Paula (26 page)

In the next three years, the government of the Popular Unity nationalized Chile's natural resources—copper, iron, nitrates, coal—which had been in foreign hands for years, refusing to pay even a symbolic dollar of compensation. It dramatically expanded agrarian reform, dividing among campesinos the large landholdings of the old and powerful families, an act that unleashed unprecedented hatred; it broke up monopolies that for decades had impeded competition in the marketplace and forced those companies to sell their goods at a price within reach of most Chileans. Children were given milk at school, clinics were organized in marginal neighborhoods, and the incomes of the very poorest were raised to reasonable levels. These changes were cause for jubilant popular demonstrations in support of the government; nevertheless, Allende's own supporters refused to face the fact that the reforms had to be paid for and that the solution did not lie in printing more money. It was not long before the onset of economic chaos and political violence. Outside Chile, the changes were being followed with great interest, for here was a small Latin American nation that had chosen the path of peaceful revolution. Abroad, Allende had always enjoyed the image of a progressive leader determined to improve the lot of workers and to overcome economic and social injustices, but inside Chile half the population detested him and the country was irreconcilably divided. The United States, edgy about the possibility that Allende's ideas might succeed and socialism spread irrevocably through the remainder of the continent, withdrew its credit and set up an economic blockade. Undermining from the Right, and errors by the Popular Unity itself, produced a crisis of never-before-seen proportions; inflation reached such astronomic numbers that it was impossible to know in the morning how much a liter of milk would cost by evening. There was paper money to burn, but very little to buy with it; long lines formed to buy essential products: oil, toothpaste, sugar, automobile tires. A black market was inevitable. For my birthday, my friends at work gave me two rolls of toilet paper and a can of condensed milk, the most coveted products of the moment. Like everybody in Chile, we were victims of anxiety about shortages. Sometimes we stood in line only out of fear of missing something, even if the reward was yellow shoe polish. A new occupation sprang up, hustlers who held your place in line, or bought products at the official price and then sold them for twice that amount. Nicolás became expert at getting cigarettes for Granny. My mother, through mysterious channels, sent me boxes of food from Buenos Aires, but her instructions were often garbled and we would receive a gallon of soy sauce or two dozen jars of pickled onions. In exchange we sent her grandchildren to her every two or three months. They traveled by themselves, with name and identification on signs around their necks. Tío Ramón convinced them that the magnificent embassy was his summer home, and if the children had ever had any doubt about their princely origins, it was thereby dissipated. To keep them from being bored, he gave them jobs in his office; the first wages of their lives were received from the hands of their formidable grandfather for services rendered as subsecretaries to the consulate's secretaries. That was also where they suffered through mumps and chicken pox, hiding in the twenty-three bathrooms so no one could take the stool sample needed for a medical examination.

We Chileans had always taken great pride in the fact that our chiefs of state had no bodyguards and that the courtyard of the Palacio de La Moneda was a public street. That all ended with Salvador Allende. Hatred had been aggravated to such a degree that associates feared for his life. His enemies were accumulating supplies to ambush him. This socialist president roared through the streets with twenty armed men in a flotilla of identical blue automobiles, none with distinctive markings, so that no one could know which one he was in. Before Allende, the president had lived in his own home, but Allende's house was small and did not lend itself to that role. So amid a barrage of hateful criticism, the government acquired a mansion in an upper-class neighborhood to serve as the official residence, and the Allende family was transported there with pre-Columbian ceramics, paintings collected over long years, works of art given by the artists themselves, inscribed first editions of books, and photographs recording important moments of Allende's political career. I had the opportunity to attend one or two gatherings in the new residence, where still the only topic of conversation was politics. When my parents came from Argentina, the president invited us to a summer house high in the hills near the capital, where he liked to spend weekends. After lunch we watched absurd cowboy movies, which he found relaxing. The bedrooms that opened onto the patio were occupied by a group of volunteer bodyguards that Allende called “my personal friends” and whom his opposition qualified as terrorist guerrillas and murderers. Some of them were always around, alert, armed, and prepared to protect him with their own bodies. One of those days in the country, Allende tried to teach us to target shoot with a rifle given him by Fidel Castro, the same weapon found beside his body the day of the military coup. I, who had never held a gun in my hands, and had grown up on Tata's adage that “The Devil loads the charge in firearms,” grabbed the rifle as if it were an umbrella and in clumsily shifting my grasp unwittingly pointed it at Allende's head. One of the guards immediately materialized out of thin air, jumped on me, and rolled me to the ground. That is one of the few memories I have of Allende during the three years of his government. I saw him less than I had before; I was not involved in politics and in fact continued to work at the publishing house he considered his worst enemy, without any idea of what was happening in the country.

