Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

by Ariel Dorfman

  My belief was put to the test by that young soldier whom we refused to kill that day.

  So the coup was not only bringing me my own death as a possibility but was visiting me now with another variety of death altogether, in a different and vicious disguise. For one moment, however brief, there on September 14 of 1973, fortune had made me into the hunter rather than the hunted; I had become the god who decides if somebody lives or if somebody dies.

  Someone with power had spared me during the coup, death had brushed near me in the dark and passed me by, as if I also had been asleep, watched over by someone more powerful.

  Now it was this young soldier’s turn.

  While he slept, I had decided that he should live.

  We left him there, Alberto and I, half in the sun, half in the shade, we left him breathing there, and went on our way.

  I never even knew his name.

  EIGHT

  A CHAPTER DEALING WITH THE DISCOVERY OF LIFE AND LANGUAGE DURING THE YEARS 1954 TO 1959 IN SANTIAGO DE CHILE

  I would be fourteen years before I returned to the States and by then it was too late.

  Sitting in a small room one day in Berkeley, California, in front of my typewriter—It must have been late in that turbulent year of 1968—abruptly, just like that, in the middle of a sentence I was writing, I stopped. I looked at those words in English perched on that piece of paper and I told myself, it popped up into my thoughts without warning, a simple revelation whose obviousness had nevertheless been brewing in my mind for some time and that only now, far from Chile, back in America, had finally surfaced: What was I doing here, making believe I was a gringo, writing in this language that suddenly seemed an alien script? I was not from here. I was Latin American.

  And then came a decision perversely opposite to the one I had made so many years ago, on the New York coast of the United States, but symmetrical to it and just as fierce: I proceeded, in that room not far from the Pacific Ocean, to renounce English along with the America of the North and its empire and its culture, renounce and denounce and try to suppress henceforth the man inside me who had spent his life identifying through that language, speaking and writing himself into personhood in that language. As nobody can, at the age of twenty-six, forgo and forget a language, as languages cannot be unlearned by decree that late in life, I did what was second best in order to establish the intensity and credentials of my convictions. Needing, like all converts, to burn what they have adored, I swore never to write another word in the English language. Spanish was to be the love of my life.

  I willed myself to become monolingual again.

  Not the outcome I would have foretold in 1954 when I arrived in Chile with a siege mentality. Spanish was everywhere, surrounding me with its babbling, sticky, suffocating sea of sound. But now the tactic that had served me so well during the last ten years—to pretend that the language I had been born into did not exist—was useless. All I could do was promise that I wouldn’t admit it to my heart, that I’d leave this foreign dump as soon as I was old enough to return to my own beloved United States.

  I am not sure now, as I write this, how strong the wall of my isolationist position really was, if it might not have crumbled into dust if I had been made instantly, gloriously welcome in Chile. But that was not to be the case: as soon as my mother, the day after we disembarked in Valparaiso, set to solve the pressing issue of how I would be educated, my prejudices against the country and against Spanish in particular were trenchantly reinforced.

  Entering the Chilean educational system proved a nightmare. A transition that would have been difficult for any child was complicated by the fact that in my last two years in the States I had found a school that was perfect for me: Dalton, a progressive private establishment on the East Side of Manhattan where my mother taught Spanish—a circumstance that, combined with a scholarship my artistic talents had won me, helped to reduce the tuition.

  My parents sought to ease the pain of the loss of that school built on the premise that children flourish if they are given freedom, by applying to the Liceo Manuel de Salas, an experimental public high school in Santiago presumably dedicated to the same philosophy. My mother, with her incurable cheerfulness and her assumption that everyone had to admire her son as unconditionally as she did, expected that I would have no problem being admitted.

  We got as far as the principal’s office.

  She was a stern, prim woman. On her desk were a series of glowing letters of introduction and recommendation from Dalton, which my mother had meticulously translated into Spanish and sent ahead. The principal feigned enthusiasm. I was twelve years old but I could tell she was faking it. How wonderful to have someone from Dalton, she cooed, a school that is like a sister to us.

