Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

by Ariel Dorfman

  I didn’t reply.

  I shut the door, walked to school quietly, not clowning with my friends as usual, spent the whole day wondering if I should carry out my threat. I can still recall today how empowering it was to have the fate of my parents at my fingertips, rolling on my tongue, like a coin that could be flipped. Twice that day, my teacher expostulated about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and freedom and both times I said to myself: Now’s the time, just raise your hand and denounce your traitor father. When I returned home, my mother was waiting for me. She had been waiting the whole day. I told her that I hadn’t whispered a word to anybody about my father or who he was. She hugged me and said I was a good boy. And never mentioned the affair again. Not once.

  Faced with the choice that E. M. Forster had posed in that work I was not to read until several decades later in which he spoke about having to choose between country and friend, I had found the guts he wished for, I had preferred and would continue to prefer the two best friends in my life, my parents, to the country I had adopted, which had adopted me.

  And so it came to pass that the Cold War managed what my parents, with all their nostalgia for Latin America and all their Spanish temptations, had never been able accomplish: to drive a wedge, the first in my life, between America and me.

  I began to fear America.

  The country I had proclaimed my champion in my search for an independent identity, the country that had nursed and guarded me, was out to get my family, would hurt them, send them running, perhaps even kill them.

  And as if to prove that my fear was not abstract, almost like a sick echo, a name, two names in fact, attached themselves in that year of 1950 to that fear, the names of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

  There were not just four Dorfmans at the table every evening: all through the early fifties, the ghosts of that other family sat with us, the four Rosenbergs, the mother and the father and their two boys, eight of us having dinner in the evening for three years, since the moment Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were arrested in 1950 until the night of their execution three years later, they were always there as a reminder of what could happen to us.

  I remember it like a dagger: we all followed the ups and downs of the trial on the radio and in the papers, listening to the news that the father and the mother of those two boys had been condemned to death, for treachery, for spying, for being Communists, for passing secrets to the Soviets, for giving them the bomb, and then the appeals and then the calls for mercy from everywhere, and I can remember saying to myself: If they kill Ethel and Julius, then they can kill my mom and dad as well.

  It was an early lesson on how terror works.

  Across the world, Stalin had mercilessly sent millions of innocents to their deaths, slaughtering along the way the dream of socialism; in the United States, the government did not need to use genocide to tame its own dissidents. It was enough to make an example of two human beings, one of whom, Ethel, was obviously innocent; it was enough to liquidate them ruthlessly, trampling on due process and distorting the law, to demonstrate what awaited anyone who dared to oppose American policies. The rest is left to the imagination: those who survive are condemned to walk with those bodies to the electric chair, to place ourselves inside the minds of the victims when the switch is snapped. And once the truly rotten apple of fear corrupts the heart, it will not take long to infect everything else, paralyze the hand that would object, muzzle the mouth.

  I learned the effectiveness of that strategy many years before the coup in Chile hammered that knowledge home. I was, I became, those two little boys who were orphaned. I stood next to my father and my mother and my sister in the sweltering night, and he hoisted me up in his arms on June 19 of the year 1953. My eyes covered the crowd outside Sing Sing, a multitude of fellow-travelers, I can remember the silence growing, the coughs being swallowed, as the hour of death approached, traveling with the Rosenbergs as they shuffled down the corridors toward their end and ours, waiting for the signal that Ethel and Julius had been executed, that we could all be next, that I could be next.

  Unless I left the United States, unless my family left.

  It was the murder of the Rosenbergs that started to reconcile me to the idea of losing America.

  Because inside the fear that my parents would be punished was another one, more insidious.

  Fear for myself.

  They weren’t American, Mom and Dad with their funny accents. Their foreign language saved them from having to deal with an enemy inside their own heads; whereas I lived, day after day, the corruption of the language I loved, its demeaning ride into jargon and intolerance. I did not have the safe haven of Spanish to keep myself pure, to help me fall asleep at night. I had nowhere to hide from my own betrayal of the land, from the voice that, in English of course, was salivating that the other Cub Scouts were going to find out who I really was and then they’d give it to me good, no way of stopping a gruff drawl in my head from suddenly erupting in the middle of a game with the accusation—it was John Wayne himself inside me—that I was a phony, that I could run but I couldn’t hide. Watch your tongue, I said to myself: Watch each word. There they were, inside my language, the agents of my omnipotent country, its government and spies and armies and movie stars and radio personalities and neighbors and teachers and playmates, all of them ready to discover that I had double-crossed them, that I was not, and never could be, an all-American kid.

