Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

by Ariel Dorfman

  I had one chance, therefore, to defend my English-language identity and I tried hard not to blow it. If it had only been Spanish … But there was also arithmetic and geometry and botany and the rudiments of Chilean history and Chilean geography and Chilean flowers and fruits and battles, a crash course on the heritage of that country I disdained. Above all, my challenge was the language that Pablo Neruda was at that very moment furiously hurling to the winds not ten blocks from where I was studying, hating every moment of class, at a private Academia. A highfalutin name for a dingy couple of catch-up classrooms in the dirtiest corner of the center of Santiago, where children in trouble were being drilled for their exams, kids mostly older than I who were either dyslexic or had other learning disabilities or had been expelled from their schools. It was there, among a group of outcasts and misfits, that I reluctantly reestablished a relationship with the language I had repudiated in that hospital in Manhattan.

  Given that I detested Spanish, it seems a miracle that I finally was able to pass the exams in December, do tolerably in math, and scrape by in Chilean history. Spanish, however, was a different story. My written test was such a shambles that the examining committee of government-named teachers decided to grill me orally. They indignantly showed me the results of the test. One of my errors was so egregious that I can still remember it. Among the words dictated to me by a foul-breathed examining teacher was azucena, water lily, undoubtedly chosen, not out of admiration for the flower, but in the hope that the student would confuse the z and the c, both pronounced like s in Latin America. I didn’t fall into that trap, however, because I had never heard the word before. I timidly asked the teacher if she could repeat it. She looked at me furiously, as if I were deaf, and sidled up to me, hissing the four syllables even more incomprehensibly into my ear. What I heard this time, perhaps under the influence of the smell of poorly digested pork and fried garlic that wafted down from her mouth, was a su cena, “to her [or his] dinner.” I gagged, I shrugged, I scribbled down those three words. When the examiners got my test, they must have thought I was a cretin. But as soon as they started to question me, they realized that I was merely a silly gringo who had just arrived in the country, and that my resolute effort to learn the language in three months should be commended rather than penalized. They gave me a passing grade. Something like a C minus. Maybe they wouldn’t have been so generous if they had been informed that I was born Latin American, that my parents were Argentinian, that I should have breezed through that test. Or maybe they would have passed me anyway, in return for the portentous lunch offered them by the “Academia,” the meal whose greasy residues the dictating lady had been burping into my ears. What did I care? I had outsmarted them. I was heading for the Grange, English-language heaven where Spanish was subordinate, tenuous, irrelevant.

  Well, not quite, as my first teacher of Spanish at the Grange was quick to proclaim as soon as I had the misfortune to meet him, on a day in March of 1955, when I started classes at Mr. Jackson’s British institution. My first two periods in the morning went like a dream: they were current events and literature, both in English, and I shot my hand up repeatedly and tried out a phony British accent and ingratiated myself with the instructors, and then, during break, had trotted out to the yard to excitedly show off my English-language prowess to anybody who cared to hear me—and to many who probably didn’t. I then marched back into the classroom, flushed and self-satisfied, ready to continue the triumphant defense of my heritage. And found myself face-to-face with the professor of castellano. Castellano? The name given to the Spanish language in many Latin American countries, a reminder that what we call Spanish is in fact the dialect of Castile, which the same Catholic Kings, Isabella and Ferdinand, who expelled the Jews, established the Inquisition, and financed Columbus, imposed on the rest of the peninsula. And which that teacher was about to impose on me.

  He called the roll and had only to hear me answer with my excruciating un-Castilian Yankee accent to curl his lip sarcastically and ask me to come to the head of the class. He handed me the second-year textbook and made me read a poem. My first poem in Spanish: “Nadie dijo nada,” by a nineteenth-century Chilean writer named Carlos Pezoa Veliz, about a homeless man who is being buried anonymously, and as the gravediggers throw earth on the body, “nadie dijo nada, nadie dijo nada,” nobody said a word, nobody said a word. In the poem, that is—because I was forced to pronounce each word, and as I waffled on, the teacher was more than happy to correct me and then asked for a couple of synonyms. I grubbed in my mind and found an empty blank space: like the people in the poem, I didn’t have a word to say, I felt that I was the one being buried. The teacher provided some choices, however, and commanded me to write them on the blackboard and mocked both my script and my spelling. Then he made me pronounce over and over the phrase “Hablo este idioma en forma execrable,” I speak this language execrably. After a few minutes of this sort of merriment, he sent me back to my seat, where I stewed, publicly humiliated, for the rest of the class.

