My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile

by Isabel Allende

  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.

  A BREATH OF HISTORY

  And since we’re talking about nostalgia, I beg you to have a little patience with what follows because I can’t separate the subject of Chile from my own life. My past is composed of passions, surprises, successes, and losses: it isn’t easy to relate in two or three sentences. I suppose there are moments in all human lives in which our fate is changed or twisted and forced to follow a different course. That has happened several times in mine, but maybe one of the most defining was the military coup in 1973. Were it not for that event, it’s clear that I would never have left Chile, that I wouldn’t be a writer, and that I wouldn’t be married to an American and living in California. Nor would I have lived with nostalgia for so long, or be writing these particular pages. All of which leads inevitably to the theme of politics. To understand how the military coup could have come about, I must briefly refer to our political history, from its beginnings to the time of General Augusto Pinochet, who today is a senile old man living under house arrest, but nonetheless a man whose importance it is impossible to ignore. More than one historian considers Pinochet to be the most singular political figure of the twentieth century, though that is not necessarily a favorable judgment.

  In Chile the political pendulum has swung from one extreme to another; we have tested every system of government that exists, and we have suffered the consequences. It isn’t strange, therefore, that we have more essayists and historians per square foot than any nation in the world. We study ourselves incessantly; we have the vice of analyzing our reality as if it were a permanent problem requiring urgent solutions. The brains who burn the midnight oil in this pursuit are a bunch of tedious eggheads who say things no one understands a single word of; as a result, no one pays much attention to them. Among us Chileans, pessimism is considered good form; it is assumed that only idiots go around happy. We are a developing nation, the most stable, secure, and prosperous in Latin America and one of the most organized; no one surpasses us in character, but it is very annoying to us when someone decrees that “the country is in fine shape.” Anyone who dares say that must be considered an ignoramus who never reads the newspapers.

  Ever since its independence in 1810, Chile has been run by the social class that has the economic power. Formerly that was landowners; today it is entrepreneurs, industrialists, and bankers. Formerly the powerful belonged to a small oligarchy that had descended from Europeans and was composed of a handful of families; today the ruling class is broader, numbering several thousand of the kinds of persons who know how to get things done. During the first hundred years of the republic, the presidents and politicians were all from the upper class, though later the middle class also had a hand in governing. Few, nevertheless, came from the working class. Presidents with a social conscience were men moved by inequality, injustice, and poverty, even though they had not experienced those afflictions personally.
Today the president and the majority of politicians, with the exception of several rightists, are not members of the economic group that has true control of the country. At this moment we have a paradoxical situation: a Socialist president and a rightist economy and policies.

  Until 1920 the country was ruled by a conservative oligarchy with a feudal mentality. One exception was the liberal president José Manuel Balmaceda (1891) who perceived the needs of the people and who tried to bring about reforms that threatened to damage the interests of the landowners, though he himself came from a very wealthy and powerful family, owners of an enormous latifundio. The conservative parliament’s fierce opposition provoked a social and political crisis. The navy rebelled and allied itself with the parliament, and a cruel civil war was unleashed that ended with the triumph of the parliament and with Balmaceda’s suicide. Nevertheless, the seeds of social ideas had been planted, and the following years saw the birth of the radical and communist parties.

  In 1920 a political leader was elected who for the first time preached social justice: Arturo Alessandri Palma, nicknamed The Lion. He came from a middle-class family of second-generation Italian immigrants. Although his family wasn’t wealthy, his European heritage, his culture, and his education easily qualified him for a place in the ruling class. He promulgated social legislation, and during the term of his government workers organized and gained access to political parties. Alessandri suggested modifying the Constitution to establish a true democracy, but the conservative forces of the opposition impeded him from accomplishing that, even though the majority of Chileans, especially the entire middle class, supported him. Parliament (again the parliament!) made it difficult for him to govern; it forced him to resign his position and exiled him to Europe. A succession of military juntas attempted to govern, but the country seemed to lose direction and the popular outcry forced the return of The Lion, who ended his term by seeing a new constitution put into effect.

  The armed forces, which felt they had been eased out of power and believed that the country owed them a great deal given their victories during the wars of the preceding century, forcefully installed General Carlos Ibáñez de Campo in the office of president. Ibáñez quickly employed dictatorial measures—which have continued to be anathema to Chileans up to the present moment—and that produced a civil opposition so formidable that it paralyzed the country and the general had to resign. Then came a period that we can classify as a sane democracy. Alliances were formed among parties, and in 1938 the left came to power under President Pedro Aguirre Cerda, a member of the Frente Popular, or Popular Front, in which communist and radical parties participated. After Pedro Aguirre Cerda, the deposed Ibáñez joined forces with the left, and three successive radical presidents followed. (Even though I was just a girl at the time, I remember that when Ibáñez was elected to govern for the second time, my family went into mourning. In my hideaway beneath the grand piano I heard the apocalyptic prognostications of my grandfather and uncles. I spent sleepless nights, convinced that enemy hordes were coming to burn our house to the ground. No such thing happened, the general had learned his lesson and acted within the Constitution.) For twenty years we had center-left governments, until 1958, when the right triumphed with Jorge Alessandri, son of The Lion and completely different from his father. The Lion was a populist with advanced ideas for his time; his son was a conservative, and projected an old-maidish image.

