We Chileans had always taken great pride in the fact that our chiefs of state had no bodyguards and that the courtyard of the Palacio de La Moneda was a public street. That all ended with Salvador Allende. Hatred had been aggravated to such a degree that associates feared for his life. His enemies were accumulating supplies to ambush him. This socialist president roared through the streets with twenty armed men in a flotilla of identical blue automobiles, none with distinctive markings, so that no one could know which one he was in. Before Allende, the president had lived in his own home, but Allende’s house was small and did not lend itself to that role. So amid a barrage of hateful criticism, the government acquired a mansion in an upper-class neighborhood to serve as the official residence, and the Allende family was transported there with pre-Columbian ceramics, paintings collected over long years, works of art given by the artists themselves, inscribed first editions of books, and photographs recording important moments of Allende’s political career. I had the opportunity to attend one or two gatherings in the new residence, where still the only topic of conversation was politics. When my parents came from Argentina, the president invited us to a summer house high in the hills near the capital, where he liked to spend weekends. After lunch we watched absurd cowboy movies, which he found relaxing. The bedrooms that opened onto the patio were occupied by a group of volunteer bodyguards that Allende called “my personal friends” and whom his opposition qualified as terrorist guerrillas and murderers. Some of them were always around, alert, armed, and prepared to protect him with their own bodies. One of those days in the country, Allende tried to teach us to target shoot with a rifle given him by Fidel Castro, the same weapon found beside his body the day of the military coup. I, who had never held a gun in my hands, and had grown up on Tata’s adage that “The Devil loads the charge in firearms,” grabbed the rifle as if it were an umbrella and in clumsily shifting my grasp unwittingly pointed it at Allende’s head. One of the guards immediately materialized out of thin air, jumped on me, and rolled me to the ground. That is one of the few memories I have of Allende during the three years of his government. I saw him less than I had before; I was not involved in politics and in fact continued to work at the publishing house he considered his worst enemy, without any idea of what was happening in the country.
Who was Salvador Allende? I don’t really know, and it would be pretentious of me to offer a definitive portrait of him; it would take volumes, anyway, to describe his complex personality, the difficulty of his program, and the role he occupies in history. For years, I thought of him as just another uncle in a large family, the one representative on my father’s side; it was only after his death and after leaving Chile that I became aware of his legendary dimensions. In private, he was a good friend to his friends and loyal to the point of imprudence; he could not conceive of betrayal and when he was betrayed found it nearly impossible to believe. I remember how quick he was with answers, and his sense of humor. He had been defeated in two campaigns but was still young when a journalist asked him what he would like to have engraved on his tombstone, and he replied instantly, Here lies the future president of Chile. In my view, his most outstanding characteristics were integrity, intuition, courage, and charisma: he followed his hunches, which rarely failed him, he did not turn away from risk, and he had the ability to captivate both masses and individuals. It was said that he could manipulate any situation to his advantage and that was why on the day of the coup the generals did not dare face him in person but chose to communicate by telephone and through messengers. He assumed the role of president with such dignity that it seemed arrogance; he had the bombastic gestures of a classical orator, and a characteristic way of walking with his chest out and holding himself very straight, almost on tiptoe, like a fighting cock. He slept very little at night, only three or four hours; you would see him at dawn reading or playing chess with his most faithful friends, but he could sleep for only a few minutes, usually in his automobile, and wake refreshed. He was a refined man, a lover of pedigreed dogs, objets d’art, elegant clothes, and strong women. He was very careful of his health, and prudent with food and alcohol. His enemies accused him of being a womanizer, and kept a close accounting of his bourgeois tastes, his lovers, his suede jackets, and silk neckties. Half the population feared he would lead the country into a Communist dictatorship and were ready to prevent that at any cost, while the other half celebrated the socialist experiment with murals of flowers and doves.
All this time, I was on another planet, doing my frivolous magazine articles and zany television programs, never suspecting the true proportions of the violence gestating in the shadows that finally would fall over all of us. In the midst of the national crisis, Delia, my boss at the magazine, sent me to interview Salvador Allende and ask what he thought about Christmas. We were readying the December issue some months in advance and in October it was not easy to approach a president who had urgent matters of state on his mind. I took advantage, however, of one of Allende’s visits to my parents’ home and timidly broached the subject to him. “Don’t ask me bullshit like that, Isabel,” was his bald reply. And so began and ended my career as a political correspondent. I continued to knock out homemade horoscopes, articles on interior decoration, gardens, and raising children, interviews with the odd and bizarre, the lovelorn column, and pieces on culture, art, and travel. Delia didn’t trust me; she accused me of making up my interviews without ever leaving the house, and of putting my own opinions in the mouths of my subjects, and so she rarely gave me important assignments.
