My Invented Country by Isabel Allende Page A

one place and cancount on witnesses to their passage through the world. In contrast, those of us who have moved on many times develop tough skin out of necessity. Since we lack roots or corroboration of who we are, we must put our trust in memory to give continuity to our lives . . . but memory is always cloudy, we can’t trust it. Things that happened in the past have fuzzy outlines, they’re pale; it’s as if my life has been nothing but a series of illusions, of fleeting images, of events I don’t understand, or only half understand. I have absolutely no sense of certainty. Nor can I picture Chile as a geographic locale with certain precise characteristics: a real and definable place. I see it the way a country road might look as night falls, when the long shadows of the poplars trick our vision and the landscape is no more substantial than a dream.

A SOBER AND SERIOUS PEOPLE
    A friend of mine says that we—we Chileans—may be poor, but that we have delicate feet. She’s referring, of course, to our unjustified sensitivity, always just beneath the skin, to our solemn pride, to our tendency to become idiotically sober given the slightest opportunity. Where did such characteristics come from? I suppose they can be attributed, at least in part, to the mother country, Spain,which bequeathed us a mixture of passion and severity; another portion we owe to the blood of the long-suffering Araucans; and the rest we can blame on fate.
    I have, through my father, a little French blood, and a touch of Indian—all you have to do is look at me to see that—but my heritage is primarily Spanish-Basque. The founders of families like mine tried to establish dynasties, and to do that they invented an aristocratic past, though in fact they were laborers and adventurers who came to the tail end of America with their hands out. Of blue blood, so to speak, not a drop. They were ambitious and hardworking, and they appropriated the most fertile land in the vicinity of Santiago and then devoted themselves to the task of gaining notice. Since they immigrated early and got rich quickly, they could claim the luxury of looking down on all those who came later. They married among themselves, and, being good Catholics, they produced a multitude of descendants. Their normal children were destined for the land, the ministry, and the church hierarchy, but never for commerce, which was reserved for a different class of people; the children who were less favored intellectually went into the navy. Often there was a son left over to become president of the republic. There are dynasties of presidents, as if the office were hereditary, because Chileans vote for a familiar name. The Errázuriz family, for example, provided three presidents, thirty-some senators, and I don’t know how many politicians, besides several heads of the church. The virtuous daughters of “known” families married their cousins or became holy women who worked questionable miracles: unmanageable daughters were given to the care of the nuns. These families were conservative, devout, honorable, proud, and avaricious, though generally of good disposition—not so much by temperament as to assure winning favor in heaven. They lived in fear of God. I grew up convinced that every privilege comes as a natural consequence of a long list of responsibilities. That Chilean social class maintained a certain distance from lesser human beings because they had been placed on Earth to set an example, a heavy burden they assumed with Christian devotion. One thing I must make clear, however, is that despite their origins and their surnames, my grandfather’s branch of the family was not of that oligarchy; they had good credentials but lacked land or fortune.
    One of the characteristics of Chileans in general, and of the descendants of Spaniards and Basques in particular, is their seriousness, which contrasts with the exuberant temperament so