The Sixth Sense

Isabel Allende, the daughter and stepdaughter of Chilean diplomats, is one of California’s most famous literary immigrants. The author of “The House of the Spirits” and other books, she is probably best known for her memoir, “Paula,” chronicling the year she spent at the bedside of her comatose daughter, watching her die after being stricken with porphyria and a series of ultimately fatal medical misadventures. We met with Allende recently to talk about her new novel, as well as about the true history of the American Gold Rush, the creative process and her experience of making a new family in a foreign land.

KATY BUTLER: A historical novel like this is a departure for you. How did you come to write it?

ISABEL ALLENDE: In 1991, after I finished “The Infinite Plan,” I had fallen in love with California,and I realized that San Francisco was only 150 years old. Before that, there was a little town

INTERVIEW

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called Yerba Buena with 300 people, and nothing was happening there. The pioneers coming West were stopping in Oregon and other places that they felt were better for agriculture, less wild than California. So California was inhabited by nomadic Indian tribes, Mexican haciendas, farmers who had lived there in large communities forever--this belonged to Mexico. And Mexico lost California in a war with the United States nine days after the gold was found.

The Gold Rush, in a year’s time, brought a large number of people here motivated by greed. And they formed this place very fast. It would have taken probably 50 more years to bring all those people here without the gold. I was fascinated by the Gold Rush because it is like war. It is a time when all human faults and human virtues become enlarged, highlighted. You see people with very strong characters; there’s adventure, with bandits and prostitutes; and there’s courage, idealism, irrational hope, all the things that in a novel are great ingredients.

I planned to start writing on Jan. 8, 1992. I knew only that it would be about a Chilean woman, not a prostitute, who comes north to the Gold Rush. Then my daughter fell sick and, during 1992, I was at her bedside. [She would die in 1993, after spending a year in a coma.] In 1993, I was very depressed and I wrote “Paula.” In 1994 and 1995, I was totally blocked and depressed and taking Prozac. I couldn’t write anything.

BUTLER: What would happen?

ALLENDE: Nothing. When I write, there are voices that I listen to. There was no voice. It was just emptiness and void and silence and a sense of terrible frustration. I would have ideas. And I would sit down and I could never get the tone right. It never sounded natural and never seemed to flow. It was just stuck there, like playing with Legos, where you put one piece on the other piece but it never looks real. I thought I would never write fiction again.

So I gave myself a subject as far removed from death as possible, and I ended up writing “Aphrodite” [a collection of erotic stories and recipes] about lust and gluttony. It unblocked me, I think, because it brought me back to my body, to the sensuous, to the joy of life.

Finally, I began to write. It just happened. The characters just walked into my house! In seven months the book was written. What I have learned in all these years is that you have to let go of things in life and in the writing. And if you just follow your characters around, you will get the story in a more natural way. They are not flat comic book characters that you can order around. You just let them live.

BUTLER: How did you research the book?

ALLENDE: First at Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. I bought books. I watched documentaries. I went to exhibits at the Oakland Museum. I found that almost everything written in the history books--and this is what they teach in school--had been written by the victors. The white males. That was how the story was told: the epic thing of white males coming to the Gold Rush. But the truth is, they were a minority. The majority of the people here were not white until October of 1849, when 40,000 people, most of them white men, crossed the continent.

In 1848, when the panning began, the majority were people of color: Mexicans, who were miners by trade, who taught the whites what to eat, how to find food, how to get the gold; Chinese people; people from South America; people from all over. Then the white men [the Forty-Niners] came overland, and they took over. They took the mines away and made laws against people of color and took away everything from them until many of them became bandits.

There was the story that we have seen so often, the story of greed and violence and abuse and racism. However, the people of color stayed. They helped form this society, but in the history books they are invisible, so my interest was to tell the story from the perspective of a woman and an immigrant of color.

BUTLER: You say that people of color were actually the majority. How did you find that out?

