The first thing you can say about Chileans is that we are friendly and hospitable; at the first hint we throw open our arms and the doors of our homes. I’ve often heard foreigners say that if they ask directions, the people they approach accompany them there personally, and if they seem to be lost, their informant is capable of inviting them home for dinner, even offering a bed if they’re in difficulty. I confess, however, that my own family was not especially friendly. One of my uncles would not allow anyone to breathe near him, and my grandfather was given to thrashing the telephone with his cane because he considered it a lack of respect to call without his consent. He was perpetually cross with the mailman because he brought unsolicited mail, and he never opened letters unless the sender’s name was prominently displayed. My relatives felt they were superior to the rest of humankind, though their rationale always seemed nebulous to me. According to my grandfather’s school of thought, we could trust no one but close family; the rest of humanity was suspect. My grandfather was a fervent Catholic but he deplored confession; he was suspicious of priests and he believed that forgiveness of sins could be negotiated directly with God, just as he could negotiate for those of his wife and his children. Despite this inexplicable superiority complex, visitors were always warmly received in our home, however vile they might be. In this sense, we Chileans are like the Arabs of the desert: the guest is sacred, and friendship, once declared, is an indissoluble bond.
It is impossible to go into a home, rich or poor, without accepting something to eat or drink, even if it’s only a cup of tea. This is another national tradition. Since coffee has always been scarce, and expensive—even Nescafé was a luxury— we drank more tea than the entire population of Asia put together, but on my last trip I found to my amazement that coffee finally had made its entrance into the culture, and now anyone willing to pay can find espressos and cappuccinos worthy of Italy. In passing I should add, for the peace of mind of potential tourists, that impeccable public bathrooms and bottled water are readily available everywhere; it’s no longer mandatory to come down with colitis after your first glass of water, as it once was. In a strange way, I lament that, because those of us who grew up drinking Chilean water are immunized against all known and yet-to-be-discovered bacteria. I can drink water from the Ganges with no visible effect on my health; my husband, in contrast, once outside the United States, can brush his teeth with bottled water and still contract typhus. In Chile we are not refined in respect to tea, any brew sweetened with a spot of sugar tastes delicious to us. There are, in addition, an infinite number of local herbs to which we attribute curative properties, and in the case of the truly poor, we have agüita perra—bitch water—nothing but plain hot water in a cracked teacup. The first thing we offer a visitor is a tecito, an agüita, or a vinito, a “nice little drink” of tea, water, or wine. We always add the diminutive -ito to our words, almost as an apology for offering, in accord with our desire not to be noticed and our horror of putting on airs, even with words. Then we offer our guest “pot luck,” which means that the mistress of the house will take bread out of her children’s mouths to give to the visitor, who is obliged to accept it. If you receive a formal invitation, you can expect a gargantuan feast: the goal is to leave the guests moaning with indigestion for several days. Of course, women always do the hard work. Now it’s considered chic for men to cook, a really bad development because while they take all the glory, the woman has to wash up the mounds of pots and dirty dishes he’s left everywhere. Our typical cuisine is simple because earth and sea are generous; there is no fruit or seafood more delicious than ours—that I can assure you. The more difficult it is to put food on the table, the more elaborate and spicy it becomes, witness the examples of India and Mexico, where there are three hundred ways to cook rice. We have one, and that seems more than sufficient to us. We don’t need to be creative or invent original dishes, we do that with names, which can lead the foreigner to the worst suspicions: “beat-up fools” (an abalone dish), “head cheese,” “dark blood,” “fried brains,” “lady fingers,” “queen’s arm,” “nun’s sighs,” “wrapped babies,” “torn bloomers,” and “monkey tail,” for a starter.
We Chileans have a sense of humor and we like to laugh, even though deep down we prefer seriousness. We had a president named Jorge Alessandri (1958–1964) who was a neurotic bachelor; he drank only mineral water and never allowed anyone to smoke in his presence, and people always said about him, with admiration, “How sad our Don Jorge is!” That calmed us because it was a sign that we were in good hands, those of a serious man, or, better still, of an aging depressive who wasted no time on pointless happiness. Which is not to say that we don’t find bad luck entertaining; we sharpen our sense of humor when things go badly, and since it seems things always go badly, we laugh a lot. That’s a small compensation for our vocation of complaining about everything. A person’s popularity is measured by the number of jokes about him. They say that President Salvador Allende invented jokes about himself—some more than a little racy—and set them loose on the world. For many years I had a magazine column and a television program with humorous pretensions, which were tolerated because there was very little competition—in Chile even clowns are melancholy. Years later, when I began to publish a similar column for a newspaper in Venezuela, it bombed and brought me a mountain of enemies besides, because humor in that country is more direct and not as cruel.
