My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile

  By that time my grandfather had retired his mourning clothes and married a matron with imperial bearing, no doubt the blood of those German colonists who during the nineteenth century had left the Black Forest to populate the south of Chile. In comparison to her we seemed like savages, and we behaved like them as well. My grandfather’s second wife was an imposing Valkyrie, tall, white-skinned, blond, gifted with a magnificent prow and a memorable stern. She had to put up with a husband who murmured his first wife’s name in his sleep and do battle with her inlaws, who never completely accepted her and on more than one occasion made her life impossible. I regret that now; without her the patriarch’s last years would have been very lonely. She was an excellent cook and mistress of the house; she was also bossy, hardworking, thrifty, and at a loss to understand our family’s twisted sense of humor. During her reign the eternal beans, lentils, and chickpeas were banished; she cooked delicate dishes that her stepsons doused with hot sauce even before tasting them, and she embroidered lovely towels they often used to scrub the mud from their shoes. I imagine that Sunday luncheons with those barbarians must have been an insufferable torment for her, but she continued them for decades to demonstrate to us that we would never defeat her, no matter what we did. In that battle of wills, she won by a mile.

  This dignified lady was never included in the time I shared with my grandfather, but she sat with us at night, knitting by memory as we listened to a horror story on the radio with the lights out, she indifferent to the program and my grandfather and I nearly ill from terror and laughing. He had reconciled his differences with the media by then, and had an antediluvian radio that he spent half the day repairing. With the help of a maestro, he had installed an antenna and some cables connected to a metal grille, hoping to capture communications from extraterrestrials since my grandmother wasn’t at hand to summon them in her sessions.

  In Chile we have the institution of the maestro, as we call anyone (though never a woman) who has a pair of pliers and some wire in his power. If this person is especially primitive in his approach, we affectionately call him a maestro chasquilla, that is, maybe only a little scruffy; otherwise he was plain maestro, an honorary title equivalent to licenciado, our designation for almost anyone who has graduated from college. With pliers and some wire, this fellow can fix anything from a lavatory to an airplane turbine: his creativity and daring are boundless. Through the greater part of his long life, my grandfather rarely needed to call on one of these specialists, because not only was he able to correct any imperfection, he also fabricated his own tools. In his later years, however, when he couldn’t bend down or lift a heavy weight, he counted on a maestro, who came to work with him . . . between slugs of gin. In the United States, where workmen are expensive, half the male population has a garage filled with tools and learns at a young age to read instruction manuals. My husband, a lawyer by profession, owns a pistol that shoots nails, a machine for cutting rock, and another that vomits cement through a hose. My grandfather was an exception among Chileans because no man from the middle class up knows how to decipher a manual, nor does he dirty his hands with motor oil—that’s what maestros are for; they can improvise ingenious solutions with the most modest resources and a minimum of fuss. I knew one who fell from the ninth floor while trying to repair a window, and miraculously emerged without injury. He went back up in the elevator, rubbing his bruises, to apologize for having broken the hammer. The idea of using a safety belt or filing for compensation never entered his mind.

  There was a little hut at the back of my grandfather’s garden, surely built for a maid, and I made myself a nest there. For the first time in my life I had privacy and silence, a luxury to which I became addicted. I studied during the day and at night I read the sci-fi novels I rented for a few pennies at a nearby kiosk. Like all teenaged Chileans then, I walked around with The Magic Mountain and Steppenwolf under my arm to impress everyone, but I don’t remember ever having read them. (Chile is possibly the one country where Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse have been permanent best-sellers, although I can’t imagine that we have anything in common with characters like Narcissus and Goldmund.) In my grandfather’s library, I came across a collection of Russian novels and the complete works of Henri Troyat, who wrote long family sagas about life in Russia before and during the Revolution. I read and reread those books, and years later I named my son Nicolás after one of Troyat’s characters, a young country man, radiant as a sunny morning, who falls in love with his master’s wife and sacrifices his life for her. The story is so romantic that even today, when I think of it, it makes me want to weep. That’s how all my favorite books were, and still are: passionate characters, noble causes, daring acts of bravery, idealism, adventure, and, when possible, distant locales with terrible climates, like Siberia or some African desert, that is, somewhere I never plan to go. Tropical islands, so pleasant for vacations, are a disaster in literature.

  I was also writing to my mother in Turkey every day. Letters took two months to be delivered, but that has never been a problem for us, we have the vice of epistolary communication: we have written nearly every day for forty-five years, with the mutual promise that when either of us dies, the other will tear up the mountain of accumulated letters. Without that guarantee we couldn’t write so freely. I don’t want to think of the uproar that would result if those letters, in which we have made mincemeat of our relatives and the rest of the world, fell into indiscreet hands.

