My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile

by Isabel Allende

  This same admiral justified the government’s decision to put him in charge of the economy by saying that he had studied economy as a hobby in courses of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And with the same candor he stated on the record his opinion that “War is the most beautiful profession there is. And what is war? The continuation of peace in which all the things peace does not allow are achieved, in order to lead man to the perfect dialectic, which is the extinction of the enemy.”

  In 1980 when these gems were appearing in the press, I was no longer in Chile. I stayed awhile, but when I felt repression tightening like a noose around my neck, I left. I watched the country and its people change. I tried to adapt and not attract attention, as my grandfather had asked, but it was impossible because in my situation as a journalist I knew too much. At first my fear was something vague and difficult to define, like a bad smell. I discounted the terrible rumors that were circulating, alleging that there was no proof, and when proof was presented to me, I said those were exceptions. I thought I was safe because I wasn’t visibly “involved” in politics, in the meantime sheltering desperate fugitives in my home or helping them over embassy walls in search of asylum. I thought that if I were arrested I could explain that I was acting out of humanitarian motives. Apparently I was somewhere on the moon. I broke out in hives from head to foot, I couldn’t sleep, and the sound of a car in the street after curfew would leave me trembling for hours. It took me a year and a half to realize the risk I was running, and finally, in 1975, following a particularly agitated and danger-filled week, I left for Venezuela, carrying a handful of Chilean soil from my garden. A month later, my husband and my children joined me in Caracas. I suppose I suffer the affliction of many Chileans who left during that time: I feel guilty for having abandoned my country. I have asked myself a thousand times what would have happened had I stayed, like so many who fought the dictatorship from within, until it was overthrown in 1989. No one can answer that question, but of one thing I am sure: I would not be a writer had I not experienced that exile.

  From the instant I crossed the cordillera of the Andes one rainy winter morning, I unconsciously began the process of inventing a country. I have flown over those mountains many times since, and I am always deeply moved because the memory of that morning assaults me full-force as I look down on the magnificent spectacle of the mountains. The infinite solitude of those white peaks, those dizzying abysses, the blue depths of the sky, symbolizes my farewell to Chile. I never imagined I would be gone for so long. Like all Chileans— except the military—I was convinced that given our tradition, the soldiers would soon return to their barracks, there would be a new election, and we would have a democratic government again. I must have intuited something in regard to the future, however, because I spent my first night in Caracas crying inconsolably in a borrowed bed. Deep down, I sensed that something had ended forever, and that my life was taking a new direction. I have felt the pangs of nostalgia ever since that first night, and they did not lessen for many years—until the dictatorship fell and I again stood on the soil of my country. Through the intervening years, I lived with my eyes turned south, listening to the news, waiting for the moment I could go back, as I selected my memories, altered some events, exaggerated or ignored others, refined my emotions, and so gradually constructed the imaginary country in which I have sunk my roots.

  There are exiles that gnaw and others

  that are like consuming fire.

  There is heartache for the murdered country

  that rises from below

  from feet and from roots

  and suddenly the man is suffocating,

  he no longer knows corn tassels,

  the guitar has been silenced,

  there is no air for that mouth

  he can’t live without a land,

  and then he falls to his knees

  not onto native soil, but into death.

  PABLO NERUDA,

  “EXILES” FROM CANTOS

  CEREMONIALES

  Among the notable changes produced by the values and the economic system instituted by the dictatorship is that ostentation became fashionable. If you aren’t wealthy, you should go into debt to look as if you are, even if you have holes in your socks. Consumerism is the current ideology in Chile, as it is in most places in the world. Economic policy, negotiating, and corruption that reached levels never seen in the nation, created a new caste of millionaires. One of the positive effects of it was that it shattered the wall separating the social classes; old family names are no longer the only passport for being accepted in society. Those who thought of themselves as aristocrats were swept off the map by young impresarios and technocrats riding their chrome motorcycles and driving their Mercedes-Benzes, and by a few military officers who got rich in key posts of the government, industry, and banking. For the first time, men in uniform were everywhere: ministries, universities, corporations, salons, and clubs.

  The hard question is why at least one third of Chile’s total population backed the dictatorship, even though for most life wasn’t easy and even adherents of the military government lived in fear. Repression was far reaching, although there’s no doubt that the poor and the leftists suffered most. Everyone felt he was being spied on, no one could say that he was completely safe from the claws of the state. It is a fact that information was censored and brainwashing was the goal of a vigorous propaganda machine; it is also true that the opposition lost many years and a lot of blood before it could get organized. But none of this explains the dictator’s popularity. The percentage of the population that approved of him was not motivated solely by fear: Chileans like authority. They believed that the military was going to “clean up” the country. “They put an end to delinquency, we don’t see walls defaced with graffiti any more, everything is clean, and, thanks to the curfew, our husbands get home early,” one friend told me. For her those things compensated for the loss of civil rights because she wasn’t directly affected: she was in the fortunate position of not having her children lose their jobs without compensation, or of being arrested. I understand why the economic right, which historically has not been characterized as a defender of democracy and which during those years made more money than ever before, backed the dictatorship, but what about the rest? I haven’t found a satisfactory answer to that question, only conjectures.

