My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile Page 6

  Chilean women are abettors of machismo: they bring up their daughters to serve and their sons to be served. While on the one hand they fight for their rights and work tirelessly, on the other, they wait on their husband and male children, assisted by their daughters, who from an early age are well instructed regarding their obligations. Modern girls are rebelling, of course, but the minute they fall in love they repeat the learned pattern, confusing love with service. It makes me sad to see splendid girls waiting on their boyfriends as if they were invalids. They not only serve the meal, they offer to cut the meat. It makes me unhappy because I was the same way. Not long ago a TV comic, a man dressed as a woman, scored a great hit by imitating a model wife. Poor Elvira—that was his name—ironed shirts, cooked complicated meals, did the children’s homework, waxed the floor by hand, and flew around to put on nice clothes and makeup before her husband came home from work, so he wouldn’t find her ugly. Elvira never rested, and everything was always her fault. One time she even ran a marathon behind the bus her husband was taking to work, to hand him the briefcase he had forgotten. The program made men howl with laughter, but it bothered the women so much that finally it was taken off the air; wives didn’t like seeing themselves portrayed so faithfully by the ineffable Elvira.

  My American husband, who takes responsibility for half the chores in our house, is scandalized by Chilean machismo. When a man washes the plate he’s eaten from, he considers that he’s “helping” his wife or mother, and expects to be praised for his effort. Among our Chilean friends there is always some woman who’ll serve breakfast in bed to adolescent boys, wash their clothes, and make their bed. If there’s no nana, the mother or a sister does it, something that would seldom happen in the United States. Willie was also horrified by the institution of the maid. I prefer not to tell him that in the past the duties of these women were even more intimate, although that was never discussed openly: mothers looked the other way and the fathers boasted of their sons’ backstairs feats. He’s a tiger, they would say, remembering their own experiences, a “chip off the old block.” The general idea was for the boy to satisfy his sexual needs with the maid, so he wouldn’t “go too far” with a girl of his own social class; and after all, a maid was safer than a prostitute. In rural areas there was a local version of the Spanish derecho a pernada, which in feudal times allowed the lord to bed any bride on the night of her wedding. In Chile, the tradition was never that organized: the patron just went to bed with anyone and at any time he pleased. So the landowners sowed their lands with bastards, and even today there are regions where nearly everyone has the same last name. (One of my ancestors knelt to pray after every rape: “Lord, I don’t do this for fun and games, only for more sons to serve in Your name . . .”) 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 matters of education and health, Chilean women are at or above the level of the men, but not in opportunities and political power. The normal pattern in the workforce is that they do the hard work and the men direct. Very few women occupy high posts in government, industry, or private or public enterprise; they bump into that ever-present glass ceiling. When a woman does reach a top-level position, let’s say, minister in the government or director of a bank, it is cause for amazement and admiration. In the last ten years, however, public opinion is registering positive for women as political leaders: they are seen as a viable alternative because they have demonstrated that they are often more honest, efficient, and hardworking than men. What a revelation! When women organize, they wield great influence, but they seem unaware of their own strength. There was the example, for instance, during the administration of Salvador Allende, when rightist women went out beating pots and pans to protest shortages and to dump chicken feathers in front of the Military School, inciting the soldiers to subversion. They helped foment the military coup. Years later, women were the first to go out and publicly denounce military repression, confronting water hoses, nightsticks, and bullets. They formed a powerful group called “Women for Life,” which played a fundamental role in overturning the dictatorship of Pinochet, but after the election they decided to dissolve the movement. Once more they ceded their power to men.

