October 21, 2025 • 33 mins
Jorge and Paola Ramos sit down with renowned author, social activist, and feminist icon Isabel Allende to discuss the state of democracy in the U.S. today, why women’s rights must constantly be defended, and how looking back at our history is crucial in times like these.
You can listen now on the free iHeartRadio app. New episodes drop every Wednesday.
Follow us at:
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ola, I'm for Caramos.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
And I'm pala ramos and this is the moment.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
I love it hell momento. Okay, So the conversation that
you're about to hear took place in San Francisco, California.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
And unfortunately I couldn't be there in person to record
this interview, So this is technically the first remote interview
of the moment.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Is by far.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
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
(01:11):
talk about love.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
And feeling as a stranger in the United States.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
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
(01:47):
awkward because this is the first time in which we
have a conversation. We've never spoken in English.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
No, let's try.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Very funny in Spanish. No, it doesn't work in English.
I try to translate and my husband doesn't get it.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
With Roger, it's in English because he doesn't speak Spanish.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
And your previous husband with Willy, it was also.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
He spoke perfect Spanish.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Okay, so the conversation was always, yeah, he.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Is it's impossible to understand why the way, even for
those of us who yeah Spanish, I.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
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
(03:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
So you can actually write in Spanish, then use GPT
and then get that translation which is almost almost perfect, No.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
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,
(04:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
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
(05:06):
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?
Speaker 3 (05:19):
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,
(05:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Okay, so history is not repeating itself exactly. So there's
a there's progress, there is.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
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
(06:57):
be replaced, as it always happens.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
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
(07:19):
to use racial profiling against immigrants who have no criminal records.
So are we losing the democracy here in the United States?
Speaker 3 (07:29):
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
(07:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Now. You said in the past, and I'm quoting, I
don't want to live under dictatorship nor authoritarianism.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
Yes I don't. But now that we are leaving it,
I am too old to leave unless I am forced to.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
No, but you might be harassed.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
That's true. What I mean. Journeys have been attacked, Professors
are being attacked, families, pliticians.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
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
(09:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
Be meaning outside the United States, but not for you,
I mean Europe.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
No, if he lives, if he goes to living in
the Congo, I will go with him.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
So the possibility for the family, for the gender family
is probably to leave if the it may.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
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?
Speaker 3 (09:40):
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
(10:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
People are afraid, file are afraid.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
People are afraid, and when people are afraid, they are
paralyzed and then you can act.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
Yeah, I know. My foundation works at the border with
refugees and immigrants.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
What are you seeing?
Speaker 3 (10:39):
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
(11:00):
verge of getting them a green car or something. Everything
was back. All is lost.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
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
(11:45):
realizing that I don't belong there either, So I'm a
visitor on this planet.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
No.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
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.
(12:54):
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
(13:16):
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,
(13:37):
and anything can happen because given the wrong circumstances and
economic crisis and a war, an authoritarian government, anything can happen.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
So how would you define this moment. You've said, it's
a moment of fear.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
So you live in Venezuela for how many years?
Speaker 3 (14:17):
Thirteen years?
Speaker 1 (14:18):
Okay, So just to understand you after the coup in
Chile seventy three, then in seventy five, is that when
you moved here.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Let me stay with Venezuela because recently I saw a
comment that you made. Clearly you believe that Venezuela is
ad dictatorship with Neologue.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
It's a terrible, terrible situation exactly.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
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
(15:26):
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
(15:46):
what it is.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
So you're expecting the dictatorship to break from within.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
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
(16:50):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
Is for you, wherever the people I love are. So
home for me is here right now because I have Roger,
Nko and Laurie.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
So that's what your husband, my.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
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
(17:45):
a happy place, and I go back there like like
all the all the inspiration comes from those very deep
early roots.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
So it was not a happy place. No, it was
not because.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
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
(18:20):
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
(18:42):
cream for us.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
So you didn't want to be your mother, not like her,
so you grew up in opposition to that idea.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
And I look at you, I mean you.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
I got it.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
It's You're completely completely independent, You're powerful, you're empowered, you
say whatever you want. You're a free woman.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Completely in a way I am. I feel that way.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
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
(19:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
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,
(20:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Yeah, because you're not around all the time.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
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
(20:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
Oh, that's that's beautiful.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
People should know that he's the one who coordinated this
interview and many others that we had in the play.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
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?
Speaker 3 (21:46):
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.
(22:06):
The life of some of these women is just incredible.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
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?
Speaker 3 (22:23):
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.
(22:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
But in that male club, then Isabel legiend that came
and then you saw more books than most of them together.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
But but the thing is that I don't never belong
to the club I was possible.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
Chile. Yeah, the hardest critics were always Chillian.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
And still today.
