My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile

by Isabel Allende

  Map

  Map by David Cain

  Dedication

  . . . for some reason or other, I am a sad exile. In some way or other, our land travels with me and with me too, though far, far away, live the longitudinal essences of my country.

  —PABLO NERUDA, 1972

  Contents

  Map

  Dedication

  A FEW WORDS OF INTRODUCTION

  COUNTRY OF LONGITUDINAL ESSENCES

  DULCE DE LECHE, ORGAN GRINDERS, AND GYPSIES

  AN OLD ENCHANTED HOUSE

  A MILLEFEUILLE PASTRY

  SIRENS SCANNING THE SEA

  PRAYING TO GOD

  THE LANDSCAPE OF CHILDHOOD

  A SOBER AND SERIOUS PEOPLE

  OF VICES AND VIRTUES

  THE ROOTS OF NOSTALGIA

  CONFUSED YEARS OF YOUTH

  DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE

  A BREATH OF HISTORY

  GUNPOWDER AND BLOOD

  CHILE IN MY HEART

  THIS COUNTRY INSIDE MY HEAD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  Back Ad

  Praise for My Invented Country

  Also by Isabel Allende

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  A FEW WORDS OF INTRODUCTION

  I was born in the years of the smoke and carnage of the Second World War, and the greatest part of my youth was spent waiting for the planet to blow apart when someone distractedly pressed a button deploying atomic bombs. No one expected to live very long; we rushed around swallowing up every moment before being overtaken by the apocalypse, so we didn’t have time to examine our navels and take notes, as people do today. In addition, I grew up in Santiago, Chile, where any natural tendency toward self-contemplation is quickly nipped in the bud. The saying that defines the lifestyle of that city is “Shrimp that dozes is shrimp on the platter.” In other, more sophisticated cultures, like those of Buenos Aires or New York, a visit to the psychologist was thought to be a normal activity: to deprive oneself of that attention was considered evidence of a lack of culture or of mental deficiency. In Chile, however, only dangerously disturbed patients visited a psychologist, and then always in a straitjacket, but that changed in the seventies, along with the arrival of the sexual revolution. (One wonders if there’s a connection . . .) In my family no one ever resorted to therapy, even though many of us were classic case studies, because the idea of confiding intimate matters to a stranger—and a stranger we were paying to listen—was absurd. That’s what priests and aunts were for. I have very little training for reflection, but in recent weeks I have caught myself thinking about my past with a frequency that can only be explained as a sign of premature senility.

  Two recent events have triggered this avalanche of memories. The first was a casual observation by my grandson Alejandro, who surprised me at the mirror scrutinizing the map of my wrinkles and said, with compassionate commiseration, “Don’t worry, Grandmother, you’re going to live at least three more years.” I decided right then and there that the time had come to take another look at my life, in order to know how I wanted to live those three years that had been so generously granted.

  The second event was a question asked by a stranger during a conference of travel writers where I’d been invited to give the opening address. I must make clear that I do not belong to that weird group of people who travel to remote places, survive the bacteria, and then publish books to convince the incautious to follow in their footsteps. Traveling demands a disproportionate effort, especially when it’s to places where there is no room service. My ideal vacation consists of sitting in a chair beneath an umbrella on my patio, reading books of adventures I would never consider attempting unless I was escaping from something.

  I come from the so-called Third World (what is the Second?), and I had to trap a husband in order to live legally in the First. I have no intention of going back to underdevelopment without good cause. Nevertheless, for reasons quite beyond my control, I have wandered across five continents, and have in addition been an exile and an immigrant. So I know something about travel, which is why I had been asked to speak at that conference. At the end of my brief talk, a hand was raised in the audience and a young man asked me what role nostalgia played in my novels. For a moment I was silent. Nostalgia . . . according to the dictionary, nostalgia is “a bittersweet longing for things, persons, or situations of the past. The condition of being homesick.” The question took my breath away because until that instant I’d never realized that I write as a constant exercise in longing. I have been an outsider nearly all my life, a circumstance I accept because I have no alternative. Several times I have found it necessary to pull up stakes, sever all ties, and leave everything behind in order to begin life anew elsewhere; I have been a pilgrim along more roads than I care to remember. From saying good-bye so often my roots have dried up, and I have had to grow others, which, lacking a geography to sink into, have taken hold in my memory. But be careful! Minotaurs lie in wait in the labyrinths of memory.

