Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

by Ariel Dorfman

  That was the limit of how much I was willing to change.

  Don’t get me wrong: I have, of course, been enormously transformed since the day I stood under Allende’s balcony and saw myself as the channel for all the suppressed voices of the universe, and they are changes I celebrate, changes I needed to learn from history.

  But I do not repent of having been that person.

  Am I deluding myself one more time? Am I defending that past because I do not dare to cut myself loose, because I fear for the continuity of my identity if I let go of that period in my life when I found a home against death? Is this the last stand of my imagination as it tries to fool that death which came to visit me so early in childhood and has never left?

  Perhaps.

  If so, if this is one more attempt to imagine the future as it does not and cannot ever exist, so be it. This is the bedrock of who I am: a man who cannot live in this world unless he believes there is hope.

  I had come to that conclusion about myself after a long journey through many countries and many languages.

  It had been tested, since the coup, by death.

  In the years to come, it would be tested by something far more dangerous, a reality that, like death, I had never really encountered before, even if I had filled long literary pages writing about its existence: I was going to find myself face-to-face with the undeniable reality of evil.

  One more story.

  In the voyages that were to come, that still awaited me, I met a woman who had been tortured in Chile.

  What saved her at the worst moments, she told me, was her unending repetition of some lines by Neruda or Machado—strange, she couldn’t remember the author or the lines themselves anymore—verses that contained water in them, trees, she thought, something about the wind. What matters is that she concentrated on them fiercely so she could make clear to herself over and over how different she was from the men who were making her suffer. She discovered that, inside her, beyond those hands and what they were doing to her, there was a space all her own which could remain intact. One small zone in the world that she could keep from them. Some dead poet was providing her with this shield, with this guardian angel of language. As she silently repeated those words to herself, she expected to be extinguished forever.

  Who can doubt that at this very moment, in this abominable world where General Pinochet is alive and Allende is dead, there are many others just like her, anonymous, unknown people, enduring other attempts to obliterate them, suck them into the black hole of history? Perhaps they will not survive, as she did, to tell the tale. But perhaps they are also sending us messages. We cannot be sure.

  We can only answer those words as if they are being transmitted.

  We do know that the woman, even if there was nobody there, was hoping to be heard. Not only by herself. And what she was saying was simple. She was not willing, even if nobody was listening, even if her fate was to disappear from the face of the earth, to be treated like an object. She was not willing to let others narrate her life and her death.

  While there is one person like her in this world, I will find myself defending both her right to struggle and our obligation to remember.

  What more can I say?

  EPILOGUE

  A FINAL CHAPTER IN WHICH WE DEAL WITH LIFE AND LANGUAGE AND DEATH ONE MORE TIME

  English made a comeback even before I left Chile.

  I was still in the Argentine Embassy when the language I had sworn never again to use crept again into my life, when the America I had supposedly flushed out of my system confronted me with the future and whispered to me what it means to be at the mercy of more powerful others in a world you no longer control.

  It is noon.

  I am sunning myself in the garden of the embassy, my eyes closed, the blanket I inherited from the dead rolled under my head as a pillow, when I hear a gringa voice cutting through the spring Santiago air. It must be an illusion, I say to myself, there are no norteamericanos in this embassy, only representatives of every failed revolution in Latin America, to which ours is now added, a continent that is closing, Uruguay a year ago, Bolivia two months ago, Perón is returning to power with a right-wing agenda in Argentina, and soon there will be no place to go in Latin America, soon we Chileans will ourselves roam a foreign land living vicariously, revolutionaries without a people to swim in, we will have become these very exiles I now contemplate. All this goes through my head as I strain my ears to listen to that woman’s voice with its atrocious U.S. accent and its garbled Spanish grammar, like an echo of what I must have sounded like when I arrived in Chile nineteen years before. That voice, whosoever it may be, is giving somebody orders—a gardener, a contractor, a maintenance man, she is telling him how she wants all this fixed up once these people leave.

  I open my eyes, I shield them from the sun, I prop myself up on an elbow.

  A middle-aged lady is standing almost immediately above me, scanning the refugee-infested garden as if she had already swept the intruders from her mind, oblivious to the screams of three Salvadoran brats playing tag, whom we have dubbed los termitas, the termites, because they destroy everything they touch. They have gnawed at the legs of a grand piano in the embassy ballroom, they have scratched every wall, they have flooded the bathrooms; we are sure that if they ever return to their homeland they will singlehandedly rid it of the right-wing dictatorship which afflicts El Salvador. Their shrill shouts are getting closer and I rise, slightly alarmed, clutching my blanket, hoping they won’t try to steal it, but I am relieved to see them veer away. They have discerned the formidable well-dressed lady in the middle of the garden and some canny instinct has warned them to steer clear of that powerhouse as she continues to give instructions. I realize who she is. A few days ago, a new Argentine Ambassador arrived, and the rumor was that his wife would soon put in an appearance, and here she is, though none of the know-it-alls had even suggested that she might be American or that the first thing she would do was inspect the grounds to make plans on how to change the landscape ruined by the hundreds of bodies that have made this their transitory home.