ALLENDE: I read a lot of letters written by wives of miners or pioneers who came, and by miners themselves. And those letters tell about life in the Gold Rush better than any history book. And then there is a fantastic collection of photographs.

BUTLER: And they show that people are not all white?

ALLENDE: Of course. You see the Chinese settlements; you see the Mexican settlements, the Indians panning for gold. You discover, for example, that the Indians did not scalp the whites; the whites scalped the Indians and collected the scalps.

BUTLER: Do you see parallels between the time of the Gold Rush and today?

ALLENDE: The racism. There is always racism. In that era, there were signs all over saying no dogs or Mexicans or Chinese allowed. Now, it is more hidden. I live in San Rafael, where there is a large Hispanic community. One day, United Markets published the life story of a little immigrant boy who came from El Salvador on one of the paper bags they give you for groceries. There was picketing in front of United Markets by white women who said they were going to boycott the market because they were promoting immigration.

People want immigrants of color to do the work, to take care of their children, walk their dogs, wash their cars, do their gardens--but then they want them to disappear at 6 o’clock. They don’t want to know that they live crowded four or five families in a small apartment.

People who come here have never heard of welfare. You come because you are desperate--so desperate that you are willing to leave behind your extended family, your village, your community. You decide to come to a country like the United States, come north, to a place where you don’t know the rules, the clues, the codes of the society. You have never driven a car. You have never lived away from your village. You don’t speak the language. And then you come here, and you are usually very exploited for a long time.

There is overt fear of the immigrant. We always fear everything that is different. So when the women who go to United Markets see men who look dark waiting at the corner for the truck, any truck, to pick them up and give them a menial job for the day, they are scared. Because they see them as different. They don’t see the misery.

The first generation comes here out of hardship only. But they have the hope that their children will be Americans. And their children will do well. My housekeeper, to give you an example, is from Nicaragua. She will probably die exhausted. But her kids will be professionals. One is studying to be a chef, another is a public accountant and another is studying administration. In Nicaragua, they wouldn’t have a chance. Her grandchildren will be totally American; they will look American and they will not speak Spanish, just like my grandchildren. And they will probably look for their roots. They will say, “Oh, let me talk to my grandmother. I will go back to Nicaragua and find out about her!” While her children don’t want to know anything about it. They want to be Americans.

BUTLER: Are there any parallels between your experience and that of your heroine in “Daughter of Fortune,” or the experience of other immigrants?

ALLENDE: I am very privileged. I speak English. I am married to an American and therefore I am legal. I do not need a job. I have paid my way. Very few come like this. My photograph is in the newspapers so people know who I am. They know I am Latin but they bear with me! But I see how my [former] daughter-in-law, who looks very Latin and speaks with a strong accent, can be discriminated against, and how angry that makes her. My grandkids are probably the only brown kids in their school. But if they do [face some discrimination], it’s OK. I think it’s good for them. It makes them aware of their race and makes them strong, and maybe they will have more dignity and more courage.

BUTLER: Will you ever feel like an American yourself? Do you define yourself as an exile or as an immigrant?

ALLENDE: I define myself as an immigrant. A first-generation immigrant. I think in Spanish, dream in Spanish, write in Spanish, cook and make love in Spanish. So there is always this thing that you have to express yourself in another language. But I feel very comfortable here and very happy in the United States. When I fell in love with my husband, Willie, I decided that I would adapt myself. I never had when I lived in Venezuela; I was always looking south, always wanting to go back to Chile, always nostalgic for my extended family. When I came here, I said, “No, I will cut off all this. I will be Willie’s wife, and I will form another extended family here.”

BUTLER: How is this extended family different from what you had in Chile?

ALLENDE: In Chile it was larger, it was natural. This is artificial. I have to make a tremendous effort to put it together and keep it together. Because everything here tends to separate people, not bring them together.

BUTLER: Was it hard for you to adapt to American ways? Or was it like learning a different dance step?

