My Invented Country by Isabel Allende Read Free Book Online Page A

in the middle of the sixteenth century. Ercilla is the author of La Araucana, an epic poem about the Spanish conquest and the fierce resistance of the natives. In the prologue, he addresses the king, his lord, saying of the Araucans that
    â€œWith undiluted courage and stubborn determination they reclaimed and sustained their freedom, spilling in sacrifice for it so much blood, both theirs and that of Spaniards, that in truth it may be said that there are few places left unstained with it, or not covered with bones. . . . And the loss of life is so great, because of all those who have died in this endeavor, that to fill out their numbers and to swell their ranks, their women also come to war, and, fighting at times like males, they deliver themselves spiritedly unto death.”
    Some Mapuche tribes have rebelled in recent years, and the country cannot ignore them much longer. In fact, they are somewhat in vogue. Intellectuals and ecologists scramble to come up with some lance-toting ancestor to adorn their genealogical tree; a heroic Indian in a family tree is much more glamorous than some decadent marquis softened by life at court. I confess that I myself have tried to adopt a Mapuche name, so I could puff myself up about having a chieftain great-grandfather—the same way that in the past people bought titles of European nobility—but to date I’ve been unsuccessful. I suspect that that’s how my father obtained his coat of arms: three starving mutts on a blue field, as I recall. The escutcheon in question was hidden away in the cellar and never mentioned, because titles of nobility were abolished when Chile declared its independence from Spain. In Chile there is nothing so ridiculous as to try to pass as a nobleman. When I worked at the United Nations I had a boss who was a true Italian count, and he had to change his calling cards because of the guffaws his heraldry provoked.
    Indian chieftains won their rank with superhuman feats of strength and valor. They would hoist a tree trunk from those virgin forests to their shoulders, and whoever could support that weight longest became the toqui. As if that weren’t enough, they recited an extemporaneous composition without pausing for breath, because in addition to proving their physical capabilities they had to make the case for the coherence and beauty of their words. That may be the source of our age-old vice of poetry. From that moment, no one would dispute his authority until the nexttournament. No torture contrived by ingenious Spanish conquistadors, however horrible, succeeded in demoralizing those formidable dark-skinned heroes, who died without a moan impaled on pikes, quartered by four horses, or slowly burned alive over hot coals. Our Indians did not have a significant culture like those of the Aztec, Maya, or Inca empires; they were rough, primitive, bad tempered, and small in number, but so brave that they were in a state of war for three hundred years, first against the Spanish colonizers, then against the republic. They were pacified in 1880, and not much was heard from them for more than a century, but now the Mapuches—“people of the earth”—have again taken up the fight because what little land is still theirs is threatened by construction of a dam on the Bío Bío River.
    The artistic and cultural products of our Indians are as somber as everything else produced in the country. They color their cloth and weavings with vegetable dyes: dark red, black, gray, white; their musical instruments are as lugubrious as the song of whales; their dances are dull, monotonous, and last so long that in the end they bring rain. Their craftwork is beautiful, but it lacks the exuberance and variety of the art of Mexico, Peru, or Guatemala.
    The Aymaras—“children of the sun”—are very different from the Mapuches; they are the same Indians as those in Bolivia, and they come and go, ignoring boundaries, because