My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile

  We Chileans like the Germans for their sausage, their beer, and their Prussian helmets, as well as the goose step our military adopted for parades, but in practice we try to emulate the English. We admire them so much that we think we’re the English of Latin America, just as we believe that the English are the Chileans of Europe. During the ridiculous war in the Falkland Islands (1982), instead of backing the Argentines, who are our neighbors, we supported the British, and from that time forward the then Prime Minister of Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher, has been the soul mate of General Pinochet. Latin America will never forgive us for such a faux pas. It’s clear that we have much in common with the fair-haired sons of Albion: individualism, good manners, a sense of fair play, class consciousness, bad teeth, and austerity. (British austerity does not, of course, include the royalty, who are to the English what Las Vegas is to the Mojave Desert). We are fascinated by the eccentricity of which the British tend to boast, but are incapable of imitating it, because we are too afraid of ridicule; on the other hand, we do try to copy their apparent self-control. I say apparent because in certain circumstances—for example, a soccer match—English and Chileans lose their heads equally and are capable of drawing and quartering their opponents. In the same fashion, despite their reputation for being levelheaded, both can exhibit fierce cruelty. The atrocities committed by the English throughout their history are matched by those Chileans commit as soon as they have a good excuse—or impunity. Our history is spattered with examples of barbarism. It isn’t for nothing that our motto is “By Right or by Force,” a phrase that has always seemed particularly stupid to me. In the nine months of the revolution of 1891, more Chileans died than during the four years of the war against Peru and Bolivia (1879–1883), many of them shot in the back or tortured, others thrown into the sea with stones tied to their ankles. The technique of “disappearing” ideological enemies, which several Latin American dictatorships were so strongly committed to during the seventies and eighties, had been practiced in Chile nearly a century earlier. None of which takes away from the fact that our democracy was the most solid, and the oldest, on the continent. We were proud of the efficacy of our institutions; of our incorruptible carabineros, our police; of the uprightness of our judges; and of the fact that no president became rich while in power: just the opposite, they often left the Palacio de la Moneda—ironically, the Palace of Money—poorer than they came in. Following 1973 we have not had occasion to boast about those things.

  In addition to the English, Germans, Arabs, Jews, Spaniards, and Italians, immigrants from Central Europe made their way to our shores: scientists, inventors, academics, some true geniuses, all of whom we refer to, without distinction as “Yugoslavians.”

  After the Spanish Civil War, refugees came to Chile escaping the defeat. In 1939, the poet Pablo Neruda, at the direction of the Chilean government, chartered a ship, the Winnipeg, which sailed from Marseilles carrying a cargo of intellectuals, writers, artists, physicians, engineers, and fine craftsmen. The affluent families of Santiago came to Valparaíso to meet the boat and offer hospitality to the voyagers. My grandfather was one of them; there was always a place set at his table for Spanish friends who showed up unannounced. I hadn’t been born yet, but I grew up hearing stories of the Civil War and the salty songs those passionate anarchists and republicans used to sing. Those people shook the country from its colonial doldrums with their ideas, their arts and professions, their suffering and passions, their extravagant ways. One of those refugees, a Catalan friend of my family, took me one day to see a linotype. He was a thin, nervous young man with the profile of an angry bird; he never ate vegetables because he considered them burro fodder, and he lived obsessed with the idea of returning to Spain when Franco died, never suspecting that the man would live another forty years. This friend was a typographer by trade and smelled of a mixture of garlic and ink. From the far end of the table, I used to watch him pick at his food and rail against Franco, monarchists, and priests; he never glanced in my direction because he detested children and dogs equally. To my surprise, one winter day the Catalan announced that he was taking me for a walk. He threw his long muffler around his neck and we set off in silence. He took me to a gray building where we went through a metal door and walked down corridors stacked with enormous rolls of paper. A deafening noise shook the walls. I watched him being transformed: his step became lighter, his eyes gleamed, he smiled. For the first time, he touched me. Taking my hand, he led me to a fabulous machine, a kind of black locomotive with all its works in view, as if it had been violently gutted. He touched its keys and with a warlike roar the matrices fell into place, forming the lines of a text.

  “Some damned German clockmaker who emigrated to the United States patented this marvel in 1884,” he yelled into my ear. “It’s called a linotype, line of types. Before that, you had to compose the text by setting the type by hand, letter by letter.”

  “Why ‘damned’?” I asked, yelling back.

  “Because twelve years earlier, my father invented the same machine and set it up in his patio, but no one gave a fig,” he replied.

  The typographer never returned to Spain, he stayed and operated the word machine, married, children fell from the skies, he learned to eat vegetables, and he adopted several generations of stray dogs. He gave me the memory of the linotype and a taste for the smell of ink and paper.

