A great book if you want to understand the history of Chile and what animates the Chilean soul. Excerpts:
This book is an exercise in nostalgia. No one passes by casually, however lost he may be, although many visitors decide to stay forever, enamored of the land and the people. 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. My long and narrow homeland can be broken up into four very different regions. Norte grande, the “big north” that occupies a fourth of the country; inhospitable and rough, guarded by high mountains, Norte chico, or “little north,” Valley of Elqui, one of the spiritual centers of the Earth, 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. It is the most prosperous area of the country, a land of grapes and apples, Zona sur, the southern zone, begins at Puerto Montt, at 40 degrees latitude south, an enchanted region of forests, lakes, rivers, and volcanoes. Moving south, the traveler crosses pampas lashed by furious winds, then the country strings out into a rosary of unpopulated islands and milky fogs, a labyrinth of fjords, islets, canals, and water on all sides. The last city on the continent is Punta Arenas, wind-bitten, harsh, and proud; a high, barren land of blizzards. Chile owns a section of the little-explored Antarctic continent, a world of ice and solitude, of infinite white, where fables are born and men die: Chile ends at the South Pole. In the summertime, a cruise ship can visit there with relative ease, but the price of such a cruise is as the price of rubies, and for the present, only rich tourists and poor but determined ecologists can make the trip. In 1888 Chile annexed the Isla de Pascua, mysterious Easter Island, the navel of the world, or Rapanui. Being so far from everything gives us Chileans an insular mentality, and the majestic beauty of the land makes us take on airs. We believe we are the center of the world—in our view, Greenwich should have been set in Santiago—and we turn our backs on Latin America, always comparing ourselves instead to Europe. We are very self-centered: the rest of the universe exists only to consume our wines and produce soccer teams we can beat. My advice to the visitor is not to question the marvels he hears about my country, its wine, and its women, because the foreigner is not allowed to criticize—for that we have more than fifteen million natives who do that all the time. I confess that I, too, suffer from that chilling chauvinism. The first time I visited San Francisco, and there before my eyes were those gentle golden hills, the majesty of forests, and the green mirror of the bay, my only comment was that it looked a lot like the coast of Chile. Later I learned that the sweetest fruit, the most delicate wines, and the finest fish are imported from Chile. Naturally. Santiago has spread out like a demented octopus, extending its eager tentacles in every direction. Santiaguinos have become accustomed to following the daily smog index just as faithfully as they keep track of the stock market or the soccer results. On days when the index climbs too high, the volume of vehicles allowed to circulate is restricted according to the number on the license plate, children don’t play sports at school, and the rest of the population tries to breathe as little as possible. The first rain of the year washes the grime from the atmosphere and falls like acid over the city. If you walk outside without an umbrella you will feel as if lemon juice has been squirted in your eyes, but don’t worry, no one has been blinded yet. There are cities, like Caracas or Mexico City, where poor and rich mix, but in Santiago the lines of demarcation are clear. Every time I go to Santiago I notice that part of the city is in black-and-white and the other in Technicolor. To the visitor I recommend stopping to buy fruit and vegetables in the stands along the highway, or to take a little detour and drive into the villages and look for the house where you see a white cloth fluttering; there they serve leavened bread, honey, and eggs the color of gold. Once I read a study in which the author maintained that if all existing breeds of dogs were liberally intermingled, within a few generations they would narrow down to one type: a strong, astute beast of medium size, with short, wiry hair, a pointed muzzle, and willful tail: that is, the typical Chilean stray. I suppose we will come to that, and I hope also that with time we will succeed in fusing all human races; the result will be a rather short individual of indefinite color, adaptable, resilient, and resigned to the ups and downs of existence, like us Chileans. In those days we went twice a day to the corner bakery to buy bread, and brought it home wrapped in a white cloth. The aroma of that bread just out of the oven, still warm, is one of the most tenacious memories of my childhood. Even so, we couldn’t resist the temptation to have them read the future in our palms. They always told me the same thing: a dark, mustached man would take me far away. Since I don’t remember a single lover who fit that description, I have to assume they were referring to my stepfather, who had a mustache like a walrus and took me