My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile

by Isabel Allende

  Willie’s family, and Willie’s life, were chaotic, but instead of running away, as any reasonable person would do, I rushed him “straight on, in the name of Chile,” like the war cry of the soldiers who took the Arica promontory in the nineteenth century. I was determined to win my place in California and in the heart of that man, cost what it may. In the United States, everyone, with the exception of the Indians, descends from someone who came from somewhere else; there was nothing special about my case. The twentieth century was the century of immigrants and refugees; the world had never seen so many humans fleeing violence or poverty abandon their place of origin to start a new life in a new land. My family and I are part of that diaspora; it isn’t as bad as it sounds. I knew that I would never assimilate completely, I was too old to melt in that famous Yankee pot. I look like a Chilean, I dream, cook, make love, and write in Spanish, and most of my books have a pronounced Latin American flavor. I was convinced that I would never be a Californian, but I wouldn’t pretend to be one either; all I aspired to was to earn a driver’s license and learn enough English to order food in a restaurant. I didn’t dream I would get much more.

  I’ve had to work several years to adapt to California, but the process has been entertaining. Writing a book about Willie’s life, The Infinite Plan, helped a lot because it forced me to travel across the state and study its history. I remember how offended I was at first by the gringos’ direct manner of speaking—until I realized that most of them are considerate and courteous. I couldn’t believe what hedonists they were, until I caught the fever and ended up soaking in a Jacuzzi surrounded by aromatic candles (meanwhile my grandfather is whirling in his grave at such wantonness). I’ve been so thoroughly incorporated into the California culture that I practice meditation and go to a therapist, even though I always set a trap: during my meditation I invent stories to keep from being bored, and in therapy I invent others to keep from boring the psychologist. I have adapted to the rhythm of this extraordinary place; I have favorite spots where I spend time leafing through books and walking and talking with friends; I like my routines, the seasons of the years, the huge oaks around my house, the scent of my cup of tea, the long nocturnal lament of the siren that warns ships of fog in the bay. I eagerly await the Thanksgiving turkey and the kitschy splendor of Christmas. I even take part in the obligatory Fourth of July picnic. And by the way, that picnic, like everything else in this land, is a model of efficiency: you drive at top speed, set up in a previously reserved space, spread out the baskets, bolt your food, kick the ball, and rush home to avoid the traffic. In Chile, a similar project would take three days.

  The North Americans’ sense of time is very special. They are short on patience. Everything must be quick, including food and sex, which the rest of the world treats ceremoniously. Gringos invented two terms that are untranslatable into most languages: “snack” and “quickie,” to refer to eating standing up and loving on the run . . . that, too, sometimes standing up. The most popular books are manuals: how to become a millionaire in ten easy lessons, how to lose fifteen pounds a week, how to recover from your divorce, and so on. People always go around looking for shortcuts and ways to escape anything they consider unpleasant: ugliness, old age, weight, illness, poverty, and failure in any of its aspects.

  This country’s fascination with violence never ceases to shock me. It can be said that I have lived in interesting circumstances, I’ve seen revolutions, war, and urban crime, not to mention the brutalities of the military coup in Chile. Our home in Caracas was broken into seventeen times; almost everything we had was stolen, from a can opener to three cars, two from the street and the third after the thieves completely ripped off our garage door. At least none of them had bad intentions; one even left a note of thanks stuck to the refrigerator door. Compared to other places on earth, where a child can step on a mine on his way to school and lose two legs, the United States is safe as a convent, but the culture is addicted to violence. Proof of that is to be found in its sports, its games, its art, and, certainly not least, its films, which are bloodcurdling. North Americans don’t want violence in their lives, but they need to experience it indirectly. They are enchanted by war, as long as it’s not on their turf.

  The racism, on the other hand, didn’t shock me, even though according to Willie it is the most serious problem in the country, because for forty-five years I had experienced the class system in Latin America, where the poor and mestizos—African or Indian—live in ineradicable segregation, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. At least in the United States there is an awareness of the conflict, and most North Americans, most of the time, fight against racism.

  When Willie visits Chile, he is an object of curiosity to my friends and to children in the street because of his undeniably foreign looks, which he accentuates by wearing an Aussie hat and cowboy boots. He likes my country, he says it’s like California was forty years ago, but he feels out of place there, the way I do in the United States. I understand the language but I don’t know the codes. When we get together with friends, I can’t really participate in the conversation, because I don’t know the events or the people they’re talking about, I didn’t see the same movies when I was young, I didn’t dance to the epileptic guitar of Elvis, I didn’t smoke marijuana or protest against the war in Vietnam. I can’t even follow the political jokes, because I see very little difference between Democrats and Republicans. And I’m a real foreigner for not sharing the national fascination with President Clinton’s amorous dalliance; after I saw Miss Lewinsky’s drawers for the fourteenth time on TV, I lost interest. Even baseball is a mystery to me, I can’t understand such passion for a group of heavyset men waiting for a ball that never comes. In California I’m a misfit; I wear silk while the rest of the population wears sneakers, and I order beef when everyone else is on a kick for tofu and green tea.