Who was Salvador Allende? I don't really know, and it would be pretentious of me to offer a definitive portrait of him; it would take volumes, anyway, to describe his complex personality, the difficulty of his program, and the role he occupies in history. For years, I thought of him as just another uncle in a large family, the one representative on my father's side; it was only after his death and after leaving Chile that I became aware of his legendary dimensions. In private, he was a good friend to his friends and loyal to the point of imprudence; he could not conceive of betrayal and when he was betrayed found it nearly impossible to believe. I remember how quick he was with answers, and his sense of humor. He had been defeated in two campaigns but was still young when a journalist asked him what he would like to have engraved on his tombstone, and he replied instantly,
Here lies the future president of Chile
. In my view, his most outstanding characteristics were integrity, intuition, courage, and charisma: he followed his hunches, which rarely failed him, he did not turn away from risk, and he had the ability to captivate both masses and individuals. It was said that he could manipulate any situation to his advantage and that was why on the day of the coup the generals did not dare face him in person but chose to communicate by telephone and through messengers. He assumed the role of president with such dignity that it seemed arrogance; he had the bombastic gestures of a classical orator, and a characteristic way of walking with his chest out and holding himself very straight, almost on tiptoe, like a fighting cock. He slept very little at night, only three or four hours; you would see him at dawn reading or playing chess with his most faithful friends, but he could sleep for only a few minutes, usually in his automobile, and wake refreshed. He was a refined man, a lover of pedigreed dogs, objets d'art, elegant clothes, and strong women. He was very careful of his health, and prudent with food and alcohol. His enemies accused him of being a womanizer, and kept a close accounting of his bourgeois tastes, his lovers, his suede jackets, and silk neckties. Half the population feared he would lead the country into a Communist dictatorship and were ready to prevent that at any cost, while the other half celebrated the socialist experiment with murals of flowers and doves.

All this time, I was on another planet, doing my frivolous magazine articles and zany television programs, never suspecting the true proportions of the violence gestating in the shadows that finally would fall over all of us. In the midst of the national crisis, Delia, my boss at the magazine, sent me to interview Salvador Allende and ask what he thought about Christmas. We were readying the December issue some months in advance and in October it was not easy to approach a president who had urgent matters of state on his mind. I took advantage, however, of one of Allende's visits to my parents' home and timidly broached the subject to him. “Don't ask me bullshit like that, Isabel,” was his bald reply. And so began and ended my career as a political correspondent. I continued to knock out homemade horoscopes, articles on interior decoration, gardens, and raising children, interviews with the odd and bizarre, the lovelorn column, and pieces on culture, art, and travel. Delia didn't trust me; she accused me of making up my interviews without ever leaving the house, and of putting my own opinions in the mouths of my subjects, and so she rarely gave me important assignments.

As problems of scarcities grew worse, the tension became unbearable and Granny began drinking more heavily. Following her husband's instructions, she joined her neighbors in the streets to protest food shortages in the traditional way: beating pots and pans. The men stayed out of sight while women marched with frying pans and cooking spoons in an apocalyptic clatter. That sound is unforgettable: it would begin with a solitary gong, then clanging was added from various other patios until the contagion spread and everyone got into the spirit; soon the women were out in the street and a deafening racket turned half the city into a living hell. Granny always tried to position herself at the head of a demonstration in order to prevent it from passing our house, where everyone knew one of the Allende family lived. Even so, in the eventuality that some bellicose ladies were moved to attack, the hose was always at the ready to dissuade them with streams of cold water. Ideological differences had not altered my camaraderie with my mother-in-law; we shared the children, the burdens of everyday life, our plans and hopes, and in our hearts we both thought nothing could separate us. To provide her a bit of independence, I opened a bank account in her name, but after three months had to close it because Granny never understood the mechanics of the transactions; she thought that as long as she had checks in the checkbook there was money in the account. She never wrote down what she spent, and in less than a week had used all her funds buying gifts for her grandchildren. Neither did politics alter the peace between Michael and me; we loved each other and were good companions.

