Isabel Allende At Age 18
Disclaimer for the gullible folks of Medium. Something in this true story is fiction. The trick is to embellish known facts.
I was born in Buenos Aires on August 31st 1942 and Isabel Allende on August 2, 1942. I met Allende once in the coffee shop of the Hotel Vancouver some years ago. What struck me about her was her simplicity and that I just might one day go shopping in a Los Angeles supermarket and run into her at the produce department. There was this look of an ordinary woman. But I was wrong.
In my trip to Buenos Aires in September 2013 I found an old Peruvian magazine, Caretas, with an extensive biography of Allende that was full of photographs of her as a younger woman. In fact we know that Allende was born in Lima, Peru.
It was my feeling when I met her at the Hotel Vancouver that she had had a recent encounter with a surgeon. That’s what led me astray.
Allende as a younger woman was a standout. My Spanish grandmother would have said, “Un cromo.”
The picture you see here had the date 1960 and the news print made it look more yellow than it would have been originally. The photo credit was for a man called Willoughby Blew so I suspect that Allende might have posed for an English photographer based in Santiago who specialized in upper crust families and families of the diplomatic corps. She and her mother her parents returned to Santiago in 1953. What is startling is that Allende would have had the gumption to pose in such a way with stockings and garters. My suspicion is that the young Allende had been exposed to a most interesting and earlier Chilean poet called Teresa Wilms Montt. There would have been a family connection for this interest. When Tomás Allende (Isabel Allende’s father disappeared in 1945) the family moved back to Santiago from Lima in 1953 and Francisca, Isabel’s mother had remarried. Francisca’s new man was a diplomat called Ramón Huidobro. It would be a patent coincidence that the man who liberated Teresa Wilms Montt from a nunnery/insane asylum she had been confined to in 1916 would not be in some way related to Isabel Allende’s foster father. Both Huidobros came from an aristocratic landed family founded by one Vicente García Huidobro Morandé.
Originally published at blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com.
