I have often said that my nostalgia dates from the time of the military coup of 1973, when my country changed so much that I can no longer recognize it, but in fact it must have begun much earlier. My childhood and adolescence were marked with journeys and farewells. I hadn’t yet put down roots in one place when it was time to pack our suitcases and move to another.
I was nine years old when I left my childhood home and with great sadness said good-bye to my unforgettable grandfather. So I would be entertained during my trip to Bolivia, Tío Ramón gave me a map of the world and the complete works of Shakespeare in Spanish, which I swallowed at a gulp, reread several times, and still own. I was fascinated by those stories of jealous husbands who murdered their wives over a handkerchief, kings whose enemies put distilled poison in their ears, lovers who committed suicide because of faulty communication. (How different Romeo and Juliet’s fate would have been if they’d had a telephone!) Shakespeare initiated me into stories of blood and passion, a dangerous road for authors like me whose fate it is to live in a minimalist era. The day that we set out for the province of Antofagasta, where we were to take a train to La Paz, my mother gave me a notebook and instructed me to start a travel diary. Ever since then I have written almost every day; writing is my most deeply entrenched habit. As that train chugged across the countryside, the landscape changed and I felt something tear inside me. On the one hand I was curious about all the new things passing before my eyes, and on the other, an insurmountable sadness was crystallizing deep within me. In the small Bolivian towns where the train stopped, we bought corn on the cob, leavened bread, black potatoes that looked rotten, and delicious sweets, all offered by Bolivian Indian women in multicolored wool skirts and black derbies like those worn by English bankers. I wrote everything down in my notebook with the industry of a notary, as if even then I foresaw that only writing would anchor me to reality. Outside the window, the world was hazy because of the dust on the glass, and deformed by the speed of the train.
Those days shook my imagination. I heard stories of the spirits and demons that wander the abandoned towns, of mummies exhumed from profaned tombs, of hills of human skulls, some more than fifty thousand years old, exhibited in a museum. In school, in history class, I had learned that the first Spaniards to reach Chile in the sixteenth century, coming from Peru, had wandered for months through these desolate reaches. I imagined that handful of warriors in red-hot armor, their exhausted horses, their hallucinated eyes, followed by a thousand captive Indians carrying provisions and weapons. It was a feat of incalculable courage and mad ambition. My mother read us some pages about the now vanished Atacameño Indians, and about the Quechuas and Aymaras, among whom we would live in Bolivia. Although I couldn’t know that yet, my destiny as a vagabond began on that journey. That diary still exists today; my son has hidden it and refuses to show it to me, because he knows I would destroy it. I regret many things I wrote in my youth: frightful poems, tragic stories, suicide notes, love letters addressed to unfortunate lovers, and especially that dreadful diary. (A caution to aspiring writers: not everything you write is worth keeping for the benefit of future generations.) When she gave me that notebook, my mother somehow intuited that I would have to dig up my Chilean roots, and that lacking a land into which to sink them I would have to do that on paper. I maintained a correspondence with my grandfather, my Tío Pablo, and with the parents of some friends, patient people to whom I related my impressions of La Paz, its purple mountains, its hermetic Indians, and its air, so thin that your lungs are always on the verge of filling with foam and your mind with hallucinations. I didn’t write to children my own age, only adults, because they answered my letters.
In my childhood and youth, I lived in Bolivia, the Middle East, and Europe, following the diplomatic destiny of the “dark, mustached man” the gypsies foretold so many times. I learned a little French and English, and also learned to eat suspicious-looking food without asking questions. My education was chaotic, to say the least, but I compensated for enormous gaps in information by reading everything that fell into my hands with the voraciousness of a piranha. I traveled by ship, plane, train, and automobile, always writing letters in which I compared what I saw with my one eternal reference: Chile. I never left behind the flashlight my Tío Pablo gave me, which helped me read in the most adverse conditions, or the notebook that contained the story of my life.
After two years in La Paz, we set off with bag and baggage for Lebanon. The three years in Beirut were a time of isolation for me, confined as I was to my home and my school. How I missed Chile! At an age when girls were dancing to rock ’n’ roll, I was reading and writing letters. Elvis Presley was already fat by the time I learned of his existence. I wore depressing gray dresses to annoy my mother who was always elegant and attractively dressed, while at the same time I daydreamed of princes fallen from the stars who would rescue me from a banal life. During recess in school, I would barricade myself behind a book in the farthest corner of the schoolyard, to disguise my shyness.
