Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

by Ariel Dorfman

  Then the song died down and faded away, freeing me from its spell, and the girl opened her eyes and saw us and smiled, and suddenly I knew that under that gypsy dress she had slipped on that morning she was wearing no bra, no underwear, that she was naked under that dress.

  And then she spoke to us. She cocked her head to one side like a bird, sizing us up, and queried: “Spare change?”

  “What?”

  “You got some spare change?”

  I didn’t answer right away. Oh, I understood her words, what they meant—the famous Depression era phrase, “Brother, can you spare a dime?” echoed inside me. What I found dumbfounding was that she should actually be asking us for money, that these flaxen-haired, healthy, saintly gringos, these blue-eyed beauties, should be acting like paupers. In the racist Latin America I was from, light-colored eyes and blond hair and white skin were a passport to privilege, a stamp of upper-class origin, and it was unheard-of that anybody born to such fortune should end up begging on the streets.

  Our Latin American supplicants were dirty, maimed, hungry, smelly, as if they had crawled out from the Court of Miracles in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. They didn’t wear shoes because they couldn’t afford them. It was misery—and not fashion—that had tattered their clothing. The boy I had brought home for a meal and then turned my back on, that child had sung himself hoarse on a bus because he had no alternative, the Santiago streets he roamed were one more nightmare into which he had awakened at birth and from which he could not escape, just as he was unable to escape the cold and the mud and the beatings and the rapes and the homelessness. He sang boleros because they were the only way to postpone death. Not like these hippies, whose poverty was so artificial and self-imposed that they could escape it with the snap of a finger. Whereas that Chilean beggar boy, like practically every indigent person I ever saw in my country or in any part of Latin America, was trapped in his race as well as his class. He had his Indian ancestry indelibly etched on his face and his stature and his skin. You could read in those dark features how his native blood had been used to condemn him to a life of subjection, to keep him from ever leaving the ghetto of his poverty.

  All of a sudden, the happiness of the two hippies that had so seduced me a few instants ago seemed an insult.

  “I haven’t got any,” I said. “No spare change.”

  “That’s cool,” she said. And the man added: “God bless you, man.

  I was about to leave, when Rodrigo half crawled, half toddled over to them and, gleefully oblivious of the cultural shock that had overcome me—and Angelica, I later found out—pointed to the harmonica and reached out for it and promptly received his first lesson in blowing in the wind. I still liked them (after all, they were cooing over my child), but I began to feel smugly superior to them, I ensconced myself in the knowledge of the remote suffering and sorrow I had witnessed and of which they had not even the faintest notion. I wanted to go up to them and shake the illusion from their eyes, force them to awaken from their dream and look at the real world, I wanted to whisper in their ears that the way to finish with oppression was not to drop out of the system but to overthrow it. Standing there, I felt redeemed and pure and intact, strengthened in the knowledge of who I was. I had left this country as a Northern Edward and was returning as a resolutely Southern Ariel and here, on the first afternoon, was proof of how thoroughly my fourteen years of absence had turned me into a Latin American, the proof I had been searching for, one of the reasons I had taken this trip back to the land of my childhood. My reaction was satisfyingly visceral, almost instinctive: those ecstatic, festive, innocent American toes wriggling with delight on these Yankee streets had been automatically put in their place by the dark vision of my destitute fellow countrymen’s bare feet. I was haunted by my experience of underdevelopment, I was possessed by the memory of the penniless people back home. I told myself that I knew where I was going: I knew the answer, Mr. Tambourine Man, I was going back to a country and a continent that needed a song for its lost millions, I was going back to the reality of people who did not have the obscene luxury of being able to choose poverty like these sham hippie paupers.

  I did not know, of course, that a night awaited me a few years later when we would throng the Alameda and celebrate our victory, I did not know that those Chilean streets were calling to me from the future, but that very first temptation which Berkeley put in my path revealed to me early on that the pull of Latin America and Chile would end up being far stronger than the remnants of Yankee identity still within me. My stay in Berkeley was to lash me even more tightly to the Chile I had chosen as my own, was to force me eventually to realize that in order to really go back I needed to rid myself of that last link, the English language, which still tied me to the United States.

  But to tell the story this way is to miss what is most intriguing about it. The journey back home was not to be as smooth and effortless as I thought it would be that afternoon when I saw my prototype hippies and dismissed anything and everything they could teach me, celebrated how different I was from these gringos huevones.

  Stupid gringos. Gringo assholes.

  That had been my parting shot at them as I gathered Rodrigo in my arms and turned in the direction of my hotel (and, metaphorically, in the direction of faraway Chile), but before our year and a half in Berkeley was over, the brothers and sisters of these two hippies, the youth of America, would have challenged me, shaken my every belief, tested my commitment to the revolution, made me question culturally and sexually and professionally the life I was leading and profoundly altered the way I understood my relationship with the United States.

