I have a lot of time for meditating in this California autumn. I must get used to my daughter as she is and not remember her as the charming, happy girl she was; neither should I lose myself in pessimistic visions of the future but take each day as it comes, without expecting miracles. Paula depends on me for her survival, she is my baby again, as she was at birth: for her, both the celebrations and stresses of living are past. I position her chair on the terrace facing San Francisco Bay and Willie’s rosebushes, laden with blossoms since he took them from the wine barrels to sink their roots in terra firma. Sometimes my daughter opens her eyes and stares at the iridescent surface of the water; I step into her line of vision but she doesn’t see me, her pupils are like bottomless wells. I can communicate with her only at night when she comes to visit me in dreams. I sleep fitfully, and often wake with the certainty that she is calling me. I jump out of bed and run to her room, where almost always something is wrong: her temperature or her blood pressure has shot up, she is sweating or she is cold, she is lying in an awkward position and her muscles are cramping. The woman who stays with her at night tends to fall asleep when the Spanish-language television programs are over. Those times, I lie down with Paula and cradle her on my breast as well as I can, since she is larger than I am, while I pray that she may find peace, that she rest in the serenity of the mystics, that she inhabit a paradise of harmony and silence, that she meet the God she sought so avidly in her brief span. I seek inspiration to divine her needs and to help keep her comfortable so her spirit can travel without disturbance to the place of encounters. What must she be feeling? Sometimes she is frightened, trembling, her eyes wide and staring, as if she were seeing visions from Hell; other times she is far away, motionless, as if she had already left everything behind. Life is a miracle, and for her it ended abruptly, without time to say goodbye or settle accounts, at the moment of vertiginous, youthful momentum. She was cut off just as she was beginning to wonder about the meaning of things, and left me the charge of finding the answer. Sometimes I spend the night wandering through the house, like the mysterious skunks in the basement that creep up to eat the cat’s food, or my grandmother’s ghost that escapes from her mirror to chat with me. When Paula is asleep, I go back to my bed and put my arm around Willie with my eyes fixed on the green numerals of the clock; the hours pass, inexorable, eating up the present—now is the future. I should take Dr. Forrester’s pills; I don’t know why I hoard them like a treasure, hidden in the basket with my mother’s letters. Some early mornings I watch the sun come up through the large windows in Paula’s room; with each dawn the world is created anew, the sky is streaked with shades of orange and night’s haze rises from the water, veiling the landscape in misty lace, like a delicate Japanese screen. I am a raft without a rudder, adrift on a sea of pain. During these long months I have been peeling away like an onion, layer after layer, changing; I am not the same woman, my daughter has given me the opportunity to look inside myself and discover interior spaces—empty, dark, strangely peaceful—I had never explored before. These are holy places, and to reach them I must travel a narrow road blocked with many obstacles, vanquish the beasts of imagination that jump out in my path. When terror paralyzes me, I close my eyes and give myself to it with the sensation of sinking into storm-tossed waters, pounded by the fury of the waves. For a few instants that are a true eternity, I think I am dying, but little by little I comprehend that, despite everything, I am still alive because in the ferocious whirlpool there is a merciful shaft through which I can breathe. Unresisting, I let myself be dragged down, and gradually the fear recedes. I float into an underwater cave, and rest there for a while, safe from the dragons of despair. Raw and bleeding inside, I cry without tears, as animals may cry, but then the sun comes up and the cat comes to ask for her breakfast, and I hear Willie’s footsteps in the kitchen, and the odor of coffee spreads through the house. Another day is beginning, a day like any other day.
