My Invented Country (6 page)

The unfortunate Indians of Tierra del Fuego, in the extreme southern tip of Chile, died by gunfire and disease long ago; of those tribes only a handful of Alacalufes survive. Hunters were paid a bounty for every pair of ears they brought as proof of having killed an Indian; in this way the territory was successfully “cleared” for the colonists. These Indians were giants who lived, nearly naked, in an inclement, icy zone where only seals can take comfort.

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, or 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 it 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 that 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. It's clear that we have much in common with the fair-haired sons of Albion: individualism, good manners, a sense of fair play, class consciousness, bad teeth, and austerity. (British austerity does not, of course, include the royalty, who are to the English what Las Vegas is to the
Mojave Desert). We are fascinated by the eccentricity of which the British tend to boast, but are incapable of imitating it, because we are too afraid of ridicule; on the other hand, we do try to copy their apparent self-control. I say apparent because in certain circumstances—for example, a soccer match—English and Chileans lose their heads equally and are capable of drawing and quartering their opponents. In the same fashion, despite their reputation for being levelheaded, both can exhibit fierce cruelty. The atrocities committed by the English throughout their history are matched by those Chileans commit as soon as they have a good excuse—or impunity. Our history is spattered with examples of barbarism. It isn't for nothing that our motto is “By Right or by Force,” a phrase that has always seemed particularly stupid to me. In the nine months of the revolution of 1891, more Chileans died than during the four years of the war against Peru and Bolivia (1879–1883), many of them shot in the back or tortured, others thrown into the sea with stones tied to their ankles. The technique of “disappearing” ideological enemies, which several Latin American dictatorships were so strongly committed to during the seventies and eighties, had been practiced in Chile nearly a century earlier. None of which takes away from the fact that our democracy was the most solid, and the oldest, on the continent. We were proud of the efficacy of our institutions; of our incorruptible
carabineros,
our police; of the uprightness of our judges; and of the fact that no president became rich while in power: just the opposite, they often left the Palacio de la Moneda—ironically, the Palace of Money—poorer
than they came in. Following 1973 we have not had occasion to boast about those things.

In addition to the English, Germans, Arabs, Jews, Spaniards, and Italians, immigrants from Central Europe made their way to our shores: scientists, inventors, academics, some true geniuses, all of whom we refer to, without distinction as “Yugoslavians.”

After the Spanish Civil War, refugees came to Chile escaping the defeat. In 1939, the poet Pablo Neruda, at the direction of the Chilean government, chartered a ship, the
Winnipeg,
which sailed from Marseilles carrying a cargo of intellectuals, writers, artists, physicians, engineers, and fine craftsmen. The affluent families of Santiago came to Valparaíso to meet the boat and offer hospitality to the voyagers. My grandfather was one of them; there was always a place set at his table for Spanish friends who showed up unannounced. I hadn't been born yet, but I grew up hearing stories of the Civil War and the salty songs those passionate anarchists and republicans used to sing. Those people shook the country from its colonial doldrums with their ideas, their arts and professions, their suffering and passions, their extravagant ways. One of those refugees, a Catalan friend of my family, took me one day to see a linotype. He was a thin, nervous young man with the profile of an angry bird; he never ate vegetables because he considered them burro fodder, and he lived obsessed with the idea of returning to Spain when Franco died, never suspect
ing that the man would live another forty years. This friend was a typographer by trade and smelled of a mixture of garlic and ink. From the far end of the table, I used to watch him pick at his food and rail against Franco, monarchists, and priests; he never glanced in my direction because he detested children and dogs equally. To my surprise, one winter day the Catalan announced that he was taking me for a walk. He threw his long muffler around his neck and we set off in silence. He took me to a gray building where we went through a metal door and walked down corridors stacked with enormous rolls of paper. A deafening noise shook the walls. I watched him being transformed: his step became lighter, his eyes gleamed, he smiled. For the first time, he touched me. Taking my hand, he led me to a fabulous machine, a kind of black locomotive with all its works in view, as if it had been violently gutted. He touched its keys and with a warlike roar the matrices fell into place, forming the lines of a text.

“Some damned German clockmaker who emigrated to the United States patented this marvel in 1884,” he yelled into my ear. “It's called a linotype,
line of types.
Before that, you had to compose the text by setting the type by hand, letter by letter.”

“Why ‘damned'?” I asked, yelling back.

“Because twelve years earlier, my father invented the same machine and set it up in his patio, but no one gave a fig,” he replied.

The typographer never returned to Spain, he stayed and operated the word machine, married, children fell from the
skies, he learned to eat vegetables, and he adopted several generations of stray dogs. He gave me the memory of the linotype and a taste for the smell of ink and paper.

In the society I was born into, in the forties, there were unbreachable barriers between the social classes. Today those lines are more subtle, but they're there, as eternal as the Great Wall of China. Climbing the social ladder was once impossible; descending was more common—sometimes the only nudge needed was to move or to marry badly, which did not mean to a cad or heartless person but someone beneath you. Money had little to do with it. Just as you didn't slip to a lower class when you lost your money, neither did you rise a notch by amassing a fortune, a lesson learned by many rich Arabs and Jews who were never accepted in the exclusive circles of “decent people.” This was how those who found themselves at the top of the social pyramid referred to themselves (assuming, naturally, that all the rest were “
in
decent people”).

Foreigners rarely catch on to how this shocking class system operates because social interchange is polite and friendly at every level. The worst epithet bestowed on the military who took over the government in the seventies was that they were “boosted-up
rotos
.” My aunts said that there was nothing tackier than being a Pinochet adherent. They said that not as a criticism of his dictatorship, with which they were in full accord, but in regard to class status. Now, few people
dare use the word
roto
in public, because it's considered bad form, but most have it on the tip of their tongues. 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. Since 1973, the year of the military coup that changed so many things, situating has become a little more complex because in the first three minutes of conversation you also have to guess whether the person you're speaking to was for or against the dictatorship. Today very few confess they were in favor, but even so it's a good idea to establish a political orientation before you express extreme opinions. The same is true among Chileans who live outside the country, where the obligatory question is, When did you leave? If he, or she, says before 1973, it means that person is
a rightist and was fleeing Allende's socialism; if he left between 1973 and 1978, you can be sure he is a political refugee; but any time after that, and she may be an “economic exile,” which is how those who left Chile looking for job opportunities are qualified. It is more difficult to place those who stayed in Chile, partly because those individuals learned to keep their opinions to themselves.