My Invented Country (9 page)

Chiloé's culture is different from that of the rest of the country, and their people are so proud of their isolation that they oppose the construction of a bridge that will join the large island to Puerto Montt. It is such an extraordinary place that every Chilean and every tourist must visit it at least once, even at the risk of staying forever. The Chilotes live as they did a hundred years ago, dedicated to agriculture and the fishing industry, specifically salmon. Buildings are constructed solely of wood, and in the heart of each house there is always a huge wood stove burning day and night for cooking and for providing warmth to the family, friends, and enemies gathered around it. The scent of those houses in winter is an ineradicable memory: blazing, aromatic firewood, wet wool, soup kettles. The Chilotes were the last to cast their lot with the republic when Chile declared its independence from Spain, and in 1826 they
tried to join with the crown of England. They say that the
Recta Provincia
attributed to warlocks was in fact a shadow government in times when the inhabitants refused to accept the authority of the Chilean republic.

My grandmother Isabel didn't believe in witches, but I wouldn't be in the least surprised to learn that she had attempted to fly on a broomstick because she spent her life practicing effects with paranormal phenomena and trying to communicate with the Great Beyond, an activity that in her time the Catholic Church regarded with a jaundiced eye. Somehow that good lady managed to attract mysterious forces that moved the table during her séances. Today that table is in my home, after having traveled around the world several times, following my stepfather in his diplomatic career only to be lost during the years of exile. My mother recovered it through some burst of inspiration and shipped it to me in California, by air freight. It would have been cheaper to send an elephant because we are talking here about a massive, carved-wood Spanish table that has a formidable foot at the center formed of four ferocious lions. It takes three men to lift it. I don't know what trick my grandmother performed when she made it dance around the room by stroking it lightly with her index finger. That lady convinced her descendants that after her death she would come to visit whenever they summoned her, and I suppose she has kept her promise. I don't claim that her ghost, or any other, is at my side every day—I
expect that they have more important matters to attend to—but I like the idea that she is ready to come in case of some compelling need.

That good woman maintained that we all have psychic powers but since we don't use them they atrophy, like muscles, and finally disappear. I must clarify that her paranormal experiments were never a macabre experience, none of the dark rooms, mortuary candelabra, and organ music that we connect with Transylvania. Telepathy, the ability to move objects without touching them, seeing the future, and communicating with souls in the Great Beyond may happen any hour of the day, and in a very casual manner. For example, my grandmother didn't believe in telephones, which in Chile were a disaster until the day of the cell phone, and used telepathy instead to send recipes for apple pie to the three Morla sisters, her bosom friends in the Hermandad Blanca, Sisterhood in White, who lived on the other side of the city. Whether or not the method worked was left unproved, because all four were terrible cooks. The Hermandad Blanca was composed of those eccentric ladies and my grandfather, who was a total nonbeliever but nevertheless insisted on accompanying his wife so he could protect her in case of danger. The man was a skeptic by nature, and never was persuaded that the souls of the dead moved the table, but once his wife suggested that it might not be spirits but extraterrestrials, he embraced the idea enthusiastically because he considered that a more scientific explanation.

There is nothing strange in all this. Half of Chile is guided by the horoscope, by seers, or by the vague prognostications of the I Ching; the other half hang crystals
around their necks or follow feng shui. On the lovelorn advice programs on TV, problems are resolved with tarot cards. The greater part of former militant leftist revolutionaries are now dedicated to spiritual practices. (There is some dialectic link between the guerrilla mentality and the esoteric that I can't quite put my finger on.) My grandmother's sessions seem more rational to me than vows made to saints, buying indulgences to guarantee heaven, or pilgrimages to local holy women: buses bursting with people and stands selling sausages and miraculous color prints. I have often heard that my grandmother moved the sugar bowl without touching it, using only her mental powers. I'm not sure whether I witnessed that feat or if from hearing it so often I've convinced myself it's true. I don't remember the sugar bowl, but it seems to me there was a little silver bell, topped with an effeminate prince, that was used in the dining room to call the servants between courses. I don't know if I dreamed the episode, if I invented it, or if it truly happened: I see that little bell slide silently across the tablecloth, as if the prince had taken on a life of his own, make a stunning Olympian turn, to the amazement of the diners, and return to my grandmother's place at the foot of the table. This happens with many events and anecdotes in my life: it seems I have lived them, but when I write them down in the clear light of logic, they seem unlikely. That really doesn't disturb me, however. What does it matter if these events happened or if I imagined them? Life is, after all, a dream.

