In my family nearly all the men studied law, although I don’t remember a single one who passed the bar. The Chilean loves laws, the more complicated the better. Nothing fascinates us as much as red tape and multiple forms. When some minor negotiation seems simple, we immediately suspect that it’s illegal. (I, for example, have always doubted that my marriage to Willie is valid, since it took place in fewer than five minutes, simply by writing our signatures in a book. In Chile it would have meant wading through several weeks of bureaucracy.) The Chilean is a legal animal. There’s no better job in the country than being a notary public: we want everything on paper, sealed, with multiple copies and stamps on every page. We are so legalistic that General Pinochet wanted to pass into history as a president, not a usurper of power, and to do that he had to change the constitution. Through one of those ironies that are so abundant in history, he later found himself trapped in the laws he himself had created in order to perpetuate his tenure in office. According to the terms of his constitution, he was to fulfill his role for eight additional years—he had already been in power for several—that is, until 1988, when he would call a referendum so the people could decide whether he was to continue or to call an election. He lost that referendum and the following year lost the election and had to turn over the presidential sash to his opponent, the democratic candidate. It’s difficult to explain to anyone outside of Chile how the dictatorship could be brought down when it could count on the unconditional support of the armed forces, the right, and a large part of the population. Political parties had been suspended, Congress disbanded, and the press was censored. As the general had often boasted: “Not a leaf stirs in this country without my consent.” How, then, could he have been defeated in a democratic vote? This could happen only in Chile. In similar fashion, using a loophole in the law, an attempt is currently underway to try him along with other military men, even though he had appointed the Supreme Court and an amnesty protects the military from bearing responsibility for illegal acts committed during the years of his government. It turns out that there are hundreds of persons who were arrested but whom the military denies having killed; since they haven’t appeared, it is assumed that they were kidnapped. In such cases the crime remains on record, so the accused cannot take shelter behind the amnesty.
Love for regulations, however unworkable they may be, finds its best exponents in the enormous bureaucracy of our suffering country. That bureaucracy is the paradise of the people in their uniform gray suits. There such a person can vegetate to his pleasure, completely safe from the traps of imagination, perfectly secure in his post to the day he retires—unless he is imprudent enough to try to change things, an observation made by the author-sociologist Pablo Huneeus (who is, I might add in passing, one of the few eccentric Chileans who isn’t related to my family). A public official must understand from his first day in office that any show of initiative will signal the end of his career because he isn’t there to be meritorious but to reach his level of incompetence with dignity. The point of moving papers with seals and stamps from one perusal to the next is not to resolve problems, but to obstruct solutions. If the problems were resolved, the bureaucracy would lose power and many honest people would be left without employment; on the other hand, if things get worse, the state increases the budget and hires more people, and thus lowers the index of the unemployed. Everyone is happy. The official abuses every smidgen of his power, starting from the premise that the public is his enemy, a sentiment that is fully reciprocated. It was a shock to find that in the United States all that’s needed to move about the country is a driver’s license, and that most transactions can be accomplished by mail. In Chile, the clerk on duty demands that the poor petitioner produce proof that he was born, that he isn’t a criminal, that he paid his taxes, that he registered to vote, and that he’s still alive, because even if he throws a tantrum to prove that he hasn’t died, he is obliged to present a “certificate of survival.” The problem has reached such proportions that the government itself has created an office to combat bureaucracy. Citizens may now complain of being shabbily treated and may file charges against incompetent officials . . . on a form requiring a seal and three copies, of course. Recently, a busload of us tourists crossing the border between Chile and Argentina had to wait an hour and a half while our documents were checked. Getting through the Berlin Wall was easier. Kafka was Chilean.
