Report from Santa Fe; Isabel Allende

Music Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by a grant from New Mexico Tech on the frontier of science and engineering education. For bachelors, masters and PhD degrees, New Mexico Tech is the college you've been looking for, 1-800-428-T-E-C-H. And by a grant from the Healy Foundation, Tau's New Mexico. Hello, I'm Lorraine Mills and welcome to Report from Santa Fe. Our guest today is the famous author of Isabella Yende. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. Well, you have come, courtesy of the Land and Foundation to give a talk to Santa Feans and the whole town of Abbas with this. You are an author who has sold 51, over 51 million books. Yeah, I should have 51 million dollars. There are they. I don't know. And translated into 30 languages,

at least maybe you have the 30. But you're one of the first really Latin American women writers. And you said the template, I'll try to go through these. But the first book that I had a quality to do onto the world stage was The House of the Spirits. An absolutely incredible read I recommend to anyone. Well, that book I wrote more than 20 years ago in exile. After I left Chile because of the military coup of 1973, I found myself totally disconnected with no roots. I thought that my life was over. And then when I started writing this book, which began as a letter from my grandfather, everything changed in my life. I found what I was born to do. Tell lies. After The House of the Spirits, there are many books, but again, some of my favorites. This is Evoluna. And after that, the stories of Evoluna. Very difficult. Your only collection of short stories. Yeah, after I wrote Evoluna, many people said,

well, this is the story of a storyteller, where are her stories. And at that time, I had fallen in love with an American, the last heterosexual bachelor in San Francisco, and moved to his house without an invitation. And so the only advantage of short stories is that you can write them in a short period of time. In a couple of weeks, you have a story. But they are very, very difficult. Because I was living with a willing, and I didn't have a place to write a room on my own, I wrote in the car, while I waited for him. And that's how the stories came out. They are all love stories because I was enlust with him at the time. And didn't he fall in love with you? No, no, no. He likes tall blondes. But did he not read love and shadows? He read love and shadows, and he fell in love with the book. But he wasn't expecting me to be the writer. He was expecting someone taller. But did he say at one point that you so clearly believed that all things were possible in love,

and so did he, and that is what attracted him to you at first? He says that we have a spiritual connection. I don't know about that. I just like to sleep with him. Let's go through some of the books. Again, this one is brilliant Paula. It was about your daughter and her tragic and timely death. Can you tell us a little about Paula and how you could possibly dig so deep and write this book? I have two kids, and I say I have because the fact that she's dead doesn't make a difference. She's still with me. And she was the oldest. And she had a rare condition that runs in the father's family. And my children and my grandchildren have it. It's called Porphyria. And it shouldn't be fatal today. It's something that can be controlled. And she didn't know that she had it, and she took very good care of herself.

Unfortunately, she had a crisis and went to a hospital in Madrid, where she was living at the time. And there was a strike in the hospital. It was a holiday, just bad luck. There was negligence in the hospital. She entered into intensive care. She wasn't taking care of properly. And then they tried to hide it. And four months later, I got back my daughter in a vegetative state in a coma. And I brought her to the United States to our home, and I took care of her until she died by the end of the year. I tried everything. Everything that medicine, science, and holistic medicine and prayer would do. And nothing helped. And I never understood why she stayed so long. She should have died at the beginning without that year of suffering. Now I know that we all learned something. It wasn't wasted that year.

And it wasn't only awful. It was very painful. But there were things that came out of that year that are extraordinary. To begin with, my son and I became so close that we are like married in soul. The family became very close. I became very strong. Very few things scare me now. And I could write that book. And when that book was published, I got thousands of letters from all over the world. And still today, 15 years later, I still get letters. So I know that I'm connected to everybody because everybody has losses. It's been an eye-opener for me and a wonderful thing. And also because of the book, I was able to create a foundation to continue the work that my daughter was doing, empowerment of women and girls. And that's very rewarding.

I want to skip ahead because you have a wonderful story about a trip that you took to India to travel, to regenerate your writing. You went on a trip to India and the woman thrusts a parcel upon you, tell us that story. That was the beginning of the foundation. I had written the book and then the checks from the book started to come in. And I didn't want to touch any of that money because, of course, I wanted to do something that was meaningful to my daughter. But I didn't know what it was. And I couldn't write. I felt that I was in a writer's block. Someone suggested go to India. India is very inspiring. So I went to India with my husband and a friend. Actually, the friend who made the earrings that you were wearing. And we went to India and it was an extraordinary trip. For me, it was incredible. I mean, Tebra had been in India many times. And we took a car and we were crossing Rajasthan. And in some place, in the middle of nowhere, in this dusty street, very, very hot. We saw an occasion tree.

