Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

by Ariel Dorfman

  So life does go on. I clutch at this straw like a lunatic drowning. The organizers of the literary prize don’t think I’m dangerous, they’re calling me as if nothing has happened. Maybe this is the sign I’m looking for, maybe they’ll leave me alone. But I don’t say this to Angelica. She would reply that it could be a trap, who knows if on the other side of the line there is a military officer and what he wants is for me to show up. Instead, I ask: “What did you tell them?”

  And Angelica: “I told them you were at the beach, writing a new novel, and that you’d get back to them.” She pauses. “It’s what I’ve told Rodrigo as well.”

  “And he believed you?”

  “Not really. He thinks you’re dead.”

  “He thinks I’m dead?”

  “He doesn’t say so, but that’s what he thinks.”

  “I’ll call him.”

  “I don’t think you should, just now. The Party contact suggested that you not call home at all, that I tell anybody who calls that I don’t know where you are, that we’ve … split.”

  That night, at our friend Catalina’s apartment, my hostess switches on the television and one of the news items is the burning of books in the center of Santiago. Forty years after Hitler came to power, forty years after his Nazi followers lit fires to consume the degenerate texts that corrupted the German youth, Chilean soldiers are relighting those flames and torching books all over again. And suddenly the camera zooms in—and there it is, my own book, hated by every right-wing person in Chile, Para leer al Pato Donald. How to Read Donald Duck. There it is, publicly being consumed by the Inquisitorial flames—and perhaps I have finally made the Guinness Book of World Records, the first author in history to have watched his own work burnt live on TV. I look up at Catalina and she averts her eyes and we both think: If they are doing this to the book, what will they do to the hands that wrote the book, and what are they doing right now to the eyes all over Chile that read that book, and what will they do to her body if they find my body here.

  Two days later, Angélica comes for me and we are on our way to a diplomat’s house, a Paraguayan lawyer who works for the UN. On our way, we stop to see another friend, Angel Parra, one of Chile’s foremost singers, the son of the greatest folklore artist of Latin America, the long-deceased Violeta Parra. I had called Angel two days before to urge him to seek asylum. He wasn’t in, but his wife, Marta, had come to the phone and told me that Angel refused to leave Chile. Now she comes to the door to greet us in a state of shock. “Por Dios,” she whispers, “ándate, go away, get away, quick. They just came for him, se llevaron al Angel, half an hour ago, the soldiers just burst in and took him. I’ve got to find someone who can save him, who can intercede before they …” She turned to me: “Ariel, you’ve got to get out. You’ve got to get out before the embassies all fill up.” The advice I had wanted to give her husband, which he had not wanted to listen to, which I now don’t want to listen to as I keep running. And two days later, at the house of our diplomat friend, I hold my first conversation with foreign journalists that he has gathered so they can be briefed by somebody who can speak English, who can tell them what the resistance intends to do, and I analyze the political situation with a security I am far from feeling (“They think this is Indonesia, people being massacred as in Djakarta; they will find this is another Vietnam,” is one of my unprophetic phrases) and I end up learning more from them than they learn from me, confirming the death of the singer Victor Jara, another friend, in the six-thousand-person-capacity Estadio Chile, confirming that the military has decided to establish a bigger detention center at the Estadio Nacional, which holds sixty thousand. Yet I ignore the signs, I begin to feel invulnerable and detached, as if the unlikely combination of luck and design that saved my life—a colleague who casually switches places, my name crossed off a list, a cartoon character who kept me from my appointment with death—will somehow continue to repeat itself forever. I run and I run and Angélica tells me that, absurd as it may seem, she has been able to collect my salary at the university, and I smile and point to this as proof that I will be able to go back to work, but she also tells me that she’s going to meet Abel soon and will have news for me and that the news may not be good, and the next day I have to leave the Paraguayan lawyer’s house; last night the soldiers raided the residence of another UN employee. I run like a fugitive in a B-movie so I will not have to accept what is happening to me and my unrecognizable country, running until finally I have to listen to the news that Angelica cannot help but bring me, there in the café of the Plaza Nuñoa, the cups of coffee clinking nearby, the orders from the mozo for the lomito con palta, eyes smarting from the cigarette smoke, shifting to the door to see if someone will come in and nail me, running from the words Angélica now passes on to me: Abel has met with her, the resistance has decided that I am to leave the country, seek refuge in an embassy. I am to go into exile.

