Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

by Ariel Dorfman

  But it was not only political expediency that nourished for so long the legend of Allende fighting to the death, at least in my case. My automatic assumption that he had been murdered put his death in perspective, helped me to deal with its pain, make sense of my survival.

  He was dying so we might live.

  I knew it when I heard Allende’s last words over the radio the morning of the coup, when I heard him admit defeat and tell us not to allow ourselves to be humiliated, when I heard him predict a time when, sooner rather than later, we would again be free. I looked at Angélica: these were the words of a man who was doomed and was saying goodbye.

  Feverishly, I started to dress.

  “Where are you going?”

  Angélica asked me that question even if she must have seen in the wild grief of my eyes what the answer had to be. I was going to try to make it to La Moneda. She shook her head, I was out of my mind—and then, amazingly, Angelica, who was, and still is, the most pragmatic, down-to-earth being on this planet, decided to cooperate in my mad expedition: “I’ll drive you down to the center.”

  She took me as far as she could, and then we hit a police barrier at the Plaza Italia, on the perimeter of downtown Santiago. Fourteen short blocks away, La Moneda was waiting for me.

  I got out of the car, determined to find some way of talking the police into letting me pass. And standing there, I hesitated. I had been saved, up till then, by a series of fortuitous circumstances totally outside my control. But now my life is no longer in the hands of somebody else, in the hands of chance, in the hands of some unknown divinity who decides to cross my name off a list, a friend who decides to change places with me. This time, for now, for this one everlasting moment, I am the only one who can decide whether I live or die.

  And then I turn, I turn after that moment’s hesitation, I turn suddenly and decisively from the stolid faces of the policemen, I walk three paces back to the car, I get into it, I let Angélica drive me away.

  It is a defining moment, that split second. I will not realize it till later, till much later, perhaps not till now that I have decided to probe that instant for its significance, only now have I realized that there, at the police barrier, I confronted the two basic dilemmas of resistance, two questions that have no easy answers, that I resolved then quickly and in haste, the same questions that at that very moment were challenging every Chilean man and every Chilean woman who had believed in the revolution. They are enmeshed in each other, these two questions, but they are not identical. They are as old as injustice, as old as the struggle against injustice, these two essential questions that cannot be avoided by anybody who, enduring violence or witnessing its dominion over others, decides to resist.

  The first is by far the least interesting: Do I have the courage to do what my conscience asks? The least interesting because at times fear wins and at other times it doesn’t and there is not much more to the matter than that. Or perhaps I find it the least interesting because I cannot help but wonder if, there at the police barrier the day of the coup, my resolve was not being fundamentally tested and somehow I was found wanting, I wonder if I could not have done more to press on to La Moneda, I wonder if I was not a coward, I wonder if I did not die at Allende’s side because, quite simply, I was afraid. But with the years it is the second question, and not the enigma of courage, that has loomed larger, the second question that seems to embody the basic mystery of resistance, that plumbs what really went on in my mind the day of the coup, the start of a complex learning process that any survivor, in Chile or elsewhere, will always have to grapple with, that question: Do I have the wisdom to distinguish a death that I cannot avoid from a death that I must embrace? Or to put it differently: Given that some periods in history make it sadly inevitable that each small conquest of human dignity and freedom be paid for with enormous suffering and even death, and given the parallel sacredness of life, how to make sure that I die the right death? A question I will have to answer there, that day, and answer over and over again until the day the dictatorship ends.

  If I decide for life at that moment when I confront the question for the first time, it is not only that it is patently insane to try to sneak past the police, cross the center of the city where snipers and soldiers are shooting at each other, in the vain hope that the troops besieging La Moneda will allow me to enter the building instead of executing me on the spot, it is not only reckless lunacy that I am defeating inside me, but despair, that handmaiden of death.

  That is the real danger that confronts me at that police barrier, then and in the years to come.

  When you have been defeated, when everything you believe in has been defeated, when the hope for change that a true revolution celebrates has been defeated, that is the moment when you can easily be drawn into the well of death. I could feel it calling inside me, that desire to destroy myself, as I contemplated where our dreams had led us. We had dared to make a prophecy, we had dared to believe that we could build a just society without shedding blood. And now the blood was ours, our peaceful revolution was ending in a massacre, yet another massacre in a Latin America strewn with corpses. And it was hard to reject the temptation to turn my death into the last way, the only way, to speak in the midst of failure, the only island of reality I could still control, my own dead body as the only proof I could now offer of my sincerity, my belief in a future of liberation that seemed forever postponed. That was the real trap of death: as the doors seem to close on every other possibility of expression, to hail martyrdom as a perverse way of subverting death itself, maybe even reversing its reign, force the future to listen to the dreams of the present, persist as a legend rather than a life.

  If at that police barrier I finally did not take that road, it may have been because I was aware that someone else was taking it for me, taking it for all of us. Salvador Allende was taking responsibility for defeat, atoning with his life for all our mistakes and his, a ritual sacrifice which stopped me and so many others from throwing our lives away.