  I should clarify that Chilean women, who are so slow to fight for political power, are true guerrillas when it comes to love. In affairs of the heart, they are truly dangerous, and, it must be said, they fall in love with considerable frequency. According to the statistics, 58 percent of married women are unfaithful. I wonder if couples don’t often switch: while the man seduces his friend’s wife, his own spouse is in the same hotel in the arms of his friend. In colonial times, when Chile was part of the vice-regency of Lima, the Inquisition sent a Dominican priest from Peru to accuse a number of women of high social standing of engaging in oral sex with their husbands. (And how did they know that?) The trial never went anywhere because the women in question refused to be browbeaten. The night after the trial they sent their husbands—who somehow or other must have participated in the sin, though only the women were being judged—to dissuade the inquisitor. They overtook him in a dark, narrow street and without further ado they castrated him, like a steer. The poor Dominican returned to Lima sans testicles, and the matter was never mentioned again.

  Though not reaching quite such extremes, I have a story about a friend who couldn’t rid himself of an impassioned lover until finally one day he escaped while she was taking a siesta. He had packed a few belongings in an overnight bag and was running down the street after a taxi when he felt something like a bear crash onto his shoulders, throwing him to the ground, where he lay squashed like a cockroach. It was his lover, who had charged after him, completely naked and screeching like a banshee. People ran from houses all over the neighborhood to enjoy the spectacle. The men were amused, but as soon as the women realized what was going on, they helped the “wronged” woman hold down my slippery friend, and then among them they lifted him up and carted him back to the bed he’d abandoned during siesta time.

  I could give three hundred additional examples, but surely these are enough.

  PRAYING TO GOD

  The account I just gave you about those ladies of the colonial era, the ones who defied the Inquisition, marks an exceptional moment in our history because in reality the power of the Catholic Church is irrefutable, and now with the strength of fundamentalist Catholic movements like the Opus Dei and the Legionarios de Cristo behind it, that power is even more unassailable.

  Chileans are very religious, although in practice that has a lot more to do with fetishism and superstition than with mystic restiveness or theological enlightenment. No Chilean calls him or herself an atheist, not even dyed-in-the-wool communists, because the term is considered an insult. The word agnostic is preferred, and usually even the strongest nonbelievers are converted on their deathbeds since they risk too much if they don’t, and a last-hour confession never hurt anyone. This spiritual compulsion rises from the earth itself: a people who live amid mountains logically turn their eyes toward the heavens. Manifestations of faith are impressive. Convoked by the Church, thousands and thousands of young people carrying candles and flowers march in long processions giving praise to the Virgin Mary or praying for peace at a deafening decibel level, screaming with the enthusiasm teenagers in other countries exhibit at rock concerts. It used to be enormously popular to say the rosary as a family, and the celebrations of the month of Mary always scored a great success, but recently the television soaps have boasted more fans.

  As you might expect, an esoteric strain runs through my family. One of my uncles has spent seventy years of his life preaching about the encounter with nothingness. He has many followers. If I had paid attention to him when I was young, I wouldn’t be studying Buddhism today and trying fruitlessly to stand on my head in my yoga class. When it comes to matters of holiness, however, that poor demented hundr
ed-year-old woman who disguised herself as a nun and tried to reform the prostitutes on Calle Maipú can’t hold a candle to my great-aunt who sprouted wings. They weren’t wings with golden feathers, like those of Renaissance angels, that would have attracted everyone’s attention; they were discreet little stumps on her shoulders, erroneously diagnosed by doctors as a bone deformity. Sometimes, depending on where the light was coming from, we could see a halo like a plate of light floating above her head. I recounted her drama in the Stories of Eva Luna, and I don’t want to repeat it here. It’s enough to say that in contrast with the Chilean’s general tendency to complain about everything, she was always content, even though she had a tragic fate. In another person that attitude of unfounded happiness would have been unpardonable, but in such a transparent woman it was easy to tolerate. I have always kept her photograph on my desk so I will recognize her when she slips slyly into the pages of a book or appears in some corner of the house.

