sweetly, I have no doubt he would have complied. For more than a hundred years legal loopholes have allowed thousands of couples to annul their marriages. And that is what my parents did. All it took was my grandfatherâs determination and connections to have my father disappear by magic and my mother declared an unmarried woman with three illegitimate children, which our law calls âputativeâ offspring. My father signed the papers without a word, once heâd been assured that he wouldnât have to support his children. The process consists of having a series of witnesses present false testimony before a judge who pretends to believe what heâs told. To obtain an annulment you must at least have a lawyer: not exactly cheap since he charges by the hour; his time is golden and heâs in no hurry to shorten the negotiations. The necessary requirement, if the lawyer is to âiron outâ the annulment, is that the couple must be in agreement because if one of the two refuses to participate in the farce, as my stepfatherâs first wife did, thereâs no deal. The result is that men and women pair and separate without papers of any kind, which is what nearly all the people I know have done. As I am writing these reflections, in the third millennium, the divorce law is still pending, even though the president of the republic annulled his first marriage and married a second time. At the rate weâre going, my mother and TÃo Ramón, who are already in their eighties and have lived together more than half a century, will die without being able to legalize their situation. It no longer matters to either of them, and even if they could marry they wouldnât; they prefer to be remembered as legendary lovers.
Like my father, TÃo Ramón worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and shortly after being installed beneath my grandfatherâs protective roof in the role of illegal son-in-law, he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Bolivia. That was in the early fifties. My mother and all three of us children went with him.
Before I began to travel, I was convinced that all families were like mine, that Chile was the center of the universe, and that every human being looked like us and spoke Spanish as a first language: English and French were schoolassignments, like geometry. We had barely crossed the border when I had my first hint of the vastness of the world and realized that no one, absolutely no one, knew how special my family was. I quickly learned what it is to feel rejected. From the moment we left Chile and began to travel from country to country, I became the new girl in the neighborhood, the foreigner at school, the strange one who dressed differently and didnât even know how to talk like everyone else. I couldnât picture the time that I would return to familiar territory in Santiago, but when finally that happened, several years later, I didnât fit in there either, because Iâd been away too long. Being a foreigner, as I have been almost forever, means that I have to make a much greater effort than the natives, which has kept me on my toes and forced me to become flexible and adapt to different surroundings. This condition has some advantages for someone who earns her living by observing; nothing seems natural to me, almost everything surprises me. I ask absurd questions, but sometimes I ask them of the right people and thus get ideas for my novels.
To be frank, one of the things that most attracts me to Willie is his challenging and confident attitude. He never has any doubt about himself or his circumstances. He has always lived in the same country, he knows how to order from a catalogue, vote by mail, open a bottle of aspirin, and where to call when the kitchen floods. I envy his certainty. He feels totally at home in his body, in his language, in his country, in his life. Thereâs a certain freshness and innocence in people who have always lived in
Like my father, TÃo Ramón worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and shortly after being installed beneath my grandfatherâs protective roof in the role of illegal son-in-law, he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Bolivia. That was in the early fifties. My mother and all three of us children went with him.
Before I began to travel, I was convinced that all families were like mine, that Chile was the center of the universe, and that every human being looked like us and spoke Spanish as a first language: English and French were schoolassignments, like geometry. We had barely crossed the border when I had my first hint of the vastness of the world and realized that no one, absolutely no one, knew how special my family was. I quickly learned what it is to feel rejected. From the moment we left Chile and began to travel from country to country, I became the new girl in the neighborhood, the foreigner at school, the strange one who dressed differently and didnât even know how to talk like everyone else. I couldnât picture the time that I would return to familiar territory in Santiago, but when finally that happened, several years later, I didnât fit in there either, because Iâd been away too long. Being a foreigner, as I have been almost forever, means that I have to make a much greater effort than the natives, which has kept me on my toes and forced me to become flexible and adapt to different surroundings. This condition has some advantages for someone who earns her living by observing; nothing seems natural to me, almost everything surprises me. I ask absurd questions, but sometimes I ask them of the right people and thus get ideas for my novels.
To be frank, one of the things that most attracts me to Willie is his challenging and confident attitude. He never has any doubt about himself or his circumstances. He has always lived in the same country, he knows how to order from a catalogue, vote by mail, open a bottle of aspirin, and where to call when the kitchen floods. I envy his certainty. He feels totally at home in his body, in his language, in his country, in his life. Thereâs a certain freshness and innocence in people who have always lived in
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