Interview with Isabel Allende by Celia Correas Zapata

"In Paula, you write that you were a solitary child who made up for her loneliness with imagination. That question takes us back to the one you asked before, the one about the labyrinth and the facing mirrors. From the time I was very young, as long as I can remember, I have felt that the world is magic, that there are two realities: one that's palpable, visible, quotidian, solar, and the other one, the night reality of secrets, shadows, uncontrollable passions - a lunar reality. And I also sense those two planes in my body. There is the person everyone sees, the one reflected in mirrors, but inside that body, organs are pulsing, hormones floating, dreams and children gestating; memory lies there, mysterious emotional and chemical processes hidden to the human eye. Inside me is the fish I was when I was gestating, the infant I was at birth, the seven-year-old girl, the mother of twenty, the mature woman I am today, the corpse I will be. Sometimes, as if in a fresco, I can see everything I was, am, and will be, and at special moments it seems I can also see that in other people. [...] I observe my grandchildren, perfect, without a freckle out of place, still innocent of anything bad, and I see who they were when I helped them from their mother's womb and who they will be after I am dead. This, which we can call games of imagination for lack of better description, I have felt from the time I was a child, when I was still living in the big, shadowy house of my grandparents" (Zapata 2003: 13-14). Zapata, Celia Correas. Isabel Allende: Life and Spirits. Houston, Texas: Arte Público Press, 2002.