There, moments before his death, Allende made his farewells by radio.

Intercut with this waking nightmare is her description of the time in 1973 when Allende recalls making her way to a school opposite the presidential palace as it was being bombed. 'Paula isn't here any more look at her eyes, they're like black water.' Chile's ambassador to Argentina, Tio Ramon was a close friend of Isabel's uncle, President Salvador Allende, whose attempts at reform were cut short in 1973 by a murderous coup and the brutal dictatorship of Augustin Pinochet.Īllende's description of this grim time in Chile's history is made to coincide with her description of one of the worst moments of Paula's illness, when another patient, insane but perceptive, recites a poem about Paula, locked in coma, resembling 'a bird with petrified wings.' 'Can't you see that you're really fighting against her?' she asks Isabel. He was 'bone thin, had a greenish tint to his skin, a walrus mustache, and Mephistophelean eyebrows,' but nevertheless possessed a fanciful, romantic spirit and boundless charm.

She adored her mother and her stepfather, Tio Ramon, who called himself the ugliest man of his generation. This vanished father is almost the only person Allende describes without affection. Later she realized, 'he just descended a rung in the immutable scale of Chile's social classes and became invisible.' As a child she imagined him fleeing the country in disguise. Isabel's father, suspected of arranging this incident, disappeared. One evening a politician saw his own son, 'decked out in a corset and lace garters,' with another man. A millionaire who lent his apartment for clandestine affairs had a false mirror through which a second group of guests could view the unwitting couples. He abandoned his family in the aftermath of a scandal. The story she tells, which is interspersed with passages describing the course of her daughter's illness, begins with the marriage of her innocent, kindly mother to a dandy in a white linen suit whose good looks and love of ostentation made him 'the indispensable element in Lima's revels.' At the height of the Second World War, Allende writes, ' obtained the best whiskey, the purest cocaine, and the most obliging party girls all doors opened to him.' This heartfelt autobiography is astonishing in its power to speak directly to the reader, perhaps because Allende's voice has a health and generosity that we welcome even when she writes of tragedy.

Paula allende