  Pinochet represented the intransigent father, capable of imposing strict discipline. The three years of the Unidad Popular were a time of experimentation, change, and disorder; the country was weary. Repression put an end to politicking, and neoliberalism forced Chileans to work, keep their mouths closed, and be productive, so that corporations could compete favorably in international markets. Nearly everything was privatized, including health, education, and social security. The need to survive drove private initiative. Today Chile not only exports more salmon than Alaska, but also, among hundreds of other nontraditional products, ships out frogs’ legs, goose feathers, and smoked garlic. The U.S. press celebrated the triumph of Pinochet’s economic system and gave him credit for having turned a poor country into the star of Latin America. None of the indices, however, revealed the distribution of wealth; nothing was known of the poverty and uncertainty in which several million people were living. There was no mention of the soup kitchens in poor neighborhoods that fed thousands of families—there were more than five hundred in Santiago alone—or of the fact that private charities and churches were trying to replace the social services that are the responsibility of the state. There was no open forum for discussing government actions or those of businessmen; public services were handed over to private companies, and foreign corporations acquired natural resources such as forests and oceans, which have been exploited with very little ecological conscience. A callous society was created in which profit is sacred; if you are poor it’s your own fault, and if you complain, that makes you a Communist. Freedom consists of having many brand names to choose from when you go out to buy on credit.

&
nbsp; The figures of economic growth, which won the Wall Street Journal’s praise, did not represent real development, since 10 percent of the population possessed half the nation’s wealth and there were a hundred persons who earned more than the state spent on all social services combined. According to the World Bank, Chile is one of the countries with the worst distribution of income, right alongside Kenya and Zimbabwe. The head of a Chilean corporation earns the same or more than his equivalent in the United States, while a Chilean laborer earns approximately fifteen times less than a North American worker. Even today, after more than a decade of democracy, the disparities in wealth are staggering because the economic model hasn’t changed. The three presidents who followed Pinochet have had their hands tied; the right controls the economy, the Congress, and the press. Chile, nonetheless, has proposed to become a developed country within the span of a decade, which is possible if, in fact, wealth is redistributed in a more equitable fashion.

  Who was Pinochet, really? This military man who so deeply marked Chile with his capitalist revolution and two decades of repression? (He is still alive but I use the past tense because he is under house arrest and the country is trying to forget he existed. He belongs to the past, even though his shadow still darkens the country.) Why was he so feared? Why was he admired? I never met him personally and I didn’t live in Chile during the greater part of his government, so I can only judge him by his actions and what others have written about him. I suppose that to understand Pinochet you need to read novels like Mario Vargas Llosa’s Feast of the Goat or Gabriel García Márquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch, because he had a lot in common with the typical figure of the Latin American caudillo so aptly described by those authors. He was a crude, cold, slippery, authoritarian man who had no scruples or sense of loyalty other than to the army as an institution—though not to his comrades in arms, whom he had killed according to his convenience, men like General Carlos Prats and others. He believed he was chosen by God and history to save his country. He was fond of medals and military paraphernalia, to the degree that he established a foundation bearing his name to promote and preserve his image. He was astute and suspicious, but he could be genial, and at times even likeable. Admired by some, despised by others, feared by all, he was possibly the man in our history who has held the greatest power in his hands for the longest period of time.

  CHILE IN MY HEART

  In Chile people try to avoid talking about the past. The youngest generations believe the world began with them; anything that happened before they were born doesn’t interest them. And it may be that the rest of the population shares a collective shame regarding what took place during the dictatorship, the same feeling that Germany had after Hitler. Both young and old want to avoid discord. No one wants to be led into discussions that drive even deeper wedges. Furthermore, people are too busy trying to get to the end of the month with a salary that doesn’t stretch far enough, and quietly doing their job so they won’t be fired, to be concerned about politics. It’s assumed that digging too much into the past can “destabilize” the democracy and provoke the military, a fear that is totally unfounded, since the democracy has been strengthened in recent years—since 1989—and the military has lost prestige. Besides, this is not a good time for military coups. Despite its many problems—poverty, inequality, crime, drugs, guerrilla wars—Latin America has opted for democracy, and for its part, the United States is beginning to realize that its policy of supporting tyranny does not solve problems—it merely creates new ones.

