Read Online My Invented Country by Isabel Allende - Free Book Online Page B

the Spaniards. At any rate, I will repeat what I’ve read about it. The Araucan Indians were polygamous and treated women very badly; they would abandon them, and their children, and leave as a group to look for new hunting grounds, where they took new women and had more children, whom they left in turn. The mothers took care of their offspring as best they could, a custom that in a way persists in the psyche of our people. Chilean women tend to accept—though not forgive—abandonment by their men because they think of it as an endemic ill, something inherent in the male nature. As for the Spanish conquistadors, very few of them brought women with them, so they coupled with Indian women, whom they valued far less than a horse. From these unequal unions were born humiliated daughters who would themselves be raped as women, and sons who feared and admired the soldier father: bad-tempered, unjust, master of all rights, including those of life and death. As those sons grew up, they identified with their fathers, never with the conquered race of the mother. Some conquistadors had as many as thirty concubines, notcounting the women they raped and immediately abandoned. The Inquisition railed against the Mapuches for their polygamous customs, but overlooked the harems of captive Indian women accompanying the Spaniards: more mestizo children meant more subjects for the crown of Spain and more souls for the Christian religion. From those violent embraces come our peoples, and to this day men act as if they were on horseback surveying the world from on high, giving orders, conquering. As a theory, that isn’t half bad, right?
    Chilean women are abettors of machismo: they bring up their daughters to serve and their sons to be served. While on the one hand they fight for their rights and work tirelessly, on the other, they wait on their husband and male children, assisted by their daughters, who from an early age are well instructed regarding their obligations. Modern girls are rebelling, of course, but the minute they fall in love they repeat the learned pattern, confusing love with service. It makes me sad to see splendid girls waiting on their boyfriends as if they were invalids. They not only serve the meal, they offer to cut the meat. It makes me unhappy because I was the same way. Not long ago a TV comic, a man dressed as a woman, scored a great hit by imitating a model wife. Poor Elvira—that was his name—ironed shirts, cooked complicated meals, did the children’s homework, waxed the floor by hand, and flew around to put on nice clothes and makeup before her husband came home from work, so he wouldn’t find her ugly. Elvira never rested, and everything was always her fault. One time she even ran amarathon behind the bus her husband was taking to work, to hand him the briefcase he had forgotten. The program made men howl with laughter, but it bothered the women so much that finally it was taken off the air; wives didn’t like seeing themselves portrayed so faithfully by the ineffable Elvira.
    My American husband, who takes responsibility for half the chores in our house, is scandalized by Chilean machismo. When a man washes the plate he’s eaten from, he considers that he’s “helping” his wife or mother, and expects to be praised for his effort. Among our Chilean friends there is always some woman who’ll serve breakfast in bed to adolescent boys, wash their clothes, and make their bed. If there’s no nana, the mother or a sister does it, something that would seldom happen in the United States. Willie was also horrified by the institution of the maid. I prefer not to tell him that in the past the duties of these women were even more intimate, although that was never discussed openly: mothers looked the other way and the fathers boasted of their sons’ backstairs feats. He’s a tiger, they would say, remembering their own experiences, a “chip off the old