  Until only a short time ago, if someone had asked me where I’m from, I would have answered, without much thought, Nowhere; or, Latin America; or, maybe, In my heart I’m Chilean. Today, however, I say I’m an American, not simply because that’s what my passport verifies, or because that word includes all of America from north to south, or because my husband, my son, my grandchildren, most of my friends, my books, and my home are in northern California; but because a terrorist attack destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and starting with that instant, many things have changed. We can’t be neutral in moments of crisis. This tragedy has brought me face to face with my sense of identity. I realize today that I am one person in the multicolored population of North America, just as before I was Chilean. I no longer feel that I am an alien in the United States. When I watched the collapse of the towers, I had a sense of having lived a nearly identical nightmare. By a blood-chilling coincidence—historic karma—the commandeered airplanes struck their U.S. targets on a Tuesday, September 11, exactly the same day of the week and month—and at almost the same time in the morning—of the 1973 military coup in Chile, a terrorist act orchestrated by the CIA against a democracy. The images of burning buildings, smoke, flames, and panic are similar in both settings. That distant Tuesday in 1973 my life was split in two; nothing was ever again the same: I lost a country. That fateful Tuesday in 2001 was also a decisive moment; nothing will ever again be the same, and I gained a country.

  Those two statements, the consoling words from my grandson and the question asked by a stranger at a conference, gave rise to this book. I’m not sure what direction it will take. For the moment, I’m wandering, but I ask you to stay with me a little longer.

  I am writing these pages in a room perched high on a hill, under the vigil of a hundred gnarled oaks overlooking San Francisco Bay, but I come from a different place. Nostalgia is my vice. Nostalgia is a melancholy, and slightly saccharine, sentiment, like tenderness. It is nearly impossible to approach those emotions without sounding insipid, but I am going to try. If I fall and slip into cloying vulgarity I will climb out of it a few lines later. At my age—I’m at least as old as synthetic penicillin—you begin to remember things that have been erased from your mind for half a century. I haven’t thought about my childhood or adolescence for decades. In truth, those periods of my remote past matter so little to me that when I look at my mother’s photograph albums I don’t recognize anyone except a bulldog with the improbable name of Pelvina López-Pun, and the only reason why she is etched in my mind is because we were very muc
h alike. There is a snapshot of the two of us, when I was a few months old, in which my mother had to indicate with an arrow which of us was which. Surely my bad memory is due in part to the fact that those times were not particularly happy ones, but I suppose that’s the case with most mortals. A happy childhood is a myth, and in order to understand that we have only to take a look at children’s stories; for example, the one in which the wolf eats the beloved grandmother, then along comes a woodsman and slits the poor beast open with his knife, extracts the old woman, alive and uninjured, fills the wolf’s belly with stones and then stitches him up, in the process creating such a thirst in the animal that he runs down to drink from the river, where he drowns from the weight of the stones. Why didn’t they do away with him in a simpler, more humane way, is what I want to know. Surely because nothing is simple or humane in childhood. In those days there was no such term as “abused children,” it was accepted that the best way to bring up little ones was with a strap in one hand and a cross in the other, just as it was taken for granted that a man had a right to give his wife a good shaking if his soup was cold when it reached the table. Before psychologists and authorities intervened, no one doubted the beneficial effects of a good switching. I wasn’t whipped like my brothers, but I lived in fear, like all the other children I knew.