to many countries in his journeys as a diplomat. Chile is a modern country of fifteen million inhabitants, but the residue of a tribal mentality lingers on. Jewish and Italian mothers are dilettantes compared with the Chilean ones. Dancing is not typical behavior among Chileans, who as a rule lack any sense of rhythm. He had such an exalted idea of himself that in his will he left instructions that he wanted to be buried standing up: that way when he knocked at the gates of heaven he could look God directly in the eye. The image of those trees from the home of my ancestors often comes to mind when I think of my destiny as an expatriate. It is my fate to wander from place to place, and to adapt to new soils. I believe I will be able to do that because handfuls of Chilean soil are caught in my roots; I carry them with me always. He grew old strengthened by intelligence and reinforced by experience. He always said that just as Romans live among ruins and fountains without seeing them, we Chileans live in the most dazzling country on the planet without appreciating it. We don’t notice the quiet presence of the snowy mountains, the sleeping volcanoes, and the unending hills that wrap us in their monumental embrace; we are not amazed by the frothing fury of the Pacific bursting upon our coasts, or the quiet lakes of the south and their musical waterfalls; we don’t, like pilgrims, venerate the millenary nature of our native-growth forests, the moonscape of the deserts of the north, the fecund Araucan rivers, or the blue glaciers where time is shattered into splinters. I grew up with the story that there are no problems of race in Chile. I can’t understand how we dare repeat such a falsehood. We don’t talk in terms of “racism” but, rather, of “the class system” (we love euphemisms), but there is little difference between them. Not only do racism and/or class consciousness exist, they are as deeply rooted as molars. Whoever maintains that racism is a thing of the past is dead wrong, as I found out in my latest visit, when I learned that one of the most brilliant graduates in the law school was denied a place in a prestigious law firm because “he didn’t fit the corporate profile.” In other words, he was a mestizo, that is, he had mixed blood, and a Mapuche surname. The firm’s clients would never be confident of his ability to represent them; nor would they allow him to go out with one of their daughters. Just as in the rest of Latin America, the upper class of Chile is relatively white, and the farther one descends the steep social ladder the more Indian the characteristics become. Mapuches - They have an atavistic—and justifiable—mistrust for all non-Indians, whom they call huincas, which doesn’t translate as “whites” but as “land robbers.” The artistic and cultural products of our Indians are as somber as everything else produced in the country. They color their cloth and weavings with vegetable dyes: dark red, black, gray, white; their musical instruments are as lugubrious as the song of whales; their dances are dull, monotonous, and last so long that in the end they bring rain. Their craftwork is beautiful, but it lacks the exuberance and variety of the art of Mexico, Peru, or Guatemala. Aymaras—“children of the sun”—are very different from the Mapuches; they are the same Indians as those in Bolivia, and they come and go, ignoring boundaries, because that region has been theirs forever. African blood was never incorporated into Chilean stock, which would have given us rhythm and beauty; neither was there, as there was in Argentina, significant Italian immigration, which would have made us extroverted, vain, and happy; there weren’t even enough Asians, as there were in Peru, to compensate for our solemnity and spice up our cuisine. Color prejudice is so strong that if a woman has yellow hair, even if she has the face of an iguana, men turn to look at her in the street. We Chileans like the Germans for their sausage, their beer, and their Prussian helmets, as well as the goose step our military adopted for parades, but in practice we try to emulate the English. We admire them so much that we think we’re the English of Latin America, just as we believe that the English are the Chileans of Europe. It isn’t for nothing that our motto is “By Right or by Force,” a phrase that has always seemed particularly stupid to me. In addition to the English, Germans, Arabs, Jews, Spaniards, and Italians, immigrants from Central Europe made their way to our shores: scientists, inventors, academics, some true geniuses, all of whom we refer to, without distinction, as “Yugoslavians.” Just as you didn’t slip to a lower class when you lost your money, neither did you rise a notch by amassing a fortune, a lesson learned by many rich Arabs and Jews who were never accepted in the exclusive circles of “decent people.” This was how those who found themselves at the top of the social pyramid referred to themselves (assuming, naturally, that all the rest were “indecent people”). Foreigners rarely catch on to how this shocking class system operates because social interchange is polite and friendly at every level. Our society is like a millefeuille