My Invented Country (3 page)

To see my country with the heart, one must read Pablo Neruda, the national poet who in his verses immortalized the imposing landscapes, the aromas and dawns, the tenacious rain and dignified poverty, the stoicism and the hospitality, of Chile. That is the land of my nostalgia, the one I invoke in my solitude, the one that appears as a backdrop in so many of my stories, the one that comes to me in my dreams. There are other faces of Chile, of course: the materialistic and arrogant face, the face of the tiger that spends its life counting its stripes and cleaning its whiskers; another, depressed, crisscrossed by the brutal scars of the past; one that shows a smiling face to tourists and bankers; and the one that with resignation awaits the next geological or political cataclysm. Chile has a little of everything.

M
y family is from Santiago, but that doesn't explain my traumas, there are worse places under the sun. I grew up there, but now I scarcely recognize it, and get lost in its streets. The capital was founded following the classic pattern
for Spanish cities of the time: a
plaza de armas
in the center, from which parallel and perpendicular streets radiated. Of that there is nothing but a bare memory. Santiago has spread out like a demented octopus, extending its eager tentacles in every direction; today five and a half million people live there, surviving however they can. It would be a pretty city, because it's well cared for, clean, and filled with gardens, if it didn't sit under a dark sombrero of pollution that in wintertime kills infants in their cradles, old people in nursing homes, and birds in the air. 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. Not all days are like that, sometimes the day dawns with a clear sky and you can appreciate the magnificent spectacle of snow-capped mountains.

There are cities, like Caracas or Mexico City, where poor and rich mix, but in Santiago the lines of demarcation are clear. The distance between the mansions of the wealthy on the foothills of the cordillera, with guards at the gate and four-car garages, and the shacks of the proletarian population where fifteen people live crowded together in two rooms without a bath, is astronomical. Every time I go to
Santiago I notice that part of the city is in black-and-white and the other in Technicolor. In the city center and in the worker's districts everything seems gray; the few trees that survive are exhausted, the walls faded, the clothing of the inhabitants very worn, even the dogs that wander among the garbage cans are mutts of indefinite color. In middle-class neighborhoods there are leafy trees, and the houses are modest but well cared for. In the areas where the wealthy live only the vegetation can be appreciated: the mansions are hidden behind impenetrable walls, no one walks down the streets, and the dogs are mastiffs let out only at night to guard the property.

Summer in the capital is long and hot. A fine, yellowish dust blankets the city during those months; the sun melts the asphalt and affects the mood of the inhabitants, so anyone who can tries to get away. When I was a girl, my family went for two months to the beach, a true safari in my grandfather's automobile, loaded with a ton of bundles on the luggage rack and three totally carsick children inside. At that time the roads were terrible and we had to snake up and down hills, which strained the vehicle to the breaking point. We always had to change tires once or twice, a task that entailed unloading all the bundles. My grandfather carried a huge pistol in his lap, like the ones used when people still fought duels, because he thought that bandits lurked on the Curacaví Hill, appropriately called the Graveyard. If there were highwaymen, they were probably just drifters who would have cut and run at the sound of the first shot, but just in case, we prayed as we drove past the hill—
undoubtedly an infallible protection against assault, since we never saw the famous
bandidos.
Nothing of that nature exists today. Now you can drive to seaside resorts in less than two hours, with excellent highways all the way. Until recently the only bad roads were those that led to the areas where the wealthy summer, part of their fight to preserve their exclusive beaches. They are horrified when they see the hoi polloi arriving in buses on the weekends with their dark-skinned children, their watermelon and roast chicken, and their radios and boom boxes blaring popular music—which is why they kept the dirt roads in the worst possible state. That has changed. As a rightist senator pontificated, “When democracy gets democratic, it doesn't work at all.” The country is connected by one long artery, the Pan American and Austral Highways, and by an extensive network of paved and very safe roads. No guerrillas on the lookout for someone to kidnap, or gangs of drug traffickers defending their territory, or corrupt police looking for bribes, as in other Latin American countries rather more interesting than ours. You are much more likely to be mugged in the heart of the city than on a little-traveled road in the country.

