Inspiration

Let me tell you about the person that inspired me to tell the story I write about in my book In the Belly of the Horse. I was in Santiago, Chile visiting the house of poet laureate Pablo Neruda, today a museum, and needed a ride back to town thirty minutes away. (By the way the poet Neruda is one of the character’s in Isabel Allende’s book ‘A Long Petal of the Sea’. Neruda helps Allende’s fictional characters immigrate from Spain to Chile). I hailed down a cab, jumped in, and the driver started to tell me about his life. He was from a small Indigenous village in the southern part of the country and when a right-wing coup organized by General Pinochet ousted the Chilean Socialist government in 1973, soldiers came into the village looking for left-wing sympathizers. His father heard the commotion and ran out of the house. Taking his son in his arms he took him into the woods to hide. He was a young child at the time, left alone by his father who went back to retrieve his mother but never returned. The cab driver felt lucky to have found refugee with other abandoned street kids and went to live with them in the local cemetery. Until that day he was still trying to obtain information about his parent’s disappearances, to no avail.

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