pastry, a thousand layers, each person in his place, each in her class, every person marked by birth. People introduced themselves—and this is still true in the upper class—using both surnames, in order to establish their identity and lineage. We Chileans have a well-trained eye for determining a person’s place in society by physical appearance, color of skin, mannerisms, and especially the way of speaking. In other countries, accents vary from place to place; in Chile they change according to social class. The process of automatic classification we Chileans practice when we are introduced has a name, situating, and is the equivalent of what dogs do when they sniff each other’s hindquarters. In Santiago the temperatures are worse than in Madrid; in summer we die of the heat and in winter of the cold, but no one has air conditioning or decent heating, because that would be tantamount to admitting that the climate isn’t as good as they say it is. When the air gets too agreeable, it’s a sure sign that there’s going to be an earthquake. For several years I worked for a women’s magazine where we were constantly surrounded with the most sought-after models and the latest candidates for the Miss Chile competition. The models, in general, were so anorexic that most of the time they sat perfectly motionless, staring straight ahead, like turtles, which made them very attractive since any man passing by could imagine that they were stupefied by the sight of him. Chile is a macho country: there is so much testosterone floating in the air that it’s a miracle women don’t grow beards. 58 percent of married women are unfaithful. Chileans are very religious, although in practice that has a lot more to do with fetishism and superstition than with mystic restiveness or theological enlightenment. No Chilean calls him or herself an atheist, not even dyed-in-the-wool communists, because the term is considered an insult. The word agnostic is preferred, and usually even the strongest nonbelievers are converted on their deathbeds since they risk too much if they don’t, and a last-hour confession never hurt anyone. This spiritual compulsion rises from the earth itself: a people who live amid mountains logically turn their eyes toward the heavens. Chile is the most Catholic country in the world—more Catholic than Ireland, and certainly much more so than the Vatican. Catholics form a majority in Chile, although there are more and more Evangelicals and Pentecostals who irritate everyone because they have a direct understanding with God while everyone else must pass through the priestly bureaucracy. We have been fortunate in that in Chile, unlike other countries in Latin America, the Catholic Church—with a few regrettable exceptions—has almost always been on the side of the poor, which has gained it enormous respect and sympathy. Chiloé’s culture is different from that of the rest of the country, and their people are so proud of their isolation that they oppose the construction of a bridge that will join the large island to Puerto Montt. It is such an extraordinary place that every Chilean and every tourist must visit it at least once, even at the risk of staying forever. My childhood wasn’t a happy one, but it was interesting. Chile is possibly the one country in the galaxy where there is no divorce, and that’s because no one dares defy the priests, even though 71 percent of the population has been demanding it for a long time. No legislator, not even those who have been separated from their wives and partnered a series of other women in quick succession, is willing to stand up to the priests, and the result is that divorce law sleeps year after year in the “pending” file, and when finally it is approved it will be with so much red tape and so many conditions that it will be easier to murder your spouse than to divorce him or her. I couldn’t picture the time that I would return to familiar territory in Santiago, but when finally that happened, several years later, I didn’t fit in there either, because I’d been away too long. Being a foreigner, as I have been almost forever, means that I have to make a much greater effort than the natives, which has kept me on my toes and forced me to become flexible and adapt to different surroundings. This condition has some advantages for someone who earns her living by observing; nothing seems natural to me, almost everything surprises me. I ask absurd questions, but sometimes I ask them of the right people and thus get ideas for my novels. There’s a certain freshness and innocence in people who have always lived in one place and can count on witnesses to their passage through the world. In contrast, those of us who have moved on many times develop tough skin out of necessity. Since we lack roots or corroboration of who we are, we must put our trust in memory to give continuity to our lives . . . but memory is always cloudy, we can’t trust it. Things that happened in the past have fuzzy outlines, they’re pale; it’s as if my life has been nothing but a series of illusions, of fleeting images, of events I don’t understand, or only half understand. I have absolutely no sense of certainty. The