I continued to work twelve hours a day at the school, not daring to resign because Michael’s million-dollar contract, won in part through the cleaning woman’s liquid magic, had gone up in smoke. Through one of those coincidences so precise that they seem metaphors, his job had crashed to the ground the very day my book was launched in Madrid. When we got off the airplane in the Caracas airport, Michael’s associate met us with the bad news; the joy of my triumph was erased, replaced by the dark clouds of his misfortune. Accusations of corruption and bribes in the bank financing the job had forced legal intervention; payments were frozen and the project was paralyzed. The most prudent course would have been to close the office immediately and try to liquidate what we could, but Michael believed the bank was too powerful, and, because political interests were involved, the legal battle would go on forever; he thought that if he could keep his head above water for a while, everything would settle down and the contract would come back to him. In the meantime, his associate, a little more shrewd about how the game was played, disappeared with his own part of the money, leaving Michael without work and up to his neck in a sinkhole of debts. Problems finally consumed Michael, but he refused to admit his downfall or his depression until the day he fainted. Paula and Nicolás carried him to his bed and I tried to revive him by slapping his face and pouring water over him, as I had seen in the movies. Later, the doctor diagnosed high blood sugar and commented, amused, that diabetes is not usually cured with buckets of cold water. Michael fainted so frequently that we all became accustomed to it. We had never heard the word porphyria, and no one attributed his symptoms to that rare metabolic disorder; three years would go by before a niece fell ill and after months of exhaustive tests doctors in a North American clinic diagnosed the illness and said the whole family should be tested. That was how we discovered that Michael, Paula, and Nicolás all were affected by that condition. By then, our marriage was like a glass bubble we were taking great precautions not to shatter; we treated each other with ceremonious courtesy and made obstinate efforts to stay together, despite the fact that every day our paths grew farther apart. We had respect and affection for one another, but the relationship weighed on me like lead; in my nightmares, I walked across a desert pulling a cart, and with every step my feet and the wheels sank into the sand. In that loveless period, I found escape in writing. While my first novel was making its way through Europe, I was still typing every night in the kitchen of our house in Caracas, but I had updated myself, now I worked on an electric typewriter. I began Of Love and Shadows on January 8, 1983, because that day had brought me luck with The House of the Spirits, thus initiating a tradition I honor to this day and don’t dare change; I always write the first line of my books on that date. When that time comes, I try to be alone and silent for several hours; I need a lot of time to rid my mind of the noise outside and to cleanse my memory of life’s confusion. I light candles to summon the muses and guardian spirits, I place flowers on my desk to intimidate tedium and the complete works of Pablo Neruda beneath the computer with the hope they will inspire me by osmosis—if computers can be infected with a virus, there’s no reason they shouldn’t be refreshed by a breath of poetry. In a secret ceremony, I prepare my mind and soul to receive the first sentence in a trance, so the door may open slightly and allow me to peer through and perceive the hazy outlines of the story waiting for me. In the following months, I will cross that threshold to explore those spaces and, little by little, if I am lucky, the characters will come alive, become more precise and more real, and reveal the narrative to me as we go along. I don’t know how or why I write; my books are not born in my mind, they gestate in my womb and are capricious creatures with their own lives, always ready to subvert me. I do not determine the subject, the subject chooses me, my work consists simply of providing enough time, solitude, and discipline for the book to write itself. That is what happened with my second novel. In 1978, in the area of Lonquén, some fifty kilometers from Santiago, they found the bodies of fifteen campesinos murdered by the government and hidden in abandoned lime kilns. The Catholic Church reported the discovery and the scandal exploded before authorities could muffle it; it was the first time the bodies of desaparecidos had been found, and the wavering finger of Chilean justice had no choice but to point to the armed forces. Several carabineros were accused, tried, and found guilty of murder in the first degree—and immediately set free by General Pinochet under a decree of amnesty. The news was published around the world, which was how I learned of it in Caracas. By then, thousands of people had disappeared in many parts of the continent, Chile was not an exception. In Argentina, the mothers of the desaparecidos marched in the Plaza de Mayo carrying photographs of their missing children and grandchildren; in Uruguay, the names of prisoners far exceeded physical bodies that could be counted. What happened in Lonquén was like a knife in my belly, I felt the pain for years. Five men from the same family, the Maureiras, had died, murdered by carabineros. Sometimes I would be driving down the highway and suddenly be assaulted by the disturbing vision of the Maureira women searching for their men, years of asking their futile questions in prisons and concentration camps and hospitals and barracks, like the thousands and thousands of other persons in other places trying to find their loved ones. In Lonquén, the women were more fortunate than most; at least they knew their men had been murdered, and they could cry and pray for them—although not bury them, because the military later scattered the remains and dynamited the lime kilns to prevent their becoming a site for pilgrimages and worship. One day those women walked up and down a row of rough-hewn tables, sorting through a pitiful array—keys, a comb, a shred of blue sweater, a lock of hair, or a few teeth—and said, This is my husband, This is my brother, This is my son. Every time I thought of them, I was transported with implacable clarity to the times I lived in Chile under the heavy mantle of terror: censorship and self-censorship, denunciations, curfew, soldiers with faces camouflaged so they couldn’t be recognized, political police cars with tinted glass windows, arrests in the