Arguably: Selected Essays (95 page)

In a noble if melodramatic way, Koestler had once held a sort of dress rehearsal for suicide with Walter Benjamin, as both contemplated being taken alive by the Gestapo. (He kept the pills Benjamin gave him, while the latter swallowed his on the Spanish border a few days later.) By comparison, his own suicide in 1983 was an affair very much lacking in grandeur. His mind and his body were certainly both giving way, but he seems to have allowed or perhaps encouraged his healthy wife, Cynthia, to join him in the extinction. An earlier study by David Cesarani was lurid to the point of sensationalism about Koestler’s callousness toward his wives and other women (to say nothing of other people’s wives). It has been plausibly alleged that in his compulsive seductions—of Simone de Beauvoir, for one—he did not always stop quite short of physical coercion. Scammell does his best to plead extenuation here, but is obviously uncomfortable. Just as many of the people who believe in numinous coincidence and supernatural intervention are secretly hoping to prove that it is they themselves who are the pet of the universe, so many of those who overcompensate for inferiority are possessed of titanic egos and regard other people as necessary but incidental. At least this case is a tragic one when considered as a life story, because it shows us what a noble mind was there o’erthrown.

(
The Atlantic
, December 2009)

Isabel Allende: Chile Redux

I
T IS WHILE SPEAKING of the island of Crete, in Saki’s story
The Jesting of Arlington Stringham
, that the eponymous character says that the place “produces more history than it can consume locally.” We all know of certain distinctive countries on the map of which this seems to be true. For some reason, a lot of them also begin with the letter
C:
Czechoslovakia (which now exists only in memory), Cuba, Cyprus—and Chile. And there is also a literary surplus that often comes with these territories: Think only of Kafka, Kundera, Yglesias, and Neruda.

For people of a certain generation (my own, to be exact: those of us sometimes vulgarly described as the baby-boomers), the imagery and cosmology of Chile are a part of ourselves. A country shaped like a long, thin, jagged blade, forming the littoral of almost an entire continent, and poised to crumble into the ocean leaving only the Andes behind. A place of earthquakes and wine and poets, like some Antarctic Aegean. And a place of arms: the scene of the grand twentieth-century confrontation between Allende and Pinochet. The nation’s territory includes the Atacama desert, an expanse of rain forest, a huge deposit of copper, a great valley full of vines, and the mysteriously-statued Polynesian outpost of Easter Island, known to the indigenous as
Rapanui
, or “the navel of the world.” (The navel, or
omphalos
, was also the name given by the ancients to the oracular cave at Delphi.)

Introduction (2005) to
The House of the Spirits
, by Isabel Allende.

The voices and portents in
La Casa de los Espiritus
are also somewhat cryptic at times, as befits the school of “magical realism.” This style, or manner, was actually pioneered somewhat earlier than most people think, by Jorge Luis Borges in neighboring Argentina. In 1926 he published an essay, “Tales of Turkestan,” in which he hymned the sort of story where “the marvelous and the everyday are entwined … there are angels as there are trees.” In 1931, in
The Postulation of Reality
, he announced that fiction was “an autonomous sphere of corroborations, omens and monuments,” as bodied forth in the “predestined”
Ulysses
of James Joyce.

From the very beginning of Isabel Allende’s narration, disbelief is suspensible in the most natural way, and (if you pay attention) the premonitions begin to register. Rather cleverly—and subversively—the action begins in a church. Bored by the blackmailing liturgy, and by the devotional decorations which make an everyday trade out of the officially supernatural, the Trueba family is preoccupied with the truly extraordinary developments within its own ranks. Effortlessly, we find ourselves conscripted into the truth of this tale; from green hair to the gift of prophecy and divination and the taken-for-granted ability to fly. Just off the center of the stage, in carefully placed hints and allusions to the Prussian goose-step, to the future burning of the books and to the Marxist gentleman referred to as “the candidate,” we can also pick up the faint drum-taps of the far-off tragic denouement.