  While revolutions were erupting in most Latin American countries and caudillos were taking over governments at gunpoint, an exemplary democracy was being consolidated in Chile. The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the crystallization of significant social advances. Free, public, compulsory education, public health for all, and one of the most advanced social security systems on the continent favored the strengthening of a vast educated and politicized middle class, as well as a proletariat with class awareness. Unions were formed, along with centers for workers, employees, and students. Women gained the vote, and electoral processes were perfected. (An election in Chile is as civilized as tea time in London’s Savoy Hotel. Citizens line up in queues to vote, without ever producing the least altercation, even if political tempers are boiling. Men and women vote at different sites, guarded by soldiers to avoid disturbances or bribery. No alcohol is sold the previous day, and businesses and offices remain closed. No one works on Election Day.)

  Concern for social justice also reached into the Catholic Church, which has great influence in Chile, and which on the basis of new encyclicals made great efforts to support the changes being effected in the country. In the meantime two large blocks of influence were being affirmed in the outside world: capitalism and socialism. To confront Marxism, the Christian Democrats were born in Europe, a center-right party with a humanist and community-oriented message. In Chile, where it promised “revolution with freedom,” that party destroyed the opposition in the election of 1964, defeating both the conservative right and parties on the left. The overwhelming triumph of Eduardo Frei Montalva, and a Christian Democrat majority in the parliament, marked a milestone. The country had changed. It was assumed that the right had faded into history, that the left would never have its chance, and that Christian Democrats would govern till the end of time, but that did not happen, and after only a few years the party lost popular support. The right had not been shattered, as had been predicted, and the left came back from defeat and reorganized. Power was divided into three parts: right, center, and left.

  At the end of Frei Montalva’s term, the country was in an uproar. There was a suffocating atmosphere of revenge on the part of the right, which felt its wealth had been expropriated and which feared it would definitively lose the power it had always boasted of, and of resentment on the part of the lower classes, which had never felt represented by the Christian Democrats. Each of the three segments of power presented a candidate: Jorge Alessandri for the right, Radomiro Tomic for the Christian Democrats, and Salvador Allende for the left.

  The parties of the left joined together in a coalition called the Unidad Popular, which included the Communist Party. The United States was alarmed despite the results of polls giving the victory to the right, and it designated several million dollars for defeating Allende. The political forces were so divided that Allende, with his theme of “the Chilean route to socialism,” won by a narrow margin, with 38 percent of the vote. Since he did not obtain an absolute majority, the election would have to be ratified by the Congress, which traditionally had given the nod to the candidate with the most votes. Allende was the first Marxist to win the presidency of a country through a democratic vote. The eyes of the world turned toward Chile.

  Salvador Allende Gossens was a charismatic physician who had been minister of health in his youth, senator for many years, and also the eternal presidential candidate of the left. He himself told the joke that on his death his epitaph would read “Here lies the next president of Chile.” He was courageous, loyal to friends and collaborators, magnanimous to his adversaries. He was considered vain because of the way he dressed, and because of his taste for the good life and beautiful women, but he was deeply serious in regard to his political convictions. In that, no one can accuse him of frivolity. His enemies preferred not to confront him personally, because he had the reputation of being able to manipulate any situation to his benefit. He endeavored to institute profound economic reforms within the frame of the Constitution, to expand the agrarian reform initiated by the previous government, and to nationalize the private enterprises, banks, and copper mines that were in the hands of North American companies. He proposed a socialist system that respected civil rights, an experiment that no one had attempted before.

  The Cuban revolution had by that time survived ten years, despite the efforts of the United States to destroy it, and there were leftist guerrilla movements in many Latin American countries. The undisputed hero of young people was Che Guevara, who had been assassinated in Bolivia, and whose face—picture a saint wearing a beret a
nd smoking a cigar—had become a symbol of the struggle for justice. Those were the days of the Cold War, when an irrational paranoia divided the world into two ideologies and determined the foreign policies of the Soviet Union and United States for several decades. Chile was one of the pawns sacrificed in that conflict of titans. The administration of Richard Nixon decided to intervene directly in the Chilean process. Henry Kissinger, who was responsible for foreign policy, and who admitted he knew nothing about Latin America, which he considered the “backyard” of the United States, said that “there was no reason to watch as a country became communist through the irresponsibility of its own people, and do nothing about it.” (This joke circulates around Latin America: Do you know why there are no military coups in the United States? Because there’s no North American embassy.) To Kissinger, Salvador Allende’s democratic path toward Socialism seemed more dangerous than an armed revolution because of the danger of infecting the rest of the continent like an epidemic.

  The CIA orchestrated a plan to prevent Allende from assuming the presidency. First it tried to bribe members of Congress not to designate Allende and to call for a second vote in which there would be only two candidates: Allende and a Christian Democrat supported by the right. Since the bribes didn’t work, the CIA planned to kidnap the commander in chief of the armed forces, General René Schneider; although the plot would be carried out by a neo-Fascist group, it would appear to be the work of a leftist commando unit. The idea was that this action would provoke chaos and a military intervention. The general was shot to death in the skirmish, but the plan had the opposite of the desired effect: a wave of horror washed across the country and the Congress unanimously awarded Salvador Allende the presidential sash. From that moment on, the right and the CIA plotted together to oust the government of the Unidad Popular, even at the cost of destroying the economy and Chile’s long democratic tradition. Then the CIA activated an alternate plan: a so-called destabilization, which consisted of cutting off international credit and initiating a campaign of sabotage to incite economic ruin and social violence. Simultaneously, their siren song was directed at the military, which in the end held the strongest card in the game.