  To begin with, that same day, just a few minutes later, I met a second pair of young Americans more or less my age, and they were just as contestatory as our singing and dancing hippies, but dressed a bit more conservatively and with a mission that was overtly political: to gather signatures to protest I can’t remember what policy concerning Vietnam, the recruiting of students by the CIA at UC Berkeley, I think it was, but it may have been a petition to the City Council or to hippie-loving Ronald Reagan. The two anti-war activists, one white and one black, were seated behind a small table at the corner of Shattuck and University, calling out to passersby to sign their petition.

  “Hey, man.”

  We stopped, listened attentively to what they were protesting, though Rodrigo would probably have preferred another harmonica lesson.

  “So, what d’you say?”

  “I’m sorry,” I answered. “We can’t sign.”

  “Why not?”

  “We’re from Chile.”

  “From where?”

  “From Chile. You know, South America.”

  “Oh, Chile.”

  They both looked at me incredulously, as if I was trying to pull a con job on them, trying to slither out of my patriotic obligation to oppose the criminal war in Vietnam. They could tell I was from New York, my accent told them that, they had never met a Latino foreigner who spoke English as I did.

  “You really from Chile?”

  “That’s right.” I smothered the temptation to sneak a slight hint of a Ricky Ricardo accent into my words.

  They looked at each other and then back at me.

  “So—who cares where the hell you’re from. You can sign anyway. This is America.”

  He was right. What was I afraid of? I looked at Angélica and she nodded imperceptibly and watched me sign and then she signed too and for good measure we gave them a couple of bucks for their campaign, feeling that here was a cause worth bestowing some spare change on.

  As we turned to leave, the black activist raised his fist in solidarity and the white one flashed the V signal and said, “Peace now,” and for the second time that afternoon I had a revelation, not only about them on that corner but about the other young Americans I had just left down the street.

  This was my generation, welcoming me back home. They had been brought up on the same Amos ‘n’ Andy radio shows, the same Es
ther Williams films, the same dirty jokes, the same idolization of Marlon Brando in The Wild One and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, they had undergone the same musical evolution from the sultry sounds of forties swing and fifties fox-trot to rhythm and blues and jazz and onward to rebellious sixties rock. They had been flooded with consumer goods and hundreds of brands of cereal that all tasted the same but were packaged differently, they had adored optimistic heroes who always saved the day in the same way and believed in know-how that could solve any dilemma, they had bought into the American dream as kids, just as I had, and had been forced, for reasons different from mine, to deny their native land. I had missed their rebellion because I had been exiled from New York, but the fact that my banishment had landed me smack in the middle of the national wars of liberation that were shaking the globe had allowed me, a typical American kid, to anticipate in remote Chile the way in which they would, several years later in the United States, react to the horror of what was being done, all over the world, in their name, and, in Vietnam, with their very lives.

  So my anti-Americanism, far from being aberrant, had been normal, even prophetic of the shame that their America, my America, should have become the bully of the world, when those gigantic zones of humanity that lived in perennial misery were only demanding the independence—yes, and the pursuit of happiness—that my adopted country, that their homeland, had first declared was the birthright of all men during its Revolutionary War. My indignation had been born, as theirs had, from the incredible paradox that it should be the country of Jefferson that financed the tyrants, taught the police how to torture, sent Marines to keep the rich safe in their mansions and the poor wretched in their hovels. These young people in front of me were measuring the United States, as I had, by its own ideals of liberty, by the Declaration of Independence it had flourished in the face of a faraway colonial power that treated it like a disobedient and wayward child, in the same the way it was now treating Cuba and Vietnam and the Congo and Chile. We wanted it to fight along with the dispossessed of the globe as it had fought against slavery during the Civil War, we wanted it to be a force for liberation as it had been during the Good War against Nazism, we wanted it to be generous with the world as it had been generous to its immigrants, we wanted it to export its freedom and not its napalm. And when it did not live up to those ideals, we felt, I myself and these two young men and so many more of them all across the U.S.A., that our trust had been violated.

  They had been stuck here, however, and I had been sent far away, and they had, in my name, kept the faith in that better America, they had set out on this march to rescue that America from the men who had betrayed what it stood for.

  That first afternoon, I was given an extraordinary welcoming present: the chance to see my own destiny in those two hippies and in those two activists, briefly glimpsed one of the persons I might have been. There, but for the grace of Joe McCarthy, would go I, either playing the harmonica and dancing to Dylan without shoes, or calling out to the conscience of America to end a war which was killing people on the other side of the world who were rebelling because they really had no shoes, yes, there would go I. If I had stayed, I would have embraced one of these two forms of protest what America had become, I would have found myself in a place like Berkeley searching for my identity.

