My Invented Country (5 page)

I grew up in a patriarchal family in which my grandfather was like God: infallible, omniscient, and omnipotent. His house in the barrio of Providencia wasn't a shadow of the house my great-grandparents had on Calle Cueto, but for me, during my early years, it was my universe. Not long ago, a Japanese newspaperman went to Santiago, intending to photograph the supposed “large house on the corner” that appears in my first novel. It was pointless to try to explain to him that it was fictional. At the end of such a long journey, the poor man suffered a terrible disappointment. Santiago has been demolished and rebuilt several times. Nothing lasts in this city. The home my grandfather built is today an unprepossessing discothèque, a depressing mélange of black plastic and psychedelic lights. The residence on Calle Cueto was demolished many years ago and in its place stand modern towers for low-income housing, unrecognizable among so many dozens of similar buildings.

Please allow me a commentary about that demolition, as a sentimental whim. One day the machines of progress arrived with the mission of pulverizing the large home of my ancestors, and for weeks the implacable iron dinosaurs tore into structures with their great claws. When finally the Sahara-like dust storms subsided, the passersby saw, to their amazement, that a few palm trees had survived intact. Solitary, denuded, with their scruffy manes and air of ashy beggars, they awaited their end. Instead of the feared exe
cutioner, however, sweaty workmen carrying picks and shovels appeared and, working like an army of ants, dug trenches around each tree, loosening them from the earth. Those slender trees held handfuls of soil in their threadlike roots. Cranes bore the wounded giants to deep holes gardeners had prepared in a different spot, and planted them there. The trunks moaned quietly, the leaves drooped in yellow strands, and for a while it seemed that nothing could save them from their agony, but they were tenacious. A slow subterranean rebellion fought to preserve life, vegetal tentacles spread out, blending clumps of dirt from Calle Cueto with new soil. With the inevitable arrival of spring, the palms awoke, swaying from the waist, shaking their hair, rejuvenated despite their trauma. The image of those trees from the home of my ancestors often comes to mind when I think of my destiny as an expatriate. It is my fate to wander from place to place, and to adapt to new soils. I believe I will be able to do that because handfuls of Chilean soil are caught in my roots; I carry them with me always. In any case, the Japanese newspaperman who traveled to the end of the world to photograph a house from a novel returned home with empty hands.

My grandfather's house was like my uncle's, and like the house of any family of similar circumstances. Chileans are not noted for originality: inside, their houses are all more or less the same. I'm told that now the wealthy contract decorators
buy the hardware for their bathrooms abroad, but in those days no one had ever heard of interior decoration. In the living room, which was swept by inexplicable drafts, there were heavy, plush, oxblood-colored drapes, teardrop chandeliers, an out-of-tune grand piano, and a large grandfather clock, black as a coffin, which struck the hours with funereal sonority. There were also two horrific French porcelain figurines of damsels with powdered wigs and gentlemen in high heels. My uncles used them to tune their reflexes: they threw them headfirst at each other in the vain hope they would be dropped and would shatter into a thousand pieces. This dwelling was inhabited by eccentric humans, half-wild pets, and my grandmother's ghostly friends, who had followed her from the house on Calle Cueto and who, even after she died, continued to wander through the rooms.

My grandfather Agustín was as solid and strong as a warrior, even though he was born with one leg shorter than the other. It never occurred to him to consult a doctor about this problem, he preferred to go to a “bonesetter.” This was a blind man who treated the legs of injured horses at the Riding Club, and who knew more about bones than any orthopedic surgeon. Over time, my grandfather's lameness worsened, it caused arthritis, and threw his vertebral column out of line, so that every movement was torture, but I never heard him complain about his pains or his problems—though like any respectable Chilean he complained about everything else. He bore the torment of his poor skeleton with the help of aspirin and long draughts of water. Later I learned that this wasn't innocent water but gin, which he
drank neat, like a pirate, with no effect on his behavior or his health. He lived nearly a century with never a sign of a single loose screw. His pain did not excuse him from his duties as a gentleman, and to the end of his days, when he was nothing but a bundle of old bones and leather, he laboriously got up from his chair to greet and bid farewell to a woman.

On my desk I have a photograph of my grandfather. He looks like a Basque peasant. He's in profile, wearing a black beret that accentuates his aquiline nose and the firm expression of a face marked by deep furrows. He grew old strengthened by intelligence and reinforced by experience. He died with a full head of white hair and blue eyes as piercing as those of his youth. “How hard it is to die,” he told me one day when he was already very weary of pain. He spoke in proverbs, he knew hundreds of folk tales, and recited long poems from memory. This formidable man gave me the gift of discipline and love for language; without them I could not devote myself to writing today. He also taught me to observe nature and to love the landscape of Chile. He always said that just as Romans live among ruins and fountains without seeing them, we Chileans live in the most dazzling country on the planet without appreciating it. We don't notice the quiet presence of the snowy mountains, the sleeping volcanoes, and the unending hills that wrap us in their monumental embrace; we are not amazed by the frothing fury of the Pacific bursting upon our coasts, or the quiet lakes of the south and their musical waterfalls; we don't, like pilgrims, venerate the millenary nature of our native-growth forests, the moonscape of the deserts of
the north, the fecund Araucan rivers, or the blue glaciers where time is shattered into splinters.

We're talking about 1950. How long I've lived, my God! Getting old is a drawn-out and sneaky process. Every so often, I forget that time is passing because inside I'm still not thirty, but inevitably my grandchildren confront me with the harsh truth when they ask me if “in your day” we had electricity. These same grandchildren insist that there's a country inside my head where the characters in my books live their lives. When I tell them stories about Chile, they think I'm referring to that invented place.

