Isabel Allende

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0:34Welcome back to This Cultural Life, the show in which the world's leading creative figures reveal the most important influences and experiences that inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this first episode of a new series is the best-selling and multi-award-winning Chilean author Isabel Allende. She became an international literary star after the publication of her 1982 debut novel The House of the Spirits, an epic family saga set amidst violent political upheavals. Since then, she's written 21 novels and five works of non-fiction and has sold over 80 million copies worldwide.

1:13Isabel Allende, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you very much for having me in the programme. You were born in Peru in 1942, but your parents were Chilean and you were brought up in Chile. Your father left the family home when you were very young. And we're going to start this discussion about the most influential people and experiences of your life by talking about your grandfather, your maternal grandfather, who you say raised you as a child. Tell us who he was, first of all. Well, when my father left, my mother, who was very young, was pregnant. And a few days later or weeks later, she gave birth to my brother Juan.

1:55and she had to move back to Chile to her parents' house because she was helpless and very vulnerable. And so she came to her parents' house with three babies in diapers. Well, I don't think I had diapers, but we were very young, 11 months apart. And my grandfather was of Basque origin, tough but kind, generous, understated, severe, authoritarian, decent, the kind of person who has a set of principles and you live by them, no matter what. And he instilled in me all the things that I have been able to use in my life to survive. Strength, discipline, tenacity, don't complain, don't ask for anything because it will not be given to you.

2:51Work for it. I was the oldest grandchild, so he would have loved if I was a boy and he would have been able to share his tools with me. But the fact that I was a girl didn't stop him from loving me in his own particular way, which was never praised me in any way. No touching, no apparent kindness, but I knew that he was always there. You mean no affection, no outward shows of affection? No physical, physical affection. What are your happiest memories of spending time alone with your grandfather? Well, happy, I don't know if it was happy, but for example, there was a radio program that was horrific.

3:37Stephen King didn't exist then, but imagine something really, really scary. so my grandfather would turn off all the lights and we would, in the darkness, we would have to listen to this horrible stuff. And of course, we had nightmares for the rest of the week. But I remember that joyfully because we were holding hands and I was scared and he was there. I had a cup of tea with him every single day of my life when I started working. I would stop after work in his house, have tea, and he would tell me anecdotes about the family, which later they all appeared in The House of the Spirits, my first novel.

4:19I didn't have to invent much with these lunatic relatives. I mean, you don't need any imagination. But did he spark that interest in storytelling then with those gothic terrifying tales of the young age? Probably, probably, But I was raised with stories. There was no television in Chile at the time. And we never went to the movies. And people sat and have a cup of tea and they would talk and tell stories, legendary stories about my grandmother, about crazy relatives, about Chile, about the devil, a lot about the devil. But there was also one more thing in that house. It had a basement, the kind of basement where all the electrical cables are hanging down like a dangerous place.

5:05But I would go there. It was my hiding place. And there was a trunk, a metallic green trunk with the initials TA, which were the initials of my father, Tomas Allende. and inside it was full of young adult books. Jack London, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Salgari, so many. It was a treasure that because it belonged to my father, I thought that it was forbidden. We never mentioned my father, ever, ever. So I thought there was something forbidden about those books and about the trunk and I read those books in the basement with a candle. That's illicit reading, isn't it? That was reading that you were...

5:50Which probably made it more attractive at a young age. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Did you ever meet your father? No, I only saw him once. He died in the street of a heart attack, and I was called to identify the body. But I couldn't because I had never seen a picture of him. When I was in the morgue, my stepfather came, and he recognised him, and he said, he's your father, look at him. How old were you at the time then? Oh, I was in my 20s. That was the first, the only contact. The only time, the only contact. Salvador Allende, the president of Chile from 1970 to 1973, who was ousted in the military coup led by General Pinochet, was your father's cousin.

6:33Yeah. So did you know Allende as you were growing up? Yeah, Salvador Allende was a good friend of my stepfather. So there were picnics on Sundays, birthdays, days, sometimes maybe for Christmas, we would get together. But it was not a very intimate or a very close relationship. It became closer when he was president. What are your overriding memories of the 11th of September 1973, the day of the military coup? People had been talking about the possibility of a military coup, but we had no idea what that was. And then that day, I got up early as usual, and I went to my office, my kids would walk to school.

7:12So my kids left, and when I was driving to my office, I saw that the streets were empty of vehicles. There were people standing in corners waiting for buses that never came, and a lot of military vehicles passing by. And when I reached the office, it was closed, and the janitor that was at the door said, go home, go home, it's a military coup, listen to the radio. I didn't have a radio in the car. I thought of my kids, and I went to a friend's house who had a phone to call my mother-in-law who lived close by to pick up the kids. She was crying, and she said that her husband, who was a French teacher, had left very early to correct some tests at the school.

