Ola, I'm for Caramos.

And I'm pala ramos and this is the moment.

I love it hell momento.

Okay, So the conversation that you're about to hear took place in San Francisco, California.

And unfortunately I couldn't be there in person to record this interview, So this is technically the first remote interview of the moment.

Yeah, but by the way, this is something we're going to do more often in order just to have access to people all around the country and honestly all around the world.

But here's what this conversation is all about, because you don't want to miss it.

We're talking to Isabel Aye savil Ayen is one of the most important and influential Latin American authors, think by far and then.

Is by far.

But you know what this conversation actually You will hear her talk about being eighty two years old and still falling in love, getting married at eighty two years old.

And yes, of course she also will talk about democracy and dictatorships and fleeing Chile and how this country is very likely falling into authoritarianism.

But you will hear her talk about love.

And feeling as a stranger in the United States.

As a stranger in the United States.

And also what people don't know and you will likely find out is that Isahela Yendi is one of the people that my father admires the most.

And so I got questions George.

Yeah, well we've been friends for thirty years now since my father died and her daughter, Paula died.

So the conversation is going to be, I promise you, very intense and great by the way, Okay, we'll get more after the break, Sauel.

So it's going to be a little awkward because this is the first time in which we have a conversation.

We've never spoken in English.

No, let's try.

Let's try.

Let's see if it works.

And I wonder if by speaking a language that is not ours, if there's a different part of your personality that comes out than in English and.

Very funny in Spanish.

No, it doesn't work in English.

I try to translate and my husband doesn't get it.

Yeah.

So people say that your real language is the one you speak when you are really angry or when you're making love, but your love life is in English.

With Roger, it's in English because he doesn't speak Spanish.

And your previous husband with Willy, it was also.

He spoke perfect Spanish.

Okay, so the conversation was always, yeah, he.

Spoke like a Mexican bandilo.

But this guy is from Polish descent, raised in the Bronx, and he was raised by the Jesuits, so he spoke Latin for twelve years, and so sometimes he speaks to me in Latin and I reply in Chilean.

Is it's impossible to understand why the way, even for those of us who yeah Spanish, I.

Have had a very interesting experience.

I'm writing a memoir right now in Spanish, and simultaneously I was writing it in English because if it's non fiction, I can do both languages.

But then my son said, why are you withing your time?

Finish it in Spanish and then we will try AI and see what happens.

And I'm reading now the translation, and the translation is not perfect.

A translator would do a much better job, but it is very good and I can adjust it, and it's good so that I can show it to my editor, in my American editor, who doesn't speak.

So you can actually write in Spanish, then use GPT and then get that translation which is almost almost perfect, No.

Not perfect, but works, and I think it would work much better if it's not a leadershire.

You work for something that is I don't know technological non fiction.

So let me ask you here.

I have the two versions of your new book.

My name is Emilie.

Would I find a difference between them?

Is there something different?

The tone, I think is the feeling.

The translation is excellent, but there is a feeling of your own culture that I don't think is possible to translate the weight of words.

I always remember Ruda talking about bread and britt is not just a law of bread.

Really is the people?

Bread is hunger, British poverty, Redish work, read is their own.

It has implications that are very cultural.

It's impossible to translate the weight of it to another language.

And I'm sure, I'm sure that from English to Spanish we have the same problem.

Yes, so my name is Emilia Leva.

You wrote it obviously in Spanish.

Emilia is a journalist based in San Francisco.

I wonder why, because it was easy.

Who decides to go to cover the civil war in Chile in eighteen ninety one, and then, of course we have the suicide of Zamanoel bal Marcella, who was as progressive as probably it's a lot of agenda, and then he commits suicide.

And I wonder if if you think that history repeats itself, or why do you approach what happened in Chile this way?

I was interested in in the parallels between what happened with the civil war in nineteen ninety one with President Balmacella, what happened eighty years later in nineteen seventy three with the military cop And I think that humanity repeats history, but not exactly.

We don't walk in circles.

We walk.

I think we walk in a spiral.

And it appears and we repeat everything, but in every turn we learn something.

And the big arc of history is to more inclusion, more progress, more democracy.

Do you see an there's progress, of course, but what happened with mace nineteen ninety one and then it happened with a lot of I'm speaking about it, and now we have Donald Trump.

Yes, but that's another story.

We'll get into that more.

You know, I look back in history in my own life eighty something years and they say, well, the past was better.

It was never better.

It was better for a few, but the great majority of people are much better today than before.

Okay, so history is not repeating itself exactly.

So there's a there's progress, there is.

