I was born in the years of the smoke and carnage of the Second World War, and the greatest part of my youth was spent waiting for the planet to blow apart when someone distractedly pressed a button deploying atomic bombs. No one expected to live very long; we rushed around swallowing up every moment before being overtaken by the apocalypse, so we didn’t have time to examine our navels and take notes, as people do today. In addition, I grew up in Santiago, Chile, where any tendency toward self-contemplation is quickly nipped in the bud. The saying that defines the lifestyle of that city is: “Shrimp that dozes is shrimp on the platter.”
In other, more sophisticated, cultures, such as those of Buenos Aires or New York, a visit to the psychologist was thought to be a normal activity: to deprive oneself of that attention was considered evidence of a lack of culture or of mental deficiency. In Chile, however, only dangerously disturbed patients visited a psychologist, and then always in a straitjacket, but that changed in the Seventies, along with the arrival of the sexual revolution. (One wonders if there’s a connection . . .) In my family nobody ever resorted to therapy, even though many of us were classic case studies, because the idea of confiding intimate matters to a stranger — and a stranger we were paying to listen — was absurd. That’s what priests and aunts were for. I have very little training for reflection, but in recent weeks I have caught myself thinking about my past with a frequency that can only be explained as a sign of premature senility.
Two recent events have triggered this avalanche of memories. The first was a casual observation by my grandson Alejandro, who surprised me at the mirror scrutinising the map of my wrinkles and said, with compassionate commiseration: “Don’t worry, Grandmother, you’re going to live at least three more years.” I decided then and there that the time had come to take another look at my life, in order to know how I wanted to live those three years that had been so generously granted.
The second event was a question asked by a stranger during a conference of travel writers where I had been invited to give the opening address. I must make clear that I do not belong to that weird group of people who travel to remote places, survive the bacteria, and then publish books to convince the incautious to follow in their footsteps. Travelling demands a disproprtionate effort, especially if it is to places where there is no room service. My ideal holiday consists of sitting in a chair beneath an umbrella on my patio, reading books of adventures I would never consider attempting unless I was escaping from something. I come from the so-called Third World, and I had to trap a husband before I could live legally in the First. I have no intention of going back to underdevelopment without good cause. Nevertheless, for reasons beyond my control, I have wandered across five continents, and have, in addition, been an exile and an immigrant. So I know something about travel, which is why I had been asked to speak at that conference. At the end of my talk, a hand was raised in the audience and a young man asked what role nostalgia played in my novels. For a moment I was silent. Nostalgia . . . according to the dictionary, nostalgia is “a bittersweet longing for things, persons or situations of the past. The condition of being homesick.” The question took my breath away because until that instant I’d never realised that I write as a constant exercise in longing. I have been an outsider almost all my life, a circumstance I accept because I have no alternative. Several times I have found it neccessary to pull up stakes, sever all ties, and leave everything behind to begin life anew elsewhere; I have been a pilgrim along more roads than I care to remember. I have said goodbye so often that my roots have dried up, and I have had to grow others, which, lacking a geography to sink into, have taken hold in my memory. But be careful! Minotaurs lie in wait in the labyrinths of memory.
Until only a short time ago, if someone had asked me where I was from, I would have answered, without much thought, nowhere, or Latin America, or, maybe, that in my heart I’m Chilean. Today, however, I say I’m an American, not simply because that’s what my passport verifies, or because my husband, my son, my grandchildren, most of my friends, my books, and my home are in northern California, but also because a terrorist attack destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, and starting with that instant, many things have changed. We can’t be neutral in moments of crisis. This tragedy has brought me face to face with my sense of identity. I realise that I am one person in the multicoloured population of North America, just as before I was Chilean. I no longer feel that I am an alien in the United States.
When I watched the collapse of the towers, I had a sense of having lived an almost identical nightmare. By a blood-chilling coincidence — historic karma — the commandeered planes struck their US targets on a Tuesday, September 11, the same day of the week and month, and at almost the same time in the morning, as the 1973 military coup in Chile, a terrorist act orchestrated by the CIA against a democracy. The images of burning buildings, smoke, flames, and panic were similar in both settings. That distant Tuesday in 1973, my life was split in two; nothing was the same again: I lost a country. That fateful Tuesday in 2001 was also a decisive moment; nothing will ever be the same, and I gained a country.