I believe that this obsession of ours with legality is a kind of safeguard against the aggression we carry inside; without the nightstick of the law we would go after one another tooth and claw. Experience has taught us that when we lose control we are capable of the worst barbarism, and for that reason we try to move cautiously, barricading ourselves behind bulwarks of paper bearing seals. Whenever possible, we try to avoid confrontation; we seek a consensus and, at the first opportunity, we put any decision to a vote. We love to vote. If a dozen kids get together in the schoolyard to play soccer, the first thing they do is write a set of rules and vote for a president, a board of directors, and a treasurer. This doesn’t mean that we’re tolerant, far from it: we cling to our ideas like maniacs (I am a typical case). You see intolerance everywhere, in religion, in politics, in the culture. Anyone who dares dissent is squelched with insults or ridicule, in the event that he can’t be made to shut up using more drastic methods.
In customs we are conservatives and traditionalists; we prefer the known evil to good yet to be learned, but in everything else we are always on the lookout for something new. We have the idea that anything that comes to us from outside the country is by nature better than ours and should be tried, from the latest electronic gadget to economic and political systems. We spent a good part of the twentieth century trying out various forms of revolution, from Marxism to savage capitalism, ranging through each and every intermediate shading. Our hope that a change in government can improve our luck is like hoping to win the lottery: totally without rational foundation. At heart we know very well that life isn’t easy. Ours is a land of earthquakes, why wouldn’t we be fatalists? Given the circumstances, we have no choice but to be also a little stoic—though there’s no reason to be too dignified about it; we are free to complain all we want.
In my family’s case, I believe we were easily as spartan as stoic. According to my grandfather, cancer is caused by easy living, whereas discomfort is good for the health. He recommended cold showers, food difficult to chew, lumpy mattresses, third-class seats on trains, and clunky shoes. His theory of healthful discomfort was reinforced by several English schools for young girls in which it was my destiny to spend the greater part of my childhood. If you survive this kind of education, you are forever after grateful for the most trivial pleasures. I’m a person who murmurs a silent prayer of thanks when warm water comes out of the tap. I expect life to be problematic, and when for several days I haven’t suffered anguish or pain, I get worried because I am sure that means the heavens are preparing a worse misfortune for me. Even so, I am not totally neurotic, quite the opposite; in fact, I’m quite easy to be with. . . . It doesn’t take much to make me happy; you know now that ordinary warm water in the faucet will do the trick.
It has often been said that we Chileans are envious, that we are bothered by others’ success. It’s true, but the explanation is that what we’re feeling isn’t envy, it’s common sense. Success isn’t normal. The human being is biologically constituted for failure, the proof of which being that we have legs instead of wheels, elbows instead of wings, and metabolism instead of batteries. Why dream of success if we can calmly vegetate in our failures? Why do today what we can put off till tomorrow? Or do well what we can do halfway? We detest it when a countryman rises above the rest of us, except when it happens in another country, in which case the lucky fellow (or female equivalent) becomes a kind of national hero. The person who triumphs locally, however, is less than adored; soon there is tacit accord that he should be taken down a peg or two. We call this sport chaqueteo, “jacketing”: grabbing the offender by his coattails and pulling him down. Despite the chaqueteo and an ambience of mediocrity, from time to time someone does manage to raise his head above the crowd. Our country has produced exceptional men and women: two Nobel laureates—Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral—the singers/composers Víctor Jara and Violeta Parra, the pianist Claudio Arrau, the painter Roberto Matta, and the novelist José Donoso, to mention a few who come to mind.
We Chileans enjoy funerals because the dead person is no longer a rival, and now he can’t backstab us. Not only do we go to burials en masse, where we have to stand for hours listening to at least fifteen speeches, we also celebrate the anniversaries of the deceased’s death. One of our entertainments is telling and listening to stories, the more macabre and tragic the better; in that, and in our taste for “the drink,” we resemble the Irish. We’re addicts of radio and television soaps; the misadventures of the protagonists offer us a good excuse to weep for our own sorrows. I grew up listening to dramas in the kitchen, despite my grandfather’s having outlawed the radio because he considered it an instrument of the devil used to propagate gossip and vulgarity. We children and servants suffered through the endless ordeals of the serial Right to Live for several years, as I remember.