The adventure in Lebanon ended abruptly in 1958, when the U.S. Marines of the Sixth Fleet disembarked to intervene in the violent political squabbles that soon would tear that country apart. Their civil war had begun months earlier amid sounds of gunfire and shouting; there was confusion in the streets and fear in the air. The city was divided into religious sectors that clashed over grudges accumulated through centuries while the army tried to keep order. One by one the schools closed their doors . . . all except mine because our phlegmatic director decided that since Great Britain wasn’t involved, the war was none of her concern. Unfortunately, this interesting situation was short-lived: Tío Ramón, frightened by the direction the conflict was taking, sent my mother to Spain with the dog, and us children back to Chile. Later he and my mother were dispatched to Turkey, but we stayed in Santiago, my brothers in a boarding school and I with my grandfather.
I was fifteen when I returned to Santiago, disoriented from having lived several years outside the country and from having lost my ties with my old friends and my cousins. I talked with a strange accent to boot, which is a problem in Chile, where people are “situated” within social classes by the way they speak. Santiago at the time seemed very provincial to me compared, for example, with the splendor of Beirut, which boasted of being the Paris of the Middle East. That didn’t mean that the rhythm of life was calm, not in the least, for Santiaguinos were already suffering from frayed nerves. Life was uncomfortable and difficult, the bureaucracy crushing, the working hours very long, but I arrived there determined to adopt that city in my heart. I was tired of telling people and places good-bye, I wanted to put down roots and never leave. I think I fell in love with my country because of the stories my grandfather told me and because of our travels together through the south. He taught me history and geography, showed me maps, made me read Chilean writers, corrected my grammar and handwriting. As a teacher, he was short on patience but long on severity; my errors made him red with anger, but if he was content with my work he would reward me with a wedge of Camembert cheese, which he ripened in his armoire; whenever he opened that door, the odor of stinking army boots flooded the neighborhood.
My grandfather and I got along well because we both liked sitting without talking. We could spend hours that way, side by side, reading or watching the rain drum against the windowpanes, without feeling any need for small talk. I believe we had a mutual liking and respect for one another. I write that word, respect, with some hesitation because my grandfather was authoritarian and machista; he was used to treating women like delicate flowers, but the idea of any intellectual respect for them never crossed his mind. I was a prickly, rebellious fifteen-year-old girl who argued with him as equal to equal. That piqued his curiosity. He would smile with amusement when I claimed the right to the same freedom and education as my brothers, but at least he listened. It’s worth mentioning here that the first time my grandfather heard the word machista it came from my lips. He didn’t know what it meant, and when I explained, he nearly died laughing; the idea that male authority, as natural as the air he breathed, had a name seemed naïve and laughable. When I began to question that authority, he didn’t find it funny anymore, but I think he understood and perhaps admired my desire to be like him, strong and independent and not the victim of circumstances, as my mother had been.
I nearly succeeded in being like my grandfather, but nature betrayed me when one day two little cherries popped out on my ribs and my plan went all to hell. That hormone explosion was a disaster for me. In a matter of weeks, I was transformed into a complex-ridden girl whose head was swimming with romantic dreams, her sole preoccupation being how to attract the opposite sex—not an easy task since I hadn’t an ounce of charm and was always in a rage. I couldn’t veil my scorn for most boys because it was obvious to me that I was cleverer than they were. (It took me a couple of years to learn how to play dumb so that men would feel superior. You can’t imagine the effort that takes!) I went through those years torn between the feminist ideas fermenting in my head—though incapable of articulating them in an intelligible way since no one in my world had ever heard such ideas expressed—and the longing to be like the rest of the girls my age, to be accepted, desired, conquered, protected.
