My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile

by Isabel Allende

  The valle central is the most prosperous area of the country, a land of grapes and apples, where industries are clustered and a third of the population lives in the capital city. Santiago was founded in 1541 by Pedro de Valdivia. After walking for months through the dry north, it seemed to him that he’d reached the Garden of Eden. In Chile everything is centralized in the capital, despite the efforts of various governments that over the span of half a century have tried to distribute power among the provinces. If it doesn’t happen in Santiago, it may as well not happen at all, although life in the rest of the country is a thousand times calmer and more pleasant.

  The zona sur, the southern zone, begins at Puerto Montt, at 40 degrees latitude south, an enchanted region of forests, lakes, rivers, and volcanoes. Rain and more rain nourishes the tangled vegetation of the cool forests where our native trees rise tall, ancients of thousand-year growth now threatened by the timber industry. Moving south, the traveler crosses pampas lashed by furious winds, then the country strings out into a rosary of unpopulated islands and milky fogs, a labyrinth of fjords, islets, canals, and water on all sides. The last city on the continent is Punta Arenas, wind-bitten, harsh, and proud; a high, barren land of blizzards.

  Chile owns a section of the little-explored Antarctic continent, a world of ice and solitude, of infinite white, where fables are born and men die: Chile ends at the South Pole. For a long time, no one assigned any value to Antarctica, but now we know how many mineral riches it shelters, in addition to being a paradise of marine life, so there is no country that doesn’t have an eye on it. In the summertime, a cruise ship can visit there with relative ease, but the price of such a cruise is as the price of rubies, and for the present, only rich tourists and poor but determined ecologists can make the trip.

  In 1888 Chile annexed the Isla de Pascua, mysterious Easter Island, the navel of the world, or Rapanui, as it is called in the natives’ language. The island is lost in the immensity of the Pacific Ocean, 2,500 miles from continental Chile, more or less six hours by jet from Valparaíso or Tahiti. I am not sure why it belongs to us. In olden times, a ship captain planted a flag, and a slice of the planet became legally yours, regardless of whether that pleased its inhabitants, in this case peaceful Polynesians. This was the practice of European nations, and Chile could not lag behind. For the islanders, contact with South America was fatal. In the mid-nineteenth century, most of the male population was taken off to Peru to work as slaves in the guano deposits, while Chile shrugged its shoulders at the fate of its forgotten citizens. The treatment those poor men received was so bad that it caused an international protest in Europe, and, after a long diplomatic struggle, the last fifteen survivors were returned to their families. Those few went back infected with small pox, and within a brief time the illness exterminated eighty percent of the natives on the island. The fate of the remainder was not much better. Imported sheep ate the vegetation, turning the landscape into a barren husk of lava, and the negligence of the authorities—in this case the Chilean navy—drove the inhabitants into poverty. Only in the last two decades, tourism and the interest of the world scientific community have rescued Rapanui.

  Scattered across the Easter Island are monumental statues of volcanic stone, some weighing more than twenty tons. These moais have intrigued experts for centuries. To sculpt them on the slopes of the volcanoes and then drag them across rough ground, to erect them on often-inaccessible bases and place hats of red stone atop them, was the task of titans. How was it done? There are no traces of an advanced civilization that can explain such prowess. Two different groups populated the island. According to legend, one of those groups, the Arikis, had supernatural mental powers, which they used to levitate the moais and transport them, floating effortlessly, to their altars on the steep slopes. What a tragedy that this technique has been lost to the world! In 1940, the Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl built a balsa raft, which he christened Kon Tiki, and sailed from South America to Easter Island to prove that there had been contact between the Incas and the Easter Islanders.

  I traveled to Easter Island in the summer of 1974, when there was only one flight a week and tourism was nearly nonexistent. Enchanted, I stayed three weeks longer than I had planned, and thus happened to be on the spot when the first television broadcast was celebrated with a visit by General Pinochet, who had led the military junta that had replaced Chile’s democracy some months earlier. The television was received with more enthusiasm than the brand-new dictator. The general’s stay was extremely colorful, but this isn’t the time to go into those details. It’s enough to say that a mischievous little cloud strategically hovered above his head every time he wanted to speak in public, leaving him wringing wet and limp as a dishrag. He had come with the idea of delivering property titles to the islanders, but no one was terribly interested in receiving them, since from the most ancient times everyone has known exactly what belongs to whom. They were afraid, and rightly so, that the only use for that piece of government paper would be to complicate their lives.

