Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

by Ariel Dorfman

  There are no buses, so Alberto and I have to walk miles across the city, and everywhere there are people like us, their heads to the ground, avoiding each other’s eyes, hurrying by, atomized. Already what was just two days ago a collective is beginning to disperse under the pressure of fear. Close by we can hear machine-gun fire, an indication that the fighting is not over. We try to hitch a ride, but nobody stops. Then, on the sidewalk, striding toward me, I catch a glimpse of an old friend, a socialist militant from way back. During the last year we’ve been too busy to see each other but I’d heard he was splitting up with his wife. Now he is there, a few feet away, a tiny baby cradled in his arms, a woman I’ve never met clutching him. As he passes by, dazed, I look straight into his face, but he doesn’t see me: there is in him such an abyss of sorrow that I am forced to look away, as if I had been caught watching a man’s soul melting, disintegrating in front of me. But there is no time for this man with whom I have studied and played soccer and drunk wine, no time for anything but Alberto pulling my sleeve, Alberto who has finally managed to flag down a car that is willing to take us the rest of the way.

  When we get in, the driver shifts the run-down engine into first gear, throws us a glance through his glasses, then looks at the street, then back at me. “Hey,” he says, fixing me in his bohemian gaze, “you’re Ariel Dorfman, aren’t you?” I don’t answer. He insists, he’s sure it’s me: I’m so ethnically different from most Chileans that I’m easy to identify. “They must be looking for you, hombre,” he adds, cheerfully. “They sure must be looking for you.”

  I glance sideways at Alberto. We had both expected more anonymity. “Oh, I don’t think they’re that interested in me,” I answer. “I’m just a writer. I’m not mixed up in politics.”

  “Yeah, nobody’s mixed up in politics anymore,” the driver says. “But try to make the hijos de puta who’re in control believe it.”

  My disappointment at not making the Junta’s priority list has come back to haunt me. It is far from exhilarating to get what I so fancied: to be distinguished as dangerous, to be held in awe by people I’ve never even met. I can feel Alberto next to me stiffen, as he thinks of his family. We stop at a traffic light and it is as if every stranger passing us is a threat. A jeep full of soldiers pulls up next to us, its motor idling. One of the recruits stares into my eyes, as if he could read my thoughts. I half expect him to pull my photo out and start firing. I feel naked: if this man who’s given us a ride thinks I’m in trouble, if this man who represents in some way the voice of everyman …

  My worst fears are confirmed that very night. A tense dinner at Alberto’s house. Hardly anybody at the table says a word. Later, I am shown to my room; the two oldest girls have gone camping for the night in the skimpy living-dining-room area. Alberto and his wife are arguing in their bedroom right next to mine. The walls are paper-thin. Alberto’s wife is worried sick. For the last two days she had not known whether her husband was alive or dead. Now that he’s back, she’s bright enough to anticipate that he’s going to be investigated at the university, that at best he’ll lose his job. And now he’s brought home a man who can get them all murdered. Just yesterday, she says, her voice rising shrilly, a whole family was taken away a few streets from here. They were harboring somebody. Did Alberto want—? Alberto tells her to hush, to keep her voice down. Now I can no longer hear what they’re saying, just the urgent whispers, her fear, his anger.

  An hour later, he comes in to see me.

  “Listen,” I say to him, before he can get in a word. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  “You’re staying. I told her you’re staying. And she’d better believe it.”

  “If I were her,” I say, “I’d be scared, too.”

  “Everybody’s scared,” Alberto says. “If we end up so scared we don’t do what’s right, then they’ve really screwed us, perdimos de verdad, we’ve really lost.”

  The next day, I leave.

  Alberto’s wife stays in her room, does not say goodbye. His girls hug me and beg me to stay, when is the tio coming back, they love to have visitors, please say I’ll be back soon, please? I lie to them, tell them soon, very soon, and Alberto nods unhappily.

  Then I’m on the street again, headed for a meeting with a contact from the Party that Alberto has set up to see if someone else can help me. I feel like a piece of baggage. Alberto himself insists on accompanying me.

  There is still hardly any transportation, so we have to walk. We go through the center of the city and both of us head, almost automatically, without sharing a word about why we are taking this detour, for La Moneda.

  There, as I face the ruins of the Presidential Palace where Allende has died, a rage surges through me with such sudden ferocity that I fear it will kill me, I fear that it will destroy me unless I can exorcise it by letting it out, unless I kill the men who have done this to us, to me, to our land.

  It is a lust for murder and revenge that will all too soon have a chance to be fulfilled.

  As we continue on our way through the shattered Santiago streets to meet our contact, we see, perhaps four blocks away from La Moneda, a young recruit slumped against a peeling wall. At first he seems to be dead, a sniper must have got him, but no, he’s asleep, his face half in the shade, half in the sun. He’s probably spent the night on duty, put his head against the wall to rest his eyes, slid into sleep, and here he is, barely out of adolescence, his legs innocently sprawled open on the narrow sidewalk, his submachine gun at his feet.

