Isabel Allende recalls it as the day when Santiago went silent. On the morning of September 11, 1973, Salvador Allende rushed to La Moneda, the Presidential palace, after learning of an unfolding military uprising. Tanks laid siege to La Moneda, a neoclassical building from the early eighteen-hundreds, as the armed forces called on President Allende to resign. Vowing to defend the Constitution, he declared, in a radio address, that he would not step down: “Social processes can be arrested by neither crime nor force.” Minutes before noon, military planes bombed La Moneda, setting its north wing on fire and blanketing the rest in smoke. When troops later stormed in, they found the President’s body in one of the palace’s main halls, his hand resting near a rifle. By day’s end, Augusto Pinochet had taken power, marking the start of his seventeen-year rule. “That distant Tuesday in 1973, my life was split in two,” Isabel Allende wrote decades later. “Nothing was ever again the same: I lost my country.”
Salvador Allende was her father’s first cousin. She believed in his vision—of transforming Chile into a freer, more equitable society, through la vía chilena, or the Chilean path to socialism—but worried about whether his project would prosper, in a world riven by competing ideologies. The disdain for President Allende among conservatives was no secret; neither was the White House’s opposition to him. The C.I.A., which backed those who deposed him, had tried to prevent him from taking power. But, like many others, Isabel Allende dismissed the rumors that his rule might be in question, or that democracy could be at stake. “We were proud of being different from other countries of the continent, which we scornfully referred to as ‘banana republics,’ ” Allende later wrote. “No, that would never happen to us, we proclaimed.”
After Pinochet took power, Allende, who worked as a TV anchor and a humor columnist, was let go. “There was nothing to laugh about—except those who were governing, which would have cost you your life,” she wrote. In the absence of a free press, news spread by word of mouth: thousands of people were tortured, or left to die, in detention centers. The number of victims imprisoned, disappeared, or killed by the state would eventually surpass forty thousand. But a sense of denial prevailed among those who could not bear the truth and those who had no sympathy for la vía chilena. “Chileans learned not to speak out, not to hear, and not to see,” Allende wrote. “When I felt repression tightening like a noose around my neck, I left.”
In 1975, on a rainy winter morning, Allende left Santiago for Caracas, Venezuela, carrying a fistful of soil; her husband and two children joined her a month later. Allende took her first steps as a novelist with a letter to her ailing grandfather, which she wrote from a makeshift desk in her closet. “I wanted to tell him that I remembered everything,” Allende later said. The letter grew into a five-hundred-page manuscript, which editors in Latin America turned down. But, in 1982, Plaza & Janés, a publishing house in Barcelona, printed three hundred and eighty of its pages, under the title “La Casa de Los Espíritus,” or “The House of the Spirits.”
An international success, “The House of the Spirits” helped Allende find a voice that other people living in exile could relate to. “Chile was not an isolated case,” Allende later wrote. “In 1975, half of Latin America’s citizens lived under some kind of repressive government, most of which were backed by the United States.” Allende went on to be exceptionally prolific—she has published twenty-six books, of which more than seventy-seven million copies have sold—but she never abandoned the subject of displacement. She revisited it time and again as an obsession, a form of catharsis, and a subject of study. She also had other losses to contend with. Among Allende’s most memorable works is “Paula,” an ode to her late daughter, who died at the age of twenty-nine, after being diagnosed with porphyria, a rare genetic disorder.
Now eighty-one, Allende recently published the novel “The Wind Knows My Name.” The book straddles two periods in history, guided by two main protagonists: Samuel Adler, a Jewish man born in Austria before the onset of the Second World War, and Anita Diaz, a Salvadoran child who is separated from her mother, amid the U.S. government’s “zero-tolerance” policy. The author draws a parallel between the viciousness of Nazism and the violence across Central America, where more than a million people have been displaced from their homes. As a means of punishment and a source of grief, family separation recurs through time, Allende powerfully shows.
Days before the fiftieth anniversary of the coup in Chile, I spoke to Allende about the legacy of exile, “The Wind Knows My Name,” and the state of American democracy. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I’d be remiss not to mention an important date ahead: the fiftieth anniversary of Pinochet’s coup in Chile—a day that marked your life and your career as a writer in exile. What memories do you carry from that day?
It was a day in September, the beginning of spring for us. And I remember it was very confusing. I got up early in the morning, my kids walked to school, and I drove to my office. I saw that the streets were empty, that some people were stranded waiting for buses that never came, and there were some military trucks going back and forth. But we had no experience in military coups. I don’t think that most people knew what it was about.
I reached the office, and the janitor who was at the door said, “It’s a military coup, go back home, everything is closed.” So, I tried to get to the house of a friend, who had a telephone, to call my in-laws and ask them to pick up my kids at school. My friend’s husband was a French teacher who had gone to school at dawn to correct some tests, and she had not heard from him. She was incredibly worried. So, I said, “I’ll go and pick him up.” The school was in downtown Santiago, close to La Moneda palace. When I got there, I met with my friend’s husband, and I got to hear Allende’s last words on the radio. Then we saw the bombing of the palace. We saw the flames and the smoke, the planes, and the noise. We couldn’t believe what was happening.
Can you imagine? It would be like having the American military bombing the White House—something impossible to imagine. Then we had practically three days of curfew. You couldn’t get out at all. Everything was censored, there was no radio, no TV. So, it was a very strange time of uncertainty and fear.
About a year and a half later, you moved to Venezuela, where you lived for thirteen years. And then you fell in love with a Californian and followed him to the San Francisco Bay Area, where you have lived for almost four decades.
From the outside—and compared with your childhood years—this seems like an extraordinarily stable period in your life. Yet you’ve described feeling like a perpetual foreigner, even in Chile. Where does that feeling stem from?
Probably from childhood. I was born in Peru, but my father abandoned my mother when I was three, so we returned to Chile, where my mother was from, to live in my grandparents’ house. Then my mother married a diplomat and we travelled. Every two years, we would be saying goodbye to people, places, schools, languages, and move to another place.
Then I became a political refugee and then an immigrant. So, my life has always had that feeling of being displaced, which is not a bad thing for a writer. It’s actually very good. Because you have to pay attention. You have to listen, to observe carefully, to understand the clues and codes of a new place. Maybe because I don’t feel that I totally belong in a place, I’m always asking questions that other people take for granted. And, in the answers, I get the stories.
You wanted to believe that the dictatorship wouldn’t last, as many other Chileans did. In 1988, the year that a plebiscite put an end to Pinochet’s rule, you returned to the country, but you never moved back. Why?