founders of families like mine tried to establish dynasties, and to do that they invented an aristocratic past, though in fact they were laborers and adventurers who came to the tail end of America with their hands out. Of blue blood, so to speak, not a drop. They were ambitious and hardworking, and they appropriated the most fertile land in the vicinity of Santiago and then devoted themselves to the task of gaining notice. Since they immigrated early and got rich quickly, they could claim the luxury of looking down on all those who came later. One of the characteristics of Chileans in general, and of the descendants of Spaniards and Basques in particular, is their seriousness, which contrasts with the exuberant temperament so common in the rest of Latin America. Chilean women, even those with fortunes, do not paint their fingernails, since that would indicate they don’t work with their hands, and one of the worst possible epithets for a Chilean woman to be called is lazy. Ours has always been a country with one foot in the poorhouse; the most that the colonist could aspire to was a quiet life dedicated to agriculture. Ostentation was once unacceptable, as I’ve said, but unfortunately that has changed, at least among the residents of Santiago. They have become so pretentious that they go to the supermarket on Sunday mornings, fill their carts with the most expensive items—caviar, champagne, filets mignons—walk through the store for a while so everyone can see what they’re buying, then leave the cart in an aisle and slip out discreetly with empty hands. I’ve also heard that a good percentage of cell phones are made of wood, mere fakes to show off. Ricardo Lagos, the current president of the republic (2002), lives with his family in a rented house in an unpretentious neighborhood. When dignitaries from other nations visit, they are startled by the small size of the house, and their amazement grows when they see the president prepare the drinks and the first lady help serve the table. Poverty disguised as the lower middle class, those who suffer most because they have hopes. My formula for an ideal weekend is to have the house filled with people, to cook for a regiment, and at the end of the day to hear everyone arguing at the tops of their voices. The national sport is to talk about the person who just left the room. In Chile we even have a term for talking about our friends and neighbors—plucking—the etymology of which surely comes from plucking chickens, or denuding the out-of-earshot victim of his feathers. This habit is so prevalent that no one wants to be the first to leave, which is why farewells take an eternity at the door. In my family nearly all the men studied law, although I don’t remember a single one who passed the bar. The Chilean loves laws, the more complicated the better. Nothing fascinates us as much as red tape and multiple forms. When some minor negotiation seems simple, we immediately suspect that it’s illegal. Love for regulations, however unworkable they may be, finds its best exponents in the enormous bureaucracy of our suffering country. That bureaucracy is the paradise of the people in their uniform gray suits. There such a person can vegetate to his pleasure, completely safe from the traps of imagination, perfectly secure in his post to the day he retires—unless he is imprudent enough to try to change things, an observation made by the author-sociologist Pablo Huneeus (who is, I might add in passing, one of the few eccentric Chileans who isn’t related to my family). A public official must understand from his first day in office that any show of initiative will signal the end of his career because he isn’t there to be meritorious but to reach his level of incompetence with dignity. The point of moving papers with seals and stamps from one perusal to the next is not to resolve problems, but to obstruct solutions. If the problems were resolved, the bureaucracy would lose power and many honest people would be left without employment; on the other hand, if things get worse, the state increases the budget and hires more people, and thus lowers the index of the unemployed. Everyone is happy. The official abuses every smidgen of his power, starting from the premise that the public is his enemy, a sentiment that is fully reciprocated. I believe that this obsession of ours with legality is a kind of safeguard against the aggression we carry inside; without the nightstick of the law we would go after one another tooth and claw. Experience has taught us that when we lose control we are capable of the worst barbarism, and for that reason we try to move cautiously, barricading ourselves behind bulwarks of paper bearing seals. Whenever possible, we try to avoid confrontation; we seek a consensus and, at the first opportunity, we put any decision to a vote. We love to vote. It has often been said that we Chileans are envious, that we are bothered by others’ success. It’s true, but the explanation is that what we’re feeling isn’t envy, it’s common sense. Success isn’t normal. The human being is biologically constituted for failure, the proof of which being that we have legs instead of wheels, elbows