The novelist Lisa St Aubin de Téran was barely a woman when she met three men who would change her life. Thirty years later, she has reimagined the life of one of them. She talks to Louise East
When Lisa St Aubin de Terán was 16 she bumped into three Venezuelans on a street in south London. It was a fateful meeting. Eight months later she was married to Jaime Terán, a man twice her age who "had English" only in the form of a pocket dictionary.
St Aubin de Terán was a precocious teenager who, despite extreme shyness, wore Edwardian dress at all times: hats the size of chess tables, elbow-length gloves, floor-sweeping gowns. Even in 1969 London she stood out like a walking waxwork, which was the one thing her new husband and his two compatriots, Otto and Elias, were trying to avoid. Landowners and aristocrats in Venezuela, the three men were now political exiles and bank robbers, on the run and under cover.
More than three decades later St Aubin de Terán has swapped the fancy dress for a slightly grubby white astrakhan jacket and a long black skirt and is sitting in her publisher's London office, eating a prawn sandwich. Lying on the table is the hefty book she sees as "the big one", the most important novel of the six she has written. Called simply Otto, it's a fictionalised version not of her husband's life but of that of his friend Oswaldo Barreto Miliani.
The marriage to Terán split up after seven intense years, during which the young St Aubin de Terán ran his huge hacienda in the Venezuelan Andes, but her friendship with Otto endures to this day. "Otto has been a huge influence on my life," she says. "Ever since he pointed out that although people thought I was so clever, a child prodigy, I was actually pig ignorant. I have remained aware of my own ignorance and tried in some way to measure up to his respect."
Otto's life certainly yields plenty of material. A youthful communist and enemy of the oppressive Venezuelan state, he appeared with Zelig-like regularity wherever revolutionary politics reached boiling point. An adviser to Fidel Castro and a friend of President Salvador Allende of Chile, he married one of the leaders of the Kurdish rebellion in Iran. In Venezuela in particular he's a legend, but after their long years of friendship St Aubin de Terán was aware of the gap between the myth and reality. "A lot of people knew what he was supposed to have done, but hardly anyone knew what he had actually done."
In a fairly dense novel, St Aubin de Terán's exploration of that gap forms the most interesting subtext, perhaps because of her experience of what she calls the gossip tom-tom. "When I lived on the hacienda I couldn't go the loo twice, I couldn't speak to anyone but it was known. It made me see how myth shaped the sense of a community and defined who we are," she says. "If you think about it, magic realism is gossip elevated to an art form. Say your daughter has an illicit affair and runs off with her boyfriend. How do you explain that? You say she ascended into heaven in a white sheet and was never heard of again."
St Aubin de Terán has always mined her life for material, writing several books of memoir (including the best-selling The Hacienda, about her experiences in Venezuela), as well as novels, poetry and short stories. Such is the picaresque nature of her life that it seems unlikely she'll ever run dry.
When her husband's behaviour became increasingly erratic and dangerous she fled Venezuela, effectively kidnapping their young daughter, Iseult, and turning her into the kind of outlaw her husband once was. She wandered Europe, sleeping on trains; married the poet George MacBeth, settling briefly with him and their son, Alex, in Norfolk; and, when that relationship split up, decamped with the painter Robbie Duff Scott to Italy, where they spent several years restoring a decaying palace in Umbria and bringing up a second daughter, Florence.
Stuffed into the nooks and crannies of her life are numerous lawsuits, an odd six months spent on a Caribbean island, jaunts through Brazil, Bolivia, Thailand and Mali, dark murmurings of a "Mafia-movie ending" to her life in Italy and tales of a literary conference in Brazil overrun by riot police. Yet St Aubin de Terán considers herself an accidental tourist whose exotic life was motivated by "chance and necessity" as much as by a spirit of adventure.
"I've always had a sense of not really belonging anywhere and at the same time feeling, with a little bit of imagination, I belong everywhere. The disadvantage is a sense of rootlessness and the advantage is that, by dint of sheer wanting to belong somewhere, I have the ability to latch onto other societies and cultures and get into them," she says. "I think a lot of writers have a restlessness in them, which propels them for reasons they don't necessarily understand."
This life spent in chaotic Brownian motion certainly makes for good reading, but St Aubin de Terán acknowledges that it has not always been easy for her children. "I think it was certainly harder for them than it was for me, but a lot of the time I travelled because I felt it was the only way I could survive as a person. So for them it was a question of whether they wanted a mother who was fixed in one place but in a state of breakdown or to be with a mother who travelled more than they might have liked but who was a viable human being."
All three, she claims, are now great travellers, "although Iseult does have an abiding hatred of trains". Three-and-a-half years ago St Aubin de Terán packed up again and moved to Amsterdam, which she settled on as the most suitable city in which to set up a film company. She now has 12 projects in development, with a Michael Radford-directed adaptation of Alan Garner's The Owl Service about to enter production.
With typical serendipity this almost arbitrary move threw up two new passions when a Dutch cameraman named Mees persuaded her to visit Mozambique to make a travel documentary. "Of course I refused to go, but he was very insistent. I completely fell in love with the country." And, as it happens, with Mees; the pair have been together for three years, during which time they've returned repeatedly to Mozambique, putting together a charitable foundation as well as developing luxury tourism lodges.
"While I was there the district administrator asked me to help set up schools," she says. "I thought, well, what's the point of putting a secondary school out in the bush if people can't get jobs when they come out? To be honest, I looked at the state of development the way I would tackle a novel and tried to find a complete beginning, middle and end that would work and would involve all the different characters."
Last September a college of tourism opened in a restored naval academy donated by the Mozambican government; a college of agriculture, complete with botanical gardens, is under way. St Aubin de Terán, a lifelong train addict, is even advising on a railway-infrastructure project. It's been a long journey from that south London street encounter, but finally, at the age of 52, St Aubin de Terán has come full circle.
"Listen," she says, hunching forward over the desk. "When I left the hacienda I thought I was really qualified for a job because I had a seven-out-of-10 success rate grafting avocado pears and I could run a sugar factory. I thought I'd just pop down to the job centre and see what they had for me in the centre of London. Of course it didn't work like that, but now I'm starting a new avocado plantation in Mozambique, and we're looking into these innovative farming methods. Everything I've done in my life so far has been in preparation for what I'm doing now. It finally links together and makes sense."
Otto is published by Virago, £15.99