My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile

by Isabel Allende

  We Chileans in Caracas got together to listen to the records of Violeta Parra and Víctor Jara, to exchange posters of Allende and Che Guevara, and to repeat a thousand times over the same rumors about our distant homeland. Every time we met we ate empanadas; I got so sick of them that to this day I can’t eat one. Every day new compatriots arrived with terrible stories, swearing that the dictatorship was about to collapse, but months went by and, far from collapsing, that government seemed stronger and stronger, despite internal protests and an enormous groundswell of international solidarity. Now no one confused Chile with China, and no one asked why we didn’t wear pineapples on our heads; the figure of Salvador Allende and the resulting political events had placed the country on the map. One photograph that made the rounds became famous: the military junta with Pinochet in the center, arms crossed, dark glasses, protruding bulldog chin—a true cliché of Latin American tyranny. Strict censorship of the press prevented most Chileans from realizing that such solidarity existed outside the country. I had lived a year and a half under that censorship, and I didn’t know that elsewhere the name of Allende had become a symbol, and when I left the country I was amazed at the reverential respect my surname occasioned. Unfortunately, that consideration didn’t help me find work, which I desperately needed.

  From Caracas I wrote to my grandfather, whom I hadn’t had the courage to say good-bye to; I wouldn’t have been able to explain my reasons for escaping without admitting that I had disobeyed his instructions not to get into trouble. In my letters I painted a rosy picture of our lives but it didn’t take enormous perception to read between the lines, and my grandfather must have guessed my true situation. Soon that correspondence turned into pure nostalgia, a patient exercise of remembering the past and the land I had left behind. I started reading Neruda again, and quoted him in my letters. Sometimes my grandfather answered with lines from other, older, poets.

  I won’t repeat here the details of those years, the good things that happened, and the bad, such as failed love affairs, loneliness, struggles, and sorrows, because I have already told about them elsewhere. It’s enough to say that the feelings of loneliness and of being an outsider that I’d had since I was a child were accentuated. I was cut off from reality, submerged in an imaginary world, while right before my eyes my children were growing up and my marriage was falling apart. I tried to write, but all I could do was go over and over the same ideas. At night, after my family went to bed, I locked myself in the kitchen, where I spent hours pounding the keys of an old Underwood, filling pages and pages with the same sentences; afterward I would rip them to pieces, like Jack Nicholson in that hair-raising film The Shining, which left half the world with nightmares for months. Nothing remains of those efforts . . . nothing but confetti. And so seven years went by.

  On January 8, 1981, I began another letter to my grandfather, who by then was nearly a hundred and was dying. From the first sentence, I knew it wasn’t a letter like the others and that it might never reach the hands of the person to whom I was writing. I wrote to ease my anguish, because that old man, the storehouse of my oldest memories, was ready to leave this world. Without him, the anchor in the land of my childhood, my exile seemed definitive. Naturally I wrote about Chile and my far-flung family. I had more than enough material to write about with the hundreds of stories that had poured from his lips over the years: our proto-macho forefathers; my grandmother, who moved the sugar bowl with pure spiritual energy; Aunt Rosa, who died at the end of the nineteenth century, and whose ghost appeared at night to play the piano; the uncle who tried to cross the cordillera in a dirigible; and all those other characters who shouldn’t simply fade into oblivion. When I told those tales to my children, they looked at me with pitying expressions and rolled their eyes. After crying so hard to go back, Paula and Nicolás had finally adapted to Venezuela and didn’t want to hear anything about Chile, and especially not their bizarre relatives. They never took part in the nostalgic conversations among us older exiles, in the failed attempts to make Chilean dishes with Caribbean ingredients, or in the pathetic celebrations of national holidays we improvised in Venezuela. My children were embarrassed to be foreigners.