7:57The school was four blocks away from the government Palace, La Moneda. So I said, I'll go and pick him up. And I went through lateral streets because most of the main streets were blocked. And I went there to pick him up and the school was empty and all the doors were open. And I went in and I went to his classroom and there he was glued to the radio listening to Salvador Allende's last words when he addressed the country.

8:38He was crying. And we saw the bombing of the palace from the roof of the school. We saw the smoke and we saw the planes going by. And so I said, we have to go back, we have to go back. And we returned home somehow. And then we had 72 hours of curfew. Nobody could get out. There was no information. But I was a journalist, and I had a TV program. So we started communicating with the producers on TV, with other journalists, and more or less have an idea of what was going on. And by 2 o 'clock in the afternoon, I got the news that the body of Allende had been taken out of La Moneda by the firemen.

9:21The government buildings surrounded the gutted presidential palace have been all shot up. There isn't a light showing. There's a heavy military guard, a heavy police guard. You can still hear sniper fire and military units responding with machine guns and tank cannon. The palace is absolutely gutted. It was reported that Allende had killed himself whilst holed up in the presidential palace as the bombs were falling from those military jets flying overhead. How do you think he died? I think he probably killed himself. He would have never surrendered. it's not for sure you know i had been with him a month before when my stepfather came to chile every time he came we had some kind of meeting a luncheon or something and we were having lunch in allende's house and people were talking about the right wing el mercurio newspaper was publishing huge titles saying chileans gather calling for violence and for the military and Allende said I will not leave the palace until my term is over because the people have put me there or he said with my feet forward which in Spanish means dead, los pies para adelante, that means that you are taken out dead and I thought that it sounded so solemn, so melodramatic for a family luncheon but he knew exactly what was going on and we didn't.

10:51As you say, you were working as a journalist at the time, and you were known to be related to Salvador Allende, and you were on the left politically. How dangerous was it for you to remain in Chile? I didn't think I was in danger because we didn't know how these things work, you know. We didn't know how repression works. Repression works in circles, in circles that at the beginning are sort of vague, and then they become more and more efficient and more concentrated. I was fired from everywhere. I had to quit my job on TV because I was doing humor, and I couldn't be doing humor while people were being tortured.

11:30the magazine where I worked. I directed a children's magazine. I was practically fired and also from the women's magazine where I worked. And I thought, well, if I keep a low profile, I'll wait because the military sooner or later will go back to their barracks and we will have democracy again. Chile was known for its democracy. And then things got really bad and eventually I had to leave. Well, of course, the soldiers didn't go back to their barracks for 17 years, in effect, because that was how long Pinochet ruled. Eventually, you went to Venezuela, and you were joined there by your husband and two children, and you lived in exile in Venezuela for 13 of those years, I think, didn't you?

12:17Yes. Getting back to your grandfather, who was such an influential character in your life, did you talk to him about politics when you were growing up? When I was growing up, we never talked religion or politics ever, or money. What were his politics? I think he was conservative, but democratic. Because when we had the coup, he was horrified. He had never been a supporter of Allende. But the idea that the military had taken over the country was unthinkable for him. And he told me many times, don't say anything. Get out of the news. Get out of your job. Just be quiet. Be silent. He was afraid for me.

12:58But I couldn't be quiet. First of all, because I didn't know the consequences at the time. And also because it was very hard to be quiet, not to get involved. Very, very hard. You know, I never dared tell him that I was going to leave because I would have broken his heart. And so I left and I left a letter for him. And I wrote to him from Venezuela many times, but I never saw him again. Your debut novel, The House of the Spirits, started as a letter written to your grandfather when you heard that he was dying in 1981. Take us back to that moment. He was very old at the time, I think, wasn't he?

13:39Very old, almost 100. Totally lucid. You know, in my family, we have bad bones, but we have good brains. No one has dementia in my family. And my grandfather, who had shrunk, he was a little bird, totally lucid, and he would write to me also. We never talked on the phone. He hated the phone. And I started writing to tell him that he could go in peace, that I remembered everything he had told me in those infinite cups of tea and talking that we shared. And so I started telling about Rose. Great Aunt Rose was my grandfather's first fiancé. And she died mysteriously. I think she was poisoned. It was never clear.

14:32And so I grew up with a sepia photograph of this lady who was supposedly beautiful, although she didn't look that beautiful in the picture. and so I started telling him I remember this now in a matter of two pages I would say a day it didn't look like a letter anymore and I knew that I had started something different and I kept going knowing that my grandfather was never going to read it. So within days you knew you were writing a novel? No I knew I was writing something and I thought it was like a memoir I didn't know exactly what I was doing, but I didn't dare say to myself, I'm going to write a book.

