| AMBASSADOR TO HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN’S BICENTENARY By Isabel Allende Your Royal Highness, Crown Prince Frederick; Mr. Jaime Lagos, Ambassador of Chile; authorities of the Hans Christian Andersen Foundation, ladies and gentlemen. How could I tell you what being appointed ambassador to Hans Christian Andersen bicentenary means to me? Of all the honors that one could possible receive, this one is by far the most magic. Thank you, for allowing me to celebrate with Denmark and the rest of the world the power of storytelling. Like most children born in the last couple of centuries, I grew up with Andersen’s tales. I was almost four years old when my father went to buy cigarettes and never came back. Finding herself alone, with three children, and no resources, my mother returned to live under her father’s roof. In that large and somber house, my mother, my brothers and I shared the same bedroom. This was in the forties, and there was no television in Chile. Fear and fantasy, plus the scary noises of mice and ghosts, made our nights very long. At bedtime, my mother told us stories. My brothers would eventually fall asleep, but I believed that each and every one of those stories was true. In my mind there was no difference between the account of a naval battle of the nineteenth century, the family anecdote of an uncle that flew to heaven in a balloon, and Andersen’s unsettling fairy tales. I lay awake in the darkness waiting for the fictional characters to materialize in the shadows of the room. At first they were translucent and silent, like jellyfish under water, but soon they would become more tangible. A phantasmagoric light illuminated the room and I could see them clearly and hear them chatting away, they were my friends. They had escaped the confinement of their own story and got involved in those of others. Thus a tin soldier complained that he was bruised because he had slept with a pea under his mattress. Thumbalina put on the Emperor’s clothes, which were definitely too big for her, while her fiancé, the blind mole, chased a lovely lady dancer made of paper. The snowman started to melt down because he was playing with matches, while the little match-seller went off to marry a prince who didn’t look at all like a prince, he looked like a toad. A nightingale, perched on a tinderbox, sang the best pieces of his repertoire to three enormous dogs with terrifying eyes. It was impossible to sort out the confusion of all those people in my bedroom, all of them with their own drama, arguing with each other or falling in love with the wrong person and thus creating new stories for me every night. When I was around five or six years old my mother got tired of repeating the same stories and she gave me a book of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen. I learned to read fast! Soon I discovered that those stories, that I believed to be true, had been made up long ago by a storyteller in Denmark. I felt betrayed! My characters were not free, they were trapped in the pages of the book. Their lives were printed and could not be changed. Thumbelina could not hear the golden nightingale singing; the naked Emperor would never meet Simple Simon; the ugly duckling could not become a prince, he could only turn into a swan, which is a very limited career option, if you think about it. |
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