My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile

  Like my father, Tío Ramón worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and shortly after being installed beneath my grandfather’s protective roof in the role of illegal son-in-law, he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Bolivia. That was in the early fifties. My mother and all three of us children went with him.

  Before I began to travel, I was convinced that all families were like mine, that Chile was the center of the universe, and that every human being looked like us and spoke Spanish as a first language: English and French were school assignments, like geometry. We had barely crossed the border when I had my first hint of the vastness of the world and realized that no one, absolutely no one, knew how special my family was. I quickly learned what it is to feel rejected. From the moment we left Chile and began to travel from country to country, I became the new girl in the neighborhood, the foreigner at school, the strange one who dressed differently and didn’t even know how to talk like everyone else. I couldn’t picture the time that I would return to familiar territory in Santiago, but when finally that happened, several years later, I didn’t fit in there either, because I’d been away too long. Being a foreigner, as I have been almost forever, means that I have to make a much greater effort than the natives, which has kept me on my toes and forced me to become flexible and adapt to different surroundings. This condition has some advantages for someone who earns her living by observing; nothing seems natural to me, almost everything surprises me. I ask absurd questions, but sometimes I ask them of the right people and thus get ideas for my novels.

  To be frank, one of the things that most attracts me to Willie is his challenging and confident attitude. He never has any doubt about himself or his circumstances. He has always lived in the same country, he knows how to order from a catalogue, vote by mail, open a bottle of aspirin, and where to call when the kitchen floods. I envy his certainty. He feels totally at home in his body, in his language, in his country, in his life. There’s a certain freshness and innocence in people who have always lived in one place and can count on witnesses to their passage through the world. In contrast, those of us who have moved on many times develop tough skin out of necessity. Since we lack roots or corroboration of who we are, we must put our trust in memory to give continuity to our lives . . . but memory is always cloudy, we can’t trust it. Things that happened in the past have fuzzy outlines, they’re pale; it’s as if my life has been nothing but a series of illusions, of fleeting images, of events I don’t understand, or only half understand. I have absolutely no sense of certainty. Nor can I picture Chile as a geographic locale with certain precise characteristics: a real and definable place. I see it the way a country road might look as night falls, when the long shadows of the poplars trick our vision and the landscape is no more substantial than a dream.

  A SOBER AND SERIOUS PEOPLE

  A friend of mine says that we—we Chileans—may be poor, but that we have delicate feet. She’s referring, of course, to our unjustified sensitivity, always just beneath the skin, to our solemn pride, to our tendency to become idiotically sober given the slightest opportunity. Where did such characteristics come from? I suppose they can be attributed, at least in part, to the mother country, Spain, which bequeathed us a mixture of passion and severity; another portion we owe to the blood of the long-suffering Araucans; and the rest we can blame on fate.

  I have, through my father, a little French blood, and a touch of Indian—all you have to do is look at me to see that—but my heritage is primarily Spanish-Basque. The founders of families like mine tried to establish dynasties, and to do that they invented an aristocratic past, though in fact they were laborers and adventurers who came to the tail end of America with their hands out. Of blue blood, so to speak, not a drop. They were ambitious and hardworking, and they appropriated the most fertile land in the vicinity of Santiago and then devoted themselves to the task of gaining notice. Since they immigrated early and got rich quickly, they could claim the luxury of looking down on all those who came later. They married among themselves, and, being good Catholics, they produced a multitude of descendants. Their normal children were destined for the land, the ministry, and the church hierarchy, but never for commerce, which was reserved for a different class of people; the children who were less favored intellectually went into the navy. Often there was a son left over to become president of the republic. There are dynasties of presidents, as if the office were hereditary, because Chileans vote for a familiar name. The Errázuriz family, for example, provided three presidents, thirty-some senators, and I don’t know how many politicians, besides several heads of the church. The virtuous daughters of “known” families married their cousins or became holy women who worked questionable miracles: unmanageable daughters were given to the care of the nuns. These families were conservative, devout, honorable, proud, and avaricious, though generally of good disposition—not so much by temperament as to assure winning favor in heaven. They lived in fear of God. I grew up convinced that every privilege comes as a natural consequence of a long list of responsibilities. That Chilean social class maintained a certain distance from lesser human beings because they had been placed on Earth to set an example, a heavy burden they assumed with Christian devotion. One thing I must make clear, however, is that despite their origins and their surnames, my grandfather’s branch of the family was not of that oligarchy; they had good credentials but lacked land or fortune.

