Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

by Ariel Dorfman

  It must have been around then, in 1956, that I first heard the name of Salvador Allende, a socialist doctor who had been the youngest Minister in the 1938 Popular Front government of Pedro Aguirre Cerda and who had, from that post, instituted the first social security and national health care system in Chile. He was now a senator and he had been instrumental in formulating a program that was supposed to solve the country’s structural problems. Nationalize the copper, nitrate, carbon, iron mines, expropriate the main industries and banks, divide up the large haciendas among the peasants that worked the land. And this overturning of privilege was to be accomplished democratically, through the electoral process. It was a program virtually identical to the one Allende set in motion when he did win the Presidency in 1970 and which he came within a hair’s breadth of implementing in 1958, when he lost the elections by thirty thousand votes to the right-wing candidate, Jorge Alessandri.

  As a red-diaper baby, I was, of course, destined to be an Allendista. It never occurred to me that it might be otherwise. If my political education had been limited in the States by the caution that had to be exercised in the McCarthy era, in Chile there were no such restraints. My left-wing parents gloried in the company of like-minded friends. The table that could not receive the beggars of Santiago dined and wined the Chilean and Latin American elite dedicated to the cause of ridding the continent of beggars, from the future President of Argentina, Arturo Frondizi, to the future President of Guyana, Cheddi Jagan. Plus a number of North American lefties, Huberman, Sweezy, the Monthly Review crowd. The air was thick with debate about socialism, democracy, liberation, and the future of revolutionary change on the Soviet model, particularly once the Twentieth Congress of the U.S.S.R. had admitted the monstruous crimes of Stalin, an admission which was immediately followed by the brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolt. This had put my hard-line father on the defensive in the ongoing discussion with my mother, who in the late 1940s, tongue firmly in cheek, had already announced that she was forming a party called the SRCLCP—the Slightly Reformed Conservation Life Communist Party. Membership, she acknowledged, was limited for the time being to one person. Herself. But it would grow, she had prognosticated, and now the explosion of defections from Soviet Communism by a host of former true believers around the world, along with news of repression and unhappiness in the Eastern Bloc countries, was proving her right. My mother had also come out, early on, against the use of violence and the death penalty. If in the years to come, under the influence of Allende and his followers, I would identify increasingly with my mother’s position and become critical of my father’s, at that point in my development it was all speculative. Oh yes, I skimmed and scanned some Marxist texts, I parroted my parents and their cronies in discussions I held with the affluent parents of my friends from the Grange who tolerated this charmingly eccentric leftist who adored James Dean, this atheist with mystical tendencies, this Jacobin with the most exquisite manners and the gentlest of dispositions, this advocate of the Chilean unwashed and uneducated who wrote entangled and hermetic stories in English. They had an easy way of deflating all my elaborate arguments: Wasn’t I going back to the United States? Didn’t I consider myself American?

  They were right.

  I was unable to confront them because I was unable to confront myself, the life I had made for myself in Chile, my urge to travel back to the very place on the planet that was responsible in great measure, I thought, for the suffering that surrounded me. I could never engage that suffering while I dreamed of returning to the Promised Land of New York.

  My future was elsewhere, and as the date of my graduation from the Grange approached, I continued to make plans to leave Chile, sending applications to several American universities. Just in case, I also interviewed for a job with an American company that was looking to hire young representatives willing to travel through Latin America selling books and magazines in English, with the promise that a year later they would be sent to the States for further training. The job was mine if I wanted it, an executive called up to tell me, and then Columbia University let me know that I had been admitted, with a scholarship, as a freshman.

  For several feverish days, I could hardly contain myself. I was going back! Finally!

  My parents watched this frenzy apprehensively, allowed the fever to subside, and then gingerly ventured a suggestion: perhaps it would be better to postpone this trip, wait until I was a bit older. At seventeen, after all, I was too young, at least by Latin American standards, to be leaving home. They told me to mull it over, instead of rashly throwing away the enchanted existence I led in this country, a spacious house with a mesmerizing garden and adoring parents and servants who took care of my every need and loyal friends and a record collection and all my books and a motorcycle and …

  I went out for a long walk by myself.

  I loved then, and still love now, the Santiago evenings in the summertime. Even now that smog has ruined the Central Valley, now that too many cars befoul the air and the trees have been cut down to make way for ugly blocks of buildings and infested avenues, even now that we have mercilessly dirtied what was once a magical landscape, even now there still remains that sense of wonder and gratitude when the sun begins to go down. To be alive at the moment when a breeze descends from the mountains and you breathe deeply, not only with the lungs, but through the skin itself, as if the earth were calming you down, is to know a measure of forgiveness. It is only a lull in the dark, but whenever I stand under the Andes of Santiago and feel that sudden gust of air that seems to come from the very gates of Paradise and pushes back the dry mad heat of the day, when I look up and the mountains are all on fire from the setting sun, the Andes are turning orange and then red and the sky behind them has grown purple and it darkens and the night is held in abeyance, I am certain that this is the condition we were made for, this peace. It is all an illusion, it cannot last, this interlude of twilight when we seem to be blessed, when we seem to have refound our lost path, and yet for a while it is true, the body, the breeze, that quiet moment suspended between light and darkness that you never want to end.