  I remember those winters in my adolescence, when the rain engulfed the patio and flowed beneath the door of my little hut, when the wind threatened to carry off the roof, and thunder and lightning rattled the world. If I had been able to stay closed up there reading all winter, my life would have been perfect, but I had to go to class. I despised waiting for the bus, tired and anxious, never knowing whether I would be one of the fortunate who got on or one of the poor wretches who didn’t make it and had to wait for the next bus. The city had spread out and it was difficult to get from one point to another; to get onto a bus (a micro to us) was tantamount to a suicide mission. After waiting hours along with twenty citizens as desperate as you, sometimes in the rain, standing ankle-deep in a mud pit, you had to run like a rabbit as the vehicle approached, coughing and belching smoke from the exhaust, and hop and grab a handhold on the steps, or on some passenger who’d been lucky enough to get his foot in the door. Not too surprisingly, this has changed. Today the micros are quick, modern, and numerous. The one drawback is that their drivers compete to be first at the bus stop in order to collect the maximum number of passengers, so they fly through the streets flattening anything in their way. They detest schoolchildren because they pay less, and old people because they take so long to get on and off, so they do anything in their power to prevent them from getting within a mile of their vehicle. Anyone who wants to know a Chilean’s true character must use public transportation in Santiago and travel across the country by bus: the experience is most instructive. Street minstrels get onto the buses, magicians, jugglers, thieves, lunatics, and beggars, along with people selling needles, calendars, and color prints of saints and flowers. In general, Chileans are bad-humored and in the street never look you in the eye, but on the micros a kind of solidarity is established that resembles the camaraderie in London’s air raid shelters during the Second World War.

  One further word about traffic: Chileans, so timid and amiable in person, become savages when they have a steering wheel in their hands; they race to see who can be first to reach the next red light, they snake in and out of lanes without signaling, shout insults or make obscene gestures. Nearly all our epithets end in -ón, which makes them sound like French. 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.

  With my grandfather I made some unforgettable trips to the coast, the mountains, and the desert. He took me twice to sheep ranches in the Argentine Patagonia
, true odysseys by train, jeep, ox cart, and horseback. We traveled to the south through magnificent forests of native trees, where it is always raining; we sailed the pure waters of lakes that mirrored snowy volcanoes; we crossed through the rugged cordillera of the Andes along hidden routes used by smugglers. Once on the other side, we were met by Argentine herders, crude, silent men with able hands and faces tanned like the leather of their boots. We camped beneath the stars, wrapped in heavy wool ponchos, using our saddles for pillows. The herdsmen killed a kid and roasted it on a spit; we ate it washed down with mate, a green, bitter tea served in a gourd passed from hand to hand, all of us sipping from the same metal straw. It would have been an insult to have turned up my nose at a tube slick with saliva and chewing tobacco. My grandfather never believed in germs, for the same reason he didn’t believe in ghosts: he’d never seen one. At dawn we washed in frosty water and strong yellow soap made from sheep fat and lye. Those journeys left me with such an indelible memory that thirty-five years later, when I told the story of the flight of the protagonists of my second novel, Of Love and Shadows, I could describe the experience and the landscape without hesitation.

  CONFUSED YEARS OF YOUTH

  During my childhood and youth, I saw my mother as a victim, and decided early on that I didn’t want to follow in her footsteps. I was a feminist long before I’d heard the word; my need to be independent and not to be controlled by anyone is so old that I can’t remember a single moment when it didn’t guide my decisions. When I look back at the past, I realize that my mother was dealt a difficult destiny and in fact confronted it with great bravery, but at the time I judged her as being weak because she was dependent on the men around her, like her father and her brother Pablo, who controlled the money and gave the orders. The only time they paid any attention to her was when she was ill, so she often was. Later she began her life with Tío Ramón, a man of magnificent qualities but one who was at least as macho as my grandfather, my uncles, and the rest of Chilean manhood in general.

  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. And in regard to that, I should clarify that the famous pill responsible for the sexual revolution had already been invented, but in Chile it was spoken of only in whispers; it was forbidden by the Church and could be acquired only through a physician friend of liberal inclinations . . . after producing a marriage license, naturally. Unmarried women were out of luck, because few Chilean men, even today, are civil enough to use a condom. In tourist guides they should recommend that visitors always carry one in their billfolds because they won’t lack for opportunity to use them. 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. One of the most therapeutic experiences for any depressed woman is to walk past a construction site and observe how the work stops as assorted workmen hang from the scaffolding to throw her verbal bouquets. The compliment has reached the level of an art form, and there is an annual contest with a prize for the best flowery accolade, according to category: classic, creative, erotic, comic, and poetic.

  I was taught as a child to be discreet and to pretend to be virtuous. I say “pretend” because what you do but don’t tell doesn’t matter as long as no one finds out. In Chile we suffer from a particular form of hypocrisy. We act as if we’re scandalized by any little peccadillo someone else commits at the same time that we are stacking up barbarous sins in private. We speak in euphemisms: “to nurse” is “to give the baby its milkie,” and “torture” is referred to as “illegal pressure.” We make a big show of being emancipated, but we are stoically silent about subjects considered taboo, not to be discussed publicly, from corruption (which we call “illicit enrichment”) to film censorship, to mention only two. At one time Fiddler on the Roof was censored; now The Last Temptation of Christ is banned because of the opposition of the clergy and the fear that Catholic fundamentalists might set off a bomb in the theater. Last Tango in Paris made its appearance when Marlon Brando had become an obese old man and butter had gone out of style. The strongest taboo, especially for women, is still the taboo of sex.