Progress, and I'm realistic.

I think that we will go through a very bad period that will last years, not only in the United States, in the world.

This flirtation with orthocratic governments and with fascism will be there for a while and then it will go away.

It will be replaced, as it always happens.

But since you just mentioned that, let me get into that.

You see what's happening right here in the United States.

We have the National Guard troops in the streets of many cities, mass agents everywhere detaining people without a warrant.

We have the Supreme Court that is allowing the police to use racial profiling against immigrants who have no criminal records.

So are we losing the democracy here in the United States?

Yes, I think we are, and I think it will be very hard to get it back.

The institutions will be broken and we will have to put them back together or replace them.

But think of Germany during the time of the war.

That was a system, an ideology that was meant to last one thousand years.

It was there to control the world, and in four years it was over because things happen and everything changes.

That the nature of the world of history is change.

Now.

You said in the past, and I'm quoting, I don't want to live under dictatorship nor authoritarianism.

Yes I don't.

But now that we are leaving it, I am too old to leave unless I am forced to.

If I am forced, but this is not a dictatorship yet.

I mean, we are getting there, but we have the film to save whatever we want.

I mean, especially you've always been completely completely open, and I don't think we're going to be arrested because of the things we're saying about the government.

No, but you might be harassed.

That's true.

What I mean.

Journeys have been attacked, Professors are being attacked, families, pliticians.

Yeah, so you might be harassed and forced to live in fear and shut up.

I am, as I said before, too old to be concerned because I have very little to lose.

I am going to die in a few years, and so what.

But I think of my son, and I think of my grandchildren, and maybe they will get used to it.

My son will not.

My son is already thinking we need a plant being.

We have to get out at some point plan.

Be meaning outside the United States, but not for you, I mean Europe.

No, if he lives, if he goes to living in the Congo, I will go with him.

So the possibility for the family, for the gender family is probably to leave if the it may.

Be if things get really really awful, we might have to leave.

I don't want to do it, though.

I want to stay here and speak up.

And that's exactly what you're doing.

But for that time, in comparison to what happened with Pinochette, is not what's happening right now.

No, or let me ask you, is it.

Do you see similarities?

I see parallels, but I see parallels.

But this country, the United States, is huge.

It's not a homogeneous country.

It's many nations and tribes within the same territory, much more difficult to control than what happened in Chilean in nineteen seventy three.

But there are many forms of lablishing an authoritarian government that is not necessarily a military coup.

You start by dividing people.

The way to control this division so people eventually don't even talk to each other, and then you establish a system of fear.

People are afraid, file are afraid.

People are afraid, and when people are afraid, they are paralyzed and then you can act.

There's so much fear.

I mean, I've been lately to Los Angeles and DC.

I've been to the border in New York.

There's fear.

There's fear everywhere.

Yeah, I know.

My foundation works at the border with refugees and immigrants.

What are you seeing?

What you have seen that the organizations and the lawyers and the people we support are afraid.

They're still working.

Some of them have had to close because there's no funding and the work they can do is very limited.

For example, we have several lawyers that have been working with the documents for immigrants and they were or the verge of getting them a green car or something.

Everything was back.

All is lost.

So you moved to the United States in the nineteen eighties, yes, in eighty eighty, Yeah, and then you became a US citizen.

But you're also Chilean.

Yeah, these two identities, how do they coexist?

That Chilena il American.

It is strange here because I feel foreign in this country.

I'm a foreigner.

I feel Yeah, I've been living here for decades, but I have an accent and I'm not like everybody else.

I don't quite fully belong.

But when I go back to Chile, I have the same feeling that I'm there for a week, and then I started realizing that I don't belong there either, So I'm a visitor on this planet.

Well, it's interesting what you're saying, because I feel the same way as I've been in this country since nineteen eighty three, and I still feel as an outsider and a stranger.

It is a Balanspaniel extran hero, it's more appropriate.

And then it's it's not only not only that you're not completely accepted, but you're like you're the other.

No.

So once you told me that after ninety eleven here in the United States, that before ninety eleven, people were asking you if you were from Chile or from the United States, and you had different answers.

But after ninety eleven, you felt for the first time that you were part of this country.

That's that feeling is not here anymore.

I felt that that I belonged because for the first time I saw people united in this country in a place of vulnerability.

No longer the bragging, swaggering American Americans were finally confronted with what can happen in their own territory.

And I felt that I was part of that because I had lived it before, and now I feel the same that I belong in this country also to a certain extent.

But what's happening is very disturbing, so disturbing that in a way, I think I always talked about the possibility that it could happen.

