O’Higgins Is Araucanian

O’Higgins Is Araucanian is a brief, extravagantly revisionist book by Lonko Kilapan that claims Bernardo O’Higgins was the legitimate son of an Irish colonial governor and an Araucanian woman. Oscar Amalfitano first remembers it as a joke; rereading it in Santa Teresa, he finds that its invented history opens onto questions of colonial violence, national memory, political fear, and the unstable line between laughter and sorrow. Its increasingly implausible account of telepathy and ancient migrations finally becomes personally disturbing when Amalfitano recognizes the name Kilapan gives O’Higgins’s mother: Riquelme, his own mother’s surname.

The book and its claims

Kilapan’s book, published in Santiago de Chile in 1978, is scarcely one hundred pages long. Its full title is O’Higgins Is Araucanian, with the subtitle “17 Proofs, Taken from the Secret History of Araucania.” The volume also carries the declaration that its text has been approved by the Araucanian History Council. Its author presents himself as Historian of the Race, President of the Indigenous Confederation of Chile, and Secretary of the Academy of the Araucanian Language; a prologue is attributed to Jose R. Pichinual, Cacique of Puerto Saavedra.

The prologue argues that O’Higgins was not the illegitimate son described by historians, but the legitimate child of Ambrosio O’Higgins and an Araucanian woman. It says the marriage followed Admapu law and the traditional Gapitun, described as an abduction ceremony. In that claim, the book gives the Liberator an Araucanian lineage and presents the biography as a disclosure of a supposedly hidden history. Amalfitano’s response is divided: the premise initially strikes him as comic, but the account of a colonial marriage conducted under the name of customary law suggests, to him, a disturbing possibility of abuse concealed by the book’s grand historical language.

A history built from implausible proofs

Amalfitano resumes the book the next day, when fatigue keeps him from preparing a class or reading anything more serious. Proof number one, “He was born in the Araucanian state,” identifies Chile with an imagined state called Yekmonchi and compares its geography and politics to those of ancient Greece. Kilapan’s account gives it an extensive territory, a central mother city, allied peoples, and a civilizing role that includes teaching the sciences, arts, sports, and, above all, the science of war. The first proof’s confident, combative opening makes its fabricated history read like an assault on the accepted account rather than a cautious alternative to it.

The book then amplifies its mixture of local history and classical reference through an account of a tomb opened in 1947—a date Amalfitano suspects should be 1974. Kilapan describes objects found with Kurillanka, including a stone, a vessel, and an obsidian ornament, and says they were distributed among Araucanian museums. He connects the account to Abate Juan Ignacio Molina, whose remains, the note says, were returned from Italy to Villa Alegre, and whose statue stood at the University of Bologna. For Amalfitano, the book’s unusual footnotes are as revealing as its claims: he wonders why the text explains “litrang” but leaves terms such as “admapu” and “epeutufe” unexplained, as if its intended readers are simultaneously assumed to know and required to be initiated into this invented history.

Proof number two, “He was born to an Araucanian woman,” makes telepathy and Adkintuwe the foundations of Araucanian communication. The book says the Araucanians used both to exchange information, and that Spanish authorities never deciphered Adkintuwe, a system Kilapan associates with messages sent through the movement of branches. It imagines three communication lines extending from the capital and argues that contact with nature preserved telepathic capacities that city life and language weakened. In the same account, the Araucanians are said to have used knot-based Prom and triangular Adentunemul writing, while dispersed families maintained contact over immense distances.

Kilapan extends this imaginative geography by tracing Araucanian migrants from Chile to India, ancient Germania, and the Peloponnese, before returning them to Chile by way of India and the Pacific. The book links Araucanian words and figures to Greek ones, and makes the history of O’Higgins’s birth the culmination of this network. It claims that Killenkusi’s daughter, Kinturay Treulen, became a spy, loved an Irishman, and hoped to bear a child who could be raised among the Spaniards and one day lead resistance to the conquistadors. That child, born at Palpal in the spring of 1777, is identified as O’Higgins. The account makes the purported origin of Chile’s Liberator depend on a chain of secret communications, cross-cultural ancestry, and political expectation.

Amalfitano’s reading: comedy, politics, and unease

The footnotes sharpen the book’s comic effect by repeatedly forcing Greek derivations onto Araucanian words and customs. Kilapan connects Lautaro’s name to a Greek word for swiftness, Prom to Prometheus, and Machi to the Greek term for a seer. Another note explains spring birth through Admapu rules about conception and the seasonal return of life. Amalfitano surveys the claims with skeptical amusement, even concluding that the book implies its author is himself telepathic. The extravagant logic is not merely a collection of isolated oddities: each note supplies another bridge between Araucanian and Greek history, making the book’s invented world feel at once systematic and impossible.

That mixture changes the emotional terms of Amalfitano’s reading. He remembers laughing aloud the first time he encountered the book. Now he reads it with something like laughter, but also something like sorrow. Its assertion about O’Higgins’s supposed illegitimacy prompts him to consider how private history survives behind public accounts: historians, he thinks, may discuss the father of the country with pity or with poorly concealed satisfaction. The passage shifts the book from an outlandish historical joke into an occasion for thinking about the judgments and humiliations that national biography can hide.

Amalfitano also places the book in the political atmosphere of Chile. Its 1978 publication falls during military dictatorship, and he imagines the circumstances in which Kilapan might have negotiated with the printers at Editorial Universitaria in Santiago, bargaining over the cost of a short book and promising further manuscripts. He considers several possible readings of its author and prose rather than settling on one explanation: the voice might serve a military figure, but it might also resemble the language of politicians across opposing factions. In Amalfitano’s interpretation, the book’s literary prestige, its claims of distinction, and its entanglement with Chilean political language make the boundary between intellectual authority and power difficult to trust.

The name that turns the book inward

The most consequential detail for Amalfitano is the name assigned to O’Higgins’s mother. Kilapan calls her Kinturay Treulen, daughter of Killenkusi and Waramanke Treulen; the official historical account, as Amalfitano recalls it, calls her Dona Isabel Riquelme. The discrepancy leads him to his own mother’s name: Dona Eugenia Riquelme, whose full name he thinks of as Dona Filia Maria Eugenia Riquelme Grana.

The connection arrests his comic distance from the book. Amalfitano has been watching Dieste’s geometry book sway in the darkness when the name prompts him to stop and think about his mother. He is briefly startled, and his attempted laugh fails. That abrupt turn gives the book its decisive role in the episode: its fantasy of a hidden national genealogy unexpectedly touches Amalfitano’s private memory. What had seemed like an absurd exercise in invented ancestry becomes a disquieting encounter with a name shared across the official and personal histories the novel sets beside one another.