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relatives used to take off his trousers in the street to give them to the poor, and a photograph of him in his undershorts, though properly attired in hat, jacket, and tie, appeared more than once in newspapers. He had such an exalted idea of himself that in his will he left instructions that he wanted to be buried standing up: that way when he knocked at the gates of heaven he could look God directly in the eye.
    I was born in Lima, where my father was one of the secretaries at the embassy. The reason I grew up in my grandfather’s house in Santiago is that my parents’ marriage was a disaster from the beginning. One day when I was four, my father went out to buy cigarettes and never came back. The truth is that he didn’t start out to buy cigarettes, as everyone always said, but instead went off on a wild spree disguised as a Peruvian Indian woman and wearing bright petticoats and a wig with long braids. He left my mother in Lima with a pile of unpaid bills and three children, the youngest a newborn baby. I suppose that that early abandonment made some dent in my psyche, because there are so many abandoned children in my books that I could found an orphanage. The fathers of my characters are dead, have disappeared, or are so distant and authoritarian they might as well live on another planet. When she found herself without a husband and on her own in a strange country, my mother had to conquer the monumental pride withwhich she’d been brought up and go home to live with my grandfather. My first years in Lima are obliterated in the mists of lost memory; all my recollections of childhood are linked to Chile.
    I grew up in a patriarchal family in which my grandfather was like God: infallible, omniscient, and omnipotent. His house in the barrio of Providencia wasn’t a shadow of the house my great-grandparents had on Calle Cueto, but for me, during my early years, it was my universe. Not long ago, a Japanese newspaperman went to Santiago, intending to photograph the supposed “large house on the corner” that appears in my first novel. It was pointless to try to explain to him that it was fictional. At the end of such a long journey, the poor man suffered a terrible disappointment. Santiago has been demolished and rebuilt several times. Nothing lasts in this city. The home my grandfather built is today an unprepossessing discothèque, a depressing mélange of black plastic and psychedelic lights. The residence on Calle Cueto was demolished many years ago and in its place stand modern towers for low-income housing, unrecognizable among so many dozens of similar buildings.
    Please allow me a commentary about that demolition, as a sentimental whim. One day the machines of progress arrived with the mission of pulverizing the large home of my ancestors, and for weeks the implacable iron dinosaurs tore into structures with their great claws. When finally the Sahara-like dust storms subsided, the passersby saw, to their amazement, that a few palm trees had survived intact. Solitary, denuded, with their scruffy manes and air of ashy beggars, they awaited their end. Instead of the feared executioner, however, sweaty workmen carrying picks and shovels appeared and, working like an army of ants, dug trenches around each tree, loosening them from the earth. Those slender trees held handfuls of soil in their threadlike roots. Cranes bore the wounded giants to deep holes gardeners had prepared in a different spot, and planted them there. The trunks moaned quietly, the leaves drooped in yellow strands, and for a while it seemed that nothing could save them from their agony, but they were tenacious. A slow subterranean rebellion fought to preserve life, vegetal tentacles spread out, blending clumps of dirt from Calle Cueto with new soil. With the inevitable arrival of spring, the palms awoke, swaying from the waist, shaking their hair, rejuvenated despite their trauma. The image of those trees from the home of