  Soon I lost track of where that strange letter was going, but I kept writing it for a whole year, at the end of which my grandfather had died and my first novel was sitting on the kitchen table: The House of the Spirits. If someone had asked what it was about, I would have said that it was an attempt to recapture my lost country, to reunite my scattered family, to revive the dead and preserve their memories, which were beginning to be blown away in the whirlwind of exile. It wasn’t a small thing I was attempting. . . . Now I have a simpler explanation: I was dying to tell that story.

  I have a romantic image of a Chile frozen at the beginning of the seventies. For years I believed that when democracy was restored everything would be as it had been before, but even that frozen image was deceptive. Maybe the place I’m homesick for never existed. Now when I visit, I must compare the real Chile to the sentimental image I’ve carried for twenty-five years. Since I’ve lived outside the country for so long, I tend to exaggerate the virtues of our national character and forget the disagreeable aspects. I forget the snobbishness and hypocrisy of the upper class; I forget how conservative and macho the greater part of the society is; I forget the crushing authority of the Catholic Church. I am frightened by the rancor and violence nourished by inequality, but I am also moved by the good things that have survived despite all that has happened, such as the immediate familiarity of our relationships, the affectionate way we greet one another with kisses, the twisted sense of humor that always makes me laugh, the friendship, hope, simplicity, and congeniality, the solidarity in difficult times, the sympathy, the indomitable courage of mothers, the patience of the poor.

  I have constructed an idea of my country the way you fit together a jigsaw puzzle, by selecting pieces that fit my design and ignoring the others. My Chile is poetic and poor, which is why I discard the evidence of a modern, materialistic society in which a person’s value is measured by wealth, fairly acquired or otherwise, and insist on seeing signs everywhere of my country of old. I have also created a version of myself that has no nationality, or, more accurately, many nationalities. I don’t belong to one land, but to several, or perhaps only to the ambit of the fiction I write. I can’t pretend to know what part of my memory is reliable and how much I’ve invented, because the job of defining the line between them is beyond my ability. My granddaughter Andrea wrote a composition for school in which she said that she liked her “grandmother’s imagination.” I asked her what she was referring to, and without hesitation she replied, “You remember things that never happened.” Don’t we all do that? I have read that the mental process of imagining and that of remembering are so much alike that they are nearly indistinguishable. Who can define reality? Isn’t everything subjective? If you and I witness the same event, we will recall it and recount it differently. Comparing the versions of our childhood that my brothers tell, it’s as if each of us had been on a different planet. Memory is conditioned by emotion; we remember better, and more fully, things that move us, such as the joy of a birth, the pleasure of a night of love, the pain of a loved one’s death, the trauma of a wound. When we call up the past, we choose intense moments—good or bad—and omit the enormous gray area of daily life.

  If I had never traveled, if I had stayed on, safe and secure in the bosom of my family, if I had accepted my grandfather’s vision and his rules, it would have been impossible for me to recreate or embellish my own existence, because it would have been defined by others and I would merely be one link more in a long family chain. Moving about has forced me, time after time, to readjust my story, and I have done that in a daze, almost without noticing, because I have been too preoccupied with the task of surviving. Most of our lives are similar, and can be told in the tone used to read the telephone directory—unless we decide to give it a little oomph, a little color. In my case,
I have tried to polish the details and create my private legend, so that when I am in a nursing home awaiting death I will have something to entertain the other senile old folks with.

