During my first term, I decided to present a ten-minute skit on the day of the coup in Chile. I didn’t write anything down. I knew what I wanted to say and what I wanted to play: myself at the age of five. I recruited my friend Lucho, my fellow Chilean exile who was about to graduate, to take on the smaller roles. Standing onstage, I relived the day of the coup in front of my peers and superiors. I described my dirt road in my Valdivia neighbourhood, the southern city we’d been living in when the coup happened. I spoke of my parents, my sister, the radio playing Allende’s final speech. My father, head of the physics department at the same college where the conservatory was, managed to run down to the performance. Knowing he was there, both of us aware that I was exposing a part of myself no one at school had any inkling of, brought tears to my eyes. They poured down my face. I was vulnerable in front of a warm, safe audience who wanted me to succeed in whatever I was experimenting with, people who had never experienced political violence witnessing my first step in the long journey of desegregating my life in order to be an artist. A step symbolized not only by the story I was telling but by whom I was telling it with: my childhood friend who had hidden his Chilean-exile identity and was only letting the school know about it now, on the cusp of his exit. My exploration was straightforward: How do I unmask myself, my true self, in front of an audience of mainstream Canadians? How do I become vulnerable as an artist? How do I tell a story so foreign to this audience and still have them identify with the character?
I thought I succeeded that day. But when I checked with my voice teacher, she was clear:
“That wasn’t performance. That was therapy. It was too personal.”
She wasn’t referring to the content. She meant the delivery. I had been working my shit out onstage, and that was not entertainment. Instead of telling the story to affect the listeners, I had told the story to see what effect it had on me. When it produced tears, I congratulated myself, as opposed to keeping my focus outward, on the audience, the most important character in a play. I began to understand what my teachers had been saying all along. Give It Away. Always Just Give It Away. I had been self-indulgent because I hadn’t actually included the audience by releasing the story. Doing so would have transformed it into a symbol that the whole room owned, making it art.
Defeat overtook the thrill of Performance Lab. Little did I know then that there was so much more to it than learning how to be vulnerable and open without being too personal, that this was the tip of the skill-acquiring iceberg, that the further I dove into my schooling, the more I would discover that the tools available to a storyteller were endless, seemingly impossible to acquire in one lifetime. According to my instructors, it was all about process. But surely a product must lie at the end of the creation tunnel? No. Product was also to be viewed as process. I decided that they were wrong, that they were only referring to the training itself, that once I graduated I would have learned how to create art in a certain, reliable way, positive results guaranteed one hundred percent of the time, like a formula of sorts. That surely art was not unlike the exact sciences, an equation to be solved, as opposed to an ever-elusive, fleeting practice whose success was so subjective and ephemeral as to render it possibly pointless every time.
Meanwhile, well into my second term at theatre school in 1991, the demand to continue to shed all veils, pull out my demons, and examine them one by one grew exponentially.
“You’re afraid to be ugly,” my teachers asserted.
One of my male classmates had been told to cut off his long hair, which he presumably wore as a mask. He had felt butt-naked after doing so. I tried to embrace grunge, all the rage, wearing ripped flannels, fire-engine red Doc Martens, and distressed cut-off denim shorts over flowered tights. I cut my long hair to my chin. But instead of ugly being synonymous with vulnerable, grunge just made me hard. Torrents of tears continued to fall down my face in voice class, but as soon as I had to play Lady Macbeth in acting class, the walls came up and my work was so flat and boring I might as well have been reciting the contents of the telephone book. Conversely, I overacted like an amateur, not trusting in either case that I was enough (“There is nothing more compelling than you when you are courageous enough to show us your heart,” my mentors taught). I cut off all access to my emotional and creative well when I had to interpret a character in a written scene.
Then there was my weight. I had stopped eating again, which gave me the illusion of having control over my life. I became so light there were times I had to hold on to the walls to get down the school halls.