It fell to my poor grandfather to cross swords with the most miserable adolescent in the history of humankind. Nothing the poor man said could console me. Not that he said much. Sometimes he muttered that I wasn’t bad for a woman, but that didn’t change the fact that he would have preferred me to be a man, in which case he would have taught me to use his tools. At least he managed to get rid of my gray, severely tailored dress through the simple expedient of burning it in the patio. That little caper sent me into a tantrum, but deep down I was grateful, even though I was sure that with or without that gray rag no man would ever look at me. A few days later, however, a miracle happened: Miguel Frías, my first boyfriend, asked me to be his girlfriend. I was so desperate that I latched onto him like a crab and never let go. Five years later we were married; we had two children and stayed together twenty-five years. But I don’t want to get ahead of my story . . .
By that time my grandfather had retired his mourning clothes and married a matron with imperial bearing, no doubt the blood of those German colonists who during the nineteenth century had left the Black Forest to populate the south of Chile. In comparison to her we seemed like savages, and we behaved like them as well. My grandfather’s second wife was an imposing Valkyrie, tall, white-skinned, blond, gifted with a magnificent prow and a memorable stern. She had to put up with a husband who murmured his first wife’s name in his sleep and do battle with her inlaws, who never completely accepted her and on more than one occasion made her life impossible. I regret that now; without her the patriarch’s last years would have been very lonely. She was an excellent cook and mistress of the house; she was also bossy, hardworking, thrifty, and at a loss to understand our family’s twisted sense of humor. During her reign the eternal beans, lentils, and chickpeas were banished; she cooked delicate dishes that her stepsons doused with hot sauce even before tasting them, and she embroidered lovely towels they often used to scrub the mud from their shoes. I imagine that Sunday luncheons with those barbarians must have been an insufferable torment for her, but she continued them for decades to demonstrate to us that we would never defeat her, no matter what we did. In that battle of wills, she won by a mile.
This dignified lady was never included in the time I shared with my grandfather, but she sat with us at night, knitting by memory as we listened to a horror story on the radio with the lights out, she indifferent to the program and my grandfather and I nearly ill from terror and laughing. He had reconciled his differences with the media by then, and had an antediluvian radio that he spent half the day repairing. With the help of a maestro, he had installed an antenna and some cables connected to a metal grille, hoping to capture communications from extraterrestrials since my grandmother wasn’t at hand to summon them in her sessions.
In Chile we have the institution of the maestro, as we call anyone (though never a woman) who has a pair of pliers and some wire in his power. If this person is especially primitive in his approach, we affectionately call him a maestro chasquilla, that is, maybe only a little scruffy; otherwise he was plain maestro, an honorary title equivalent to licenciado, our designation for almost anyone who has graduated from college. With pliers and some wire, this fellow can fix anything from a lavatory to an airplane turbine: his creativity and daring are boundless. Through the greater part of his long life, my grandfather rarely needed to call on one of these specialists, because not only was he able to correct any imperfection, he also fabricated his own tools. In his later years, however, when he couldn’t bend down or lift a heavy weight, he counted on a maestro, who came to work with him . . . between slugs of gin. In the United States, where workmen are expensive, half the male population has a garage filled with tools and learns at a young age to read instruction manuals. My husband, a lawyer by profession, owns a pistol that shoots nails, a machine for cutting rock, and another that vomits cement through a hose. My grandfather was an exception among Chileans because no man from the middle class up knows how to decipher a manual, nor does he dirty his hands with motor oil—that’s what maestros are for; they can improvise ingenious solutions with the most modest resources and a minimum of fuss. I knew one who fell from the ninth floor while trying to repair a window, and miraculously emerged without injury. He went back up in the elevator, rubbing his bruises, to apologize for having broken the hammer. The idea of using a safety belt or filing for compensation never entered his mind.
There was a little hut at the back of my grandfather’s garden, surely built for a maid, and I made myself a nest there. For the first time in my life I had privacy and silence, a luxury to which I became addicted. I studied during the day and at night I read the sci-fi novels I rented for a few pennies at a nearby kiosk. Like all teenaged Chileans then, I walked around with The Magic Mountain and Steppenwolf under my arm to impress everyone, but I don’t remember ever having read them. (Chile is possibly the one country where Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse have been permanent best-sellers, although I can’t imagine that we have anything in common with characters like Narcissus and Goldmund.) In my grandfather’s library, I came across a collection of Russian novels and the complete works of Henri Troyat, who wrote long family sagas about life in Russia before and during the Revolution. I read and reread those books, and years later I named my son Nicolás after one of Troyat’s characters, a young country man, radiant as a sunny morning, who falls in love with his master’s wife and sacrifices his life for her. The story is so romantic that even today, when I think of it, it makes me want to weep. That’s how all my favorite books were, and still are: passionate characters, noble causes, daring acts of bravery, idealism, adventure, and, when possible, distant locales with terrible climates, like Siberia or some African desert, that is, somewhere I never plan to go. Tropical islands, so pleasant for vacations, are a disaster in literature.