  The military coup didn’t come out of nowhere; the forces that upheld the dictatorship were there, we just hadn’t perceived them. Defects that had lain there beneath the surface blossomed in all their glory and majesty during that period. It isn’t possible that repression on such a grand scale could have been organized overnight unless a totalitarian tendency already existed in a sector of the society; apparently we were not as democratic as we believed. As for the government of Salvador Allende, it wasn’t as innocent as I like to imagine; it suffered from ineptitude, corruption, and pride. In real life, it may not always be easy to distinguish between heroes and villains, but I can assure you that in democratic governments, including that of the Unidad Popular, there was never the cruelty the nation has suffered every time the military intervenes.

  Like thousands of other Chilean families, Miguel and I left with our two children because we didn’t want to go on living in a dictatorship. That was 1975. The country we chose to emigrate to was Venezuela because it was one of the last remaining democracies in Latin America, shaken by military coups but one of the few countries that would grant us visas and the opportunity for work. Neruda says:

  How can I live so far away

  from what I loved, what I love?

  From the changing seasons, clothed

  in steam and cold smoke?

  (Strangely enough, the thing I missed the most during those years of self-imposed exile were the seasons of the year. In the eternal green of the tropics, I was a complete stranger.)

  In the seventies Venezuela was experiencing the peak of the oil boom, black gold gushed from its soil like a raging river. Everything seemed easy; with a minimum of work and decent connections, people lived better than anywhere else. Money flowed like water, and people spent it as if there were no tomorrow. More champagne was consumed in Venezuela than in any other country in the world. For those of us who had gone through the economic crisis of the government of the Unidad Popular, in which toilet paper was a luxury, and then escaped tremendous repression, Venezuela was beyond our comprehension. We couldn’t take in the leisure time, the easy money, and the freedom of that country. We Chileans, so serious, so sober and prudent, so fond of rules and legalisms, couldn’t understand that unfettered joy and indifference to discipline. Accustomed to euphemisms, we were offended by the frankness of speech. We Chileans numbered several thousand, and soon we were joined by others escaping from the “dirty wars” in Argentina and Uruguay. Some arrived with marks of recent imprisonment; all came with an air of defeat.

  My husband found work in the interior of the country and I stayed in Caracas with our two children, who begged me every day to go back to Chile, where they had left grandparents, friends, school—in short, everything they knew. That separation from my husband proved fatal; I believe it marked the beginning of the end of our lives as man and wife. We weren’t the exception, because most of the couples who left Chile together ended up separated. Far away from country and family, the pairs found themselves face to face, naked and vulnerable, without the family pressure, the social crutches and routines that hold two people together. The circumstances were no help: fatigue, fear, insecurity, poverty, confusion; if in addition you were separated geographically, as happened with us, the prognosis was poor. Unless you’re lucky and your bond is very strong, love dies.

  I couldn’t find a job as a journalist. What I’d done earlier in Chile made little impression, partly because exiles tend to inflate their credentials and in the end no one believes much of anything; there were false doctors who had barely graduated from high school and real doctors who ended up driving taxis. I didn’t know a soul, and there, as in the rest of Latin America, you don’t get anywhere without connections. I had to earn a living by taking insignificant jobs, none of which is worth mentioning. I didn’t understand the Venezuelan temperament, I confused their deeply felt sense of equality with bad manners, their extroversion with pedantry, their emotionalism with immaturity. I came from a country in which violence had been institutionalized and yet I was shocked by how quickly Venezuelans lost control. (Once at a movie theater a woman pulled a pistol from her handbag because I accidentally sat in a seat she had reserved.) I didn’t know their customs; for example, they rarely say no because they think it’s rude: they would rather say “Come back tomorrow.” I would go to look for a job and they would interview me with a great show of friendliness, offer me coffee, and say good-bye with a firm handshake and that “Come back tomor
row.” So I would come back the next day, and the same routine would be repeated until finally I gave up. I felt that my life was a failure; I was thirty-five years old and I thought I had no future before me except to grow old and die of boredom. Now when I remember that time, I realize that opportunities existed but I didn’t see them; I was confused and fearful, and incapable of dancing to their tune. Instead of making an effort to learn about the land that had so generously taken me in, and learn to love it, I was obsessed with going home to Chile. When I compare my experience as an exile with my current situation as an immigrant, I can see how different my state of mind is. In the former instance, you are forced to leave, whether you’re escaping or expelled, and you feel like a victim who has lost half her life; in the latter it’s your own decision, you are moving toward an adventure, master of your fate. The exile looks toward the past, licking his wounds, the immigrant looks toward the future, ready to take advantage of the opportunities within his reach.