My Invented Country (7 page)

N
o one asks a returning Chilean where he's been or what he saw; on the other hand, we immediately inform the foreigner arriving for a visit that our women are the most beautiful in the world, that our flag won some mysterious international contest, and that our climate is idyllic. Judge for yourself: the flag is nearly identical to that of Texas, and the most notable aspect of our climate is that while there's a drought in the north there are sure to be floods in the south. And when I say floods, I am talking Biblical deluges that leave hundreds dead, thousands injured, and the economy in ruins; they do, however, trigger that solidarity that tends to bog down in normal times. We Chileans are enchanted by states of emergency. In Santiago the temperatures are worse than in Madrid; in summer we die of the heat and in winter of the cold, but no one has air conditioning or
decent heating, because that would be tantamount to admitting that the climate isn't as good as they say it is. When the air gets too agreeable, it's a sure sign that there's going to be an earthquake. We have more than six hundred volcanoes, some where the petrified lava of former eruptions is still hot, others with poetic Mapuche names: Pirepillán, demon of the snow; Petrohué, land of the mists. From time to time these sleeping giants rouse themselves from their dreams with a long bellow, and then it seems as if the end of the world has come. Experts on earthquakes say that sooner or later Chile will disappear, buried in lava or dragged to the bottom of the sea by one of those gigantic waves that tend to rise up in fury in the Pacific, but I hope this doesn't discourage potential tourists, because the probability that it will happen precisely during their visit is rather remote.

The matter of female beauty requires a separate comment. It's outrageous flattery raised to a national level. The truth is that I have never heard it said outside the country that Chilean women are quite as spectacular as my amiable compatriots assert. Our women are no more alluring than Venezuela's, who win all the international beauty contests, or Brazil's, who sashay along the beaches parading their
café au lait
curves, to mention only two of our rivals. But according to popular Chilean mythology, from time immemorial sailors have deserted their ships, entranced by the longhaired sirens who wait, scanning the sea, on our beaches. This monumental approbation on the part of our men is so gratifying that we women are inclined to forgive them many things. How can we deny them when they find us beautiful? If there is a thread of truth in all this, perhaps
it is that a Chilean woman's attraction lies in a blend of strength and flirtatiousness that few men can resist—that's according to what I hear, for it hasn't been a hundred percent true in my case. My male friends tell me that the amorous game of glances, of suggestion, of giving a man his head and then reining him in, is what captivates them, but I suppose that wasn't invented in Chile, we imported it from Andalusia.

For several years I worked for a women's magazine where we were constantly surrounded with the most sought-after models and the latest candidates for the Miss Chile competition. The models, in general, were so anorexic that most of the time they sat perfectly motionless, staring straight ahead, like turtles, which made them very attractive since any man passing by could imagine that they were stupefied by the sight of him. In any case, these beauties all looked like tourists. Without exception, the blood flowing through their veins was European: they were tall, slim, and had light hair and eyes. That is not the typical Chilean woman, the one you see in public: a mestizo, brunette and rather short—although I can't deny that recent generations are taller. Today's young people seem gigantic to me (admittedly, I am barely five feet tall . . .). Nearly all the female characters in my novels are inspired by Chilean women whom I know very well because I worked with them and for them for several years. More than by upper-class señoritas, with their long legs and blond manes, I've been impressed by the women of the people: mature, strong, hard-working, earthy. In their youth they are passionate lovers, and afterward they are the pillars of their family good mothers and good companions to men who
often do not deserve them. Under their wings they harbor their own and others' children, friends, relatives, and hangers-on. They are always bone tired, weary from serving others, always putting off what they should do for themselves; the last among the last, they work tirelessly and age prematurely, but they never lose their capacity to laugh at themselves, their romantic hope that their partners will change, or the small flame of rebelliousness that burns in their hearts. Most are martyrs by vocation: they are the first up to wait on their families and the last to go to bed; they take pride in suffering and sacrificing. They sigh and weep with great gusto as they tell one another the stories of abuse from husband and children!

Chilean women dress simply, nearly always in slacks; they wear their hair down and use little makeup. On the beach or at a party they all look the same, a chorus of clones. I took the time to go through old magazines, from the end of the sixties to today, and I find that in this sense very little has changed in forty years. I think that the only difference is the volume among various hairstyles. Every woman has “a little black dress,” which is synonymous with elegance and which, with few variations, accompanies her from puberty to coffin. One of the reasons I don't live in Chile is that I wouldn't fit in. My closet has enough veils, plumes, and glitter to outfit the entire cast of
Swan Lake;
furthermore, I have tinted my hair every color chemicals have to offer, and have never stepped out of the bathroom without my eye makeup. Being permanently on a diet is a symbol of status among us, though in more than one poll the men interviewed have used terms like “soft, curvy, with something you can get a grip on,” to describe how they prefer their women. We don't believe them: surely
they say that to console us . . . which is why we cover our protuberances with long sweaters or starched blouses, just the opposite from Caribbean women, who proudly display their pectoral abundance in low necklines and posteriors sheathed in fluorescent spandex. But beauty is a matter of attitude. I remember one woman with a Cyrano de Bergerac nose. In view of her lack of success in Santiago, she went to Paris and in no time at all she had appeared in France's most sophisticated fashion magazine—eight pages, full color—wearing a turban and in bold profile! From that time, this woman-attached-to-a-nose has passed into posterity as a symbol of the crowed-over beauty of Chilean women.

