Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

by Dorfman, Ariel

  I was not so far gone that I deluded myself into believing that I could manage this metamorphosis ensconced in my regular surroundings: the only way to force my mom and dad to accept a change in designation was to spring it on them in a location where I controlled how I was called. So when my father announced one day that he would have to spend many months in Europe on United Nations business and wanted the whole family to come along, London, Paris, Geneva, Italy, and then a visit to Argentina on home leave before returning to the States, I was delighted: no school for half a year, the legendary Old Continent of castles and adventures, the home of the Grand Masters of Painting. But more important: here was my chance to throw Vlady into the sea, drown the sonofabitch, and baptize myself with my true and princely title. I did not inform my parents of my intentions when we boarded the French ship De Grasse in June 1951. First I carefully spread my new English name among the other children on that ship, then engaged their parents, the crew members, the waiters, the stewards, until everybody was calling me Eddie. I would have preferred the lofty and lordly Edward, but what the hell, a small price to pay, that tacky diminutive, for getting rid of the detested Vladimiro. By the time my parents began to realize what I had wrought, it was too late. I informed them that I would not answer if called Vlady ever again. Not quite true, because when we returned to the States many months later, Vlady was waiting for me there in the memories of the neighbors and the school, and during the next few years my two names fluctuated back and forth, until our expatriation to Chile in 1954 gave me the opportunity to start afresh and definitely cut Lenin’s embalmed name out of my life, to the point that my high school graduation certificates are all made out in the name of Edward Dorfman (a crazy thing to do, because my legal name was and in fact still is Vladimiro). Many of my friends from Chile still call me Ed or Eddie, and not the Ariel which I was eventually to adopt.

  But it was on that French ship that I made the real transition and I could not have conceived of a more appropriate locale: a floating hotel in the middle of nowhere, a site of exile where you can craft your identity any way you want, where you can con everybody into believing anything because there is no way of confirming or denying your past.

  And it was also on that ship that I was to begin a different sort of transition, one which was to prove far more crucial in the decades to come in defending the self I had come to identify with English. A transition to what might well be called the biggest con game ever invented by humanity: literature. The game I am still engaged in right now, the reader believing in the truth of my perishable, sliding words, lending faith to them without a shred of proof that I am not making everything up, inventing a self in this book as I invented (or so I say) a name for my future on that vessel.

  But that was not the reason, at least not initially, not then, why literature entered my life so forcefully so early. During those six months in Europe, a rehearsal for the more permanent departure I was envisioning, literature was revealed to me as the best way to surmount the question of how to hold on to the language that defined my identity if I did not inhabit the country where it was spoken.

  Until then, writing had played a negligible, indeed minimal, part in my existence. English had been for me, as it is for all native speakers, an oral experience. From the start, in that hospital, it had been a way of charming adults and forging alliances with the other children, dancing my words into their foreign hearts. As soon as I encountered the world of America, my repetition and learning of English quickly turned into a ritual of belonging, another way of combating loneliness, perfecting accent and grammar and vocabulary as evidence that I was not an immigrant recently stranded on these shores. As a child, I was always performing, partly because of my exuberant personality (today I would be diagnosed as having a mild form of ADD, Attention Deficit Disorder), but also, I believe, as a way of incessantly staking my claim to the public space in an English that I knew I had not been born to, endlessly acting out for the benefit of my fellow Americans.

  I didn’t have the means—or the desire—to pin down those early performances of mine in any permanent form, to transform them into letters on paper, to make them “literary”: it was enough to play with words and horse around endlessly for the delight (or to the groans) of others. These vociferous demonstrations got so out of control that my father and mother instituted a “silly hour,” an hour a day when my imagination was officially given freedom publicly to invent alternative babbling worlds. But even this was not enough. I built a soap-box theater where I animated puppets and drawings, parading them for my family and for their guests and for the neighbors, for the other children, my teachers, and anybody else I could conceivably drag in. Given the range and variety attainable by the human voice, it is not surprising that when reading appeared timidly on the horizon, I showed no interest: Look at Spot. Look at Spot run. Run, Dick, run. I was running other sorts of linguistic circles, running so fast with my loud mouth that I ended up lagging behind in my reading skills. And when my mother tried to remedially teach me, I drove her dizzy, running (sic!) around her chair, from one side to the other, unable to sit quietly, unable to concentrate. Look at Vlady run.

  If I couldn’t slow down to start reading, the laborious, agonizing crucifixion of writing was even less appealing as a creative vehicle. My first texts were, in fact, limited, secondary, and parasitical, serving to support illustrations, like the bubbles in the mock comic books I began to create. Even my first “novel” (a twenty-page cowboys-and-Indians extravaganza scribbled as a present for my father when I was a bit over seven) was no more than a series of drawings with a few written words scattered here and there.