As problems of scarcities grew worse, the tension became unbearable and Granny began drinking more heavily. Following her husband’s instructions, she joined her neighbors in the streets to protest food shortages in the traditional way: beating pots and pans. The men stayed out of sight while women marched with frying pans and cooking spoons in an apocalyptic clatter. That sound is unforgettable: it would begin with a solitary gong, then clanging was added from various other patios until the contagion spread and everyone got into the spirit; soon the women were out in the street and a deafening racket turned half the city into a living hell. Granny always tried to position herself at the head of a demonstration in order to prevent it from passing our house, where everyone knew one of the Allende family lived. Even so, in the eventuality that some bellicose ladies were moved to attack, the hose was always at the ready to dissuade them with streams of cold water. Ideological differences had not altered my camaraderie with my mother-in-law; we shared the children, the burdens of everyday life, our plans and hopes, and in our hearts we both thought nothing could separate us. To provide her a bit of independence, I opened a bank account in her name, but after three months had to close it because Granny never understood the mechanics of the transactions; she thought that as long as she had checks in the checkbook there was money in the account. She never wrote down what she spent, and in less than a week had used all her funds buying gifts for her grandchildren. Neither did politics alter the peace between Michael and me; we loved each other and were good companions.
It was then that my passion for theater began. Tío Ramón was named ambassador just at the time that kidnapping public figures became the vogue throughout Latin America. The possibility that it might happen to him served as inspiration for a play in which a group of guerrillas kidnaps a diplomat to exchange him for political prisoners. I dashed it off in a frenzy; I sat down at the typewriter and couldn’t sleep or eat until I wrote the final word three days later. A prestigious theater company agreed to produce it, and so one night I found myself reading it with the actors, all of us sitting around a table on a cold, drafty, bare stage under a single lightbulb, wearing our overcoats and clutching thermos bottles with hot tea. Each actor read and analyzed his part, pointing out the whopping errors in the text. As the reading progressed, I slid farther and farther down in my chair, until I was barely visible above the table. At the end, thoroughly ashamed, I picked up the scripts and went home and rewrote the
play from the first line, studying each character separately to give him or her coherence. The second version was better, but it lacked tension and a dramatic denouement. I attended all the rehearsals and incorporated most of the modifications suggested to me, and in so doing learned a few tricks that would prove to be helpful for my novels. Ten years later, when I was writing The House of the Spirits, I remembered those sessions around the table in the empty theater and tried to give each character a complete biography, a defined personality, and an individual voice—although, in the case of that book, the outrages of history and a tenacious lack of discipline on the part of the spirits undercut my intentions. The play, logically enough, was called The Ambassador, and I dedicated it to Tío Ramón, who did not get to see it because he was in Buenos Aires. It opened to good reviews but I could not take credit because it was actually the director and actors who made the work—only a few strands of my original idea survived. I do wonder sometimes whether it may not have saved my stepfather from being kidnapped, because, according to the law of probabilities, it was impossible that what I had written for the stage could happen in real life. It did not, I am sorry to say, protect another diplomat who was abducted in Uruguay and forced to undergo the ordeals I had imagined in the security of my home in Santiago. Now I am more careful about what I write, because I have found out that although something is not true today, it may be true tomorrow. A different theater company asked me for a play, and for them I wrote two musical comedies that we called café-concierto for lack of a better name, and they enjoyed an unexpected success. The second piece was memorable because it included a chorus of fat women to enliven the spectacle with singing and dancing. It was not easy to find attractive, overweight soubrettes willing to make fools of themselves on the stage, so the director and I took up positions on a busy corner in the center of the city and stopped every fleshy prospect we saw go by to ask if she would like to be an actress. Many accepted enthusiastically, but as soon as they understood the demands of the work couldn’t get away fast enough. It took several weeks to find six aspirants for the role. There was no space in the theater because of the current production, so we moved all the furniture out of our small living room and rehearsed there. We did have an out-of-tune piano which, in a flight of fancy, I had painted lime green and decorated with a courtesan reclining on a divan. The entire house shook with seismic shuddering when that monumental chorus minced as Greek vestal virgins, bopped to the rhythm of rock ’n’ roll, flirted petticoats in a frenetic cancan, and pirouetted on point