The lives of the characters in TV soaps are much more important than those of family, even though the plot isn’t always easy to follow. For example, the handsome lead seduces a woman and leaves her in an interesting condition, then for revenge he marries a girl who is lame, and leaves her, too, “baby waiting,” as we say in Chile, but right away he runs off to Italy to join his first wife. I think this is called trigamy In the meantime, the second girl has her lame leg operated on, goes to the beauty shop, inherits a fortune, becomes an executive in a large corporation, and attracts new suitors. When the lead returns from Italy and sees that rich young female with two legs the same length, he repents of his felony. And then begin the writer’s problems in untangling the mare’s nest the story has become. The first seduced woman gets an abortion, so there won’t be any bastards running around that TV channel, and he kills off the luckless Italian, thus the lead—who apparently is the good guy in the series—is opportunely widowed. This allows the formerly lame heroine to marry in white, despite the enormous belly she’s sporting, and within a short time she gives birth to . . . a baby boy, of course. No one works; they live on their passions, and the women all go around wearing false eyelashes and cocktail dresses from early morning on. In the course of this tragedy nearly all the actors end up hospitalized; there are births, accidents, rapes, drugs, teenagers who run away from home or from prison, blind men, madmen, rich who become poor and poor who become rich. There’s a lot of suffering. The day after a particularly dramatic chapter, telephones all across the country are buzzing with the details: my friends call collect from Santiago to California to keep me up to date. The only thing that can compete with the last chapter of a TV series is a visit from the pope, and that has happened only one time in our history, and likely won’t happen again.
Besides funerals, morbid stories, and soaps, we count on crimes, always an interesting subject for conversation. We are fascinated with psychopaths and murderers; if they’re upper class, so much the better. “We have a bad memory for crimes of state, but we never forget the peccadilloes of the man next door,” commented a famous journalist. One of the best-known murders in our history was committed by a Señor Barceló, who killed his wife after having abused her all during the years they shared together and then alleged it had been an accident. I was embracing her, he said, and my gun misfired and a bullet penetrated her brain. He couldn’t explain why he had a loaded pistol in his hand, pointed at the nape of her neck. Given that information, his mother-in-law initiated a crusade to avenge her unfortunate daughter; I don’t blame her, I would have done the same. This woman came from the highest level of Santiago society, and was used to getting her way. She published a book denouncing her son-in-law, and after he was sentenced to death she installed herself in the office of the president of the republic to prevent him from granting a pardon. The villain was executed. He was the first, and one of the few, upper-class prisoners to receive the death penalty because that punishment was reserved for those who had no connections or good lawyers. Today the death penalty has been eliminated, as it has in any decent country.
I also grew up with the family anecdotes told to me by my grandparents, my uncles, and my mother—very handy when it comes to writing novels. How many of them are true? Doesn’t matter. At the hour of remembering, no one wants verification of facts, the legend is enough, like the sad tale of the ghost that during a séance told my grandmother the location of a treasure hidden beneath the stairs. Due to an error in the plan of the property, not because of any malevolence on the part of the spirit, the treasure was never found, even though they tore down half the house. I’ve tried to verify the how and the when of these lamentable events, but no one in my family is interested in documenting them, and if I ask a lot of questions, my relatives get offended.
I don’t want to give the impression that we are all bad, we also have our virtues. Let me see, I’ll try to think of one. . . . Well, we’re a people with poetic souls. It isn’t our fault; that one we can blame on the landscape. No one who is born and lives in a natural world like ours can resist writing poetry. In Chile, you lift up a rock, and instead of a lizard out crawls a poet or a balladeer. We admire our writers, we respect them, and we put up with their manias. Years ago at political meetings people would shout aloud the poems of Pablo Neruda, which we all knew by heart. We liked his love poems best because we have a weakness for romance. We are also moved by misfortune: dejection, nostalgia, disillusion, grief. Our evenings are very long, which may explain our preference for melancholy themes. If poetry isn’t your thing, there are always other forms of art. All the women I know write, paint, sculpt, or do crafts in their leisure time—which is very scarce. Art has replaced knitting. I’ve been given so many paintings and ceramics that I can no longer get my car in the garage.