Speaker 3 (23:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
They should be so proud of you.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
Except Scarmeta, who was always nice, and and Poero. But
for the rest I think they weren't sort of angry
that I sold.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
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?
Speaker 3 (24:26):
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
(24:48):
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,
(25:12):
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
(25:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
Going back to your book, you said that the last book,
in a way, is to honor your stepfather Raman.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
Yeah, the character of Papo in the book is like
my stepfather, Ramon.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
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
(26:34):
your mother starts sola. Are you alone? And I maybe not,
that's not the right question in English.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
No, I don't, that's what you mean.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Yeah, solo.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Three times a day, and you have a conversation.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Spirit at my house of the spirits.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
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
(27:45):
everything else, I call Paul and my mother.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
I'm agnostic. You're agnostic too, right, So that's a little sad.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
Guys, would be much better to have God.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
Yeah, it's a beautiful idea. But you can keep them
alive inside yourself in a way.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
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
(28:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Most you mean the love story.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
So what's beautiful is that you kept love alive at
all your life.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
I have been chronically married my life.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
I was, Antonio, can you show me?
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Can you show me the question?
Speaker 3 (29:56):
You know.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
Wanella's everywhere in this office.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
Well, but let me explain.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
It's not that there's an explanation of her.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
I'm not obsessively compulsively in.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Love with well, but you just have his face.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
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
(30:50):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
I think it was a mistake not called primaries, I
mean the party and the people should have chosen the candidate.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
Yeah, but probably I mean more the age that he
was not treated correctly, that there was ageism in the criticism.
Speaker 3 (31:19):
I think that he demonstrated that he was losing it
and he should have stepped out of the race.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
So your great great great granddaughter, what will she inherit
from you?
Speaker 3 (31:36):
Nothing?
Speaker 1 (31:38):
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?
Speaker 3 (31:49):
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
(32:11):
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
(32:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Listo the Moment is a production of Radio Bulante Studios
and partnership with Iheart's Mike would do the podcast network.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Executive producers at iHeart, Arlen Santana and Leo Gomez. Pablo
Gureta and Dylan Hunger also serve as producers.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
If you like the moment, pertaminto Ustan podcasts in Espanol.
Look for Radio Bulante Historias de tod America Latina wherever
you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
Sound design, final mixed and theme song by Elias Gonzalez.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
I'm pto ramos and I'm pala ramas. Thanks for listening.
Ola, I'm for Caramos.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
And I'm pala ramos and this is the moment.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
I love it hell momento. Okay, So the conversation that
you're about to hear took place in San Francisco, California.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
And unfortunately I couldn't be there in person to record
this interview, So this is technically the first remote interview
of the moment.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Is by far.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
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
(01:11):
talk about love.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
And feeling as a stranger in the United States.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
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
(01:47):
awkward because this is the first time in which we
have a conversation. We've never spoken in English.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
No, let's try.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Very funny in Spanish. No, it doesn't work in English.
I try to translate and my husband doesn't get it.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
With Roger, it's in English because he doesn't speak Spanish.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
And your previous husband with Willy, it was also.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
He spoke perfect Spanish.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Okay, so the conversation was always, yeah, he.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Is it's impossible to understand why the way, even for
those of us who yeah Spanish, I.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
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
(03:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
So you can actually write in Spanish, then use GPT
and then get that translation which is almost almost perfect, No.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
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,
(04:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
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
(05:06):
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?
Speaker 3 (05:19):
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,
(05:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Okay, so history is not repeating itself exactly. So there's
a there's progress, there is.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
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
(06:57):
be replaced, as it always happens.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
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
(07:19):
to use racial profiling against immigrants who have no criminal records.
So are we losing the democracy here in the United States?
Speaker 3 (07:29):
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
(07:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Now. You said in the past, and I'm quoting, I
don't want to live under dictatorship nor authoritarianism.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
Yes I don't. But now that we are leaving it,
I am too old to leave unless I am forced to.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
No, but you might be harassed.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
That's true. What I mean. Journeys have been attacked, Professors
are being attacked, families, pliticians.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
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
(09:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
Be meaning outside the United States, but not for you,
I mean Europe.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
No, if he lives, if he goes to living in
the Congo, I will go with him.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
So the possibility for the family, for the gender family
is probably to leave if the it may.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
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?
Speaker 3 (09:40):
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
(10:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
People are afraid, file are afraid.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
People are afraid, and when people are afraid, they are
paralyzed and then you can act.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
Yeah, I know. My foundation works at the border with
refugees and immigrants.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
What are you seeing?