  When it was over, I hurried after that teacher, approached him in the hall. I didn’t know what I was going to say, and may have been as astonished as he was by what dropped out of my faltering mouth: that before I graduated from the Grange I would win the prize for excellence in the use of the Spanish language. He looked at me for a few seconds, perhaps wondering whether this gringo brat was making fun of him or just crazy. Unable to decide, he settled on one word: Nunca. Never. He turned smartly on his heel, as if executing a military maneuver, and left me there in the hall nursing plans for revenge.

  He ignored me for the next few weeks, and then one day he didn’t turn up for class and we heard he had resigned from the school to seek his fortune abroad, gone off to a small college in the United States no less (so much for his anti-Yankee sentiments!). He was replaced by another teacher, mouselike and dreary, who couldn’t have cared less if I was gringo or Martian. So my tormentor was not around to eat crow when almost five years later, at the end of 1959, at the final graduation ceremonies, I received, just as I had vowed, the prize for Spanish. I did meet him once more, however: many years later, when I was in exile. It was late December of 1977 and I had flown from Amsterdam to an MLA convention in Chicago, where I had been invited to deliver the keynote speech to over a thousand U.S. university professors of Spanish and Latin American literature. By then I had made a name for myself, had penned several best-selling essays and won a major literary prize for a novel. When I finished my speech (which dealt with the Chilean cultural resistance against Pinochet and the mistakes that had been made during the Allende period), I was approached by none other than my former castellano teacher at the Grange. I had vaguely heard about him, that he was about to retire from the small college, but I hadn’t expected to see him here. He was all gushy and sentimental: Quiero que usted sepa, señor Dorfman, I want you to know, Mr. Dorfman, how much I admire your writings, cuánto admiro lo que escribe. Would I care to autograph a copy of a book I had written on imagination and violence in the Latin American novel which he had been using for the last few years with students at his college?

  I looked at him, speechless at this opportunity for vindication: it was clear that he didn’t recognize in this Ariel Dorfman the Edward he had insulted in his classroom back in Chile. My youngest son, Joaquín, upon being told many years later about this encounter, has scolded me for not disclosing my identity with a Count of Monte Cristo flourish and humbling the bastard. Instead, I confess I murmured some inane nicety and let him toddle away with my autograph. I had been as tongue-tied as the first time our paths crossed, but this time it was not my lack of Spanish which paralyzed me but my excess of it. Nothing I could have said to him would really have explained what had befallen that tongue in the twenty or so years since our last exchange. Yes, he had been unjustifiably harsh to a boy without a country who could not defend himself. And yes, I hate tormentors of children. But I had come to the absurd conclusion that I owed him a favor; I bizarrely contem
plated whether I shouldn’t thank him for having been so cruel. There at that MLA convention in Chicago he was suddenly revealed to me—and the revelation is confirmed now, as I write this—as an avenging angel of the Spanish language, an envoy of history come to shake me out of my arrogance, an instrument secretly sent by the unknowing Chilean people to shock me into understanding once and for all that I could not continue acting as if the language I had been given at my birth had no right to exist. ,

  That teacher was indeed abusive, but I had been abusive as well, to the language he had dedicated his life to nursing so it would grow among the young. I deserved his contempt and that realization jolted me into opening a space for Spanish in my life, a minor space, ridiculously dwarfish compared to the gigantic area in my brain seething with English, but that was enough: once it was accorded respect, once it was given a chance to establish itself in my life, there was no stopping it.

