In customs we are conservatives and traditionalists; we prefer the known evil to good yet to be learned, but in everything else we are always on the lookout for something new.
Superego is not the same as consciousness; the former punishes us and the latter guides us. I stopped listening to the overseer inside me who demands compliance and performance with the voice of my grandfather. The race uphill is over; now I stroll calmly in the land of intuition, which has turned out to be the best environment for writing.
All the women I know write, paint, sculpt, or do crafts in their leisure time – which is very scarce. Art has replaced knitting.
It never crosses your mind to praise something another person is wearing, because they’re certain to whip it off and give it to you. If there is food left from a meal, the genteel thing is to give it to the guests to take home, just as you never arrive at someone’s house with empty hands.
Despite this inexplicable superiority complex, visitors were always warmly received in our home, however vile they might be. In this sense, we Chileans are like the Arabs of the desert: the guest is sacred, and friendship, once declared, is an indissoluble bond.
I do not fear my vulnerability because I no longer confuse it with weakness.
Irina could not imagine the courage it took to grow old without becoming too frightened; her knowledge of age.
I don’t have to cultivate the image of fortitude instilled by my grandfather, which was very useful earlier in my life but not anymore; now I can ask for help and be sentimental.
Why had that woman tried to give me her baby? “It was a girl. No one wants a girl!” the driver answered.
The idea that everyone was equal was fine as a theoretical slogan, he said, but in practice it was an aberration. We are not equal in the eyes of.
Then we offer our guest “pot luck,” which means that the mistress of the house will take bread out of her children’s mouths to give to the visitor, who is obliged to accept it. If you receive a formal invitation, you can expect a gargantuan feast: the goal is to leave the guests moaning with indigestion for several days. Of course, women always do the hard work.
That is what I am attempting in my stumbling spiritual practice: to rid myself of the negative feelings that prevent walking with assurance. I want to transform rage into creative energy and guilt into a mocking acceptance of my faults; I want to sweep away arrogance and vanity.
I want to transform rage into creative energy and guilt into a mocking acceptance of my faults; I want to sweep away arrogance and vanity.
As a rightist senator pontificated, “When democracy gets democratic, it doesn’t work at all.
It’s very difficult to cut the throat of some creature with which you’ve established a personal relationship, as we could attest from the time my grandfather brought home a young goat to fatten in the patio of our house and roast on his birthday. That goat died of old age. And as it turned out, it wasn’t a nanny but a male, and as soon as it grew horns, it attacked us at will.
This is to assuage our conscience, darling,” she would explain to Blanca. “But it doesn’t help the poor.
I could never have invented such a clan. Actually, I had no need to, with a family like mine you don’t need imagination.
He had always been thin, but there he was reduced to nothing but skin and bones. His skin was burned by the unrelenting sun, salt, and sand, his features sharpened: he was a Giacometti sculpture in cast iron.
That huge old house, which had an entrance on two streets, was one-story tall with a mansard roof, and it harbored a tribe of great-grandparents, maiden aunts, cousins, servants, poor relatives, and guests who became permanent residents; no one tried to throw them out because in Chile “visitors” are protected by the sacred code of hospitality. There was also an occasional ghost of dubious authenticity, always in plentiful supply in my family.
My maternal aunts and uncles, the Barros, were twelve rather eccentric brothers and sisters, though none was hopelessly mad.