instead of wings, and metabolism instead of batteries. Why dream of success if we can calmly vegetate in our failures? Why do today what we can put off till tomorrow? Or do well what we can do halfway? We detest it when a countryman rises above the rest of us, except when it happens in another country, in which case the lucky fellow (or female equivalent) becomes a kind of national hero. The person who triumphs locally, however, is less than adored; soon there is tacit accord that he should be taken down a peg or two. We call this sport chaqueteo, “jacketing”: grabbing the offender by his coattails and pulling him down. Despite the chaqueteo and an ambience of mediocrity, from time to time someone does manage to raise his head above the crowd. (In New Zealand this is called the "tall poppy" syndrome) We Chileans enjoy funerals because the dead person is no longer a rival, and now he can’t backstab us. According to my grandfather’s school of thought, we could trust no one but close family; the rest of humanity was suspect. We have agüita perra—bitch water—nothing but plain hot water in a cracked teacup. If you receive a formal invitation, you can expect a gargantuan feast: the goal is to leave the guests moaning with indigestion for several days. The more difficult it is to put food on the table, the more elaborate and spicy it becomes, witness the examples of India and Mexico, where there are three hundred ways to cook rice. A very elegant woman broke wind, involuntarily and loudly, and to cover it up made a noise with her shoes. Then Herr Otto says (it has to be in a German accent), “You can break a shoe, you can break a heart, but you’ll never make the noise you made with that fart.” The first time I heard the expression “politically correct” I was forty-five years old, and I have never been able to explain to friends or relatives in Chile what that means. Once in California I tried to get one of those dogs they train to lead the blind but are given away when they can’t pass the rigorous tests. In my application I had the bad idea of mentioning that I wanted a “rejected” dog, and by return mail I received a dry note informing me that the term “rejected” is never used; instead, you say that the animal “has changed careers.” Try and explain that in Chile! Elvis Presley was already fat by the time I learned of his existence. My grandfather and I got along well because we both liked sitting without talking. We could spend hours that way, side by side, reading or watching the rain drum against the windowpanes, without feeling any need for small talk. (It took me a couple of years to learn how to play dumb so that men would feel superior. You can’t imagine the effort that takes!) Tropical islands, so pleasant for vacations, are a disaster in literature. A hand held out as if begging for alms is a direct allusion to the size of the enemy’s genitals; that’s good to know before you’re foolish enough to place a coin in the offending palm. My grandfather never believed in germs, for the same reason he didn’t believe in ghosts: he’d never seen one. The only time they paid any attention to her was when she was ill, so she often was. I felt asphyxiated, a prisoner in a rigid system—we all were, particularly the women around me. I couldn’t take a step outside the norms; I had to be like all the others, sink into anonymity or encounter ridicule. It was assumed that I would graduate from high school, keep my sweetheart on a short rein, marry before I was twenty-five—any later and all was lost—and rapidly produce children so no one would think I used contraceptives. For a Chilean, the seduction of any woman in her reproductive years is a conscientiously executed task. Although usually my compatriots are terrible dancers, they are accomplished sweet-talkers; they were the first to discover that a woman’s G spot is in her ears, and that to look for it any lower is a waste of time. Latin America is one of the most violent areas of the world, second only to Africa. Just like a newspaper or a magazine, a book is a means of communication, which is why I try to grab the reader by the throat and not let go to the end. Chile is a hypocritical, prudish country bristling with scruples in respect to sex and sensuality, a nation of “old ladies,” male and female. The double standard rules. Promiscuity is tolerated in men, but women must pretend that sex doesn’t interest them, only love and romance, although in practice they must enjoy the same liberties as men—if not, who are the men dallying with? To wait to be respected for being a feminist was like expecting the bull not to charge because you’re a vegetarian. 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. 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.” 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 childhoods as difficult as possible so they will grow up to be creative adults. Their parents are not at all appreciative of my efforts. 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. 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 anesthetizing the passengers. In Chile we were very grateful. If there were two Chileans in a room, you could be sure of finding three political parties. 