  In my case, the natural unhappiness of childhood was aggravated by a mass of complexes so tangled that even today I can’t list them. Fortunately, they left no wounds that time hasn’t healed. Once I heard a famous Afro-American writer say that from the time she was a little girl she felt like a stranger in her family and her hometown. She added that nearly all writers have experienced that feeling, even if they have never left their native city. It’s a condition inherent in that profession, she suggested; without the anxiety of feeling different, she wouldn’t have been driven to write. Writing, when all is said and done, is an attempt to understand one’s own circumstance and to clarify the confusion of existence, including insecurities that do not torment normal people, only chronic nonconformists, many of whom end up as writers after having failed in other undertakings. This theory lifted a burden from my shoulders. I am not a monster; there are others like me.

  I never fit in anywhere: not into my family, my social class, or the religion fate bestowed on me. I didn’t belong to the neighborhood gangs that rode their bikes in the street, my cousins didn’t include me in their games, I was the least popular girl in my school, and for a long time I was the last to be invited to dance at parties—a torment, I like to think, due more to shyness than to looks. I cloaked myself in my pride, pretending it didn’t matter to me, but I would have sold my soul to the devil to be part of a group had Satan presented me with such an attractive proposition. The source of my difficulties has always been the same: an inability to accept what to others seems natural, and an irresistible tendency to voice opinions no one wants to hear, a trait that frightened away more than one potential suitor (I don’t want to give a false impression, there weren’t very many). Later, during my years as a journalist, curiosity and boldness had their advantages. For the first time I was part of a community, I had absolute liberty to ask indiscreet questions and divulge my ideas, but that ended abruptly with the military coup of 1973, which unleashed uncontrollable forces. Overnight I became a foreigner in my own land, until finally I had to leave because I couldn’t live and bring up my children in a country where terror reigned and where there was no place for dissidents like myself. During that period, curiosity and boldness were outlawed by decree. Outside Chile, I waited years to return once democracy was restored, but when that happened I didn’t, because by then I was married to a North American and living near San Francisco. I haven’t gone back to take up residence in Chile, where in truth I have spent less than half of my life, although I visit frequently. But in order to respond to the question that the stranger asked about nostalgia, I must refer almost exclusively to my years there. And to do that, I have to talk about my family because nation and tribe are confused in my mind.

  COUNTRY OF LONGITUDINAL ESSENCES

  Let’s begin at the beginning, with Chile, that remote land that few people can locate on the map because it’s as far as you can go without falling off the planet. Why don’t we sell Chile and buy something closer to Paris? one of our intellectuals once asked. No one passes by casually, however lost he may be, although many visitors decide to stay forever, enamored of the land and the people. Chile lies at the end of all roads, a lance to the south of the south of America, four thousand three hundred kilometers of hills, valleys, lakes, and sea. This is how Neruda describes it in his impassioned poetry:

  Night, snow and sand compose the form

  of my slender homeland,

  all silence is contained within its length,

  all foam issues from its seaswept beard,

  all coal fills it with mysterious kisses.

  This elongated country is like an island, separated on the north from the rest of the continent by the Atacama Desert—the driest in the world, its inhabitants like to say, although that must not be true, because in springtime parts of that lunar rubble tend to be covered with a mantle of flowers, like a wondrous painting by Monet. To the east rises the cordillera of the Andes, a formidable mass of rock and eternal snows, and to the west the abrupt coastline of the Pacific Ocean. Below, to the south, lie the solitudes of Antarctica. This nation of dramatic topography and diverse climates, studded with capricious obstacles and shaken by the sighs of hundreds of volcanoes, a geological miracle between the heights of the cordillera and the depths of the sea, is unified top to tail by the obstinate sense of nationhood of its inhabitants.

  We Chileans still feel our bond with the soil, like the campesinos we once were. Most of us dream of owning a piece of land, if for nothing more than to plant a few worm-eaten heads of lettuce. Our most important newspaper, El Mercurio, publishes a weekly agricultural supplement that informs the public in general of the latest insignificant pest found on the potatoes or about the best forage for improving milk production. Its readers, who are planted in asphalt and concrete, read it voraciously, even though they have never seen a live cow.

