On August 2, a celebration for the Chilean writer. The success, the tragedy of her daughter, her marriages: a life “of love and shadow” also marked by the political events of her country
Of love and shadow, like one of the early novels. The writer Isabel Allende turns 80 tomorrow and shines in the Californian light, her white hair, the immaculate studio – “my cathedral” – where she still hides to write from dawn for hours; the aura of an achieved harmony with the world. But she is a milestone marked by decades of turbulent passions and, above all, dark tragedies. Politics and personnel together.
Allende bears the surname of Salvador, the president of the Chilean “historical compromise”, crushed in blood in 1973 by Pinochet’s soldiers. Abandoned by her husband, mother Panchita had been helped by her relatives – including the leader of Unidad pupular – to settle with her three children in the family home in Santiago. A condition of vulnerability and submission to the males of the family from which Isabel will always want to free herself: “Not because she taught me – she told in an interview with 7 -, but because I saw her with my own eyes deprived of the rights that instead they had his brothers, my uncles, my grandfather; she essentially forced to live on charity. And I would have liked to defend it ».
The Chilean formation in that context of rigid patriarchy will give the bestseller the plot and setting The house of the spirits1982, transformed in Hollywood into an equally famous film in 1993: the torment of a country divided between progressives and reactionaries right into the homein the midst of generations, with the consequence of violence, disappearances, escapes.
The coup captures Isabel engaged as a journalist, already married to Michael Frias, mother of two children, Paula and Nicolas: they have to save themselves, even more so with that cumbersome surname, and they do it in Caracas, Venezuela. The injustice and oppression of the dictatorship are overcome by fantasy from Eva Mooncapable of imagining happy loves to the point of living them.
In reality, however, Allende’s marriage in exile does not survive. “I was moved with him for 28 years: he was very good, but very boring.” And it will be again subject elaborated in the novels: married women too young, unaware of pleasures, poised between machismo and demands. The space opens up for a new love, this time passionate and adventurous: with William Gordon, Allende and their two children move to California. His literary production at this stage expands the borders, enters the plains of the United States, addresses the issue of Hispanic immigration and racism, engages with male protagonists such as the gringo Gregory Reeves de The infinite planeopenly inspired by the new groom.
But the catastrophe is lurking. At just 28 years old, her daughter Paula falls ill with a rare and merciless disease that reduces her to a coma and in a few months, in 1992, she turns her off. Isabel watches over her incessantly, first in the hospital in Spain where the girl lived, then in California. “On the first day at home, a stray cat came in through the window and deposited a dead bird on her bed, a kind of offering. We couldn’t get rid of it. He settled with her Paula and did not part with her until she died. I am sure that the cat was the embodiment of the spirit of grandmother Isabel, who came from the Hereafter to be with her great-granddaughter ». To stand up, Isabel does what she can, and she knows: he writes a diary next to the bed which is a dialogue, a memoir, a thread knotted between the women of his family to keep them together. It will become the most heartbreaking of his lyrics, Paulalike all previous and subsequent ones published in Italy by Feltrinelli.
It is a turning point, a pain that resurfaces in every writing and in every action. Allende creates a Foundation in the name of her daughter, oriented by a sentence she uttered during a distant telephone conversation between Madrid and Santiago. Isabel it exposed a problem she ran intoPaula replied, “Mom, what’s the most generous thing you can do in this case?”
Lonely women, migrants, abandoned children. It has long been a constant and little publicized mission of her, which allows her to maintain contact with the harshness of life, she explained, without contradicting her version of magical realism: «I accept that the world is mysterious. I live and write keeping myself open to those mysterious dimensions that we all experience in life in the form of inexplicable coincidences, premonitions, revelatory or prophetic dreams, miracles, visions, and so on …. ».
A personal religion shared with the «Sisters of perpetual disorder», a group of friends who have been constantly gathered for thirty years, even in a pandemic, to meditate laically and spread love.
What saved her, she confessed recently, is to continue to be curious, and above all romantic. At 74, Isabel Allende got divorced again, at 77 she remarried a friend of her age, Roger (“And if I camp up to a hundred, I’ll do it again!”); leading the battle for the right to old feelings and sex. In her later books, from The Japanese lover a Violet. And once again in real life, a message of optimism to friends and readers: «It is assumed that beyond a certain age you cannot have an active life. Well it’s not like that: you can even fall in love. What is the difference? It’s like when you were young, but with a sense of urgency: the remaining days you want to live them with sympathy, love, humor, a good meal, a glass of wine, dogs … And these days you don’t want to lose even one “
August 1, 2022 (change August 1, 2022 | 11:38)
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