My family is famous for practical jokes, but it may lack taste in matters of humor; the only jokes my relatives understand are German stories about Herr Otto. Here’s one example: A very elegant woman broke wind, involuntarily and loudly, and to cover it up made a noise with her shoes. Then Herr Otto says (it has to be in a German accent), “You can break a shoe, you can break a heart, but you’ll never make the noise you made with that fart.” As I’m writing this, I’m weeping with laughter. I’ve tried to tell the joke to my husband, but it doesn’t translate, and besides, in California ethnic jokes are not at all in favor. I grew up with jokes about Galicians, Jews, and Turks. Our humor is black. We never let an opportunity pass to make fun of other people, whoever they may be: deaf mutes, the retarded, epileptics, people of color, homosexuals, priests, and the homeless. We have jokes about all religions and races. The first time I heard the expression “politically correct” I was forty-five years old, and I have never been able to explain to friends or relatives in Chile what that means. Once in California I tried to get one of those dogs they train to lead the blind but are given away when they can’t pass the rigorous tests. In my application I had the bad idea of mentioning that I wanted a “rejected” dog, and by return mail I received a dry note informing me that the term “rejected” is never used; instead, you say that the animal “has changed careers.” Try and explain that in Chile!
My mixed marriage with a gringo hasn’t gone all that badly; we get along (even though most of the time neither of us has the least idea of what the other is talking about) because we are always ready to give each other the benefit of the doubt. The greatest drawback is that we don’t share a sense of humor. Willie can’t believe that I can be funny in Spanish, and as for me, I never know what the devil he’s laughing about. The one thing that amuses us both at the same time are the off-the-cuff speeches of President George W. Bush.
THE ROOTS OF NOSTALGIA
I have often said that my nostalgia dates from the time of the military coup of 1973, when my country changed so much that I can no longer recognize it, but in fact it must have begun much earlier. My childhood and adolescence were marked with journeys and farewells. I hadn’t yet put down roots in one place when it was time to pack our suitcases and move to another.
I was nine years old when I left my childhood home and with great sadness said good-bye to my unforgettable grandfather. So I would be entertained during my trip to Bolivia, Tío Ramón gave me a map of the world and the complete works of Shakespeare in Spanish, which I swallowed at a gulp, reread several times, and still own. I was fas
cinated by those stories of jealous husbands who murdered their wives over a handkerchief, kings whose enemies put distilled poison in their ears, lovers who committed suicide because of faulty communication. (How different Romeo and Juliet’s fate would have been if they’d had a telephone!) Shakespeare initiated me into stories of blood and passion, a dangerous road for authors like me whose fate it is to live in a minimalist era. The day that we set out for the province of Antofagasta, where we were to take a train to La Paz, my mother gave me a notebook and instructed me to start a travel diary. Ever since then I have written almost every day; writing is my most deeply entrenched habit. As that train chugged across the countryside, the landscape changed and I felt something tear inside me. On the one hand I was curious about all the new things passing before my eyes, and on the other, an insurmountable sadness was crystallizing deep within me. In the small Bolivian towns where the train stopped, we bought corn on the cob, leavened bread, black potatoes that looked rotten, and delicious sweets, all offered by Bolivian Indian women in multicolored wool skirts and black derbies like those worn by English bankers. I wrote everything down in my notebook with the industry of a notary, as if even then I foresaw that only writing would anchor me to reality. Outside the window, the world was hazy because of the dust on the glass, and deformed by the speed of the train.
Those days shook my imagination. I heard stories of the spirits and demons that wander the abandoned towns, of mummies exhumed from profaned tombs, of hills of human skulls, some more than fifty thousand years old, exhibited in a museum. In school, in history class, I had learned that the first Spaniards to reach Chile in the sixteenth century, coming from Peru, had wandered for months through these desolate reaches. I imagined that handful of warriors in red-hot armor, their exhausted horses, their hallucinated eyes, followed by a thousand captive Indians carrying provisions and weapons. It was a feat of incalculable courage and mad ambition. My mother read us some pages about the now vanished Atacameño Indians, and about the Quechuas and Aymaras, among whom we would live in Bolivia. Although I couldn’t know that yet, my destiny as a vagabond began on that journey. That diary still exists today; my son has hidden it and refuses to show it to me, because he knows I would destroy it. I regret many things I wrote in my youth: frightful poems, tragic stories, suicide notes, love letters addressed to unfortunate lovers, and especially that dreadful diary. (A caution to aspiring writers: not everything you write is worth keeping for the benefit of future generations.) When she gave me that notebook, my mother somehow intuited that I would have to dig up my Chilean roots, and that lacking a land into which to sink them I would have to do that on paper. I maintained a correspondence with my grandfather, my Tío Pablo, and with the parents of some friends, patient people to whom I related my impressions of La Paz, its purple mountains, its hermetic Indians, and its air, so thin that your lungs are always on the verge of filling with foam and your mind with hallucinations. I didn’t write to children my own age, only adults, because they answered my letters.
In my childhood and youth, I lived in Bolivia, the Middle East, and Europe, following the diplomatic destiny of the “dark, mustached man” the gypsies foretold so many times. I learned a little French and English, and also learned to eat suspicious-looking food without asking questions. My education was chaotic, to say the least, but I compensated for enormous gaps in information by reading everything that fell into my hands with the voraciousness of a piranha. I traveled by ship, plane, train, and automobile, always writing letters in which I compared what I saw with my one eternal reference: Chile. I never left behind the flashlight my Tío Pablo gave me, which helped me read in the most adverse conditions, or the notebook that contained the story of my life.
