TELEGRAPH SATURDAY MAGAZINE (UK)
Author Isabel Allende on how to lure a lover, why you should run round the dinner table shaking a chocolate cake and what to do if your novel lacks ‘oomph’ and reads like the telephone book.
‘I love to do things with my hands,’ says the Chilean novelist Isabel Allende, wrist-deep in a bowl of avocado, celery and apple. ‘What’s the point of cooking if you can’t touch the food!’ she snorts. Today she is preparing a romantic lunch for her best friend Juliette and Juliette’s boyfriend Craig. ‘We are all hoping Craig will be Juliette’s husband. We are trying to woo him with this meal.’
Allende is something of an expert on aphrodisiacs, having written her own cookbook, Aphrodite, on the subject in 1997. The book gives tips on how to plan an orgy, her fantasy about her husband cooking in the nude, and her favorite turn-on, ‘a raw egg served on my lover’s navel with chopped onions, pepper, salt, lemon and a drop of Tabasco.’
For nearly 40 years, Allende has lived in the US. During a book tour for Eva Luna in 1987, she stopped off in San Francisco and met a lawyer called Willie Gordon at one of her signings. They had a fling and later Allende returned: ‘To see if I could get him out of my head or whether lust had turned into love. When I arrived at his house uninvited, Willie, in a panic, tried to make his escape, but I took one running leap and was on him like a prizefighter,’ she writes in her memoir My Invented Country.
They married in 1987 and now live in a Spanish style house (of Allende’s design) on a promontory with a magnificent view over the bay of San Francisco. ‘Last night I sat in the hot tub with the dog and watched the moon coming up, and the sky was purple and the bay was like a silver mirror,’ Allende says, delighted with her little piece of paradise.
Allende grew up in Chile amongst a colorful extended family that she used as the basis for her first book, The House of Spirits. ‘With a family like mine you don’t need imagination,’ she jokes. Her grandparents were not especially interested in food. ‘My grandfather put himself above comfort and my grandmother was so preoccupied with learning to levitate, she would eat anything set before her.’ Fortunately Allende’s mother soon replaced the family cook, and out went the endless peas, lentils and jiggly jellies, and in came a whole new world of sensual delights. Her mother is the best cook she knows. ‘Simply by tasting a dish, she can recreate it from scratch.’ Allende is somewhere in between. She loves food, but believes you shouldn’t over do it. For dinner parties, she recommends buying in a chocolate cake, ‘You take off all the store trimmings and run around the dinner table several times shaking it so it looks more languid, like you made it yourself’.
Chocolate is a passion. ‘I have two pieces a day, sometimes more depending on how depressed I might be. I take it in my luggage when I am traveling.’ Today she is making a chocolate mousse for desert using the best quality dark chocolate. ‘It is better for your adrenaline and your love life. Milk chocolate is for wimps,’ she says brandishing a chocolate covered wooden spoon.
When her husband, who also writes books (mystery novels), shows up for lunch, he is wearing his signature wide-brim hat. First he tackles her for a kiss, and then tells the guests with a wink, ‘Everything she says is true.’ Allende admits she has a passion for exaggeration. In My Invented Country, she writes, ‘Most of our lives are similar and can be told in the tone used to read the telephone directory – unless we decide to give It a little oomph, a little color.’
‘My father was a writer too,’ Gordon begins, and without missing a beat Allende chips in ‘Your father was a weird charlatan!’ He counters, ‘ We never agree. We will fight for three days about one word. She will take a hatchet to my work. But it’s better after that.’
As Allende cooks, she talks mile a minute. It’s like watching a TV chef, she is so adept at multi-tasking. Today she is making a traditional Chilean salad to start. (‘something everyone makes’). ‘Soak the celery in very cold water for half an hour. It opens up a little bit and looks better,’ she advises. ‘As you cut the apple, you put lemon on it, so it doesn’t turn black on the knife. Not too much olive oil as the avocado is already oily.’
Allende started work as a journalist at 17 and progressed to working in television. But her career came to an abrupt halt when President Salvadore Allende (her father’s cousin) was assassinated in 1973 and General Pinochet took over. ‘Pinochet was an assassin, a traitor and a thief. He broke the backbone of the country. I knew he would never come to trial. Justice in Chile is very slow and class oriented. I knew they would postpone it until he died,’ she says plunging her red varnished fingernails into a bowl to massage the salad.