Children and animals are often the conveyors of the magical: innocence and experience being in their cases less immediately distinguishable. Clara and the dog Barrabás would make an almost cartoonish filmic double-act for anyone with the necessary entrepreneurial imagination: a sort of Scooby-Doo with the facts of life thrown in. Here it is Isabel Allende’s brilliantly dead-pan and dry humor, concerning such things as the beast Barrabás’s murderous penis, that draws us into the story and makes us surrender. In counterpoint to this highly bearable lightness, her notes of seriousness are correspondingly weighty. (Why does nobody ever believe Clara’s prophecies? Because nobody ever believed Cassandra.) By the time we reach chapter five (“The Lovers”) we are suddenly aware that we are watching a parody of
Animal Farm
in reverse, with a song about chickens organizing to defeat a fox heard by a wealthy landowner who wants to put a stop to such romantic nonsense.

The romance between the rich man’s daughter and the penniless son of the peasant is such a folkloric cliché that one has to become wary for an instant, even with an author who has already won one’s trust. However,
The House of the Spirits
depends for its ingenuity on the blending of the micro-cosmic with the macrocosmic: the little society of the family and the wider society of Chile. Lineage is important in the unfolding of this, and the Truebas all have one dynastic name, while the “Pedros”—like the nameless French serfs who were all called “Jacques”—mark their descent by numbers: Secundo, Tercero … just like monarchs in fact. Isabel Allende herself bears a great name that has become imperishable for nonhereditary reasons, and so it is rather generous of her, in the circumstances, to invert what is traditional and to make a hero out of what Marxism might normally prefer to cast as a villain. Esteban Trueba is a patriarch in every sense: a self-made man of property and a
seigneur
who haughtily insists on exercising every
droit
, libidinous or financial. His appetites are gigantic, and no peasant girl is safe from him, but he feels himself bound nonetheless by a
contrat social
and a sense of
noblesse oblige
. (If I lapse into French instead of Spanish at this point, it is because all metaphors of the
lutte de classe
are ultimately French ones.)

My own family is not the only one where there exists an extraordinary bond between grandfather and granddaughter. The emotional strength of this phenomenon has been noted many times (some people even joke that such alliances are so durable and intense because they are based upon a common enemy). At any rate, we know from the highly candid and affecting memoirs of Isabel Allende that her own grandfather, Agustin Llona, was in many ways the “main man” in her early life: the representative of the masculine virtues. Indeed, he is the
raison d’être
of this novel. One day, in exile from her martyred country, Isabel Allende heard the awful news:

that my grandfather was dying, and that he had told the family he had decided to die. He had stopped eating and drinking, and he sat in his chair to wait for death. At that moment I wanted so badly to write and tell him that he was never going to die, that somehow he would always be present in my life, because he had a theory that death didn’t exist, only forgetfulness did. He believed that if you can keep people in your memory, they will live forever. That’s what he did with my grandmother. So I began to write him a long letter, elaborated from the awful thought that he was going to die.

Esteban Trueba, the fictional memorial of this grand old gentleman, is life-affirming. He builds a grand estate at
Tres Marías
out of his own unremitting struggle with adversity, and accepts the responsibility for his tenants even as he declines to listen to any whining or subversive back-chat from them. He also becomes a distinguished senator, and leads the charge against the party of Allende, even irritating the more conciliatory conservatives who dislike making a fuss:

“The day we can’t get our hands on the ballot boxes before the vote is counted we’re done for,” Trueba argued.

“The Marxists haven’t won by popular vote anywhere in the world,” his confreres replied. “At the very least it takes a revolution, and that kind of thing doesn’t happen in this country.”

“Until it happens!” Trueba answered furiously.

“Relax,
hombre
. We’re not going to let that happen,” they consoled him. “Marxism doesn’t stand a chance in Latin America. Don’t you know it doesn’t allow for the magical side of things?”