After two years in La Paz, we set off with bag and baggage for Lebanon. The three years in Beirut were a time of isolation for me, confined as I was to my home and my school. How I missed Chile! At an age when girls were dancing to rock ’n’ roll, I was reading and writing letters. Elvis Presley was already fat by the time I learned of his existence. I wore depressing gray dresses to annoy my mother who was always elegant and attractively dressed, while at the same time I daydreamed of princes fallen from the stars who would rescue me from a banal life. During recess in school, I would barricade myself behind a book in the farthest corner of the schoolyard, to disguise my shyness.
The adventure in Lebanon ended abruptly in 1958, when the U.S. Marines of the Sixth Fleet disembarked to intervene in the violent political squabbles that soon would tear that country apart. Their civil war had begun months earlier amid sounds of gunfire and shouting; there was confusion in the streets and fear in the air. The city was divided into religious sectors that clashed over grudges accumulated through centuries while the army tried to keep order. One by one the schools closed their doors . . . all except mine because our phlegmatic director decided that since Great Britain wasn’t involved, the war was none of her concern. Unfortunately, this interesting situation was short-lived: Tío Ramón, frightened by the direction the conflict was taking, sent my mother to Spain with the dog, and us children back to Chile. Later he and my mother were dispatched to Turkey, but we stayed in Santiago, my brothers in a boarding school and I with my grandfather.
I was fifteen when I returned to Santiago, disoriented from having lived several years outside the country and from having lost my ties with my old friends and my cousins. I talked with a strange accent to boot, which is a problem in Chile, where people are “situated” within social classes by the way they speak. Santiago at the time seemed very provincial to me compared, for example, with the splendor of Beirut, which boasted of being the Paris of the Middle East. That didn’t mean that the rhythm of life was calm, not in the least, for Santiaguinos were already suffering from frayed nerves. Life was uncomfortable and difficult, the bureaucracy crushing, the working hours very long, but I arrived there determined to adopt that city in my heart. I was tired of telling people and places good-bye, I wanted to put down roots and never leave. I think I fell in love with my country because of the stories my grandfather told me and because of our travels together through the south. He taught me history and geography, showed me maps, made me read Chilean writers, corrected my grammar and handwriting. As a teacher, he was short on patience but long on severity; my errors made him red with anger, but if he was content with my work he would reward me with a wedge of Camembert cheese, which he ripened in his armoire; whenever he opened that door, the odor of stinking army boots flooded the neighborhood.
My grandfather and I got along well because we both liked sitting without talking. We could spend hours that way, side by side, reading or watching the rain drum against the windowpanes, without feeling any need for small talk. I believe we had a mutual liking and respect for one another. I write that word, respect, with some hesitation because my grandfather was authoritarian and machista; he was used to treating women like delicate flowers, but the idea of any intellectual respect for them never crossed his mind. I was a prickly, rebellious fifteen-year-old girl who argued with him as equal to equal. That piqued his curiosity. He would smile with amusement when I claimed the right to the same freedom and education as my brothers, but at least he listened. It’s worth mentioning here that the first time my grandfather heard the word machista it came from my lips. He didn’t know what it meant, and when I explained, he nearly died laughing; the idea that male authority, as natural as the air he breathed, had a name seemed naïve and laughable. When I began to question that authority, he didn’t find it funny anymore, but I think he understood and perhaps admired my desire to be like him, strong and independent and not the victim of circumstances, as my mother had been.
I nearly succeeded in being like my grandfather, but nature betrayed me when one day two little cherries popped out on my ribs and my plan went all to hell. That hormone explosion was a disaster for me. In a matter of weeks, I was transformed into a complex-ridden girl whose head was swimming with romantic dreams, her sole preoccupati
on being how to attract the opposite sex—not an easy task since I hadn’t an ounce of charm and was always in a rage. I couldn’t veil my scorn for most boys because it was obvious to me that I was cleverer than they were. (It took me a couple of years to learn how to play dumb so that men would feel superior. You can’t imagine the effort that takes!) I went through those years torn between the feminist ideas fermenting in my head—though incapable of articulating them in an intelligible way since no one in my world had ever heard such ideas expressed—and the longing to be like the rest of the girls my age, to be accepted, desired, conquered, protected.
It fell to my poor grandfather to cross swords with the most miserable adolescent in the history of humankind. Nothing the poor man said could console me. Not that he said much. Sometimes he muttered that I wasn’t bad for a woman, but that didn’t change the fact that he would have preferred me to be a man, in which case he would have taught me to use his tools. At least he managed to get rid of my gray, severely tailored dress through the simple expedient of burning it in the patio. That little caper sent me into a tantrum, but deep down I was grateful, even though I was sure that with or without that gray rag no man would ever look at me. A few days later, however, a miracle happened: Miguel Frías, my first boyfriend, asked me to be his girlfriend. I was so desperate that I latched onto him like a crab and never let go. Five years later we were married; we had two children and stayed together twenty-five years. But I don’t want to get ahead of my story . . .