NEW YEAR’S, 1981. THAT DAY BROUGHT HOME THE FACT THAT SOON I would be forty and had not until then done anything truly significant. Forty! That was the beginning of the end, and I did not have to stretch too much to imagine myself sitting in a rocking chair knitting socks. When I was a lonely and very angry child living in my grandfather’s house, I dreamed of heroic exploits: I would be a famous actress and, instead of buying fur coats and jewels, I would give all my money to an orphanage; I would discover a vaccine against broken bones; I would stick my fìnger in a dike to save another Dutch village and . . . wait a minute! I mean, be a second Dutch boy with my thumb in the dike. I wanted to be Tom Sawyer, or the Black Pirate, or Sandokán, and after I had read Shakespeare and incorporated tragedy into my repertoire, I wanted to be one of those magnificent characters who, after living life to the full, dies in the last act. The idea of becoming an anonymous nun came to me much later. In that period of my life, I felt different from my brothers, and other children. I never saw the world as they did; to me, things and people tended to become transparent, and dreams and stories in books were more real than reality. At times I had moments of terrifying lucidity and believed that I could divine the future and the remote past, long before I was born; it was as if all times were occurring simultaneously in one space, and suddenly, through a small window that opened for a fraction of a second, I traveled to other dimensions. In my adolescence, I would have given anything to belong to the boisterous clique that danced to rock ’n’ roll and smoked behind adults’ backs, but I didn’t try, because I knew I wasn’t one of them. The sense of loneliness that had plagued me since childhood became even more acute, but I consoled myself with the vague hope that I was cut out for a special destiny that someday would be revealed to me. Later, I threw myself into the routines of matrimony and motherhood, in which the unhappiness and solitude of my early youth receded and my plans for greatness were forgotten. My work as a journalist, my involvement in theater and television, kept me busy; I did not again think in terms of destiny until the military coup brought me to a brutal confrontation with reality and forced me to take a new direction. Those years of self-imposed exile in Venezuela could be summarized in a single word that for me had the weight of a curse: mediocrity. At forty, it was a little late for surprises, my time was quickly running out and I was sure of nothing but the unsatisfactory quality of my life, and boredom, but pride prevented me from admitting it. I assured my mother—the only person interested in knowing—that everything was going well in my tidy little life; with stoic discipline, I had recovered from my thwarted love, I had a secure job, for the first time I was saving money, my husband seemed still to love me, and my family was back on the normal track. I even dressed like an inoffensive schoolteacher—what more could anyone ask? Not a trace remained of the fringed shawls, long skirts, and flowers in my hair, but sometimes, when I was alone, I took them from the bottom of a suitcase and tried them on for a few minutes before the mirror. I was choking in my role as a sensible bourgeois woman, consumed by the desires of my youth, but I had no right to complain; I had risked everything once, had lost, and fate had given me a second chance, I should be grateful for my good fortune. “It’s a miracle what you’ve pulled off, Isabel, I never thought you would be able to put your marriage and your life back together,” my mother told me one day with a sigh that was not relief, and in a tone that to me sounded ironic. She may have been the only person to sense the contents of my Pandora’s box, but she didn’t dare lift the lid. That New Year’s in 1981, while everyone was celebrating with champagne and fireworks were bursting outside to announce the new year, I made a vow to master my ennui and humbly resign myself to the mundane existence lived by almost everyone else. I decided that it was not difficult to sacrifice love if I had the noble companionship of my husband, and that steady employment at the school was preferable to the risks of journalism or the theater, and that I ought to plan to stay indefinitely in Venezuela instead of sighing over an idealized country that lay at the far end of the planet. Those were reasonable resolutions, a
nd anyway, after twenty or thirty years, when my passions had dried up, when I couldn’t remember even the bad taste of failed love and boredom, I could enjoy a tranquil retirement from the sale of shares I was accumulating in Marilena’s business. The plan was entirely rational—and it lasted not quite a week. On January 8, someone called from Santiago saying that my grandfather was very ill; that news canceled all my promises of good behavior and launched me in an unexpected direction. Tata was now nearly one hundred years old; he had the skeleton of a bird, was a semi-invalid, and sad, but perfectly lucid. Once he had read the last word of the Encyclopædia Britannica and memorized the huge dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy, and when he lost all interest in the vicarious disasters of his soap operas, he knew it was time to die, and wanted to do it with dignity. Dressed in his threadbare