My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile

  In the summertime, little kids used to come by the house with baskets of blackberries and bags of quince for making preserves. The muscleman Gervasio Lonquimay also came by to check the metal springs of the cots and wash the wool mattresses, a task that could last three or four days because the wool had to dry in the sun and then be combed by hand before being stuffed back into the ticking. It was rumored that Gervasio Lonquimay had been in jail for slitting a rival’s throat, gossip that lent him an aura of unquestionable prestige. The maids always offered him a cool drink for his thirst and towels for his sweat.

  An organ grinder, always the same one, was a fixture in the streets of our barrio until one of my uncles bought his hurdy-gurdy and pathetic parrot, and went around cranking out music as the bird distributed little papers that brought good luck, to the horror of my grandfather and the rest of the family. I understand that my uncle’s intention was to seduce a cousin with this display, but that the plan did not achieve the desired result: the girl married in a whirlwind and ran as far away as possible. Finally my uncle gave away the instrument but kept the parrot. It was very ill-humored, and at the first sign of inattention would nip a piece from the finger of anyone who came too close, but my uncle liked it because it swore like a corsair. It lived with him for thirty years, and who knows how many it had lived before: a Methuselah with feathers. Gypsy women, too, passed through the barrio, bamboozling the unwary with their mangled Spanish and those irresistible eyes that had seen so much of the world; they came always in twos or threes, with a half dozen runny-nosed brats clinging to their skirts. We were terrified of them because people said they stole little children, locked them in cages so they would grow up deformed, and then sold them to the circuses as freaks. They cast the evil eye on anyone who didn’t give them money. They were thought to have magical powers: they could make jewels disappear without touching them, and unleash plagues of lice, warts, baldness, and rotted teeth. 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.

  AN OLD ENCHANTED HOUSE

  My first memory of Chile is of a house I never knew, the protagonist of my first novel, The House of the Spirits, where it appears as the large home that shelters the issue of the Truebas. That fictional family bears an alarming resemblance to my mother’s; I could never have invented such a clan. Actually, I had no need to, with a family like mine you don’t need imagination. The idea of the “large old house on the corner,” so much a part of the novel, evolved from the home on Calle Cueto where my mother was born, and so frequently evoked by my grandfather that it seems I have lived there. There are no houses like that left in Santiago, they’ve been devoured by progress and demographic growth, but they still exist in the provinces. I can see it: vast and drowsy, worn by use and abuse, with high ceilings and narrow windows and three patios, the first with orange trees and jasmine and a singing fountain, the second with a weed-choked garden, and the third a clutter of laundry utensils, dog houses, chicken coops, and unhealthful quarters for the maids, like cells in a dungeon. To go to the bathroom at night, you had to make an excursion with a flashlight, defying cold air and spiders and turning a deaf ear to the sounds of creaking wood and scurrying mice. That huge old house, which had an entrance on two streets, was one-story tall with a mansard roof, and it harbored a tribe of great-grandparents, maiden aunts, cousins, servants, poor relatives, and guests who became permanent residents; no one tried to throw them out because in Chile “visitors” are protected by the sacred code of hospitality. There was also an occasional ghost of dubious authenticity, always in plentiful supply in my family. Some attest that souls in pain wandered within those walls, but one of my older relatives confessed to me that as a boy he dressed up in an ancient military uniform to frighten Tía Cupertina. That poor maiden lady hadn’t the slightest doubt that her nocturnal visitor was the spirit of Don José Miguel Carrera, one of the fathers of the nation, who had come to ask for money to say masses for the salvation of his warrior’s soul.

  My maternal aunts and uncles, the Barros, were twelve rather eccentric brothers and sisters, though none was hopelessly mad. When they married, some stayed on in that house on Calle Cueto with their spouses and children. That is what my grandmother Isabel did when she married my grandfather Agustín. The couple not only lived in that chicken yard of outlandish relatives but, on the death of my great-grandparents, they bought the house and for several years raised their four children there. My grandfather modernized the house, but his wife suffered from asthma because of the damp; in addition, the poor moved into the neighborhood and “the best people” began to emigrate en masse to the eastern part of the city. Bowing to social pressure, my grandfather built a modern house in the barrio of Providencia, and although it was then on the city’s outskirts, he predicted that the area would prosper. The man had a good eye, because within a few years Providencia had become the most elegant residential area in the capital, though that ended long ago when the middle class began to creep up the slopes of the hills and the truly rich moved farther and farther up the cordillera, where the condors nest. Today Providencia is a chaos of traffic, commerce, offices, and restaurants, where only the old live in ancient apartment buildings, but then it was bordered by open country where wealthy families had their summer farms, and where the air was clear and life bucolic. I will have more to say about that house a little later, but for the moment, let’s go back to my family.

