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obesity turned her into a monstrous statue trapped within the four walls of her house. Once a week the parish priest served communion at the house. That somber widow instilled in her children the idea that the world is a vale of tears and that we come here only to suffer. A prisoner in her wheelchair, she made judgments on the lives of others; nothing escaped her tiny falcon eyes and her prophet’s tongue. For the filming of The House of the Spirits, to play that role they had to transport an actress the size of a whale from England to the studio in Copenhagen, after removing severalseats in the plane to contain her unimaginable corpulence. She appears on the screen for only an instant, but she makes a memorable impression.
    Unlike Doña Ester and her descendants, so solemn and serious, my maternal relatives were happy-go-lucky, exuberant, spendthrift womanizers, quick to bet on the horses, play music, and dance the polka. Now, dancing is not typical behavior among Chileans, who as a rule lack any sense of rhythm. One of the great discoveries I made in Venezuela, where I went to live in 1975, is the therapeutic power of dance. You get three Venezuelans together and one will play the drums or the guitar and the other two will dance; there is no ill that can resist that treatment. Our parties, in contrast, seem like funerals: the men gather in a corner to talk business and the women die of boredom. Only the young dance, seduced by North American music, but as soon as they marry they turn solemn like their parents. The greater part of the anecdotes and characters in my books are based on that unique family. The women were delicate, spiritual, and amusing. The men were tall, handsome, and always game for a fistfight. They were also chineros, which is what they called habitués of brothels, and more than one died of “an undiagnosed illness.” I must assume that the culture of the whorehouse is important in Chile because it appears again and again in the literature, as if our authors were obsessed with it. Even though I don’t consider myself an expert on the subject, I am not innocent of creating awhore with a heart of gold; mine, from my first novel, is named Tránsito Soto.
    I have a hundred-year-old aunt who aspires to sainthood, and whose only wish has been to go into the convent, but no congregation, not even the Little Sisters of Charity, could tolerate her for more than a few weeks, so the family has had to look after her. Believe me, there is nothing as insufferable as a saint, I wouldn’t sic one on my worst enemy. During the Sunday lunches at my grandfather’s house, my uncles laid plans to murder her, but she always escaped unharmed, and is alive to this day. In her youth, this woman wore a habit of her own invention, sang religious hymns for hours in her angelic voice, and, the minute no one was watching, slipped out to Calle Maipú to shout at the top of her lungs for the salvation of the ladies of the night, who welcomed her with a rain of rotten vegetables. On that same street, my Tío Jaime, my mother’s cousin, earned money for his medical studies by pumping an accordion in “houses of ill repute.” At dawn, at the top of his lungs, he would be singing a song titled “I Want a Naked Woman,” creating such an uproar that the good sisters would come outside to protest. In those days, the black list of the Catholic Church included books like The Count of Monte Cristo, so imagine the furor that wanting a naked woman would cause when yodeled by my uncle. Jaime became the most famous and most beloved pediatrician in the country, and the most picturesque politician—quite likely to recite his speeches in the Senate in rhymed verse—and by far the most radical of my relatives, a Communist to the left of Mao, when Mao was still in diapers. Today he is ahandsome and lucid old man who wears fiery-red socks as a symbol of his political beliefs. Another of my