black suit and with his cane between his knees, he settled himself in his armchair and, in view of the fact that his granddaughter had failed him so badly, summoned the ghost of my grandmother to help him at that critical time. Through the years, we had kept in touch by means of my steady stream of letters and his sporadic replies. I decided to write him one last time, to tell him he could go in peace because I would never forget him and planned to bequeath his memory to my children and my children’s children. To prove it, I began the letter with an anecdote about my great-aunt Rosa, my grandfather’s first sweetheart, a young girl of almost supernatural beauty who had died in mysterious circumstances shortly before they were to marry, poisoned either by error or malice, and whose soft sepia-tone photograph always sat on the piano in Tata’s house, smiling with unalterable beauty. Years later, Tata married Rosa’s younger sister, my grandmother. From the first lines I wrote, other wills took control of my letter, leading me far away from the uncertain story of the family to explore the more secure world of fiction. During the journey, my motives became muddled, and the limits between truth and invention blurred: as the characters came to life, they were more demanding than my own children. With my head in limbo, I worked a double schedule at the school, from seven in the morning to seven at night, committing catastrophic errors. I don’t know how I avoided wrecking the operation; I kept only half an eye on the accounts, the teachers, the students, and the classes, while all my real attention was centered on the canvas bag in which I carried the pages I churned out at night. My body functioned like an automaton, while my mind was lost in that world being born word by word. I reached home as it was growing dark, ate dinner with the family, took a shower, and then sat down in the kitchen or dining room before a small portable typewriter until fatigue forced me to bed. I wrote without effort, without thinking, because my clairvoyant grandmother was dictating to me. At six in the morning, I had to get up to go to work, but those few hours of sleep were sufficient; I went about in a trance, I had energy to burn, as if I had a lighted flame inside me. The family heard the clacking of the keys and saw me with my head in the clouds, but no one asked a single question; they may have guessed I didn’t have an answer, that in fact I wasn’t sure what I was doing, because although my intention to write my grandfather a letter had quickly faded, I could not admit that I had launched into a novel, that idea seemed presumptuous. I had spent more than twenty years on the periphery of literature—journalism, short stories, theater, television scripts, hundreds of letters—without daring to confess my true calling. I would have to publish three novels translated into several languages before I put down “writer” as my profession when I filled out a form. I carried my papers everywhere out of fear they would be lost, or that the house would burn down; I was as solicitous of that ribbon-tied pile of pages as I would be with a newborn baby. One day, when the bag had become very heavy, I counted five hundred pages that were whited out so many times with correction fluid that some were stiff as cardboard; others were stained with soup, or had glued-in sections that unfolded like maps—O blessed computer, that today allows me to make clean corrections! But now I had no one to send that long, long letter to, my grandfather had departed this earth. When we received the news of his death, I felt a kind of happiness, since that was what he had wanted for years, and I continued to write with even more confidence because that splendid old man had at last joined Memé, and both were reading over my shoulder. My grandmother’s fantasies and Tata’s sly laugh accompanied me every night. The epilogue was the most difficult part; I wrote it many times, without finding the tone I wanted: it seemed sentimental, or sounded like a sermon or a political tract. I knew what I wanted to tell but didn’t know how to express it, until once again ghosts came to my aid. One night I dreamed that my grandfather was lying in his bed with his eyes closed, just as he was that early morning in my childhood when I crept into his room to steal the silver mirror. In the dream, I lifted the sheet and saw he was dressed in mourning, complete with necktie and shoes, and realized he was dead. I sat down by his side, there amidst the black furniture, to read him the book I had just written, and as my voice narrated the story the furniture turned blond again, blue veils fluttered over the bed, and the sun came in through the window. I awakened, startled, at three in the morning with the solution. Alba, the granddaughter, is writing the story of her family beside the body of her grandfather, Esteban Trueba, who is to be buried the next morning. I went into the kitchen, sat down at the typewriter, and in less than two hours, without a pause, wrote the ten pages of the epilogue. They say a book is never finished; instead, the author just gives up. In this case, my grandparents, perhaps bothered by seeing their memories betrayed, forced me to put the words “The End.” I had written my first book. I did not know those pages would change my life, but I felt that a long period of paralysis and muteness had ended.
