My Invented Country (10 page)

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 negotia
tions. 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.

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 ques
tionable 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.