  Chile is a modern country of fifteen million inhabitants, but the residue of a tribal mentality lingers on. Things haven’t changed much, despite the demographic explosion, especially in the provinces, where each family stays within its tight circle, large or small. We are divided into clans that share an interest or an ideology, and their members resemble one another, dress similarly, think and act like clones, and, of course, protect one another, excluding anyone not of the group. I can mention, for example, clans of agricultural landholders (I’m referring to the owners, not humble campesinos), doctors, politicians (regardless of party), entrepreneurs, soldiers, teamsters, and then all the rest. Above even the clan is the family, inviolable and sacred; no one escapes his duties to family. For example, my stepfather Tío Ramón calls from time to time to tell me that some uncle three times removed, whom I have never met, has died and left a daughter in a difficult situation. The girl wants to study nursing but doesn’t have the means to do so. It is up to Tío Ramón, as the elder of the clan, to contact anyone who has blood ties to the deceased, from close relatives to far-flung cousins, to finance the education of the future nurse. To refuse to help would be so despicable that it would be writ in the annals of the family for several generations. Given the importance that family has for us, I have chosen mine as the thread that ties this book together, so if I expand on a member of my clan it’s with good reason—though at times that may be nothing more than my wish not to lose those blood ties that bind me, too, to my land. My relatives will serve to illustrate certain vices and virtues of the Chilean character. As a scientific method this may be questionable, but from the literary point of view it has its advantages.

  My grandfather, who came from a small family ruined by the early death of his father, fell in love with a girl famed for her beauty, Rosa Barros, but the girl died mysteriously before they could wed. All that remains of her is a pair of sepia-tone photographs, faded in the fog of time, in which her features are barely perceptible. Years later, my grandfather married Isabel, Rosa’s younger sister. In those days in Santiago, everyone within a specific social class knew each other, so that marriages, though not arranged as they were in India, were indeed family matters. Therefore it seemed logical to my grandfather that since he had been accepted by the Barros as a suitor of one of their daughter
s, there was no reason why he should not court the other.

  My grandfather Agustín was a slim man when he was young; he had a distinctive aquiline nose, and, solemn and proud, wore a black suit cut from one of his dead father’s. He came from an old family of Spanish-Basque origins, but unlike his relatives, he was poor. His family didn’t offer a great deal to talk about, except for Tío Jorge, my uncle, who was as elegant and good-looking as a prince; he had a brilliant future before him, and was desired by all the señoritas of marrying age. He had the bad fortune, however, to fall in love with a woman de medio pelo, as Chileans call the struggling lower middle class. In another country they might have been able to love one another without tragedy, but in the world they lived in they were condemned to being ostracized. This woman adored my Tío Jorge for fifty years, but she wore a moth-eaten fox stole, she dyed her hair carrot red, she smoked up a storm, and she drank beer from the bottle, more than enough reasons for my great-grandmother Ester to declare war on her and forbid her son to speak his beloved’s name in her presence. He obeyed without a word, but the day after the matriarch’s death, he married his lover, who by then was a mature woman with lung problems, although still captivating. They loved each other in their poverty and no one was ever able to part them. Two days after he died of a heart attack, they found her dead in bed, wrapped in her husband’s old bathrobe.

  Allow me a word about that great-grandmother Ester, because I believe that her powerful influence explains some aspects of the character of her descendants, and in no little measure she represents the intransigent matriarch who was, and is, so common in the culture. The mother figure reaches mythological proportions in our country, so I don’t find my Tío Jorge’s submission surprising. Jewish and Italian mothers are dilettantes compared with the Chilean ones. I have just discovered, by chance, that her husband had a bad head for business and lost his lands and the fortune he had inherited; it seems that his creditors were his own brothers. When he realized he was ruined, he went out to his country house and blew a hole in his chest with a shotgun. I say I just learned about this because for a hundred years the family hid that story, and it is still mentioned in whispers. Suicide was considered a particularly opprobrious sin, since the body couldn’t be buried in the consecrated earth of a Catholic cemetery. To escape that shame, my great-grandfather’s relatives dressed his corpse in a morning coat and top hat, sat him in a horse-drawn carriage, and drove him to Santiago, where he could be given a Christian burial because everyone, including the priest, turned a blind eye. This event divided the direct descendants, who swear that the story of the suicide is calumny, and the descendants of the dead man’s brothers, who ended up with his wealth. In either case, the widow was left sunken in depression and poverty. She had been a happy, pretty woman, a piano virtuoso, but upon her husband’s death she dressed in severe mourning, locked the piano, and from that day forward left her home only to go to daily mass. Over time, arthritis and obesity turned her into a monstrous statue trapped within the four walls of her house. Once a week the parish priest served communion at the house. That somber widow instilled in her children the idea that the world is a vale of tears and that we come here only to suffer. A prisoner in her wheelchair, she made judgments on the lives of others; nothing escaped her tiny falcon eyes and her prophet’s tongue. For the filming of The House of the Spirits, to play that role they had to transport an actress the size of a whale from England to the studio in Copenhagen, after removing several seats in the plane to contain her unimaginable corpulence. She appears on the screen for only an instant, but she makes a memorable impression.