It was then that my passion for theater began. Tío Ramón was named ambassador just at the time that kidnapping public figures became the vogue throughout Latin America. The possibility that it might happen to him served as inspiration for a play in which a group of guerrillas kidnaps a diplomat to exchange him for political prisoners. I dashed it off in a frenzy; I sat down at the typewriter and couldn't sleep or eat until I wrote the final word three days later. A prestigious theater company agreed to produce it, and so one night I found myself reading it with the actors, all of us sitting around a table on a cold, drafty, bare stage under a single lightbulb, wearing our overcoats and clutching thermos bottles with hot tea. Each actor read and analyzed his part, pointing out the whopping errors in the text. As the reading progressed, I slid farther and farther down in my chair, until I was barely visible above the table. At the end, thoroughly ashamed, I picked up the scripts and went home and rewrote the play from the first line, studying each character separately to give him or her coherence. The second version was better, but it lacked tension and a dramatic denouement. I attended all the rehearsals and incorporated most of the modifications suggested to me, and in so doing learned a few tricks that would prove to be helpful for my novels. Ten years later, when I was writing
The House of the Spirits,
I remembered those sessions around the table in the empty theater and tried to give each character a complete biography, a defined personality, and an individual voice—although, in the case of that book, the outrages of history and a tenacious lack of discipline on the part of the spirits undercut my intentions. The play, logically enough, was called
The Ambassador,
and I dedicated it to Tío Ramón, who did not get to see it because he was in Buenos Aires. It opened to good reviews but I could not take credit because it was actually the director and actors who made the work—only a few strands of my original idea survived. I do wonder sometimes whether it may not have saved my stepfather from being kidnapped, because, according to the law of probabilities, it was impossible that what I had written for the stage could happen in real life. It did not, I am sorry to say, protect another diplomat who was abducted in Uruguay and forced to undergo the ordeals I had imagined in the security of my home in Santiago. Now I am more careful about what I write, because I have found out that although something is not true today, it may be true tomorrow. A different theater company asked me for a play, and for them I wrote two musical comedies that we called
café-concierto
for lack of a better name, and they enjoyed an unexpected success. The second piece was memorable because it included a chorus of fat women to enliven the spectacle with singing and dancing. It was not easy to find attractive, overweight soubrettes willing to make fools of themselves on the stage, so the director and I took up positions on a busy corner in the center of the city and stopped every fleshy prospect we saw go by to ask if she would like to be an actress. Many accepted enthusiastically, but as soon as they understood the demands of the work couldn't get away fast enough. It took several weeks to find six aspirants for the role. There was no space in the theater because of the current production, so we moved all the furniture out of our small living room and rehearsed there. We did have an out-of-tune piano which, in a flight of fancy, I had painted lime green and decorated with a courtesan reclining on a divan. The entire house shook with seismic shuddering when that monumental chorus minced as Greek vestal virgins, bopped to the rhythm of rock 'n' roll, flirted petticoats in a frenetic cancan, and pirouetted on point to the chords of a
Swan Lake
that would have given Tchaikovsky a heart attack. Michael had to reinforce both the stage and the floor of our house to prevent their giving way beneath that pachydermal onslaught. The women, who had never had a day's physical exercise, began to shed pounds at an alarming rate, and to save that sensuous flesh from melting away, Granny fed them great pots of creamed noodles and apple tarts. For the opening of the play, we put up a sign in the foyer requesting that instead of sending the chorus girls flowers, please to order pizza. With these efforts, we were able to preserve the rounded hills and deep valleys of vast carnal topographies throughout two long years of arduous performances, including a national tour. Michael was enthusiastic about this artistic adventure, and attended so often that he knew the parts by heart and in an emergency could have replaced any of the actors, including the voluminous vestal virgins. You and Nicolás learned the songs, too, and ten years later, when I couldn't remember even the titles, you two could perform them from start to finish. My grandfather went several times, first out of a sense of family, and then for the pleasure, and every time the curtain fell he jumped to his feet with hurrahs and applause and flourishes of his cane. He fell in love with the chorus girls and offered long disquisitions on plumpness as an element of beauty and the sin against nature represented by the undernourished models in fashion magazines. His ideal of beauty was embodied in the owner of his liquor shop, with her Valkyrian breasts and epic buttocks and the good nature that prompted her to sell him gin disguised in bottles for mineral water. He dreamed of her on the sly, so Memé's vigilant ghost would not catch him in the act.