"Inés of My Soul": Isabel Allende's story of a real-life conquistadora

"Inés of My Soul"

by Isabel Allende

HarperCollins, 320 pp., $25.95

It is billed as historical fiction, but the heart of Isabel Allende's new novel, "Inés of My Soul," is grounded in documentable fact.

The heroine of this story is the indomitable Inés Suárez, a real-life conquistadora whose efforts were indispensable in Spain's assertion of power over the New World's southern hemisphere. Allende casts the story as the reminiscences of an old lady: before Inés dies, she relates her adventures to her stepdaughter.

Born in 1507, Inés was an improbable candidate to become a founding mother of Latin America. As a young woman, she worked as a seamstress in Plasencia, a city in Spain's western Extremadura region. Her first husband was a ne'er-do-well who left to seek his fortune in the New World.

The couple had no children, so after a few years in which she received only brief messages from her husband, Inés decided to travel to the New World, too, to ascertain whether her husband was living or dead, and to decide what to do with the rest of her life.

The trans-Atlantic voyage required Inés to tap inner resources she hadn't known she'd possessed. She arrived in the New World, and after months of inquiries from Cartagena to Panama to Callao, learned that her husband had been conscripted into the army of Francisco Pizarro and had perished in a battle against another Spanish faction. By then she had already honed the skills to survive on her own, and Pizarro himself set her up in business in Cuzco, Perú. And then she met Pedro de Valdivia.

As a field marshal under Pizarro, Valdivia had fought nobly in many successful battles. But he had seen the cruel and corrupt side of his leader, and Valdivia wanted to put some distance between himself and Pizarro. He was always hungry for new adventure, so he petitioned for permission to conquer and Christianize the lands to the south, in the name of the Spanish Empire.

Inés went with him. The two had become lovers from their first meeting, although Valdivia still had a wife in Spain. They defied the gossip, just as they defied the dangers they encountered on their journey.

Inés' ability to divine water saved the expedition as it crossed the barren Atacama desert. She treated maladies and wounds as the group fought fierce resistance from successive waves of Chilean Indians. When necessary, she even joined in the fight.

Eventually, the group reached a salubrious valley and established a settlement there, the basis for today's Santiago, Chile. But the survival of this outpost was not assured, and its successful defense cost many years, many lives, and finally the partnership between Inés and Valdivia.

Much of this history may come as a revelation to Yankee readers. School lessons certainly mention the Inca Empire, and Pizarro's treachery and rampant greed in dealing with the Incas, but rarely delve into the European conquest of other South American lands where gold was not a factor. The book's differentiation between various Spanish factions, as well as different native peoples, contributes more facets to a turbulent South American history of which most North American readers may not be aware.

As the niece of Chilean president Salvador Allende, who died in a violent coup in 1973, Isabel Allende is no stranger to the terrible price of ambition and power. She ventures into this earlier chapter of Chile's blood-soaked history with vivid and unflinching detail, insistent that her readers comprehend the ironically brutal cost of "civilizing" a land.

Of course, there is also the fact of Inés Suárez's compelling life, recreated in the author's sensual and emotive storytelling style. But all of this cannot disguise the niggling problem that, for this tale, Allende declines the license given novelists to create an imaginative framework or story structure. By relying instead on the episodic narrative provided by history, she deprives readers the satisfaction of a fully tailored novelistic experience.