I was also writing to my mother in Turkey every day. Letters took two months to be delivered, but that has never been a problem for us, we have the vice of epistolary communication: we have written nearly every day for forty-five years, with the mutual promise that when either of us dies, the other will tear up the mountain of accumulated letters. Without that guarantee we couldn’t write so freely. I don’t want to think of the uproar that would result if those letters, in which we have made mincemeat of our relatives and the rest of the world, fell into indiscreet hands.
I remember those winters in my adolescence, when the rain engulfed the patio and flowed beneath the door of my little hut, when the wind threatened to carry off the roof, and thunder and lightning rattled the world. If I had been able to stay closed up there reading all winter, my life would have been perfect, but I had to go to class. I despised waiting for the bus, tired and anxious, never knowing whether I would be one of the fortunate who got on or one of the poor wretches who didn’t make it and had to wait for the next bus. The city had spread out and it was difficult to get from one point to another; to get onto a bus (a micro to us) was tantamount to a suicide mission. After waiting hours along with twenty citizens as desperate as you, sometimes in the rain, standing ankle-deep in a mud pit, you had to run like a rabbit as the vehicle approached, coughing and belching smoke from the exhaust, and hop and grab a handhold on the steps, or on some passenger who’d been lucky enough to get his foot in the door. Not too surprisingly, this has changed. Today the micros are quick, modern, and numerous. The one drawback is that their drivers compete to be first at the bus stop in order to collect the maximum number of passengers, so they fly through the streets flattening anything in their way. They detest schoolchildren because they pay less, and old people because they take so long to get on and off, so they do anything in their power to prevent them from getting within a mile of their vehicle. Anyone who wants to know a Chilean’s true character must use public transportation in Santiago and travel across the country by bus: the experience is most instructive. Street minstrels get onto the buses, magicians, jugglers, thieves, lunatics, and beggars, along with people selling needles, calendars, and color prints of saints and flowers. In general, Chileans are bad-humored and in the street never look you in the eye, but on the micros a kind of solidarity is established that resembles the camaraderie in London’s air raid shelters during the Second World War.
One further word about traffic: Chileans, so timid and amiable in person, become savages when they have a steering wheel in their hands; they race to see who can be first to reach the next red light, they snake in and out of lanes without signaling, shout insults or make obscene gestures. Nearly all our epithets end in -ón, which makes them sound like French. A hand held out as if begging for alms is a direct allusion to the size of the enemy’s genitals; that’s good to know before you’re foolish enough to place a coin in the offending palm.
With my grandfather I made some unforgettable trips to the coast, the mountains, and the desert. He took me twice to sheep ranches in the Argentine Patagonia, true odysseys by train, jeep, ox cart, and horseback. We traveled to the south through magnificent forests of native trees, where it is always raining; we sailed the pure waters of lakes that mirrored snowy volcanoes; we crossed through the rugged cordillera of the Andes along hidden routes used by smugglers. Once on the other side, we were met by Argentine herders, crude, silent men with able hands and faces tanned like the leather of their boots. We camped beneath the stars, wrapped in heavy wool ponchos, using our saddles for pillows. The herdsmen killed a kid and roasted it on a spit; we ate it washed down with mate, a green, bitter tea served in a gourd passed from hand to hand, all of us sipping from the same metal straw. It would have been an insult to have turned up my nose at a tube slick with saliva and chewing tobacco. My grandfather never believed in germs, for the same reason he didn’t believe in ghosts: he’d never seen one. At dawn we washed in frosty water and strong yellow soap made from sheep fat and lye. Those journeys left me with such an indelible memory that thirty-five years later, when I told the story of the flight of the protagonists of my second novel, Of Love and Shadows, I could describe the experience and the landscape without hesitation.