Some frivolous thinkers believe that Chile is a matriarchy, deceived perhaps by the strong personality of its women, who seem to carry the lead in society. They are free and well organized, they keep their maiden names when they marry, they compete head to head in the workforce and not only manage their families but frequently support them. They are more interesting than most men, but that does not affect the reality: they live in an unyielding patriarchy. To begin with, a woman's work or intellect isn't respected; we must work twice as hard as any man to earn half the recognition. Don't even mention the field of literature! But we're not going to talk about that, because it's bad for my blood pressure. Men have the economic and political power, which is passed from one male to the next, like the baton in a relay, while women, with few exceptions, are
pushed to the side. Chile is a macho country: there is so much testosterone floating in the air that it's a miracle women don't grow beards.

There is no secret about machismo in Mexico; it's in their
rancheras,
their country ballads, but among us it is much more veiled—though no less injurious. Sociologists have traced the causes back to the Spanish conquest, but since male dominance is a world problem, its roots must be much more ancient, it isn't fair to blame only the Spaniards. At any rate, I will repeat what I've read about it. The Araucan Indians were polygamous and treated women very badly; they would abandon them, and their children, and leave as a group to look for new hunting grounds, where they took new women and had more children, whom they left in turn. The mothers took care of their offspring as best they could, a custom that in a way persists in the psyche of our people. Chilean women tend to accept—though not forgive—abandonment by their men because they think of it as an endemic ill, something inherent in the male nature. As for the Spanish conquistadors, very few of them brought women with them, so they coupled with Indian women, whom they valued far less than a horse. From these unequal unions were born humiliated daughters who would themselves be raped as women, and sons who feared and admired the soldier father: bad-tempered, unjust, master of all rights, including those of life and death. As those sons grew up, they identified with their fathers, never with the conquered race of the mother. Some conquistadors had as many as thirty concubines, not
counting the women they raped and immediately abandoned. The Inquisition railed against the Mapuches for their polygamous customs, but overlooked the harems of captive Indian women accompanying the Spaniards: more mestizo children meant more subjects for the crown of Spain and more souls for the Christian religion. From those violent embraces come our peoples, and to this day men act as if they were on horseback surveying the world from on high, giving orders, conquering. As a theory, that isn't half bad, right?

Chilean women are abettors of machismo: they bring up their daughters to serve and their sons to be served. While on the one hand they fight for their rights and work tirelessly, on the other, they wait on their husband and male children, assisted by their daughters, who from an early age are well instructed regarding their obligations. Modern girls are rebelling, of course, but the minute they fall in love they repeat the learned pattern, confusing love with service. It makes me sad to see splendid girls waiting on their boyfriends as if they were invalids. They not only serve the meal, they offer to cut the meat. It makes me unhappy because I was the same way. Not long ago a TV comic, a man dressed as a woman, scored a great hit by imitating a model wife. Poor Elvira—that was his name—ironed shirts, cooked complicated meals, did the children's homework, waxed the floor by hand, and flew around to put on nice clothes and makeup before her husband came home from work, so he wouldn't find her ugly. Elvira never rested, and everything was always her fault. One time she even ran a
marathon behind the bus her husband was taking to work, to hand him the briefcase
he
had forgotten. The program made men howl with laughter, but it bothered the women so much that finally it was taken off the air; wives didn't like seeing themselves portrayed so faithfully by the ineffable Elvira.

My American husband, who takes responsibility for half the chores in our house, is scandalized by Chilean machismo. When a man washes the plate he's eaten from, he considers that he's “helping” his wife or mother, and expects to be praised for his effort. Among our Chilean friends there is always some woman who'll serve breakfast in bed to adolescent boys, wash their clothes, and make their bed. If there's no
nana,
the mother or a sister does it, something that would seldom happen in the United States. Willie was also horrified by the institution of the maid. I prefer not to tell him that in the past the duties of these women were even more intimate, although that was never discussed openly: mothers looked the other way and the fathers boasted of their sons' backstairs feats. He's a tiger, they would say, remembering their own experiences, a “chip off the old block.” The general idea was for the boy to satisfy his sexual needs with the maid, so he wouldn't “go too far” with a girl of his own social class; and after all, a maid was safer than a prostitute. In rural areas there was a local version of the Spanish
derecho a pernada,
which in feudal times allowed the lord to bed any bride on the night of her wedding. In Chile, the tradition was never that organized: the
patron
just went to bed with anyone and at any
time he pleased. So the landowners sowed their lands with bastards, and even today there are regions where nearly everyone has the same last name. (One of my ancestors knelt to pray after every rape: “Lord, I don't do this for fun and games, only for more sons to serve in Your name . . .”) Today the
nanas
have become so emancipated that the lords of their domains prefer to hire illegal immigrants from Peru, whom they can mistreat as badly as they used to their Chilean servant girls.

In matters of education and health, Chilean women are at or above the level of the men, but not in opportunities and political power. The normal pattern in the workforce is that they do the hard work and the men direct. Very few women occupy high posts in government, industry, or private or public enterprise; they bump into that ever-present glass ceiling. When a woman does reach a top-level position, let's say, minister in the government or director of a bank, it is cause for amazement and admiration. In the last ten years, however, public opinion is registering positive for women as political leaders: they are seen as a viable alternative because they have demonstrated that they are often more honest, efficient, and hardworking than men. What a revelation! When women organize, they wield great influence, but they seem unaware of their own strength. There was the example, for instance, during the administration of Salvador Allende, when rightist women went out beating pots and pans to protest shortages and to dump chicken feathers in front of the Military School, inciting the soldiers to subversion. They helped foment the military coup. Years later, women
were the first to go out and publicly denounce military repression, confronting water hoses, nightsticks, and bullets. They formed a powerful group called “Women for Life,” which played a fundamental role in overturning the dictatorship of Pinochet, but after the election they decided to dissolve the movement. Once more they ceded their power to men.