Top Quotes: “My Invented Country” — Isabel Allende
Origins
“In 1888 Chile annexed the Isla de Pascua, mysterious Easter Island, the navel of the world, or Rapanui, as it is called in the natives’ language. The island is lost in the immensity of the Pacific Ocean, 2,500 miles from continental Chile, more or less six hours by jet from Valparaíso or Tahiti. I am not sure why it belongs to us. In olden times, a ship captain planted a flag, and a slice of the planet became legally yours, regardless of whether that pleased its inhabitants, in this case peaceful Polynesians. This was the practice of European nations, and Chile could not lag behind. For the islanders, contact with South America was fatal. In the mid-nineteenth century, most of the male population was taken off to Peru to work as slaves in the guano deposits, while Chile shrugged its shoulders at the fate of its forgotten citizens. The treatment those poor men received was so bad that it caused an international protest in Europe, and, after a long diplomatic struggle, the last fifteen survivors were returned to their families. Those few went back infected with smallpox, and within a brief time the illness exterminated eighty percent of the natives on the island. The fate of the remainder was not much better. Imported sheep ate the vegetation, turning the landscape into a barren husk of lava, and the negligence of the authorities — in this case the Chilean navy — drove the inhabitants into poverty. Only in the last two decades, tourism and the interest of the world scientific community have rescued Rapanui.”
“Santiaguinos have become accustomed to following the daily smog index just as faithfully as they keep track of the stock market or the soccer results. On days when the index climbs too high, the volume of vehicles allowed to circulate is restricted according to the number on the license plate, children don’t play sports at school, and the rest of the population tries to breathe as little as possible. The first rain of the year washes the grime from the atmosphere and falls like acid over the city. If you walk outside without an umbrella you will feel as if lemon juice has been squirted in your eyes, but don’t worry, no one has been blinded yet.”
“African blood was never incorporated into Chilean stock, which would have given us rhythm and beauty; neither was there, as there was in Argentina, significant Italian immigration, which would have made us extroverted, vain, and happy; there weren’t even enough Asians, as there were in Peru, to compensate for our solemnity and spice up our cuisine. But I am sure that if enthusiastic adventurers had converged from the four corners of the earth to people our land, proud Spanish-Basque families would have managed to intermingle with them as little as possible, unless they were northern Europeans. It has to be said: our immigration policy has been openly racist. For a long time we didn’t accept Asians, blacks, anyone with a deep tan. It occurred to one president in the eighteen hundreds to bring Germans from the Black Forest and grant them land in the south, which of course wasn’t his to give, since it belonged to the Mapuches, but no one noted that detail except the legitimate owners. The idea was that Teutonic blood would set a fine example for our mestizos, instilling in them a work ethic, discipline, punctuality, and organization. The brown skin and coarse hair of the Indians were looked down on; a few German genes wouldn’t hurt us a bit, was the thinking of the authorities of the time. It was hoped that these admirable immigrants would marry Chilean women and from that mixture white blood would win out over that of the humble Indians — which is what happened in Valdivia and Osorno, provinces that today can boast of tall men, full-breasted women, blue-eyed children, and authentic apple strudel. Color prejudice is so strong that if a woman has yellow hair, even if she has the face of an iguana, men turn to look at her in the street. My own hair was colored from the time I was a tiny child, using a sweet-smelling liquid called Bay Rum; there is no other explanation for the miracle that the lank, black strands I was born with were transformed before I was six months old into, angelic golden curls. Such extremes weren’t necessary with my brothers, because one had curly hair and the other was blond. In any case, the people who emigrated from the Black Forest have been very influential in Chile, and according to the opinion of many, they rescued the south from barbarism and made the splendid paradise it is today.
After the Second World War, a different wave of Germans came to seek refuge in Chile, where there was so much sympathy for them that our government didn’t affiliate with the Allies until the last moment, when it was impossible to remain neutral. During the war the Chilean Nazi Party paraded with brown uniforms, flags bearing swastikas, and arms raised in a Nazi salute. My grandmother ran alongside, throwing tomatoes at them. This woman was an exception because in Chile people were so anti-Semitic that the word Jew was a dirty word, and I have friends who had their mouths washed out with soap for having dared say it. When you referred to that people, you said Israelite or Hebrew, nearly always in a whisper. There still exists today a mysterious colony out in the countryside called Dignidad, a Nazi camp that is completely out of bounds, as if it were an independent nation;no government has been able to dismantle it. because it is believed that it has the covert protection of the armed forces. During the days of the dictatorship (1973–1989), Dignidad was a torture center used by the intelligence services. Today its chief is a fugitive from justice, accused of raping minors among other crimes. The people in the area welcome these supposed Nazis, however, because they staff an excellent hospital, which they place at the service of the local population. At the entrance to the colony there is a stupendous German restaurant where they have the best pastries for miles around, served by strange blond men with facial tics, who speak in monosyllables and have lizard eyes. This I haven’t witnessed, but have been told.