In the context, that’s rather a clever question. And, in her grandpa’s quoted opinion that forgetfulness is the equivalent of death, isn’t there an echo of the author, much admired by Isabel Allende, who has most attempted to fuse Marxism with magic? Gabriel García Márquez, in his epic
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, describes a village which suffers an epidemic of insomnia. After an interval of chaotic and protracted wakefulness, the increasingly deranged inhabitants begin to forget the names of common objects. Their solution is to write labels and affix them to the said objects, which serves to keep the crisis at bay for a while. But then the insomnia mutates into radical amnesia, and they begin to forget what letters stand for, and how words are written or read.… Esteban Trueba’s wife, Clara, the mistress of his other grand home in the capital city, experiences a similar difficulty, managing “to keep that immense covered wagon of a house rolling with its population of eccentrics, even though she had no domestic talent and disdained the basic operations of arithmetic to the point of forgetting how to add.” By the way, in the same chapter we learn that “the presence of his granddaughter sweetened Esteban Trueba’s character. The change was imperceptible, but Clara noticed it. Slight symptoms gave him away: the sparkle in his eyes when he saw the little girl, the expensive presents he bought her, the anguish he felt if he heard her cry. Still, it was not enough to bring him closer to Blanca. His relationship with his daughter had never been good …”

The class war is fought not just between the siblings of the Trueba dynasty and the humble Tercero family, but among them as well. Like many mighty patriarchs, Esteban Trueba is fated to be disappointed by his sons as well as his daughter. One of the boys, Nicolás, becomes somewhat futile and vapid, wasting his time on aeronautical fantasies and difficult women. Another, Jaime, becomes a conscience-stricken medical student who rejects his privileged upbringing in order to minister to the poor, or at least to make them the objects of his charity in the aptly-named Misericordia District. (Ever since Graham Greene, I sometimes think, the Socialist physician—Dr. Magiot, Dr. Czinner—has been an especially serious character. And of course, Salvador Allende himself was a doctor.)

In the discussions and encounters between the two young men—and during the acute crisis over Amanda’s pregnancy and ghastly abortion—we are meeting people to whom the notion, at least, of cruelty and bloodshed is repugnant. But in Esteban García, the crafty youth who is also an illegitimate by-blow of old man Trueba, we are finally introduced to evil. Again spurning the ideal-types of radical romanticism, Isabel Allende portrays this cold, plebeian, ambitious type as the instrument of death foretold. Here is the sort of person, found in every society, who becomes a torturer and executioner when the state is taken over by sadists. By way of an ironic wrinkle in the genealogical plot, he gets his great opportunity from his unaware grandfather, who despises the surreptitious and whose combats have always been in the open. The patriarch wants the honest military gentlemen to seize power, to scatter the subversives, and to restore decency and tradition and order. But he wants them then to return to the barracks and supervise new elections. Esteban García, no aristocrat, desires the day when police rule will be permanent, and he himself can have endless official permission to humiliate his betters as well as his inferiors.

The House of the Spirits
is, or rather retrospectively it became, the last of a trilogy that is comprised of itself, preceded by
Daughter of Fortune
and
Portrait in Sepia
. The “subject” is assuredly family life, which is also the tempestuous subtext of much of Isabel Allende’s nonfiction. But the story is about Chile. For millions of people across the world, this very name took on the same resonance as had “Spain” forty years before. On one side, the landlords, the clerical hierarchy, the army, and the Fascists. On the other, “the people” in their various gnarled, exploited, neglected and semi-upright postures. Arbitrating and manipulating things were far-off superpowers and vested interests. My little summary does, admittedly, possess all the subtlety of a Brecht play put on in Berkeley. But sometimes things
are
quite simple, and even Brecht might have turned down the idea of multinational corporations instructing Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to use murderous force to protect their dividends. Given the starkness of this, as it appeared at the time, it is greatly to Señora Allende’s credit that she contrived so much wit, grace, and
chiaroscuro
.