  In Chile there is a plethora of saints of all stripes, which isn’t strange, considering it is the most Catholic country in the world—more Catholic than Ireland, and certainly much more so than the Vatican. A few years ago we had a young girl, in appearance very like the statue of Saint Sebastian the Martyr, who performed amazing cures. The press and television swarmed all over her, as well as multitudes of pilgrims who never gave her a moment’s peace. When she was examined more closely, she turned out to be a transvestite, but that did nothing to detract from her prestige or put an end to her marvels. Just the opposite. Every so often we wake up with the announcement that another saint or new Messiah has made his or her appearance, which never fails to attract hopeful throngs. In the seventies, when I was working as a journalist, I happened to write an article about a girl who was credited with having the gift of prophecy and a faculty for curing animals and restoring dead engines to working order. The humble little house where she lived was filled with the country folk who came every day, always at the same hour, to witness her discreet miracles. They swore that they heard an inexplicable rain of rocks on the roof of the hut, rattling like the end of the world, and that the earth would tremble and the girl would fall into a trance. I had the opportunity to attend a couple of these events, and I witnessed the trance, during which the young saint displayed the extraordinary physical strength of a gladiator, but I don’t recall any rocks from the skies or quaking earth. It’s possible, as a local evangelical preacher explained, that these things failed to occur because I was there, a skeptic capable of ruining even the most legitimate miracle. No matter, the phenomenon was reported in the newspapers, and people’s interest in the saint kept rising until the army came and put an end to everything in its own way. I used her story ten years later in one of my novels.

  Catholics form a majority in Chile, although there are more and more Evangelicals and Pentecostals who irritate everyone because they have a direct understanding with God while everyone else must pass through the priestly bureaucracy. The Mormons, who are also numerous and very powerful, serve their followers as a valuable employment agency, the way that members of the Radical Party used to do. Whoever is left is either Jewish, Muslim, or, in my generation, a New Age spirtualist, which is a cocktail of ecological, Christian, and Buddhist practices, along with a few rituals recently rescued from the Indian reservations, and with the usual accompaniment of gurus, astrologists, psychics, and other spiritual guides. Since the health care system was privatized and pharmaceuticals became an immoral business, folkloric and Eastern medicine, machis or meicas, our Indian healers, and self-taught herbalists and purveyors of miraculous cures have in part replaced traditional medicine, with equally effective results. Half of my friends are in the hands of a psychic who controls their destinies and keeps them safe by cleansing their auras, laying on hands, or leading them on astral journeys. The last time I was in Chile, I was hypnotized by a friend who is studying to be a curandero, a healer, who led me back through several incarnations. It wasn’t easy to return to the present, however, since my friend hadn’t reached that part of the course, but the experiment was well worth the effort because I discovered that in former lives I was not Genghis Khan, as my mother believes.

  I have not succeeded in completely shaking free of religion, and when I’m faced with any difficulty, the first thing that occurs to me is to pray, just in case, which is what all Chileans do, even atheists . . . forgive me, agnostics. Let’s say I need a taxi. Experience has taught me that once through the Lord’s Prayer will make one appear. There was a time, somewhere between infancy and the age of fifteen, when I nursed the fantasy of being a nun as a way of disguising the fact that I most surely was not going to find a husband, and to this day I haven’t completely discarded that fancy. I am still assailed by the temptation to end my days in poverty, silence, and solitude in a Benedictine order or a Buddhist convent. Theological subtleties are not what count with me, what I like is the lifestyle. Despite my unconquerable frivolity, the monastic life attracts me. When I was fifteen, I left the church forever and acquired a horror of religions in general and monotheistic faiths in particular. I am not alone in this predicament; many women my age, guerrillas in the battle for women’s lib, are similarly uncomfortable in patriarchal religions—can you think of one that isn’t?—and they have had to invent their own cults, although in Chile even cults have a Christian bent. However animist someone may claim to be, there will always be a cross somewhere in her house, or around her neck. My religion, should anyone be interested, can be reduced to a simple question: What is the most generous thing one can do in this case? If that question doesn’t apply, I have another: What would my grandfather think about this? None of which relieves me of the compulsion to cross myself in my hour of need.