At my age — I’m at least as old as synthetic penicillin — you begin to remember things that have been erased from your mind for half a century. I haven’t thought about my childhood or adolescence for decades. In truth, those periods of my remote past matter so little to me that when I look at my mother’s photograph albums I don’t recognise anyone except a bulldog with the improbable name of Pelvina López-Pun, and the only reason why she is etched in my mind is because we were very much alike. There is a snapshot of the two of us, when I was a few months old, in which my mother had to indicate with an arrow which of us was which. Surely my bad memory is due in part to the fact that those times were not particularly happy ones, but I suppose that’s the case with most mortals. A happy childhood is a myth, and in order to understand that we have only to take a look at children’s stories; for example, the one in which the wolf eats the beloved grandmother, then along comes a woodsman and slits the poor beast open with his knife, extracts the old woman, alive and uninjured, fills the wolf’s belly with stones then stitches him up, in the process creating such a thirst in the animal that he runs down to drink from the river, where he drowns from the weight of the stones. Why didn’t they do away with him in a simpler, more humane way, is what I want to know. Surely because nothing is simple or humane in childhood. In those days it was accepted that the best way to bring up little ones was with a strap in one hand and a cross in the other, just as it was taken for granted that a man had a right to give his wife a good shaking if his soup was cold when it reached the table. Before psychologists and authorities intervened, no one doubted the beneficial effects of a good switching. I wasn’t whipped like my brothers, but I lived in fear, like all the other children I knew.
In my case, the natural unhappiness of childhood was aggravated by a mass of complexes so tangled that even today I can’t list them. Fortunately, they left no wounds that time hasn’t healed. Once I heard a famous Afro-American writer say that from the time she was a little girl she felt like a stranger in her family and her home town. She added that almost all writers have experienced that feeling, even if they have never left their native city. It’s a condition inherent in that profession, she suggested; without the anxiety of feeling different, she wouldn’t have been driven to write. Writing, when all is said and done, is an attempt to understand one’s own circumstance and to clarify the confusion of existence, including insecurities that do not torment normal people. This theory lifted a burden from my shoulders. I am not a monster; there are others like me.
I never fit in anywhere: not into my family, my social class or the religion fate bestowed on me. I didn’t belong to the neighbourhood gangs that rode their bikes in the street, my cousins didn’t include me in my games, I was the least popular girl in my school, and for a long time I was the last to be invited to dance at parties. I cloaked myself in my pride, pretending it didn’t matter to me, but I would have sold my soul to the Devil to be part of a group had Satan presented me with such an attractive proposition. The source of my difficulties has always been the same: an inability to accept what to others seems natural, and an irresistible tendency to voice opinions no one wants to hear, a trait that frightened away more than one potential suitor (I don’t want to give false impressions — there weren’t very many).
Later, during my years as a journalist, curiosity and boldness had their advantages. For the first time I was part of a community. I had absolute liberty to ask indiscreet questions and divulge my ideas, but that ended abruptly with the military coup of 1973, which unleashed uncontrollable forces. Overnight I became a foreigner in my own land, until finally I had to leave because I couldn’t live and bring up my children in a country where terror reigned. During that period, curiosity and boldness were outlawed by decree. Outside Chile I waited years to return once democracy was restored, but when that happened I didn’t, because by then I was married to a North American and living near San Francisco. I haven’t gone back to take up residence in Chile, where in truth I have spent less than half of my life.
Extract from My Invented Country, A Memoir, by Isabel Allende (HarperCollins, £18.99). © Isabel Allende
A life of stories
Isabel Allende was born in 1942 and lived in Chile until a CIA-backed coup deposed her cousin, President Salvador Allende. She then moved to Venezuela, where she lived and wrote for a decade, initially as a journalist. But she claims that she “could never be objective” enough for that career and recalls the poet Pablo Neruda telling her “you are the worst journalist in this country. You lie all the time. Why don’t you switch to literature?” Allende’s first literary success came in 1982 with The House of the Spirits, which she began as a letter to her dying grandfather. Other best-selling and much-translated novels include Portrait in Sepia, Daughter of Fortune, Eva Luna, Of Love and Shadows and City of the Beasts.
In December, 1991, her 26-year-old daughter fell into a coma and subsequently died. Sitting by her bedside in a Madrid hospital for a year, Allende again turned to storytelling to make sense of her circumstances, producing one of her most moving works, the memoir Paula.
Melissa Katsoulis