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. 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 Möbius strip. 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. 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. 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. With their modest way of talking and behaving, Chileans referred to a queue as la colita, “the mini-line,” even when it was three blocks long, and sometimes stood in them without knowing what was being sold, just out of habit. Soon there was a psychosis of shortages, and as soon as three or more people were together, they automatically started a queue. There were professional line-standers who got tips for holding a place; I understand that my own children rounded out their allowance that way. In 1975, half of Latin America’s citizens lived under some kind of repressive government, most of which were backed by the United States, which has a shameful record of overthrowing legally elected governments and of supporting tyrannies that would never be tolerated in its own territory: Papa Doc in Haiti, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Somoza in Nicaragua, and many others. I stayed awhile, but when I felt repression tightening like a noose around my neck, I left. I watched the country and its people change. I never imagined I would be gone for so long. According to the World Bank, Chile is one of the countries with the worst distribution of income, right alongside Kenya and Zimbabwe. the right controls the economy, the Congress, and the press. (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.) 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Before you ask me why a leftist with my surname chose to live in the Yankee empire, I will tell you that it wasn’t by plan, not by any stretch of the imagination. Like almost all the major milestones in my life, it happened by chance. If Willie had been in New Guinea, most probably I would be there now, dressed in feathers. I suppose there are people who do plan their lives, but I stopped doing that a long time ago because my blueprints never get used. About every ten years I take a look back and can see the map of my journey—well, that is if it can be called a map, it looks more like a plateful of noodles. If you live long enough to review the past, it’s obvious that all we do is walk in circles. We’re good travelers and terrible emigrants: nostalgia is always nipping at our heels. The North Americans’ sense of time is very special. They are short on patience. Everything must be quick, including food and sex, which the rest of the world treats ceremoniously. Gringos invented two terms that are untranslatable into most languages: “snack” and “quickie,” to refer to eating standing up and loving on the run . . . that, too, sometimes standing up. North Americans don’t want violence in their lives, but they need to experience it indirectly. They are enchanted by war, as long as it’s not on their turf. The thing I most appreciate about my situation as an immigrant is the marvelous sense of freedom. I come from a very traditional culture, from a closed society, where each of us carries from birth the karma of his ancestors and where we constantly feel watched and judged. A stain on one’s honor cannot be cleansed. A child who steals crayons in kindergarten is branded as a thief for the rest of his life. In the United States, in contrast, the past doesn’t matter; no one asks your last name; the son of a murderer can be president . . . as long as he’s white. You can make mistakes because new opportunities abound, you just move to a new state and change your name and start a new life. Spaces are so vast that roads never end. I'm never short on ideas only time. The entire world passes through San Francisco, each person carrying his or her cargo of memories and hopes. This city is filled with foreigners; I am not an exception. In the streets you hear a thousand tongues, temples are raised for all denominations, and the scent of food from the most remote points of the world fills the air. Few people are born here, most are strangers in paradise, as I am. It doesn’t matter to anyone who I am or what I do; no one watches me or judges me, they leave me in peace. The negative side of that is that if I drop dead in the street, no one will notice but, in the end, that is a cheap price to pay for liberty. The price I would pay in Chile would be high indeed, because there diversity is not as yet appreciated. In California the only thing that isn’t tolerated is intolerance. I visit Chile once or twice a year, and when I arrive a lot of people seem happy to see me, though I think they’re even happier when I leave. This book has helped me understand that I am not obligated to make a decision: I can have one foot in Chile and another here, that’s why we have planes, and I am not among those who are afraid to fly because of terrorism. I have a fatalistic attitude: no one dies one minute before or one minute after the prescribed time. For the moment California is my home and Chile is the land of my nostalgia. My heart isn’t divided, it has merely grown larger.