  I wrote my first book by letting my fingers run over the typewriter keys, just as I am writing this, without a plan. I needed very little research because I had it all inside, not in my head but in that place in my chest where I felt a perpetual knot. I told about Santiago in the time of my grandfather’s youth, just as if I’d been born then; I knew exactly how a gas lamp was lit before electricity was installed in the city, just as I knew the fate of hundreds of prisoners in Chile during that same period. I wrote in a trance, as if someone was dictating to me, and I have always attributed that favor to the ghost of my grandmother, who was whispering into my ear. Only one other time have I been gifted with a book dictated from that other dimension, and that was when I wrote my memoir Paula in 1993. I have no doubt that in writing that book I received help from the benign spirit of my daughter. Who, really, are these and the other spirits who live with me? I haven’t seen them floating around the hallways of my home, wrapped in white sheets, nothing as interesting as that. They are simply memories that come to me and that from being caressed so often gradually acquire flesh. That happens with people, and also with Chile, that mythic country that from being missed so profoundly has replaced the real country. That country inside my head, as my grandchildren describe it, is a stage on which I place and remove objects, characters, and situations at my whim. Only the landscape remains true and immutable; I am not a foreigner to the majestic landscape of Chile. My tendency to transform reality, to invent memory, disturbs me, I have no idea how far it may lead me. Does the same thing happen with people? If, for example, I saw my grandparents or my daughter for an instant, would I recognize them? Probably not, because in looking so hard for a way to keep them alive, remembering them in the most minimal details, I have been changing them, adorning them with qualities they may not have had. I have given them a destiny much more complex than the ones they lived. In any case, I have been very lucky because that letter to my dying grandfather saved me from desperation. Thanks to it, I found a voice and a way to overcome oblivion, which is the curse of vagabonds like me. Before me opened the road-of-no-return of literature, which I have stumbled down the last twenty years, and which I hope to follow as long as my patient readers will put up with me.

  Although that first novel gave me a fictitious country, I never stopped loving the other one, the one I had left behind. The military government was solidly entrenched in Chile, and Pinochet was ruling with absolute power. The economic policy of the Chicago Boys, as Milton Friedman’s disciples were known, had been imposed by force; it could not have been done any other way. Entrepreneurs were enjoying enormous privileges, while workers had lost most of their rights. Those of us who had left thought that the dictatorship would remain in power for some time, but in truth a valiant opposition was growing inside the country, one that finally would lead to restoring the toppled democracy. In order to do that it would be necessary to set aside the many party squabbles and join together in the Concertación coalition . . . but that would be seven years later. In 1981 few could imagine that possibility.

  Up until then my life in Caracas, where we had lived for ten years, had gone by in complete anonymity, but books attract a little bit of attention. Finally I resigned from the school where I was working and dived into the uncertainty of literature. I had another novel in mind, this one situated somewhere in the Caribbean; I thought I was through with Chile and that it was time to write about the land that gradually was becoming my adopted country. Before I began writing Eva Luna, I had to do a lot of research. To describe the odor of a mango or shape of a palm, I had to go to the market to smell the fruit and to the plaza to look at the trees, which hadn’t been the case with a Chilean peach or willow tree. I have Chile so deep inside me that I think I know it backward and forward, but when I write about a different place, I have to study it.

  In Venezuela, a splendid land of assertive men and beautiful women, I was liberated at last from the discipline of English schools, the rigor of my grandfather, Chilean modesty, and the last vestiges of that formality in which, the good daughter of diplomats, I had been brought up. For the first time I felt comfortable in my body and stopped worrying about what others thought of me. In the meantime my marriage had deteriorated beyond repair, and once our children left the nest to go to the university there was no further reason to stay together. My husband and I were amicably divorced. We were so relieved by this decision that as we said good-bye we bowed reverential Japanese bows for several minutes. I was forty-five years old, but I didn’t look bad for my age—at least that’s what I thought until my mother, always an optimist, warned me that I was going to spend the rest of my life alone. Nevertheless, three months later, during a long promotion tour in the United States, I met William Gordon, the man who was written in my destiny, as my clairvoyant grandmother would say.

  THIS COUNTRY INSIDE MY HEAD

  Before you ask me why a leftist with my surname chose to live in the Yankee empire, I will tell you that it wasn’t by plan, not by any stretch of the imagination. Like almost all the major milestones in my life, it happened by chance. If Willie had been in New Guinea, most probably I would be there now, dressed in feathers. I suppose there are people who do plan their lives, but I stopped doing that a long time ago because my blueprints never get used. About every ten years I take a look back and can see the map of my journey—well, that is if it can be called a map, it looks more like a plateful of noodles. If you live long enough to review the past, it’s obvious that all we do is walk in circles. The idea of settling in the United States never crossed my mind; I believed that the CIA had incited the military coup in Chile for the sole purpose of ruining my life. Over the years I have become more modest. I had only one reason to become just one more among the millions of immigrants pursuing the American Dream: lust at first sight.