  Alberto and I stop. We look at the soldier, we look at his weapon, we look at each other.

  There is nobody else present. Not even a witness. A thought crosses my mind and, as if in a mirror, I can see it reflected in Alberto’s eyes. It would be easy to steal the gun. And if the bastard wakes up, we just pull the trigger, one less murderer. They wanted war? They’ll get it.

  We both hesitate there, our eyes fixed in fascination on the sleeping soldier not one yard away, we hesitate for two more seconds as if we were on the edge of eternity.

  That’s how long it takes me to dismiss the idea as mad, that’s how long it takes me to watch it disappear simultaneously from Alberto’s face, as if we were synchronized to some internal common clock. One more instant passes and then we are gone, we leave him and his weapon behind, there on that corner.

  Those few seconds are to be as important and prophetic in my life and the life of the country as the brief moment just three days before when I turned from the police barrier that blocked passage to my death at La Moneda, the death that Taty imagined for me. What both Alberto and I have instinctively rejected is armed struggle as the way to bring back democracy. In retrospect, it will look to me as if we were symbolically deciding with the whole nation, because many other Chileans must have been mulling over at that same time whether to answer military violence with their own violence, we are collectively establishing the strategy of peaceful resistance to the dictatorship that will culminate, seventeen years later, in a return to democracy.

  In my case, though it takes only a couple of seconds to be resolved, it is a strategy rooted in deeply held convictions that go back to a discovery about who I am and who I want to be, made more than thirteen years before, in March of 1960, when I started my studies at the University of Chile, when I found myself on the second day of classes doing battle with the police for the first time in my life. That morning’s session of Comparative Literature had focused on more abstruse battles with authority and repression, as we brainily dissected a story by Kafka about a crow pecking at somebody’s feet. But the next class was suspended to give way to a rousing student assembly where the miserable state of public education and the low salaries of the secondary-school teachers were denounced. The fiscally conservative government had refused to negotiate and a strike was being called for the following week. A motion was made and passed that we immediately cease all Faculty activities in solidarity with the teachers; and then another was approved by acclaim that we stage a protes
t right away, a lightning sortie into the streets to let President Alessandri and his right-wing coalition know that we aren’t going to take this sort of treatment sitting down. I joined the fervent multitude as we marched and chanted down the wide tree-lined avenue of Macul, handing out pamphlets to unconcerned passersby, disrupting traffic and, in truth, not appreciably advancing the cause of higher education. I was a bit wary of showing solidarity with teachers who in high school, just a few months ago, I had considered the mortal (and boring!) enemies of the young. My skepticism vanished as soon as I joyfully merged with the other peaceful marchers. Peaceful, that is, until the police arrived and ordered us to disperse and then grabbed a couple of our ringleaders and began to beat them, although, I must admit, not with excessive savagery. That was the first day I saw Freddy Taberna in action, a tall, lithe, hawk-nosed geography student who was to become one of my dearest buddies, Freddy who would be executed by a firing squad in the north of Chile four days after the coup, Freddy, whose dead body was never returned to his family, that body of Freddy’s alive back then, shouting at the police, prancing in front of them, taunting them, I saw Freddy go down under a blow from a nightstick and saw him get up again as if it had hardly happened and then an officer gave the order to throw tear gas, and we all fled back down Macul, coughing and gagging, toward the university, which, according to Latin American custom, was out of bounds for the police, as extraterritorial, in fact, as an embassy. We stopped at its gates and, made valiant again by the proximity of the hallowed halls of higher learning, turned to confront the police one more time, and I saw them dragging a young woman by the hair and I felt inside me a mild version of the rage I would be filled with many years later at the bombed walls of La Moneda. All around me students were picking up rocks and soon the air was thick with missiles, most of them falling far short of their objective. So I stooped down and picked up a rock as hard and round and manageable as a baseball and, taking aim, threw it into the air and watched it go much farther than the other projectiles, landing with a thunk against the shield of a beefy policeman. Everybody around me cheered. I had one hell of an arm. The fact that I was using my prowess at the Yankee sport of baseball to outthrow my soccer-playing classmates and attack a Chilean police force trained and armed by the United States was a cultural contradiction I did not stop to analyze. It was not a time to wonder how Yogi Berra would have judged one of his erstwhile fans applying his technique to street-fighting tactics in faraway Chile.

  Encouraged by my unexpected popularity, I let fly another rock, and this one whistled by another cop, barely missing his head. Another cheer went up and I picked up another rock and got ready to let loose with it and then … And then I dropped it. Those were the first and the last two rocks I ever hurled in what was to be a long revolutionary career.

  What happened between the second rock that flew through the air and the third rock that would not leave my hand was the fear that I might end up hurting somebody irreparably. In that lull between two actions, I identified with the unknown cop I had almost felled with my gringoland arm, identified not only with him but with his wife and his children and his family. I was certain that hurting him or anyone else if there was a way of avoiding it would transform me into somebody I couldn’t live with. I think that in the hand that dropped the rock something that was most viscerally mine rejected violence as a method, as a solution, as a way of life.