to the chords of a Swan Lake that would have given Tchaikovsky a heart attack. Michael had to reinforce both the stage and the floor of our house to prevent their giving way beneath that pachydermal onslaught. The women, who had never had a day’s physical exercise, began to shed pounds at an alarming rate, and to save that sensuous flesh from melting away, Granny fed them great pots of creamed noodles and apple tarts. For the opening of the play, we put up a sign in the foyer requesting that instead of sending the chorus girls flowers, please to order pizza. With these efforts, we were able to preserve the rounded hills and deep valleys of vast carnal topographies throughout two long years of arduous performances, including a national tour. Michael was enthusiastic about this artistic adventure, and attended so often that he knew the parts by heart and in an emergency could have replaced any of the actors, including the voluminous vestal virgins. You and Nicolás learned the songs, too, and ten years later, when I couldn’t remember even the titles, you two could perform them from start to finish. My grandfather went several times, first out of a sense of family, and then for the pleasure, and every time the curtain fell he jumped to his feet with hurrahs and applause and flourishes of his cane. He fell in love with the chorus girls and offered long disquisitions on plumpness as an element of beauty and the sin against nature represented by the undernourished models in fashion magazines. His ideal of beauty was embodied in the owner of his liquor shop, with her Valkyrian breasts and epic buttocks and the good nature that prompted her to sell him gin disguised in bottles for mineral water. He dreamed of her on the sly, so Memé’s vigilant ghost would not catch him in the act.
When Aurelia, the epileptic poet in your ward, dances in her disheveled boas and polka-dotted dresses, she reminds me of those massive ballerinas, and also of a personal adventure. Bedizened in her theatrical garb, Aurelia in middle age dances a meaner fandango than I ever did in my youth. One day an ad appeared in the newspaper offering work in a follies theater to young, tall, pretty girls. My boss at the magazine asked me to apply for the job, get behind the scenes, and write an article on the lives of those “pitiful women” as she, in her feminist rigor, classified them. I was nowhere close to meeting the minimal requirements, but this was one of those assignments no one else wanted to try. I didn’t have the nerve to go alone, so I asked a good friend to go with me. We got all dolled up in the kinds of kinky clothes we supposed showgirls wore when not performing, and stuck a rhinestone brooch in my dog’s topknot, a mutt we baptized Fifi for the occasion but whose real name was Dracula. When Michael saw how we were dressed, he decided we should not step outside the house without protection, and, since we didn’t have anyone to leave the children with, they came along, too. The theater was in the center of the city; it was impossible to park anywhere near, and we had to walk several blocks. My friend and I took the lead—I with Dracula in my arms—and Michael, our knight in shining armor, brought up the rear with a child’s hand in each of his. It was like parading through a bull ring: men charged appreciatively, suggesting a little tossing and goring, and shouting “Olé!”, all of which we took as a good sign. There was a long line at the box office, only men, of course, most of them old, but also a few recruits on their day off, and a class of noisy adolescents in school uniform who naturally fell silent when they saw us. The porter, as decrepit as the rest of the place, led us up a rickety stairway to the second floor. Cued by the movies, we expected to see an obese gangster type with a ruby ring and chewed cigar, but instead, in the bare, empty, dust-covered loft, we were greeted by a woman in a drab overcoat, wool cap, and gloves with cut-off fingers, who might have been someone’s aunt from the country. She was sitting in a pool of light, sewing on a sequined dress. A coal brazier at her feet was the only source of heat, and in another chair lay a hugely fat cat that stiffened like a porcupine when it saw Dracula. In one corner stood a full-length, triple-leaf mirror with a chipped frame, and from the ceiling hung large plastic bags containing the costumes for the extravaganza, incongruous, iridescent-feathered birds in that lugubrious barn.
“We came about the ad,” my friend said, affecting a heavy accent from the docks district.
The good woman looked us over from head to toe, with a dubious glint in her eye: we didn’t exactly fit her notion of showgirls. She asked whether we had experience in the trade, and my friend reeled off her résumé: Her name was Gladys, she was a beauty operator by day and singer by night; she had a good voice but didn’t know how to dance, although she was willing to learn, it couldn’t be all that hard. And before I could say a word on my own, she pointed to me and added that her friend here was named Salomé and was a follies star with a string of successes in Brazil, in particular, one act in which she appeared nude on stage, then Fifi, the trained dog, brought her clothes in his mouth and a burly mulatto put them on her. The black artist hadn’t come, she said, because he was in the hospital, where he had recently been operated on for appendicitis. By the time she finished her spiel, the woman had stopped sewing and was observing us openmouthed.