During the nineteenth century, the English arrived in large numbers and took control of maritime and rail transport, along with the import and export industry. Some third- or fourth-generation descendants, who had never set foot on English soil but nevertheless called it home, took pride in speaking Spanish with an accent and in keeping up with the news by reading out-of-date papers from the “homeland.” My grandfather, who had many business dealings with companies raised sheep in Patagonia for the British textile industry, always said that he never signed a contract, that a man’s word and a handshake were more than enough. The English — gringos, as we generically call anyone who has blond hair or whose mother tongue is English — established schools and clubs and taught us various extremely boring games, including bridge.
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.”
“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.”
Feminism
“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.”
“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 land.”
“Willie was also horrified by the institution of the maid. I prefer not to tell him that in the past the duties of these women were even more intimate, although that was never discussed openly: mothers looked the other way and the fathers boasted of their sons’ backstairs feats. He’s a tiger, they would say, remembering their own experiences, a “chip off the old block.” The general idea was for the boy to satisfy his sexual needs with the maid, so he wouldn’t “go too far” with a girl of his own social class; and after all, a maid was safer than a prostitute. In rural areas there was a local version of the Spanish derecho a pernada, which in feudal times allowed the lord to bed any bride on the night of her wedding. In Chile, the tradition was never that organized: the patron just went to bed with anyone and at any time he pleased. So the landowners sowed their lands with bastards, and even today there are regions where nearly everyone has the same last name. (One of my ancestors knelt to pray after every rape: “Lord, I don’t do this for fun and games, only for more sons to serve in Your name…”) Today the nanas have become so emancipated that the lords of their domains prefer to hire illegal immigrants from Peru, whom they can mistreat as badly as they used to their Chilean servant girls.”
“There was the example, for instance, during the administration of Salvador Allende, when rightist women went out beating pots and pans to protest shortages and to dump chicken feathers in front of the Military School, inciting the soldiers to subversion. They helped foment the military coup. Years later, women were the first to go out and publicly denounce military repression, confronting water hoses, nightsticks, and bullets. They formed a powerful group called “Women for Life,” which played a fundamental role in overturning the dictatorship of Pinochet, but after the election they decided to dissolve the movement. Once more they ceded their power to men.
I should clarify that Chilean women, who are so slow to fight for political power, are true guerrillas when it comes to love. In affairs of the heart, they are truly dangerous, and, it must be said, they fall in love with considerable frequency. According to the statistics, 58 percent of married women are unfaithful. I wonder if couples don’t often switch: while the man seduces his friend’s wife, his own spouse is in the same hotel in the arms of his friend. In colonial times, when Chile was part of the vice-regency of Lima, the Inquisition sent a Dominican priest from Peru to accuse a number of women of high social standing of engaging in oral sex with their husbands. (And how did they know that?) The trial never went anywhere because the women in question refused to be browbeaten. The night after the trial they sent their husbands — who somehow or other must have participated in the sin, though only the women were being judged — to dissuade the inquisitor. They overtook him in a dark, narrow street and without further ado they castrated him, like a steer. The poor Dominican returned to Lima sans testicles, and the matter was never mentioned again.”
“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.”
“As a foreigner, as I have been almost forever, 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.”
“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 around the world.”
Class
“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.”
“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 bridgés, 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.”
“My mother has a tape containing juicy anecdotes and family scandals, but she won’t let me listen to it because she’s afraid I’ll divulge the contents. She has promised me that at her death, when she is absolutely safe from the apocalyptic vengeance of her blood kin, I will inherit that recording. I grew up surrounded with secrets, mysteries, whispers, prohibitions, matters that must never be mentioned. I owe a debt of gratitude to the countless skeletons hidden in our armoire because they planted the seeds of literature in my life. In every story I write I try to exorcise one of them.
In my family no one spread gossip, and in that we were somewhat different from the ordinary homo chilensis because the national sport is to talk about the person who just left the room.
In this, too, we are different from our idols, the English, whose principles forbid them from making personal remarks. (I know a former soldier in the British army, married, the father of four children and grandfather of several, who decided to change gender. Overnight he appeared dressed as a woman and no one, absolutely no one, in the English village where he had lived for forty years made the least comment.) In Chile we even have a term for talking about our friends and neighbors — plucking — the etymology of which surely comes from plucking chickens, or denuding the out-of-earshot victim of his feathers. This habit is so prevalent that no one wants to be the first to leave, which is why farewells take an eternity at the door. In our family, in contrast, the norm of not speaking ill of others, a rule imposed by my grandfather, reached such an extreme that he never told my mother the reasons why he opposed her marriage to the man who would become my father. He refused to repeat the rumors that were
circulating about his conduct and his character because he didn’t have proof, and rather than defame my mother’s suitor, he preferred to risk the future of his daughter, who in blissful ignorance ended up marrying a man who didn’t deserve her. Over the years I have freed myself from this family trait. I have no scruples about repeating gossip, talking behind others’ backs, or spreading their secrets in my books, the reason why half my relatives don’t speak to me.”
