They were going to accomplish this epic task whether I joined them or not; but if I did, if I took up their challenge to redefine the world with the same tenacity and fearlessness with which they were ready to redefine themselves, if I could join my homeless body to their homeless lives, I could help to change not only an unjust world but my own self as well. I could imagine my life, not in terms of individual self-fulfillment, where I would disappear when I died, but in terms of service to humanity, where death does not really exist. In them, I finally found the brotherhood I had first conjectured as a child, that brotherhood I had needed back in the forties to quell the lonely darkness and which now in the sixties challenged my tenuous, confused bilingual persona to anchor itself to their cause.
It was a challenge which, at that time, back in 1960, I was not entirely ready to meet. I was not prepared to take the next logical and drastic step that derived from that overpowering vision—to join a revolutionary organization.
The earthquake had only shattered the walls that segregated me from the workers, leaving intact all the barriers I had accumulated since I was born, barriers of race and class and language and interests and life-style, and these would not really crumble—and crumble partly, at that—until an earthquake that was not nature’s but social, the earthquake of the Allende revolution, transformed my existence. It was only when the workers finally came out of their neighborhoods and threatened to take over the state itself and from that state reorganize the whole of society, it was only when they crossed the boundary separating our lives, that I understood that I could not remain on the sidelines anymore, that I could no longer merely be a left-wing intellectual but had to become a militant.
But back then in 1960, at that point in my life, and for the next ten years, it was unthinkable that I devote my whole life to the oppressed. How could I, if I didn’t even know who I was, what life I would be devoting? How to merge the certainty that I wanted, above all things in the world, to be a writer with the needs of these people I hardly had visited, no matter how I might admire their tenacity? And how to submit my fragile identity with its well of secrets to the scrutiny of an organization that couldn’t care less about individual problems, that would have frowned on such dilemmas as petit-bourgeois deviations? Worse still, such a submission to Party discipline would wrest from me the independence I required to confront the contradictions of my existence: I wanted to serve the poor but lived in a big house with two maids and drove my father’s gargantuan diplomatic car, which, of course, I shamefully hid from my new comrades at the university; and vocal as I might be in support of the Latin American resistance, I kept doggedly writing my most personal work in English, the language of the “thieving Yankee” responsible for the country’s underdevelopment. My very Edwardly name was a reminder that I was a mock-Chilean who did not belong in this country, let alone with the workers and their cause.
And the change in my name became, in fact, the first step, the easiest symbolic step, toward a deeper and more difficult shift in my total identity as I set out to become somebody else, almost an ironic echo of the mind-set of those European immigrants to the United States whose country I was now trying to distance from my life. In the months that followed, almost imperceptibly, I adopted Ariel—which happened to be my neglected middle name and had been on my passport since my birth.
When my father chose Lenin as the model to mark my future, my mother, given the second choice, had timidly decided on Ariel because, she said, she loved the character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the spirit of air and goodness and magic, a way to balance her husband’s extremely terrestrial and overtly political nomination. Not that I ever gave a second thought to the girlish and delicate Ariel when I was looking to replace the detested Vlady. But now in the university, uncomfortable with the Edward which had served me so well at the Grange, I discovered that an inordinate number of young Latin American men my age—several of them studying at my Faculty—had also been called Ariel by their parents, a collective baptism that had its origin in an essay, the most influential in the history of the continent, written by the Uruguayan Jose Enrique Rodó in 1900. For most members of my mother’s generation, his book, Ariel, had been a touchstone in their evolution as they dealt with the enigma of why their Latin America had fallen so far behind the United States. Rodó identified Latin America with the figure of Prospero’s idealistic helper, in contrast to the crass materialism of a Caliban dedicated to profit, positivism, utilitarian to a fault, worshipping the “fervent pursuit of well-being that has no object beyond itself.” My mother had answered Rodó’s call to the youth of the continent to defend this spiritually superior America of the South from the soulless Northern Titan by giving her son a name that suggested that someday Latin America would be truly worthy of the Europe that had given it (and her) birth.
I took a liking to Ariel. Even though my sympathies were with the colonized and despised Caliban of The Tempest who is taught the language of his master only so that he might learn to curse; even if Ariel, in anti-colonial interpretations in vogue during the sixties, was seen as the elite servant of the invader Prospero, the native criollo who had bowed to power and decided to mimic the civilization of Europe; even so, the name my mother had given me was, nevertheless, recognized by vast numbers of Latin Americans as a symbol of opposition to the United States. For me, it became a way of defining my own growing disaffection with the land whose extreme materialism I had cherished and coveted, while at the same time subtly asserting my affiliation with the language that continued to be my constant companion and best friend, the English that had been elevated to its supreme pinnacle in the works of Shakespeare. And there you have me, bearing a biblical name that was made famous in Europe in the first work in the modern era that tried to come to grips with the tensions arising out of the colonization of the New World, a character who then had been appropriated by an Uruguayan writer and bequeathed to an Argentine mother as a way of defining a wayward gringo son who had finally come back to the Latin America she loved. There I was, a young man born in Buenos Aires and brought up in New York and on his way to becoming Chilean, an amalgam of the Latino and the Anglo. I ate up that name and gave it the meaning that I so desired. I was Caliban the savage, cannibilizing Ariel, the Hebrew Lion of God, for my own purposes.