W
ho are we, we Chileans? It's difficult for me to define us in writing, but from fifty yards I can pick out a compatriot with one glance. I find them everywhere. In a sacred temple in Nepal, in the Amazon jungle, at Mardi Gras in New Orleans, on the brilliant ice of Iceland, there you will find some Chilean with his unmistakable way of walking or her singing accent. Although because of the length of our narrow country we are separated by thousands of kilometers, we are tenaciously alike; we talk the same tongue and share similar customs. The only exceptions are the upper class, which has descended with little distraction from Europeans, and the Indians—the Aymaras
and a few Quechuas in the north and the Mapuches in the south—who fight to maintain their identities in a world where there is constantly less space for them.

I grew up with the story that there are no problems of race in Chile. I can't understand how we dare repeat such a falsehood. We don't talk in terms of “racism” but, rather, of “the class system” (we love euphemisms), but there is little difference between them. Not only do racism and/ or class consciousness exist, they are as deeply rooted as molars. Whoever maintains that racism is a thing of the past is dead wrong, as I found out in my latest visit, when I learned that one of the most brilliant graduates in the law school was denied a place in a prestigious law firm because “he didn't fit the corporate profile.” In other words, he was a mestizo, that is, he had mixed blood, and a Mapuche surname. The firm's clients would never be confident of his ability to represent them; nor would they allow him to go out with one of their daughters. Just as in the rest of Latin America, the upper class of Chile is relatively white, and the farther one descends the steep social ladder the more Indian the characteristics become. Nevertheless, lacking other points of comparison, most of us consider ourselves white. It was a surprise for me to discover that in the United States I am a “person of color.” (Once, when I was filling out a form, I opened my blouse to show my skin color to an Afro-American INS officer who was intent on placing me in the last racial category on his list: “Other.” He didn't seem to think it was funny.)

Although few pure Indians remain—approximately ten
percent of the population—their blood runs through the veins of our mestizo people. Mapuches are rather short, and generally have short legs, a long torso, dark skin, dark hair and eyes, and prominent cheekbones. They have an atavistic—and justifiable—mistrust for all non-Indians, whom they call
huincas,
which doesn't translate as “whites” but as “land robbers.” These Indians, who are divided into several tribes, contributed greatly to forming the national character, although there was a time when no one with any self-respect admitted the least association with them because of their reputation for drinking, laziness, and thieving. That was not, however, the opinion of Don Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, a renowned Spanish soldier and writer who came to Chile in the middle of the sixteenth century. Ercilla is the author of
La Araucana,
an epic poem about the Spanish conquest and the fierce resistance of the natives. In the prologue, he addresses the king, his lord, saying of the Araucans that

Some Mapuche tribes have rebelled in recent years, and the country cannot ignore them much longer. In fact, they are somewhat in vogue. Intellectuals and ecologists scramble to come up with some lance-toting ancestor to adorn their genealogical tree; a heroic Indian in a family tree is much more glamorous than some decadent marquis softened by life at court. I confess that I myself have tried to adopt a Mapuche name, so I could puff myself up about having a chieftain great-grandfather—the same way that in the past people bought titles of European nobility—but to date I've been unsuccessful. I suspect that that's how my father obtained his coat of arms: three starving mutts on a blue field, as I recall. The escutcheon in question was hidden away in the cellar and never mentioned, because titles of nobility were abolished when Chile declared its independence from Spain. In Chile there is nothing so ridiculous as to try to pass as a nobleman. When I worked at the United Nations I had a boss who was a true Italian count, and he had to change his calling cards because of the guffaws his heraldry provoked.

Indian chieftains won their rank with superhuman feats of strength and valor. They would hoist a tree trunk from those virgin forests to their shoulders, and whoever could support that weight longest became the
toqui.
As if that weren't enough, they recited an extemporaneous composition without pausing for breath, because in addition to proving their physical capabilities they had to make the case for the coherence and beauty of their words. That may be the source of our age-old vice of poetry. From that moment, no one would dispute his authority until the next
tournament. No torture contrived by ingenious Spanish conquistadors, however horrible, succeeded in demoralizing those formidable dark-skinned heroes, who died without a moan impaled on pikes, quartered by four horses, or slowly burned alive over hot coals. Our Indians did not have a significant culture like those of the Aztec, Maya, or Inca empires; they were rough, primitive, bad tempered, and small in number, but so brave that they were in a state of war for three hundred years, first against the Spanish colonizers, then against the republic. They were pacified in 1880, and not much was heard from them for more than a century, but now the Mapuches—“people of the earth”—have again taken up the fight because what little land is still theirs is threatened by construction of a dam on the Bío Bío River.

The artistic and cultural products of our Indians are as somber as everything else produced in the country. They color their cloth and weavings with vegetable dyes: dark red, black, gray, white; their musical instruments are as lugubrious as the song of whales; their dances are dull, monotonous, and last so long that in the end they bring rain. Their craftwork is beautiful, but it lacks the exuberance and variety of the art of Mexico, Peru, or Guatemala.

The Aymaras—“children of the sun”—are very different from the Mapuches; they are the same Indians as those in Bolivia, and they come and go, ignoring boundaries, because that region has been theirs forever. They are affable by nature and although they have maintained their customs, their language, and their beliefs, they have been integrated into the culture of the whites, especially in matters relating
to commerce. In that they are different from some groups of Quechuas in the most isolated areas of the mountains of Peru, for whom the government is the enemy, just as it was during the Spanish colonial period. The war of independence and the creation of the Republic of Peru have not modified their lives in any way; in fact some are not even aware that those things happened.