And some think that the distance that looked like black birds. And as we got closer, there were women dressed in dark colors, which is unusual in India. And because it was so hot, we decided to just stop and drink water or whatever. There was no reason why those women were there because there was not a well or a market or a town. They were just there in the middle of nowhere. And as we approached this woman, came closer. In India, like in many places in the world, people don't have this polite distance that we always give. People really get very close and touch you. And they started touching Tebra's red hair and all the bracelets. And we gave them all the bracelets. And then as we were leaving to the car, one of the women came running behind and gave me this little parcel. I mean, this rags. And I thought that she was trying to give me something back for the bracelets. I said, no, no, no. It's not necessary. No, don't worry. And she insisted. And so I picked up this thing that weighed nothing. And I sort of opened their rugs, and there was a newborn baby inside.

And so I kissed the baby, blessed the baby, and gave it back, but she didn't want it. And so she turned around and sort of ran. And then the driver of the car who was Indian came running and took the baby away from me and tried to give it back to the women who were sort of scared of him. And the guy said, you can't take it. You can't take it. You can't take it out of the country. Leave it, leave it. And then they pushed me in the car and we left. And in the car, when I sort of woke up from this shock, I said, why was she trying to give me her baby? And the driver said, it's a girl who wants a girl. And in that moment, I knew what I was going to do with the income from the book. I was going to try to empower girls like that little baby. And that's what I've been doing for the last few years.

You have a website. I want people to know about how they can find out more information about your foundation. And your website is... My name, just my name. And so type my name, Google my name, and then it comes up. The foundation and stuff about me that sometimes helps the journalist before an interview or students who are writing something. And people are just like the gossip, you know, they want to see the pictures or whatever. You had said in your latest memoir that some of our days, which will come to in a minute, that your daughter used to ask you this question, what is the most generous thing to do? Every time she was a psychologist. And when I married Willie, we had so many problems that I lived in therapy. I mean, the money I have spent in therapy could have a mansion in the French Riviera. And so I would call Paula to do Spain where she was living. And I would explain the whole melodrama. There would be a pause. And then she would say, mother, what is the most generous thing to do in this case?

And you know, the most generous thing to do is usually a very good thing to do. It doesn't solve everything, but it makes you feel good. And that is the motto of my foundation. The mission and the motto is generosity to just give away. You only have what you give. I have stories. If I don't give them away, there are no stories. It's like everything else. If you cook and you don't share your food, what's the point? When I have, when I'm alone at home, I eat apples on tea. I only cook if I can share it. And like that, everything else. Speaking of cooking, after Paula, you did this really beautiful book called Aphrodite. And it is, it's so beautiful if we put together your daughter-in-law as a graphic designer and she put, because the pictures and the fonts and the stories tell us a little about this.

Well, after Paula, I wasn't a writer's blog, as I said for some time. And then I decided to come out of the blog by writing something that was not fiction. I'm a journalist by training and I know that if I'm given an assignment and enough time to research, I can write about everything except sports. What politics maybe not. And so I gave myself an assignment that would be as removed from death and illness and loss as possible to just come out for all that darkness. And I decided to write about lust and gluttony. We only deadly sins that are worth the trouble really. And the research, of course, pulled me out of whatever darkness I was. And I started to visit the pawn shops in San Francisco in the gay neighborhood with my mother who was visiting and doesn't speak English. So I had to translate. My mother also doesn't see very well. So she would come very, very close to these rubber things.

So what is this for? And I would have to translate the instructions. And we cooked together. And she came up with erotic recipes. I mean, I was very fortunate that the book was released two months before Viagra. Because otherwise we would have bought it. Today you take a pill. You don't need to cook. After that came daughter fortune again, very California based, Chilean California, much as yourself. For fun, I just think this is such a delightful romp. But you're taken on the famous zero. Well, that's because I'm in live with Antonio banderas. I've been in love with Antonio banderas forever. And that was a really good excuse to get to know him because he's in two movies. And I'm still hopeful that he will be in that movie, too. The sacrifices you must make. Oh, yes. And now your most recent book that came out this year is called The Some of Our Days.