  English had used America as its secret weapon. Now it was time for Spanish to use Chile, to draw me into its net. Out there, just beyond the oasis of that British school rememorating an old empire that no longer existed, just beyond the boundaries of my body straining to return to the newer empire of the United States (soon to be on a collision course with the Chile I had hardly taken the trouble to gaze at), out there, at the edge of my tongue, within reach of the Spanish words I hardly knew how to formulate, a real challenge was lying in wait for me: the people who spoke that language, the guardians of a plenitude of things and experiences that were to sensually surround my body and demand a name. That Spanish out there contained my future. It contained the words of García Lorca I would say to Angélica one day, Verde que te quiero verde, the lover-like green of desire, and the words of Quevedo I would say to my country, Miré los muros de la patria mia, watching the walls of my fatherland crumble, and the words of Neruda I would say to the revolution, Sube a nacer conmigo, hermano, rise and be born with me, my brother, and the words of Borges I would whisper to time, los tigres de la memoria, the tigers of memory with which I would try to fool death once again. I would realize one day that the word for hope in Spanish, the word esperanza, hides within its syllables the sound and meaning of esperar, to wait, that there was in the language itself a foretelling of frustration, a warning to be cautious, to hope but not to hope too much because the experience of those who forged those syllables tells them that we end up, more often than not, being violated by history.

  Not only wonders, in Spanish: also learning with it how to avoid responsibility. A day comes back to me—I must have been sixteen—the first time I realized that Spanish was beginning to speak me, had infiltrated my habits. It was in carpentry class and I had given a final clumsy bang with a hammer to a monstruous misshapen contraption I had built and it broke, fell apart right there, so I turned to the carpentry teacher and “Se rompió,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

  His mouth had twisted in anger. “Se, se, se,” he hissed. “Everything in this country is se, it broke, it just happened, why in the hell don’t you say I broke it, I screwed up. Say it, say, Yo lo rompí, yo, yo, yo, take responsibility, boy.” And all of a sudden I was a Spanish speaker, I was being berated for having used that form of the language to hide behind, I had automatically used that ubiquitous, impersonal se, I had escaped into the language, escapé lenguaje adentro, merged with it.

  I became conscious then of the other elusive ways in which the language allowed its devoutest followers to pass the buck onto others, the proliferation of passive forms and the overemployment of the hay que, había que, habría que (approximately, “it should be necessary to …”) which, in years to come, would drive me crazy, people all around me endlessly discussing in smoke-filled rooms what should be done and very few of them effectively doing anything. But by then I had gone deeper into the language and learned that this multiplication of possibilities and parallel paths could also be a virtue, could also enrich the language. I had come to explore the verb system in Spanish, perhaps the richest in the Indo-European family of languages. I had come to adore the fluid use of time that Spanish plays with, I had internalized the subjunctive, to mentally live a plurality of forms of time that had not yet occurred, a time that was suspended and waiting to occur, a time that existed in the mind even if it had no chance of materializing in history, the construction of alternative imaginary universes always haunting the hard reality of our hearts trapped in the prison house of today and now and right here.

  I was not aware of what was happening to my mind: it was a subtle, cunning, camouflaged process, the vocabulary and the grammatical code seeping into my consciousness slowly, turning me into a person who, without acknowledging it, began to function in either language. Although from the very beginning I did not allow my new language to enter into a dialogue with the older one. I stubbornly avoided comparing their relative merits, what one could offer me that the other could not. It was as if they inhabited two strictly different, segregated zones in my mind, or perhaps as if there were two Edwards, one for each language, each incommunicado like a split personality, each trying to ignore the other, afraid of contamination. I did not attempt—or even contemplate the possibility—of cross-fertilization: to weigh the caliber and performance of one against the other would have meant creating a territory from which to think the phenomenon, a common space they both shared within me. It would have meant admitting that I was irrevocably bilingual, opening the door to questions of identity that I was much too vulnerable and immature to face: Who is it that speaks Spanish? Is it the same youngster who speaks English? Is there a core that is unchanged no matter what dictionary you reach for? And which is better equipped to tell a particular story? And how is it that your body language changes when you switch from one to the other? Is it a different body? Questions that only many years later, only now that I have agreed to their coexistence, can I begin to register. Questions which, if I had asked them when I was first starting this journey toward duality, would have made me clamp down, suffocate Spanish again, deny its right to a voice. And my Spanish knew this, and cooperated, was glad to be once again inside my head, did not call attention to its gains, was not stupidly going to let itself crow victory when suddenly, in the middle of a sentence in English, a word in Spanish would make its upstart appearance as if nothing was more natural in the world, given that there was no English equivalent for that untranslatable turn of phrase. My Spanish did not demand that I examine why I needed that precise word when I had an infinitude of English at my tongue’s end, why it was irreplaceable. Having smuggled itself in, my Spanish was wise enough not to corner me. Instead, quite simply, it grew. And grew. And grew.

