Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

by Dorfman, Ariel

  I have been able to persist in this dismissal of Spanish because my parents do not use violence to make me desist. All it would have taken, as soon as we emerged from the hospital, was a quick slap the second time I stubbornly insisted on being monolingual in English, for my defenses to collapse. But my mother and father were very affectionate, not the sort to force-feed a meal to a child, let alone a language. And their own migratory experience probably made them tolerant of linguistic shifting, aware that languages are best learned through love. It was a capricho, they thought: a silly whim which would soon pass, would in fact pass, they proclaimed, as soon as the family returned to Argentina. Because my mother and father predicted, as exiles always do, that they would be back home by next year.

  This was no idle dream.

  I can remember a night when my parents waited anxiously by the radio with a group of expatriate friends—it must have been June 1946, so I was already a four-year-old Yankee enthralled by the Jack Benny Show and by Amos ‘n’ Andy perpetually trying to head North—waiting for news of the election back in Argentina. They were all certain that the nefarious General Juan Domingo Perón (“and his slut Evita,” they added) would be defeated by a coalition of Conservatives, Liberals, Centrists, Socialists, and Communists, all of them supported by the United States: the anti-fascist coalition falling apart all over the world was still holding in laggard Argentina. I was waiting just as anxiously to hear that Perón—whoever he might be—had won. I had no idea what that far-off general represented: only that if he was defeated, my parents and their Spanish-gabbing pals would commandeer the first plane back to Buenos Aires to participate in the new government, and Vlady, of course, would have to tag along.

  That was, I believe, the reason why I so ferociously repressed my Spanish self, because his threats to awaken, like a monster in the farthest recesses of the castle in the fairy tales, his threats to return from the dead like the youngest brother sold into slavery, were connected to a real place in the world, a recalcitrantly physical space that I could not erase from the real map of the world the way I had erased the Spanish perversely localized there.

  But my bizarre ally, General Perón, saved me for English and America, he saved me for the Teddy Bears’ picnic and for Burt Lancaster as The Crimson Pirate and for Joe DiMaggio hitting one more home, he saved me for the smell of hot dogs sizzling at Nedick’s and for the Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue and for the Three Musketeers candy bar and for the infinite aisles of toys at Macy’s and the buzz of the yellow cabs of New York and the icy excitement of skaters at Rockefeller Center and the little train that could and the Great Gildersleeve.

  Perón! Who had never heard of the Great Gildersleeve. Like most of my readers, for that matter.

  Perón saved me by doing something entirely unforgivable to the left-wing intellectuals of Argentina, including my own father: he stole the working class from them, the working class they had appealed to and supposedly understood and yet had never been able truly to represent. The cabecitas negras, so called because of their shock of black hair, pouring in from the hinterlands like an untamed horde, the masses of the Argentine poor who were fed up with conservative governments and didn’t feel interpreted by immigrant European Marxist know-it-alls, were making sure that a little blond Jewish boy who spoke English in New York, for one, wouldn’t cry for Argentina, that I could continue my accelerated process of Americanization, that I could lie on my tummy every Sunday with the Herald Tribune spread out larger than my body and follow the funnies while a mirage of voices on the radio acted out the roles. Not a bad example of how America enthralled me with its cutting edge of technology and marketing, striving already, with the harmonizing of sound and images right there in the living room, toward that most pervasive and invasive of media wonders that would soon conquer the world, including Argentina: television.

  And while I watched the comic strips unfold like a screen before my ecstatic eyes, I knew somewhere in my head that a remote and apparently evil Argentine general’s hold on power was all that kept me in the Land of Oz, and that the day he was forced to leave his Argentine sanctuary was the day I would be forced instantly to leave mine, the United States, never again to greet New Year’s with clowning and revelry in Times Square, never again to exchange insults in Americanese—Ya Fatso, ya big slob, ya jughead—in the playground, in the schoolyard, and, ultimately, in the streets. Many years later, my own son Joaquín would be caught in a similar warped situation when Angélica and I were in exile in the States, longing, like my parents before us, for our own Promised Land. We longed for Chile. And all that Joaquín wanted was to stay in America. So it would be his turn to pray that his mother and father would not compel him to leave his friends and the English language behind and regress forever to the obscure Chile that they so desired and that our son born in Amsterdam hardly knew, perhaps repeating what his own grandfather Adolfo had felt when at the turn of the century he was forced to leave the Russia he loved, perhaps repeating my prayers about Argentina when I was a child.

  I slowly came to realize, however, that the real menace was advancing, not from the Argentina where Perón was tightening his grip, but from my beloved America itself, where another sort of grip was tightening. History had arranged for me to adopt a homeland at the very crossroads of the twentieth century when this homeland was itself adopting a new post-war definition of its worldwide mission, an identity that would aggressively exclude from America my father and just about every friend and acquaintance he had made there, designating them, literally and specifically, as anti-American. Extraneous to the essence of the United States and therefore unworthy of living there—and, perhaps by implication, unworthy of living at all. If the war against Fascism had sent me North, the alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States paving the way for my Russian-infatuated father to be welcomed with open arms in the metropolis of capitalism, the falling-out of the two former allies was eventually to be responsible for sending me South.