  Now, from a faraway corner of the garden, not far from the wall where my sleeping bag had miraculously come out of the sky, a warbling quena breaks into a melody. The Indian flute is out of tune, or whoever is playing it is out of practice; this is not a happy sound. Its sour disharmony interrupts the decrees of the ambassador’s wife. She turns in that general direction with distaste, wrinkles her nose, turns back, mutters to herself in English: “If music be the food of love …”

  “Play on,” I suddenly pipe up, also in English. “Give me excess of it.” The lady looks around, surprised, unable to apprehend who might be quoting Twelfth Night back at her. I press my advantage: “Though in this case,” I add, “perhaps Shakespeare was right and the appetite may indeed sicken and so die.”

  Now she focuses her eyes on me. I see myself as she must see me, ill-shaven, clutching a smelly blanket, my hair unkempt, lanky and hungry and sad. I see her astonishment. If King Lear in person had popped out from behind the bushes, she could not have been more flabbergasted.

  I stand up and hold out my hand.

  She takes it, has no choice, looks at it as if it were the stump of a beggar.

  “Ariel Dorfman,” I say as she shakes it.

  “But you’re … You’re American. What are you doing here?”

  Here. As if to say among the barbarians. In this place which the Communist barbarians, the human termites, the Latin American refuse, have desecrated.

  “I am American. Latin American. Soy chileno.”

  We chat for a while, and there under the warm sun of Santiago I feel the winter of her discontent melting, made glorious by the sun of my conversation. I can tell that my desultory appearance has been rendered insignificant by my culture, my English chitchat. We prattle as if we were at a cocktail party in her garden, the sort she will be holding as soon as the riffraff depart. I had started the exchange on a whim, almost sa
rcastically, as if to upset her categorizing and show her that all these revolutionaries were not what she seemed to think, but now, as our conversation continues, I find myself liking her. I find her to be pleasant, sophisticated, also genuinely interested in trying to make life easier for her unsolicited guests. She is delighted to have someone to question. Are the children all right? (The answer is yes, they are the only sane ones here.) Is the food adequate? (The answer should be no, the man in charge of feeding us is pocketing a good part of what he should be spending, but I don’t mention this. I’d rather play it safe, prefer to say, “Could be better.”) Is there anything I need?

  This is the question I had been waiting for. I am dying for a shower, I could swoon for a nice meal, I will go crazy if I have to spend one more day in here without being able to set foot on the streets of my city. But all that pales in comparison with what I desperately want, what every last person in this place would kill for: a phone.

  But I have to be careful. It’s illegal for me or any of the other refugees to contact anybody directly from the embassy. If we are caught, it could spoil our relations with the staff that cares for us. One of them has warned us that any such attempt might even lead to our expulsion from the grounds, a threat we do not take too seriously, though you never know …

  I don’t mention my need to her immediately. I figure that this is the first of several meetings and that I should wait. I am already, even before I leave Chile, receiving a crash course in exile: when you are a beggar, everybody who approaches is judged by the jingle of coins in his pockets, the glint of charity in her eyes, what they can give, what they can offer, what you can get, the world turned into a shopping list of needs.

  My patience pays off.

  A few days later, the ambassador’s wife leads me to the forbidden elevator that takes me up to the forbidden third floor of the building and gestures generously toward a forbidden phone and then discreetly leaves me to myself.

  I am able to make the calls I have been dreaming about since I came to the embassy, since I have been secluded here. To speak to Angelica, to my parents, to my friends—they breathe life and hope back into me, they guardedly give me advice and information, they transmit the country to me as they will in the seventeen years to come, bit by bit, like a puzzle of whispers that has to be reassembled in the country of my head. And in the weeks to come, I will perform a similar service for many of my fellow castaways. Through it all, my hostess never intrudes, never asks for anything, never suggests that she wants anything from me except a chance to use her English, to reminisce about our America. That’s all: the chance for two expatriates to exchange memories.

  That’s how it happened.

  That’s how English started to flirt again with my mind. I could feel the ferocious tide of exile pulling at me, I could already feel the power of this repudiated language, and if its power here is so colossal, what temptations will it offer me when I venture into that outer world?

  It is there, in the embassy, even before exile creates a distance from my country, even before I’ve left it, that I start a new stage in my journey, that I begin to concede that history may be forcing me, against my will, to become bilingual, it is in that embassy that I first explore the possibility of living in two languages, using each one for a different community. It is there that I set out on the road to this hybrid mongrel of language who writes this so many years later. It will not happen immediately: I will cling to my Spanish during my fιrst years of wandering, as other refugees cling to the photos of parents who will die back home and never be seen again, but my other language, my despised English self, will never be far away, always waiting for me with the same tenacity as Spanish did during its years of exclusion. It will crawl back into my life by offering me, as it did in the embassy, the one service I cannot refuse: to use my mastery of its syntax and vocabulary to help free the Latin American country I now call home and speed me back to a place where I would have no more use for it.