  Willie had two divorces behind him and a string of affairs that he can barely remember. He had been single for eight years, his life was a disaster, and he was still waiting for the tall blonde of his dreams when I came along. He had barely looked down and separated me from the design on the carpet, when I informed him that in my youth I had been a tall blonde; that was what caught his attention. What about him attracted me? I could tell that he was a strong person, the kind who may fall to his knees but who gets right back up on his feet. He was different from the average Chilean: he didn’t complain, he didn’t blame others for his problems, he accepted his karma, he wasn’t looking for a mother, and it was obvious he didn’t need a geisha to bring him breakfast in bed or to lay out his clothes for the next day. I could see that he didn’t belong to the school of the stoics, like my grandfather, it was too obvious that he enjoyed his life, but he did have the same stoic stability. Besides that, he’d traveled a lot; which is always seductive to us Chileans, who are basically insular people. At twenty he’d gone around the world, hitchhiking and sleeping in cemeteries. (He explained to me that they’re very safe, no one goes there at night.) He had been exposed to different cultures, he was broad-minded, and he was tolerant and curious. He also spoke good Spanish—with the accent of a Mexican bandit—and he had tattoos. In Chile, only criminals sport tattoos, so I thought he was really sexy. He could order dinner in French, Italian, and Portuguese, and he knew how to mumble a few words in Russian, Tagalog, Japanese, Mandarin, Swahili, and Farsi. Years later I discovered that he invented them, but by then it was too late. To top it all off, he could speak English as well as any North American manages to master the language of Shakespeare.

  We found a way to be together for two days, and then I had to continue my tour, but at the end I decided to return to San Francisco for a week to see whether I could get him out of my head or whether lust had turned into love. This is a very Chilean way to behave; any of my female compatriots would have done the same. We Chilean women are ferociously dec
isive in two things: in defending our cubs and in trapping a man. We have a strongly developed nesting instinct; an adventure isn’t enough for us, we want to form a household and if possible, have children. Imagine! When I arrived at his house, uninvited, Willie, in a panic, tried to make his escape, but he wasn’t really a serious opponent for me. I took one running leap and was on him like a prizefighter. Finally he agreed, gritting his teeth, that I was the closest thing to a tall blonde he was ever going to get, and we got married. That was 1987.

  To be near Willie, I was ready to give up a lot, but not my children or my writing, so as soon as I got my residence papers I began the process of moving Paula and Nicolàs to California. I had quickly become enamored of San Francisco, a happy, tolerant, open, and cosmopolitan city—and so different from Santiago! My new home was founded by adventurers, prostitutes, merchants, and preachers, all of whom flocked there in 1849, drawn by the Gold Rush. I wanted to write about that intriguing period of greed, violence, heroism, and conquest, perfect material for a novel. In the mid-nineteenth century the surest route to California from the east coast of the United States, or from Europe, went right by Chile. Ships had to sail through the Strait of Magellan or around Cape Horn. Those were dangerous odysseys, but worse was crossing the North American continent in a wagon or slogging through the malaria-infected jungles of the Isthmus of Panama. Chileans learned of the discovery of gold before the news spread in the United States, and they came en masse: they had a long tradition of mining and they liked an adventure. We have a name for our compulsion for following where a road leads, we say that we’re patiperros, because we roam like yappy little strays sniffing a trail, with no fixed direction. We need escape, but as soon as we cross the cordillera we begin to miss home, and always come back. We’re good travelers and terrible emigrants: nostalgia is always nipping at our heels.