  One of the characteristics of Chileans in general, and of the descendants of Spaniards and Basques in particular, is their seriousness, which contrasts with the exuberant temperament so common in the rest of Latin America. I grew up among millionaire aunts, cousins of my grandfather and my mother, who wore ankle-length black dresses and made a great virtue of “turning” their husbands’ suits, a tedious process that consisted of ripping apart the suit, pressing out the pieces, and sewing them back together, inside out, to give them new life. It was easy to distinguish the victims of these labors because the breast pocket of their jacket was always on the right rather than the left. The result was consistently pathetic, but the effort demonstrated how thrifty and hardworking the wearer’s good lady was. The tradition of industrious women is fundamental in my country, where sloth is a male privilege. It is forgivable in men, just as alcoholism is tolerated among them, because it is assumed that these are unavoidable biological characteristics: if you’re born that way, you’re born that way. . . . That isn’t true of women, you understand. Chilean women, even those with fortunes, do not paint their fingernails, since that would indicate they don’t work with their hands, and one of the worst possible epithets for a Chilean woman to be called is lazy. It used to be that when you got on a bus you would see all the women knitting; that’s no longer true because now Chile is showered with tons of secondhand clothing from the United States and polyester garbage from Taiwan and knitting has passed into history.

  There has been speculation that our ponderous seriousness is the bequest of exhausted Spanish conquistadors, who arrived half dead with hunger and thirst, driven more by desperation than by greed. Those valiant captains—the last to share in the booty of the conquest—had to cross the cordillera of the Andes through treacherous passes, slog across the Atacama Desert beneath a sun like burning lava, or defy the ominous seas and winds of Cape Horn. The reward was scarcely worth the trouble, because Chile, unlike other regions of the continent, did not offer the possibility of wealth beyond dreams. Gold and silver mines could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and the minerals had to be torn from the rock with unspeakable effort. Neither did Chile have the climate for prosperous tobacco, coffee, or cotton plantations. Ours has always been a country with one foot in the poorhouse; the most that the colonist could aspire to was a quiet life dedicated to agriculture.

  Ostentation was once unacceptable, as I’ve said, but unfortunately that has changed, at least among the residents of Santiago. They have become so pretentious that they go to the supermarket on Sunday mornings, fill their carts with the most
expensive items—caviar, champagne, filets mignons—walk through the store for a while so everyone can see what they’re buying, then leave the cart in an aisle and slip out discreetly with empty hands. I’ve also heard that a good percentage of cell phones are made of wood, mere fakes to show off. Such behavior once would have been unthinkable. The only people who lived in mansions were nouveau riche Arabs, and no one in his right mind would have worn a fur coat, even if it was as cold as the South Pole.

  The positive side of such modesty—false or authentic—was, of course, simplicity. None of those parties for fifteen-year-olds with pink-dyed swans, no imperial weddings with four-layer cakes, no parties, with orchestra, for lap dogs, as in other capital cities of our exuberant continent. Our national seriousness was a notable characteristic that disappeared with the advent of the all-out capitalism imposed in the last two decades, when to be rich and to show it became fashionable. The character of the people is deep-rooted, however. Ricardo Lagos, the current president of the republic (2002), lives with his family in a rented house in an unpretentious neighborhood. When dignitaries from other nations visit, they are startled by the small size of the house, and their amazement grows when they see the president prepare the drinks and the first lady help serve the table. Although the right does not forgive Lagos for not being “one of us,” they admire his simplicity. This couple are typical exponents of the old middle class formed in free, humanist, state schools and universities. The Lagos are Chileans brought up with the values of equality and social justice, and today’s materialistic obsession seems not to have rubbed off on them. It is hoped that their example will end once and for all the wooden cell phones and the shopping carts abandoned in supermarket aisles.

