Isabel Allende and the truth about lies

May 24, 2003 By CHRIS WATSON SANTA CRUZ SENTINEL STAFF WRITER

Too many people in Isabel Allende’s family have called her a liar for her to dismiss the charges completely. x They say she spins family stories until they’re unrecognizable.

That she imagines and fabricates characters that never existed.

But the author of these tales — and of novels like "The House of the Spirits," "Eva Luna," "Paula," "Daughter of Fortune" and "Portrait in Sepia" — shrugs off the accusations.

"To be called a liar is awful," she said recently, "but I don’t care.

"And as Mario Vargas Llosa said in his essay ‘The Truth About Lies,’ a fiction writer must use lies to get at the truth sometimes."

It comes with the territory of fiction.

One story no one has a quarrel with, however, is Allende’s story of where she was on Tuesday, 9/11.

But if you ask her about it, be sure to specify which 9/11, which Tuesday — 2001 or 1973 — you want to know about.

On Tuesday, at the Capitola Book Cafe, Allende will talk about her new book, "My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile," which orbits those two significant years in the two countries she calls home — Chile and the USA

"On Sept. 11, 2001, I was at home in California, having a shower, when the phone rang," she said recently from her home in Northern California. "It was my mother from Chile, and she was crying.

"I thought she must be crying about what happened in Chile on Sept. 11, 1973; but she said, ‘no, no, turn on the TV.’ ’’

On the very day the World Trade Center was destroyed in New York, Chileans were remembering the bombs that had leveled the presidential palace in Santiago, Chile, on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 1973 — the bombs that signaled the military overthrow of president Salvador Allende, Isabel’s uncle.

"In 1973 in Santiago," Allende remembered, "I got up early to go to work. The streets were empty, no buses, no traffic, only military convoys going by.

"I drove downtown and stopped at a friend’s house who had a telephone and tried to call my in-laws. Then I heard on the radio that there was a military coup.

"My friend’s husband, a teacher, was trapped downtown, so I went to pick him up. The school was empty, and he was listening to the radio and crying. The radio announced that they were asking the president to surrender, and he wouldn’t and that they would give him half an hour and then they would bomb the palace.

"My friend and I went up to the roof of the school and watched the bombing of the palace, watched the panic, the fires."

For Allende, the terrorist act in New York and the CIA-orchestrated terror in Chile still resonate harmonically.

She writes in "My Invented Country":

"That distant Tuesday in 1973 my life was split in two; nothing was ever the same, I lost a country. That fateful Tuesday in 2001 was also a decisive moment; nothing will ever again be the same, and I gained a country."

With "one foot in California and one foot in Chile," Allende writes that were it not for the events of 1973, she would never have become a writer, never have married an American, lived in California or "lived with nostalgia for so long, or be writing these particular pages."

"My Invented Country" is Allende’s salute to the places, people and events that turned her into the writer she is today. It is a book filled with the geography, politics and history of Chile and with stories about the author’s "weird" family and the places that served, for a time, as her homes-away-from-home — Bolivia, Venezuela, Brussels, Beirut.

A memoir that contains more delight than angst, "My Invented Country" serves also, at times, as a travelogue of Chile, the most civilized of Latin American countries, in some opinions.

Allende’s memoir also works as a vindication of her trademark blend of magical realism — a heady mixture of what is mythic, what is real and what is remembered by the heart.

She writes:

"(My grandmother) introduced me to magical realism long before the so-called boom in Latin American literature made it fashionable."

"Besides," she said, "with my family, you don’t have to invent much."

In the memoir, Allende rationalizes her blurring of fiction and facts. At other times, she carefully profiles the real people who were the models for characters in "The House of the Spirits," "Eva Luna" and other stories.

Still, anyone who’s read her novels will be hard-pressed to distinguish absolutely between what is real and is imagined.

And in truth, that blurring of exterior and interior worlds has affected Allende’s personal life.

In "The House of the Spirits," for example, she discovered that a character she thought was a total invention — the French count — turned out to bear frightening similarities to the father who abandoned her when she was little.

It was only when literary critics began to point it out that she began to recognize the impact of his abandonment on her life.

"I thought I never missed him," she said, "but there are no loving fathers in my fiction, and all the women in my books are strong."

One of the spookiest blendings of fact and fiction occurred around the writing of Allende’s second novel, "Of Love and Shadows," based on a true political crime that occurred during the dictatorship of Pinochet.

"The novel was based on a real case, about people who disappeared during a dictatorship and whose bodies were found five years later in an abandoned mine."

What facts she didn’t know — who found the bodies and how— she invented.

Only later, when a Jesuit priest visited her and asked how she knew he’d heard about the murder in confession, how she knew what he was wearing and that he drove a motorcycle to the mine, did Allende feel a shiver go up her spine.

"When I found out that, to the smallest detail, it was true, I felt panic. I felt that all stories do exist, that I just tap into them.

"And I felt," she added, "that the written word has tremendous power and that a writer has a terrible responsibility."

Allende’s talent, though, is wider than the grave politics that so deeply etch her work.

Her sense of humor, for example, has survived, and is well-displayed in this memoir.

She writes:

• "In my family . . . the national sport is to talk about the person who just left the room.
• "We Chileans are enchanted by states of emergency.
• "We Chileans enjoy funerals, because the dead person is no longer a rival, and now he can’t backstab us.
• "In my family nearly all the men studied law, although I don’t remember a single one who passed the bar. Chileans love laws, the more complicated the better. Nothing fascinates us as much as red tape and multiple forms." Allende hopes, if nothing else, that her memoir incites travelers to visit one of the most enchanting places on earth.

"You should go during our winter, when it’s summer there," she said.

"Take a tour to the south, cross the seven lakes to Argentina. There’s wonderful food everywhere, and the transportation is safe and modern. Chile is not like other Latin American countries where things don’t work. The coffee is good, the beds are good and the bathrooms are clean."

Could she be telling the truth?

Should we believe her?

While we decide, let’s relax and drink a toast to weird families everywhere.

What follows is Allende’s mother’s recipe for Pisco Sours, a preferred drink at summer gatherings in Chile.

Pisco Sours

Mix in a blender:

1 portion lemon juice 4 portions of Peruvian Pisco (a clear liquor similar to tequila) a little whiskey sugar to taste crushed ice Add one egg white (not whipped) and blend again.

Contact Chris Watson at cwatson@santa-cruz.com. If You Go WHO: Isabel Allende, ‘My Invented Country.’ WHERE: Capitola Book Cafe, 1475 41st. Ave., Capitola. TIME: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. DETAILS: 462-6035.