  I used to say that Chile is a fundamentalist country, but after seeing the excesses of the Taliban, I have to moderate my opinion. Maybe we’re not fundamentalists, but we’re close. We have been fortunate in that in Chile, unlike other countries in Latin America, the Catholic Church—with a few regrettable exceptions—has almost always been on the side of the poor, which has gained it enormous respect and sympathy. During the dictatorship, many priests and nuns took on the task of helping the victims of repression, and they paid dearly for it. As Pinochet said in 1979, “the only persons going around crying for democracy to be restored in Chile are the politicians and one or two priests.” That was the period when the generals posited that Chile was blessed with “a totalitarian democracy.”

  Churches are filled on Sundays, and the pope is venerated, although no one pays any attention to his views on contraceptives because it’s thought that there’s no way an aged celibate who doesn’t have to work for a living can be an expert on that subject. Religion is colorful and ritualistic. We don’t have Carnival, but we do have processions. Every saint is noted for his or her special power, like the gods on Olympus: restoring sight to the blind, punishing unfaithful husbands, finding a sweetheart, protecting drivers. The most popular, however, is undoubtedly Padre Hurtado, who isn’t a saint as yet, though we all hope he soon will be, no matter that the Vatican is not noted for swift action. This amazing priest founded a center for good works called “The Home of Christ,” which today is a multimillion-dollar enterprise devoted entirely to aiding the poor. Padre Hurtado is so miraculous that I have seldom asked him for something that hasn’t been granted, after I have made some significant sacrifice or contributed a fair sum to his charitable works. I must be one of the few people alive who have read the three complete volumes of the ageless epic La Araucana, in rhyme and old Spanish. I didn’t do it out of curiosity, or to pretend to be cultured, but to fulfill a promise to Padre Hurtado. This man of good heart maintained that a moral crisis is produced when the same affluent Catholics who faithfully go to mass deny their workers a dignified wage. These words should be engraved on the thousand-peso note, so we never forget them.

  There are also various representations of the Virgin Mary, which compete among themselves: those faithful to the
Virgen del Carmen, patron saint of the armed forces, believe that the Virgen de Lourdes or the Virgen de La Tirana are inferior, a sentiment returned with equal delicacy by the devout followers of the latter Virgins. Regarding La Tirana, it’s of interest to mention that in the summertime her festival is celebrated in a sanctuary near the city of Iquique, in the north of Chile, where various followers dance in her honor. The fiesta is a little like Brazil’s Carnival, but on a much more sedate scale: as I’ve said before, we Chileans are not the extroverts of Latin America. The dance studios prepare all year for the festival, practicing choreographed dances and making costumes, and on the scheduled day dancers perform before the statue of La Tirana, the men made up as heroes, like Batman, for example, and the girls wearing revealing blouses, skirts that barely cover the buttocks, and boots with high heels. It is not too surprising, therefore, that the Church does not sanction these demonstrations of popular faith.

  Not satisfied with a huge and multihued bevy of saints, we also have a delicious oral tradition of evil spirits, interventions of the devil, and dead who rise from their tombs. My grandfather swore that he saw the devil on a bus, and that he recognized him because he had green cloven hooves like a billygoat.

  In Chiloé, a group of islands off Puerto Montt in the south of the country, they tell tales of warlocks and malicious monsters: of La Pincoya, a beautiful damsel who rises from the water to trap unwary men, and the Caleuche, an enchanted ship that carries away the dead. On nights of the full moon, glowing lights indicate sites where treasures are hidden. It is said that in Chiloé there was for a long time a government of warlocks called the Recta Provincia, or Righteous Province, which met in caves by night. The guardians of those caves were the inbunches, fearsome creatures that feed on blood, and whose bones have been broken, and eyelids and anuses stitched shut, by witches. The Chilean’s imagination for cruelty never ceases to terrify me.