Culture
“In Chile, the clerk on duty demands that the poor petitioner produce proof that he was born, that he isn’t a criminal, that he paid his taxes, that he registered to vote, and that he’s still alive, because even if he throws a tantrum to prove that he hasn’t died, he is obliged to present a “certificate of survival.” The problem has reached such proportions that the government itself has created an office to combat bureaucracy.”
“Sociologists say that forty percent of Chileans suffer from depression, especially women, who have to put up with the men.”
“We distrust doctors because it’s obvious that good health does not promote good business, and we go to them only when everything else has failed, after we’ve tried all the remedies recommended by our friends and acquaintances. Let’s say you faint at the door of a supermarket. In any other country they call an ambulance, but not Chile, where several volunteers will pick you up, haul you behind the checkout counter, pour cold water on your face and whiskey down your gullet to bring you to; then they will force you to swallow pills some lady takes from her purse because “my friend has these attacks and this is a fantastic remedy.” There will be a chorus of experts who will diagnose your condition in clinical terms because every citizen with an ounce of sense knows a lot about medicine. One of the experts, for example, will say that you have an obturation of a valve in your brain, but another may suspect a complex torsion of the lungs, and a third that you have ruptured your pancreas. Within a few minutes there will be a hue and cry all around you, and someone will arrive who’s run to the pharmacy to buy penicillin to inject you with — just in case. Come to think of it, if you’re a foreigner, my advice is not to faint in a Chilean supermarket; it can be a deadly experience.
To illustrate how free we are about prescribing, once during a southern cruise to our beautiful San Rafael lagoon in the cold fjords of the south, we were given sleeping pills with dessert. At dinner the captain notified the passengers that we were about to sail through particularly rough waters, and then his wife went from table to table handing out pills, the name of which no one dared ask. We took them obediently and twenty minutes later all the passengers were out like a light, suggesting the story of Sleeping Beauty. My husband said that in the United States the captain and his wife would have been arrested for anesthetizing the passengers. In Chile we were very grateful.”
The Dark Years
“The CIA orchestrated a plan to prevent Allende from assuming the presidency. First it tried to bribe members of Congress not to designate Allende and to call for a second vote in which there would be only two candidates: Allende and a Christian Democrat supported by the right. Since the bribes didn’t work, the CIA planned to kidnap the commander in chief of the armed forces, General René Schneider; although the plot would be carried out by a neo-Fascist group, it would appear to be the work of a leftist commando unit. The idea was that this action would provoke chaos and a military intervention. The general was shot to death in the skirmish, but the plan had the opposite of the desired effect: a wave of horror washed across the country and the Congress unanimously awarded Salvador Allende the presidential sash. From that moment on, the right and the CIA plotted together to oust the government of the Unidad Popular, even at the cost of destroying the economy and Chile’s long democratic tradition. Then the CIA activated an alternate plan: a so-called destabilization, which consisted of cutting off international credit and initiating a campaign of sabotage to incite economic ruin and social violence. Simultaneously, their siren song was directed at the military, which in the end held the strongest card in the game.”
“Despite the many problems the population faced during that time, from those multiple shortages to political violence, three years later in the parliamentary elections of March 1973, the Unidad Popular increased its margin of votes. Efforts to derail the government through sabotage and propaganda had not had the hoped-for results. That was when the opposition moved into the last phase of the conspiracy and incited a military coup.”
“On Tuesday, September 11, 1973, we saw them in action. Their savagery was so extreme that it’s believed they were drugged, just as the men who took the Arica promontory were intoxicated with chupilca del diablo, an explosive mix of liquor and gunpowder. In 1973, the army surrounded the Palacio de la Moneda, the seat of government and symbol of our democracy, with tanks, and then its planes bombed it from the air. Allende died inside the palace; the official version is that he committed suicide. There were hundreds of dead and so many thousands of prisoners that the sports stadiums and even some schools were turned into jails, torture centers, and concentration camps. Using the pretext of liberating the country from a hypothetical Communist dictatorship that might occur in the future, democracy was replaced by a regimen of terror that was to last sixteen years, and leave its consequences for a quarter of a century.”
“I came from a country in which violence had been institutionalized and yet I was shocked by how quickly Venezuelans lost control. (Once at a movie theater a woman pulled a pistol from her handbag because I accidentally sat in a seat she had reserved.) I didn’t know their customs; for example, they rarely say no because they think it’s rude: they would rather say “Come back tomorrow.” I would go to look for a job and they would interview me with a great show of friendliness, offer me coffee, and say good-bye with a firm handshake and that “Come back tomorrow.” So I would come back the next day, and the same routine would be repeated until finally I gave up.”
“Our home in Caracas was broken into 17 times; almost everything we had was stolen, from a can opener to 3 cars, 2 from the street and a third after thieves completely ripped off our garage door. At least none of them had bad intentions; one even left a note of thanks on the refrigerator.”
“According to the World Bank, Chile is one of the countries with the worst distribution of income, right alongside Kenya and Zimbabwe. The head of a Chilean corporation earns the same or more than his equivalent in the United States, while a Chilean laborer earns approximately fifteen times less than a North American worker.”