My use of the verb cannibalize to describe the process by which I created my new identity is not accidental, not merely a pun on Shakespeare’s character. Cannibalize: a term coined by Brazilian modernists at the beginning of the century to articulate how the New World should react to the European (and later North American) forms it was importing from abroad, how it could thrive only by eating them up, chewing them through, digesting, transforming, transubstantiating them, creating a new compound. That theory of Latin American identity suggests that, given the impossibility of turning your back on foreign influences, you should neither submit slavishly to them nor reject them as entirely alien. The solution is to devour them, to make them your own. As Latin American literature and art have been doing since their origins, as Allende promised to do with the revolution. More than the name Ariel itself, it was the process of that naming, the process of situating myself on the border between the continent of my birth and the world outside, which signals how I became a Latin American. Because there you have, in a nutshell, in that process of redefining my identity, the way in which Latin America captured me.
I was fortunate that my pursuit of a resolution to my paradoxes, my desire for a sanctuary on this planet, coincided with a unique moment in the history of the continent where I had been born, when hope was reawakening that hundreds of years of humiliation were over, a time when Latin America was breaking from its past and struggling to rid itself of the foreign influences that had dominated its destiny for so long. There was a place for someone like me in that quest, an intoxicating invitation for a youngster on the verge of becoming an adult who could not conceive his own future with any degree of stability, who had, like the continent itself,
come to a dead end in his development and could not continue telling himself that the remedy for his problems lay abroad. Instead of answering my questions, this continent sent me back more questions, all of them contradictory. Like me, Latin America was an enigma, a vibrant, sprawling, messy reality which did not itself know what it was or where it was going, entangled in the process of discovering where it had been, a continent that was more a project than an object, a series of half-formed nations trapped in a history not of their own making, trying to invent an alternative.
The United States had turned me into one of its children by offering me comfort and safety and power during its most expansive and optimistic post-war phase. Latin America, contestatory, insurgent and rebellious, would appeal to an entirely different way of imagining myself, encouraging me to merge my personal crisis of identity with its parallel crisis, my own search with its search, my journey with its journey. Afraid though I was of the gray twilight area of fluctuating identity inside me, afraid though I might be of being set adrift again, quite soon I began to understand that this was probably what I needed, a continent as mixed up as I was, itself a combination of the foreign and the local, unable to distinguish at times where one started and the other ended. Before I knew what had hit me, I was entranced by a Latin America that called out to my own deeply divided, hybrid condition. I located in that culture my secret image, the mirror of who I really was, this mixture, this child who dreamed like so many Latin Americans of escape to the modern world and had found himself back here, in the South, en el sur, forced to define his confused destiny as if he were a character in a story by Borges. I had decided not to go back North. It was time to take all the simultaneous roads into Latin America I could find or perhaps it was Latin America, during that frantic decade, taking the roads into me, invading me, penetrating me, saturating my senses, filling me with people, with landscapes, with foods, with colors, with projects, a jumble of interrogations. I set out to explore the space and the people around me with a fury enhanced by the awareness of all the energy I had wasted purging my Spanish and turning my back on my Latino self.
Something similar happened in my quest for a new nationality. Except that reincarnating an identity depends on your will to belong and the willingness of people to accept that need and recognize you, whereas the transition toward becoming a citizen of Chile, dependent as it was on the acquiescence of the state and not on my own desires, turned out to be a far bumpier road. As the sixties advanced and I began to reimagine myself as a Latin American, at some intangible point—I cannot really put my finger on exactly when it happened—I stopped telling people I was from Argentina, I started to lie to them and to myself, responding that I was from Chile.
That lie came back to haunt me and almost derailed my efforts legally to become a Chilean citizen.
The occasion was Allende’s campaign in 1964. I had become so involved with local politics that I had ended up being elected president of the Independent Allendista Students of the Universidad de Chile. My political activism up to then had been typical of so many of my fellow left-wing students: you live at home, you read a lot, you discuss forever, you go out once in a while to a slum to participate in some sort of vounteer community service under the auspices of the Student Federation, you plot against the Christian Democrats and try to take the university away from them, you spend a month in a población teaching peasants recently arrived from the countryside how to read, you march forever, you get teargassed, a nightstick grazes your ribs and then a bruise or two develop, the bruise disappears, life goes on, you are more in love with the concept of el pueblo than with the real people themselves.