street, homes, offices, my racing to help fugitives find asylum in some embassy, sleepless nights when we had someone hidden in our home, the clumsy schemes to slip information out of the country or bring money in to aid families of the imprisoned. For my second novel, I didn’t have to think of a subject, the women of the Maureira family, the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and millions of other victims pursued me, obliging me to write. The story of the deaths at Lonquén had lain in my heart since 1978; I had kept every press clipping that came into my hands without knowing exactly why, since at that time I had no inkling that my steps were leading toward literature. So by 1983, I had at my disposal a thick folder of information, and knew where to find other facts; my job consisted of weaving those threads into a single cord. I was relying on my friend Francisco in Chile, whom I meant to use as model for the protagonist, a family of Spanish Republican refugees on whom to pattern the Leals, and a couple of women I had worked with on the women’s magazine in Santiago as inspiration for the character of Irene. I drew Gustavo Morante, Irene’s fiancé, from a Chilean army officer who followed me to San Cristobal Hill one noontime in the autumn of 1974. I was sitting under a tree with my mother’s Swiss dog, which I used to take for walks, looking down on Santiago from the heights, when an automobile stopped a few meters away and a man in uniform got out and walked toward me. I froze with panic; for a split second I considered running, but instantly knew the futility of trying to escape and simply waited, shivering and speechless. To my surprise, the officer did not bark an order to me but removed his cap, apologized for disturbing me, and asked if he could sit down. I still was unable to speak a word, but since arrests were always made by several men it calmed me to see that he was alone. He was about thirty, tall and handsome, with a rather naive, unlined face. I noticed his distress as soon as he spoke. He told me he knew who I was; he had read some of my articles, and hadn’t liked them, but he enjoyed my programs on television. He had often watched me climb
the hill and had followed me that day because he had something he wanted to tell me. He said that he came from a very religious family; he was a devout Catholic and as a young man had contemplated entering the seminary, but had gone to the military academy to please his father. He soon discovered he liked that profession, and with time the army had become his true home. “I am prepared to die for my country,” he said, “but I didn’t know how difficult it is to kill for it.” And then, after a very long pause, he described the first detail he had commanded, how he was assigned to execute a political prisoner who had been so badly tortured he couldn’t stand and had to be tied in a chair, how in a frosty courtyard at five in the morning he gave the order to fire, and how when the sound of the shots faded he realized the man was still alive and staring tranquilly into his eyes, because he was beyond fear.
“I had to approach the prisoner, put my pistol to his temple, and press the trigger. The blood splattered my uniform. It’s something I can’t tear from my soul. I can’t sleep, I am haunted by the memory.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.
“Because it isn’t enough to have told my confessor, I want to share it with someone who may be able to make use of it. Not all the military are murderers, as is being said; many of us have a conscience.” He stood, saluted me with a slight bow, put on his cap, and left.
Months later, another man, this one in civilian clothes, told me something similar. “Soldiers shoot at the legs to force the officers to fire the coup de grace and stain themselves with blood, too,” he said. I jotted down those memories and for nine years kept them at the bottom of a drawer, until I used them in Of Love and Shadows. Some critics considered the book sentimental, and too political; for me, it is filled with magic because it revealed to me the strange powers of fiction. In the slow and silent process of writing, I enter a different state of consciousness in which sometimes I can draw back a veil and see the invisible, the world of my grandmother’s three-legged table. It is not necessary to mention all the premonitions and coincidences recorded in those pages, one will suffice. Although I had abundant information, there were large lacunae in the story, because many of the military trials were conducted in secret and what was published was distorted by censorship. In addition, I was far from the scene and could not go to Chile to interrogate the involved parties as I would have done under other circumstances. My years as a journalist had taught me that it is in personal interviews that one obtains the keys, motives, and emotions of a story, no research in a library can replace the firsthand information derived from a face-to-face conversation. During those warm Caracas nights, I wrote the novel from the material in my file of clippings, a few books, some tapes from Amnesty International, and the inexhaustible voices of the women of the desaparecidos speaking to me across distance and time. Even with all that, I had to call upon my imagination to fill in blanks. After she read the original, my mother objected to one part that to her seemed absolutely improbable: the protagonists, at night and during curfew, go by motorcycle to a mine sealed off by the military; they find a break in the fence and enter an area that is off-limits, dig into the mouth of the mine with picks and shovels, find the remains of the murdered, photograph them, return with the proof, and deliver it to the cardinal, who finally orders the tomb opened. “That’s impossible,” she said. “No one would dare run such risks at the height of the dictatorship.” “I can’t think of any other way to resolve the plot, just think of it as literary license,” I replied. The book was published in 1984. Four years later, the list of exiles who could not return to Chile was abolished and for the first time I felt free to go back to my country to vote in a plebiscite that finally unseated Pinochet. One night the doorbell rang in my mother’s house in Santiago and a man insisted in talking with me in private. In a corner of the terrace, he told me he was a priest, that he had learned in the sanctity of the confessional about bodies buried in Lonquén, had gone there on his motorcycle during curfew, had opened a sealed mine with pick and shovel, had photographed the remains and taken the proof to the cardinal, who ordered a group of priests, newspapermen, and diplomats to open the clandestine tomb.