  “I’m not leaving.”

  “What do you mean? It’s been decided.”

  “Tell Abel I want to see him. Tell him I want a second opinion.”

  A second opinion. As if you were sick, as if a different doctor would come up with a different diagnosis, as if you had been coopted by the Junta’s language, their medical prognosis of the country as a body that needs to be operated on, the cancerous growth cut out so that it can live, as if somebody’s second opinion would decide that no, you are not a cancer, you do not need to be extirpated, you do not need to leave Chile.

  Angélica agrees. It is hazardous for her, for Abel, for me, but she agrees. She knows I am making believe I have a choice, she knows I cannot survive much longer on the run like this, she knows I will eventually acquiesce to my destiny; but she also knows that in the years ahead I need to be able to tell myself—and others, just as I am telling my readers right now—that I was forced out, tell myself that I am not a coward.

  Angélica makes one last try. “You’re not immortal, you know,” she says.

  There is nothing I can answer.

  Two days later, however, I will discover how mortal I am. I find myself here, in this car being driven to my next safe house by a woman I have never met. She is part of an informal network that has sprung up all over the country, people who are risking their lives to protect those in danger. I will not be told her name—better not to know anything about her—but years later, when I am writing Death and the Maiden, I will have my protagonist, Paulina, do something similar in the months after the coup, though I can only hope that the woman who came to my rescue back then was never caught, that she never went through Paulina’s experience of torture and rape.

  This woman whose name I never wanted to know tells me that her son, who is studying at the Catholic University, has a classmate, let’s call him Esteban, a freshman studying psychology. Esteban is the perfect collaborator for the resistance, a committed Allendista who is not suspected by the authorities at his university or his neighborhood of harboring sympathies for the left, because an illness has forced him, during the last year, to stay away from politics. Esteban’s father, a textile worker I believe he was, has offered his house for the few days it will take to set up my scheduled meeting with Abel to determine whether I must leave Chile.

  “So we shouldn’t expect any trouble?” I ask the woman.

  “Nothing much,” comes the casual answer.

  I begin to feel tension mounting in my body as we head for the industrial belt of Santiago, and the tension jumps another notch when my driver turns off the main road and winds along a half-finished street that flanks working-class developments. I become acutely aware of my body. My green eyes, my Woody-Allen-like glasses, my six foot two, my Jewish nose, my blond hair, my overly white skin, my every gesture, make me conspicuous here. The car stops in front of a modest one-story house. As I get out, I can feel eyes on me, somebody watching. Some boys are setting up a soccer match a bit farther down the street. One of them kicks the rag ball hard, too hard, and it lands near me. I look at it, go over,
kick it back, then kick myself mentally, wondering if this has not called attention to my presence, though to ignore the ball would have been even more eye-catching. An old woman materializes on the threshold of the house next door, looks at the car, at me, at my smartly dressed driver. The old woman doesn’t say a word, just remains there like a drab spiteful statue of stone watching Esteban, who has come out to greet us warmly, watching me say goodbye to my driver with a quick peck on the cheek, watching me disappear into Esteban’s house: in this neighborhood, there are no secrets.

  I am soon put at my ease by the family’s sense of humor, their simple courage, as if disasters like this coup happen to them all the time. We sit down to a quick meal, and when it grows darker, Esteban escorts me to the back of the house, a small walled-in yard, most of it taken up by a vegetable patch and a wooden shack. When he became the first member of this working-class family to make it to the university, Esteban’s father built him this private space so he could study. There is a narrow bed, a table that doubles as a desk, and books lining one of the walls. A heavily curtained window looks out on the yard.