  The thing I most appreciate about my situation as an immigrant is the marvelous sense of freedom. I come from a very traditional culture, from a closed society, where each of us carries from birth the karma of his ancestors and where we constantly feel watched and judged. A stain on one’s honor cannot be cleansed. A child who steals crayons in kindergarten is branded as a thief for the rest of his life. In the United States, in contrast, the past doesn’t matter; no one asks your last name; the son of a murderer can be president . . . as long as he’s white. You can make mistakes because new opportunities abound, you just move to a new state and change your name and start a new life. Spaces are so vast that roads never end.

  At first Willie, condemned to live with me, felt as uncomfortable with my Chilean ideas and customs as I felt with him. We had major problems, among them that I tried to impose my antiquated norms of family life upon his children and that he had no sense of romanticism. We also had minor problems, such as my being incapable of working the household appliances, and his snoring, but gradually we have overcome these differences. Maybe that’s what marriage is about, nothing more than that: being flexible. As an immigrant I have tried to preserve the Chilean virtues that I like and to renounce the prejudices that are as confining as a straitjacket. I have accepted this country. To love a place you must participate in the community and give back something in return for all you receive. I believe I have done that. There are many things I admire about the United States and others I would like to change, but isn’t that always true? A country, like a husband, is always open to improvement.

  One year after I moved to California, in 1988, the situation changed in Chile; Pinochet had lost the referendum and the country was ready to reinstate democracy. So I went back. I went with fear; I didn’t know what I was going to find, and I nearly didn’t recognize Santiago or its people: everything was different. The city was filled with gardens and modern buildings, seething with traffic and commerce, energetic and fast-paced and progressive. But there were feudal backwashes, such as maids in blue aprons taking their elderly charges in the wealthy barrios for walks, and beggars at every
stoplight. Chileans were cautious; they respected hierarchies and dressed very conservatively—men in ties, women in skirts—and in many government offices and private enterprises, employees were wearing uniforms, like flight attendants. I realized that many of the people who had stayed and suffered in Chile considered those of us who left to be traitors, and believed that life had been much easier for us. There were many exiles, on the other hand, who accused those who stayed in the country of collaborating with the dictatorship.

  The candidate of the Concertación Party, Patricio Alwyn, had won by a narrow margin; the presence of the military was still intimidating, and people were quiet and frightened as they went about their lives. The press was still censored; the journalists who interviewed me, trained in discretion, asked careful, ingenuous questions, and then didn’t publish the answers. The dictatorship had done everything possible to erase recent history and the name of Salvador Allende. On the return flight, when I saw San Francisco Bay from the air, I gave a sigh of exhaustion and, without thinking, said: Back home at last. It was the first time since I’d left Chile in 1975 that I felt I was “home.”

  I don’t know whether my home is the place where I live or simply Willie. We have been together a number of years, and it seems to me that he is the one territory I belong in, where I’m not a foreigner. Together we have survived many ups and downs, great successes and great losses. The most profound sorrow has come from the tragedies of our daughters. In the space of one year, Jennifer died of an overdose and Paula of a rare genetic condition called porphyria, which caused her to sink into a long coma and finally took her life. Willie and I are strong and stubborn, and it was difficult for us to admit that our hearts were broken. It took time and therapy before we could finally put our arms around one another and weep together. The mourning was a long voyage through hell, from which I was able to emerge with his help and that of my writing.

  In 1994 I went back to Chile, looking for inspiration, a trip I have since repeated yearly. I found my compatriots more relaxed and the democracy stronger, although conditioned by the presence of a still-powerful military and by the senators Pinochet had appointed for life in order to control the Congress. The government had to maintain a delicate balance among the political and social forces. I went to working-class neighborhoods where people had once been contentious and organized. The progressive priests and nuns who had lived among the poor all those years told me that the poverty was the same but that the solidarity had disappeared, and that now crime and drugs, which had become the most serious problem among the young—had been added to the issues of alcoholism, domestic violence, and unemployment.

