The few exiles who returned to the hospital were received with much less fanfare, because it was unwise to attract attention. This was the tacit slogan throughout the country: don’t provoke the military, so as to pretend the recent past was buried and in the process of being forgotten.
I discovered that social climbing was a middle-class phenomenon, the poor never gave it a thought, they were too busy trying to survive. Over the years these communities acquired political savvy, they organized and became fertile territory for leftist parties. Ten years later, in 1970, they were decisive in electing Salvador Allende and for that reason had to suffer the greatest repression during the dictatorship.
This was to be his most stubborn, persistent memory of the war: that fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boy, still smooth-cheeked, filthy with the dirt of battle and dried blood, laid out on a stretcher with his heart exposed to the air.
What I learned then helps now in my writing: working under pressure, conducting an interview, doing research, using the language efficiently. I never forget that a book is not an end in itself. Just like a newspaper or a magazine, a book is a means of communication, which is why I try to grab the reader by the throat and not let go to the end.
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.
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.
The elderly are the most entertaining people in the world, she eventually told Irina. They have loved a lot, say whatever they like, and couldn’t care less about other people’s opinion.
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.
Placed in a historic transition, I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life.
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 my case, it’s not so much wanting to live in Chile as it is the desire to recapture the certainty I feel there. That’s my home ground.
In Chile it is bad manners to acknowledge that you’re overly satisfied, because that can irritate the less fortunate, which is why for us the correct answer to the question “How are you?” is “So-so.” That is an opening for sympathizing with the other speaker’s situation.
Sociologists say that forty percent of Chileans suffer from depression, especially women, who have to put up with the men. You must remember, too, that our country goes through major disasters, and that there are many poor, so it seems rude to mention one’s own good fortune.
My grandmother claimed that space is filled with presences, the dead and the living all mixed together.
We distrust doctors because it’s obvious that good health does not promote good business, and we go to them only when everything else has failed, after we’ve tried all the remedies recommended by our friends and acquaintances.
The subjects that have replaced politics among Chileans are money, which there is never enough of, and soccer, which is a kind of consolation. The lowliest illiterate knows the names of all the players throughout our history, and has his own opinion of each.
I wait for you to complete the voyage into yourself, for the old wounds to heal. I know that when you return from your nightmares, we shall again walk hand in hand, as before.
I am grateful to that unhappy childhood because it provided ample material for my writing. I don’t know how novelists with happy childhoods in normal homes manage.
Captain Longfellow – who, like most Englishmen, was kinder to animals than to people.
AND SINCE we’re talking about nostalgia, I beg you to have a little patience with what follows because I can’t separate the subject of Chile from my own life. My past is composed of passions, surprises, successes, and losses: it isn’t easy to relate in two or three sentences.