Almost as soon as you leave Santiago, the countryside becomes bucolic: poplar-lined pastures, hills, and vineyards. To the visitor I recommend stopping to buy fruit and vegetables in the stands along the highway, or to take a little
detour and drive into the villages and look for the house where you see a white cloth fluttering; there they serve leavened bread, honey, and eggs the color of gold.

Along the coastal route there are beaches, picturesque little villages, and coves where fishermen anchor their boats and spread their nets. There you find the fabulous treasures of our cuisine: first of all, the conger, king of the sea, wearing its jacket of jeweled scales; then the corbina, with its succulent white meat, accompanied by a court of a hundred other more modest but equally savory fish. Then comes the chorus of our shellfish: spider crabs, oysters small and large, mussels, abalone, langoustine, sea urchins, and many others, including some with such a questionable appearance that no foreigner dares try them, like the
pícoroco,
iodine and salt, pure marine essence. Our fish are so delicious that to prepare them you don't even need to know how to cook. You arrange a bed of minced onion in the bottom of a clay platter or Pyrex baking dish, lay the fresh fish, dotted with butter and sprinkled with salt and pepper and swimming in lemon juice, over the onion. Bake the fish in a hot oven until done—but not too long, you don't want it to get dry. Serve with one of our chilled white wines in the company of your closest friends.

Every year in December we would go with my grandfather to buy the Christmas turkey, which the campesinos raised for that holiday. I can see that old man, hobbling along on his bad leg, chasing around a field trying to catch the bird in question. He had to time his leap perfectly to fall on it, press it to the ground, and hold it while one of us struggled to bind its feet with a cord. Then he had to give
the campesino a tip to kill the turkey out of sight of us children, otherwise we would have refused to taste it once it was cooked. It's very difficult to cut the throat of some creature with which you've established a personal relationship, as we could attest from the time my grandfather brought home a young goat to fatten in the patio of our house and roast on his birthday. That goat died of old age. And as it turned out, it wasn't a nanny but a male, and as soon as it grew horns, it attacked us at will.

The Santiago of my childhood had the pretensions of a large city but the soul of a village. Everything was public knowledge. Did someone miss mass on Sunday? That news traveled fast, and by Wednesday the parish priest was knocking at the door of the sinner to find out the reason. Men were stiff with hair pomade, starch, and vanity; women wore hat pins and kid gloves; elegant dress was expected when going into “the city” or to a movie—which people still thought of as a “talkie.” Few houses had a refrigerator—in that my grandfather's house was very modern—and every day a hunchbacked man came by to deliver blocks of ice in sawdust for the neighborhood iceboxes. Our refrigerator, which ran for forty years without a repair, was fitted with a motor as noisy as a submarine, and from time to time shook the house with fits of coughing. The cook had to use a broom to fork out the bodies of electrocuted cats that had crawled beneath it to get warm. In the long run, that was a good method of birth control because dozens of cats were
born on the roof tiles, and if some hadn't been zapped by the refrigerator we would have been inundated.

In our house, as in every Chilean home, there were animals. Dogs are acquired in different ways: inherited, received as a gift, picked up after they've been run over but not killed, or because they followed a child home from school, after which there's not a chance of throwing them out. This has always been the case and I hope it never changes. I don't know a single normal Chilean who ever bought a dog; the only people who do that are the fanatics from the Kennel Club, but no one takes them seriously. Almost all the dogs in Chile are called Blackie, whatever their color, and cats bear the generic names of Puss or Kitty; our family pets, however, always had Biblical names: Barrabas, Salome, Cain, except for one dog of dubious lineage whom we called Chickenpox because he appeared during an epidemic of that disease. Gangs of ownerless dogs roam the cities and towns of my country, not in the form of the hungry, miserable packs you see in other parts of the world but, rather, as organized communities. They are mild-mannered animals, satisfied with their social lot, a little lackadaisical. Once I read a study in which the author maintained that if all existing breeds of dogs were liberally intermingled, within a few generations they would narrow down to one type: a strong, astute beast of medium size, with short, wiry hair, a pointed muzzle, and willful tail: that is, the typical Chilean stray. I suppose we will come to that, and I hope also that with time we will succeed in fusing all human races; the result will be a rather short individual of
indefinite color, adaptable, resilient, and resigned to the ups and downs of existence, like us Chileans.

