussy.” Women should not have sexual drives, and any alternative to a monogamous heterosexual relationship was considered an aberration or a sin.

  Silly, you men—so very adept

  at wrongly faulting womankind,

  not seeing you’re alone to blame

  for faults you plant in woman’s mind.

  After you’ve won by urgent plea

  the right to tarnish her good name,

  you still expect her to behave—

  you, that coaxed her into shame.

  …

  So where does the greater guilt lie

  for a passion that should not be:

  with the man who pleads out of baseness

  or the woman debased by his plea?

  Or which is more to be blamed—

  though both will have cause for chagrin:

  the woman who sins for money

  or the man who pays money to sin?

  —“Silly Men” by Juana Inés de la Cruz

  * * *

  In my life I have proved to be an incurable romantic, but romance in literature is a huge challenge for me. I have been writing for years without being able to develop the talent of great romance authors; I will never have it. I try to imagine a lover that my heterosexual female readers would like, but that compendium of masculine virtues is beyond my reach. Ideally he is handsome, strong, rich or powerful, not a complete fool, disillusioned by love but ready to fall in love with the female protagonist, etc. I don’t know anybody who could serve as my model.

  If I manage to come up with a presentable lover—let’s say an idealistic and brave young man, all muscle and brown skin, long black hair and velvet eyes, like Huberto Naranjo in Eva Luna—he always turns out to be dangerous or slippery; his attraction is often fatal for my female lead, who would end up with a broken heart unless I kill him off on page 159. Sometimes the hero is a good guy, but if he becomes too mushy he also has to die to avoid a sentimental ending. That was the case with Ryan Miller in Ripper; I had to choose between killing him or Attila, his dog. What would you have done?

  Male lovers in my books are fanatical guerrillas, hair-lipped merchants, vegetarian professors, invisible octogenarians, amputee soldiers, and so on. Among the few exceptions who survived my murderous instinct are Captain Rodrigo de Quiroga and Zorro. The former is a historical character, the valiant conquistador of Chile and Inés Suárez’s husband, in my novel Inés of My Soul. He escaped my scissors because I didn’t invent him; in real life he died in battle when he was already an old man. Zorro isn’t my creation either. The masked California hero is more than a hundred years old and still climbing balconies to seduce innocent maidens and bored wives. I can’t kill him because the copyright belongs to a corporation that has good lawyers.

  My grandchildren have tried to explain to me the numerous forms of love that young people practice today. When they mentioned, for example, polyamorous relationships, I told them that they have always existed. When I was young in the 1960s and 1970s it was called free love, but they assure me that’s not the same thing, because many of them are nonbinary—masculine/feminine—and the combinations of partners and groups are much more interesting than in “your time.” I hate it when they talk of “your time.” This is my time! But I do admit that, unfortunately, I have passed the age in which I could venture into the terrain of modern polyamorous nonbinary relationships.

  * * *

  Since we are talking about modern love, I have to mention dating online, as is done nowadays. In 2015, when my second husband, Willie, and I divorced after twenty-eight years of marriage, I decided to live alone in a smal
l house. To remarry was out of the question. To start again with an old man full of ailments seemed like a nightmare, and to attract a lover was as remote a possibility as growing wings. Nevertheless, some younger friends suggested I should look online. How could I do that if I can’t even order something on Amazon? No one would have answered my ad: Seventy-three-year-old grandmother, documented Latina immigrant, feminist, short of stature and with no domestic skills looks for a companion, clean and with good manners, to go to restaurants and movies.

  The euphemism for horny is “spontaneous,” or something to that effect. I am not spontaneous in the abstract; I need intimacy, dim light, sympathy, and marijuana. For us women, sexual passion diminishes or even disappears as we age unless we are in love. Apparently that’s not the case with men. I read somewhere, although it might be a myth, that men think about sex an average of once every three minutes, and they cling to their erotic fantasies up until their death, even if some of them can’t remember what an erection is. I wonder how they can get anything done under those circumstances.

  Any sixty-year-old grumpy guy with a beer belly feels that he deserves a woman twenty or thirty years younger, as one can see all around, but an older woman with a younger man is still considered obscene. Here’s an example of an ad I saw online: Retired accountant in his seventies, expert in wine and restaurants, looks for busty woman with high libido to have a good time. Who answers that kind of ad? Since most men want much younger women, if a dupe were to be interested in my profile, he would have to be over a hundred years old.

  My journalist’s curiosity induced me to research, and I started interviewing women of different ages who had gone online to find a partner. I also investigated a couple of matchmaking agencies, which ended up being fraudulent. For a very high fee they guaranteed eight dates with suitable men. They offered me refined and progressive professionals between sixty-five and seventy-five years of age, in good health, etc. I went out with three or four who matched that description and soon realized that they worked for the agency. The same guys went out with all the clients so that the company could meet its eight-date quota.

  The Internet is more honest, although sometimes it lends itself to abuse. Judith, an attractive thirty-year-old woman, waited for her date for forty minutes in a bar. When she gave up and was walking to her car, she got a text message: “I am in the bar but didn’t approach you because you are ugly, fat, and old.” Why such meanness, I wonder? Judith was depressed for months because of a mentally disturbed jerk who enjoyed bullying a stranger.

  * * *

  This was another interesting case. Brenda, a pretty, forty-six-year-old, successful businesswoman fell in love online with a romantic and passionate English architect. They were separated by a nine-hour time difference and a ten-hour flying distance, but shared so many common ideas and inclinations it was as if they had grown up together. The architect and Brenda had the same tastes, from classical music to Persian cats. He tried to travel to California to meet her on a couple of occasions, but his work prevented him from doing so. She wanted to go to London, but he insisted that he needed to see her in her environment, in her house, with her friends and her show cats. Finally they agreed to meet when he returned from Turkey, where he had an important project.

  Soon after, Brenda got a call from a lawyer. The architect had run over a person while driving a rented car in Istanbul. He had been arrested and was desperate; the conditions in the prison were a nightmare and he urgently needed a loan to make bail. The money had to be deposited immediately in a specific bank account.

  Brenda was very much in love, but she was not stupid. The figure was very high, even for someone with as many resources as she had, and before wiring the money she consulted a local detective. “Look, lady. I am not going to charge you because I don’t need to investigate this case, I know it by heart,” the detective said, and explained that the guy was a well-known swindler, an unemployed actor from Los Angeles who specialized in deceiving lonely and wealthy women on the Internet. He found out as much as possible about them in order to present himself as the ideal suitor. Brenda had a very informative webpage and he got the rest by using his aristocratic British accent during their long conversations. He seduced her as he had done before with several other women.

  She did not send him the money for the supposed bail and never heard from him again. Her disappointment was so great that she couldn’t even lament the loss of love; instead, she was grateful to have been saved in time. According to her, the moral of the story was that one shouldn’t trust English architects.

  I am not as smart as Brenda. I would have gotten the money he requested and would have traveled that same night to Turkey to rescue the man from his dungeon. Fortunately, I didn’t have to take any of those risks. And I am not alone either, as I had envisioned, because heaven sent me a troubadour I was not expecting.

  * * *

  We have talked about sexual passion and romantic passion. But what does it mean simply to be passionate? According to the dictionary, it’s a disorderly mood disturbance; it is also described as a powerful and irresistible emotion that can lead to obsessive or dangerous actions.

  My own definition is less somber. Passion is unbridled enthusiasm, exuberant energy, and determined devotion to someone or something. The good thing about passion is that it pushes us forward and keeps us committed and young. I have been training for years to be a passionate old woman, just as others train to climb mountains or play chess. I don’t want to allow caution, so often prevalent in later years, to destroy my passion for life.

  Almost all the female protagonists of my books are passionate because they are the people who interest me. I want characters capable of committing obsessive and dangerous actions, as the dictionary says. A safe and quiet life is not good material for fiction.

  I have sometimes been described as a passionate person because I never sat quietly in my house, as was expected of me. I have to clarify that my risky endeavors were motivated not always by a passionate temperament but because circumstances threw me in unexpected directions. I did the best I could. I have lived in a rough sea where waves would lift me and then drop me to the bottom. This surge has been so strong that before, when things went well, I would prepare for a violent fall, which I considered inevitable, instead of relaxing in the tranquillity of the moment. Now it’s not like that. Now I drift along day after day, happy just to float for as long as possible.

  * * *

  Though I always had passion when I was a young woman, I don’t think I had literary ambition. I think the idea never crossed my mind because ambition was a male thing; when applied to women it was an insult. The Women’s Liberation Movement allowed some women to appropriate this concept, just as they did with assertiveness, competitiveness, desire for power, eroticism, and the self-confidence to say no. Once in a while the women of my generation grabbed the opportunities that were available—not that there were many—but we rarely had a plan for success.

  In the absence of ambition I had good luck. Nobody, let alone I, could foresee the immediate acceptance that I enjoyed with my first novel and have experienced with the rest of my books. Maybe my grandmother was right when she prophesied that her granddaughter was going to be fortunate because I had a birthmark in the shape of a star on my back. For years I thought that birthmark was unique, but as it happens it’s very common, and moreover it fades over time.

  I was always disciplined in my work because I internalized my grandfather’s admonition that leisure time was dead time. I followed that rule for decades, but I have learned that leisure can be fertile soil where creativity grows. I am no longer tormented by an excess of discipline, as I was before. Now I write for the pleasure of telling a story word by word, step by step, enjoying the process without thinking of the result. I don’t tie myself to a chair eight or ten hours a day, writing with the concentration of a notary. I can relax because I have the rare pr
ivilege of having loyal readers and good publishers who don’t try to influence my work.

  I write about what I care for, in my own rhythm. In those leisure hours that my grandfather considered wasted, the ghosts of imagination become well-defined characters. They are unique, they have their own voices, and they are willing to tell me their stories if I give them enough time. I feel them around me with such certitude that I wonder why nobody else perceives them.

  The ability to overcome obsessive discipline didn’t happen in one day; it took me years. In therapy and in my minimal spiritual practice I learned to tell my superego to back off and leave me alone; I want to enjoy my freedom. Superego is not the same as consciousness; the former punishes us and the latter guides us. I stopped listening to the overseer inside me who demands compliance and performance with the voice of my grandfather. The race uphill is over; now I stroll calmly in the land of intuition, which has turned out to be the best environment for writing.

  * * *

  My first novel, The House of the Spirits, was published in 1982 after the boom in Latin American literature, as the set of magnificent books written by a group of famous writers from my continent was called. The boom was a male phenomenon. Women writers in Latin America were systematically ignored by critics, professors, students of literature, and publishing houses. If they were published at all, it was in small editions without adequate promotion or distribution. The reception my novel got surprised everybody. It was said that it had taken the literary world by storm. Wow! Suddenly it became obvious that the readers of novels were mostly women, and not just in Latin America. There was an important market out there, just waiting for publishing houses to grab it. That’s exactly what they did, and now as much fiction is published by women as by male writers.