  I feel it now and I felt it then, breathing in the gift from the Andes and desiring somehow to be buried here someday, to have my ashes scattered in this place someday.

  And that is where and when I asked myself, under those mountains, if this country had not become, in some way I had not anticipated, my home. That is where I decided, far from New York and far from Buenos Aires, a different future for my life.

  But what about my literature? What about my English?

  My decision not to return to the States would not have been conceivable if I had not come to the conclusion, during my high school years, that I could continue to write my fiction in the English language even if I was far from the States.

  This divorce, the extrication of the English in which I wrote from the nation where I had learned. it, had come gradually and was as much a product of my reading habits as it was of my own existential experience. During my first years in Santiago, I used my writing according to my plans back in New York: obdurately to get myself home, following in the footsteps of so many exiles through history, nostalgically traveling through words to the country I could not inhabit, and doing so, not surprisingly, in genres which were themselves typically North American. I churned out endless adventure stories, modeled on the Hardy Boys and their imitators, and wrote dozens of half-hour comic radio skits set in a mythical American landscape.

  When I was about fifteen, my writing abruptly matured. Again, a sickness intervened, a dangerous strain of hepatitis. If consulted, my old friend Thomas Mann, who believed in the symbiosis of illness and creativity, death and artistic exploration, internal decomposition and the external order we impose on the page, might have explained my sudden turn by this brush with mortality. Whatever the cause, during my two-month convalescence, I wrote a delirious sci-fi four-hundred-page utopian epic, marrying for the first time politics and fantasy in my writing; but a
lso setting my characters far from the United States, a decisive turn away from realism.

  And when I went back to school and resumed my normal activities, I discovered that writing—creating an alternative vision—could influence the way one lives one’s life. My day became split in two: I still adhered, of course, to the cheerful world of Doris Day and Rock Hudson, who presided over my diurnal, apparently normal everyday existence, my colonialized personality; while at nighttime and on weekends I would write stories that got increasingly darker and more daring and more intimate, privately drifting further and further away from childhood and its hunger for simplicity, optimism, and easy solutions.

  It was an evolutionary leap that had been percolating for some time, anticipated by the literature, from the States itself, that I had started to read. As I moved from the Hardy Boys to Hemingway, from Tom Swift to Steinbeck, from Nancy Drew to Kerouac and the Beats, from Woody Woodpecker to John Hersey and Howard Fast, I found myself able to contact in my writing an ambiguity and a turbulence that had not till then been allowed expression. Or maybe it was the other way around: I was able to understand those disturbing books, absorb The Great Gatsby, for instance, because in my own life I was starting to live, however faintly, the same discovery those American authors were dragging their characters through: that the American dream might be, after all, a nightmare. This intellectual and emotional growth was also nourished by an avid plundering of the British classics, Shakespeare, Dickens, Sterne, Milton, Hardy, Donne, Austen, and then an expansion into French authors (also in English), Stendhal and Zola and Romain Rolland, and, in my last year at the Grange, the existentialists Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir, and the brooding, tormented Russians, and I can remember the day I plucked the Buddenbrooks saga from my parents’ bookshelf, the pages that had been waiting in the back of my head ever since I had exchanged those brief words with my mentor-in-exile on the steamer to Europe; and at last, one wondrous night, I encountered Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Joseph K. and I knew that literature could be a prayer and a pickax, a way out of the frozen world in which we find ourselves trapped, our only protest against death and loneliness.

  So that by the time I took my walk under those Chilean mountains, I had already come to the conclusion that my writing did not need to be based in any community other than the community of like-minded individuals, the humanitas of select spirits; I really believed that I could live in Chile indefinitely and at the same time write fiction in English, without my identity eroding or being put to the test.

  How could I have anticipated there, that evening, as the sun set magnificently on Santiago de Chile, that what awaited me, less than a decade into the future, was the moment in Berkeley when I would swear never to use English again? How could I have known that history was about to interfere drastically in my life once more?

  Something was heading toward me and the country I had chosen as my refuge. With my schizophrenic, adulterous existence, writing in English and speaking in Spanish, singing American songs at sunrise and being lullabied into sleep by the Chilean mountains in the evening, crazy about Conrad and crazy about Cervantes, suspended vulnerably between two nations and two languages, I was totally unable to recognize what was bearing down on me, on us, the man-made future about to envelop my world and change it forever.

  The revolution was coming to Latin America.

  The continent I had been born to and now lived in, the continent I had finally decided not to flee, was about to explode in the sixties.

  PART TWO

  SOUTH AND NORTH

  NINE

  A CHAPTER DEALING WITH THE DISCOVERY OF DEATH, SOMETIME IN SEPTEMBER 1973, IN SANTIAGO DE CHILE

  It is the morning of September 14, and for the first time since the coup, I am alone.