  The rules to live by were: try to forget the past, work for the future, and don’t provoke the military for any reason. Compared to the rest of Latin America, Chile was living in a good moment of political and economic stability; even so, five million people were still below the poverty level. Except for the victims of repression, their families, and a few organizations that kept a watch out for civil rights violations, no one spoke the words disappeared or torture aloud. That situation changed when Pinochet was arrested in London, where he had gone for a medical check-up and to collect his commission for an arms deal. A Spanish judge charged him with murdering Spanish citizens, and requested his extradition from England to Spain. The general, who still counted on the unconditional support of the armed forces, had for twenty-five years been isolated by the adulators who always congregate around power. He had been warned of the risks of travel abroad, but he went anyway, confident of his impunity. His surprise at being arrested by the British can be compared only to that of everyone in Chile, long accustomed to the idea that he was untouchable. By chance, I was in Santiago when that occurred, and I witnessed how within the course of a week a Pandora’s box was opened and all the things that had been hidden beneath layers and layers of silence began to emerge. In those first days there were turbulent street demonstrations by Pinochet’s supporters, who threatened nothing less than a declaration of war against England or a commando raid to rescue the prisoner. The nation’s press, frightened, wrote of the insult to the Esteemed Senator-for-Life and to the honor and sovereignty of the nation, but a week later demonstrations in his support had become minimal, the military were keeping mute, and the tone had changed in the media: now they referred to the “ex-dictator, arrested in London.” No one believed that the English would hand over the prisoner to be tried in Spain, which in fact didn’t happen, but in Chile the fear that was still in the air diminished rapidly. The military lost prestige and power in a matter of days. The tacit agreement to bury the truth was over, thanks to the actions of that Spanish judge.

  On that trip I traveled through the south. Again I lost myself in the prodigious nature of my country and met with faithful friends to whom I am closer than to my brothers; in Chile, friendship is forever. I returned to California renewed and ready to work. I assigned myself a subject as far removed from death as possible and wrote Aphrodite, some ramblings about gluttony and lust, the only cardinal sins worth paying a penance for. I bought a ton of cookbooks and quite a few about eroticism, and I made excursions to the gay district of San Francisco, where for several weeks I scavenged through the pornography shops. (That kind of investigation would have been difficult in Chile. On the off chance that such material existed, I would never have dared buy it: it would have placed my family’s honor in jeopardy.) I learned a lot. It’s a shame that I acquired this knowledge so late in my life, when I don’t have anyone to practice with: Willie made it clear that he is not disposed to hanging a trapeze from the ceiling.

  That book helped me emerge from the depression I had sunk into with the death of my daughter. Since that time I have written a book a year. I’m never short on ideas, only time. With Chile and California in mind, I wrote Daughter of Fortune and Portrait in Sepia, books in which the characters travel back and forth between my two countries.

  In conclusion I want to add that the United States has treated me very well. It has allowed me to be myself, or any version of self it has occurred to me to create. The entire world passes through San Francisco, each person carrying his or her cargo of memories and hopes. This city is filled with foreigners; I am not an exception. In the streets you hear a thousand tongues, temples are raised for all denominations, and the scent of food from the most remote points of the world fills the air. Few people are born here, most are strangers in paradise, as I am. It doesn’t matter to anyone who I am or what I do; no one watches me or judges me, they leave me in peace. The negative side of that is that if I drop dead in the street, no one will notice but, in the end, that is a cheap price to pay for liberty. The price I would pay in Chile would be high indeed, because there diversity is not as yet appreciated. In California the only thing that isn’t tolerated is intolerance.

  My grandson Alejandro’s observation about the three years I have left to live forces me to ask myself whether I want to live them in the United States or return to Chile. I don’t know the answer. Frankly, I doubt that I would leave my house in California. I visit Chile once or twice a year, and when I arrive a lot of people seem happy to see me, though I think they’re even happier when I leave—including my mother, who lives in fear that her daughter will do something foolish, for example, appear on television talking about abortion. I feel great for a few days, but after two or three weeks I begin to miss tofu and green tea.

  This book has helped me understand that I am not obligated to make a decision: I can have one foot in Chile and another here, that’s why we have planes, and I am not among those who are afraid to fly because of terrorism. I have a fatalistic attitude: no one dies one minute before or one minute after the prescribed time. For the moment California is my home and Chile is the land of my nostalgia. My heart isn’t divided, it has merely grown larger. I can live and write anywhere. Every book contributes to the completion of that “country inside my head,” as my grandchildren call it. In the slow practice of writing, I have fought with my demo
ns and obsessions, I have explored the corners of memory, I have dredged up stories and people from oblivion, I have stolen others’ lives, and from all this raw material I have constructed a land that I call my country. That is where I come from.

  I hope that this long commentary answers that stranger’s question about nostalgia. Don’t believe everything I say: I tend to exaggerate and, as I warned at the beginning, I can’t be objective where Chile is concerned. Let’s just say, to be completely honest, that I can’t be objective, period. In any case, what’s most important doesn’t appear in my biography or my books, it happens in a nearly imperceptible way in the secret chambers of the heart. I am a writer because I was born with a good ear for stories, and I was lucky enough to have an eccentric family and the destiny of a wanderer. The profession of literature has defined me. Word by word I have created the person I am and the invented country in which I live.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS