It is very difficult to determine what a typical Chilean family is like, but I can say, without any fear of contradiction, that mine was not average. Nor was I a typical señorita with regard to the mores of the milieu in which I grew up; I made a clean getaway, as they say. I will describe some parts of my youth, to see whether in the process I shed some light on aspects of my country’s society, which in those days was much less tolerant than it is today—which says a lot about how it was then. The Second World War was a cataclysm that shook the world, and changed everything from geopolitics and science to customs, culture, and art. Without much discussion, new ideas swept away those the society had held for centuries, but innovations were slow to cross two oceans or to break through the impenetrable wall of the Andes. It took several years for new modes to reach Chile.
My clairvoyant grandmother died suddenly of leukemia. She didn’t fight for life, she gave herself to death enthusiastically because she was very curious to see heaven. During her lifetime in this world she had the good fortune to be loved and protected by her husband, who bore her extravagant behavior with good humor; if he hadn’t she would have ended up in a madhouse. I’ve read several letters she left in her own hand, in which she seems to be a melancholy woman with a morbid fascination with death. I remember her, however, as luminous and ironic, and full of gusto for life. Her leaving was like a catastrophic wind; the entire house went into mourning and I learned what it was to be afraid. I feared the devil that appeared in the mirrors, the ghosts that hovered in the corners, the mice in the cellar, I was terrified that my mother would die and I would have to go to an orphanage, that my father—that man whose name could not be spoken—would come back and take me away, I was afraid of committing sins and going to hell, afraid of the gypsies, of the bogeyman whose name the nursemaid invoked to threaten me . . . in short, I had an endless list, more than enough reasons to live in terror.
My grandfather, furious at being abandoned by the great love of his life, dressed in black from head to toe, painted the furniture the same color and forbade parties, music, flowers, and desserts. He spent the day at his office, lunched in town, dined at the Union Club, and on weekends played golf and jai alai, or went to the mountains to ski. He was one of the first to initiate that sport in days when getting to the runs was an odyssey equal to scaling Everest. He never imagined that one day Chile would be a Mecca of winter sports, where Olympic teams from all over the world are sent to train. We saw him only a minute in the early morning, but he was nonetheless a determining factor in my formation. Before we went to school, my brothers and I would go by to say good morning. He received us in his room filled with dark furniture and smelling of an English soap with the trademark Lifebuoy. He never patted or hugged us—he thought it unhealthy—but we would go to any lengths for a word of approval from him. Later, when I was about seven and had begun to read the newspaper and ask questions, he noticed my presence, and then began a relationship that would continue long after his death, because till this day signs of his hand are perceptible in my character, and I am constantly nourished by the anecdotes he told me.
My childhood wasn’t a happy one, but it was interesting. I was never bored, thanks to the books that belonged to my Tío Pablo, who at that point was still a bachelor living at home. He was an unreconstructed reader; his bookshelves covered the walls from floor to ceiling, and volumes piled up on the floor to be covered with dust and cobwebs. He stole books from his friends without a trace of guilt because he thought printed material—except what belonged to him—was the patrimony of all humankind. He let me read his treasures because he meant to pass his vice as a reader on to me, no matter what the cost. He gave me a doll when I finished reading War and Peace, a fat book with tiny print. There was no censorship in that house, but my grandfather did not allow lights to be on in my room after nine o’clock at night, and to circumvent that my Tío Pablo gave me a flashlight. My best memories of those years are of books I read beneath the covers, using my flashlight. We Chilean children read the novels of Emilio Salgari and Jules Verne, the Treasury of Youth and collections of didactic little novels that promoted obedience and purity as maximum virtues. We also read the magazine El Peneca, a reader that was published every Wednesday. As early as Tuesday I was stationed at the door to keep the magazine from falling into my brothers’ hands first. I devoured that as an aperitif, then gobbled up more succulent dishes, such as Anna Karenina and Les Misérables. For dessert I savored fairy tales. Those magnificent books allowed me to escape the rather shabby reality of that house in mourning in which we children, like the cats, were considered a nuisance.
My mother was again an eligible young woman, thanks to having been able to have her marriage annulled, and though living under her father’s wing, she had a few admirers—maybe one or two dozen by my calculations. Besides being beautiful, she had that ethereal and vulnerable look some girls had then, a look that’s been completely lost in these days when ladies lift weights. Her fragility was very seductive because even the wimpiest man felt strong by her side. She was one of those women who make men want to protect her, exactly the opposite of me; I am more like a tank at full throttle. Instead of wearing black and weeping about being abandoned by her frivolous husband, as was expected of her, my mother tried to enjoy herself as much as she could under the circumstances, which was very little because in those days women couldn’t go to a tearoom alone, to say nothing of the movies. Films that were in the least interesting were classified as “not recommended for señoritas,” which meant that they could be seen only in the company of a man of the family, who took responsibility for the moral harm the spectacle could inflict upon a sensitive female psyche. A few snapshots have survived from those years; in them my mother looks like a younger sister of the actress Ava Gardner. She was born with beauty: luminous skin, easy laugh, classic features, and a great natural elegance, more than enough reason for sharp tongues to comment on her every move. If her platonic suitors stirred the sanctimonious society of Santiago, imagine the scandal that erupted when it learned of her love affair with a married man, the father of four children and nephew of a bishop.
Among her many suitors, my mother chose the ugliest. Ramón Huidobro resembled a green frog, but with the kiss of love he was transformed into a prince, just like the fairy tale, and now I can swear that he’s handsome. Clandestine relationships had existed always, we Chileans are expert in that, but their romance had nothing clandestine about it, and soon was an open secret. Given the impossibility of either dissuading his daughter or preventing the scandal, my grandfather decided to defuse the gossip by bringing the lover to live beneath his roof, defying the church and all of society. The bishop called in person to set things straight, but my grandfather took his arm and in friendly fashion led him to the door, stating that he took care of his own sins and those of his daughter as well. With time, that lover would become my stepfather, the incomparable Tío Ramón, friend, confidant, my only and true father, but when he came to live in our house I thought he was my enemy, and I tried to make his life impossible. Fifty years later, he assures me that wasn’t true, that I never declared war, but he says that out of a noble heart to salve my conscience, because I remember all too well my plans for his slow, painful death.
Chile is possibly the one country in the galaxy where there is no divorce, and that’s because no one dares defy the priests, even though 71 percent of the population has been demanding it for a long time. No legislator, not even those who have been separated from their wives and partnered a series of other women in quick succession, is willing to stand up to the priests, and the result is that divorce law sleeps year after year in the “pending” file, and when finally it is approved it will be with so much red tape and so many conditions that it will be easier to murder your spouse than to divorce him or her. My best friend, tired of waiting for her marriage to be annulled, read the newspapers every day with the hope that she would see her husband’s name. She never dared pray that the man would be dealt the death he deserved, but if she had asked Padre Hurtado sweetly, I have no doubt he would have complied. For more than a hundred years legal loopholes have allowed thousands of couples to annul their marriages. And that is what my parents did. All it took was my grandfather’s determination and connections to have my father disappear by magic and my mother declared an unmarried woman with three illegitimate children, which our law calls “putative” offspring. My father signed the papers without a word, once he’d been assured that he wouldn’t have to support his children. The process consists of having a series of witnesses present false testimony before a judge who pretends to believe what he’s told. To obtain an annulment you must at least have a lawyer: not exactly cheap since he charges by the hour; his time is golden and he’s in no hurry to shorten the negotiations. The necessary requirement, if the lawyer is to “iron out” the annulment, is that the couple must be in agreement because if one of the two refuses to participate in the farce, as my stepfather’s first wife did, there’s no deal. The result is that men and women pair and separate without papers of any kind, which is what nearly all the people I know have done. As I am writing these reflections, in the third millennium, the divorce law is still pending, even though the president of the republic annulled his first marriage and married a second time. At the rate we’re going, my mother and Tío Ramón, who are already in their eighties and have lived together more than half a century, will die without being able to legalize their situation. It no longer matters to either of them, and even if they could marry they wouldn’t; they prefer to be remembered as legendary lovers.
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.