  It all begins there, at the moment when I seduce the ambassador’s wife with my English in order to get to a phone. How, then, can I refuse to continue using it in the future when far more urgent situations arise, when a friend back in Chile is facing a firing squad, when the resistance is pressing for funds for a clandestine newspaper, when a journalist needs to be briefed, when a committee needs a report, when a TV producer is looking for somebody to debate the representatives of Pinochet, when The New York Times asks for an op-ed piece, who am I to reject the most important language in the world when I speak it like a native? And once it has reentered my life, once English has again established a foothold in my existence, who is to drive it away?

  Time is on its side, history is on its side, and the years will pass and I will not be returning to my Chilean homeland so soon, until the day comes when English grows indispensable and my two languages call a truce after forty years of raging for my throat, my two languages decide to coexist. But how I became a bigamist of language, how I shared them or they shared me, how I married them both, is in the future, as I head North and look to the South where I can no longer live, the South to which I finally returned in many ways and under many guises, regaining it in spite of Pinochet, my country which, again because of a history I did not control, I was once more to lose.

  So this is where this part of my life ends? Poised on the verge of a bilingual future, about to plunge into a world that will force me, in order to survive, to accept that I belong to two cultures, that I straddle a space between two cultures?

  There is still something left to tell.

  I still have to return to Argentina, the place of my birth, the place from which I set out on this journey in 1945, the place I would have called home if my father had not been forced to flee, back then.

  That is where I head, flying over the cordillera, westward back to Argentina in early December of 1973, reversing my first voyage, when I flew eastward to Chile so many years ago on my way to the States.

  My whole family was waiting for me at the Buenos Aires airport, father and mother and sister and cousins and uncle and aunt—and, of course, Angélica and Rodrigo.

  So were the Argentine police.

  They arrested me, interrogated me for a few hours, finally let me go. Behave, they said, be a good boy, don’t give us any trouble.

  I took their warning to heart.

  It would have been perfect to have remained in Argentina. My wonderful parents were resettling there, I had many friends, the language was Spanish, publishing houses were interested in my work, and, most important of all, it was right next to Chile, the ideal place from which to conspire against Pinochet. But my interrogation by the police confirmed what I already knew from rumors: President Perón, just back from years of exile in Madrid, was veering strongly to the right. I could see that, in the months to come, he would acquiesce to the cleansing of his country of subversives, the very people who had fought to bring him back to power, I could see that I would be one of the victims of this massacre. I told my Argentine friends that I thought we were heading for a calamity, that this country was going to repeat the Pinochet model, but they vehemently disagreed—just as I had disagreed when foreigners had warned me during the Allende years in Santiago, my friends in Argentina answered what I had answered, that there was no danger, you don’t know the country.

  I wasn’t going to wait for them to wake up. I could recognize death now when I saw it approaching, I was learning its lessons fast. And I knew that I had to get out of Argentina with my family before it was too late.

  Of course, it’s not enough to see death coming. You also have to be lucky.

  I had no travel documents: the Chileans would not give me a passport, and when I tried to make use of my former nationality, get documentation from the Argentinians, they stonewalled me. The bureaucrats insisted that they could find no evidence that I had been born in Buenos Aires; the birth certificate I brought to them, they said was invalid. No matter how hard I tried, I always came up against a b
lind wall, an indifferent clerk, a sarcastic look. Somebody with a lot of power was blocking my application, somebody had me on his list, somebody did not want me to leave for a place where I would be safe.

  It was many weeks before a powerful congressman, an old friend of my father’s, was able to set up an interview with the Police Commissioner of Buenos Aires to see if he could help.

  When I was ushered in, the Police Commissioner was working at his desk, signing papers. He gestured to the chair, without looking up, and kept on, paper after paper. I sat down. When he was done, his eyes came up from his desk, met my gaze. He watched me for a moment. Neither of us said a word.

  “I’ve been told you’re a writer,” he said.

  From my briefcase, I extracted a novel that had just been published in Argentina, that had won a major literary prize. It was called Moros en la Costa (Hard Rain in its English translation) and it had been written during a few months at the end of 1972. I had, in fact, been planning to write a different novel, in which I imagined a futuristic Latin American country governed by a dictator whom I called El Grande—who had come to power in a coup and had then turned the land into a laboratory for foreign corporations. I could not know, of course, that my mind was anticipating with icy and pessimistic precision what General Pinochet one year later would be meticulously doing to my country. And yet some part of me must have known. When, in September of 1972, I took a few months off from the university to write my fictitious tyranny of the future, I found myself unable to go on, I found myself rejecting the very notion of putting those images of horror down on paper and unloading them on the public. To invent a country governed by El Grande was to admit that we were going to lose. So I betrayed my literary vision and refused to proceed, and dismissing my apprehensions as fraudulent, meaningless, and anti-historical, I devoted the next few months to writing Hard Rain, in which I prophesied that we would overcome and that Chile would be free. Again, as in the case of Susana la Semilla, the only freedom that my creation managed to materialize was my own.