In Chile people try to avoid talking about the past. The youngest generations believe the world began with them; anything that happened before they were born doesn’t interest them. And it may be that the rest of the population shares a collective shame regarding what took place during the dictatorship, the same feeling that Germany had after Hitler. Both young and old want to avoid discord. No one wants to be led into discussions that drive even deeper wedges. Furthermore, people are too busy trying to get to the end of the month with a salary that doesn’t stretch far enough, and quietly doing their job so they won’t be fired, to be concerned about politics. It’s assumed that digging too much into the past can “destabilize” the democracy and provoke the military, a fear that is totally unfounded, since the democracy has been strengthened in recent years—since 1989—and the military has lost prestige. Besides, this is not a good time for military coups. Despite its many problems—poverty, inequality, crime, drugs, guerrilla wars—Latin America has opted for democracy, and for its part, the United States is beginning to realize that its policy of supporting tyranny does not solve problems—it merely creates new ones.
The military coup didn’t come out of nowhere; the forces that upheld the dictatorship were there, we just hadn’t perceived them. Defects that had lain there beneath the surface blossomed in all their glory and majesty during that period. It isn’t possible that repression on such a grand scale could have been organized overnight unless a totalitarian tendency already existed in a sector of the society; apparently we were not as democratic as we believed. As for the government of Salvador Allende, it wasn’t as innocent as I like to imagine; it suffered from ineptitude, corruption, and pride. In real life, it may not always be easy to distinguish between heroes and villains, but I can assure you that in democratic governments, including that of the Unidad Popular, there was never the cruelty the nation has suffered every time the military intervenes.
Like thousands of other Chilean families, Miguel and I left with our two children because we didn’t want to go on living in a dictatorship. That was 1975. The country we chose to emigrate to was Venezuela because it was one of the last remaining democracies in Latin America, shaken by military coups but one of the few countries that would grant us visas and the opportunity for work. Neruda says:
How can I live so far away
from what I loved, what I love?
From the changing seasons, clothed
in steam and cold smoke?
(Strangely enough, the thing I missed the most during those years of self-imposed exile were the seasons of the year. In the eternal green of the tropics, I was a complete stranger.)
In the seventies Venezuela was experiencing the peak of the oil boom, black gold gushed from its soil like a raging river. Everything seemed easy; with a minimum of work and decent connections, people lived better than anywhere else. Money flowed like water, and people spent it as if there were no tomorrow. More champagne was consumed in Venezuela than in any other country in the world. For those of us who had gone through the economic crisis of the government of the Unidad Popular, in which toilet paper was a luxury, and then escaped tremendous repression, Venezuela was beyond our comprehension. We couldn’t take in the leisure time, the easy money, and the freedom of that country. We Chileans, so serious, so sober and prudent, so fond of rules and legalisms, couldn’t understand that unfettered joy and indifference to discipline. Accustomed to euphemisms, we were offended by the frankness of speech. We Chileans numbered several thousand, and soon we were joined by others escaping from the “dirty wars” in Argentina and Uruguay. Some arrived with marks of recent imprisonment; all came with an air of defeat.
My husband found work in the interior of the country and I stayed in Caracas with our two children, who begged me every day to go back to Chile, where they had left grandparents, friends, school—in short, everything they knew. That separation from my husband proved fatal; I believe it marked the beginning of the end of our lives as man and wife. We weren’t the exception, because most of the couples who left Chile together ended up separated. Far away from country and family, the pairs found themselves face to face, naked and vulnerable, without the family pressure, the social crutches and routines that hold two people together. The circumstances were no help: fatigue, fear, insecurity, poverty, confusion; if in addition you were separated geographically, as happened with us, the prognosis was poor. Unless you’re lucky and your bond is very strong, love dies.
I couldn’t find a job as a journalist. What I’d done earlier in Chile made little impression, partly because exiles tend to inflate their credentials and in the end no one believes much of anything; there were false doctors who had barely graduated from high school and real doctors who ended up driving taxis. I didn’t know a soul, and there, as in the rest of Latin America, you don’t get anywhere without connections. I had to earn a living by taking insignificant jobs, none of which is worth mentioning. I didn’t understand the Venezuelan temperament, I confused their deeply felt sense of equality with bad manners, their extroversion with pedantry, their emotionalism with immaturity. I came from a country in which violence had been institutionalized and yet I was shocked by how quickly Venezuelans lost control. (Once at a movie theater a woman pulled a pistol from her handbag because I accidentally sat in a seat she had reserved.) I didn’t know their customs; for example, they rarely say no because they think it’s rude: they would rather say “Come back tomorrow.” I would go to look for a job and they would interview me with a great show of friendliness, offer me coffee, and say good-bye with a firm handshake and that “Come back tomorrow.” So I would come back the next day, and the same routine would be repeated until finally I gave up. I felt that my life was a failure; I was thirty-five years old and I thought I had no future before me except to grow old and die of boredom. Now when I remember that time, I realize that opportunities existed but I didn’t see them; I was confused and fearful, and incapable of dancing to their tune. Instead of making an effort to learn about the land that had so generously taken me in, and learn to love it, I was obsessed with going home to Chile. When I compare my experience as an exile with my current situation as an immigrant, I can see how different my state of mind is. In the former instance, you are forced to leave, whether you’re escaping or expelled, and you feel like a victim who has lost half her life; in the latter it’s your own decision, you are moving toward an adventure, master of your fate. The exile looks toward the past, licking his wounds, the immigrant looks toward the future, ready to take advantage of the opportunities within his reach.
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.