WE HADN’T YET RECOVERED from our brief brush with movie-land fame when Of Love and Shadows was premiered, the film based on my second novel. The actress Jennifer Connelly was so like you—slim, fragile, thick eyebrows, long hair—that I couldn’t stay to see the end of the film. There is a moment when she is in a hospital bed, and her companion, Antonio Banderas, picks her up in his arms and supports her on the toilet. I remember clearly the identical scene between you and Ernesto, a little before you fell into the coma. The first time I saw Jennifer Connelly was in a restaurant in San Francisco, where we’d agreed to meet. When I saw her coming toward me in her faded jeans, her white starched blouse and ponytail, I thought I was dreaming: she was you, daughter, revived in all your beauty. Of Love and Shadows was filmed in Argentina because they didn’t dare make it in Chile, where the legacy of the recent dictatorship still had a lot of weight. I thought it was an honest film and regretted that it came out with so little promotion, although it did circulate later on video and television.
The book is a political adventure based on actual events; it tells of fifteen campesinos who disappeared after being arrested by the military, but it is essentially a love story. On Willie’s fiftieth birthday, a friend gave him that book, which he read on his vacation. Later he thanked her for the book with a note that said, “The author understands love the way I do.” And that is why, because of the love he perceived in those pages, he decided to come meet me when I passed through northern California on a book tour. At our first meeting he asked me about the protagonists; he wanted to know if they existed or whether I had imagined them, whether perhaps their love survived the duress of exile, and whether they had ever returned to Chile. I hear that question frequently; it isn’t only children who want to know how much truth there is in fiction. I began to answer his questions, but after only a few sentences he interrupted me. “No, no, don’t say any more. I don’t want to know. The important thing is that you wrote it and therefore you believe in that kind of love.” Then he confessed that he had always been sure that love like that was possible and that one day he would live it, although up to that time he had not experienced anything even remotely similar. My second novel brought me luck. Because of it I met Willie.
By then, Daughter of Fortune had been published in Europe. According to some critics it was an allegory of feminism: Eliza shed her Victorian corset to dive, with absolutely no preparation, into a man’s world in which she had to dress as a male in order to survive; in the process she acquired something very valuable: freedom. I didn’t have that in mind when I wrote the book; I thought the theme was simply the fever for gold, the tumult of adventurers, bandits, preachers, and prostitutes who gave birth to San Francisco, but that analysis seems valid to me because it reflects my feminist convictions and the desire for freedom that has determined the course of my life. To write the novel I had traveled with Willie across California, soaking myself in its history and trying to imagine what those years were like, the period in the nineteenth century when gold gleamed in the riverbeds and clefts in the rocks, inflaming men’s greed. The distances are still great despite the expressways; on horseback or on foot along narrow mountain paths they must have been infinite. The magnificent geography, the forests, the snow-covered peaks, the rivers with racing waters, invite silence and remind me of the enchanted landscape of Chile. The history of my two homelands, Chile and California, and the peoples who inhabit them, are very different, but the scenery and the climate are very much alike. Often when I return home after a trip, I have the impression of having traveled in a circle for thirty years and ended up again in Chile; there are the same winters of rain and wind, the dry, hot summers, the same trees, the cliff-lined coasts, the cold, dark sea, the endless hills, the clear skies.
After Daughter of Fortune followed Portrait in Sepia, the novel I was writing at that time, which also connects Chile with California. Its theme is memory. I am an eternal transplant, as the poet Pablo Neruda used to say; my roots would have dried up by now had they not been nourished by the rich magma of the past, which in my case had an inevitable component of imagination. Perhaps it isn’t only in my case. It is said that the processes of remembering and of imagining are nearly identical in our brains. The plot of the novel is based on something that happened in a distant branch of my family, when the husband of one of the daughters fell in love with his sister-in-law. In Chile this kind of family history is not aired. Even though everyone knows the truth, a conspiracy of silence is woven around it to keep up appearances. That may be why no one wants to have a writer in the family. The setting was a beautiful country estate at the foot of the Andean cordillera, and the protagonists were the finest people in the world, who didn’t deserve such suffering. I believe that the pain would have been more bearable if it had been talked about instead of hidden behind a veil, if instead of locking in the secret they had opened doors and windows to let the breeze carry off the bad smell. It was one of those dramas of love and betrayal buried beneath layers and layers of social and religious conventions, as told in a Russian novel. Just as Willie says, behind closed doors there are many family secrets.
I didn’t plan the novel as a second part of Daughter of Fortune, although they coincide historically, but several characters, such as Eliza Sommers, the Chinese physician Tao Chi’en, the matriarch Paulina del Valle, and others, made their way into the pages of the new book and there was nothing I could do to stop them. When I was about halfway along in the writing, I realized that I could connect those two novels with The House of the Spirits and make a kind of trilogy that begins with Daughter of Fortune and uses Portrait in Sepia as a bridge. The unfortunate thing is that in one of the books Severo del Valle loses a leg in the war, and in the following book he has two; that is, somewhere there is an amputated leg floating in the dense fog of literary errors.
The research that had to do with California was easy, I had done that for the previous book, but the rest had to be done in Chile, with the help of Tío Ramón, who for months dug through history books, documents, and old newspapers. It was a good excuse to visit my parents more often; they had entered the decade of their eighties and were beginning to look more frail. For the first time I thought of the terrifying possibility that one not too distant day I might be left an orphan. What would I do without them? Without the routine of writing my mother? That year, contemplating the proximity of death, she returned the packs of my letters bundled in Christmas wrapping paper. “Here, you keep them, because if I suffer a sudden stroke it wouldn’t do for them to fall into someone else’s hands,” she told me. Ever since then she has given me my letters every year, with my promise in return that when I die, Nico and Lori will burn them in a purifying bonfire. The flames will carry off our sins of indiscretion. In them we spill out anything that crosses our minds and sling mud on everyone. Thanks to my mother’s epistolary talent and my obligation to answer her, I have in my hands a voluminous correspondence in which events are kept fresh. That is how I have been able to write this memoir. The purpose of that methodical correspondence is to keep pulsing the cord that has joined us since the instant of my conception, but it is also an exercise to strengthen memory, that ephemeral mist in which recollections dissipate, change, and blend together; at the end of our days it turns out that we have lived only what we can evoke. What I don’t write I forget; it is as if it never happened. That’s why nothing significant is left out in those letters. Sometimes my mother calls me to tell me something that has affected her in some major way, and the first thing I think to say is, “Write me about it, so it won’t fade away.” If she dies before I do, which is probable, I will be able to read two letters every day, one of hers and one of mine, until I am one hundred and five years old, and as by then I will likely be deep in the confusion of senility, it will all seem new to me. Thanks to our correspondence, I will live twice.