  This took time. Only in September of 1949, when I was seven, did I begin to understand that there was such a thing as the Cold War and that its existence had serious implications for my life and, yes, for my language.

  Until then, I was largely oblivious to its effects. I was not yet four years old when Winston Churchill, in March 1946, proclaimed in Fulton, Missouri, that an iron curtain had come down on Eastern Europe, calling for “a fraternal association of the English-speaking people” to confront Stalin’s plans for world domination. I was undoubtedly on that very day striving with energy and enthusiasm in some kindergarten in Manhattan to become a full-fledged member of that fraternal association, and couldn’t have cared less about iron curtains: what was falling down in my life were London Bridge and Humpty Dumpty who sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty who had a great fall, and me, I was falling down and laughing and squealing as I ran a ring around a rosy, pocketful of posies, all fall down! I didn’t know that the curtain was coming down in the very middle of my life, splitting it as if I were a country occupied by two warring armies, that my father would be classified as a man who belonged on the other side of that curtain. I didn’t know that the man who stood next to Churchill that day, President Harry (“Give ’em Hell”) Truman, was planting the seeds of my future banishment from America the Beautiful. As the elected guardian of the spacious skies and purple-mountained majesty that I had learned to praise in my foster home, he was already, before the war even ended, sending the Russians “to hell” and that day in Missouri was getting ready to “scare the hell” out of his fellow countrymen with the Communist bogeyman. It was only a matter of time (yes, time, which I imagined then as a mouse running hickory dickory dock up and down a clock) before the policy of containment of the enemy abroad would turn into a relentless, vicious assault on the presumed enemies inside. A year later, Truman ordered the Federal Loyalty Program to root out any employees in the Executive branch who might have had any links to Communism, and Congress, not to be outdone, increased the investigations of
its House Committee on Un-American (sic!) Activities. The witch-hunt was on!

  As for me, if I was able to concentrate on witches and activities of another sort, my first Halloween, my first trick-or-treating, the horrible, deformed, wart-filled stepmother in Disney’s Snow White, it was because my father had taken the one job that helped to safeguard him and his family from the political terror that was seeping into the American bloodstream.

  He had accepted, in August 1946 (two months after Perón’s sobering victory), a high post in the recently formed United Nations: the second man in the Council for Economic Development. The world organization’s charter did not permit the host country to interfere in any way in the lives of its foreign staff, and for many years my dad thought himself beyond reach of the Thought Police or the Red Scare, even as more and more of his American friends lost their jobs or were jailed or ostracized.

  His diplomatic immunity not only meant that he couldn’t be expelled from the country; it also translated into Parkway Village, a housing development in Queens that had been set aside for the United Nations staff who worked at nearby Lake Success; we moved in late 1947, once again—when else?—on the Day of the Dead. The arrival of families from all the nations of the world to those comfortable red-brick houses turned that piece of American real estate into an international village: all the colors, all the countries, all the religions, right there, in those twenty square blocks of suburbia, converging peacefully, living side by side. And all the languages—at home, that is, once the Norwegian and Ghanaian and Chinese mothers called the children indoors; but outside, in the gardens, in the playgrounds, and, above all, at the International School, which I attended for two years, the language was English. Everybody’s preferred second language.

  I was there at the outset, at that time and place in history when English became the first truly international language of humanity, the beginning of that language’s conquest of the transnational spaces of the planet. Forty or so years before anybody ever heard of the Internet and the World Wide Web, English became, experimentally in my Village on the Parkway, the meeting place of the world, where children from every nation played excitedly on a common ground, cajoled and imagined and flamed each other.

  Parkway Village—and the International School it harbored—dreamed itself, and managed to embody, an island of tolerance and olive branches and peace poised on the edge of an increasingly xenophobic and warlike America. My first two years there passed as if I were living and learning inside a magic circle: the bitter feud between the two superpowers, the struggle for Greece, for Berlin, for Italy, the intense U.S. meddling and intervention in what would become known as the Third World, the brutal Soviet crushing of democracy in Hungary and Poland and Czechoslovakia, all that transpired far away, as if the streets surrounding Parkway Village were a shadow-land and our extraterritorial enclave the only reality. Nothing unsettled my fun and games with America in my beloved English, round and round the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel. But my refuge of innocence and immunity in a world intent on racing in the other direction could not last.

  In September 1949 two events, only one relevant to my personal life and the other of worldwide significance, coincided to explode me out of my cocoon, to bring the Cold War home.

  The first was my departure from the United Nations Children’s School. I had outgrown it, and my parents had no alternative but to place me in an American public school, P.S. 117, a few blocks away, on the other side of bustling Grand Central Parkway. I was suddenly outside the multicultural oasis where forbearance reigned, thrust straight into the frantic traffic of an America that was growing more paranoid by the day.

