I often ask myself what exactly nostalgia is. In my case, it’s not so much wanting to live in Chile as it is the desire to recapture the certainty I feel there. That’s my home ground. Each country has its customs, its manias, its complexes. I know the idiosyncrasies of mine like the palm of my hand; nothing surprises me, I can anticipate others’ reactions, I understand what gestures mean, silences, formulas of courtesy, ambiguous responses. Only there do I feel comfortable socially—despite the fact I rarely behave as I’m expected to—because there I know how to behave and my good manners rarely fail me.
When I was a recently divorced forty-five, I immigrated to the United States, obeying the call of my impulsive heart. The first thing that surprised me was the infallible optimism of North Americans, so different from people in the southern tip of South America, who always expect the worst to happen. Which it does, of course. The U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to the pursuit of happiness, which anywhere else would be an embarrassing presumption. North Americans also believe they have the eternal right to be entertained, and if any of their rights are denied, they feel frustrated. The rest of the world, in contrast, expects that on the whole, life is hard, and boring, so they celebrate sparks of joy and diversion, however modest, when they occur.
In Chile it is bad manners to acknowledge that you’re overly satisfied, because that can irritate the less fortunate, which is why for us the correct answer to the question “How are you?” is “So-so.” That is an opening for sympathizing with the other speaker’s situation. For example, if one person says he’s just been diagnosed with a fatal illness, it would be very bad taste to rub in his face how well everything’s going for you, wouldn’t it? But if the other person has just married an heiress, you’re free to confess your own happiness without fear of wounding anyone’s feelings. That is the sense of the “So-so” that can sometimes confuse visiting foreigners: it gives us time to feel out the ground and avoid a faux pas. Sociologists say that forty percent of Chileans suffer from depression, especially women, who have to put up with the men. You must remember, too, that our country goes through major disasters, and that there are many poor, so it seems rude to mention one’s own good fortune. I had a relative who twice won the jackpot in the lottery, but he always said “So-so,” in order not to offend. As an aside, it’s rather interesting to learn how his good fortune came about. He was a very strong Catholic and as such never wanted to hear talk of contraceptives. After his seventh child was born, desperate, he went to the church, knelt before the altar, and had a heart-to-heart talk with his Creator. “Lord, since you sent me seven children, it would be a kindness if You helped me feed them,” he argued, and immediately took a long, carefully prepared list of expenses from his pocket. God listened patiently to the arguments of his loyal servant and almost immediately revealed the winning lottery number in a dream. Those millions lasted for several years, but inflation, which was endemic in Chile during that time, reduced his capital at the same rate he enlarged his family. When the last of his children was born, number eleven, he returned to church to argue his case, and again God came to his aid by sending another revelation in a dream. The third time it was no deal.
In my family, happiness was irrelevant. My grandparents, like the great majority of Chileans, would have stood with their mouths agape if they’d known that there are people who spend good money on therapy to overcome their unhappiness. For them, life was just difficult, any other view was foolishness. You found satisfaction in doing the right thing, in family, honor, the spirit of service, study, and your own fortitude. Joy was in our lives in many ways, and I suppose that love was not the least important, but we didn’t talk about it, we would have died of shame before saying the word. Emotions flowed silently. In contrast to most Chileans, in our family we didn’t touch much and babies were never coddled. The modern custom of extolling a child’s every move as if it were witty and charming was not in vogue, nor was there anxiety about bringing up offspring who were free of traumas. Just as well, because if I’d been brought up protected and happy, what the devil would I write about now? With this in mind, I’ve tried to make my grandchildren’s childhood as difficult as possible so they will grow up to be creative adults. Their parents are not at all appreciative of my efforts.
Physical appearance was ignored in my family; my mother swears that she didn’t know she was pretty until she was forty, because looks were never mentioned. In that, we could claim originality because in Chile appearances are fundamental. In our clan it was also bad taste to talk about religion and, most of all, money. On the other hand, illness was a constant topic of conversation, it is Chile’s most chewed-over topic. We specialize in exchanging remedies and medical advice; everyone loves to prescribe a cure. We distrust doctors because it’s obvious that good health does not promote good business, and we go to them only when everything else has failed, after we’ve tried all the remedies recommended by our friends and acquaintances. Let’s say you faint at the door of a supermarket. In any other country they call an ambulance, but not Chile, where several volunteers will pick you up, haul you behind the checkout counter, pour cold water on your face and whiskey down your gullet to bring you to; then they will force you to swallow pills some lady takes from her purse because “my friend has these attacks and this is a fantastic remedy.” There will be a chorus of experts who will diagnose your condition in clinical terms because every citizen with an ounce of sense knows a lot about medicine. One of the experts, for example, will say that you have an obturation of a valve in your brain, but another may suspect a complex torsion of the lungs, and a third that you have ruptured your pancreas. Within a few minutes there will be a hue and cry all around you, and someone will arrive who’s run to the pharmacy to buy penicillin to inject you with—just in case. Come to think of it, if you’re a foreigner, my advice is not to faint in a Chilean supermarket; it can be a deadly experience.
To illustrate how free we are about prescribing, once during a southern cruise to our beautiful San Rafael lagoon in the cold fjords of the south, we were given sleeping pills with dessert. At dinner the captain notified the passengers that we were about to sail through particularly rough waters, and then his wife went from table to table handing out pills, the name of which no one dared ask. We took them obediently and twenty minutes later all the passengers were out like a light, suggesting the story of Sleeping Beauty. My husband said that in the United States the captain and his wife would have been arrested for anaesthetizing the passengers. In Chile we were very grateful.