The Some of Our Days is like a sequel to Paola. And it's written to her. Like I see if I'm talking to her to tell her what happened with her family after she died. And in the last, in the last decade after she died. And so much has happened that you won't believe it. It's a very weird family. The kind of stuff that you can't have in a novel because it doesn't work in a novel. But in real life, it happens all the time. Now, Paola and Aruda, the iconic poet of Chile, when you were a journalist, when you had to leave Chile, we'll talk about your family background a little bit. Your uncle or cousin was Salvador Agende, the president of Chile. September 11, 1973 is the dramatic. We'll tell us a little about your background and Chile. And then what Neruda said to you? I should start by Neruda. In 1973, in August, he invited me to his house in the beach. I was then a journalist, a young journalist. And I thought, oh, my God, the noble laureate wants me to interview him.

So I watched my car, my little car, but a new tape recorder. And did all the trip that was like an hour and a half to hours in the rain to get to his house. And we had a wonderful meal. He showed me his collections of different things. And then I saw that he was tired because by then he was already ill. And I said, well, I'm ready for the interview. Don Paolo. And he said, interview, what interview? I said, well, I came to interview you. And he said, look, child, I would never be interviewed by you. You are the worst journalist in this country. You can never be objective. You put yourself in the middle of everything. You wake up things. I'm sure if you don't have a story, you make it up. Why don't you switch to literature, where all these defects are virtues. I didn't pay any attention then. I became a writer much later. But now that I am a writer, I realize that I was really a lousy journalist. I could never say things as other people see them. There's always, how can I say an angle? And I stand always behind things.

So as a journalist, it doesn't work. In your first book, the House of the Spirits, you portray four generations of a family in Chile through all of the time of political turmoil. I think they say about certain writers in New Mexico, there's a coyote-trixture tradition that you lie to bring us the truth, that you can use fiction to bring the truth of what that family went through, especially during the revolutionary days. And you as a result of that, no, is Salvador, your uncle, or your cousin, it's very confusing. He was my father's cousin, first cousin, which in Chile would be an uncle, because it goes by generation. But here it's a cousin. And so because of your name, you had to leave?

No. Not because of my name. I left because I did not agree with the dictatorship. And I was a journalist and everything was censored. It was a very risky time. I ended up doing things that were forbidden, like helping hiding people, smuggling information and that kind of stuff, which many people did. I wasn't the only one. But then there was a point where I was afraid, and then I didn't want my children to grow up in a place like that. And we got out thinking that it would be for a very short time, because Chile was the longest and most solid democracy in Latin America. We never expected a military coup, let alone a dictatorship. It lasted 17 years. So a whole generation of Chileans left. And when they came back, in most cases, they couldn't come back with their children or their grandchildren. So there were many losses and families that were broken. I remained abroad. I remained first in Venezuela and then here in the United States. I go back to Chile all the time, but my mother returned alone with my stepfather, because all her children and her grandchildren did not return.

In these times in our country, we've had the issue of torture come up so much that the issue of abacrued and then whether torture could possibly be legal. And I thought that Chile is a country that has lived with torture. And what is your advice to Americans who could contemplate that it could be okay to torture? I cannot imagine how anybody can be okay with torture for any reason whatsoever. First of all, it's not efficient. The information you get is not true. People will say anything because they are in awful pain. Torture humiliates and degrades and breaks the person who is tortured, but also the victimizer. You become a rotten human being and you carry that for the rest of your life. A country that allows torture breaks something essential in the soul of the country. So I am absolutely appalled at the fact that any politician or anybody in this country can say that torture is okay.

And you've written in some cases in Chile there would be a victim of torture living in the same building. The president of Chile, Michelle Bachele, her father was a general who did not comply with the coup and was killed by his peers in torture. Then she, who was 15 and her mother, were arrested and they were also tortured. Eventually they got out of the country and they made a life somewhere else in Germany. When this woman returned as a doctor, started working against the dictatorship and then she became eventually the president of Chile. And she meets in the elevator her torturer in the building where she lives. Eventually the guy left. But that's the kind of thing that can happen that you go to the market and you meet the person who has killed your husband or raped you or disappeared your daughter. Yes, so how can a society. You can't. You can't heal that kind of thing. Yes. No, she is quite a remarkable woman. She's a remarkable woman. She's a physician and she's a socialist, a single mother, a doctor, atheist, which in Chile, that is a very Catholic country, is unheard of.

