The Great Escape

"I began to get an inkling when I was living out there because literally, this person didn't recognise me, which was pretty strange. And then the muscles in his face used to set for weeks on end . . . "

Prize-winning novelist Lisa St Aubin de Teran is telling me about her first husband, Jaime Teran. For months on end, this mid-thirties Venezuelan nobleman followed 16-year-old Lisa around her hometown of London, eventually convincing her to marry him in 1970. Lisa was enticed by Jaime's promise of moving to his family's ancestral home, a vast Venezuelan estate perched high among the awesome peaks of the South American Andes. They moved to Venezuela when she was 18, and there began the extraordinary story which Lisa tells in her autobiographical book, The Hacienda.

For this budding young author and poet, life had become the very stuff of fiction - but there was a drawback that couldn't be edited out. Culturally islanded in one of the remotest parts of the world, Lisa discovered that she was married to a man who was chronically schizophrenic, frequently violent, and occasionally murderous. He was also on the top rung of a feudal ladder which extended for miles around "the Hacienda", incorporating thousands of people, most of them peasants and serfs.

Jaime's mental illness was extreme. Indeed, Lisa can pinpoint the exact moment when the extent of her husband's lunacy first dawned on her.

Jaime loved animals to the point of obsession, and the Terans had several hand-reared sheep as family pets. "One day," says Lisa, "I was sitting in the house and I heard him calling me - it was a really desperate cry for help. I went out and he was actually killing one of these sheep, and he was screaming and he just kept on saying, 'Please don't let me kill him, please don't let me kill him!' But he couldn't stop doing it. And then I thought, click! This is what it's all about."

Jaime Teran's family had a long history of eccentricity. One of them thought that he was married to his dog, while another lived in perpetual darkness. "They were very inbred," explains Lisa. "People even looked eccentric - a typical feature of the family would be to have half of one eye blue, and the other half brown. You could travel a long way away and you could see somebody with this." Nearly everybody on the estate, including hundreds of peasant-workers, were blood relations of the Terans.

GUNNED DOWN

By the time she reached her early twenties, Lisa realised that she and her daughter would have to escape from the estate if they wanted to stay alive. Jaime discussed a "family pact" of suicide, urging Lisa with the logic of the plan, and even suggested that it might be easier if he just finished them off with a shotgun in the middle of the night.

"I actually prepared to escape for three years. I knew that I was risking a huge amount, and I'd been warned by a lot by people who had become reasonably friendly with me that I must never try to get out of this situation - that they'd come after me and they'd kill me."

Lisa knew about two women who were gunned down after they escaped from Teran marriages, and here she was contemplating an even greater crime - kidnapping her own child, the last of the Teran line.

"Venezuela was a police state at the time," she explains. "In those days they had a military road block every 30 kilometres on every road, and at each road block you had to stop and present your papers. And as the law stood when I lived in Venezuela, a woman was not entitled to take her own child across any of those road blocks without written permission from her husband. So I wouldn't have even made it to the airport, let alone got on the aeroplane, so I had to have an enormous amount of documentation, and I gathered it over three years.

"After I arrived back in Europe, I moved around for two years every 10 to 15 days, because I knew that I had to shake off a tail that was there to get Iseult back to Venezuela. They wanted her back and me out of the picture. So I was running for my life and running not to have her kidnapped back."

Did she know when they were following her?

"Yeah, at certain points," nods Lisa calmly. "They got reasonably close, but never very close. It became second nature for me to be very alert and ingenious about where I went. And that all got incredibly tiring and incredibly expensive. I was running out of money and I was running out of stamina and Iseult was very tired of always being on the run, never being able to make a friend or settle anywhere."

It was at that stage that Lisa went to live in a remote corner of Norfolk, finally turning a corner and closing the door on this turbulent chapter of her life for good. n

• The Hacienda by Lisa St Aubin de Teran is published by Virago Press.