The life force of language.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara
• Position: Isabel Allende

This Chilean best-selling writer imbues her work with spiritual strength and humor, transcending personal tragedy

The night before this interview I attended a talk by Isabel Allende at Georgetown University - a stop on a long publicity tour for her memoir, Paula (HarperCollins). Allende spoke about her book, which she began in 1991 in a hospital in Madrid, where her daughter was being treated for porphyria. A beautiful, intelligent, active young woman in her late twenties, Paula had just married a young Spaniard. She was working as a volunteer with poor children at a Catholic school in Madrid when she became ill. Although porphyria is rarely fatal, due to an error in procedure, an accident, or some other unknown circumstance, Paula never came out of her coma and died on December 6, 1992. In spite of the fact that Paula was engendered by a tragedy, this is not a sad book, for Allende emphasizes the beautiful moments she spent with her daughter as much as the physical destruction caused by the disease.

In her presentation, Allende spoke of the most difficult moments of her long, hard ordeal, but she also read humorous passages about her own life, including one in which she recounts her experiences as a chorus girl at the follies, when she was researching an article for a feminist magazine. I was impressed with the ease with which she passed from terribly painful to amusing segments of the book, laughing and provoking laughter, telling embarrassing anecdotes, answering difficult questions. Small, pretty, and very sharp, in front of an audience Allende is a professional in complete control of her medium - perhaps due to the long years she worked on Chilean television. It was obvious that this presentation had been carefully orchestrated and rehearsed, one of many that she was giving to promote her new book in countless cities. And yet, one sensed terrible pain behind the protective shield. After the talk, several listeners remained in their seats sobbing disconsolately.

I asked Allende where she found the strength and vitality to do these presentations night after night, week after week - how she could go on talking about Paula and laughing, how she managed to get on with her life - because her energy was indeed amazing. "When the idea to do this book tour came up, I was terrified," she admits. "I thought I wouldn't be able to do it. Obviously because the topic is very hard for me to deal with, and also because it's all still very fresh in my mind. Two things have helped me a lot. One is people's reaction. There's a marvelous energy that the public transmits. You can feel people's affection, their openness, their tolerance, their understanding. So many people come up to me with a letter they've written on the back of a ticket, a little note, or a gift to tell me that they've lost someone close . . . Or often very young girls who identify with Paula . . . The second thing is that I read these texts in English, and the language constitutes a filter. These aren't the words that I wrote; they're the words of my translator, and that creates a little space between the text and me, which helps. But those few times I'll have to do it in Spanish I think will be very hard."

In her talk at Georgetown Allende spoke of the mask of language she hides behind. Nevertheless, people penetrate that mask and feel her pain. "It's that the pain is always there," she explains. "It's part of my nature. It's like wrinkles and grey hair. Those things are part of me now. I welcome a feeling that I know will be with me the rest of my life. Each time I see a long-haired girl in blue jeans walking down the street, I think it's Paula. And often I find myself with my hand on the phone ready to call her - because I called her all the time, almost every day - and then I realize that there's no place to call her. What I'm saying is, that's going to be with me always . . . and I have to live with it."

Four years ago Allende was at a party celebrating the publication of The Infinite Plan (HarperCollins), feeling elated, triumphant, thinking that she had reached the high point of her career, when she received the call that Paula was in the hospital. When she arrived at the intensive care unit and was informed of her daughter's state, she was convinced that Paula would get better. She began to write during the long hours of waiting at the hospital; it was a way of killing time. Besides, she thought that Paula might not remember certain things when she awakened, and the book - a long memoir of the author's life with family anecdotes and descriptions of the political situation - would serve to orient her.

"My mother told me: 'Write or you'll die,'" says Allende, "and I started to think that as long as I wrote, Paula would stay alive. It was a way of defying death. My mother saw the end way before I did. Life is full of signs and premonitions, if only we knew how to read them. I had a lot of trouble coming to terms with the truth."

Allende began jotting down her thoughts and recollections on a yellow pad. She didn't intend to write a book, so the procedure never became a literary project. "At least not while I was writing," she says. "Now it is, because it's out of my hands. But writing was so tied to everything that happened . . . From the moment when Paula got sick I began to write, and I wrote during the entire year she was ill and during the first year of mourning. It was like part of the process, I never separated it completely. There are no variations in an illness like this one, nothing ever happens. There are no reactions, I wrote a lot of letters to my mother . . . when I went back over them I saw that none of them revealed any kind of change . . . Everything is the same from the first day to the last. Writing was a means of separating the days, of allowing time to pass and fixing it in my memory. It was like, by writing the day, the day happened. Without that, everything was the same. Writing was so tied to the process of grieving and also trying to help Paula that the book never developed an independent life. It's just that it wasn't a book. It started to be a book a lot later. So it never had its own life. When I wrote the last draft of...