ALLENDE: I think of myself as a person who is always moving. That was my fate, my karma. And I accept. I would love to have had roots and have my grandchildren around me with a sense of belonging and all that. That’s not going to happen. My grandchildren spend a week in their father’s house and a week in their mother’s house. And that’s OK. You can’t have everything. I have a lot.

BUTLER: And how about your own background? Is it American Indian as well as European?

ALLENDE: My family would say that we are fully European. But I do not believe that. I don’t believe that anybody in Chile is fully anything; that we are the result of mixture. And even if we do not have it in the blood, we have it in the culture. And I think we should be very proud of that and rescue that from our background.

BUTLER: My favorite line in your new book is this: When Eliza is leaving for the north, you write that she “had the clear sensation of beginning a new story in which she was both protagonist and narrator.” Did this ever happen to you?

ALLENDE: Yes. When I started writing “The House of the Spirits,” I was writing about myself and my family, but I realized I was the narrator. I had the incredible possibility of turning things around, for better or worse, to highlight some things and keep other things hidden, to create the legend of my own life.

BUTLER: Did that affect your sense of control of the narrative of your real life?

ALLENDE: No.

BUTLER: You already had a sense that you controlled your life?

ALLENDE: No. I had the idea that I was in control for a while. But when Paula fell sick I realized I didn’t control anything. I looked back at my life and I realized that most of the things that had happened to me had happened by chance. I had not chosen. My karma seems to be to get what I never aimed for and to lose what I most love. So that is what my fate has been about. I don’t have any feeling of control.

BUTLER: What did you get that you never aimed for?

ALLENDE: Success, celebrity. Never aimed for. I never expected that I would make enough money to support an extended family all by myself. Never hoped to do that.

BUTLER: What did you lose?

ALLENDE: I lost Paula. I lost my extended family. I lost my country. I lost a sense of belonging. I lost control over the things I would have wanted to control. But it’s OK. I never expected I would find a man like Willie and fall in love late in my life and 12 years later still be madly in love. So that is unexpected. It is a gift that I never aimed for.

I learned the hard way losing Paula--her year of agony, in which I witnessed her slow death, unable to help her in any way. I learned that if I could not keep her alive, I could not make the lives of the people I love easier. I can’t.

BUTLER: How did you let go?

ALLENDE: When she died. It took her a day and a night to die. This thing inside me broke. I let go of the anger against the things that had gone wrong in my destiny. About Paula’s death. I had been very angry at the hospital. But the sadness took over, and I realized that it was nobody’s bad intention. It had been a misfortune. And somehow I accepted that. It was like unfolding, unfolding of things. During the whole year that I wrote “Paula,” this unfolding continued. Every single day.

I am a happier person now because I don’t cling. I know that I can’t have most of the things I wish I could have. To give you an example: We were going to buy a house up in the hills. And then it all turned out wrong and it’s not going to happen. I promise that it didn’t take me 30 seconds to let go. Willie’s still angry, and he’s hitting his head against the wall, and I say, “Willie, just let go.” We have a nice house. We are going to be dead, naked, underground, some day very soon. So what is the problem?

BUTLER: Has anything changed for you recently?

ALLENDE: Paula’s agony was too long, and too painful. I could not remember her dancing and laughing. I could only remember her in the wheelchair or hooked to all those machines with a respirator. Slowly, I think that has started to change. I went to Alaska on a cruise with my mother last spring, and one day we were in the front part of the ship, slowly going into a bay, where all the glaciers were. There was absolute silence and whiteness. Everything was white but the sky and the water. There was a sense of solitude and beauty. And I thought that Paula was OK. I started seeing her happy again. I started having a few dreams in which I didn’t see her sick. The other day I dreamed that I saw her with lipstick. She never in her life wore any lipstick. But I saw her with lipstick, and she was talking to me. I woke up and told Willie. It was such a wonderful thing to meet her in a dream and she was OK.

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Isabel Allende is the author of numerous novels, including “House of the Spirits,” “Stories of Eva Luna” and, most recently, “Daughter of Fortune.” Katy Butler is a former reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle who has previously written for Book Review and the New Yorker.