A Long Petal of the Sea

by Isabel Allende

The poet thought this was a splendid riposte, and so accepted him on board, together with fishermen, farm and factory workers, manual laborers, and intellectuals as well, despite instructions from his government to avoid anyone with ideas.

until then his thoughts strayed to Ofelia del Solar, like someone wasting their time imagining they’re going to win the lottery. He had fallen in love with her at first sight with adolescent intensity, but as he didn’t see her again, love rapidly became a myth to him. In his daydreams he would conjure up the details of her face, the way she moved, her dress, her voice. Ofelia was a flickering mirage that vanished at the slightest hesitation. He loved her theoretically, like the troubadours of olden days.

wrote them in a school notebook together with her recollections, as a precaution, in case at some point her memory began to fail her. She embellished the facts, because she was aware that life is how we tell it, so why would she jot down trivia?

the burning nostalgia left by that love gradually merged into that gray area of memory where what we have lived fades away. He sensed he had learned a lesson, although the precise meaning of that lesson wasn’t clear to him.

“If copper is Chilean, I don’t see why it has to be nationalized.” “It’s always been in the hands of North American companies, Àvia. The government took it back and refused to indemnify the Americans, because they owe the country billions of dollars in excessive profits and tax evasion.”

Carme had said on more than one occasion that if she died in Chile she wished to be buried in Spain, where her husband and son Guillem were laid to rest, but if she died in Spain she wanted to be buried in Chile, to be near the rest of her family. Why? Well just to cause trouble, she would say with a laugh. And yet it wasn’t simply a joke, it was the anguish of divided love, separation, of living and dying far from one’s loved ones.

Roser suggested to Victor that the only healthy way to grow old was to integrate into Venezuelan society. They had to live in the present, making the most of everything that agreeable country had to offer, grateful they were well received and had work, without wallowing in the past.

The degree of inequality was staggering: three-quarters of the wealth was in the hands of twenty families. The middle class survived on credit; there was poverty for the many and opulence for the few: shantytowns contrasting with glass skyscrapers and mansions behind walls. Well-being and security for some, unemployment and repression for others. The economic miracle of recent years, based on absolute freedom for capital and a lack of basic rights for workers, had burst like a bubble.

The military government had decided public services should be in private hands. Health was not a right, but a consumer good to be bought and sold.

The military putsch saved the country from Allende’s chaos and a Marxist dictatorship.” “And to prevent that imagined left-wing dictatorship, an implacable right-wing one has been imposed, Felipe.”

She refused to follow the alternative treatments that Meche and other well-intentioned female friends suggested: she didn’t want to know about homeopathy, herbs from Amazonia, healers, or exorcisms. “I’m going to die: so what? Everybody has to die.”

Roser asked her husband to please let her go, because she was very weary. “Don’t take me to the hospital for any reason. I want to die in our bed, holding your hand.” Defeated at last, Victor had to accept his own powerlessness. He couldn’t save her, and he couldn’t imagine life without her. He realized in horror that the half century they had spent together had galloped by. Where had the days and years gone? The future without her was the huge empty room without doors and windows that appeared in his nightmares.

He didn’t want to accept being old. Advanced age is a distortion of a familiar reality, it changes the body as well as circumstances. You gradually lose control and have to depend on the kindness of others—but Victor had thought he would die before this happened. The problem was how hard it sometimes can be to die swiftly and with dignity.

It wasn’t true that he talked to himself; he was talking to the dogs, the parrot, and the cat. The hens didn’t count, because they didn’t have their own names; they came and went as they liked, and they hid their eggs.

“Happy birthday, Papa. What are you doing?” “Remembering and repenting.” “For what?” “For the sins I didn’t commit.”

The idea of having dinner with his dead wife was similar to going to Midnight Mass at Christmas, an annual metaphorical ritual. It had nothing to do with ghosts, it was simply a few hours enjoying her memory, and a toast to a good wife who, with a few ups and downs, had put up with him for many decades.

“Sadness, my enemy, is gaining ground, Ingrid. At this rate in the years I have left I’m going to turn into a hermit.” “That would be death in life, Victor. Do as I do. Don’t wait to defend yourself against that enemy, go out and confront it. It took me years in therapy to learn that.” “What reasons do you have to be sad, child?” “That’s what my husband asks me. I don’t know, Victor, I suppose you don’t need reasons; it’s part of your nature.”

I have been a foreigner all my life, first as the child of diplomats, then as a political refugee, and now as an immigrant in the United States. Maybe that’s why a sense of place is so important in all my writing. Where do I belong? Where are my roots? Is my heart divided or has it just grown bigger? These are the questions faced by my protagonists in A Long Petal of the Sea, the title of which comes from a quote by Neruda.

You think that you will not make the same mistakes you made before, but you will make new ones.

when I tell this, people think that I’m making it up. I probably am, because imagination and memory are the same thing in the brain, practically. But it helps to have been brought up in that feeling that what we perceive of reality is partial; that it’s not all of it, and that there are other dimensions of reality,

I am the least athletic person in the universe, but I compare writing to training for a sport. You have to do it every single day and nobody cares about your effort or how much time you spent or how much was wasted time. It doesn’t matter. It’s the end of the performance that’s the only thing that really counts.