The tormented life of José Donoso in a biography written by his daughter
By: Nelson Sandoval Díaz / EFE
Magazine "Ñ". December 10, 2009
life of the Chilean writer José Donoso (1924-1996) is shredded by his daughter Pilar in Taking the veil, a leafy biography that will be starting this Friday at bookstores Santiago de Chile.
Taking the veil has been a laborious life for its author, through it, he told to submit to the press last night, wanted to settle accounts with his father and also something stormy relationship who maintained, and has been also prepared to "do not ask me more about him."
No wonder: "Keep Pilarcita worsens the problem, we have totally crucified with his hatred, his hatred of herself, her hatred of the world, her husband, their daughters. Suddenly fear a murder is so violent and perverse, "notes Donovan about her daughter in one of his notebooks.
"I can not get rid of oppressive chain. Am I also a character in his novels and not he a character in my life, she wonders, for its part, the text Pilar Donoso (Spain, 1967), which for many years, has confessed, failed to separate fact from fiction in the relationship with his father.
That relationship
Pilar awakened, he said, one of his greatest fears while working on the book of 442 pages: it was taken as a "vendetta" and that only dissipated when it was done because he realized that there Donoso "is pretty well" in the text although it was not saved anything about it.
Reflections on homosexuality, its great bitterness and frustration, hatred, contempt or appreciation to relatives, friends or acquaintances, their lack of practicality, all told in first person appears, through passages of his life.
"Taking the veil" (Alfaguara) sued him eight years Pilar Donoso work, whose main base was the 64 newspapers, each several hundred pages, the author of "The Obscene Bird of Night" (1970) left us before dying at the universities of Iowa and Princeton (USA), which he taught.
The title comes from the universe also Donoso, is taken from "cottage" (1978), for many critics one of the great works of the writer, whose characters, members of the oligarchy, "ran a veil" on the issues uncomfortable or they could threaten the family. Although
Pilar Donoso did not intend to reveal hidden secrets in his book, believes that it closes a circle of passion "Worthy of the best of his novels" about his father, also author of Coronation (1957), The next garden (1981) and where elephants go to bed
"My own father told me entrusted this task before his death, "revealed Pilar, and specified that in Donoso's notebooks are dedications that the author expressly left" to my future biographers, as well as reflections on whether her daughter would be "able to carry out this work" .
Donoso files, according to Pilar, "are endless and include manuscripts of his novels, comments about their characters, thinking about his creative process, interspersed with notes on his personal life, which are rescued her for this biography.
beginning of the book has "everything shocking bad things said about me, my mom (Maria Pilar Serrano)" and then work is divided into chapters according to the city where they lived and the house as they did, José Donoso aspects that were "essential".
also reveals, for the author's homosexuality, that what most worries was that Donoso his work was labeled as "gay literature", to the extent that upon reaching Princeton was horrified to realize that it had included doctoral theses.
"There are hundreds of thousands of things I have not spoken here: my homosexuality, passive and latent and imaginative at this time as a flight to fear of a total commitment to you, "Donovan said in a letter to his wife.
" My marriage is worth worth it? I want to María Pilar? Is not it a prison for me? Is not she who is destroying me slowly, not me who is leaving destroy me? "Asks another of his diaries, in a sample of compulsive paranoia.
" When I read his diaries I can only confirm that he himself, beyond his art as a novelist, had a serious dysfunction of reality, "Pilar Donoso writes in the biography. (1995), among other works.
* * *
After reviewing the 64 private notebooks of his father, Pilar Donoso found completely unknown corners of the writer's personality and narrated in this article.
Pilar Donoso
La Tercera. November 9, 2008
Summer 2006. Sitting in the bow-window of the house of my mother Cachagua rest on my lap six of the 64 volumes of the diaries of my father.
I have fear ... watch them, take their weight, fast browsing and acknowledge the point, almost ant. I sense that may contain the possibility to find the ramblings, revelations of a creative mind that explores the profound anxieties of the soul in these pages that I face is a parallel world, dark, hidden, close to death.