  In the months to come, I was to discover that the borders between these two alternatives of rebellious America—withdrawal and engagement—were not as clear-cut as they had seemed that first afternoon, that these two versions of how to deal with the crisis of the United States crossed over and blended and intermingled with the lives of most of the men and women of my generation, precisely because what characterized most of them was their refusal to separate politics from everyday life, the personal from the political, the revolution in the state from the revolution in the culture. But I did not immediately comprehend this. The challenge that I shall call cultural, the challenge to the way I conceived and organized my life, was to take a bit longer to burrow its questions into my heart—although eventually it was to affect my convictions and probe my future with far greater persistence than the political movement that was bursting all over the United States, poised to change the course of America and the world forever.

  Or so it seemed, as we were to find out that very day, that March 31 of 1968. Leaving behind both our flower-power people and our power-to-the-people people on their respective street corners, each couple trying to bag some spare change, we proceeded to use our money at a Co-op Store for something more practical: to buy some diapers (the wonder of disposable diapers!—whatever the hippies might say about the horrors of consumerism) and baby food (even if the company that manufactured it was also providing food for the troops in Vietnam), and then we gulped down a quick dinner—hot dogs. I loved hot dogs. I had spent fourteen years without greasy hot dogs and white Wonder buns and brightly colored mustard, I had eaten two hot dogs that morning for breakfast when the plane stopped briefly in Los Angeles on the way to San Francisco, had rushed to buy them while Angélica watched with sympathetic puzzlement, but that had not been enough, I required another one—quick—and then entered our hotel room and clicked on the television because I knew that Lyndon Johnson was going to make an announcement about the escalation of the war in Vietnam, Westmoreland had asked for who knows how many more troops in answer to the devastating January Tet offensive, and that was when I heard the President of the United States tell the world that he had decided not to seek reelection.

  One America had kicked me out and now here was a different America with yet another gift, the news that the same Johnson who had invaded Santo Domingo and who could ignore the anti-American threats of obscure and faraway Chilean academics, had been toppled from his perch by the mutinous generation that I would have belonged to if I had remained here.

  But that was not the only America that greeted me.

  We had been met at the airport, in a far less metaphorical and political way, by a member of the staff of the Center for Latin American Studies, which was host to the scholars from Chile. She had driven us around Berkeley to scout out possible housing and then had dropped us off at our hotel. She said goodbye, handing me the keys to the car. It was the Center’s, and they would be glad to let me use it for the weekend. I could take my time returning it.

  Angélica and I were astonished and even more at the casual way in which the generous offer was made, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, that we should have a car. We didn’t have one in Chile, nor an apartment, nor a bed, nor even a refrigerator to call our own. Only a society of enormous affluence and abundance could pass me the car keys just like that, only a society where a car was presumed to be practically a birthright, only such a society could entrust one’s car to an unknown person, no questions asked, not even whether I had a license, not even whether I had insurance.

  The next day we took the car out for a spin, decided to go shopping at a Montgomery Ward’s department store. The only way there, according to the hotel clerk, was by the freeway, so I gritted my teeth and zoomed onto my first interstate, screaming like a child on his first roller coaster, Angélica holding on for dear life, both of us amazed at the mad traffic, the interforking multiple lanes, more girders and cement in a few miles of California highway than you could find in the single solitary cracked road joining Arica, our northernmost city in the far-off desert, to lush Puerto Montt, thousands of miles to the south. And then to discover in that relatively small department store so many more choices of things than in all of Santiago’s shops put together, every conceivable object that we might need and many more that we didn’t! And there it was, what Rodrigo required: a combination playpen and crib, a little home where he could sleep and keep his toys and which we could carry with us everywhere. Such an extraordinary device, so felicitous in its shape, so convenient in its design, carefully thought out to make our life comfortable—portable, expeditious, unavailable in Chile even if we had had the money, which, of course
, we didn’t.

  Face-to-face with that infinite assortment of cars and blue jeans and supermarkets and brands of soup and baby clothes, face-to-face with the possibility that the simple things my family needed to live were right there, within reach of my pocket, I felt transformed, incredibly, into an adult, merely by virtue of being able to—of all things!—buy what I desired.

  Our budget was restricted, of course—and yet, in the days that followed, we managed to fashion for ourselves a life with all the basics, something that America took for granted and that Chile, quite simply, could not. In the months to come, I would flirt with the hippie philosophy that detested the consumerist dream, but Angélica and I remarked that such a countercultural rebellion was conceivable only when the rebels themselves already had life’s most essential goodies at their fingertips, took it as their God-given prerogative. Down with the capitalist dream, sure, but meanwhile pass the potato chips, no, not that kind, the ones over there with the honey-barbecue flavor, and while you’re at it, make sure Rodrigo’s snug in his stroller, which only the multimillionaires in Santiago (or the sons of diplomats!) would have in their homes. I might denounce the way in which that American cornucopia was built upon the deprivation of Third World serfs, but I was not about to deprive myself of those wonders, not after having been reduced for so many years to nibbling candy bars bite by tiny bite, not after having read about Kentucky Fried Chicken in the magazines and being able, now, to stand in front of a real Colonel Sanders and order take-out food that made life so easy and, yes, so dependable and comforting, I was not willing to forgo those small raptures during the short year and a half of my stay.