  But it is not only protection that Salvador Allende is offering me, there, that day when I do not continue on to La Moneda. His death will also, in the years to come, make terrible demands on those who survive him, cast a shadow on our lives, burden us impossibly. There are some among us who will not be able to carry the sacred weight of Allende’s death, some of us who will follow him into death.

  One of those is his own daughter, Beatriz Allende. Taty—as Beatriz is known to her close friends—Is Allende’s constant companion and confidante. At the very moment that I am instinctively turning toward life at the police barrier, she is being ordered out of La Moneda along with all the women who are there that day. The President decides that Taty and the other women must leave when he realizes that he is going to die. When he receives the ultimatum from the Armed Forces to surrender or the Air Force will use bombs and Hawker Hunters to dislodge him, when he announces that he will never board the plane waiting to fly him into exile.

  At first, Taty refuses. How her father convinced her is something I never found out, Taty never told me when we met many months later, in early March of 1974, in the little breakfast room on the second floor of the Hotel Havana Libre in Cuba.

  I was on my way to my European exile. The Cubans had managed to get me out of Argentina, had paid my plane ticket, mine and Angelica’s and Rodrigo’s, and they had done it just in time. Two days after we left Buenos Aires, three men from the Argentine police had come to my grandmother’s apartment asking for me. They did not believe her when she told them that her grandson had left the country. They interrogated her, my ninety-year-old grandmother, for an hour. Then they left. “We’ll find him,” they told my Baba Pizzi, who must have felt that time had stood still, that time repeated itself, who must have remembered how, seventy or so years before, she had heard similar words, in Russian, from the czarist police when they had come to her home to look for her revolutionary brother, “We’ll find him, wherever he’s hiding.” The Argentinians neve
r found me—but they would find lots of other people, in the years to come they would disappear thousands and thousands of others who did not escape.

  How strange the paths to survival are, the bonding that occurs between survivors. I had last spoken to Taty the afternoon of September 10 at La Moneda, had briefly mentioned my ideas about Susana la Semilla, had prognosticated that if we could make it to the day spring would begin, eleven days away, we were going to win, mother nature herself would see to that. She had answered with a laugh, saying that I was an incorrigible poet, totally loco, but I should always stay that way. I remembered that laugh when I heard that La Moneda had been bombed, sure that she had died there. Nevertheless, here we were, six months later, together again.

  I asked about her mother and her sister, she asked about Angélica and Rodrigo and my parents. I was curious, of course, about her last hours with Allende, but this was a delicate area for both of us, and I skirted it.

  Taty had no such inhibitions. All of a sudden, she said: “Tell me about La Moneda.”

  I was silent. There was nothing to tell.

  “About La Moneda,” she insisted. “How did you manage to escape that day?”

  She must have read the perplexity on my face.

  “After the bombardment,” she said. “Where did you hide? How come they never found you?”

  I stuttered that I didn’t know what she was talking about, that I’d never made it to La Moneda that morning.

  “There’s no need to be modest with me,” she said. “Everybody knows you’re a hero. Vamos, I’ve been waiting all these months to talk with you. You must have been one of the last people to see my father alive.”

  She had sighted me there, she fervently assured me that the last time she looked back I was standing at Allende’s side, waiting for the end exactly the defiant way I had imagined it, exactly the way it never happened. And then she asked me again about Allende’s last moments, she wanted to see her father’s martyrdom through my absent eyes.

  Her hallucination will taunt me then and still taunts me now, so many years later, because her vision of my body there next to Allende came as much from my imagination as from hers; it was the ghost of myself calling to me out of her mouth. She presented me, all over again, with the ending I had planned for myself, the way I would like to have been remembered, the way I had deliberately constructed my definitive revolutionary committed persona during the months that preceded the coup, she placed me boldly face-to-face with the radical Ariel I had sworn loyalty to, all the words I had chanted about my willingness to die for humanity, the easy words of liberation with which I had invented myself as an unequivocally political animal, the scenario that was filmed only in my head. She is a messenger of death, a messenger from her father: reminding me that in an alternative parallel version of my existence it would be my face on a poster while somebody else in exile accompanies the widow up the steps to meet some Minister of Foreign Affairs, somebody like me helps my Angélica to testify in front of the Human Rights Commission; in the life and death that I finally did not choose, my son would be demanding my body, next to other relatives in a teargassed Santiago street, my son pins my photo to his jacket and demands that I be redeemed from disappearance, demands the right to bury me, Taty reminds me that I am not one of the many Claudio Gimenos of this world.

  I am eventually able to convince Taty that she has made a mistake, explaining how I was spared. But there is one thing I do not tell her: how I hesitated at the police barrier and did not join her at La Moneda, how her father’s death saved me. I do not tell her that it took only a second for me to decide not to throw my life away.