The browsing and finally decided to venture to start reading, although perhaps then I regret it because I believe in oblivion as part of survival. (...)
disappears a check of $ 150 and returns to suspect that I have won, he said, are "tinc" about my lack of honesty with money. He feels that if he had strength and time, take all the finances back in their hands and so would no longer have those horrible ideas that frighten.
The truth is that I took over from 18 years finances of the house of my parents, go to the bank, deposit, bring money to pay salaries, etc.. They gave me power over their accounts, for convenience, or rather for convenience, since all the "practical" found it impossible to bear. I can not deny that the early years when I was a newlywed, but pretty girl, age 19, when he was commissioned by them to the supermarket, the car missed a few things I needed some milk, rice, etc. Somehow felt it was a "payment" for this work was so tedious that run with a house that was not mine and all "sent" no rewarding to do, but from there to steal ... Duele think my father thought I was some kind of threat, an enemy at home.
"I wonder if the greed, the cruelty of Pilarcita with all that money is nothing more than a form of fear of robbery, the prosperity of" other "Chileans, decay and old age our: yes is undoubtedly a form of fear, a desire to draw his silhouette incomplete with the material that we have provided an easy-escape and difficult-of all that is decadent, old age, symbolized in ourselves, in the weakness of my health in the depressions of María Pilar. promise more later. Not a little tenderness. I see our old age supported by it. Fear of drinking Maria Pilar. Fear of the black legend about me that may have come from more than one place or address: Ivan Road, the Donoso Larraín, many other spokesmen. Poor child! Woe to us, old and poor and in their hands. "(...)
regard to his illness, he feels he does not support, I'm not going to take care as they age or my mother in the If he dies first. has never been so from the very young, I felt that these beings somewhat fragile, ethereal, creative, practical and see what something unintelligible. I assumed to be very small role as mother of my parents. One time, my old father and said, "You has sido más madre mía que yo padre tuyo". Con esta incertidumbre ante su propia vejez escribe:
"La Pilarcita -a mí, por lo menos, a quien le resulta más difícil sacarle plata que a María Pilar- no me quiere mucho. In fact que me desprecia. Pero también es verdad que esta sensación la tengo con casi toda la gente que conozco y a quienes aprecio".
(...)
El me lo pidió directamente, que escribiera su biografía. Como ya he dicho, el modus operandi era que nos sentábamos en su estudio largas horas para que yo grabara lo que él decía. Era una conversación absolutamente guiada por él, saying he wanted to pass on to posterity, never frankly, not showing his weakness, and with an eye toward reality.
wanted me to write what he would say and nothing else. I think now that he never imagined that I would be able to undertake this project as I am addressing today. I also think I felt unable to embark on the reading of his notebooks. In fact I found this pithy comment about "limited Pilarcita mind forever." (...)
With my mother would think of something similar but less so than me I'm your main fixation. It is also cruel but she manages to arouse certain feelings of compassion:
"Life made available María Pilar undoubted opportunities, location, beauty, people selection, taste, culture, everything within reach. And all So is she made a cloth, rag, an old drunk with packets as the 'Bird'. Strange how all things in life are going to form a pattern, a recognizable and are only necessary parts unintelligible puzzle that is my life - or the lives of all? -. Why do I never manage to see the full design? When I see him? I do not think it will ever see. "
feel attacked, threatened, abused by my mother, especially in economics, believes that she is going to lead to total ruin. This fear does make you feel robbed , destitute, homeless. think that my mother works against him when he speaks of "heritage" are offended, because it believes that it has everything that has spent all in dress, his doctors and the psychoanalysis of it during 35 years of marriage.
