Be loyal to your man; keep him from doing anything foolish; be happy to listen to him, or pretend to be happy; be a good cook; and pay no attention to the priests, since they know nothing. That’s the formula for conquering a man’s heart, according to Inés Suárez (c 1507-1580).
Suárez, protagonist of Isabel Allende’s historical novel, “Inés of My Soul,” should know. She’s had three men, or would have had them if it hadn’t been for the priests. She was the wife of two of them and was the mistress of a third, Pedro de Valdivia, the founder of Chile, whose exploits are the focus of this story in which Suarez helps Valdivia settle, defend and govern Chile.
A poor 16th-century Spanish seamstress, Suárez was born in Plasencia, Extremadura, Spain, in 1507 and came to America in 1537 trying to find her husband, Juan de Málaga, who, lured by the fabled wealth of the New World, had left Spain several years earlier. Suárez soon learned her husband had died. And in 1539, she (as a widow of a Spanish soldier) was granted a small plot of land as well as several Indian servants to help her establish herself in Peru.
Then she met Valdivia, who had married a young, scrupulous, frigid and devoutly Catholic wife whom he also had left in Spain. His distaste for her and his love for adventure took him to Peru, where he offered his services to the governor, Francisco Pizarro.
As Allende presents this multilayered story, Valdivia and Suárez fall in love at first sight. But since both are Catholic and divorce is forbidden by the church, which at this time has the power of the Inquisition (a power that Suárez resents and fears) behind it, the lovers cannot marry. So they live in sin until 1548, when, in exchange for being acquitted on charges of treason and immoral behavior, Valdivia is forced to give up his paramour and marry her to Rodrigo de Quiroga (1549).
Written as Suárez’s memoir to be given to the child of de Quiroga and her stepdaughter, Isabel Rodrigo, the narrative begins in 1580 as a 70-year-old Suárez looks back on her life from early childhood to old age. The novel ends with Suárez on her deathbed, thinking about Valdivia’s death while remembering his voice saying good-bye: “Farewell, Inés of my soul”
When Valdivia and Suárez begin their relationship, they lie to the priests, whom Suárez dislikes because they put their fingers in everybody’s pie, “though they themselves were no paragons of virtue.” She tells them that she is Valdivia’s domestic servant. It doesn’t hurt that she is an excellent seamstress, a competent nurse, a capable cook and a talented douser, who can find water in the Atacama Desert, considered the driest place on Earth. Later, because of her abilities, Suárez receives permission from Pizarro to accompany Valdivia in his effort to found and colonize Chile.
If it hadn’t been for Suárez, whom some historians have called Chile’s founding mother, there arguably would have been no Santiago and maybe no Chile. But Suárez has been nearly ignored by historians for more than 400 years. Allende writes this narrative trying to give Suárez her due.
Calling her book “a work of intuition,” Allende, best-selling New York Times author (“The House of the Spirits”), explains that the novel is composed of documented historical events strung together with the “fine thread of imagination.”
The result is an inside look at an era of history unfamiliar to many in the United States, even though that history parallels our own. Filled with facts about 16-century Spain, Peru and Chile, the book covers the turbulent lives and loves of Spanish conquistadors and conquistadoras (female conquistadors).
Allende describes everything from birth control (Suárez uses a sponge dipped in vinegar) to medicine made from fresh llama blood, urine and milk, to ghosts, sorcery, miracles – the appearance of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which turns the tide of a battle – to the religious rituals of the Spanish and of the Araucanian Indians.
Allende’s poetic language brings the descriptions alive on the page. She is especially good with the senses of sound and smell. The Indians don’t just attack, they “utter visceral howls that gradually merged into a long cry: Ooooooohm – which echoed in the mountains and moved their spirit. No one could escape the spell of that Ooooooohm.” Allende doesn’t merely note the passion between Suárez and Valdivia, she describes their scent. His is a combination of “iron, wine, and horse,” while hers is “kitchen, smoke, and sea.”
Suárez’s passion, though, is part of a larger narrative, impassioned in its own way: the history of Chile, a country with “pearls as big as partridge eggs, (and) gold that fell from the trees.” This story spans two religions, two continents, one desert, swamps, jungles and a fertile valley set beside the Mapocho River, which would become the city of Santiago named in honor of Saint James.
Here a man could bring “the word of the One, True God and the gifts of our Spanish civilization.” But the Araucanian Indians who lived here fought against the invaders because they had their own gods and civilization. Soon the area was known as the country of “rotos,” the graveyard of the Spaniards.
Allende, who grew up in Santiago and was the niece of its former president, Salvador Allende, describes the countryside so vividly that it almost becomes a character in the drama:
“Rain, more rain; rivers; lakes; white, foaming waterfalls: a liquid universe. And always in the background, the snow-capped mountains, smoking volcanoes, drifting clouds. Pedro de Valdivia’s soul escaped his body, captured among slim, moss-covered tree trunks as soft as velvet. The Garden of Eden, the promised land, paradise. Mute, his face wet with tears, the conquered conqueror was coming to know the place where the land ends: Chile.”
Told from the perspective of an old woman, who tends to repeat herself and whose thoughts seem to wander, the book, although at times repetitive and confusing, is hard to put down. Not only does it present page-turning action, but the action is also told with a striking sense of poetry. That sense is perhaps Allende’s greatest contribution to the story of a larger-than-life though little known conquistadora.
Diane Scharper is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a professor at Towson University. She is editing an anthology of memoirs to be published in 2007.
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Inés of My Soul
By Isabel Allende
HarperCollins, 320 pages, $25.95
