Free My Invented Country by Isabel Allende Page B

performed amazing cures. The press and television swarmed all over her, as well as multitudes of pilgrims who never gave her a moment’s peace. When she was examined more closely, she turned out to be a transvestite, but that did nothing to detract from her prestige or put an end to her marvels. Just the opposite. Every so often we wake up with the announcement that another saint or new Messiah has made his or her appearance, which never fails to attract hopeful throngs. In the seventies, when I was working as ajournalist, I happened to write an article about a girl who was credited with having the gift of prophecy and a faculty for curing animals and restoring dead engines to working order. The humble little house where she lived was filled with the country folk who came every day, always at the same hour, to witness her discreet miracles. They swore that they heard an inexplicable rain of rocks on the roof of the hut, rattling like the end of the world, and that the earth would tremble and the girl would fall into a trance. I had the opportunity to attend a couple of these events, and I witnessed the trance, during which the young saint displayed the extraordinary physical strength of a gladiator, but I don’t recall any rocks from the skies or quaking earth. It’s possible, as a local evangelical preacher explained, that these things failed to occur because I was there, a skeptic capable of ruining even the most legitimate miracle. No matter, the phenomenon was reported in the newspapers, and people’s interest in the saint kept rising until the army came and put an end to everything in its own way. I used her story ten years later in one of my novels.
    Catholics form a majority in Chile, although there are more and more Evangelicals and Pentecostals who irritate everyone because they have a direct understanding with God while everyone else must pass through the priestly bureaucracy. The Mormons, who are also numerous and very powerful, serve their followers as a valuable employment agency, the way that members of the Radical Party used to do. Whoever is left is either Jewish, Muslim, or, in my generation, a New Age spirtualist, which is a cocktailof ecological, Christian, and Buddhist practices, along with a few rituals recently rescued from the Indian reservations, and with the usual accompaniment of gurus, astrologists, psychics, and other spiritual guides. Since the health care system was privatized and pharmaceuticals became an immoral business, folkloric and Eastern medicine, machis or meicas, our Indian healers, and self-taught herbalists and purveyors of miraculous cures have in part replaced traditional medicine, with equally effective results. Half of my friends are in the hands of a psychic who controls their destinies and keeps them safe by cleansing their auras, laying on hands, or leading them on astral journeys. The last time I was in Chile, I was hypnotized by a friend who is studying to be a curandero, a healer, who led me back through several incarnations. It wasn’t easy to return to the present, however, since my friend hadn’t reached that part of the course, but the experiment was well worth the effort because I discovered that in former lives I was not Genghis Khan, as my mother believes.
    I have not succeeded in completely shaking free of religion, and when I’m faced with any difficulty, the first thing that occurs to me is to pray, just in case, which is what all Chileans do, even atheists . . . forgive me, agnostics. Let’s say I need a taxi. Experience has taught me that once through the Lord’s Prayer will make one appear. There was a time, somewhere between infancy and the age of fifteen, when I nursed the fantasy of being a nun as a way of disguising the fact that I most surely was not going to find a husband, and to this day I haven’t completely discarded that fancy. I amstill assailed by the temptation to end my days in poverty, silence, and