  And the punishment, if not death, was something just as bad. The psychological, emotional, moral distance from America which the Cold War had instilled inside me threatened to be transmuted into physical space, to send me thousands of real miles away. There was a man who would do it. The name had surfaced back then, in that year of 1950, made its way into my haunted vocabulary next to the Rosenbergs: the name of Joe McCarthy. The Republican senator from Wisconsin who, around the time when I decided not to denounce my father, had summoned America on a crusade to sweep “the whole sorry mess of twisted, warped thinkers from the national scene so that we may have a new birth.” It would take him until 1953 to set his sights directly on that twisted, warped thinker called Adolfo Dorfman, but in the intervening years there was not a day I did not evoke him, the nemesis who would hound my family out of the United States. What would he have said if he had known that his cleansing of America would have the unintended effect of sending an Argentine kid who adored Disney back to Latin America, where he would be corrupted by all the rotten apples down there and end up writing the first left-wing critique of that most imperialist of creatures, Donald Duck? Think of it: Joe McCarthy parting me from Charlie McCarthy.

  The net around my father was tightening.

  As 1953 rolled on, the persecution finally reached the United Nations, where the administration buckled under U.S. pressure: nine of the ten Americans working in my father’s division were dismissed. But he, stubborn as a mule, defiant as usual, did not cover his tracks, camouflage his movements. On the contrary, my dad would make it a point to go to the cafeteria and sit noticeably next to those who had been sacked, make a point of talking to them on their last day of work, posting goodbye notes on the bulletin board and protesting in letters as impulsive as the one which had got him into trouble with the Argentine Army.

  If he had been less imprudent, if he had “played ball,” as one of his superiors had suggested, perhaps things would have turned out differently. But he was about to commit—isn’t it always so with exiles?—one more rash, unpardonable act.

  An old friend of his, Maurice Halperin, was in trouble.

  Maur, a prominent fellow-traveler, had during the war been given a high post by Wild Bill Donovan in the COI (Office of the Coordinator of Information), soon to become the OSS and later the CIA. As head of the Latin American division, Halperin had befriended dozens of exiled left-wing Latin Americans, including my father, who shared his obsession with getting rid of the Nazi-loving Argentine military. Maur had landed my father his first job after the Guggenheim, helping him bring h
is family from Argentina. (It seems curious that the forerunner of the very CIA that would flush me out of Chile thirty years later was instrumental in helping me leave Argentina as an infant.) After the war, Maur and Adolfo had grown even closer—and when my father read, one morning in late 1953, that Halperin, then a professor at Boston University, had been accused of espionage by HUAC and would be called to testify, he grabbed the phone and offered Maur his solidarity, without caring if J. Edgar Hoover himself was listening to the conversation.

  The only support Halperin needed was a place to stay in New York. When Maur and his wife, Edith, arrived—it must have been October, perhaps November, of 1953—they told us that their secret intentions were to drive on to Mexico, to leave the country before something worse happened to them. I was disturbed by that visit, that night they spent with us at our Riverside Drive apartment, impressed by the haste with which they had fled, the consequences for the family, their sixteen-year-old son, David, left behind to finish his studies, their voices cracking as they spoke over the phone with their married daughter, Judith, to tell her yes, they were okay, yes, they would call tomorrow from Washington, heading South, heading South. How strange that the first political refugees I remember in my life were American citizens, sleeping in our midst as I would sleep many years later with my family on the floors of foreign friends’ homes, my parents giving them the same sanctuary Angélica and I would give other exiles in the future. The two Halperins sitting down without their two children at the table where the four Dorfmans had hosted the four phantom Rosenbergs.

  Next day, they were gone, Maurice never to return to his native land. He would spend five years in Mexico and then continue on to the Soviet Union for another four and then Cuba until 1968, finally ending up in Vancouver for the rest of his life, sadly disillusioned with Communism, the cause for which he had lost his country. I watched him and Edith load their packed suitcases into their Studebaker, watched them embark on that long trip they were not coming back from, watched them turn the corner and disappear from my eyes as if I were previewing my own future.

  I was. The asylum my father offered to the accused spy, the man without a country, probably turned out to be the last straw. A few days after we had seen the Halperins off, Adolfo was summoned by a UN official, who informed him that Senator McCarthy himself had called up the Secretary General and warned him to “get that troublemaker Dorfman out of here. Or else.” Or else—meaning? Probably deportation. If he was lucky. The functionary pointed out that, since mid-1950, coinciding ominously with the outbreak of the Korean War, my father’s visa had been revoked and invariably he had been detained and interrogated every time he returned to the United States from abroad; on each ocasion he had been allowed back in only after the UN authorities had lodged strong protests. They were no longer in a position to continue defending him. Choose: resign or serve at UN regional offices in Bangkok or Santiago.

  Two days later, my father was on a plane to Chile, and eight months after that, having finished school, I found myself awakening to the last day of my stay in America—everything boxed away—ready to board a ship heading South with all our possessions. I can remember so clearly, almost as if I had a jagged mirror in my head or in my heart, I can remember like a reflection in the pool of the past my last hours before we took the taxi. Every afternoon of that summer I had been playing baseball in a park near our apartment overlooking the Hudson, every game I had been getting better, and that last day I went off banging my fist into my glove, headed for my last game. It sounds so corny that I almost hesitate to consign it here, I almost wonder if my memory has not made this up: but I stepped up to the plate the last time I was batting and with my eyes wide open I swung at the ball and I hit a home run and I jogged around the bases slowly and landed with both feet on home plate and the game was over and we had won. All too literary to be true, but what can I do if that is how it happened, if I was making things harder for myself by playing the end as melodramatically as I could? The coach came over and grinned at me, talked about tomorrow’s game. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I was leaving, couldn’t even begin to explain. I answered sure, I’d see him tomorrow, knowing that they would wait for me awhile and then the coach would shrug his shoulders and point to somebody else to take my place, knowing they would forget me. It was over: the day I had been fearing for almost ten years had arrived.