  I will remember what I told her and what I did not when, several years after she offered me that delusionary vision of my ending at La Moneda, I hear the news that Taty Allende has killed herself. Until her death, like so many of us in those first years of exile, she drives herself mercilessly, working for Chile’s freedom, less perhaps as a tribute to the living who need support from abroad than as a way to placate the dead. But the dead will not be placated. When her father decreed, at La Moneda, that only men should die there that day, when he ordered his daughter out because she was a woman, he could not guess that he was condemning her to self-destruction. Taty would not let herself forget that, if she had been Allende’s son, she would have been allowed, indeed been expected, to die at her father’s side. She can never forgive herself for being alive only because of her sex. She belonged there. She could truly imagine herself nowhere else. The bullet she was certain was meant for her so many years earlier at that place where Allende died is the bullet that she belatedly fires at herself.

  Did she know, at that moment when she took the gun in her hand, when she took her life with that gun, did she know that Salvador Allende had himself committed suicide? Was that the deeper ritual of death she was enacting, not to stand by her father’s side at the moment of reckoning, but to be her father, follow his example by killing herself?

  I have no way of knowing what went on in my friend’s head. To be dead is, by definition, to be unable to tell the story of how we died. What is clear is that we ended up interpreting Allende’s death in different ways—that she was finally engulfed by it and that I managed to break loose, the real daughter and the metaphorical son of the President taking divergent paths in a world where our father had ceased to exist, could only speak to us ambiguously from death.

  That, at any rate, is what I think. And the fact that I survived and that she died gives me, irreparably, the last word. Even though she is there, looking at me still, staring at me from death next to her father, calling to me even now with the pale reminder that I could have chosen her path.

  Reminding me that I will have to carry her and her father and all the other dead of Chile like an orphan till the day I die.

  Telling me that perhaps I took the greater risk when I decided not to be devoured by the coup.

  SIX

  A CHAPTER DEALING WITH THE DISCOVERY OF LIFE AND LANGUAGE DURING THE YEARS 1945 TO 1954 IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  It was not true, of course, that my Spanish had died in New York.

  My Spanish had resisted. When I had tried to smother it, my Spanish had hidden and then endured inside me, waiting for its chance to come out and find a way back into my life. I knew it was there, I knew it, but told nobody that I understood the language that my parents continued to speak at home.

  How did I manage to stop Spanish from surfacing, how did I keep it at bay during ten years?

  By shutting myself off, by closing the door, by throwing away the key. That is, if my first memory, the first one in my life, means anything at all.

  I never wanted it to be the original memory, the moment when my consciousness begins. All I ever desired was to recall that day in the hospital, understand who I was before that day in the hospital, but what whirls up from the remote past is this: I am a child of three, probably going on four, I am sitting on the toilet, and outside the locked door my father is calling for me to hurry up or let him in. I am not sure what he wants but I am sure that he is angry and that I would rather stay here in this place where I can be intimate with myself by myself. That’s it. Irrelevant, unheroic, only mysterious inasmuch as it happens to have clawed itself upward to the surface of my mind, there to remain scrawled indelibly to this day, as clear to me now in retrospect as it must have been when I lived it: the darkened bathroom, the mirror, my shorts and underpants wrapped around my ankles, the voice of my father, the certainty that I like to be here alone, the mild fear, the vague guilt. Nothing more. Nothing until now that revealed why I remembered this insignificant incident, why it should be there at the beginning of my remembered life, why I have forgotten everything that came before. Until now that, writing this, I realize that my father is calling to me in Spanish and that I am not answering him, that he is angry because I did not answer, that now he is switching to English and to this I reply, I call out something, anything, I flush the toilet, I wash my hands
, I open the door. So that’s what this is about: my refusal to let on that I understand his words unless he adapts to my language. My first memory: how I built a space of my own where Spanish cannot enter, where I can keep myself separate from its threat, forever apart, unyielding. The central act of my early life: I hide in the toilet with my nakedness and my privacy and my shit and my English, I reject that voice in Spanish, the voice of tradition that is echoed by words inside me that I refuse publicly to acknowledge. This is how I create, day by day, my identity. This is how I deny, day by day, the brother who is in my mind and understands Spanish, how I deny him the chance to resurrect.

  It is a scene that, in gentler versions, will repeat itself over and over again. There I am at the dinner table a year later, maybe I am five by now. My mother and my father from time to time interrupt their conversation to try to catch me unawares, slyly direct a question to me in Spanish to see if I will acquiesce to whatever wonder is being offered, a toy, candy, an outing, a hug, a second helping, a movie matinee, but I do not bite, I repeat the same phrase from that first day at the hospital, “I don’t understand,” even if I do, because a few minutes later I pertinently erupt in English into the middle of their Spanish-language conversation. But when they turn to me and follow up, again in Spanish, again I clamp down: I am not ready to admit that my native language has any hold on me whatsoever, that there is an ember under the ashes.