  Esteban hands me a flashlight, asks me not to switch on the lights, if possible, during the night. And to be very quiet during daytime hours.

  “If the military come,” he says, “it’ll probably be at night. They were here last week, but I don’t think they’ll be back. If they do come, we’ll try to stall them. You escape over this wall.”

  He begins to draw a map. The house, the street, a gas station nearby, a church, I can trust the priest, but the best way to get there is not this way but that way, because there is a fascist who lives in this house, two roads down. The gas station has a pay phone, but it might be risky to use it after curfew. “At any rate,” he repeats, “you can trust the priest. And if everything is all right here, you can always come back.”

  Then he asks if I have understood, and I nod, and he goes out, leaving me in the darkening dusk.

  I have not understood a word he said. I stare at the map in disbelief. I can make no sense of the diagram. While he talked, while he pointed and drew arrows and told me to trust the priest and what street to use and what street to avoid, the only thing I did understand, quite starkly, was that I was doomed.

  Every night since the coup, there has been some justification, however lame, for sleeping in a house other than my own. I could invent a hundred reasons. But here? What was I doing here? In the shack of a textile worker, lost in a marginal neighborhood of Santiago?

  In this shack, finally, the fear that has eluded me these ten days spills into my guts, a fear that has always been missing from my life. Real, stomach-sickening, mind-crawling fear that screams at me to get the hell out of this place before it’s too late. What has happened to those who are being killed can happen to me, not in my imagination, to the naked body of Claudio Gimeno being approached by an officer, but in reality, to my own body.

  I am marooned here this evening, in this shack, as the shadows in the yard tell me that curfew has arrived. I am more vulnerable than my hosts. If a military commander happens to raid this población tonight, if my extraordinary luck runs out, the very things that would help me survive in my own surroundings—my physical appearance, my contacts, the class I was born into, my very language—are liabilities here. I would be punished precisely for having stepped outside the boundaries and privileges that had been set up for me, precisely because I have abjured them.

  And that may be why, next to the fear, perhaps within it, neither dissolving nor dissembling it, I feel bizarrely, wildly successful: this is the way ordinary people in the country I now call my own have always lived, day in, day out, what most of the population of this planet experience as their daily horizon. With no father to turn to, no international connections, no second language to shelter them, no white skin to make their enemies think twice before attacking them. With no grand words to ward off death. The violence of misery, the violence of sickness, the violence of malnutrition, the violence of ignorance, and, if they dared to rebel against this condition, the violence of the police and the Army—this was something they could not avoid, this was their life.

  Isn’t this exactly what I have wanted since the far-off days in the sixties when I first envisaged the possibility of a revolution? What I have been impossibly looking for all these years: to fuse, no matter how briefly, with the working class of Chile, to have gone so deep into it that I could share its fate?

  And now the distance that had haunted me all my life, the loneliness, was gone. My relationship with the poor and the humiliated was no longer reversible, no longer dependent, at least for the moment, on my choice. My life was now a lottery, out of my hands, and it was strangely comforting not to be able to escape or keep on running, a strange solace in the knowledge that finally, when the moment of truth had come, my body had been loyal to my dream of a world without suffering, that I was willing to risk the consequences of being a rebel against injustice. The revolution had brought me to this shack, to this possible ending, and there, alone with my death, I feel complete and whole and real as I had never felt before and would never feel afterwards.

  I am at home.

  I have no nightmares that night. I fall asleep and wake once in a while and listen to the faraway barking of dogs and the sporadic gunfire, wonder if a truck’s engine will disturb the silence, if the shouts of soldiers will crack open the dawn, ask how it can be that daylight takes so long to come. But the fear is no longer there. I am ready to face the next day and what it brings and the next one and the conversation in which I will tell my contact Abel that nothing can make me leave this country that I can now really say is mine.

  But that is not how it will turn out.

  A different revelation awaits me the next day.