Oh, I had tried to serve those masses who I continued to proclaim would save me and the world. Suspicious of political parties and their lumbering bureaucracies, I thought, bursting with gringo can-do-ism, that I could sidestep those fossilized structures and go directly to the poorer sectors of society, people who were, after all, paying with their taxes and their work for our education and should receive some sort of benefit from us. Sometime in 1963, with funds from my ever helpful dad, I conceived—under the pompous title of Universidad Móvil para el Trabajador (Mobile University for the Worker)—a week of conferences by a group of my most brilliant classmates to be delivered directly in the poblaciones callampas, the shantytowns that had sprouted all over Santiago exactly like mushrooms (callampas), as homeless families took over unused land and, overnight, built their tin huts and put up their Chilean flags.
I contacted the communal leaders of one of the poblaciones where I had done some volunteer work. I presented our program. It started with “What Is Literature?” on Monday night and went on to “What Is Chile?” and “What Is Latin America?” and “What Is History?” and “What Is the Body?” on the following nights, until we ended with “What Is the Universe?” on Saturday.
They were skeptical. With their enormous problems—no gas, no streetlights, no paved streets, no trees, no playgrounds, no water, but of course plenty of mud—the pobladores wondered if our educational project could really be considered a priority. My answer: How were these difficulties to be overcome if we didn’t make an effort to understand who we were, the origins of who we were, if we didn’t believe that knowledge might make us free. The communal leaders seemed moved—more I think by my bubbling enthusiasm than by my arguments. They looked at one another and waited in silence, and then one of them offered the ramshackle one-room building that housed the elementary school. “You care enough to take all this trouble,” he said. “Let’s see what happens.” Later on, he accompanied me to the bus stop, and before I got on the bus, he stopped me.
“The key,” he said, “is the children.”
“The children?”
“If the children come, so will their parents.”
We took his advice. The Sunday before the first lecture, our stalwart group of would-be instructors spent the day in the población handing out leaflets to the kids, telling them that tomorrow night was the Universidad Móvil’s inaugural session on literature and that the price of admission to the cartoons that would be shown before the class was at least one progenitor.
The tactic worked. When I arrived with my family’s old 8mm movie projector and my childhood’s silent cartoons, the elementary school was packed. The kids and their parents enjoyed Mighty Mouse above all, just as I had when I was five and my father had brought home what had been back then, in 1947, the latest technology in home entertainment. For most of them, it was the first time they had seen a motion picture of any sort; television in Chile was not widespread then. And my conversation with them had seemingly also been successful: we had talked about sounds and rhythm and images and how they were all poets in the way they spoke every day and how the simplest story was open to as many interpretations as there were readers. At the end, I reminded everybody that tomorrow there was another talk, and many in the audience promised to return.
So I was alarmed the next day when I received a harried call from Miguel, the geography student in charge of “What Is Chile?” from the one telephone in the población, which, as fortune would have it, was located inside the elementary school itself.
“Oye, Miguel said,”do you hear that?”
I listened. Over the phone came the sound of dull thuds and in the distance the faint screams of infantile voices.
“Did you hear it?” he insisted.
“Yes.”
My friend was very calm. “It’s the kids of the población. They’re stoning the school and threatening to burn it down unless you show Mighty Mouse again.”
“What?”
“I think you’d better come and help me give that lesson in what Chile is.”
I grabbed my dad’s immense diplomatic car and incongrously arrived in it to the huzzahs of hundreds of children who demanded that I show the Ratón Aerodinámico not once but twice, plus a couple of other short features. Then I stood by while my friend talked to the kids—and the three lone adults, sitting in the back of
the schoolroom, who had straggled in once it was clear that there was no danger from the stone throwers—about what Chile was. But I was learning more about Chile than they were, learning that it was not a matter of simply parachuting into these places, that it took many years to establish the right channels, the right methods, the right contacts, and that I had tried to leap over those years of hard work and ignore the way things were done here, among these people, and the result was that, to save our makeshift Universidad Móvil made in Chile, I had been forced to call on a flying rodent made in the imperial United States.
The rest of the week went a bit better because we returned to the original formula: first cartoons, then the lecture; but by Saturday we all agreed that the experiment so gullibly organized had not been worth the effort and that it was better not to repeat it, that this was not the best way to change the consciousness of the Chilean people. Instead of enticing our compatriots to know more about themselves and how they had come to be so deprived, we had instilled in their children a desire to be like Mighty Mouse, to adore the power of the U.S. media. Our decision to close our doors was also influenced perhaps by the fact that the 1964 Presidential elections were looming on the horizon, and if this time Allende won against Eduardo Frei, the Christian Democratic candidate, efforts such as ours would be unnecessary. It would be the government itself which would work to establish a whole new system for bringing knowledge to the workers. A whole new system? If we were victorious, a whole new world would be fashioned by us.
Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey Page 17