I can add about our character that we’re affectionate; we go around bestowing kisses right and left. We greet each other with a sincere kiss on the right cheek. Children kiss adults as they arrive and as they leave, and as an additional sign of respect they call them uncle or aunt, as they do in China, and that includes schoolteachers. Older people are kissed mercilessly, even against their will. Women kiss, even if they hate each other, and they kiss any male within reach, and neither age nor social class nor hygiene can dissuade them. Only males in their reproductive years, let’s say between fourteen and seventy, do not kiss each other—with the exception of father and son—but they clap each other on the back and heartily embrace. This affection has many other manifestations, from opening the doors of your house to receive anyone who shows up unexpectedly to sharing everything you have. It never crosses your mind to praise something another person is wearing, because they’re certain to whip it off and give it to you. If there is food left from a meal, the genteel thing is to give it to the guests to take home, just as you never arrive at someone’s house with empty hands.
The first thing you can say about Chileans is that we are friendly and hospitable; at the first hint we throw open our arms and the doors of our homes. I’ve often heard foreigners say that if they ask directions, the people they approach accompany them there personally, and if they seem to be lost, their informant is capable of inviting them home for dinner, even offering a bed if they’re in difficulty. I confess, however, that my own family was not especially friendly. One of my uncles would not allow anyone to breathe near him, and my grandfather was given to thrashing the telephone with his cane because he considered it a lack of respect to call without his consent. He was perpetually cross with the mailman because he brought unsolicited mail, and he never opened letters unless the sender’s name was prominently displayed. My relatives felt they were superior to the rest of humankind, though their rationale always seemed nebulous to me. According to my grandfather’s school of thought, we could trust no one but close family; the rest of humanity was suspect. My grandfather was a fervent Catholic but he deplored confession; he was suspicious of priests and he believed that forgiveness of sins could be negotiated directly with God, just as he could negotiate for those of his wife and his children. Despite this inexplicable superiority complex, visitors were always warmly received in our home, however vile they might be. In this sense, we Chileans are like the Arabs of the desert: the guest is sacred, and friendship, once declared, is an indissoluble bond.
It is impossible to go into a home, rich or poor, without accepting something to eat or drink, even if it’s only a cup of tea. This is another national tradition. Since coffee has always been scarce, and expensive—even Nescafé was a luxury— we drank more tea than the entire population of Asia put together, but on my last trip I found to my amazement that coffee finally had made its entrance into the culture, and now anyone willing to pay can find espressos and cappuccinos worthy of Italy. In passing I should add, for the peace of mind of potential tourists, that impeccable public bathrooms and bottled water are readily available everywhere; it’s no longer mandatory to come down with colitis after your first glass of water, as it once was. In a strange way, I lament that, because those of us who grew up drinking Chilean water are immunized against all known and yet-to-be-discovered bacteria. I can drink water from the Ganges with no visible effect on my health; my husband, in contrast, once outside the United States, can brush his teeth with bottled water and still contract typhus. In Chile we are not refined in respect to tea, any brew sweetened with a spot of sugar tastes delicious to us. There are, in addition, an infinite number of local herbs to which we attribute curative properties, and in the case of the truly poor, we have agüita perra—bitch water—nothing but plain hot water in a cracked teacup. The first thing we offer a visitor is a tecito, an agüita, or a vinito, a “nice little drink” of tea, water, or wine. We always add the diminutive -ito to our words, almost as an apology for offering, in accord with our desire not to be noticed and our horror of putting on airs, even with words. Then we offer our guest “pot luck,” which means that the mistress of the house will take bread out of her children’s mouths to give to the visitor, who is obliged to accept it. If you receive a formal invitation, you can expect a gargantuan feast: the goal is to leave the guests moaning with indigestion for several days. Of course, women always do the hard work. Now it’s considered chic for men to cook, a really bad development because while they take all the glory, the woman has to wash up the mounds of pots and dirty dishes he’s left everywhere. Our typical cuisine is simple because earth and sea are generous; there is no fruit or seafood more delicious than ours—that I can assure you. The more difficult it is to put food on the table, the more elaborate and spicy it becomes, witness the examples of India and Mexico, where there are three hundred ways to cook rice. We have one, and that seems more than sufficient to us. We don’t need to be creative or invent original dishes, we do that with names, which can lead the foreigner to the worst suspicions: “beat-up fools” (an abalone dish), “head cheese,” “dark blood,” “fried brains,” “lady fingers,” “queen’s arm,” “nun’s sighs,” “wrapped babies,” “torn bloomers,” and “monkey tail,” for a starter.