15:15I'm going to write a novel because that sounded so pretentious. So when you started writing this letter, which became something else, you were in probably in your early 40s by that time. I was 39. I'd read that the Chilean poet and national hero Pablo Neruda played a part in encouraging you towards fiction. No, John. He told me that I was the worst journalist in the country, that I lied all the time, I could never be objective, and I should turn to fiction, because in literature all those defects are virtues. And that was in 1973, a month and a half before the coup. And I started writing in 81, so I didn't even remember what Neruda had told me.

15:59Right, so he wasn't an influential figure in steering you towards this illustrious career that you went on. The House of the Spirits is an epic story that spans decades to tell huge family saga and also a national tragedy is played out as well. And the country in which it all takes place is never named Chile. And yet the political events, the rise and fall of the leftist government, the military coup, and the brutality of the ruling junta in the early 1970s are clearly recognisable. So why didn't you call it Chile? Because the same things were happening all over Latin America, in Uruguay, in Argentina, in Brazil, in many places we had the military take over.

16:42And repression and people disappearing and torture and executions were everywhere. To me, this was more the story of a continent than of Chile in particular. Also, if I had mentioned And Chile, I suppose I would have felt that I had to be very precise with the facts and the dates that sometimes didn't coincide with the story I was telling. Because in a way, the story of the family is like a microcosmos of what happens to the macrocosmos of the country. So both stories have evolved together. The day Esteban Trueba asked to be received, Severo and Nevea del Valle remembered the words with which Clara had broken her lengthy silence.

17:31With all due honesty, they told him of their daughter's traits, without omitting the fact that she had spent more than half her lifetime without speaking, because she did not feel like it. But Esteban Trueba was not the kind of man to let himself be scared away by tales of ghosts and hallways, objects that move of their own accord, or prognostications of bad luck, much less by Clara's prolonged silence, which he considered a virtue, and he asked to be introduced to her. The patriarchal figure at the heart of the story, the character called Esteban, was he based directly on your grandfather as a character?

18:07As a character, but my grandfather was never a rapist, a murderer. He never approved of the coup. He was a very decent and honourable man. He would have died of a heart attack if he had read the book and thought even for a minute that I had based my character on him. But Esteban, like my grandfather, is a self-made man, authoritarian, conservative, who thinks that he's always right and that whatever his values and his principles are, that is the way the country should be and the family should be. There's no questioning. That was my grandfather. If so many of the events of the novel are drawn from real life stories that you'd heard told by your grandfather or other members of the family, how did your family react when House of the Spirits was published?

18:59Well, when the book was published, it was forbidden in Chile. We had censorship. So some copies got into the country, smuggled into the country. They changed the jacket and they were photocopied. and somehow some people read it. Eventually, censorship was eliminated only for books and for theater plays because they were expensive and few people could afford it. And so you could buy it in Chile, but under the table. No bookstore would display it. Some members of my family were really offended and some didn't speak to me for years until the movie came out. From the novel by Isabella Allende, The House of the Spirits, Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close, Winona Ryder, Antonio Banderas and Vanessa Ridgrave.

19:49When Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons were my parents, oh, that was great. That's the official story of my family now. What were they objecting to? The politics. Because you had revealed that it was a very conservative family on your grandmother's side. and in the book and in the film that they saw, the coup was supported. In fact, there's a moment when Esteban is sitting there watching the television as the planes are bombing the palace and he has a bottle of champagne ready to be opened. Was that the sort of response? From several of my relatives, of course. And some of my relatives would denounce other people and I'm sure that some people were arrested and even tortured.

20:28Maybe they disappeared because of some, at least I know of one of my relatives. The House of the Spirits became a huge international bestseller and launched your career. How did your life change? It didn't change very much at the beginning. I was living in Venezuela and the book was very successful in Europe. So I didn't get the echo of what was happening until a year later. And then my life changed slowly. I wrote a second book, then a third book, and by the third book I quit my day job and I dared call myself a writer because I thought I could make a living writing, which is rare, let me tell you.

21:09You became and remain one of the world's most famous Chileans and yet you couldn't visit your homeland for 13 years. Do you still feel Chilean? Yes. If you ask me who are you, I would say Chilean. I have lived in Chile very few years, really. But I have the Chilean accent. I have an invented country in my brain, the country where my grandfather lived, the country of my childhood. that doesn't exist anymore, of course. And so when I say I'm Chilean, I am from that Chile, that old, old Chile.

21:50Your next choice, Isabel Allende, is the collection of classic Middle Eastern folktales, The Thousand and One Nights, stories of love, magic and fantasy, which you say have inspired your own writing. Where and when did you first read them? It was in hiding. Like the books that I read in my father's basement. We were living in Lebanon, and my stepfather had an armoire, always locked. But of course, we, the kids, we knew how to unlock the armoire, because there he kept cigarettes, chocolates, whiskey. And there he had all the things that we wanted, and of course we didn't have, but we knew how to open the armoire.