  It occurs to me that this sobriety, so deeply rooted in my family, as well as our habit of veiling our happiness or well-being, was founded in the embarrassment we felt when we saw the poverty all around us. It seemed to us that having more than others did was not only divine injustice but also a form of personal sin. We had to do penance and practice charity to compensate. The penance was to eat beans, lentils, or chickpeas every day, and to freeze in the winter. The charity part was a routine family activity, which was almost exclusively the purview of women. From the time we were little girls, our mothers or aunts took us by the hand and led us out to distribute food and clothing to the poor. That custom ended some fifty years ago, but helping a neighbor is an obligation that Chileans happily assume today, as is only just in a country that has no lack of opportunity for doing good. In Chile, poverty and solidarity go hand in hand.

  There is no doubt of a tremendous disparity between rich and poor, just as there is in nearly all of Latin America. At least the Chilean people, poor as they may be, are well educated, informed, and aware of their rights—though they don’t always reap the benefits of them. Poverty, nevertheless, continues to raise its ugly head, especially in times of crisis. I can’t resist the temptation to copy a paragraph my mother wrote me from Chile following the floods of the winter of 2002, which buried half the country in an ocean of filthy water and mud.

  It’s been raining for days. Suddenly it lets up and only a fine mist keeps everything wet. Just as the Ministry of the Interior says better weather is on the way, another downpour comes along and blows off your hat. This has been another trial for the poor. We’ve seen the true face of misery in Chile, poverty disguised as the lower middle class, those who suffer most because they have hopes. These people have worked a lifetime to get a decent place to live and it turns out they’re swindled by builders: their homes are nicely painted on the exterior, but they don’t have drainage, so the rain not only soaks them, the walls begin to crumble like stale bread. The only thing that distracts from the disaster is the world soccer championship. Iván Zamorano, our soccer idol, donated a ton of food and spends his days in flooded neighborhoods entertaining the kids and handing out soccer balls. You can’t imagine the painful scenes; it’s always those who have the least who suffer the worst misfortunes. The future looks black because this endless rain has all the vegetable fields under water and the wind has flattened whole orchards. In Magallanes sheep have died by the thousands, trapped in the snow at the mercy of the wolves. Of course Chilean solidarity can be seen everywhere. Men, women, and teenagers in water up to their knees and covered with mud are caring for children, handing out clothing, and shoring up entire neighborhoods that have been washed toward the ravines. They have set up an enormous tent in the Plaza Italia; cars drive by and without even stopping someone tosses out a bundle of blankets and food into the arms of a waiting student. The Mapocho station has been turned into an enormous shelter for the victims, and on the stage all of Santiago’s artists, rock musicians, even the symphony orchestra, keep things lively, and people stiff with cold can’t resist dancing and so for a few minutes forget their troubles. This has been an enormous lesson in humility. The president and his wife, along with all his ministers, are visiting the shelters and offering comfort. The greatest thing is that the minister of defense, Michelle Bachelet, the daughter of a man assassinated during the dictatorship, called out the army to come to the aid of those affected, and is touring in an armored car, with the commander in chief by her side, helping in every way possible, night and day. Everyone is doing what he or she can. The big question is what will the banks do, they’re such a scandal in this country.

