What does Isabel Allende have to do with Salvador Allende?
Outside Chile, the author found that bearing her surname “was like a title of nobility, like being called Kennedy”. The relationship with the former Chilean president, dismissed by Augusto Pinochet.
The former president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was a first cousin of the father of the writer Isabel Allende.
The Chilean author, the most widely read living writer in the Spanish language, was born in Lima, Peru, on August 2, 1942, while her father Tomás Allende Pesce, first cousin of the former president of Chile, was secretary of the Chilean embassy in Peru.
When she was three years old, her parents separated and her mother moved with Isabel and her siblings back to Chile. There, she lived until 1953, when her mother remarried Ramón Huidobro Domínguez. It was then that the new family moved first to Bolivia and then to Lebanon. Upon her return to Chile in 1959, Allende married Miguel Frías and their two children, Nicolás and Paula, were born.
Before becoming a best-selling author, Isabel Allende worked as a feminist columnist for Paula magazine.
Her first novel, La casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits, 1982), was a smash hit, and from then on, her life continued on an upward climb with other bestselling titles, such as De amor y de sombra (1984), Eva Luna (1987), El plan infinito (1991), Paula (1994), Afrodita (1997), Hija de la fortuna (1998), Retrato en sepia (2000) and La ciudad de las bestias (2002), among many others. In 2023 he published El viento conoce mi nombre (The Wind Knows My Name).
It is estimated that all her work to date has sold more than 75 million copies and has been translated into 42 languages. This enormous success led her to receive countless awards and distinctions around the world. And to become a member of the American Academy of Arts.
Isabel and Salvador
Isabel Allende tells in great detail about her relationship with her father’s cousin, in an interview she had with the Center for Miguel Enriquez Studies (CEME), of the Chilean Archive.
“With Salvador Allende I had more contact when he was elected president, because my stepfather was appointed ambassador to Argentina and, every two months, I would go to Santiago to chat with him. On those occasions, there was a family reunion usually at Allende’s house in Santiago or at his country house,” the writer says and evokes the former president:
“I remember him as an extraordinarily charismatic man, with an enormous ability to win people over. On a personal level, he was capable of seducing his worst enemy. He had a great sense of humor. And a somewhat arrogant way of behaving. Especially after he became president. It was as if he had invested himself with the importance of the office,” she recalls for CEME.
The last time Isabel Allende saw the former president alive was nine days before the military coup, at a lunch at the politician’s home:
“Fidel Castro had sent her coconut sorbet, he used to send her sorbets. Allende loved it and did not share it with anyone, he ate it by himself. That day, we were joking, laughing because he ate his coconut and everyone wanted to take a spoonful of the sorbet. Suddenly, the conversation drifted towards the campaign that El Mercurio was making for Allende to resign the Presidency. There, in a very solemn tone, he said: ‘I will not leave La Moneda unless I die or when my term ends. I am not going to betray the people’. There was an uncomfortable silence. As if that statement, so solemn as to be written in marble, was not appropriate for a family reunion. I think Allende was the only one among those present who was aware of what could happen,” reflects the author.
The coup of ’73
Isabel Allende tells in the interview with CEME, that on September 11, 1973 she was on her way to work when she noticed that the streets were empty and that there were only military trucks: “It must be a military coup,” the writer had thought then, although -she assures- she did not really know what a military coup was.
“The magazine’s editorial office was padlocked. I went to see a friend, Mr. Osvaldo Arenas, a teacher at the Instituto Nacional, a school a few blocks from the Palacio de la Moneda. He was there, all alone, with a portable radio. He was crying: ‘They are going to bomb La Moneda, they are going to kill the president,’ Arenas lamented.
Isabel denied: “No, Don Osvaldo, how can you think that they are going to bomb La Moneda? For a Chilean it was an unthinkable hypothesis!”, explains Allende and continues:
“However, at that very moment, the planes began to pass overhead. We went up to the terrace and on the radio we heard the president’s voice, bidding farewell to the country with his famous speech:
“Someday the great avenues will open again where the free man will walk”, said the former Chilean president Salvador Allende, who committed suicide in the presidential palace that same day.
Immediately Isabel and her friend, Osvaldo, saw the bombs fall on La Moneda:
“The roar, the smoke… That’s when the curfew began… 48 hours without being able to go out on the street. I never imagined that something like that could happen in Chile, a country with a solid and established democracy for 160 years, known as ‘the England of Latin America’. That there were concentration camps and torture centers all over the country was a revelation. The brutality and violence had already been there, hidden in the shadows, but for me it was like waking up to a nightmare,” the writer told the Chilean press.
She and Miguel Frías, her husband at the time and father of her children Nicolás and Paula, were driving in the car, waving a white flag, to take food to those who had been isolated. On the way, they were forced to stop several times.
“As we drove through the streets I could see corpses, burning books, and people covered in blood being dragged into trucks,” Allende recalls the horror of those days.
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The writer helped those persecuted by the coup:
“Many times people came to me to hide or to take in. And I tried to gather information, interview people who had been tortured, get the names of prisoners and torturers. All this information was going to Germany.
Thus, fleeing the country became urgent. In 1975, Isabel Allende emigrated with her family to Venezuela, where they lived until 1988. The writer says that, at that time, her name was very striking.
“Outside Chile I realized that being called Allende was like having a title of nobility, it was more or less like being called Kennedy”.