Forty years ago when I came to the United States, I told Willie, my husband, then this is a very fascist country.

I said, what are you talking about.

This is the cradle of democracy, and I said, look at the history, look at slavery, look at everything that has happened in this country.

And have the population has weapons, it is armed to the teeth, and anything can happen because given the wrong circumstances and economic crisis and a war, an authoritarian government, anything can happen.

So how would you define this moment.

You've said, it's a moment of fear.

Of fear of crisis and great corruption of everything, personal eruption of the people who are in power, but also corruption of the system, of the institutions, of the supreme Court of everything is being deteriorated to an extent that is unimaginable in such a short time.

So you live in Venezuela for how many years?

Thirteen years?

Okay, So just to understand you after the coup in Chile seventy three, then in seventy five, is that when you moved here.

Yeah, I strayed for a year in Chile, and then I left.

I went to Venezuela and I lived there for thirteen years, and then I met Welly here on a book tour, and I moved to the United States.

Let me stay with Venezuela because recently I saw a comment that you made.

Clearly you believe that Venezuela is ad dictatorship with Neologue.

It's a terrible, terrible situation exactly.

So we all want Nicolas Madua to be out of Venezuela.

Yeah, but as you know, the US is putting a lot of pressure, military pressure, and you said that you don't believe that a US intervention is the way to get rid of Nicholas magur No.

I think that you have to be very careful with an intervention.

Look what happened in Afghanistan in Iraq twenty years of occupation?

Do they want that?

People don't know what a military occupati is.

Ask the people in Gasa what a military ecupation is, so be very careful with that.

It's like in the United States, people have no idea what an authoritarian government is.

The people who know about that are the African Americans because they suffered in all their history, they suffered discrimination and abuse and exploitation in ways that the whites have not suffered.

So you can sort of flirt with the idea because you don't know what it is.

So you agree with the idea that Nikolas Madula should not be empowered in Venezuela, of course, but to get rid of him is not with a military occupation or with a US military.

I don't I think that it will reinforce the military in Venezuela because everybody gathers around the idea of war.

It makes him only stronger unless you flees the country.

So you're expecting the dictatorship to break from within.

Yes, it has such huge opposition, such intelligence resistance, that it will eventually end.

Of course, it will look if it ended in Chile when they had all the power in the world.

It felt it crumbled.

Let me ask you about home and where it's home for you.

So I've been thinking about where home for me is.

I don't know how many homes I live in the United sy how many houses.

So when I think of home, I think of the place where I grew up in Mexico with my brothers and sister, and I closed my eyes, and that's when I don't have nightmares.

When I have good dreams.

Then I think of that house and I sort of walked that house in my dreams when I'm maybe six, seven eight, And that's the only peaceful place that I know.

So I wonder where home.

Is for you, wherever the people I love are.

So home for me is here right now because I have Roger, Nko and Laurie.

So that's what your husband, my.

Son, and my daughter in law.

But what you were saying about the House of the dreams the house of the past.

I grew up in my grandparents' house in Santiago.

It was not a happy place, and my childhood was not happy, so I don't have good memories of it.

But I go back like Claro, but it was not a happy place, and I go back there like like all the all the inspiration comes from those very deep early roots.

So it was not a happy place.

No, it was not because.

Not for me as a child, because the House of the Spirit is fiction.

To begin with.

I lived in my grandparents' house and my mother was a charity case because my mother married the wrong man.

She was twenty five years old and returned to her parents' house with two babies in diapers and me I was not even three years old, and no money, no education for work.

She was spoiled senorita and without a husband at the time when there was no divorce in Chile, and so she had to live under her parents roof, and she had schooling for the kids and clothes and food, but no pocket money, so my mother couldn't buy an ice cream for us.

So you didn't want to be your mother, not like her, so you grew up in opposition to that idea.

Yeah, I wanted to be like my grandfather.

Who are the keys of the car, the keys of the house, the money, everything everything.

I wanted to be like him.

And I look at you, I mean you.

I got it.

It's You're completely completely independent, You're powerful, you're empowered, you say whatever you want.

You're a free woman.

Completely in a way I am.

I feel that way.

Yeah, I have a question for my daughter, Paul, and I want to ask you that.

But before doing that, I think we never spoke about you being a mother, because I've always thought of you as my friend and as a writer and as a independent woman, but not as a mother.

And I wonder if if you feel complete as a mother, or with a guilt that I feel that I haven't spent enough time with my children, that you feel the same way, a certain guilt that you did everything, but we're not completely present in their lives.