  In that shack, with the daylight, I begin to explore the wall of books that belong to Esteban and discover there—along with my own book on Donald Duck—hundreds of other volumes, most of them the cheap editions brought out by Quimantú, the State Publishing House, sold at newsstands, gobbled up by millions of Chileans. In two and a half years, more books have been produced and distributed than in all the previous hundred and sixty years of Chilean history. I have been part of this extraordinary cultural crusade. Twice a week, as an advisor to Quimantú, I have helped to select the literary, philosophical, historical texts that have then made their way into the hands of the public. I knew, of course, that the books were being bought. The statistics said so. And I had often encountered, during the Allende years, hundreds of workers and students and housewives and even, in one case, a young peasant, all of whom had been reading our collection, Dostoevsky and Cortázar and Aeschylus and Latin American short stories and Bolivar and Balzac.

  But to find these books here, in this shack, and to find one of my own books among them, to run into them now, in the midst of defeat, this was different. I had cast my words into reality like bottles into an unknown sea, and if it was true that my words, that books, could not protect me from death or torture, neither could it be denied that those books were here, being read, and tomorrow they would still be here, and what had been read and thought and nursed inside could not be erased so easily. Angélica had told me, at our last meeting, that one day Rodrigo had begun to sing, as they walked to the bus, the hymn of the Unidad Popular, “Venceremos, venceremos, la miseria sabremos vencer.” We shall overcome, we shall find a way of ending misery. She had told him to stop, never to sing that song again, and he had refused: Esas canciones me gustan, I like those songs. She then crouched down next to him, and taking him firmly by the shoulders, she forced up his chin so he had to look her in the eye and she proceeded to tell our six-year-old son that if he ever sang that song or any of the other songs we used to sing in the streets, the soldiers would come and shoot his daddy. Did he understand? Rodrigo had not responded for a few seconds. Angélica waited. Then he had said: “But if I sing them in my head, nobody will know.” He was anticipating there, in front of his heartbroken mother
, what I was to discover a few days later in this book-filled shack. This was how the resistance would grow, this was the way the past would endure: the words and deeds we had fed to the world yesterday would not, could not, easily be eradicated from this earth.

  And yet, if the books revealed to me that my life had a meaning which did not begin and end in my own self but reached beyond it, into the community, these same books were reminders that it was not possible to hide who I really was: an intellectual, a man who writes, someone who gives words and stories to others. The books were telling me that I could not make believe that my past did not exist. My books—those I wrote and those that I helped to publish—could remain in this shack. I could not, without endangering the lives of those who had offered me refuge. Maybe I will, after all, be forced to leave my country.

  And so, the next day, I am confused, full of conflicting desires and signals when I ring the doorbell of the apartment where Abel is supposed to meet me, and Abel opens the door and I step inside.

  It is an unassuming middle-class flat, nothing special about it, except that the blinds are down. Abel seems at home here, blends in. Who loaned him this place? Relatives? Friends? Sympathizers? It’s better not to know. Better not to observe any details. Forget everything about this apartment, just as I’ve already forgotten, hope I’ve forgotten, its location. What you don’t know can’t be extracted from you. That’s what a dictatorship does: it turns us into instant amnesiacs, forces us to glide through life as if blindfolded, impossibly also demanding the opposite—to survive, you have to be attentive, carefully register everything, a tiny particular can mean the difference between life and death. As I sit down in the armchair that Abel indicates, I can’t help catching a glimpse of a portrait in the living room, I cannot disregard that striking naval officer in full uniform glaring from the wall behind Abel—like a teenager told to avert his eyes when the full-bodied woman he is about to make love to starts to undress for the first time, I am drawn to what has been forbidden, wondering if this means that the resistance has people inside the Navy, if this is the house of an admiral, and before I can go on searching for signs in the living room which might confirm or deny this conjecture, I cut into my own train of thought, as far as I can remember I try to concentrate on Abel, on this meeting with Abel I have been fearing.