"Maria Pilar is a sort of little game, he forgets things and reconstructs them according to your taste and serve him, erasing fully what is reality. But surely what it bothers me is that it does not recognize anything I've done for her, what I sacrificed in the best sense of the word, for her understanding and tolerant of what I've been with his drinking, his quarrels with Pilarcita. This is not me I can forgive and away from it terribly. Sometimes I say 'so little tender that you are with me. "
it does not count for tenderness and understanding and tolerance, only añuñú, which in our advanced age, leaving her teeth and she shamelessly throughout the house is a bit ridiculous, if there is no and understanding between us and there is not. I I mind that less and less, especially for its non-recognition of my work (provided you like the brightness that gives my work, but do not realize or choose not realize what it costs me energy and exhaustion) it helps me (who else I drove, helped and corrected in his book? You have forgotten that a great deal, starting with the idea contributions are mine) and my personal finance for all your medical problems, even in his drunkenness.
I can only love her less. And sometimes, especially lately, I come to a dangerous threshold of tolerance ".
(...) Incredibly
is that with respect to their own day, also comes in a frenzy of discovery ... It is concerned the consultation on dailies that are stored both in the library of the University of Iowa and the University of Princeton.
did not want anyone to read. He considered intimate, private. He left there to be analyzed by scholars in the distant future. That was protected in future was far enough for him, but not for me and mine.
"September 1991
I'm interested in going to the Special Collection Library to see what materials my own and in what state. Guess I'll leave my first day, the Coronation, restriction under, because I remember those first, above all, are awfully close. I do not like that are accessible worldwide and as curious can walk out there circulating.
I've been reading some of the literature of Donovan who scored in Princeton Benahid Nadja, and I am appalled that there are several entries, lists of doctoral dissertations, on the subject of homosexuality. It's amazing that this is what they get in clean, but of course that the place no limits are given for it! What can I do! A really fits. But I have to find Some ways to address the fact that, in this day and age, is an issue that the public cares passionately and you can not say no to me so quickly. Nor do I say I have no reason to be frightened and depressed. What to do? How to deal with the matter? ".
(...) Having a written record of every step of the life of my father from age 42 onwards, and also have my mother's day, I contacted not necessarily with what he wanted to know. Sometimes it's better just to keep in memory, which is based on the subjectivity of feelings, situations, places, words spoken, thus allowing one is able to be structured as a person. And natural selection to save memory in it the memory of what it meant for one.
I disagree with this record so methodical and gritty of all thought or emotion, conflict. If we let human beings embodied everything we think and feel at every stage of life and reveal our true intimacy, I think, most would be pretty nasty, hateful, heinous.
(...) I have been confronted with the written word that my father reflected in his diaries (which after a few years all have free access) and on every page without realizing I was also with me, I had to restructure a thousand times in front of words reflected here, to the confusion, to pain, to love, to fear, to hate ... But among the thousands of pages I rescued myself and perhaps eventually also knew who I was.
While it was not her biological daughter, he taught me in life and now through their books to learn to look at me and tease out the layers that covered my own soul and find that I have a lot of it, above all taught me to look, to observe, to hear through the pain, internal cracks, lack of identity, today, the tribal identity, ancestral I have no knowledge, I find in these pages. Finally ... yes I have a story, my story.
only need to take the veil. And run it is that we have voluntarily entered a blind, watching what is disturbing, that it is difficult to face ... Leaving the denial. With the veil that covered everything we see, may well believe that reality does not exist. Inherent in man, this mechanism protects us in some way to handle what life is intolerable, painful. But for my father, this theme was a feature of Chilean society to avoid seeing reality in depth, with all that that implies.
Among the many methods of escape, there was one, the masks, which fascinated him and somehow was his own system of concealment and revelation of his identity.
"What lies behind the mask of his face is never a face. It's always a different skin. The masks are you, and the mask behind the mask as well are you and so on and all others. And those masks are of what you were taught to love and reject, and what you also want it or reject it, and what you used to defend yourself, and what you used to attack. And much more. Different masks are functional, you use because you used to live. I do not know what you mean by authenticity. I do believe is that human life is a refined and very complex masking system and simulations. You have to defend. "
This is because the challenge, drawing back the veil ensure that the same José Donoso recourse. Finally discover who was hiding his face behind his many masks and hiding the great fear of not being accepted by others.