  In the society I was born into, in the forties, there were unbreachable barriers between the social classes. Today those lines are more subtle, but they’re there, as eternal as the Great Wall of China. Climbing the social ladder was once impossible; descending was more common—sometimes the only nudge needed was to move or to marry badly, which did not mean to a cad or heartless person but someone beneath you. Money had little to do with it. Just as you didn’t slip to a lower class when you lost your money, neither did you rise a notch by amassing a fortune, a lesson learned by many rich Arabs and Jews who were never accepted in the exclusive circles of “decent people.” This was how those who found themselves at the top of the social pyramid referred to themselves (assuming, naturally, that all the rest were “indecent people”).

  Foreigners rarely catch on to how this shocking class system operates because social interchange is polite and friendly at every level. The worst epithet bestowed on the military who took over the government in the seventies was that they were “boosted-up rotos.” My aunts said that there was nothing tackier than being a Pinochet adherent. They said that not as a criticism of his dictatorship, with which they were in full accord, but in regard to class status. Now, few people dare use the word roto in public, because it’s considered bad form, but most have it on the tip of their tongues. Our society is like a millefeuille pastry, a thousand layers, each person in his place, each in her class, every person marked by birth. People introduced themselves—and this is still true in the upper class—using both surnames, in order to establish their identity and lineage. We Chileans have a well-trained eye for determining a person’s place in society by physical appearance, color of skin, mannerisms, and especially the way of speaking. In other countries, accents vary from place to place; in Chile they change according to social class. Usually we can also immediately determine the subclass, of which there are at least thirty, determined by different levels of tastelessness, social ambition, vulgarity, new money, and so on. You can tell, for example, where a person belongs by the resort he goes to in the summer.

  The process of automatic classification we Chileans practice when we are introduced has a name, situating, and is the equivalent of what dogs do when they sniff each other’s hindquarters. Since 1973, the year of the military coup that changed so many things, situating has become a little more complex because in the first three minutes of conversation you also have to guess whether the person you’re speaking to was for or against the dictatorship. Today very few confess they were in favor, but even so it’s a good idea to establish a political orientation before you express extreme opinions. T
he same is true among Chileans who live outside the country, where the obligatory question is, When did you leave? If he, or she, says before 1973, it means that person is a rightist and was fleeing Allende’s socialism; if he left between 1973 and 1978, you can be sure he is a political refugee; but any time after that, and she may be an “economic exile,” which is how those who left Chile looking for job opportunities are qualified. It is more difficult to place those who stayed in Chile, partly because those individuals learned to keep their opinions to themselves.

  SIRENS SCANNING THE SEA

  No one asks a returning Chilean where he’s been or what he saw; on the other hand, we immediately inform the foreigner arriving for a visit that our women are the most beautiful in the world, that our flag won some mysterious international contest, and that our climate is idyllic. Judge for yourself: the flag is nearly identical to that of Texas, and the most notable aspect of our climate is that while there’s a drought in the north there are sure to be floods in the south. And when I say floods, I am talking Biblical deluges that leave hundreds dead, thousands injured, and the economy in ruins; they do, however, trigger that solidarity that tends to bog down in normal times. We Chileans are enchanted by states of emergency. In Santiago the temperatures are worse than in Madrid; in summer we die of the heat and in winter of the cold, but no one has air conditioning or decent heating, because that would be tantamount to admitting that the climate isn’t as good as they say it is. When the air gets too agreeable, it’s a sure sign that there’s going to be an earthquake. We have more than six hundred volcanoes, some where the petrified lava of former eruptions is still hot, others with poetic Mapuche names: Pirepillán, demon of the snow; Petrohué, land of the mists. From time to time these sleeping giants rouse themselves from their dreams with a long bellow, and then it seems as if the end of the world has come. Experts on earthquakes say that sooner or later Chile will disappear, buried in lava or dragged to the bottom of the sea by one of those gigantic waves that tend to rise up in fury in the Pacific, but I hope this doesn’t discourage potential tourists, because the probability that it will happen precisely during their visit is rather remote.

  The matter of female beauty requires a separate comment. It’s outrageous flattery raised to a national level. The truth is that I have never heard it said outside the country that Chilean women are quite as spectacular as my amiable compatriots assert. Our women are no more alluring than Venezuela’s, who win all the international beauty contests, or Brazil’s, who sashay along the beaches parading their café au lait curves, to mention only two of our rivals. But according to popular Chilean mythology, from time immemorial sailors have deserted their ships, entranced by the longhaired sirens who wait, scanning the sea, on our beaches. This monumental approbation on the part of our men is so gratifying that we women are inclined to forgive them many things. How can we deny them when they find us beautiful? If there is a thread of truth in all this, perhaps it is that a Chilean woman’s attraction lies in a blend of strength and flirtatiousness that few men can resist—that’s according to what I hear, for it hasn’t been a hundred percent true in my case. My male friends tell me that the amorous game of glances, of suggestion, of giving a man his head and then reining him in, is what captivates them, but I suppose that wasn’t invented in Chile, we imported it from Andalusia.