Speaker 3 (10:39):
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
(11:00):
verge of getting them a green car or something. Everything
was back. All is lost.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
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
(11:45):
realizing that I don't belong there either, So I'm a
visitor on this planet.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
No.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
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.
(12:54):
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
(13:16):
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,
(13:37):
and anything can happen because given the wrong circumstances and
economic crisis and a war, an authoritarian government, anything can happen.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
So how would you define this moment. You've said, it's
a moment of fear.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
So you live in Venezuela for how many years?
Speaker 3 (14:17):
Thirteen years?
Speaker 1 (14:18):
Okay, So just to understand you after the coup in
Chile seventy three, then in seventy five, is that when
you moved here.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Let me stay with Venezuela because recently I saw a
comment that you made. Clearly you believe that Venezuela is
ad dictatorship with Neologue.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
It's a terrible, terrible situation exactly.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
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
(15:26):
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
(15:46):
what it is.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
So you're expecting the dictatorship to break from within.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
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
(16:50):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
Is for you, wherever the people I love are. So
home for me is here right now because I have Roger,
Nko and Laurie.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
So that's what your husband, my.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
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
(17:45):
a happy place, and I go back there like like
all the all the inspiration comes from those very deep
early roots.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
So it was not a happy place. No, it was
not because.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
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
(18:20):
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
(18:42):
cream for us.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
So you didn't want to be your mother, not like her,
so you grew up in opposition to that idea.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
And I look at you, I mean you.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
I got it.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
It's You're completely completely independent, You're powerful, you're empowered, you
say whatever you want. You're a free woman.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Completely in a way I am. I feel that way.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
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
(19:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
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,
(20:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Yeah, because you're not around all the time.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
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
(20:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
Oh, that's that's beautiful.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
People should know that he's the one who coordinated this
interview and many others that we had in the play.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
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?
Speaker 3 (21:46):
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.
(22:06):
The life of some of these women is just incredible.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
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?
Speaker 3 (22:23):
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.
(22:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
But in that male club, then Isabel legiend that came
and then you saw more books than most of them together.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
But but the thing is that I don't never belong
to the club I was possible.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
Chile. Yeah, the hardest critics were always Chillian.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
And still today.
Speaker 3 (23:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
They should be so proud of you.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
Except Scarmeta, who was always nice, and and Poero. But
for the rest I think they weren't sort of angry
that I sold.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
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?
Speaker 3 (24:26):
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
(24:48):
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,
(25:12):
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
(25:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
Going back to your book, you said that the last book,
in a way, is to honor your stepfather Raman.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
Yeah, the character of Papo in the book is like
my stepfather, Ramon.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
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
(26:34):
your mother starts sola. Are you alone? And I maybe not,
that's not the right question in English.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
No, I don't, that's what you mean.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Yeah, solo.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Three times a day, and you have a conversation.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Spirit at my house of the spirits.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
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
(27:45):
everything else, I call Paul and my mother.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
I'm agnostic. You're agnostic too, right, So that's a little sad.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
Guys, would be much better to have God.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
Yeah, it's a beautiful idea. But you can keep them
alive inside yourself in a way.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
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
(28:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Most you mean the love story.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
So what's beautiful is that you kept love alive at
all your life.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
I have been chronically married my life.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
I was, Antonio, can you show me?
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Can you show me the question?
Speaker 3 (29:56):
You know.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
Wanella's everywhere in this office.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
Well, but let me explain.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
It's not that there's an explanation of her.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
I'm not obsessively compulsively in.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Love with well, but you just have his face.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
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
(30:50):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
I think it was a mistake not called primaries, I
mean the party and the people should have chosen the candidate.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
Yeah, but probably I mean more the age that he
was not treated correctly, that there was ageism in the criticism.
Speaker 3 (31:19):
I think that he demonstrated that he was losing it
and he should have stepped out of the race.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
So your great great great granddaughter, what will she inherit
from you?
Speaker 3 (31:36):
Nothing?
Speaker 1 (31:38):
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?
Speaker 3 (31:49):
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
(32:11):
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
(32:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Listo the Moment is a production of Radio Bulante Studios
and partnership with Iheart's Mike would do the podcast network.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Executive producers at iHeart, Arlen Santana and Leo Gomez. Pablo
Gureta and Dylan Hunger also serve as producers.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
If you like the moment, pertaminto Ustan podcasts in Espanol.
Look for Radio Bulante Historias de tod America Latina wherever
you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
Sound design, final mixed and theme song by Elias Gonzalez.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
I'm pto ramos and I'm pala ramas. Thanks for listening.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist
It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.