With a handful of soil from her garden and her first husband and two children Paula and Nicolas, she fled to Venezuela. She worked little and eventually her first marriage fell apart. But on January 8, 1981, she started writing a letter to her 99-year-old grandfather in Chile. ‘He was dying and I couldn’t bid him farewell so I wrote him a letter. I wanted to tell him he could die in peace, all the family anecdotes he told me I had remembered.’ The letter turned into a book. Her mother told her it was a novel not a memoir, as only half of it was true.
Initially The House of Spirits was rejected everywhere, but now it is her bestselling work. To date, Allende has written 27 books and sold 77 million copies translated into 42 languages. Her writing has changed a lot she says. ‘The baroque almost overdone style of the 1970s is not in any more. I am surprised anyone still reads that stuff.’ Her current book, Ines of My Soul, [this interview took place in 2007] is a fictionalized account of the first Spanish woman to arrive in Chile with the conquistadors in 1540. ‘I fell in love with this person. She would go to the end of the world for love.’
As Allende is scooping liberal amounts of the salad into hollowed out grapefruits, she says with a sigh that she wishes she were better at presentation. ’Most of my food looks chewed, but I love setting the table, the candles and the flowers. When that’s done I want everyone to leave. I’m just joking. I love to entertain.’
Summer for Allende is all about travel and entertaining. Her son Nicolas and his family, and her daughter Paula’s husband and his new family (Paula died in 1993 from complications from porphyria) all live nearby. ‘In summer the house is permanently open and its like an Arab banquet with food everywhere, fruit, homemade cookies and good wine. Everyone has a key to the house, so we have to tell them when Willie and I have made a date to be together. My grandchildren say we don’t need to know all that. They think it is gross that old people make love,’ she chuckles.
In winter the house is closed. ‘Winter is for writing,’ she says. Every year on January 8 she begins a new book. Her writing space is the little house beside the swimming-pool that was originally built as a cabana (‘until she took it over,’ says Willie with a roll of the eyes). It is a light filled space with an enormous desk in the middle, paintings by Allende’s mother and a chair with a pink towel for Olivia, a Tibetan terrier that Allende calls ‘a black hole of need.’
Every morning Allende rises at 6.30, puts on her make-up, does her hair and gets dressed ‘as if I am going somewhere’. She walks Olivia and then writes from 8.30am until 7pm. There is no email and no phone in the office. The only distraction is the fabulous view of the bay. There is a second room in this office, which, she calls ’my little prayer room’. ‘Women of my generation do not feel comfortable in any religion. It’s all so patriarchal. You have to believe something that can’t be believed. But we are body, mind and something else too. I meditate, very early in the morning, when my head isn’t full of stuff.’
‘I can’t believe I am doing all this and not writing!’ she says nearing the end of the lunch preparation. But a love of food and hospitality is in her blood. ‘In Chile we eat all the time, no matter how poor or how much in a hurry. Even if a policeman comes to raid your house, you offer a little tea.’
Today lunch is served indoors on a carved wooden table ‘My grandmother had séances on the table,’ she says.
For the main course, Allende has made a seafood linguine, another dish inspired by her homeland. ‘Chile has the best seafood in the world,’ she says. The country has nearly 3000 miles of coast and an immensely varied climate from the Sahara-like Atacama Desert in the North to the labyrinth of fjords and forests in the South. ‘Our national cuisine is very simple; there is no need to dress things up with spices or sauces,’ she says.
Chile is evidently very close to her heart. Her parents still live there and she visits every year. But she would never move back. ‘I would have no privacy. And despite her dislike of ‘the appalling President Bush’, she likes America and San Francisco, ‘a happy, tolerant, open and cosmopolitan city’. But most of all, she can’t imagine life without Willie. ‘I thought I was going to get over him in a week and here we are 20 years later. We actually are in love you know, but some days I look at him in the morning and think who is this white guy?’
Update: Isabel Allende’s most recent book is Perla The Might Dog (2024). She is currently married to Roger Cukras.
© images by Aya Brackett
Lucie Young 