  Chile also owns the island of Juan Fernández, where the Scots sailor Alexander Selkirk, the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe, was set ashore by his captain in 1704. Selkirk lived on the island for more than four years—without a domesticated parrot or the company of a native named Friday, as portrayed in the novel—until he was rescued by another captain and returned to England, where his fate did not exactly improve. The determined tourist, after a bumpy flight in a small airplane or an interminable trip by boat, can visit the cave where the Scotsman survived by eating herbs and fish.

  Being so far from everything gives us Chileans an insular mentality, and the majestic beauty of the land makes us take on airs. We believe we are the center of the world—in our view, Greenwich should have been set in Santiago—and we turn our backs on Latin America, always comparing ourselves instead to Europe. We are very self-centered: the rest of the universe exists only to consume our wines and produce soccer teams we can beat.

  My advice to the visitor is not to question the marvels he hears about my country, its wine, and its women, because the foreigner is not allowed to criticize—for that we have more than fifteen million natives who do that all the time. If Marco Polo had descended on our coasts after thirty years of adventuring through Asia, the first thing he would have been told is that our empanadas are much more delicious than anything in the cuisine of the Celestial Empire. (Ah, that’s another of our characteristics: we make statements without any basis, but in a tone of such certainty that no one doubts us.) I confess that I, too, suffer from that chilling chauvinism. The first time I visited San Francisco, and there before my eyes were those gentle golden hills, the majesty of forests, and the green mirror of the bay, my only comment was that it looked a lot like the coast of Chile. Later I learned that the sweetest fruit, the most delicate wines, and the finest fish are imported from Chile. Naturally.

  To see my country with the heart, one must read Pablo Neruda, the national poet who in his verses immortalized the imposing landscapes, the aromas and dawns, the tenacious rain and dignified poverty, the stoicism and the hospitality, of Chile. That is the land of my nostalgia, the one I invoke in my solitude, the one that appears as a backdrop in so many of my stories, the one that comes to me in my dreams. There are other faces of Chile, of course: the materialistic and arrogant face, the face of the tiger that spends its life counting its stripes and cleaning its whiskers; another, depressed, crisscrossed by the brutal scars of the past; one that shows a smiling face to tourists and bankers; and the one that with resignation awaits the next geological or political cataclysm. Chile has a little of everything.

  DULCE DE LECHE, ORGAN GRINDERS, AND GYPSIES

  My family is from Santiago, but that doesn’t explain my traumas, there are worse places under the sun. I grew up there, but now I scarcely recognize it, and get lost in its streets. The capital was founded following the classic pattern for Spanish cities of the time: a plaza de armas
in the center, from which parallel and perpendicular streets radiated. Of that there is nothing but a bare memory. Santiago has spread out like a demented octopus, extending its eager tentacles in every direction; today five and a half million people live there, surviving however they can. It would be a pretty city, because it’s well cared for, clean, and filled with gardens, if it didn’t sit under a dark sombrero of pollution that in wintertime kills infants in their cradles, old people in nursing homes, and birds in the air. Santiaguinos have become accustomed to following the daily smog index just as faithfully as they keep track of the stock market or the soccer results. On days when the index climbs too high, the volume of vehicles allowed to circulate is restricted according to the number on the license plate, children don’t play sports at school, and the rest of the population tries to breathe as little as possible. The first rain of the year washes the grime from the atmosphere and falls like acid over the city. If you walk outside without an umbrella you will feel as if lemon juice has been squirted in your eyes, but don’t worry, no one has been blinded yet. Not all days are like that, sometimes the day dawns with a clear sky and you can appreciate the magnificent spectacle of snow-capped mountains.