So it's very unique that we have a woman president like that. And what way is Latin America going now? You have the other female president? Yeah, Cristina in Argentina. They say that Latin America is going left. I think that the left has changed. It's not the same left as the 1970s except in Venezuela where Chavez is still fixed with the ideas of the 70s. But most countries are trying to work out a political system that will be neoliberal or capitalist in the economy and yet take care of people. Because when there is great inequality, great poverty, when you have a sector of the population that is marginalized that does not participate in the economy like it happens in many countries, you cannot have pure capitalism.

Because then you have the richer getting richer and controlling everything and the poor totally abandoned and the middle class suffering more and more. But anyway, that's happening in this country too. That you have a middle class that has been impoverished, poor people that have no health insurance that are not taking care of. So we have to be very careful with these things. You kind of do things in black and white. They are grazing between. Speaking of putting things in black and white, I want to talk if you would speak with us a little about your techniques for writing. I know that you started a book on a magical day for you, January 8th. And then you kind of hold up what you're writing. Tell us a little about your process for writing. I start on January 8th now for discipline. At the beginning, it was superstition. It was a good day for me because I started the House of the Spirits on January 8th. And it was a lucky book.

So just for Kabbalah, I give the day. But then it my life became really complicated because it's not only writing the books, it's all the research. You have to go around the world selling it. Like if you were selling rugs, you have to do the millions of interviews and travel all over and the book tours and all that. So for discipline, I clear my calendar six months a year. And I started January 8th. I don't do anything until the summer. And that's the time when I can get out. And the memoir is so important for us to read. I really felt like I was part of your family. Talk to us a little about the letters that you and your mother have exchanged for how many years? Oh, the lifetime. The first time I was separated from my mother, it was 15. And then in different moments in our life, we have been separated. But most of our lives, we have not lived in the same country.

And she established very early on the habit of writing to me every single day. When she was living in Turkey, the letters would take two months. But then we faxed and then we emailed. And now we went back to the mail. And it doesn't matter how long it takes. But we still write each other every day. I like to see her handwriting. I like the envelope with the stamp. And I have collected her letters. And she gives me back my own letters at the end of the year. And I know that when she dies, I will be open. I will be able to open a letter from my mother every day for the rest of my life. And in the end of the house of the spirits, the mother gives to the daughter, these little bundles also of letters to explain her past. Even when she wasn't there, her mother's journals and everything that happened. And letters are very important for women. In the literary world, in history, women have no voice. It's only recently that some of us have some voice. And we speak for those who have been silenced for centuries.

But we express ourselves in letters. They're beautiful letters written by women. And my mother, who is a wonderful writer, an intelligent woman, but belongs to a generation on a time and a place where she couldn't do anything with her life, expresses all her soul and her life and her ideas in these fabulous letters. And it's a treasure for me. If my house burned, I would save the dog first and then the letters. Well, I hope that your house never burns because you have built in northern California. A house that is very much like the house of the spirits. My husband built a house thinking of the house of the spirits. And of course, it's much better than the house of the spirits ever was. And yet you feel it is also populated by all the people you've ever loved.

Yeah, I believe that the memories are there. And if you really remember people, they live with you. I don't see the ghost of my grandmother moving the three-legged table. I don't see Paula roaming around in a white gown with wings. No. But their photographs are everywhere. They are in my altar. I write about them. I think about them. I talk to them all the time. They are with me. So that's my way of living with the spirits. And you address, I want to show again a few of your books. This is her book this year. The sum of our days, which is addressed to her daughter. And I just had such a sense of her presence. And then knowing all about you and your families. We'll just show a couple of these. But this is such a delight. Aphrodite. Thank you. And beautifully, beautifully put together. The famous, the only short stories, the stories of Eva Luna. And then Eva Luna. And then what started it all, we've gone backwards. But the house of the spirits, for anyone who hasn't read this, all the 51 million.

I would say don't read it. Just watch the movie. Oh, Antonio bandera. Oh, well, of course. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Our guest today is the famous writer Isabella and again, thank you for joining us. Thank you. And I'm Lorraine Melz. I'd like to thank your audience for being with us today on report from Santa Fe. We'll see you next week. Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by a grant from New Mexico tech on the frontier of science and engineering education. For bachelor's, master's and PhD degrees, New Mexico tech is the college you've been looking for 1-800-428-TECH. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Taos, New Mexico.