Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

by Ariel Dorfman

  “I hope you realize,” Abel starts off, “that you are putting us both in jeopardy by asking for this meeting.”

  I realize it. I am sorry, I say, but I couldn’t accept the Party’s order to seek asylum in an embassy. That’s why I asked for a second opinion.

  “Well, the second opinion is that you should get the hell out of here before it’s too late. And the third opinion will be the same, and the fourth one, and all the opinions in the universe. Look at you. For God’s sake, look at yourself in a mirror. Where would we hide you? And what use would you be to us in hiding, anyway? Do you really think you’re needed here?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “No,” Abel says. “You’re the one who needs to be here. You’re the one who needs to stay here to write the great novel of the Chilean Revolution. That’s why you want to stay, isn’t it?”

  How to explain to Abel in ten minutes the story of my drifting ancestors who have fled for two thousand years, how to tell him that it’s time to stop, enough is enough, how to explain that I repudiated Spanish and Latin America in a Manhattan hospital at the age when most children are learning the difference between saying God and saying dog, that history forced me to come here, to this continent that bewitched me, that a man winked at me on the street, that my books were there in that shack, that I have wandered the earth and that I cannot leave now? How to tell him this when the country is being ravaged, when the President is dead, when Abel looks at his watch and we both notice there are three hours left till curfew, three hours till the sun sets on Santiago de Chile and then the soldiers own the uncontested city, policing it with their jeeps and their dogs and their machine guns, the rest of the people listening, trapped inside their houses, listening to the faraway shots, listening to the patrols getting nearer and nearer, listening for the sound of brakes and men in boots and shouted orders, listening to the sound passing by and not stopping, not this time, not this time, somewhere in this city a man like me listens to his neighbor being raided, listens to the cries, listens to his own heartbeat of relief, the horrible joy of knowing that it is somebody else being taken away, how to make him empathize with my tragedy if he is the one who is going to stay and I am the one who is going away, if he is right that I want to remain because—among ten thousand other reasons—I can’t stand the idea of being shut out of this country and excluded from witnessing and transmitting its story through my words, that I cannot miss this chance to become totally, definitively, forever Chilean by writing myself into the country and the country into myself?

  Abel presses his advantage. “That’s where you’re needed, out there,” he says. “Think of what we need, not what you need.”

  He is right, of course. There is no argument against the cool logic of his words. I belong to the people of Chile, not because I can share their death, but because I can contribute to their fight against death.

  Abel must see the pain in my eyes as I reach my decision. He must see something beaten and old in my eyes, because now he speaks to me as if he could read my thoughts, as if he knows the story of this life I have never told him.

  He embraces me, he says goodbye, he whispers in my ear: “Vive por todos nosotros.”

  Live for us all.

  And then, as he hugs me, his voice lowers one more notch, grows so soft that I hardly know if he said it or if I imagined his words: “If you really love Chile …”

  If I really love Chile … I will be able to survive exile, I will be able to continue identifying ever more deeply with this country even if my journey has been interrupted, even if the sources that have nurtured me are far and the language is far and the people and the struggle and the grapes and the seaside, all far, far away, it is as if all this, right now, is already unreal, Abel’s knowing smile and droopy eyelids and his hug and this apartment with its absurd portrait of an admiral, it is already receding into memory, all this is already a dreamscape, words in my mind to remember when things get tough and distant, mere memories that I will not be able to hold in my hands or listen to, whispered softly in my ears, Abel’s words of wisdom and solidarity that cannot save me, because nothing can save me from what is going to happen now that I must face a fear deeper than death, the fear that I will never again return to this land I have come to love.

  TEN

  A CHAPTER DEALING WITH THE DISCOVERY OF LIFE AND LANGUAGE DURING THE YEARS 1960 TO 1964 IN SANTIAGO DE CHILE

  Where are you from?

  It was a question that since the age of two and a half, and until I was eighteen, I had always answered, spontaneously, invariably: I was from America, I was American.