  Good. My mother asked when I could start.

  The principal pursed her lips and said, “Bueno … weeeelll …” There are, she said, some problems, she said. She ticked them off with a long index finger, adressing my mother, hardly looking at me. First: Chile operated, perhaps we were not aware of it, on the French model. In the United States, he, Vladimiro (meaning me, Eddie, sitting in front of her), was considered a child—un niño—with two more years of elementary education to go, but here, and now my mother tried to interrupt, but the principal waved her aside, here, she insisted, he is a joven, a young man, a pre-teen. At the age of twelve, he is supposed to be in high school here, because here, she accentuated the word, aquí, there were six years of higher education and not four as in the United States. And not every student is automatically allowed to enter high school here, she said, this is paid for by the state and by the Chilean people, and therefore it is the state that decides if the child is ready to commence higher forms of instruction, and there is a battery of tests to which every pupil must submit before being allowed entry. Tests which este joven had not undergone, she said. Again my mother tried to put a word in, but the principal was unrestrainable. That is not all, the principal said. There is a second matter, she said, waving that long index finger; second was the fact that we happened to be in the Southern Hemisphere, perhaps we had not realized that here, aquí en Chile, the seasons were reversed, she pointed in the general direction of the schoolyard, where kids in overcoats milled around, some of them peering into the principal’s office to see what the hell was going on, all of them shouting at each other in Spanish, not a friendly English insult sullying the clean Chilean air, which meant, the principal proceeded, that school had started in March, and it was now late August, so I had already lost five months. However, she said, given the recommendations, she said, basking in the smugness of her own fiefdom, yes, she felt el joven Vladimiro would be well served to pursue his studies at her model institution.

  My mother breathed a sigh of relief.

  So it was settled.

  Not really. The principal now turned her attention to me. She asked me a question. I began to stammer a few words in Spanish, gringo, pidgin, ungrammatical, mispronounced, mixed-up Spanish, the first words I had uttered in that native language of mine in ten years. I extracted them tentatively and against their will and against mine, and the first thing I told her, foolish and arrogant and defiant, was that my name was Edward, tried to convey, tongue-tied, that I answered to a different name than the one on my birth certificate. My first conversation with a Chilean citizen. And she heard me out, she let me have my say, if you could call it that, watched me splutter every hunchbacked word into the air, make every mistake in the book, she let me grind to a halt and stumble and cease my massacre of the language of Cervantes. And with every blunder I could feel the principal’s mistrust turning into a more drastic hostility.

  She didn’t like me. No. It wasn’t me she didn’t like. It was my language. It was that I was a Yankee. It was that I called myself Edward. That I felt that I could just barge in here, into this sanctuary of hers where the best and the brightest young Chileans were being trained in freedom and independence with taxes paid by her fellow countrymen, that I could presume to
gain admittance, leaping over the thousands of deserving native applicants, merely because I was from the North, this child who had denied his name and his heritage. This child who had betrayed the cause of Latin America, had forgotten the language and the culture in those ten years in the North. Payback time.

  Am I exaggerating? Am I injecting what I know now into what I did not know then? Probably. But the animosity was there. I felt it then, I can feel it now so many years later, emanating from some cold center under her skin even if I had no way at that time of grasping its dimensions, not enough knowledge of Chile to realize that many people here—particularly among the intellectual elite—begrudged and even hated the United States, blaming it for their country’s poverty and backwardness. The Cold War that had chased me from the United States was not going to leave me alone now that I had journeyed to the farthest reaches of the American sphere of influence, about as far South as you could go: how was I to guess, sitting there as the icy strutting resentment of the principal glazed over me, how was I to know that I was being categorized as a representative of the North, of the gringos who had come down to Chile and taken over the economy, who owned the copper mines and the banks and the major industries and the foreign policy and the steamships. It was her duty to educate a generation of young men and women to stand on their own feet and defy these foreigners who believed that their dollars and their technology and their language gave them the right to dictate terms to a sovereign land.

