A little grandmother

Here's Isabel Allende signing her book for me on Tuesday night. Before this picture was taken (by Angelica Risopatron) I'd been lining with most of the rest of the packed, multinational audience. "I'll sign all your books, new books, old books, books by other authors..."

At the start, she'd come on stage waving to us, her colourful jacket swinging from her shoulders, accompanied by Professor Jose Ruano of the University of Ottawa and by the Chilean Ambassador who introduced her, saying that she was a friend of his family besides being someone who had "helped to place Chile on the international stage". He had also known her as "a passionate journalist" in the days before the military coup when President Salvador Allende was killed (not her father as some assume although his daughter's name is also Isabel). It is interesting that Pinochet's coup took place on September 11th, a date that the United States now associates with horror, and the climax of Isabel's latest novel is a true historical event that occurred on that same day in 1541, when Santiago, the then new settlement of the Spanish conquistadores, was attacked and destroyed by the Mapuche Indians. During that "demented period of history", as the professor pointed out, the native warriors never surrendered, and that clash of two cultures is a cautionary tale for our own times. Ines of my Soul imagines the life of a real Spanish woman, Ines de Suarez, who lived through it, one woman among 110 men.

Isabel Allende herself began by telling us that Chile is "long and narrow like a sword at the south of the world," and proud of its democracy until the "brutal" year 1973 when forty thousand Chileans took refuge in Canada, for which she says: Gracias muchas veces, muchas gracias!

She herself lives in California now, but "the Bush administration has me seriously thinking of moving to Canada." (Applause.)

Then she talked about the book, telling us it was about a woman who refuses to be an abandoned wife, following her "slippery husband" to Peru where she "falls in lust" with a Spanish captain, Pedro Valdivia. The heroine is a dowser (as was the writer's grandfather), and "not a whiner" but courageous and smart, a loyal, fierce companion to this man who takes her to Chile for nine years until Valdivia jilts her, at which point she gets her own back by marrying a younger man. The documents of the day prove that Ines de Suarez spent the rest of her life in the colony; it took the author four years to research the background to this story which she found "irresistible." She listened to the ghosts until, she says, "I became her!" to the extent that she was surprised to see not Ines but herself, "a little grandmother", when she looked in the mirror.

By writing documentary fiction one gets to live many lives. In writing her book (she read an extract aloud to us) she tried to witness the horror of it through the eyes of this sixteenth century woman and in spite of her unavoidable admiration for the Indians she supposes she'd have done the same in her place. She realises that what the conquistadores did to the native people in South America was a "cruel genocide" which cannot be condoned, but of which she admits she is one of the products.

What she said in answer to the audience's questions was more personal. For superstitious reasons and as a form of self-discipline, she always starts on a book on January 8th (that's when she began her first novel as a letter to her 99-year old grandfather). She leads a schizophrenic life, the first half of the year in solitude and privacy, the rest in the public eye. When working on a book she spends many hours in solitude, during which dreams become very important to her. "It's a form of madness," she said. "I'd be in an institution if I weren't able to write." Asked whether her training as a journalist helps she confessed that she was not cut out to be a journalist. Doing that work, she lied all the time. "If I didn't have a story, I made it up. As many people do today," she added, mischievously. She did learn how to look for sources, how to interview people, how to make her writing grab the reader within six lines. You have to seduce your reader, she said, hold his attention till the very last line. What keeps her going is the thought of the deadline. (Pause.) And coffee.

She obviously has a lively sense of humour, but says humour is like fish: three days later it turns stale. Chilean humour is dry, cruel and black, not appreciated in Venezuela, where she had to live for a time.

"Do you have psychic powers?" somebody asked, knowing that Isabel Allende's grandmother experimented with the paranormal. Isabel didn't give a direct yes or no; she said she'd participated in her grandmother's scéances as a child and told us that spiritual forms of communication were preferable to a bad 'phone service! In answer to another question she spoke about how she used her family's upsets and characters as copy. Like Thomas Mann, she lets her family discuss what she writes, especially when it's about them, thinks it's good for them, even. People are never what you see, she says. "I stir the mud!" The confrontations that ensue "allow me to see all the sides." Sometimes she offends people, "but if I have to choose between hurting a relative and hurting a good story, the story wins. And I apologise afterwards."

She has a warm, strong relationship with her mother to whom she wrote letters every day for forty years. Her mother kept all the letters and returned them to Isabel in batches at the end of every year. I found this on her website:

Mi madre es el mas largo amor de mi vida. Nunca hemos cortado el cordón umbillical.