A South American landscape of the imagination

One of the things Chileans do most tenaciously is explain Chile. We do it face to face, by correspondence, in the form of a book, in films and over the Internet. We escape from Chile but always return to the point of departure, if only in imagination. I remember voluntary exiles of long ago, expatriates often assimilated into the international world, members of what today would be called the jet set, who would fall into paroxysms of nostalgia. They would get together to reminisce, to talk about the “country of absence,” as the poet and Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral called it, to party, laugh and lament.

In my mind’s eye I see an elderly Chilean woman married to an authentic French duke and living in a 17th century castle, who in the twilight of her life masqueraded as an Araucanian -- a Mapuche Indian -- and wept from the bottom of her heart for her lost childhood. I travel to Paris from Madrid for a weekend and find the cafes and restaurants of the new exiles, primarily the second generation of those who escaped the military dictatorship. They may have learned many things and forgotten others, but memory of things Chilean is now and always persistent, obstinate. I walk past one of those places, and I hear the cuecas, tonadas and tangos of the old guard. I tell myself that we’re hopeless. We aspire constantly to go; we’re incapable of living peacefully in our corner of Chile, but when we do leave, we never truly adapt.

Isabel Allende writes that she gained a country after Sept. 11, 2001: That she developed a true solidarity with her adopted country. I do not doubt that sentiment. It is a generous, human, understandable reaction. But Chile, her invented country, is an unresolved space in her sensibility, a permanent internal crisis, a contradiction. This writer is the daughter and stepdaughter of diplomats; she has spent her life packing and unpacking suitcases. That is not a way of life recommended for acquiring what we think of as a secure identity.

But in the pages of “My Invented Country,” one sees that finally she has been able to adapt and survive with enviable health, with a blend of solid good sense, ingenuity and imagination. She has, moreover, added a new title to a Chilean genre par excellence. Interpretations of Chile in verse and prose have flourished since the days of the conquest. Allende refers to “La Araucana” by Alonso de Ercilla, a 16th century poet and soldier, but she could also cite the letters of Pedro de Valdivia, the first of the conquistadors, Pedro de Ona’s “Arauco Domado” or “Historica Relacion” by the Jesuit Alonso de Ovalle.

In the 1940s, Pablo Neruda set out to write a “Canto general de Chile.” Later he broadened his initial project, developed it and ended by publishing it as “Canto General.” The tendency to explicate without ever reaching definitive conclusions, to depict the country, has been never-ending. And inevitably it is contradictory and partial because there is no one Chile, and, especially, there is no one way of being Chilean. In Allende’s book, country is a history of family and also of literature. Identity is sustained by familiar recollections of childhood and adolescence: scrapbooks, small religious cards, family memoirs. And it is writing that imposes coherence upon those reflections, making the organization of memory possible.

“My Invented Country” is a mixture of questions that remain unanswered -- or half-answered -- and of scattered affirmations. Allende is remembering an earlier time, vanished now except in her consciousness. She says, for example, that women do not have the same opportunities as men in regard to political power. This statement was valid 30 years ago, but now it seems less so. Michelle Bachelet, minister of defense, and Soledad Alvear, minister of foreign relations, are never in less than second or third place in polls for the next presidential election. And even in past generations it was argued, with good evidence, that Chile is the closest thing to a matriarchy. There is a long line of strong women behind or at the side of power, of grand, dominant females.

Some of Allende’s theses take me back to the vanished Chile of my youth; some, on the other hand, are absolutely current. She writes that things are very slow in reaching Chile, yet it seems to me that the neoliberal economy in Chile is raging at a nearly dizzying pace. Among my personal nostalgias is my longing for the provincial country in which it took a great effort to maintain contact with the outside world, where a certain magazine that arrived at the one French bookshop in Santiago or the appearance of such and such an author in the showcase of the English bookstore was like manna from heaven. In those years, reading a book by Albert Camus or William Faulkner was sublime and, in a certain way, magical, and I still recall the feeling of absorbing the pages like a sponge. Now we are bombarded with information, and time to give our full attention to music or to reading a book is a treasure we can no longer claim.

Allende writes a little disparagingly of the Chileans’ so-called legalism. She says that Gen. Augusto Pinochet maneuvered a change in the constitution and organized a plebiscite to determine his own continuation in power -- all owing to an obsession with legalities. The truth is that it isn’t easy to understand, especially from outside the country, that a dictator would put his authority to an electoral test and then accept the negative results. But a strict respect for the law, something that in Chile’s past was known as “state religion,” was how the founders of the republic prevented the anarchy that had dominated nearly all the rest of Spanish America. If we found a means by which to emerge from a dictatorship in a peaceful manner, however mediocre or limited the transition, that isn’t all bad. Our famous criollo legalism should be celebrated. It does produce bureaucracy, and it tends to entrench a gray, probably boring order, but I prefer that to bloody violence, however colorful.

Some of the observations in “My Invented Country” are lucid, original and expounded with an unquestionable sense of humor. We are, as Allende indicates, overly prudent, unforthcoming, frightened of what the neighbors will say. We are brimming over with secrets and have closets crammed with skeletons; we have an endless stream of stories, whether of our families or others’. We are also naive, meek and limited in resources -- and that applies both to the material world and to imagination.

Allende claims, for example, that we have very little gastronomic imagination but that we use our creativity in giving names to our dishes: beat-up fools, head cheese and nun’s sighs, among others. This is an amusing observation and not as trivial as it might at first seem. Our timidity, our lack of expression, our opaque behavior in everyday life find compensation in verbal richness. Allende describes our conversations, our fondness for gossip and our laughter. I leave, return and find myself in this ambience, this constant exercise of language, this game. I have seen respectable Santiago gentlemen laugh so hard that they fell off their chairs.

It is probable, on the other hand, that the modernization of customs has introduced elements of circumspection, of dissembling and greater self-control. I can remember families that caroused together, never speaking of it, never admitting it, in at-home blowouts with mad dancing and pillows -- or more substantial objects -- tossed at one another’s heads. I’m afraid such celebrations are lost to us now, to our misfortune. Just as we have lost the eccentrics of the old Santiago landscape: Mad Manuel, Incandescent Isaac, Phantom Federico.

It seems to me that here we approach one of the keys of our theme. We are an opaque, grayish, cautious society, but we have a curious capacity for verbalizing. Which is why we are a country of poets and writers, of obsessive explicators and fabulists. We are melancholy, shy, discreet, yes, but there is always some euphoric double hidden away in our hall closets.

“My Invented Country” is part essay and part autobiography. When Allende poses sweeping general truths, she leaves room for argument. When with broad brushstrokes she summarizes recent history, I am not completely convinced. But the book gets my undivided attention when it expounds on the relationship of the author to that country of hers, invented, imaginary, fictional, to the story of her family, which is itself invented memory, and to her vocation as a narrator. We discover that the writer, throughout a difficult life of wandering and uncertainty, acquired a certainty, a strong territory of her own, a grounding, in her narratives. This for writers, or nonwriters for that matter, is the most suggestive, most instructive, aspect of the work. It is arbitrary, imaginative, even capricious, but it has the virtues of that arbitrariness. It will evoke more than one mistaken notion and more than some disillusion, but it will also provoke curiosity. And that is where everything begins.