  The daughters of certain emancipated or intellectual families went to the university, but that was not true for me. My family thought of themselves as intellectuals but actually we were medieval barbarians. It was expected that my brothers would be professional men—if possible doctors or engineers, all other occupations were inferior—but I was to settle for a largely decorative job until motherhood occupied me completely. During those years, professional women came principally from the middle class, which is the strong backbone of the country. That has changed, I’m happy to say, and today the level of education for women is actually higher than for men. I wasn’t a bad student, but since I already had a boyfriend it didn’t occur to anyone that I might go to the university—not even to me. I finished high school at sixteen, so confused and immature that I had no idea what the next step might be, even though I always knew I would have to work because you can’t be a feminist without financial independence. As my grandfather always said, the person who pays the bills rules the roost. I got a job as a secretary in one of the organizations of the United Nations, where I copied forestry statistics onto large pages of graph paper. In my free time I didn’t embroider my trousseau, I read novels by Latin American authors and fought like a tiger with any male who crossed my path, beginning with my grandfather and my wonderful Tío Ramón. My rebellion against the patriarchal system was exacerbated when I went into the job market and found out for myself the disadvantages of being a woman.

  And what about writing? I suppose that secretly I wanted to devote myself to literature, but I never dared put such a presumptuous goal into words, because that would have unleashed an avalanche of guffaws around me. No one had any interest in what I might have to say, much less write. I wasn’t familiar with any important female authors, aside from two or three nineteenth-century English maiden ladies and our national female poet, Gabriela Mistral—but she was very mannish. Writers were mature men, solemn, remote, and usually dead. Personally I didn’t know any, except for that uncle who went around the barrio playing the hurdy-gurdy, and who had published a book about his mystic experiences in India. Hundreds of copies of his thick novel were piled up in the cellar—bought, almost certainly, by my grandfather to get them out of circulation—fine material for the forts my brothers and I built when we were little. No, literature was definitely not a reasonable career path in a country like Chile where intellectual scorn for women was absolute. Through all-out war, we women have earned the respect of our troglodytes in certain areas, but the minute we’re a bit careless, machismo raises its shaggy head again.

  For a while I earned a living as a secretary, I married, and immediately became pregnant with my first child, Paula. Regardless of my feminist theories, I was a typical Chilean wife, selfless and servile as a geisha, the kind of woman who makes a baby of her husband, with premeditation and treachery. Enough to say, as proof, that I had three jobs, I ran the house, I looked after the children, and I ran like a marathoner the whole day to fight my way through the pile of responsibilities that had fallen on me, including a daily visit to my grandfather, but at night I waited for my husband with the olive for his martini between my teeth and the clothing he would wear the next morning carefully laid out. In any free moments, I shined his shoes and cut his hair and fingernails . . . just a run-of-the-mill Elvira.

  Soon I was transferred to a different office, the depa
rtment of information, where I was supposed to edit reports and act as press officer, either of which was much more entertaining than counting trees. I must admit that I didn’t choose journalism, I was caught off guard; the profession simply sank its claws into me. It was love at first sight, a sudden passion that has determined a large part of my life. It happened during the early days of television in Chile, which consisted of two black-and-white channels originating from the universities. The only screen I’d ever seen was at the movies, but it was Stone Age TV, the most primitive stage, and though I hadn’t taken regular courses at the university, I found myself launched upon a career. In those days, journalism was still a profession you learned on the job, and there was a certain tolerance for spontaneous practitioners like me. I should note here that in Chile women make up the majority among journalists, and are more prepared, visible, and courageous than their male colleagues; it is also true that they nearly always work under a man’s orders. My grandfather was indignant when I told him what I was doing; he considered reporting an occupation for knaves; no one of sound mind would talk with the press, and no decent person would choose a calling in which the main order of work was talking about other people. However, I think he secretly watched my television programs because occasionally he let slip some revealing comment.

  By the early sixties the rings of poor settlements around the capital city had grown in alarming fashion: cardboard walls, tin roofs, people in rags clearly visible along the road from the airport. Since this made a very bad impression on visitors, for a long time the solution was to put up walls to hide them. As one politician said, “Where there is poverty, hide it.” There are marginal areas still today, despite the sustained effort of various governments to relocate the squatters in more decent barrios, but the situation is greatly improved. Back then, immigrants from the country and the most remote provinces came in massive numbers looking for work, and being unable to find decent housing they gravitated to these miserable hovels. Despite police harassment of the occupants, these shantytowns grew and became organized: once people took over a piece of land it was impossible to remove them or keep others from joining them. Shacks lined unpaved little streets that were a dust bowl in summer and a swamp in winter. Hundreds of barefoot children ran wild among the huts while parents went off every day to the city to look for a day’s work that would “feed the pot,” a vague term that could mean anything from earning a pitiable wage to buying a bone to make soup. Several times I visited these communities with a friend who is a priest, and afterward, when feminism and political unrest forced me out of my shell, I went often, trying to help. As a journalist I could make reports and tape interviews that helped me better understand our Chilean mentality.