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family ruined by the early death of his father, fell in love with a girl famed for her beauty, Rosa Barros, but the girl died mysteriously before they could wed. All that remains of her is a pair of sepia-tone photographs, faded in the fog of time, in which her features are barely perceptible. Years later, my grandfather married Isabel, Rosa’s younger sister. In those days in Santiago, everyone within a specific social class knew each other, so that marriages, though not arranged as they were in India, were indeed family matters. Therefore it seemed logical to my grandfather that since he had been accepted by the Barros as a suitor of one of their daughters, there was no reason why he should not court the other.
    My grandfather Agustín was a slim man when he was young; he had a distinctive aquiline nose, and, solemn and proud, wore a black suit cut from one of his dead father’s. He came from an old family of Spanish-Basque origins, but unlike his relatives, he was poor. His family didn’t offer a great deal to talk about, except for Tío Jorge, my uncle, whowas as elegant and good-looking as a prince; he had a brilliant future before him, and was desired by all the señoritas of marrying age. He had the bad fortune, however, to fall in love with a woman de medio pelo, as Chileans call the struggling lower middle class. In another country they might have been able to love one another without tragedy, but in the world they lived in they were condemned to being ostracized. This woman adored my Tío Jorge for fifty years, but she wore a moth-eaten fox stole, she dyed her hair carrot red, she smoked up a storm, and she drank beer from the bottle, more than enough reasons for my great-grandmother Ester to declare war on her and forbid her son to speak his beloved’s name in her presence. He obeyed without a word, but the day after the matriarch’s death, he married his lover, who by then was a mature woman with lung problems, although still captivating. They loved each other in their poverty and no one was ever able to part them. Two days after he died of a heart attack, they found her dead in bed, wrapped in her husband’s old bathrobe.
    Allow me a word about that great-grandmother Ester, because I believe that her powerful influence explains some aspects of the character of her descendants, and in no little measure she represents the intransigent matriarch who was, and is, so common in the culture. The mother figure reaches mythological proportions in our country, so I don’t find my Tío Jorge’s submission surprising. Jewish and Italian mothers are dilettantes compared with the Chilean ones. I have just discovered, by chance, that her husband had a bad head for business and lost his lands and the fortune he had inherited; itseems that his creditors were his own brothers. When he realized he was ruined, he went out to his country house and blew a hole in his chest with a shotgun. I say I just learned about this because for a hundred years the family hid that story, and it is still mentioned in whispers. Suicide was considered a particularly opprobrious sin, since the body couldn’t be buried in the consecrated earth of a Catholic cemetery. To escape that shame, my great-grandfather’s relatives dressed his corpse in a morning coat and top hat, sat him in a horse-drawn carriage, and drove him to Santiago, where he could be given a Christian burial because everyone, including the priest, turned a blind eye. This event divided the direct descendants, who swear that the story of the suicide is calumny, and the descendants of the dead man’s brothers, who ended up with his wealth. In either case, the widow was left sunken in depression and poverty. She had been a happy, pretty woman, a piano virtuoso, but upon her husband’s death she dressed in severe mourning, locked the piano, and from that day forward left her home only to go to daily mass. Over time, arthritis and