Chilean author Allende's journey to America crystallized on 9/11

Michael Kiefer The Arizona Republic Jun. 6, 2003 12:00 AM

Isabel Allende moved from Chile to San Francisco in 1988 to be with a man. She married that man so she could get a green card and stay in the country. She became an American citizen in 1992. But on Sept. 11, 2001, as the Twin Towers fell, the bestselling novelist finally decided that she had become American. The events of that day brought back painful memories of another Sept. 11, in 1973 - also a Tuesday - the day her uncle, Chilean President Salvador Allende, was killed in a military coup. "The images of burning buildings, smoke, flames and panic are similar in both settings," she writes in her new book, My Invented Country. "That distant Tuesday in 1973, my life was split in two; nothing was ever again 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." Allende, 60, is the author of 11 books, most of them fiction. "Among the more commercial writers, she's probably the one taken most seriously," says Raymond L. Williams, professor of Latin American literature at the University of California-Riverside. Yet here is one of Latin America's most famous living authors, calling herself a norteamericana, an estadounidense (a U.S. citizen). She wants to stay, not just for love of a man, but because she wants to belong, to take part. She'd lived away from her native Chile for many years - but as an exile. Now she is an immigrant. "The exile looks toward the past, licking his wounds," she writes, "the immigrant looks toward the future, ready to take advantage of the opportunities within his reach." On Tuesday, Allende will talk about that conversion in Tempe, where she will read from My Invented Country, which is now out in English. Expect a good show: Allende has as great a reputation for her speeches as for her outsized personality. "When I met her for the first time, I was dazzled," says friend and novelist Amy Tan. "She has these great big luminous eyes, and she has a funny mouth. She opens her mouth and - you have no idea - you think she's going to spout magical realism, based on everything you've read about her, and then she comes out with this dirty joke, and your mouth drops open and you can't believe what you heard."

Memories and whimsy

The new book is subtitled A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile, which doesn't let on that it's also a journey from Chile, through time as well as space, a critical look at a country Allende thinks she remembers. Her grandchildren tell her she recalls things that never happened. Indeed, the word inventado in the book's Spanish title is more whimsical than its nearest English equivalent, "invented," and it carries a stronger connotation of things made up. "From the moment I crossed the cordillera of the Andes one rainy winter morning," she writes, "I unconsciously began the process of inventing a country." Allende was a journalist in Chile in 1973 when Gen. Augusto Pinochet took control of the government. Two years later, because of her name and her politics, she fled to Venezuela with her husband and two children. Allende was a foreigner in Venezuela, and it tinged her books. The Spanish word for foreigner is extranjero, whose root is linked to the words extraño, "strange," and extrañar, "to miss or to long for." "I think it's good for a writer to be searching for roots, to cling to memory, to try to understand your circumstances," she said in a recent telephone interview. "You don't take anything for granted. You observe carefully. I think the writing comes from my need to preserve my memory and to find a place to plant my roots, because I don't have a geographical place. It has to be a mythical place or a metaphorical place, which is the books." Allende's debut as a novelist came unexpectedly. In 1981, she started a letter to her grandfather, who was dying, and it turned into her first novel, The House of the Spirits, which came out a year later. Allende was immediately lauded as a "magical realist," a term often used to describe the fiction of Nobel-prize winner Gabriel García Márquez. Simply put, it describes a playful and quasi-mystical storytelling style that seems to give equal weight to the probable and the improbable, tongue-in-cheek and straight-faced. Allende, an urban and urbane Chilean, was surprised to be categorized with a tropical Colombian. "We are perceived as one continent abroad," Allende says, "because these writers seemed so similar or familiar in a way, and they were writing different stories in different styles, but everything was under the big label of Latin American Magical Realism." And though they are culturally different, they share a language that allows a looser perception of reality, but that depicts a reality nonetheless. And both, as professor Williams points out, listened to stories passed down orally from grandparents, stories that later found their way into their fiction. Tan went to hear Allende read shortly after she published her own first novel, The Joy Luck Club. She was delighted when Allende introduced the ghost of her grandmother, who, she told the audience, was standing next to her. "I couldn't tell if she was joking or serious," Tan recalls, "because she just sort of turned to the side and introduced her grandmother, and you could practically see her grandmother there, she was so lively." Williams says that much of Allende's appeal lies in her storytelling abilities, partly because, like García Márquez, she started out as a journalist and "consequently understands quite well how to communicate to a large audience." Critics describe her as the most-read Latin American female writer; she has sold more than 35 million books in 30 languages. "She's had an exceptional life," Williams says, "and she has an incredible ability to tell stories about that." Allende sees this at the heart of her or any writer's work. "All that one writes is based on our own experience, or one writes about things one cares for," she says. Exile was too much for Allende's marriage. In 1988, she met William Gordon, who would become her second husband, and she began her odyssey toward becoming an American. But even that word is loaded. South and Central Americans, Canadians and Mexicans often bristle that we in the United States have appropriated the word "American" to describe ourselves. Technically, they're all "Americans." "I didn't want to become an American or move forever to this country," Allende says. "I was just having an affair with a guy that I fell in lust with. And then after we started living together, things started to work." She liked California, liked its yoga classes and bookstores, and most of all liked its freedoms in lifestyle and politics.

Marriage of convenience

Then her visa ran out and she had to leave the country. She didn't want to stay illegally, she says, because she had been illegal before during her years in exile, and so she decided to marry Gordon. "I forced this poor man into marriage because I needed a green card," she says, her voice rising. "For no other reason - I'm not kidding! We've been very happy for 16 years, but that's just a miracle. The reason I married him is I couldn't be an alien." And though she became a citizen in 1992, actually considering herself American was not so easy, she found. She polished her English but felt she still didn't understand the nuances of the language and the codes and subtleties of the people who speak it. And perhaps they didn't understand her, and once again, she found herself relegated to a linguistic barrio. "I speak Spanish. Here, I'm just another Latino and I should be cleaning houses. What am I doing there on a platform with a microphone? That's the first question," she says with a laugh. "As a Latin American in the United States, people don't make much of a difference between Mexico or Argentina or Uruguay or Chile. It's different to be a Cuban in Miami than to be a Mexican farm worker in California." Or a Chilean novelist in the Bay area. But she's optimistic: She's an immigrant now, not an exile. She carries Chile in her heart and in her imagination, but she plans a future in the United States. "I don't want to be a customer," she says. "I want to belong to a community that goes somewhere and is doing something. So I want to be a citizen and I want to be involved."

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