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REAL
LIVES - turning points
Isabelle
While her family, like million other Chilean exiles, was scattered by
the coup, she is convinced that had she not fled across the mountains,
eventually making her way to Venezuela, where she stayed until 1987, she
would not have become a writer. That vocation not only helped her break
the junta's "chain of hatred" in her own soul, but later eased
her recovery from the death, seven years ago, of her 28-year-old daughter
Paula, who had lain comatose for 12 months with the rare genetic disorder,
porphyria. For Allende, writing has in part been a tenacious reflex to
loss, whether of exile or bereavement...
Isabelle Allende was born during the second world war in Lima, Peru. Her
father Tomás Mende (Salvador's cousin) was a Chilean diplomat who
absconded in an "unsolved mystery" from both his job and his
family when Isabelle was three. She now thinks he may he been bi-sexual
and embroiled in a scandal. She never saw him again (her mother cut his
face out of all family photographs) until called upon to identify after
he suffered a heart attack in the street She was unable to recall what
he had looked like. Allende sees herself as marked by his disappearance.
"Until very-recently, I didn't trust men," she says. "I
thought they weren't reliable; if you wanted something done, you had to
do it yourself - including raising the kids. I never allowed anyone else
to pay the bills because I understood that economic independence created
the rest; I started working early and I've worked all my life. I never
surrendered to a relationship with a man the way I did to my children.
And my mother.
She returned to Chile with her mother to live with her maternal grandparents
and two uncles in Santiago. While the grandly conservative Catholic household
left the poor-relation Isabel prone to rebellion and mixing with the Amerindian
servants, its anglo-philia later found ironic expression in the English
expatriates of Daughter Of Fortune. "My grandfather was Basque and
my grandmother Castilian, but everything from England was good - including
the soap. I was born in the middle of the second world war, and practically
everyone in the country had pro-German sympathies; the Chilean armed forces
were trained by the Prussians. But my grandparents were knitting socks
for the British troops.
After she was 10, and her mother remarried another diplomat, Allende lived
in Bolivia and Lebanon, attending a Beirut school run by British Quakers,
before being sent home at 15 (her grandfather enrolled her in an English
finishing school), and starting work two years later. She had a spell
translating Barbara Cartland into Spanish ("I couldn't resist making
improvements"), then became a successful journalist, working for
a magazine, Paula, that campaigned for abortion and divorce in
a staunchly Catholic country, and penned humorous feminist columns, called
" Civilise Your Cavemen". In the 1960s - sporting long dyed-blonde
hair and driving a car painted with giant flowers - she had her own TV
chat show.
"I was a lousy, journalist", she insists. "I has no problem
exaggerating or making up quotes. My colleagues thought they were being
objective, but I never thought they were and I didn't even pretend."
Flattered by a lunch invitation from Chile's poet laureate Pablo Neruda,
she supposed she had been summoned to interview him, "He laughed
and said he would never allow himself to be interviewed by me; an that
I was the worst journalist and I only ever wrote about myself. But he
amused by my columns".
At 19 Allende married an Anglo-Chilean engineering student with whom she
lived for 25 years and had two children. She says she served him "like
a geisha". "It was the way a Latin American woman served a man,
but I exaggerated because all my life is about exaggeration. I had three
jobs. We had a car; he'd take it, and I'd go on the bus with the grocery,
then come running home to serve him a drink. I thought I was feminist,
but I was raising the children alone; my husband never changed a diaper;
I never applied the theory to my practical life."
Though not "political" like her Allende cousins, she chaffed
against not only male prerogatives ("I'd wanted to be a man since
I was five") but an impervious hierarchy that was partly racial:
the more Indian the blood, the lower the class. "I’m fascinated
with how you break a system, defy and challenge it. As a woman, that’s
determined my life" she says. "I was brought up seeing the injustice
of a class system; the poor didn’t have a chance. The people who
had control for generations had impunity. It was very hard to change society
when I was growing up, though it happened with Salvador Allende."
While she regrets not having done more for her uncle's short-lived regime,
the military coup when she was 31 awoke her to the amount of evil that
was possible. "I was a very frivolous person; involved in women’s
issues and feminism but not politics. In my humorous columns or tv programme
I was always looking for the ironic and funny; I failed to see the tragedy
brewing in my country". But in the first 48 hours after the coup,
her "perpetual innocence and extended adolescence" were shattered.
"My husband, who in the construction business, had to take food to
workers stranded by the curfew. We went out slowly in the with a white
flag, and were stopped 10 or 20 times. Driving through the streets, I
could see corpses, and books being burned, and people dragged into trucks,
running with blood." Partly because she was Allende and a familiar
face on television, she found herself called on to help the resistance.
"Through friends in the church, I smuggled information and hid people
in my house before they could be taken o border or, when that became unsafe,
to asylum in embassies."...
Though Allende had refused safe passage offered by the Mexican embassy,
after 14 months of the terror she fled. "By then I'd been fired from
my job, and I was on a list. I couldn’t take the fear for my family
any more." Her husband joined her in Caracas when it became clear
she could not return. Despite hardship, Venezuela was liberating. "I’d
come from a country where we dress in grey and pretend we’re British,
to a place enjoying the oil boom, where there was an erotic charge in
the streets." The House of the Spirits was begun on January
8 (Allende has since started all her books one same date)...
While her daughter was ill, she wrote an extended letter to her, in the
diminishing hope that she would one day read it. The letter grew into
her memoir, Letter to Paula, which she calls "the most important
book I will ever write, which has the greatest truth. Writing is exorcism.
It deals with the demons of the past, sorts out the confusion. Life happens
so fast there's no time to see the connections or consequences; there's
too much noise everywhere. But in my work, there is no noise. Everything
has a ripple effect in a book; in the years of introspection, I grow.
For me, it's like meditation or prayer"...
Her writing has sought to recover a place lost not only through exile
but through childhood separation from Chile as a diplomat's daughter.
"In Chile I realise I'm a foreigner, even, though I understand the
codes and can speak with my own accent, and it's very sad for me to confront
that," Allende says. "I'm a foreigner in the US too, and always
will be. But my roots are more in my books now than in a place; my home
will be in my writing."
Maya Jaga (2000)
"A view from the bridge’
London: Guardian
Saturday Review, 5th February, 2000 pp. 6-7.
Extracted with permission.
Copyright The Guardian, 2000.
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