I did not inherit my grandmother's psychic powers, but she opened my mind to the mysteries of the world. I accept that anything is possible. She maintained that there are multiple dimensions to reality, and that it isn't prudent to trust solely in reason and in our limited senses in trying to understand life; other tools of perception exist, such as instinct, imagination, dreams, emotions, and intuition. She introduced me to magical realism long before the so-called boom in Latin American literature made it fashionable. Her views have helped me in my work because I confront each book with the same criterion she used to conduct her sessions: calling on the spirits with delicacy, so they will tell me their lives. Literary characters, like my grandmother's apparitions, are fragile beings, easily frightened; they must be treated with care so they will feel comfortable in my pages.

Apparitions, tables that move on their own, miraculous saints and devils with green hooves riding on public transport make life and death more interesting. Souls in pain know no borders. I have a friend in Chile who wakes up at night to find tall, skinny visitors from Africa dressed in tunics and armed with spears, specters only he can see. His wife, who sleeps right beside him, has never seen the Africans, only two eighteenth-century English gentlewomen who walk through doors. And another friend of mine lived in a house in Santiago where lamps mysteriously crashed to the floor and chairs overturned; the source of the mayhem was discovered to be the ghost of a Danish geographer who was dug up in the patio along with his maps and his notebook.
How did that poor wandering soul end up so far from home? We will never know, but the fact is that after several novenas and a few masses for him, the geographer left. He must have been a Calvinist or a Lutheran during his lifetime and didn't like the papist rites.

My grandmother claimed that space is filled with presences, the dead and the living all mixed together. It's a fabulous idea, and that's why my husband and I have built a large house in northern California with high ceilings, beams, and arches that invite ghosts from various periods and latitudes, especially those of the far south. In an attempt to replicate my great-grandparents' large house, we have aged it through the costly and laborious process of attacking the doors with hammers, staining the walls with paint, rusting the iron with acid, and treading on the plants in the garden. The result is rather convincing: I believe that more than one distraught spirit might settle in with us, deceived by the look of the property. During the process of adding centuries to the house, the neighbors watched from the street, open-mouthed, not understanding why we were building a new house if we wanted an old one. The reason is that in California you don't find much in the way of Chile's colonial style, and in any case, nothing is truly old. Don't forget that before 1849 there was no San Francisco. Where it stands now was a village called Yerba Buena; it was populated by a handful of Mexicans and Mormons, and its only visitors were fur dealers. It was gold fever that brought the hordes to San Francisco. A house that looks like ours is a historical impossibility in these parts.

I
t is very difficult to determine what a typical Chilean family is like, but I can say, without any fear of contradiction, that mine was
not
average. Nor was I a typical señorita with regard to the mores of the milieu in which I grew up; I made a clean getaway, as they say. I will describe some parts of my youth, to see whether in the process I shed some light on aspects of my country's society, which in those days was muc
h less tolerant than it is today—which says a lot about how it was then. The Second World War was a cataclysm that shook the world, and changed everything from geopolitics and science to customs, culture, and art. Without much discussion, new ideas swept away those the society had held for centuries, but innovations were slow to cross two oceans or to break through the impenetrable wall of the Andes. It took several years for new modes to reach Chile.

My clairvoyant grandmother died suddenly of leukemia. She didn't fight for life, she gave herself to death enthusiastically because she was very curious to see heaven. During her lifetime in this world she had the good fortune to be loved and protected by her husband, who bore her extravagant behavior with good humor; if he hadn't she would have ended up in a madhouse. I've read several letters she left in her own hand, in which she seems to be a melancholy
woman with a morbid fascination with death. I remember her, however, as luminous and ironic, and full of gusto for life. Her leaving was like a catastrophic wind; the entire house went into mourning and I learned what it was to be afraid. I feared the devil that appeared in the mirrors, the ghosts that hovered in the corners, the mice in the cellar, I was terrified that my mother would die and I would have to go to an orphanage, that my father—that man whose name could not be spoken—would come back and take me away, I was afraid of committing sins and going to hell, afraid of the gypsies, of the bogeyman whose name the nursemaid invoked to threaten me . . . in short, I had an endless list, more than enough reasons to live in terror.