  It was there, in that school, that the second event overtook me: there that I heard, one day in that month of September, that the Soviets had detonated their first nuclear bomb. The United States had been, in effect, chasing the Russians round and round the mulberry bush and now, all of a sudden, the enemy had stood its ground and threatened to do to the Americans what the Americans had been threatening to do to them since Nagasaki. “Pop goes the weasel” suddenly applied to the monkey chasing the weasel and the whole world: Pop goes the planet.

  In the months to come, as hysteria swept the United States, I was unable to insulate myself from the mounting frenzy. How could I, when we kids were being terrorized by the siren sounding its dire shriek, made to scrunch under our desks during endless air-raid drills, waiting for the Russians to come and bomb, fry, vaporize us in one blind howling second, how could I ignore the Cold War when the enemy was portrayed everywhere as akin to polio—a sickness that could strike without provocation, creeping from some filth and sin inside and outside, prostrating children and leaving them in braces, on crutches, in wheelchairs? How could I ignore the red menace if my teacher had used the innocent word, apple, A is for apple, to lecture us on the danger and decay hidden everywhere. “There are people,” she said, “bad Americans,” she said, “who are like rotten apples.”

  Later, out in the playground, some kid had come up to me and asked the riddle/joke of the day, of the times: What is worse, he asked, than finding a worm in your apple? I blurted out the answer: Half a worm. What I did not tell him or anybody else was that I had a rotten apple at home, that I was the son of that rotten apple, that inside me was a worm I had swallowed, half a worm inside me as if I were the apple. For me the Red Menace was not something out there, foggy and vague.

  The two worlds I had successfully kept apart, that of my family and that of my foster country, had finally collided. In that public school I was forced to come to terms with the confusion in my soul: my father was the enemy of the flag I pledged allegiance to every morning, the flag and words that had pledged to protect me in return.

  At about that time, across the ocean, E. M. Forster was writing words that sadly applied to my dilemma (and oddly mirrored the predicament of so many Soviet children who, in their twisted totalitarian police state, were being asked, at that very moment, to turn in their own families): “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

  I was about to find out if I had the guts.

  The Cold War was going to submit me, before I was eight years old, to a loyalty test.

  One incident has stayed with me, scuttling into my memory, there to remain like a crab. It must have been in early 1950. A day at breakfast when I was angry with my father or he was angry with me—the stupid details of our stupid quarrel have long ago slipped my mind, but not what happened next: I went to the door as I did every morning, to walk to school with a couple of friends who were waiting outside on the sidewalk. Suddenly I turned and pouted at my dad: “I’m going to tell my teacher you’re a Communist.” He went pale. But he said nothing. Just looked at me. My mother waited for a few seconds. And now, as I focus on that threshold moment, I realize that by then I must have known full well the perilous implications of what that word meant, because my mother and father had made sure that, when asked by anybody, I would get my father’s profession right, that I would answer he was an economist. I had been made to enunciate each syllable separately, precisely, several times over, so my tongue could not blunder, however inadvertently, into the dangerous word Communist. My father—even though he had remained sympathetic to the Soviet Union—had not been a Communist for over a decade. He had kept that past affiliation a secret, even from me—one of the few acts of caution in his courageous life—but the guilt by association that was corroding America right then, the deduction of guilt from opinions, the guilt by silence, had penetrated my own mind. Children have a way of guessing when something is wrong, and I knew in my bones that my family was different. I knew that we led a sort of double life: that what was said in the intimacy of the home was never repeated anywhere else. I knew that the English language that was being corrupted by fear could not penetrate our safe haven where Spanish reigned, the language of secrecy, the language of clandestine emotions. I knew that the
foreign language my parents spoke somehow protected them—but also set them apart, targeted them. And I knew other things: that a very important man named Alger Hiss (I had met him, he was an acquaintance of my father’s) had been arrested for espionage and jailed for something called perjury. I had overheard that Aaron Copland, whose Appalachian Spring I had listened to, enthralled, at a concert at Tanglewood, that very same nice man who had talked to me after the concert and shaken my hand and rumpled my hair, that composer, in person, had been interrogated about his Communist connections by stone-faced men in Congress; and rumors abounded that the adored Charlie Chaplin was going to be deported; and … Now that I think of it, the signs were all around me, and had gradually dripped into my consciousness like a slow poison, the discussions at home, the worried friends of my father: Do you know who was called today before the House Committee? Do you know who’s getting the boot? Do you know who refused to testify? Do you know who named names? It all comes back to me in bits and pieces, fragments swirling venomously in my mind which must have been smoldering inside me that morning, at the door, when I repeated the word, the dangerous one, loud and clear.

  “Communist,” I reasserted, so they would understand that this was no joke. My father continued to look at me quietly. No apology. No plea. And then my mother crossed the room, crouched down next to me, and looked me straight in the eyes. She must have told me she was sure I wouldn’t do it, something like that, I can’t remember her exact words, just the touch of her fingers softly on my arms, her kiss goodbye, her eyes sorrowful, trusting.