We Chileans have a sense of humor and we like to laugh, even though deep down we prefer seriousness. We had a president named Jorge Alessandri (1958–1964) who was a neurotic bachelor; he drank only mineral water and never allowed anyone to smoke in his presence, and people always said about him, with admiration, “How sad our Don Jorge is!” That calmed us because it was a sign that we were in good hands, those of a serious man, or, better still, of an aging depressive who wasted no time on pointless happiness. Which is not to say that we don’t find bad luck entertaining; we sharpen our sense of humor when things go badly, and since it seems things always go badly, we laugh a lot. That’s a small compensation for our vocation of complaining about everything. A person’s popularity is measured by the number of jokes about him. They say that President Salvador Allende invented jokes about himself—some more than a little racy—and set them loose on the world. For many years I had a magazine column and a television program with humorous pretensions, which were tolerated because there was very little competition—in Chile even clowns are melancholy. Years later, when I began to publish a similar column for a newspaper in Venezuela, it bombed and brought me a mountain of enemies besides, because humor in that country is more direct and not as cruel.
My family is famous for practical jokes, but it may lack taste in matters of humor; the only jokes my relatives understand are German stories about Herr Otto. Here’s one example: A very elegant woman broke wind, involuntarily and loudly, and to cover it up made a noise with her shoes. Then Herr Otto says (it has to be in a German accent), “You can break a shoe, you can break a heart, but you’ll never make the noise you made with that fart.” As I’m writing this, I’m weeping with laughter. I’ve tried to tell the joke to my husband, but it doesn’t translate, and besides, in California ethnic jokes are not at all in favor. I grew up with jokes about Galicians, Jews, and Turks. Our humor is black. We never let an opportunity pass to make fun of other people, whoever they may be: deaf mutes, the retarded, epileptics, people of color, homosexuals, priests, and the homeless. We have jokes about all religions and races. The first time I heard the expression “politically correct” I was forty-five years old, and I have never been able to explain to friends or relatives in Chile what that means. Once in California I tried to get one of those dogs they train to lead the blind but are given away when they can’t pass the rigorous tests. In my application I had the bad idea of mentioning that I wanted a “rejected” dog, and by return mail I received a dry note informing me that the term “rejected” is never used; instead, you say that the animal “has changed careers.” Try and explain that in Chile!
My mixed marriage with a gringo hasn’t gone all that badly; we get along (even though most of the time neither of us has the least idea of what the other is talking about) because we are always ready to give each other the benefit of the doubt. The greatest drawback is that we don’t share a sense of humor. Willie can’t believe that I can be funny in Spanish, and as for me, I never know what the devil he’s laughing about. The one thing that amuses us both at the same time are the off-the-cuff speeches of President George W. Bush.