  There are cities, like Caracas or Mexico City, where poor and rich mix, but in Santiago the lines of demarcation are clear. The distance between the mansions of the wealthy on the foothills of the cordillera, with guards at the gate and four-car garages, and the shacks of the proletarian population where fifteen people live crowded together in two rooms without a bath, is astronomical. Every time I go to Santiago I notice that part of the city is in black-and-white and the other in Technicolor. In the city center and in the worker’s districts everything seems gray; the few trees that survive are exhausted, the walls faded, the clothing of the inhabitants very worn, even the dogs that wander among the garbage cans are mutts of indefinite color. In middle-class neighborhoods there are leafy trees, and the houses are modest but well cared for. In the areas where the wealthy live only the vegetation can be appreciated: the mansions are hidden behind impenetrable walls, no one walks down the streets, and the dogs are mastiffs let out only at night to guard the property.

  Summer in the capital is long and hot. A fine, yellowish dust blankets the city during those months; the sun melts the asphalt and affects the mood of the inhabitants, so anyone who can tries to get away. When I was a girl, my family went for two months to the beach, a true safari in my grandfather’s automobile, loaded with a ton of bundles on the luggage rack and three totally carsick children inside. At that time the roads were terrible and we had to snake up and down hills, which strained the vehicle to the breaking point. We always had to change tires once or twice, a task that entailed unloading all the bundles. My grandfather carried a huge pistol in his lap, like the ones used when people still fought duels, because he thought that bandits lurked on the Curacaví Hill, appropriately called the Graveyard. If there were highwaymen, they were probably just drifters who would have cut and run at the sound of the first shot, but just in case, we prayed as we drove past the hill—undoubtedly an infallible protection against assault, since we never saw the famous bandidos. Nothing of that nature exists today. Now you can drive to seaside resorts in less than two hours, with excellent highways all the way. Until recently the only bad roads were those that led to the areas where the wealthy summer, part of their fight to preserve their exclusive beaches. They are horrified when they see the hoi polloi arriving in buses on the weekends with their dark-skinned children, their watermelon and roast chicken, and their radios and boom boxes blaring popular music—which is why they kept the dirt roads in the worst possible state. That has changed. As a rightist senator pontificated, “When democracy gets democratic, it doesn’t work at all.” The country is connected by one long artery, the Pan American and Austral Highways, and by an extensive network of paved and very safe roads. No guerrillas on the lookout for someone to kidnap, or gangs of drug traffickers defending their territory, or corrupt police looking for bribes, as in other Latin American countries rather more interesting than ours. You are much more likely to be mugged in the heart of the city than on a little-traveled road in the country.

  Almost as soon as you leave Santiago, the countryside becomes bucolic: poplar-lined pastures, hills, and vineyards. To the visitor I recommend stopping to buy fruit and vegetables in the stands along the highway, or to take a little detour and drive into the villages and look for the house where you see a white cloth fluttering; there they serve leavened bread, honey, and eggs the color of gold.

  Along the coastal route there are beaches, picturesque little villages, and coves where fishermen anchor their boats and spread their nets. There you find the fabulous treasures of our cuisine: first of all, the conger, king of the sea, wearing its jacket of jeweled scales; then the corbina, with its succulent white meat, accompanied by a court of a hundred other more modest but equally savory fish. Then comes the chorus of our shellfish: spider crabs, oysters small and large, mussels, abalone, langoustine, sea urchins, and many others, including some with such a questionable appearance that no foreigner dares try them, like the pícoroco, iodine and salt, pure marine essence. Our fish are so delicious that to prepare them you don’t even need to know how to cook. You arrange a bed of minced onion in the bottom of a clay platter or Pyrex baking dish, lay the fresh fish, dotted with butter and sprinkled with salt and pepper and swimming in lemon juice, over the onion. Bake the fish in a hot oven until done—but not too long, you don’t want it to get dry. Serve with one of our chilled white wines in the company of your closest friends.

  Every year in December we would go with my grandfather to buy the Christmas turkey, which the campesinos raised for that holiday. I can see that old man, hobbling along on his bad leg, chasing around a field trying to catch the bird in question. He had to time his leap perfectly to fall on it, press it to the ground, and hold it while one of us struggled to bind its feet with a cord. Then he had to give the campesino a tip to kill the turkey out of sight of us children, otherwise we would have refused to taste it once it was cooked. It’s very difficult to cut the throat of some creature with which you’ve established a personal relationship, as we could attest from the time my grandfather brought home a young goat to fatten in the patio of our house and roast on his birthday. That goat died of old age. And as it turned out, it wasn’t a nanny but a male, and as soon as it grew horns, it attacked us at will.

  The Santiago of my childhood had the pretensions of a large city but the soul of a village. Everything was public knowledge. Did someone miss mass on Sunday? That news traveled fast, and by Wednesday the parish priest was knocking at the door of the sinner to find out the reason. Men were stiff with hair pomade, starch, and vanity; women wore hat pins and kid gloves; elegant dress was expected when going into “the city” or to a movie—which people still thought of as a “talkie.” Few houses had a refrigerator—in that my grandfather’s house was very modern—and every day a hunchbacked man came by to deliver blocks of ice in sawdust for the neighborhood iceboxes. Our refrigerator, which ran for forty years without a repair, was fitted with a motor as noisy as a submarine, and from time to time shook the house with fits of coughing. The cook had to use a broom to fork out the bodies of electrocuted cats that had crawled beneath it to get warm. In the long run, that was a good method of birth control because dozens of cats were born on the roof tiles, and if some hadn’t been zapped by the refrigerator we would have been inundated.

  In our house, as in every Chilean home, there were animals. Dogs are acquired in different ways: inherited, received as a gift, picked up after they’ve been run over but not killed, or because they followed a child home from school, after which there’s not a chance of throwing them out. This has always been the case and I hope it never changes. I don’t know a single normal Chilean who ever bought a dog; the only people who do that are the fanatics from the Kennel Club, but no one takes them seriously. Almost all the dogs in Chile are called Blackie, w
hatever their color, and cats bear the generic names of Puss or Kitty; our family pets, however, always had Biblical names: Barrabas, Salome, Cain, except for one dog of dubious lineage whom we called Chickenpox because he appeared during an epidemic of that disease. Gangs of ownerless dogs roam the cities and towns of my country, not in the form of the hungry, miserable packs you see in other parts of the world but, rather, as organized communities. They are mild-mannered animals, satisfied with their social lot, a little lackadaisical. Once I read a study in which the author maintained that if all existing breeds of dogs were liberally intermingled, within a few generations they would narrow down to one type: a strong, astute beast of medium size, with short, wiry hair, a pointed muzzle, and willful tail: that is, the typical Chilean stray. I suppose we will come to that, and I hope also that with time we will succeed in fusing all human races; the result will be a rather short individual of indefinite color, adaptable, resilient, and resigned to the ups and downs of existence, like us Chileans.

  In those days we went twice a day to the corner bakery to buy bread, and brought it home wrapped in a white cloth. The aroma of that bread just out of the oven, still warm, is one of the most tenacious memories of my childhood. Milk was a foamy cream sold from a tin can. A little bell that hung from the neck of the horse, and the smell of the stable invading the street, announced the arrival of the milk cart. Maids lined up with their bowls and basins and bought what was needed by the cup, which the milkman measured out by thrusting his hairy arm up to the armpit into large tin cans that were always swarming with flies. Sometimes several liters extra were bought to make manjar blanco, also called dulce de leche, a kind of blancmange that lasted several months when stored in the cool shadows of the cellar, where the home-bottled wine was also kept. First a fire of kindling and charcoal was built in the patio. A tripod was set over it that supported an iron kettle black from use. The ingredients were added in proportions of four cups of milk to one of sugar, and that mixture was flavored with two vanilla beans and the peel of a lemon and then boiled patiently for hours, occasionally stirred with a long wooden spoon. We children would watch from a distance, waiting for the process to end and the sweet to cool so we could lick the kettle. We were not allowed to come anywhere near it during the cooking; every time we would be told the sad story of the greedy little boy who fell into the pot and, as the tale went, “was dissolved in the boiling milk till not even his bones could be found.” When pasteurized milk in bottles was invented, housewives dressed in their best clothes to be photographed—Hollywood-style—beside the white truck that replaced the unsanitary cart. Today not only are there whole, skim, and flavored milks, you can also buy bottled manjar blanco, no one makes it at home anymore.