Look uria this idea of parenting is a new thing before you had kids, and you spend time with the kids, and you gave them everything you could, but you were not watching them and trying to make them happy for all the time.

So my kids grew up like all the other kids, playing in the street, walking alone to school, fending for themselves.

And if you ask Nico, my son, he says that he had a very happy childhood exactly because his mother wasn't on top of him.

Yeah, because you're not around all the time.

No, and I have three jobs often and maybe I wasn't there, but I was present in so many ways.

I was the person who was them all the time, if not physically, emotionally all the time.

And we were talking with Nico the other day that we have been separated only two years in our lives.

Nikol is fifty seven years old, and the two years in which he was married in Venezuela and I married, really here were the only two years in our lives that we have not been at more than fifteen minutes distance from each other.

Oh, that's that's beautiful.

I mean, it's a really relationship that is incredibly profound and solid, but not not crazy.

It's not the deepest thing, no, at all.

People should know that he's the one who coordinated this interview and many others that we had in the play.

He runs the foundation with his wife.

And it's just the other day I said, you know, Nico, I realized that I never stopped to tell you that I'm very grateful and that I love you.

He said, I know.

I don't.

Just don't say no, no, no, no, let's say it.

Don't get too close.

Many of your characters are strong, curious, compassionate women, are they?

Did you want to create a feminist world?

No?

I write about women because I know them so well.

I've been with women, working for women all my life, and I have a foundation that whose mession it is to invest in the power of women and girls.

So I know all these characters that appear in my books usually have been inspired by someone that I have met.

The life of some of these women is just incredible.

Let me see about machismo.

I know I met you very uncomfortable when I ask you about the Nobel Price for literature.

But is there a lot of machismo in the fact that you haven't gotten it yet?

I have no idea but that there is machismo in literature, in the book industries.

There still is a lot.

When I started with the House of the Spirits and it became a sudden success in Europe.

Women have been writing in Latin America for centuries, but there was a lot of one name in the boom of Latin American literature.

The men occupied all the space, and they protected each other, and all the awards and all the opportunities and everything was between them.

It was a club, a male club exactly.

But in that male club, then Isabel legiend that came and then you saw more books than most of them together.

But but the thing is that I don't never belong to the club I was possible.

Still you don't belong to No, No, I don't.

Once you told me that most lost critical mands forth is the most criticism comes from Chile.

Chile.

Yeah, the hardest critics were always Chillian.

And still today.

It has changed since twenty and fourteen when I got the National Book Award, the literary award that the country gives every four years, and then I got some respect.

But my colleagues always treated me badly.

They should be so proud of you.

Except Scarmeta, who was always nice, and and Poero.

But for the rest I think they weren't sort of angry that I sold.

More books and still do so I have the question from Paola.

Course of course not, but anyway she sent.

She sent the question she's your daughter.

I don't know my daughter, Paula.

So I know that you've always identified as a feminist.

So at the time when the US feminist movement seems to be fractured, no one seems to be lacking a collective, unified voice, particularly in Donald Trump's America, what do you think the movement here can learn from feminists in Latin America and in Chile.

Now, what should they be seeing there?

Look, Paula, I have seen everything.

I started working as a feminist when I was very, very young, and I have seen how much we have advanced on the backlash and how the movement makes mistakes and then corrects the mistakes.

It's a revolution, and in every revolution there is no no map.

We just improvised the best we can.

And in the United States right now, there is rampant misogyny that people, I mean men are not even embarrassed anymore, and I think that would provoke a feminine reaction.

Women will react to this.

Young women today in many places, not only the United States, don't want to call themselves feminists because it's not sexy, and they think that getting a man is more important.

But there's a point when you realize that if you don't, if you're not vigilant, if you don't defend your rights, you lose them immediately.

Think of Afghanistan.

Taliban comes and in twenty four hours women lose everything they had acquired in the last twenty years.

In the United States, reproductive rights are threatened and have ended in many places, and respect for women.

There's a war against women.

Women have to realize that.

Going back to your book, you said that the last book, in a way, is to honor your stepfather Raman.

Yeah, the character of Papo in the book is like my stepfather, Ramon.

We're talking the past about being alone and painful in tragedy, in your in your life.

So again the distinction between and in Spanish solo start solo.

So you know in Mexico, soy solo or SOI sola, which is much stronger.

No, so after Paula and then your father, your stepfather and your mother starts sola.

Are you alone?

And I maybe not, that's not the right question in English.

No, I don't, that's what you mean.

Yeah, solo.

Yeah, you know, I think that I have invented a way of keeping them alive.

So give me.