  For several years I worked for a women’s magazine where we were constantly surrounded with the most sought-after models and the latest candidates for the Miss Chile competition. The models, in general, were so anorexic that most of the time they sat perfectly motionless, staring straight ahead, like turtles, which made them very attractive since any man passing by could imagine that they were stupefied by the sight of him. In any case, these beauties all looked like tourists. Without exception, the blood flowing through their veins was European: they were tall, slim, and had light hair and eyes. That is not the typical Chilean woman, the one you see in public: a mestizo, brunette and rather short—although I can’t deny that recent generations are taller. Today’s young people seem gigantic to me (admittedly, I am barely five feet tall . . .). Nearly all the female characters in my novels are inspired by Chilean women whom I know very well because I worked with them and for them for several years. More than by upper-class señoritas, with their long legs and blond manes, I’ve been impressed by the women of the people: mature, strong, hard-working, earthy. In their youth they are passionate lovers, and afterward they are the pillars of their family good mothers and good companions to men who often do not deserve them. Under their wings they harbor their own and others’ children, friends, relatives, and hangers-on. They are always bone tired, weary from serving others, always putting off what they should do for themselves; the last among the last, they work tirelessly and age prematurely, but they never lose their capacity to laugh at themselves, their romantic hope that their partners will change, or the small flame of rebelliousness that burns in their hearts. Most are martyrs by vocation: they are the first up to wait on their families and the last to go to bed; they take pride in suffering and sacrificing. They sigh and weep with great gusto as they tell one another the stories of abuse from husband and children!

  Chilean women dress simply, nearly always in slacks; they wear their hair down and use little makeup. On the beach or at a party they all look the same, a chorus of clones. I took the time to go through old magazines, from the end of the sixties to today, and I find that in this sense very little has changed in forty years. I think that the only difference is the volume among various hairstyles. Every woman has “a little black dress,” which is synonymous with elegance and which, with few variations, accompanies her from puberty to coffin. One of the reasons I don’t live in Chile is that I wouldn’t fit in. My closet has enough veils, plumes, and glitter to outfit the entire cast of Swan Lake; furthermore, I have tinted my hair every color chemicals have to offer, and have never stepped out of the bathroom without my eye makeup. Being permanently on a diet is a symbol of status among us, though in more than one poll the men interviewed have used terms like “soft, curvy, with something you can get a grip on,” to describe how they prefer their women. We don’t believe them: surely they say that to console us . . . which is why we cover our protuberances with long sweaters or starched blouses, just the opposite from Caribbean women, who proudly display their pectoral abundance in low necklines and posteriors sheathed in fluorescent spandex. But beauty is a matter of attitude. I remember one woman with a Cyrano de Bergerac nose. In view of her lack of success in Santiago, she went to Paris and in no time at all she had appeared in France’s most sophisticated fashion magazine—eight pages, full color—wearing a turban and in bold profile! From that time, this woman-attached-to-a-nose has passed into posterity as a symbol of the crowed-over beauty of Chilean women.

  Some frivolous thinkers believe that Chile is a matriarchy, deceived perhaps by the strong personality of its women, who seem to carry the lead in society. They are free and well organized, they keep their maiden names when they marry, they compete head to head in the workforce and not only manage their families but frequently support them. They are more interesting than most men, but that does not affect the reality: they live in an unyielding patriarchy. To begin with, a woman’s work or intellect isn’t respected; we must work twice as hard as any man to earn half the recognition. Don’t even mention the field of literature! But we’re not going to talk about that, because it’s bad for my blood pressure. Men have the economic and political power, which is passed from one male to the next, like the baton in a relay, while women, with few exceptions, are pushed to the side. Chile is a macho country: there is so much testosterone floating in the air that it’s a miracle women don’t grow beards.

  There is no secret about machismo in Mexico; it’s in their rancheras, their country ballads, but among us it is much more veiled—though no less injurious. Sociologists have traced the causes back to the Spanish conquest, but since male dominance is a world problem, its roots must
be much more ancient, it isn’t fair to blame only the Spaniards. At any rate, I will repeat what I’ve read about it. The Araucan Indians were polygamous and treated women very badly; they would abandon them, and their children, and leave as a group to look for new hunting grounds, where they took new women and had more children, whom they left in turn. The mothers took care of their offspring as best they could, a custom that in a way persists in the psyche of our people. Chilean women tend to accept—though not forgive—abandonment by their men because they think of it as an endemic ill, something inherent in the male nature. As for the Spanish conquistadors, very few of them brought women with them, so they coupled with Indian women, whom they valued far less than a horse. From these unequal unions were born humiliated daughters who would themselves be raped as women, and sons who feared and admired the soldier father: bad-tempered, unjust, master of all rights, including those of life and death. As those sons grew up, they identified with their fathers, never with the conquered race of the mother. Some conquistadors had as many as thirty concubines, not counting the women they raped and immediately abandoned. The Inquisition railed against the Mapuches for their polygamous customs, but overlooked the harems of captive Indian women accompanying the Spaniards: more mestizo children meant more subjects for the crown of Spain and more souls for the Christian religion. From those violent embraces come our peoples, and to this day men act as if they were on horseback surveying the world from on high, giving orders, conquering. As a theory, that isn’t half bad, right?