The House of the Spirits

by Isabel Allende

In l981 I was 39 years old, living in exile in Venezuela, working as a school administrator, frustrated and lonely. My marriage was slowly ending, my children were teenagers and they had their own interests, I hated my job. I missed Chile and the life I had before the military coup of 1973 that forced me out of the country. On the 8th of January, I got a phone call that my beloved grandfather was dying. I started a farewell letter for him that rapidly turned into something else. My intention was to tell him that he could go in peace because I remembered all he ever told me, his life, my crazy relatives, and much more. The first anecdote was about my great-aunt Rosa, my grandfather’s first fiancé, who died poisoned in mysterious circumstances. Years later, he married Rosa’s youngest sister, my grandmother. When did I realize that I was not writing a letter but a novel? I suppose it was when I changed the names of my relatives in those pages. At that point they became characters and I felt free to shuffle their lives and stories at my will. I couldn’t quit my day job, so I only wrote at night and on weekends. The book was in my heart, I didn’t plan it, I didn’t have to think, just write and write like a madwoman. By the end of the year, I had 560 pages on the kitchen counter. The House of the Spirits was an exercise in nostalgia and imagination. It became an unexpected worldwide success and it gave me a voice, it made me a writer, it paved the way for all the books that would follow, and it changed my life forever.

He did not know that she had seen her own destiny, that she had summoned him with the power of her thought, and that she had already made up her mind to marry without love.

To me the most interesting character in the book is Clara del Valle, because she was inspired by my grandmother Isabel, who dedicated her short life to study paranormal phenomena. She had some talent to predict the future. Once a week she met with three lovely witches to invoke the spirits of the dead around a heavy Spanish carved oak table. According to the legend, the table would jump twice for yes and once for no when the spirits answered the ladies’ questions. I grew up with the idea that the world is a very mysterious place and there are many dimensions of reality. The fact that something cannot be explained of proved doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, according to my grandmother. So when I am accused of having used too much magic realism in The House of the Spirits, all I can say in my defense is that’s not a literary device, it’s the way I perceive life and the world. By the way, I have the Spanish table in my house. It has never moved on its own volition.

“This is to assuage our conscience, darling,” she would explain to Blanca. “But it doesn’t help the poor. They don’t need charity; they need justice.”

Justice is an obsessive theme in all my books, like death, love, and courage. Clara in my first novel—like my grandmother Isabel in real life—was a most unconventional woman for her time. She could see clearly how the world is a brutal patriarchy, how unfair racism and social class system are, and how privileged she herself was. She practiced charity because that was the only way she could help. It would be her granddaughter Alba’s mission to fight for justice. I did not have to invent Clara, I just had to remember my grandmother and collect the innumerable anecdotes about her legendary life. For many people who knew her, she was magical, kind, funny, generous, and visionary. For my grandfather, she was the love of his long life.

Blanca laughed at the story and said it was impossible, because hens are born stupid and weak and foxes are born astute and strong, but Pedro Tercero did not laugh. He spent the whole evening absorbed in thought, ruminating on the story of the fox and the hens, and perhaps that was the night the boy began to become a man.

One of my mother’s crazy cousins used to tell the story of a bunch of hens that were attacked at night by a fox. After several of them perished and others were maimed, they decided to get together and confront the fox. They gather all their courage and the following night they all jumped on the fox and pecked him to death. To me, (and to Pedro Tercero in the novel) this is metaphor for social justice. The weak, the poor, the victims, can turn their fate around if they act together against the predator. Pedro Tercero is one of the protagonists in the novel. The inspirations for this character were some of the idealistic young men and women who in the 70s believed that a revolution could change the world.

She believed that by giving problems a name they tended to manifest themselves, and then it was impossible to ignore them; whereas if they remained in the limbo of unspoken words, they could disappear by themselves, with the passage of time.

In my grandfather’s home, where I grew up, we never talked about feelings: it was considered bad taste and sentimental. Sorrow and pain were usually dismissed or silenced. One was supposed to deal with one’s own emotional stuff with little external help except maybe the priest in confession. I had never heard of psychologists; therapy was not an option. My grandmother spent much of her life in silence. She would go into one of her mute periods and remain there for as long as she needed; that was therapy for her. I never heard my grandfather complain about something or share any negative feelings. That became a trait of my character as well. I find that silence and time usually softens sorrows, heals sadness, and disarms grudges.

Jean de Satigny.

One of the most notorious characters in the novel is the Count Jean de Satigny. Originally, he was called Count de Bilbaire, but when my mother read the manuscript, she was appalled that I had given the pervert count the maternal surname of my father. I had to change it. This was 1981, several decades before computers were a home fixture. Cut and paste was exactly that: cut with scissors and paste with glue or scotch tape. Delete was done with a white liquid called Tippex. First, I had to find another name that was one letter shorter than Bilbaire so it would fit in the space. We had a plastic tray with a map of France where I found a place called Satigny. Six letters instead of seven. Perfect. Then my whole family sat around the dining room table and went through each page with a ruler from top to bottom looking for the damn Count. My daughter would paint the name with Tippex, my mother would dry it with a hair dryer, and I would place the page in my typewriter and change Bilbaire into Satigny. That’s how authors wrote back then. And before my time, they wrote novels by hand with ink and pen.