It was similar to when I’d been in the MIR and the Terror, self-starvation, sleeplessness, and a sexless marriage would bring on a near fainting fit in the street and force me to hang on to buildings.
Although that period had ended only three years earlier, it belonged to a reality so far removed from anything in theatre school that I was still at a loss as to how to integrate it into my work. I fluctuated between extremes, being too personal during Performance Lab and detached while playing Lady Macbeth. If being an actor meant having the ability to serve as a conduit for others’ text, then I was a colossal failure. The story of Macbeth was probably much more familiar to me than it was to my classmates, because Chilean politics was as Shakespearean as you could get. Macbeth was Pinochet, King Duncan Allende. I knew the story in my bones. And yet I didn’t know how to inhabit it.
“The problem is the English language,” was my voice teacher’s assessment.
My command of English was that of a native speaker, all my elementary schooling having taken place in North America, but it was confined to my head. Spanish was in my heart, guts, and soul. How to make English move to the nether regions? Who knew? It was all too discouraging to contemplate.
It wasn’t just language. It was dissociation, she said. The concept was new to me, though not the sensation. I had left my body and unplugged my heart many times to survive traumatic moments. Much of my MIR time had been spent in a state of dissociation, I now realized. Apparently my spirit stood next to me while I was acting too, only entering on the rare occasions when it found a chink in my armour, before being expelled once more. Dissociation had saved me from irreversible damage time after time. I feared it would be impossible to talk myself—body, psyche, and soul—into dropping my guard and letting my spirit inhabit its temple while onstage. I wondered if I was still dissociating in my everyday life as well.
The Terror, that constant underground companion, had retreated back into the shadows since my return to Canada. The threats during the Terror had been concrete: torture, murder. Easy to put a finger on, easy to put a face to. The military, the cops, the dreaded secret police. I did not feel that kind of fear anymore, yet it was clear that fear kept me from renouncing dissociation. I wanted to let my guts shine in a play, but no matter how far I was willing to go for my calling, I knew in my heart that I wasn’t ready to drop my shields and invite my spirit in to stay so I could do that. I felt certain that if I bared the ugliness my teachers had spoken of—as well as the beauty—with an embodied spirit onstage, I would die of pain, sorrow, and shame. This new fear took hold of me and wouldn’t let go, my animal brain convinced that the vulnerability required of an actor equalled being at the mercy of torturers and murderers. Or a rapist.
In the spirit of looking at one’s demons and hence one’s fears, I decided to examine the first time I remembered dissociating. Although I had dissociated before the age of thirteen, the rape was a good place to start, as it had come up almost immediately in my training and was the sole reason I had started therapy. Since landing downstage centre of my life in that first session, it stared me in the face, even though I’d never spoken of it again with my ever-patient therapist. But lifting up and turning over the rock labelled “rape” and studying its underbelly was not unlike peering into a kaleidoscope. Images collapsed into each other, as did sensations. At its nucleus lived a pain so sharp and unfamiliar, so unfathomable, that my spirit had escaped to the crowns of
the rainforest trees, where it bore witness to a man on top of me, my face covered by my white shirt, tied in a knot behind my head.
Tops of trees had always been my saviours, one in particular. Other kids had pets, I had Cedar. I could survey the entire neighbourhood unseen when I reached Cedar’s pinnacle and sat on one of his branches. He became my tree in 1974, when I was six years old and my family had just moved to student housing at the University of British Columbia, on Vancouver’s west side. My parents were still together, and both were revalidating their degrees. No matter that my father had been the head of the physics department and my mother the head of the English department at Austral University in Valdivia, not to mention both being adult educators during Allende’s literacy campaign, their “Third World” education and experience seemed to have little value in English Canada. They found themselves back at school, never complaining, always grateful for the chance to start over. Papi washed cars, delivered newspapers, and tended gardens to pay the bills. Mami was a teaching assistant. Both got janitor jobs that were shared with the other Chilean refugee families, and for years we’d all go en masse to clean downtown buildings at night and on weekends. We kids were in charge of collecting the garbage and other menial tasks, and showing the adults how to use the vacuum cleaners. We also served as translators when Mami (the only adult who spoke English, learned at the age of sixteen when she’d spent a year in Salt Lake City on a student exchange) was too busy scrubbing toilets; we’d interpret the instructions on the various bottles of cleaner.