  I’ve said goodbye to Alberto, received the information from our Party contact that Angélica is waiting for me at a café uptown, and that is how I find myself walking up Avenida Eleodoro Yáñez, alone for the first time with my loss, with no need to pretend that I can deal with this sorrow without another human being to help keep my desolation at bay. I am alone with the extraordinary evil and violence that is being visited on this country, and as I walk I can feel hope being sucked out of me as if I were bleeding it. I can feel all the rage of Chile filling me and there is nothing inside me or outside to counter that despair, not even tears. I can’t find a tear inside me to cry for my dead President and my dying land and my dry heart: I am hollow, adrift, someone who does not know who he is or what to do with his life.

  It is then, when I am most lost, midway through my life, just past the age of thirty-one, that I see that man.

  In truth, he sees me first.

  He sees me as I cross a street, he reads my face as I cross the street, he understands everything I am feeling as I cross the street, and as I turn to him momentarily, for a split second that no camera could capture, no spy could register, at that instant when his person passes mine in mid-street, that man, a Chilean worker, bronzed, short, muscular, determined, dignified, that man I have never before seen and would probably not recognize today, that man closes and opens his left eye and then he is gone, he vanishes as if he had never existed.

  He winked at me. Just that. No more than that. But that wink said it all. It said to me: No es para tanto, compañero. Things are not that bad, compañero. It said: Vamos a salir adelante. We’ll find a way out. It said: No está tan solo como piensa. You’re not as alone as you think.

  He saw me there in the pit of my sorrow and offered no more than his encouragement, proof that I was not really alone, that he was there even if we never saw each other again, that we could communicate even if the soldiers patrolled the streets and there seemed no place of refuge and they were beginning to torture prisoners a few blocks away, forecasting with the closing and opening of his eye how we would start rebuilding the country that had been stolen from us, bit by bit, wink by wink, under their very guns and boots. But, above all, it said to me that I was recognized, that I belonged, that he spoke my language, and that language was not Spanish and of course not English but the unspoken language of solidarity, the gesture of one man who had not lost hope toward another who was on the verge of losing it. It was a welcome, I thought, a wink of complicity that told me I had ceased to be a stranger and had finally become a compañero.

  Compañero. A word for which there is no adequate English equivalent, because soul mate, buddy, friend, comrade, even companion, do not contain, like an echo, the Spanish word for bread—pan—and it is that pan which speaks most profoundly in compañero of two people who break bread, of that other who is a brother even if you have never met him, of that trust.

  Many months later, I will see this encounter more as a despedida, a farewell; I will fantasize that he was giving me a goodbye present, because he could tell that I was already leaving, that I could not remain; he was giving me that wink to remember and cherish in the long years ahead, when the despair I felt on that street in Santiago on September 14 of 1973 would seem like nothing compared to the abyss of distance and guilt and horror that exile would bring as I watched my country, from afar, being defiled and my friends being slaughtered and men such as this remote compañero of mine being humiliated day after day after day. That would be the time when that wink would return to me, remind me that he was counting on me as I had counted on him the day of my despair. But that was not how I understood our encounter then, not that it will keep me warm in the winter of my exile, but that I belong here, that nothing will make me leave this Chile which, now more than ever, has become my home.

  Nobody agrees with me. Angélica offers the news that my mother has had two threatening phone calls, a male voice on the other side relishing her fright, her son-of-a-cunt Marxist bastard is going to get it now, if you see him, lady, say goodbye because you won’t ever see him again, your conchatumadre Jew-boy traitor, so it does not exactly look like a brilliant idea to try to go home to my parents. And certainly not to our own house, where Angélica ha
s started to burn papers, from posters of Che Guevara to minutes of Party meetings to innumerable political documents, up in smoke, joining the smoke that casts a suspicious pall over the whole of Santiago, where it is much too warm this spring to have all those chimneys ablaze, thousands of proud men and women turning to ashes and air the words of the Allende revolution. From the conflagration she has begun to rescue my manuscripts, and I do not ask her why, I do not want her to tell me that this is a step toward leaving the country, a step toward admitting that we will never more sleep in our little bungalow, that I will never again sit down to write in my study.

  I ask her something else. Where am I to go, then?

  Angélica has also been trying to set up a meeting with Abel, my superior in the Party structure, to try to get some sort of decision about what we should do. Meanwhile, she has arranged that I spend a couple of nights, though no more, at the apartment of a friend—let’s call her Catalina—who has strongly right-wing parents and has only recently become an Allendista sympathizer and whom no one would ever suspect of harboring a fugitive.

  “Is there any good news?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Angélica says. “Well, maybe. It’s crazy, but you got a phone call from the Cultural Institute of Nuñoa, to remind you that you’re on the jury for the 1973 literary prizes and could you please send in your list of candidates, so that you can vote on the winners at next week’s meeting.”