Here the madness was divided up equally, and there was nothing left over for us to have our own lunatic.”

With a family like mine, I don’t need to invent much. Most of my relatives had a touch of madness; we were known to be “original”, which is to say that we didn’t quite fit into the usual mold. Today, some of my relatives would be certified nutcases, but in Chile in the 40s and 50s they were absorbed into the general weirdness of our clan. One of them was the guy who told the story of the hens and the fox. He spent his life pedaling to nowhere on a fixed bike. His sister wanted to be a nun but was rejected in every convent where she applied, so she ended up dressed like a bishop saying mass and praying the rosary in the red district of Santiago to save the souls of the sinners. A great uncle took off his clothes in the financial district to give them to a homeless person and walked in his underwear, with a top hat and his silver cane, to the Congress. He was a senator. Etc. I could go on forever, but you get the idea. These anecdotes are in the house of the spirits.

“Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality. Dying is like being born: just a change,” Clara had said.

When I wrote the book, I could not have guessed that this statement would be prophetic for me. The worst fear of any mother is to lose a child. My daughter Paula died at home, in my arms, when she was twenty-nine years old. My heart was broken, the pain was unbearable. But a few months later my granddaughter Nicole was born in the same room where Paula had died. I received her from her mother’s womb and cut the umbilical cord. I realized then that the moment of Paula’s death was almost identical to the moment of Nicole’s birth: the same feeling that some sacred and mysterious was happening. Both were crossing a threshold, Paula into another life, Nicole into this life. That certainty helped me to overcome my grief and took away forever the fear of death.

Gone with her were the spirits and the guests, as well as that luminous gaiety that had always been present because she did not believe that the world was a vale of tears but rather a joke that God had played and that it was idiotic to take it seriously if He himself never had.

I am convinced that if my grandmother Isabel had lived longer, I would be a different woman today. I spent the first eleven years of my childhood in my grandfather’s house. When my grandmother died, her husband went into a deep silent mourning. He dressed in black from head to toe, painted some of the furniture black, and banned gaiety from the house: no music, games, parties, dessert, flowers, etc. It was a gloomy and cold house that soon began to deteriorate because no one really cared for it. My clairvoyant grandmother was the light of the house, the light of our lives. She truly believed that this world was a divine joke. My somber Basque grandfather thought the joke was not funny at all.

Perhaps she feared the grandiose love that had stood so many tests would not be able to withstand the most dreadful test of all: living together.

Several years after my mother annulled her marriage to my father, she fell in love with an inconvenient man. He was Catholic, married, and had four young kids. In Chile there was no divorce, so their relationship faced unsurmountable obstacles. However, they fought for their love, he left his family, and was able to make a life with mother and her three kids. They couldn’t get legally married because he could not annul his marriage. In their youth they shared passion and romance but they had little in common and I always suspected that in their later years they were trapped in domestic routines and could not admit that their love had cooled off, By then they had become legendary lovers. That suspicion prompted me to imagine Blanca and Pedro Tercero’s relationship, which also confronted many obstacles. It survived because they couldn’t live together.

When she had nearly achieved her goal, her Grandmother Clara, whom she had invoked so many times to help her die, appeared with the novel idea that the point was not to die, since death came anyway, but to survive, which would be a miracle.

This happens when Alba had been arrested, raped, tortured, and was praying to die on the cement floor of her cell. In that situation of terror and total despair, the ghost of her grandmother appeared to console her and give her the strength to fight for her life. Fortunately, I have never experienced anything as horrible as the ordeal that Alba endured, but I have had sorrow and fear in my life, especially at the time of the military coup and the brutal dictatorship in Chile. In those times I found comfort in the memory of my grandmother Isabel, that luminous woman who lived with one foot in this world and another in the Beyond. I don’t see ghosts, but I certainly feel all around me the presence of the kind spirits of my grandparents, my parents, and my daughter.

EPILOGUE

I have been writing for forty years and I have published twenty-five books. Now my task is easier because I have a computer instead of an old typewriter, and I have some experience, but the process has not changed. I write without a script, instinctively. I feel in my heart that the story is basically true; it happened, or it is happening now somewhere in the world, or it will happen. After the book is published, I am confronted with critics and professors of literature who deconstruct the novel, analyze and interpret every line, and find hidden meaning where I never intended to put it. Often this process kills the story. Please, dear reader, let intuition and emotion guide you through my pages, as they guided me when I wrote them. My latest novel, VIOLETA, will be out on 2022: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57933338-violeta