22:31And being a diplomat, he went out every evening to some social event. So we would open the armoire, drink the whiskey, smoke the cigarettes. My brothers would do that, while I, with a flashlight, would read 1001 Nights. Of course, I couldn't mark the book. So I was skipping from one story to the other. I could never finish a story. It was more about the atmosphere, the color, the sensuality, the magic of it. That book had a huge influence in me. because my hormones were exploding at the time. I must have been 14. This was in Lebanon. We girls didn't go anywhere with school and home. That's it.

23:15No social life. And this book was like a window into fantasy and eroticism, which I couldn't quite understand. That sense that life is playful, joyful, and scary also, and full of color. I think that I tried to convey that in my books. Isn't it interesting that this was a book that you weren't supposed to read, just as those books that had been left in the trunk left by your father? This, again, illicit literature. And your very first book, The House of the Spirits, became a banned book. I mean, I wonder when you were writing The House of the Spirits, whether that was part of it, knowing that you had to be bold with your stories and write something that some people wouldn't want other people to read.

24:02John, I wasn't thinking. I just opened a vein and let it come out. There was no plan. There was no outline, nothing. And at the end, I had 500 and something pages on the kitchen counter. and when my former husband, Miguel, read it, he realised that the chronology was completely crazy. So he was an engineer. He made a chart with the dates and the characters so that I would see the evolution of each character according to the events of the country as well. And so I did a second draft adjusting those things. But you say that first novel, The House of the Spirits, poured out of you is like opening a vein.

24:46Were all the books like that? afterwards or was it that one in particular? No because I had no idea of the book industry of I never read a book review in my life never taken a course so the first book was written with innocence with with the with the confidence of the ignorant you know and then after that I learned some or at least more stuff about writing and I never had that freedom again never. Let's get back two 1001 nights, this story which you discover in the hidden locked closet. They are fantastical fables involving magic and the supernatural. And there's a magical aspect to many of your books, including The House of the Spirits, in which one character is clairvoyant and can move objects around with the power of her mind.

25:41Was that based on your own grandmother? that. Yes. These are all the stories that were told about my grandmother. And she spent her short life experimenting with the paranormal at a time when there was great curiosity about secret societies and the Rosa Cruces and Gurdjieff. There were seances. I grew up with that, with the idea that all that was not only possible, it was almost normal. And if you think about it, we all have superstitions. The thing about my grandma is it was more explicit. My grandfather didn't approve of it, but he protected her and loved her. And then after she died, repeated all the stories about her, the story about her moving the table and about all those things.

26:30Do you regard yourself as a magical realist author or do you dislike that phrase? I don't mind it. I think that magic realism is accepting that life is very mysterious, that there are many things we can't control, we can't explain. And I accept that in my life. Therefore, it comes very naturally in my writing. But it is not a literary device like salt and pepper that you can sprinkle on any story. It doesn't work that way. It works sometimes for some stories. But, you know, in my life, for example, I am not magical at all. I'm not like my grandmother, but I pay attention. I am tuned to it. I'm tuned to dreams.

27:13I have been writing down my dreams for years so I know what the symbols mean, the images, the recurrent images mean. And I use that knowledge in my daily life, often in my writing. So you believe in those greater forces that are not so easily explained? I believe that there are parts of my brain or everybody's brain that we have not developed, that we don't pay attention to. Magic realism has manifestations in daily life, in reality. And sometimes you can really explain them. And fantasy has none. I mean, fantasy, for example, is the invisibility cloak of Harry Potter. You have never seen it. We wish it was available and you could order it on Amazon, but you can't.

28:03Now, the invisible Indians in the Amazon, they sound as magical as the invisible cloak, but they are Indians that paint their bodies in the colors of nature and move so swiftly in the vegetation that they can be a yard away and you don't see them. So Garcia Marquez has a beautiful explanation. he says that when he had a character called Remedios the Beautiful she ascends to heaven embody a soul like the Virgin Mary and the whole scene didn't work. He tried many things and eventually he came up with the idea that Remedios was hanging the sheets to dry and the wind came and lift her with the sheets like sails or like the wings of a big bird.

28:49With the sheets is magic realism. Without the sheets it's fantasy.

28:58Your next choice, Isabel Allende, is a tragic event that you say broke my heart and changed me forever. Your daughter, Paola, died in 1992 at the age of 29 after becoming seriously ill and falling into a coma for a year. What do you remember about first hearing the news that she was in hospital that night? I was launching a book called The Infinite Plan in Barcelona. I was with Antonio Banderas, and then my husband, I saw him in the crowd, and he came almost running, and he told me that Paula was in the hospital. And I remember I gave my glass of champagne to Banderas, and I went to the airport.