“No one has any knowledge of this except the cardinal and myself. If my participation in that matter had been known, I’m sure I wouldn’t be here talking with you, I would be among the disappeared. How did you learn?” he asked.
“The dead told me,” I replied, but he did not believe me.
Of Love and Shadows also brought Willie into my life, and for that I am grateful.
My first two novels were slow to cross the Atlantic, but finally they arrived in Caracas bookstores, some people read them, a couple of favorable reviews were published, and the quality of my life changed. Circles I had not had access to opened to me, I met interesting people, I was invited by various print media to collaborate, and I was called by television producers who wanted to roll out the red carpet for me, but by then I knew how uncertain promises can be and chose not to leave my secure position at the school. One day at the theater, a man with a soft voice and careful pronunciation came up to me to congratulate me on my first novel; he said it had touched him deeply: among other reasons, because he and his family had lived in Chile during the government of Salvador Allende and had witnessed the military coup. Later, I found out he had been imprisoned during those first days of indiscriminate brutality, because his neighbors, not recognizing his accent, had thought he was a Cuban agent and had informed on him. That was the beginning of my friendship with Ildemaro, the most significant of my life, a combination of good humor and rigorous lectures. I learned a lot under his tutelage; he guided my reading, revised some of my writing, and argued politics with me. When I think of him, I seem to see his finger pointed toward me as he instructs me on the work of Benedetti or clears the fog from my brain with an erudite sermon on socialism. That is not the only image, however; I also remember him weak with laughter or red with embarrassment when we punctured his solemnity with jokes. We incorporated him, his wife, his three children, and even a grandmother into our family and for the first time in many years again felt the warmth of being a tribe; we reinstated our Sunday dinners, our children thought of themselves as cousins, and we all had keys to both houses. Ildemaro, who is a physician but has a greater calling for the arts, provided us with tickets to a multitude of functions we attended because we didn’t want to offend him. At first, Paula was the only one with sufficient courage to laugh at the sacred cows of art in his presence, but soon the rest of us followed her example, and we ended by organizing an informal theater troupe with the aim of parodying our friend’s cultural events and intellectual disquisitions. He, however, quickly found a clever way to undercut our scheme: he became the most active member of the company. Under his direction, we mounted spectacles that transcended the limits of our long-suffering circle of friends, as, for instance, a lecture on jealousy that featured a machine of our own invention to measure “the level of the jealousy factor” in victims of that scourge. One psychiatric association—I can’t remember whether Jungian or Lacanian—took us seriously; we were invited to perform a demonstration, and one night found ourselves in the headquarters of the institute with our preposterous satire. Our Jealousy Machine consisted of a black box with erratic needles indicating measurements and capriciously blinking lights connected by cables to a helmet on Paula’s head, who valiantly enacted the role of guinea pig while Nicolás manipulated the controls. The psychiatrists listened, amazed, and took notes; some seemed somewhat perplexed, but in general they were satisfied, and the next day a scholarly review of the program appeared in the newspaper. Paula survived the Jealousy Machine and became so fond of Ildemaro that she made him the recipient of her most intimate confidences and to please him accepted the starring role in all the company’s productions. Now Ildemaro calls me frequently about Paula; he listens to my report without interrupting and tries to give me encouragement—but not hope, because he has none himself. There was nothing back then to indicate
that it would be my daughter’s fate to suffer this calamity; she was a beautiful, twenty-year-old student, brilliant and happy, who had no qualms about playing the fool on stage if Ildemaro requested it. Our indefatigable Mama Hilda, who had left Chile and followed our family into exile, and who lived half her life in our house, kept a permanent sewing operation going in the dining room, where we made our costumes and sets. Michael participated with good humor, even though his health and enthusiasm tended to flag. Nicolás, who suffers from stage fright and empathetic shyness, was in charge of the technical production—light, sound, and special effects—and in that way could remain behind the curtains. Little by little, most of our friends were drawn into the troupe and there was no one left as audience, but rehearsing the works was so entertaining for actors and musicians that no one cared if we performed to an empty house. Our home was filled with people, noise, and laughter; finally we had an extended family and felt comfortable in this new country.