Let me give you a stupid example.

I have the photographs of my mother and Pauli on the sink where I washed.

I brush my teeth so.

Three times a day, and you have a conversation.

I have a conversation.

Of course, I know this is all made up in my mind, that I'm not seeing ghosts, but I keep the presents and when I have decided that I have a group of spirits that help me.

This is only in my head.

Spirit at my house of the spirits.

So let's say that I need help because I feel depressed, I feel lazy.

I don't want to do this, I don't want to do that.

Then I call my grandfather, my grandfather who comes and in two minutes he instills discipline.

If I need common sense, I call the o Ramon.

If I need magic, I call my grandmother.

And for everything else, I call Paul and my mother.

I'm agnostic.

You're agnostic too, right, So that's a little sad.

Guys, would be much better to have God.

Exactly because I was thinking it would be lovely, just for fantastic to know that I'm going to see my brother who died recently, and my father and my cat Lola.

No, that would be beautiful.

Yeah, it's a beautiful idea.

But you can keep them alive inside yourself in a way.

You taught me that.

You taught me that.

So you're running now a memoir for the last ten years from twenty fifteen to twenty twenty five.

But you were telling me that it has to do more than anything about age and getting No.

I think that it has to do about life, love and aging or death, because it's the end of my relationship with Willie, which was a long love affair that iime, I spend alone, a time of reflection, and then when I met Roger and a new love came unexpected, new life eighty yeah, no, late seventies okay, and he came into my life and all this is under the cloud.

Let's say, oh, the umbrella of aging, because this is not an original story except for the fact that it happens very late in life when.

Most you mean the love story.

The love story, yeah no, and the breaking up of a marriage because very few people decide at seventy four to divorce when you have invested almost thirteen years with the same person.

So it's scary.

But if it was not because of the age, it wouldn't have anything original.

So what's beautiful is that you kept love alive at all your life.

I have been chronically married my life.

By the way, I just remember something funny.

People don't know, but there's another love in this room and you're sitting on it.

I was, Antonio, can you show me?

Can you show me the question?

You know.

Wanella's everywhere in this office.

Well, but let me explain.

It's not that there's an explanation of her.

I'm not obsessively compulsively in.

Love with well, but you just have his face.

Everyone happened is that I said once publicly that I was in love with him, and people started sending me pictures and pushions and all kinds of memorabilia.

Someone sent me a picture of Antonio and there's naked.

No I have in my shruck.

I don't believe that she looks really good naked.

No comment on that.

So, So you were talking about aging and age ism.

Just recently I saw that that Kamala Harris thought it was reckless for Joe Biden to be in charge of the the election campaign.

But I was just seeing you and Joe Biden are the same age.

I look better than him, much better than much much better.

Yeah.

Yeah, was it a mistake that he.

I think it was a mistake not called primaries, I mean the party and the people should have chosen the candidate.

Yeah, but probably I mean more the age that he was not treated correctly, that there was ageism in the criticism.

I think that he demonstrated that he was losing it and he should have stepped out of the race.

So your great great great granddaughter, what will she inherit from you?

Nothing?

Zero?

Well, no money, I don't mean money.

But what can she in many years from now, in one hundred years from now, when we're not here, she can say what about you?

I hope that she can say, My great great great grandmother was one of the pioneers that made my life today possible as a woman.

She changed the patriarchy with other women.

Of course, it was a movement that would be what would really feel like a legacy, because I'm asked all the time, what is your legacy?

There is no legacy books, that's not a legacy that that will disappear in whatever.

But but if I am part of a chain, a link in a long chain, if that, if I didn't break the chain, if I was there as a link to promote the end of the patriarchy to be replaced for something more reasonable, more sustainable, more just, more peaceful, more beautiful in every way, then that's my legacy, and I hope it will be in her genes.

Yes.

Listo the Moment is a production of Radio Bulante Studios and partnership with Iheart's Mike would do the podcast network.

Our stuffing through Daniel Alarcon.

La Ponte and Lisa said that with the help of Paul Alan Jego Corso, Natalie Ramirez, Elsa li lianau Joa, the CEO of Radio Bulante Studio, sist Carolina Gere.

Executive producers at iHeart, Arlen Santana and Leo Gomez.

Pablo Gureta and Dylan Hunger also serve as producers.

If you like the moment, pertaminto Ustan podcasts in Espanol.

Look for Radio Bulante Historias de tod America Latina wherever you listen to podcasts.

Sound design, final mixed and theme song by Elias Gonzalez.

I'm pto ramos and I'm pala ramas.

Thanks for listening.