  Unlike Doña Ester and her descendants, so solemn and serious, my maternal relatives were happy-go-lucky, exuberant, spendthrift womanizers, quick to bet on the horses, play music, and dance the polka. Now, dancing is not typical behavior among Chileans, who as a rule lack any sense of rhythm. One of the great discoveries I made in Venezuela, where I went to live in 1975, is the therapeutic power of dance. You get three Venezuelans together and one will play the drums or the guitar and the other two will dance; there is no ill that can resist that treatment. Our parties, in contrast, seem like funerals: the men gather in a corner to talk business and the women die of boredom. Only the young dance, seduced by North American music, but as soon as they marry they turn solemn like their parents. The greater part of the anecdotes and characters in my books are based on that unique family. The women were delicate, spiritual, and amusing. The men were tall, handsome, and always game for a fistfight. They were also chineros, which is what they called habitués of brothels, and more than one died of “an undiagnosed illness.” I must assume that the culture of the whorehouse is important in Chile because it appears again and again in the literature, as if our authors were obsessed with it. Even though I don’t consider myself an expert on the subject, I am not innocent of creating a whore with a heart of gold; mine, from my first novel, is named Tránsito Soto.

  I have a hundred-year-old aunt who aspires to sainthood, and whose only wish has been to go into the convent, but no congregation, not even the Little Sisters of Charity, could tolerate her for more than a few weeks, so the family has had to look after her. Believe me, there is nothing as insufferable as a saint, I wouldn’t sic one on my worst enemy. During the Sunday lunches at my grandfather’s house, my uncles laid plans to murder her, but she always escaped unharmed, and is alive to this day. In her youth, this woman wore a habit of her own invention, sang religious hymns for hours in her angelic voice, and, the minute no one was watching, slipped out to Calle Maipú to shout at the top of her lungs for the salvation of the ladies of the night, who welcomed her with a rain of rotten vegetables. On that same street, my Tío Jaime, my mother’s cousin, earned money for his medical studies by pumping an accordion in “houses of ill repute.” At dawn, at the top of his lungs, he would be singing a song titled “I Want a Naked Woman,” creating such an uproar that the good sisters would come outside to protest. In those days, the black list of the Catholic Church included books like The Count of Monte Cristo, so imagine the furor that wanting a naked woman would cause when yodeled by my uncle. Jaime became the most famous and most beloved pediatrician in the country, and the most picturesque politician—quite likely to recite his speeches in the Senate in rhymed verse—and by far the most radical of my relatives, a Communist to the left of Mao, when Mao was still in diapers. Today he is a handsome and lucid old man who wears fiery-red socks as a symbol of his political beliefs. Another of my relatives used to take off his trousers in the street to give them to the poor, and a photograph of him in his undershorts, though properly attired in hat, jacket, and tie, appeared more than once in newspapers. 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.

  I was born in Lima, where my father was one of the secretaries at the embassy. The reason I grew up in my grandfather’s house in Santiago is that my parents’ marriage was a disaster from the beginning. One day when I was four, my father went out to buy cigarettes and never came back. The truth is that he didn’t start out to buy cigarettes, as everyone always said, but instead went off on a wild spree disguised as a Peruvian Indian woman and wearing bright petticoats and a wig with long braids. He left my mother in Lima with a pile of unpaid bills and three children, the youngest a newborn baby. I suppose that that early abandonment made some dent in my psyche, because there are so many abandoned children in my books that I could found an orphanage. The fathers of my characters are dead, have disappeared, or are so distant and authoritarian they might as well live on another planet. When she found herself without a husband and on her own in a strange country, my mother had to conquer the monumental pride with which she’d been brought up and go home to live with my grandfather. My first years in Lima are obliterated in the mists of lost memory; all my recollections of childhood are linked to Chile.

  I grew up in a p
atriarchal family in which my grandfather was like God: infallible, omniscient, and omnipotent. His house in the barrio of Providencia wasn’t a shadow of the house my great-grandparents had on Calle Cueto, but for me, during my early years, it was my universe. Not long ago, a Japanese newspaperman went to Santiago, intending to photograph the supposed “large house on the corner” that appears in my first novel. It was pointless to try to explain to him that it was fictional. At the end of such a long journey, the poor man suffered a terrible disappointment. Santiago has been demolished and rebuilt several times. Nothing lasts in this city. The home my grandfather built is today an unprepossessing discothèque, a depressing mélange of black plastic and psychedelic lights. The residence on Calle Cueto was demolished many years ago and in its place stand modern towers for low-income housing, unrecognizable among so many dozens of similar buildings.