Our favourite place to work was a luxury men’s hair salon on the fancy part of Hastings Street, just west of the Downtown Eastside. While the adults immersed themselves in the chore of getting rid of every last hair that graced the shiny tiled floor, we practised the hustle as we Windexed the mirrors. Once our jobs were done, we’d head east, to Pigeon Park, where all the winos hung out. We’d come back super rich, because the melancholy drunks would give us all their money. “You’re just like my kid. Here. Take this quarter and buy yourself a Revello,” they would offer, rummaging through their coat pockets, change rolling around on the ground, glistening in the puddles. We’d dive for the coins and the occasional dollar bill, and run back to the salon before the adults missed us too much. There we’d play dumb, arranging the magazines, captivated by the bushes on full display in the Penthouse centrefolds.
Student housing at UBC consisted of five cul-de-sacs referred to as “the courts.” The houses were all identical: two-bedroom, two-storey white stucco with diagonal roofs for the chronic rain. Designed as they were for families, children could be found at every address. We lived in Salmo Court, the twelve homes in our cul-de-sac inhabited by families from Germany, Bermuda, Sweden, Iran, England, and the rest of Canada. On the day we arrived, I went for a walk to get the lay of the land while five-year-old Ale made a dash for the playground. I had seen that our sliding glass living room door gave way to a forest, and I would certainly check that out. But first, I decided to exit the front door and saunter by all the other houses, hoping to get a glimpse of the worldly children who lived there.
As soon as I emerged, I heard a witch cackle. I pricked up my ears and heard it again. Without a shadow of a doubt, a witch was cackling. Turning my head in every direction, including up to the sky to see if the witch was passing by on a broom, I decided I had to find this witch to see if she could show me her potions. Two potions would be good: one for love and the other to kill Pinochet. Boys would go crazy for me, and Pinochet would be dead and we could all go back to Chile. Just then, the witch rounded the corner across the way, wearing a long black dress and a cone-shaped black hat, carrying her broom in both hands. A green mask covered her face, with its pointy nose and hideous, oversized black mole. The witch was about eight, two years older than me; that was clear from her height. A group of laughing children followed her as she cackled away, head thrown back, long light-brown hair cascading down her back. I crossed the centre of the court, which also served as a parking lot, with a space in front of every house, and took up the rear. The witch led the kids around the laundromat building and I broke into a run, not wanting to lose sight of them.
As I rounded the corner, I crashed right into a girl coming in the opposite direction. My age, she had enormous brown eyes, her baby-blond hair in pigtails. She held a sandwich in her hand, intact despite the collision. I was taken by her beauty, elegance, and femininity; she wore a satiny dress, white knee socks, and impeccable white shoes. Ribbons adorned her hair, and a gold chain with a cross hung around her neck. A sharp pang hit me, right in the gut, forcing me to swallow the knot that formed in my throat, for she took me back, right back to the dirt lane of my yellow wooden house in Huacho Copihue, my Valdivia barrio, where little girls dressed like this, where I myself had once worn patent-leather white shoes on the day I’d declared my love to the boy across the way.
There was fury in this girl’s eyes, and her glare soon landed me back in Salmo Court, the exile land, where my braids were falling apart and I donned barf-coloured corduroy floods, a brown T-shirt with a fading decal on it of hugging squirrels with the caption Best Friends, and beige stained waffle runners, all donations from a church group that helped refugees. The witch long gone, I smiled at this girl instead, for there was nothing to do but dive into the deep end. New, friendless—in short, fresh off the boat—I knew I needed to act if I was to put a dent in my state of exile.