  And yet I had been rehearsing this moment for a long time, ever since I had sworn that I would not allow the crazy and futile polarization that the Cold War had transferred into my human heart to destroy my idyllic relationship with America.

  I had trained myself for the loss that I saw looming over me, not, as might have seemed logical, by responsibly rebuilding my bridges to Latin America with whatever driftwood of my shipwrecked Spanish might still be washing around my life. On the contrary. What I did was even more ferociously burn those bridges. The fiercer the confrontation between East and West and the closer my departure, the more determined was I to plunge in the opposite direction, deeper into the vibrant maelstrom of the American dream, spinning more recklessly than ever into the neurosis of English. Or perhaps I gave myself even more fully to the country I was going to leave because I had already left it in my mind by betraying it, perhaps the passion was intensified by the distance that was already growing, trying to pretend that the rift had not cloven into me. Readying myself for a future when I would not have America nearby, as if I had to frantically accumulate it inside me. Like lovers before a separation exhaust themselves, try to put off the dawn when one of them must depart for war and the other remain behind, I was like him, like her, trying desperately to bring the other body into my own body, sweat and rub and touch and smell so that he, that she, would not be effaced by any mortal coil of time or geography.

  I did so by proclaiming and parading my loyalty to the only permanent America I could accept as my guardian: not the transitory, superficial America whose government harassed my parents and their friends and intimidated me, but the more profound and loving culture of that America which I disassociated from politics and policies. On the verge of leaving for another continent, I melted, I tried to melt, I wanted to melt and dissolve, bewitched, dazzled, and bewildered, into the gigantic melting pot of America. I lived the early fifties as if America was a permanent shower I took as often as I could, trying to “wash that man right out of my hair,” one of my favorite songs which I had heard the incomparable Mary Martin sing in person at the Broadway show of South Pacific, the man in question being, in my case, the residue of my Argentine self, my Spanish-speaking side, the Chiquita Banana kid. At a time when the United States was waging a war against everything foreign and alien, I waged my own internal war, determined to sweep away like a beggar whatever had been malevolently deposited in me by the language of my birth; so that, if I was forced to return to Latin America, I would at least not be tempted to stay there and forget my fatherland, the United States that was paradoxically sending my true father away.

  I took this crusade against my past to its extreme. Because there had been, all these years, one vestige from my previous life that reminded me and everybody else how different I really was: my name. It stood between the United States and me, forced me to recollect every day, every moment of the day, how far I really was from being irreversibly American, how tainted I was by both Russia and Latin America.

  I hated being called Vladimiro, but hated Vlady even more. The kids at school deformed my name without mercy: Bloody, Floody, Flatty—and especially the terminal insult, Laddie and Lady, names for dogs. Kids are cruel. But adults, who are not inevitably cruel—at least not to children—would also make me feel thoroughly self-conscious about who I was. Where did you get that name? What does it mean? My parents, absurdly, had told me to allege I was named after the pianist Vladimir Horowitz. And I obeyed. What was I supposed to proclaim in red-baiting America? That my dad worshipped Lenin and was glad that Uncle Joe Stalin had the bomb so he could defend socialism against
the imperialists? What did my name mean? It means that I can’t conform, that I can’t make believe I’m from here, that’s what it means.

  Slowly, when I was alone, I had begun to call myself by another name. A fantasy that many children indulge in—we are not really the offspring of our parents, we were exchanged as babies, we are princes and princesses, our lineage secretly royal. The name I chose for myself, accordingly, was Edward, a name I had first come across in the Classic Comics edition of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper—though later, as obsessively it became my favorite story, I managed to ingest the Errol Flynn film version and also read over and over again an abridged edition of the text. I was fascinated by the tale of the two physically identical boys born the same day in Renaissance England, one to poverty and hardship and the other to opulence and power, and how they switched places, the beggar and the Prince of Wales. It may have been the first time I came across the idea of the doppelganger that was to haunt my literary work, the certainty that out there (in here?) somebody just like us suffers and watches and is waiting for his chance to take over our lives. Or the opposite idea: we may seem marginal and powerless to ignorant eyes, but someday our majesty will be recognized and the world will bow down before us. Twins, doubles, duality, duplicity, there at the start of my life. So I told myself that in reality I was Edward the Prince, but not content, like most children, to secrete my fantasy within my own closeted world, I decided to force the world to acknowledge, if not my princehood, at least my Edwardliness. With the same deranged determination with which I had succeeded in coercing my parents into speaking English back to me, I now carefully planned the demise of Vlady and the crowning of Edward.