In times gone by, the minute two or more people got together, the obligatory subject was politics; if there were two Chileans in a room, you could be sure of finding three political parties. I understand that in one period we had more than a dozen socialist mini-parties; even the right, monolithic in the rest of the world, was split. However, politics no longer brings out our passions; we talk about it only to be able to complain about the government, one of our favorite activities. We no longer vote religiously, as in the days when dying citizens were carried on stretchers to fulfill their civic duty. Nor do we, as we once did, have instances of women giving birth in the voting booth. The young don’t register to vote, some 84.3 percent of the people believe that political parties do not represent their interests, and a greater number say they are content not to participate in any way in the conduct of the nation. This is a phenomenon of the Western world, it appears. Young people have no interest in fossilized political schemes dragged over from the nineteenth century. They are preoccupied with living well and prolonging their teenage years as long as possible—let’s say, till about forty or fifty. To be fair, there is also a small percentage who are militants in respect to ecology, science, and technology, and I have heard about some who do social service through the churches.
The subjects that have replaced politics among Chileans are money, which there is never enough of, and soccer, which is a kind of consolation. The lowliest illiterate knows the names of all the players throughout our history, and has his own opinion of each. This sport is so important that souls from purgatory wander the streets freely when there’s a match because the entire population is in a catatonic state in front of television sets. Soccer is one of the few human activities that proves the relativity of time: the goalie can float in the air for half a minute, the same scene can be repeated several times in slow motion, or backward and, thanks to the time change between continents, a game between Hungary and Germany can be seen in Santiago before it’s played.
In our house, as in the rest of the country, dialogue was unknown; our get-togethers consisted of a series of simultaneous monologues during which no one listened to anyone: pure confusion and static, like a short-wave radio transmission. It didn’t matter, because neither was there interest in learning what others thought, only in repeating one’s own side of things. When my grandfather grew old, he refused to wear a hearing aid because he thought that the only thing good about his years was not having to listen to the foolish things people said. As General Mendoza expressed so eloquently in 1983: “We are abusing dialogic expression. There are cases in which dialogue is unnecessary. A monologue is more necessary because a dialogue is a simple conversation between two people.” This philosopher added later that “The country lives in organized disorder.” My family would have been in total agreement.
We Chileans have a tendency to speak in falsetto. Mary Graham, an Englishwoman who visited the country in 1822, commented in a book titled Diary of My Residence in Chile that people were charming, but that they spoke in a disagreeable tone of voice, especially the women. We swallow half our words, we aspirate the s and change vowels, so that the word señor sounds like inyol. There are at least three official languages: the educated speech used in communication media, in official matters, and by some members of the upper class when not among friends; the colloquial language used by ordinary people; and the indecipherable and always changing speech of young people. The visiting foreigner should not despair, because even if he doesn’t understand a word, he’ll see that people are dying to be of help. We also speak very low and sigh a lot. When I lived in Venezuela, where men and women are very sure of themselves and of the ground beneath their feet, it was easy to distinguish my compatriots by the way they walked—like spies in disguise—and by their unvarying tone of apology. I used to go every morning to a Portuguese bakery to have my first cup of coffee, where there was always a mob of customers fighting to get to the counter. The Venezuelans would shout from the door, “Hey, a coffee over here!” and before you knew it they had a paper cup of café con leche, passed to them hand to hand. We Chileans—and in that period there were a lot of us because Venezuela was one of the Latin American countries that accepted refugees and immigrants—would hold up a trembling index finger and in the thread of a voice plead, “I’m sorry, may I please have a little cup of coffee, señor?” We could stand there the entire morning, waiting in vain. The Venezuelans joked about our much too precious manners, and in turn we Chileans were shocked by how forward they were. Those of us who lived in that country for several years changed, though, and among other things we learned to shout when we ordered our coffee.
Having read these observations about the character and customs of Chileans, you can understand my mother’s doubts: there’s no reason I should have turned out the way I did. I have none of the sense of decorum, the modesty, or the pessimism of my relatives, and none of their fear of what people will say, of extravagance, or of God. I don’t speak or write apologetically, instead I’m rather grandiloquent, and I like attracting attention. That is, I simply am as I am today, after a lot of living. In my childhood I was a strange little insect; in adolescence, a shy mouse—for many years my nickname was Laucha, which was what we called our ordinary household mice—and in my youthful years I was everything from a rabid feminist to a flower-crowned hippie. My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else’s. In short, a disaster. If I lived in Chile no one would speak to me. But one thing I am is hospitable. At least they managed to hammer that virtue into me when I was a child. Knock at my door at any hour of the day or night and even if I’ve just broken my femur I will crawl to open the door and offer you your first cup of tea of the day. In everything else, I am the antithesis of the lady my parents, with great sacrifice, tried to make of me. It isn’t their fault, they simply had very little to work with, and besides, I was bent by destiny.
If I had stayed in Chile, as I always wanted, married to one of my second cousins (in the improbable case that one of them proposed to me), maybe today I would carry my ancestors’ blood in my veins with dignity, and perhaps my father’s coat of arms bearing the flea-bitten dogs would be hanging in a place of honor in my home. I should add that however rebellious I may have been in my life, I have not lost the manners that were drummed into me day and night, as they should be for anyone who is to be a “decent” person. Which was fundamental in my family. That word encompassed much more than I could possibly explain in these pages, but I can say with absolute confidence that courtesy and good manners were a large part of what was defined as decency.
Well, I’ve gone way off on a tangent, and I need to pick up the main thread of this account, if there is any thread in all this meandering. But that’s how nostalgia is: a slow dance in a large circle. Memories don’t organize themselves chronologically, they’re like smoke, changing, ephemeral, and if they’re not written down they fade into oblivion. I’ve tried to arrange my thoughts according to themes or periods of my life, but it’s seemed artificial to me because memory twists in and out, like an endless Moebius strip.