  I would come to understand how she felt because many years later I turned into somebody very much like her, fiercely proud of Chile, resolutely nationalistic, fanatically defensive of our right to decide our fate without foreign influence or intervention. I would become that principal whose name I never knew, I would join her camp, her battle for the liberation of Chile would become my battle. Yes, that same woman would gladly have given me refuge in the days after the coup against Allende, taken me in and risked her life and her family’s life to save me, if she herself, as seems probable in retrospect, had not been one of those hunted down. But at that moment when I first set foot in my future country, she was not willing to give me refuge then and there, to ease me into Chilean society, to welcome me charitably into the Spanish I had forsaken.

  She turned to my mother and pointed out that my Spanish was—what words did she use? let me invent here because what I remember now is the tone rather than the vocabulary, her piercing desire to draw lines, to exclude, to exercise her petty sectarian quota of power—yes, she said something to the effect that Este niño no sabe hablar castellano. This child can’t speak Spanish. No longer a joven: demoted in age, demoted to helplessness. However she said it, her conclusions could not have been more dramatic. Vladimiro, she said, accentuating each syllable of the Russian revolutionary name, will have to wait seven months, until March of 1955, to be admitted, and he will unfortunately have to lose a whole year, start high school from scratch in the first year, and we should be grateful that she was waiving, in homage to the sister school of Dalton, all entrance examinations, grateful that I was not losing two years.

  Five minutes later, we were out in the corridor, my mother and her twelve-year-old son. Five minutes later, as soon as the door to the principal’s office was closed, I blurted out, in English of course, my decision: “I’m not coming to this stupid school!” I can remember the startled look on the faces of two young girls who were skipping down the hall, their surprise, whether at the foreign sounds coming from my mouth or at the passion with which I was spewing them I could not tell, but I can remember their look and how it made me feel even more alien to them and to their establishment and to their country, how it verified my decision to shun that sort of look if I possibly could.

  My mother shook her head in despair. “But then where in heaven will you go to school?”

  Within two days I was sitting in the office of Mr. Jackson, the British-born headmaster of the Grange, a prestigious English prep school that had been established as a way of insuring that the descendants of British merchants and entrepreneurs who had migrated to Chile in the nineteenth century would be brought up in the best Victorian traditions—and keep the language of their forefathers. My dad had looked into that school as a possibility and decided against it and now warned me: the Grange was the opposite of Dalton in every possible way. It was a boys-only school, resolutely hierarchical, run on the theory that young males are savages that need to be disciplined and threatened and toughened up for a life where they will have to exercise cold control over other, lesser beings in order to succeed. Uniforms and ties were compulsory, students were beaten with a cane if they stepped out of line, showers were freezing, in the chill of early mornings the kids were marched out onto the gravel of the driveway and forced to endure half an hour of excruciating physical exercises. And if they cut their hands on the stones, better still. Nor was I going to be able to avoid the detested Spanish language: the Grange, like every other educational institution in Chile, also taught the full official curriculum in Spanish.

  “Why’s it called an English school, then?” I asked.

  Because the system was modeled on British public schools, came the answer. Because boys at the Grange played rugby and cricket (and not, my parents pointed out, baseball or American football or basketball). Because a series of subjects were additionally taught in English—language, literature, history, current events, geography, even mathematics—which meant, my parents hastened to explain, hoping that maybe this would dissuade their recalcitrant son from going to an authoritarian school, that in order to accommodate these extra classes, days at the Grange were several hours longer than at other Chilean schools. There was even instruction on Saturday mornings.

  “And what do kids speak in their free time, when they’re on break?”

  “English is enforced,” my dad said. “Drastically, it seems.”

  That was all I needed to hear. Even before I crossed its august gate, saw its spacious green fields, walked into the ivy-covered buildings, I had decided that the Grange was the place for me.