  If I had realized how radical that process of learning Spanish was to be, how it was to change my life and chain me to Chile, I would undoubtedly have rebelled, preferred to endure hundreds of abusive teachers and mocking schoolmates than jeopardize the predominance of my English-language identity, my determination to return to America.

  I did not think at the time that there was the slightest danger of Chile, or Spanish, enchanting me forever. My head was firmly turned North, living the archetypal colonialist dream, looking to the mother country for everything of value, and because my father happened to be a diplomat, it was not only my head but my stomach as well that was able to make believe we still inhabited the United States.

  A few weeks after my first Spanish lesson at the blackboard of the Grange had launched me in the direction of Chile, my Yankee past reclaimed me in the form of an enormous box my father brought home. Imported straight from America. He handed me a knife and told me to cut into it. I didn’t hesitate and stabbed the heart of the box, and the loot came pouring forth and was parceled out. Cornflakes and Hershey’s syrup and Campbell’s tomato soup and Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix and Schrafft’s almond crunch, along with magazines and books and records and shirts and bathing suits, to be shared by one and all. And one kind of booty that was only for me: an assortment of twelve candy bars. Every three months, my dad said, there�
�ll be a new shipment. I went whooping up to my room and proceeded to hide and hoard those candies in the bottom drawer of my desk, under my most precious manuscripts. Food and literature, the twin obsessions of my life, side by side. My stock was supposed to last me exactly twelve weeks, until the next shipment would bring relief. If I disciplined myself, I could, like Robinson Crusoe on his island, resist the siege of the savages and the brutal wheel of time; if I resisted temptation, the candy bars would allow me to remain the child I had been, flash back piecemeal each night to the States until the day when I could really journey home and gorge myself at the local drugstore.

  I had not read Proust yet nor knew how to pronounce the word madeleine, but during those first years in Chile my candy bars helped me indulge in a Proustian struggle to recapture the past, though in my case the attempt to prove that time was an illusion was not left to chance but turned into what I thought would be a cold and calculating scientific campaign. Before going to sleep each night, I would gnaw at the edge of, say, a Baby Ruth and carefully, almost religiously, return the rest to the wrapper; and then I would go to bed and lie awake ruminating, not on death, as I did when I was a child, but on who in the hell Baby Ruth had been and whether she had been able to eat all the concoctions she wanted, and then my mind would inevitably turn to the candy bar there, in the drawer, so close at hand, so lonesome, so willing to take me, salivating, back to my lost and faraway land, and I would creep out from under the covers and open the drawer and take that delectable Baby Ruth out and peel its paper like a flower and smell it and bring it almost to my lips and then put it back to sleep sexually inside its wrappers without even licking it once and then back to bed and more thoughts and then a flood of distance and the abysm of desire and finally a rush to open the drawer and pull back the wrapping, and open the soft heart of the candy, and a tiny bite, the hope that the morsel of chocolate would melt me toward the States. But it was never enough and all too soon I was taking another bite and another one until the last crumb was gone and often, all too often, on I would go to the next Baby Ruth and then a Mars bar and just one more, only one more, I promise, I swear! and all of a sudden there I was, stranded in my room in Santiago with all those empty wrappers on the floor and the hint of a tummy ache and the realization that I had just swallowed in one sitting a whole month of secret passages to America, uselessly telling myself what all exiles tell themselves as they fantasize about returning home tomorrow: this distance is a mere parenthesis, a punishment that will end if I can only stay the same, if I can only foil time. Not knowing that many years later, in my next exile, I would devour empanadas with the same expectation that those Chilean meat pies could act as my adult ticket to the past, to the country of the past where my body was forbidden to go. The country I wanted to escape during my adolescence, the empanadas I hardly wasted time on then, obsessed as I was with my Milky Ways.