In those days we went twice a day to the corner bakery to buy bread, and brought it home wrapped in a white cloth. The aroma of that bread just out of the oven, still warm, is one of the most tenacious memories of my childhood. Milk was a foamy cream sold from a tin can. A little bell that hung from the neck of the horse, and the smell of the stable invading the street, announced the arrival of the milk cart. Maids lined up with their bowls and basins and bought what was needed by the cup, which the milkman measured out by thrusting his hairy arm up to the armpit into large tin cans that were always swarming with flies. Sometimes several liters extra were bought to make
manjar blanco,
also called
dulce de leche,
a kind of blancmange that lasted several months when stored in the cool shadows of the cellar, where the home-bottled wine was also kept. First a fire of kindling and charcoal was built in the patio. A tripod was set over it that supported an iron kettle black from use. The ingredients were added in proportions of four cups of milk to one of sugar, and that mixture was flavored with two vanilla beans and the peel of a lemon and then boiled patiently for hours, occasionally stirred with a long wooden spoon. We children would watch from a distance, waiting for the process to end and the sweet to cool so we could lick the kettle. We were not allowed to come anywhere near it during the cooking; every time we would be told the sad story of the greedy little boy who fell into the pot and, as the tale went, “was dissolved in the boiling
milk till not even his bones could be found.” When pasteurized milk in bottles was invented, housewives dressed in their best clothes to be photographed—Hollywood-style—beside the white truck that replaced the unsanitary cart. Today not only are there whole, skim, and flavored milks, you can also buy bottled
manjar blanco,
no one makes it at home anymore.

In the summertime, little kids used to come by the house with baskets of blackberries and bags of quince for making preserves. The muscleman Gervasio Lonquimay also came by to check the metal springs of the cots and wash the wool mattresses, a task that could last three or four days because the wool had to dry in the sun and then be combed by hand before being stuffed back into the ticking. It was rumored that Gervasio Lonquimay had been in jail for slitting a rival's throat, gossip that lent him an aura of unquestionable prestige. The maids always offered him a cool drink for his thirst and towels for his sweat.

An organ grinder, always the same one, was a fixture in the streets of our barrio until one of my uncles bought his hurdy-gurdy and pathetic parrot, and went around cranking out music as the bird distributed little papers that brought good luck, to the horror of my grandfather and the rest of the family. I understand that my uncle's intention was to seduce a cousin with this display, but that the plan did not achieve the desired result: the girl married in a whirlwind and ran as far away as possible. Finally my uncle gave away the instrument but kept the parrot. It was very ill-humored, and at the first sign of inattention would nip a piece from the finger of anyone who came too close, but
my uncle liked it because it swore like a corsair. It lived with him for thirty years, and who knows how many it had lived before: a Methuselah with feathers. Gypsy women, too, passed through the barrio, bamboozling the unwary with their mangled Spanish and those irresistible eyes that had seen so much of the world; they came always in twos or threes, with a half dozen runny-nosed brats clinging to their skirts. We were terrified of them because people said they stole little children, locked them in cages so they would grow up deformed, and then sold them to the circuses as freaks. They cast the evil eye on anyone who didn't give them money. They were thought to have magical powers: they could make jewels disappear without touching them, and unleash plagues of lice, warts, baldness, and rotted teeth. Even so, we couldn't resist the temptation to have them read the future in our palms. They always told me the same thing: a dark, mustached man would take me far away. Since I don't remember a single lover who fit that description, I have to assume they were referring to my stepfather, who had a mustache like a walrus and took me to many countries in his journeys as a diplomat.