  That response had been there, on the tip of my tongue, my first day of class at the Universidad de Chile in March of 1960—a response that stayed there, that I did not let roll off into the politically effervescent air of a Latin America headed for a showdown with the United States.

  Where are you from?

  Who asked me that, with its implied query: Who are you? I can’t remember the face, only my momentary bewilderment, the fact that I did not dare to admit that I was from the United States. Perhaps it was Claudio Gimeno himself. I did, after all, lay eyes on him that day for the first time, although it would be too bizarre, perhaps too suitably literary and symmetrical, that the man who saved me for this life of exile which has ended up here in the United States should have been the first person in the world to hear me deny my North American origins. I press myself harder to recall that moment and it seems that it was just after Historia de America, the first class on my schedule, where our radical Panamanian mulatto professor had gone about dissecting the term America itself, how the United States had appropriated that word and denied it to the South, much in the way, he said, that the same United States had stolen a great part of Mexico and occupied Nicaragua and now sat on the narrow strip of the Canal refusing to return it to the people of Panama. Once lost, he said, it was difficult to get territory back, but establishing an alternative history was a start, even if his forced exile from his own country proved that such an intellectual enterprise was not without risks. But it was essential that Americans south of the Rio Bravo think of themselves differently, in freedom and with sovereignty, because from that thinking, from that territory of the imagination, history could be altered. Just look at Jose Marti, who died in 1895, before his dream of Cuba’s independence could materialize, before his words of warning against the United States proved prophetic: the most powerful nation in the hemisphere had entered the war against Spain (and Teddy Roosevelt never charged up that hill—it was all a fraud, a trumped-up photo) and then kept Puerto Rico as a colony and occupied Cuba for years and invaded it whenever it was felt that “those people,” in General Shafter’s memorable phrase, “who were no more fit for self-government than gun-powder is for hell,” deserved to be taught a lesson. But because of Marti and his words, Fidel Castro had staged his first insurrection in 1953 and taken the Moncada and, when captured, had turned his trial into an indictment of the Batista dictatorship and declared that he had rebelled so that one hundred years after his birth the ideas of Martí would not die. And now Cuba was standing up to Eisenhower, was getting rid of the gambling casinos and the whorehouses and taking back the sugar plantations run by U.S. corporations. And that was possible because Marti had thought of Cuba as part of nuestra América, our America, as opposed to their America.

  As he spoke, he asked for opinions and we gave them, each of us, and then it was my turn. I don’t remember exactly what I said but I do remember the way I said it, the slight smidgen of a gringo accent that still crept into my voice like slime out of a swamp, I can remember becoming aware of how foreign I must look to my new classmates, my hair, my height, my eyes, my skin, my gestures, all revealing that I was from somewhere else, I can remember how all those other students from la otra América turned to me with interest, they were already preparing that question, where are you from? a question I would try to circumvent in the years to come, working strenuously at my Chilean accen
t and my Chilean slang and my Chilean trivia. But for now I was going to have to face that curiosity as soon as the class was over and my answer would have to take into account that millions of people around the world were rebelling against a colonial and post-colonial order upheld by the United States, that one year before I had stepped into the classroom, Fidel had entered Havana with his band of guerrillas and that right then and there the first U.S. advisors were arriving in Vietnam, I was going to step out of that classroom at the exact intersection in history when the country where I was receiving my university education was being shaken by riots and strikes and protest marches aimed at the conservative government and its American sponsors, I was going to have to answer the question about my identity in a world whose walls were being painted with that famous formula: “Yankee, go home.”

  ¿De dónde eres? Where are you from?

