Violeta

by Isabel Allende

Lucinda said that each person was free to narrate their life the way they saw fit.

Teaching is learning.

It was clear to me from a young age that although I respected them, my mother and my aunts were stuck in the past, uninterested in the outside world or anything that might challenge their beliefs.

“Exert some independence; you’re not a little girl. You can’t let anyone else decide things for you. You have to take care of yourself in this world,” she said.

Affection must be cultivated, Camilo; it has to be watered and tended like a plant, but we’d let ours dry up.

Viewed from the outside, it all looked to be true, but nothing is as simple as it seems. No one knows what really goes on within a couple’s inner sanctum or why someone might put up with things that others deem inexcusable.

Lust can hold us hostage for so long! It was never so humiliating as in my middle age, when the woman in the mirror showed her fifty years of struggle and exhaustion, body and soul. For Julián, on the other hand, age was a choice; he decided he would remain thirty years old forever, and he almost managed it. He was an energetic, unworried, happy womanizer until an age when the rest of us were beginning to contemplate the inevitability of death. “All you regret in the end are the sins you didn’t commit,” he would say.

I must confess, Camilo, that more than once I prayed to heaven that Julián Bravo would crash in one of his airplanes, and I even fantasized about murder in order to free myself of him. I wouldn’t have been the first or the last woman to kill her lover because she couldn’t stand him anymore.

The reality is that everyone is responsible for their own life. We’re dealt certain cards at birth, and we play our hand; some of us lose, but others may play skillfully from the same bad hand and triumph. Our cards determine who we are: age, gender, race, family, nationality, etc., and we can’t change them, only play them to the best of our abilities. The game is marked by challenges and chances, strategizing and cheating.

Sometimes our fates take turns that we don’t notice in the moment they occur, but if you live as long as I have they become clear in hindsight. At each crossroads or fork we must decide which direction to take. These decisions may determine the course of the rest of our lives.

It was as if I was pulling a cart loaded down with all that baggage as well as the weight of wasted time. I never imagined that I’d begin a new life after that night.

“there is no road, the road is made by walking,”

the Nordic concept of janteloven, which meant: Don’t think you’re so special—remember that the nail that sticks out is the one the hammer hits.

At seventy-three, I was one of the oldest people on the pilgrimage between Oviedo and Santiago, but I advanced at a steady pace for sixteen days, with a walking stick in my hand and a backpack on my back. They were exhausting, exhilarating days crossing an unforgettable landscape, full of emotional encounters with other walkers and spiritual reflection. I relived my entire life, and when I finally arrived at the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, it was with the certainty that death is merely the threshold to another form of existence. The soul transcends.

At eighty-seven I was still a young woman learning to dance the rumba for exercise, since I found the gym too boring, and taking a canoe trip over the turquoise waters of the Futaleufú River in Patagonia, with some of the roughest rapids in the world.