  My preconceptions were confirmed by a small incident I witnessed as my parents chatted for a few minutes with the school’s Secretary of Studies at the entrance to the main building. Nearby, three young boys in gray jackets were playing marbles in the dust, heatedly arguing in Spanish about whether one of them had cheated. Their excited jabber was interrupted by an older boy in a blue jacket. He came upon them gliding out of nowhere, like a blue shadow out of nowhere, and barked: “English!” That word. No more. The boys looked up guiltily, fell silent, rose to their feet. The older boy (I would later learn he was called a prefect) stood there for a few seconds, rocking back and forth, policeman-like, his hands behind his back, the youthful caricature of a Dickensian stepfather. The prefect let the marble players wait a bit more, then demanded their names and delivered their punishment in crisp, Laurence Olivier English: “You should be caned. But this morning I’m feeling merciful. Two hours’ detention. Saturday afternoon! Copy a thousand times: I am not to speak Spanish during break. Say it.”

  Each of the boys repeated the phrase over in an English heavily accented by Spanish, floundering over the words as if they were extras in some Western where the Mexicans can barely make themselves understood.

  “Next time …” the prefect said, and he lifted his arm up in the air and brought it down, making a whistling sound with his mouth and smacking one palm against the other with a great white whack.

  Then he was gone.

  It would be nice to report that I felt a wave of sympathy for the victims, who, like me, had been stripped of the language that gave meaning to their lives, their games rendered joyless, as they were obligated by older people in power to stutter halfhearted words in a foreign tongue they hated. But there was no room for compassion in my barren exile’s heart. That trio of marble players was persecuted here at the Grange. Well, too bad for them. I would have been persecuted for my language at the Liceo Manuel de Salas, that would have been my d
aily bread, doled out by kids like them, in the jungle of the Chilean schoolyards. That blond prefect in his blue jacket, coercive, driven, bleak, was defending my interests, my language, my colonial enclave at the Grange, an outpost of civilization in the midst of semi-savage territory where I could practice my English unopposed. He was like a barbed-wire fence, keeping Chile out, banishing Spanish to the streets outside the Grange, where it belonged: an inferior, barbarous tongue mumbled by the natives.

  Even so, I would have to learn that language. The headmaster, Mr. Jackson himself, notified me of this requirement when I finally met him a few minutes later. He was ready to admit me to the Grange and didn’t mind at all that I preferred not to call myself Vladimiro. Here the boys answered to their last name, and besides, Edward seemed a reasonable choice. He couldn’t, however, let me into school this late in the year. He did have a suggestion, however, that the principal of the Liceo Manuel de Salas had not even broached. Why not use the few months left in 1954 to study all the subjects taught in the first year of high school and take the examinations on my own? Then next March he could place me in the second year. My parents explained that my Spanish was not quite up to that sort of testing.

  Mr. Jackson looked me squarely in the eyes. Nonsense, he said. You can do it, Dorfman, he said to me, placing both his hands on my shoulders, you can show them the sort of stuff we’re made of, you can learn Spanish in a snap, he said, even though I was later to discover that his own Spanish was atrocious, that he had never mastered the language. We’ll pull through, won’t we? he said.

  And I nodded.

  I would stop feeling sorry for myself and pull through.

  And that is how, in the first days of September of 1954, I forced this throat of mine to make up for ten years of neglect of Spanish, I studied my way back into the language. I did it out of love of English. I did it because I had been encouraged by a defender of the British Empire to believe in myself, to be self-reliant, to keep my head, as Rudyard Kipling had put it in “If,” Mr. Jackson’s favorite poem, when all about me were losing theirs. I did it to spite the Chilean woman principal who didn’t think a gringo kid could be worthy of her school. But above all I did it because my parents had cautioned me that enough was enough: if I did not pass these exams, I was going to enter the first year at Manuel de Salas and that was that.