  Just as a Chilean is annoyed by the success of others, he is equally magnanimous during disasters, at which time he sets aside his pettiness and is instantly converted into the most supportive and generous person in this world. There are several annual television marathons in Chile devoted to charity, and everyone, particularly the most humble among us, throws himself into a true frenzy to see who can give the most. Occasions for appealing to public compassion are never wanting in a nation eternally rocked by catastrophes that shake the foundations of life, floods that sweep away entire towns, gigantic waves that deposit ships in the center of a plaza. We are created in the idea that life is precarious, and we are always waiting for the next calamity to happen. My husband—who is six feet tall and a bit creaky in the knees—could never understand why I keep the glasses and plates on the lowest shelves in the kitchen, which he can reach only when lying on his back . . . until the 1988 earthquake in San Francisco destroyed the neighbors’ china while ours escaped unscathed.

  Not everything is guilt-ridden breast-beating and charitable works performed in order to redress economic injustices. Oh, no. Our seriousness is amply compensated by our gluttony; in Chile, life is lived around the dining-room table. Most of the executives I know suffer from diabetes because they hold their business meetings at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. No one signs a paper without indulging in, at least, cookies and coffee, or a drink.

  While it is true that we eat beans every day, on Sundays the menu changes. A typical luncheon at my grandfather’s house began with stick-to-the-ribs fried empanadas, meat pies with onion, which can provoke heartburn in the healthiest eater; then came a cazuela, a raise-the-dead soup of meat, corn, potatoes, and vegetables, followed by a succulent seafood chupe that flooded the house with its delicious aroma; and to end, we had a selection of irresistible desserts, which always included a tarte of manjar blanco or dulce de leche, a milk-based caramel (my aunt Cupertina’s legendary recipe)—all accompanied by our fatal pisco sours and several bottles of good red wine that had been aged for years in the family cellar. Before we left, we were given a tablespoon of milk of magnesia. This dosage was increased by five when an adult birthday was being celebrated: we children didn’t merit such deference. I never heard the word cholesterol mentioned. My parents, who are over eighty, consume ninety eggs, a quart of cream, a pound of butter, and four pounds of cheese per week. They’re healthy and lively as little kids.

  Family reunions were not only a fine opportunity for everyone to eat and drink till they dropped, but also a chance to do battle to the death. With the second pisco sour the screams and insults among my rela
tives could be heard through the whole barrio. Afterward, each person went his own way, swearing never to speak to the others again, but the next Sunday everyone was there: no one dared not come, my grandfather wouldn’t have forgiven it. I understand that this pernicious custom is still being observed in Chile, even though there has been great progress in other regards. I always was intimidated by those compulsory reunions, but now, in the ripe years of my life, I have recreated them in California. My formula for an ideal weekend is to have the house filled with people, to cook for a regiment, and at the end of the day to hear everyone arguing at the tops of their voices.

  Feuds among relatives were carried on in private. Privacy is a luxury of the well-to-do because most Chileans have none. Middle-class families and below live in very close quarters, in many homes several people sleep in the same bed. When there is more than one room, the dividing walls are so thin that every sigh comes right through. To make love you have to hide in unimaginable places: public baths, underneath bridges, at the zoo. Considering that the solution to the housing problem may take twenty years—and that’s optimistic—it occurs to me that the government has the obligation to provide free motels for desperate couples. That way many mental problems could be avoided.

  Every family has more than one troublemaker, but the modus operandi always is to close ranks around the black sheep and avoid scandal. From the cradle, we Chileans learn that “dirty linen is washed in private,” and no one talks about alcoholic relatives, those with money problems, the ones who beat their wives or have served time. Everything is hidden, from a kleptomaniac aunt to the cousin who seduces little old ladies to relieve them of their pitiful savings, and particularly the distant male cousin who sings in a cabaret dressed as Liza Minnelli, because in Chile any originality in matters of sexual preference is unpardonable. There has been a real battle over discussing AIDS in public; no one wants to admit how it is transmitted. Neither is there legislation pertaining to abortion, one of the most serious health problems in the country; everyone hopes that if the subject isn’t broached, it will disappear as if by magic.