My grandfather, furious at being abandoned by the great love of his life, dressed in black from head to toe, painted the furniture the same color and forbade parties, music, flowers, and desserts. He spent the day at his office, lunched in town, dined at the Union Club, and on weekends played golf and jai alai, or went to the mountains to ski. He was one of the first to initiate that sport in days when getting to the runs was an odyssey equal to scaling Everest. He never imagined that one day Chile would be a Mecca of winter sports, where Olympic teams from all over the world are sent to train. We saw him only a minute in the early morning, but he was nonetheless a determining factor in my formation. Before we went to school, my brothers and I would go by to say good morning. He received us in his room filled with dark furniture and smelling of an English soap with the trademark Lifebuoy.
He never patted or hugged us—he thought it unhealthy—but we would go to any lengths for a word of approval from him. Later, when I was about seven and had begun to read the newspaper and ask questions, he noticed my presence, and then began a relationship that would continue long after his death, because till this day signs of his hand are perceptible in my character, and I am constantly nourished by the anecdotes he told me.

My childhood wasn't a happy one, but it was interesting. I was never bored, thanks to the books that belonged to my Tío Pablo, who at that point was still a bachelor living at home. He was an unreconstructed reader; his bookshelves covered the walls from floor to ceiling, and volumes piled up on the floor to be covered with dust and cobwebs. He stole books from his friends without a trace of guilt because he thought printed material—except what belonged to him—was the patrimony of all humankind. He let me read his treasures because he meant to pass his vice as a reader on to me, no matter what the cost. He gave me a doll when I finished reading
War and Peace,
a fat book with tiny print. There was no censorship in that house, but my grandfather did not allow lights to be on in my room after nine o'clock at night, and to circumvent that my Tío Pablo gave me a flashlight. My best memories of those years are of books I read beneath the covers, using my flashlight. We Chilean children read the novels of Emilio Salgari and Jules Verne, the
Treasury of Youth
and collections of didactic little novels that promoted obedience and purity as maximum virtues. We also read the magazine
El Peneca,
a reader that was published every Wednesday. As
early as Tuesday I was stationed at the door to keep the magazine from falling into my brothers' hands first. I devoured that as an aperitif, then gobbled up more succulent dishes, such as
Anna Karenina
and
Les Misérables.
For dessert I savored fairy tales. Those magnificent books allowed me to escape the rather shabby reality of that house in mourning in which we children, like the cats, were considered a nuisance.

My mother was again an eligible young woman, thanks to having been able to have her marriage annulled, and though living under her father's wing, she had a few admirers—maybe one or two dozen by my calculations. Besides being beautiful, she had that ethereal and vulnerable look some girls had then, a look that's been completely lost in these days when ladies lift weights. Her fragility was very seductive because even the wimpiest man felt strong by her side. She was one of those women who make men want to protect her, exactly the opposite of me; I am more like a tank at full throttle. Instead of wearing black and weeping about being abandoned by her frivolous husband, as was expected of her, my mother tried to enjoy herself as much as she could under the circumstances, which was very little because in those days women couldn't go to a tearoom alone, to say nothing of the movies. Films that were in the least interesting were classified as “not recommended for señoritas,” which meant that they could be seen only in the company of a man of the family, who took responsibility for the moral harm the spectacle could inflict upon a sensitive female psyche. A few snapshots
have survived from those years; in them my mother looks like a younger sister of the actress Ava Gardner. She was born with beauty: luminous skin, easy laugh, classic features, and a great natural elegance, more than enough reason for sharp tongues to comment on her every move. If her platonic suitors stirred the sanctimonious society of Santiago, imagine the scandal that erupted when it learned of her love affair with a married man, the father of four children and nephew of a bishop.