  Does that mean that during my baptismal moment in the line of fire I suddenly converted to pacifism, ready to preach tolerance to my enraged university classmates? Not at all. As for most of my generation, Fidel Castro’s homegrown revolution, the first in Latin America successfully to stand up to the gringos, was for many years our touchstone, our Mecca, our guiding macho light. I praised its accomplishments as well as its excesses. I justified its disastrous export of armed struggle. I even admit with a shudder now that I thought Fidel’s execution and exile of his opponents was absolutely necessary. Them or us, I would say: take your pick, I would say, ten million starving children or a couple of bourgeois counterrevolutionaries. It was not a time for subtleties.

  So I am not trying, more than thirty years later, to recast myself as a saint, suggesting that during my first street protest in early 1960 I was visited by a Gandhian epiphany. But that incident does signal my deepest, most intimate preference for a revolution that could take power without killing its adversaries—or its followers, for that matter.

  My defense of armed violence during the sixties was to be enthusiastic and outspoken, but it was, primarily, that: spoken, defended with my mouth, but not carried out with my body. And what if, in order to save the people, save the revolution, stop children from starving, I was asked to kill that cop? Then what? A question which was to return in café discussions and smoke-filled cabals at dinner tables all through the sixties, a question that I never had to answer, basically because my father had, by absolute accident, ended up in Chile when he had to flee the United States in the fifties. If the Chilean workers had not, for forty years, been working toward a peaceful revolution that Allende was to embody, perhaps my commitment to the liberation of the Latin American poor would eventually have led me, like so many of my generation in other countries of the continent, to hills and slums where, gun in hand, I would have been hunted down and slaughtered. As it was, I was fortunate enough to find one of the only mass movements in the planet that reconciled my drastic need for structural, earth-shattering change and my desire that this change be accomplished without harm to others.

  All revolutions, up until the victory of the Unidad Popular government in 1970, had invariably been violent, based on the premise that radical changes in society and the economy could not be accomplished without first smashing the military machine through which ruling classes ensure their ownership of wealth and power, and then going on from there to a complete—some would say total—takeover of all the organs of the state (executive, legislative, judicial), all the means of communication, and, eventually, all forms of property. This had been the orthodox doctrine of the left since the Bolshevik Revolution; in fact, since the Paris Commune in 1870—exactly a century before our triumph in Chile—had first been held up by Marx as a model for the coercion that any successful revolution would have to resort to if it wished to remain in power; only ten years earlier, it had been launched in Latin America itself with the Cuban Revolution. Allende believed, and with him the majority of the Chilean people, that it was possible, and indeed desirable, to effect those changes through democratic means, that one did not have to persecute and kill one’s enemies in order to neutralize them, that one did not have to limit anyone’s basic freedoms in order to be rid of the plagues of hunger, unemployment, homelessness, exploitation, that one did not have to install a dictatorship in order to defend the gains of the revolution.

  Critics of this Chilean road to socialism predicted that this strategy would fail, that the ruling classes would never give up their power willingly, that it would end in a bloodbath, pointing to the same Paris Commune, where the counterrevolution, when it restored order, had massacred the communards. Allende’s answer was that he had no illusions about the peacefulness of his adversaries. Once democracy could not be counted on to protect their interests, the former rulers of Chile would conspire to destroy and vandalize that democracy, would undoubtedly try to subvert the military. But they would be isolated, our theory went; we had disarmed them, stripped them of any justification for their terror by renouncing terror ourselves as the inevitable midwife of change. This was our strategy of persuasion as a moral force in history, this was Allende’s way of escaping the spiral of violence and counterviolence that had fed on each other voraciously throughout the twentieth century. We were trying to keep not only our own hands clean of blood but those of our foes as well.

  I say we, but the truth is that at the beginning of the Allende period I was myself brimming with doubts about the feasibility of a gentle revolution. By the end of those three years, however, I had beco
me a true believer, in great measure because I witnessed a small but vocal minority on the Chilean left, brimming with bookish theories to which reality was supposed to conform, sabotage our revolution. Knowing that Allende would not repress them, they irresponsibly accelerated social change to try to force an armed outcome to the conflict. Their incessant mobilization of the poorer sectors of society, their indiscriminate takeover of industries, housing projects, and fields, their push to radicalize the revolution, ended up alienating the middle classes, which were essential for our triumph if we were to keep the military on our side.

  But hadn’t the ultra-left been correct?

  Now that someone like the cop who had been giving Freddy Taberna a couple of whacks with his nightclub in 1960 was going down the steps of a cellar in 1973, to torture someone just like Freddy, now that the armed men whom I had delicately not wanted to hurt back in 1960 were shooting at us, now that they were inflicting on us the violence we had refused to inflict on them, did I still think we should turn the other cheek? Did I still think there was no justification for throwing even a rock at them? Was I going to leave that weapon in the hands of the sleeping recruit, who, when we awoke, would be more than ready to pull the trigger? Did I still believe that violence was not a solution?