She didn’t smile back. She just stared at her sandwich as if it was made of shit and piss. I approached, fingers interlocked behind me, swinging my leg a little bit, whistling softly as I looked at the ground, trying to appear as nonchalant and nonthreatening as possible. The girl spoke to me in rapid-fire sentences. Mystified as to what she was saying, I just nodded and smiled. Keeping eye contact, I broke into a sweat on that warm, mid-August afternoon. She spoke again, this time with even more urgency, her eyebrows knitted together. I nodded and smiled again. Then she thrust the sandwich into my face, her words pleading. I looked at the sandwich. Then I looked at her. She rammed it against my mouth, her tone indisputably one of life and death. I opened my trap and she fed me the sandwich.
It was the strangest thing I’d ever tasted, as far as sandwiches went: peanut butter and banana on Wonder bread. My taste buds imploded, unable to decipher what this combination of tastes and textures was, but I continued to smile and nod as I chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed. At long last the sandwich was eaten, all evidence of its existence gone. The girl sighed with relief and took off around the corner in a blur like the Road Runner, ponytails bouncing. Standing motionless, I decided that seeing a witch and then getting fed a free sandwich wasn’t a bad way to start my new life in Salmo Court.
I started ambling again, past the laundromat and up a little grassy knoll. I came across another patch of forest and wandered through it, past ferns, salal, and huckleberry bushes, stepping over ancient fallen trees into rugs of moss, ducking spiderwebs. I reached a stump and sat on it. As I looked up, I noticed that if I stood on the stump and got on my tippytoes, I was able to reach the lowest branch of this tall, tall tree. Shafts of light led the way, and I climbed to its top. Surveying the land for any sight of the witch, her gaggle of children, or the beautiful sandwich feeder, I saw sets of swings, little playgrounds, more forest, the tops of the houses in adjacent courts, and a plane crossing the sky. I leaned my head against the trunk of my new tree, put my arms around it, and kissed Cedar.
FIVE
Unlike the other Chileans who’d arrived in Vancouver via air, we’d come by land, my father at the wheel of a 1970 baby-blue, two-door Chevrolet Malibu bought for seventy dollars in San Diego, California. Crossing the border into Canada in the early summer of 1974, we’d driven down Oak Street on a clear blue day, the north shore mountains a beacon in the distance.
We’d left Chile in December 1973, just three months after the coup. My mother had been fired and fingered as an MIRista (she was) to the military by the
right-wing dean of Austral University. MIRistas were amongst the most wanted, because during Allende’s government the MIR was the only organization that had openly called for arming the people in order to defend socialism. Formed in 1965 in the universities, the MIR had stood for revolutionary change since its inception. Within months of Pinochet’s takeover, most of its central committee was imprisoned, had been disappeared, or were dead. A year later, its secretary general, Miguel Enríquez, would be murdered in a shootout, and most of the MIR’s membership, made up of students of all social classes, teachers, factory workers, miners, peasants, homemakers, artists, soldiers, liberation theology clergy, and more, were in jail, exiled, or in deep hiding. If it hadn’t been for Giovanna, my mother’s best friend, Mami would probably have been dead or in a concentration camp.
Giovanna was an Italian American from San Francisco who had moved to Chile in 1970, just before Allende’s win. Her Chilean husband, a diamond smuggler wanted in Europe, had brought her there, and it wasn’t long before she became politicized. Many other foreigners arrived at that time, not following a spouse but in order to witness Allende’s peaceful road to socialism and, more importantly, to offer their solidarity work. Giovanna’s marriage didn’t last. When it ended, she decided to stay on and be a part of history in the making: revolutionary socialist change without the armed revolution. She taught alongside my mother in the English department of the university in Valdivia. They became fast friends, and many evenings were spent in a large wooden house on the shores of the Calle-Calle River, where their colleague James, a British professor from Oxford University who had come to support Allende, lived with his wife and children.
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