I bound up the pages in the same ribbon I had used for a year and shyly handed it to my mother, who returned it after a few days, horrified, asking me how I dared reveal our family secrets and describe my father as a degenerate—even naming him by name. Actually, I had given the French count in my story a name chosen at random: Bilbaire. I suppose I had heard it somewhere, stored it in some forgotten compartment, and when I created the character bestowed it on him without the least awareness of having used my paternal grandmother’s surname. With that reaction from my mother came certain suspicions about my father that had tormented my childhood. To please her, though, I agreed to the change and, after much searching, found a French patronymic with one fewer letter that would fit easily into the same space: I could paint over “Bilbaire” with the correction fluid and type in “Satigny,” a task that took several days, revising page by page, rolling each page into the portable and consoling myself as I did this dog work with the thought that Cervantes wrote Don Quijote with a quill pen, by candlelight, in prison, and with his one remaining hand. After I changed the name, my mother enthusiastically entered into the game of fiction, participated in choosing the title The House of the Spirits, and offered stupendous ideas, including some for the controversial count. It was my mother, who has a morbid imagination, who had the idea that among the scabrous photographs the count collected was one of “a stuffed llama riding atop the lame servant girl.” Ever since, my mother has been my editor, the only person who corrects my books, because someone with the capacity to create something so twisted deserves all my confidence. It was also she who insisted I publish the book; she contacted Argentine, Chilean, and Venezuelan publishers, sent letters right and left, and never lost hope, even though no one offered to read the manuscript, or even replied. One day we were given the name of a person in Spain who might help us. I didn’t know such people as literary agents existed, in fact, like most normal human beings, I had never read a page of literary criticism, and could not have imagined that books are analyzed in universities with the same intensity accorded stars in the firmament. Had I known, it would never have occurred to me to try to publish that pile of pages defaced with soup and correction fluid that the mailman dutifully placed on the desk of Carmen Balcells in Barcelona. That magnificent Catalan, doting mother to nearly all the great Latin America
n writers of the last three decades, took the trouble to read my book and within a few weeks called to tell me that she would like to be my agent, and also to warn me that even though my novel wasn’t bad, that didn’t mean very much—anyone can succeed with a first book, only the second would prove I was a writer. Six months later, I was invited to Spain for the publication of the novel. The day before I left, my mother entertained the family with a dinner to celebrate the occasion. As dessert was served, Tío Ramón handed me a package; I opened it, and there before my awestruck eyes was the first copy of my book, straight from the presses, which he had obtained with the sleight of hand of a veteran dealmaker, importuning editors, mobilizing ambassadors on two continents, and utilizing the diplomatic pouch to get it to me in time. It is impossible to describe my feelings at that moment; all I can say is that I have never experienced it with any of my other books, or their translations into languages I thought were dead, or adaptations to film or stage: that copy of The House of the Spirits, with its rose-colored border and image of a woman with green hair, touched my deepest emotions. I left for Madrid with the book in my arms, easily visible to any who might wish to look, and accompanied by Michael, who was as proud of my feat as my mother was. They went into bookstores to ask if they had my book, and created a scene if they said “no” and another if they said “yes,” but this time because they had not sold them all. Carmen Balcells had met us at the airport enveloped in a purple fur coat and, around her neck, a mauve silk muffler that dragged the ground behind her like the fading tail of a comet; she opened her arms wide and at that instant became my guardian angel. She threw a party to present me to the Spanish intelligentsia, but I was so frightened I spent a good part of the evening hiding in the bathroom. That night in her house I saw for the first and last time two pounds of Iranian caviar with soup spoons at the disposal of the guests, a pharaonic extravagance totally unjustified since, however you looked at it, I was a flea, and she had no way to foresee the providential trajectory that novel would trace—she must have been swayed by the illustrious name of Allende, along with my provincial appearance. I still remember the first question I was asked in an interview conducted by the most renowned literary critic of the moment: “Can you explain the cyclical structure of your novel?” My expression must have been totally bovine, because I hadn’t any idea what he was talking about. In my vocabulary, only buildings had “structure,” and the only “cyclical” I was familiar with referred to the moon or menstruation. Shortly thereafter, the best publishing houses in Europe, from Finland to Greece, bought the translation rights and the book shot off on its meteoric career. One of those rare miracles had happened that every author dreams of, but I did not absorb the scandalous success until a year and a half later when I was about to finish a second novel, just to prove to Carmen Balcells that I was a writer and demonstrate that the caviar had not been a total waste.