  Somebody whose face and name I can’t recollect asked me that question as soon as class was over. I should have answered: I don’t know. I should have answered: All my life I thought I was a Yankee but now I’m not so sure, I wanted to be one so badly that I went to the extreme of changing my name to Edward. So your name’s Edward? ¿Te llamas Edward? Where are you from? I should have answered: You want to know the truth? I’m still attracted to the United States and who knows if I won’t end up there, I may hate its politics but I love its jazz and its movies and its people and the language they gave me, which is still the language I use to make sense of the world. You want to know the truth? I’ve been flirting with Spanish recently, but I don’t feel it deep inside me, I don’t imagine myself writing anything intimate or relevant in the language you people speak. I should have answered: I don’t have a country, I don’t have a community, I don’t have a cause. Goddamn it, I don’t even have a girlfriend who might begin to anchor me to a place. I should have answered: I’m alone on this planet and I don’t know where I belong.

  Instead, quite simply, I said: “Soy de Argentina,” I’m Argentinian. I fell back on that accidental birthplace I barely knew and did not particularly care for, because I had nothing else to cleave to but the remote moment when I had fallen into nothingness and found parents and a country and a language waiting. It was a convenient way of not having to examine my own confusion, admit that my fluid life was in transition, suspended between a country to the North that was drifting away from me and this country here in the South I was not yet ready to commit to permanently. It was a way of giving myself time to figure out who I really was.

  A decade later, I knew the answer.

  Ten and a half years later, to be exact, on the night of September 4, 1970, I was standing on Santiago’s main avenue, the Alameda, all around me the delirious dancing throngs of my compatriots celebrating our victory in the Presidential elections, and up there was Salvador Allende on the small balcony of the Student Federation building, Allende presiding over the birth of a new nation at two o’clock in the morning.

  “Entraré a La Moneda,” Allende told us that night, “y conmigo entrará el pueblo. Seré el Compañero Presidente.” That was his promise to the outcasts of Chile: he would enter La Moneda and the people would enter with him. He would be no ordinary President. “I am going to be,” he said, “your Compañero Presidente.” I was there when Allende swore his loyalty to us, his equality, his fraternity, he would not betray us. And I called back from the deepest lungs of my compañero soul, I called to him as if I were on a desert island and he had come to rescue me, I began to chant, Compañero, compañero—the echo of thousands of others who were calling to him, the words came out of my mouth as if they had been waiting forever to find that night, that place, this moment in history, Compañero, compañero, calling to him until there was nothing in the world but that tribal sound filling the streets which were ours forever, which we claimed as our birthright, until all the voices were one voice, we would enter La Moneda with him, the Palace of the Presidents of Chile, Compañero Presidente.

  I called to him and it was no longer my call: in that sea of words, my word had become theirs.

  We had baptized Salvador Allende.

  Although, in truth, I was the one who was being baptized. I now fully knew—or at least so I told myself—the answer to that question I had evaded at the start of the sixties. I knew where I was from and, more crucially, I knew that to formulate the question in this manner was wrong, I knew, standing there in the multitude, that what matters is to know where you are going. Where was I from? I had just cast the first vote of my life and it had been for Salvador Allende. Where was I from? I was from Chile and this ocean of people stretching for blocks was my community, and by my side, holding my hand, was my Chilean wife. And the language in which I was imagining the future was the same language in which I was writing it. I had banished English from my life in order to become the privileged guardian of this Spanish I was chanting like a mantra and in which I would soon begin to tell, I was sure, the epic story that was unfolding before my eyes. And a few miles away, at home, our three-year-old Chilean son was sleeping, and he would not have to live the dislocations of his father and his grandparents. I had sworn he would be the first of his family in many generations to be born and grow up and have children of his own under the same Southern constellation of stars. I had sworn it when he was born in February of 1967 as if I were the one being born instead of him, and hammered home my point by giving him a name that symbolized my commitment to Spanish and Latin America, Rodrigo, the name of El Cid, the first Iberian hero, and Fidel, because Fidel had freed Cuba from the Americans. And now we were going to free Chile as well.