  In the broadest terms, it can be said that my long and narrow homeland can be broken up into four very different regions. The country is divided into provinces with beautiful names, but the military, who may have had difficulty memorizing them, added numbers for identification purposes. I refuse to use them because a nation of poets cannot have a map dotted with numbers, like some mathematical delirium. So let’s talk about the four large regions, beginning with the norte grande, the “big north” that occupies a fourth of the country; inhospitable and rough, guarded by high mountains, it hides in its entrails an inexhaustible treasure of minerals.

  I traveled to the north when I was a child, and I’ve never forgotten it, though a half-century has gone by since then. Later in my life I had the opportunity to cross the Atacama Desert a couple of times, and although those were extraordinary experiences, my first recollections are still the strongest. In my memory, Antofagasta, which in Quechua means “town of the great salt lands,” is not the modern city of today but a miserable, out-of-date port that smelled like iodine and was dotted with fishing boats, gulls, and pelicans. In the nineteenth century it rose from the desert like a mirage, thanks to the industry producing nitrates, which for several decades were one of Chile’s principal exports. Later, when synthetic nitrate was invented, the port was kept busy exporting copper, but as the nitrate companies began to close down, one after another, the pampa became strewn with ghost towns. Those two words—“ghost town”—gave wings to my imagination on that first trip.

  I recall that my family and I, loaded with bundles, climbed onto a train that traveled at a turtle’s pace through the inclement Atacama Desert toward Bolivia. Sun, baked rocks, kilometers and kilometers of ghostly solitudes, from time to time an abandoned cemetery, ruined buildings of adobe and wood. It was a dry heat where not even flies survived. T
hirst was unquenchable. We drank water by the gallon, sucked oranges, and had a hard time defending ourselves from the dust, which crept into every cranny. Our lips were so chapped they bled, our ears hurt, we were dehydrated. At night a cold hard as glass fell over us, while the moon lighted the landscape with a blue splendor. Many years later I would return to the north of Chile to visit Chuquicamata, the largest open-pit copper mine in the world, an immense amphitheater where thousands of earth-colored men, working like ants, rip the mineral from stone. The train ascended to a height of more than four thousand meters and the temperature descended to the point where water froze in our glasses. We passed the silent salt mine of Uyuni, a white sea of salt where no bird flies, and others where we saw elegant flamingos. They were brush strokes of pink among salt crystals glittering like precious stones.

  The so-called norte chico, or “little north,” which some do not classify as an actual region, divides the dry north from the fertile central zone. Here lies the valley of Elqui, one of the spiritual centers of the Earth, said to be magical. The mysterious forces of Elqui attract pilgrims who come there to make contact with the cosmic energy of the universe, and many stay on to live in esoteric communities. Meditation, Eastern religions, gurus of various stripes, there’s something of everything in Elqui. It’s like a little corner of California. It is also from Elqui that our pisco comes, a liquor made from the muscatel grape: transparent, virtuous, and serene as the angelic force that emanates from the land. Pisco is the prime ingredient of the pisco sour, our sweet and treacherous national drink, which must be drunk with confidence, though the second glass has a kick that can floor the most valiant among us. We usurped the name of this liquor, without a moment’s hesitation, from the city of Pisco, in Peru. If any wine with bubbles can be called champagne, even though the authentic libation comes only from Champagne, France, I suppose our pisco, too, can appropriate a name from another nation. The norte chico is also home to La Silla, one of the most important observatories in the world, because the air there is so clear that no star—either dead or yet to be born—escapes the eye of its gigantic telescope. Apropos of the observatory, someone who has worked there for three decades told me that the most renowned astronomers in the world wait years for their turn to scour the universe. I commented that it must be stupendous to work with scientists whose eyes are always on infinity and who live detached from earthly miseries, but he informed me that it is just the opposite: astronomers are as petty as poets. He says they fight over jam at breakfast. The human condition never fails to amaze.