  The road to that moment in which I felt at home inside a vast social movement bent on providing a home for everyone, that road to a revolution bent on shaking Chile to its foundations, had started for me, suitably enough, with an earthquake, yes, a literal earthquake which tore down the walls behind which I had lived in seclusion and ignorance and privilege all those years in the South.

  It was a day in late June of 1960, a few months after that first question at the university about who I was had received no clear answer. I had gone with friends to a soccer match in the National Stadium, the same stadium where thirteen years later one of those friends and many of the working people I was about to meet would be imprisoned and tortured. I remember we were facing the cordillera. I remember my exact position, facing those mountains, because of what happened next. Suddenly, without warning, the seats began to tremble and a roar split the air and the whole stadium rocked back as if it were a gigantic boat, and then, incredibly, for a second, the Andes were blotted out, they simply disappeared, cut off from view by the other half of the stadium, rising. Everybody was too dazed even to panic. I held on to my wooden bench and absurdly focused on the players on the field, who were just as absurdly scrambling after a ball that was bouncing up and down haphazardly, even as they fell all over themselves like drunken madmen. And then it was over.

  For us, in Santiago, that is. Because we had merely registered the aftershocks of a settling and grinding of tectonic plates that had devastated a vast region in the south of Chile. Whole towns lay in ruins, dozens had died, thousands were injured, and the survivors slept in the streets under an icy, pouring rain, afraid to return to houses that might collapse at any minute. As the earth continued to rumble in the south, the students of Chile—including Eddie Dorfman, soon to be Ariel—stopped going to class and spent the next week helping to collect items needed for the rescue operation: food, clothes, blankets, building materials, and, above all, money. By the end of the week, we had filled several rooms of our Faculty to the brim, and we promptly dispatched the supplies to the south in trucks. I had been tireless—and had been repaid for my efforts by discovering the working poor of Chile.

  Though poor may not be the right word because it defines those people by what they lack, defines them as essentially suffering and deprived. And precisely what I unearthed, buried under their invisibility, was that these people were not to be pitied and certainly not to be
patronized. They produced everything I consumed, everything that everybody consumed, and had nothing to show for it except the pride in their hands, the immense stories those hands encompassed, those hands that had paved every one of the multiple streets of Chile, not one of which was named for them or their ancestors. They had practically no possessions and yet they were ready to cheerfully give what they could not afford to help those faraway brothers and sisters in the south of Chile who, like them, were naked under a threatening sky. I discovered their courage and good humor not once that week, not twice, but over and over again, in hundreds of textile workers toiling at colossal looms and construction workers with faces covered with dust and bronze-faced women laboring in immaculate white uniforms under the harsh lights and sour smells of pharmaceutical laboratories and saleswomen always smiling in department stores while their legs cramped and lads nursing hungry mustaches behind grocery counters and impoverished peasants tilling arid plots whose eyes met mine without flinching and the clean inhabitants of dirty shantytowns and tenements, and everywhere I found—what did I find? One word? One word to describe what I saw in them? Hope. If I had to choose one word, that would be it. Esperanza.

  I had by then read some books, meditated on some theories about revolution. I had mused over phrases about knowing the world by changing it and the proletariat being the gravediggers of the established order and the need to swim in the water of the masses, but they had all been words on a piece of paper. Workers of the world unite, Marx and Engels had urged at the end of the Communist Manifesto, and I was all for uniting every poor person in sight but I had never really met a worker, I had never understood until now that those ideas could become grounded, made territorial, visible, in real human beings, in a class that had residencia en la tierra, residence on this earth. A few blocks from where I lived in my enclave of privilege and rhetorical indignation, there existed a fierce historical agent that could make my free-floating desire for a better and more beautiful world come true, take that hope out of the dubious promise of dry texts and into reality. These workers were hidden from view, tucked away in the red belt of Santiago or in the fields or in the factories or in the bars, yes, hidden from view, but if they ever came into view, if they ever forced their bodies onto the horizon, if they ever took over the world they had built with those bodies, they would forge a society that deserved to be called human.