  Until that trip to Europe, in fact, it was assumed that I would devote my life to the plastic arts when I grew up. Drawing, from the earliest age, was the only way of nailing me down for hours in one spot, my preferred way of marking the world with the immediacy of my feelings. If colors so quickly came to dominate my life, it was because, like language, they were a way of loving and exploring myself, but also, almost simultaneously, a way of being loved, being explored by others—initially my parents but later on the wider world beyond them—ready to respond to and recognize the shape, the beauty, they called it, of those revelations I was extracting from some miraculous source within me. There was no greater joy then, there is no greater joy now: finding a refuge inside others for what had been inside me, like seeds settling into them, the pleasure of transferring those visions born of my pleasure to other hearts and eyes. Perhaps because I had such a supportive environment, parents who were fawning in their devotion, my art quickly announced itself as powerful, by which I mean that it both radiated power and conferred it, integrated me to people out there and yet also made me distinct and special, made me belong while allowing me to be different.

  When we journeyed to Europe in 1951, there was not the slightest indication that the plastic arts were about to be supplanted in my life. On the contrary, I had just spent a whole year at an after-school program for gifted young artists at Queens College, where another scholarship awaited my return.

  When I came back from Europe many months later, however, I rejected that potential career. I thought of myself—at nine years of age—as a writer, having discovered on that sea voyage that it was literature, and not painting, that could shield my identity constructed in English.

  This discovery of how the literary imagination could protect me had humble origins: a small notebook, bound in red leather, presented to me by my parents when we boarded the De Grasse. They suggested that I record there, and therefore keep forever (I remember that word, forever), my recollections of the trip. It was in that diary—unfortunately lost in the coup in Chile many years later—that I first tentatively anticipated the specific marvels of writing. After the day’s harrowing conglomeration of activities, I would sit myself down and watch my hand painstakingly preserve what otherwise would have become ephemeral; I fixed time, stopped it, calmed it; I read over the next evening what I had written and
found it wanting, crossed out one word, put in another one, tested it, forced myself to work. Nobody would ever read this, I said, but once in a while I would show my mother what I’d written (always looking for approval, obsessed with contacting others) and I realized that I could be absent in my body and still be there, with her, or anybody else for that matter, through my words. More important, perhaps, than replicating myself in others was the intuition that writing was first of all a private act whose audience was primarily one’s own self, so that loneliness did not need to be mastered by escaping from it into the outer world of performance, demanding the frantic fraternity of others, but by journeying with written words into the loneliness itself. A dangerous discovery: because I think I began, from that moment, to live in order to record life, that the register of that life started to be more essential than life itself. It was then that I began formulating the expression of what was happening while it was happening, often before it happened. But I was unaware of that peril: by expressing my English entirely independent of the oral or, more crucially, of performance, I took a pivotal step toward answering the question of how to keep alive the language I had adopted as my own if I was to leave the United States. In that diary, for the first time, I created an imaginary space and self outside the body and, perhaps as fundamentally, beyond geography, a dialogue with language which could be deepened regardless of where that body happened to be, what contingent geography surrounded me.

  These faint glimmerings of literature’s power and how that power could answer my specific needs were reinforced and in fact received a boost from an unexpected quarter.

  One morning, my father stopped me as, hurly-burly and zany as usual, I rushed by him on the deck of our steamer headed for Le Havre.

  He pointed to a man, gaunt I remember him somehow, his back to us, holding the hand of a woman, standing at the bow.

  “That’s Thomas Mann,” my father said in a hushed tone I had rarely heard from him. We were not religious in my family: at that point I don’t think I had stepped inside a church or a synagogue. Though in a few weeks’ time I was to discover the interior of the great cathedrals of France and England, and the quiet that greeted me there, the lowered voices of my parents as they crossed the threshold, would remind me of the sacred awe that had overcome my father as he spoke of Thomas Mann.

  “He’s a great novelist, perhaps the greatest in the world,” my father whispered. “Do you want to say hello to him?”

  I nodded.

  We went up to him. Thomas Mann was looking forward, in the direction of the Europe where he had been born, to which he was returning for the first time since he had fled the Nazis in 1938. Mann turned from his vision of the homeland that awaited him, scrutinized me intensely, shook my hand. I was unabashed and looked right back. I don’t remember what petty phrases we exchanged, probably about the trip, the weather, some such nonsense. I must have conned him, informing him that my name was Edward—an ironic act in retrospect, given that all too soon the German writer would be laboring away at Felix Krull, Confidence Man, may even have been gathering notes about that profession so akin to writing, there in his stateroom. But it is not primarily the accomplishment of presenting myself to a great man with my new personality that remains with me today.

  I would be mythifying grossly if I stated that our brief and vapid exchange of pleasantries altered my life, disclosed to me in a flash my true calling. It is true that for one intense moment, confronted with the brooding, famous, implausibly eternal bulk of Thomas Mann, I suddenly knew what I wanted in life: to be him, be Thomas Mann. I wanted that power to reach all humanity. I wanted the world to admire me the way they admired him, the way my parents admired me when I came running with my minor artistic wares in search of adoration, the way my parents admired him even if he was not their son.

  Far more essential to my transition to literature, and specific to Thomas Mann’s providential and ultimately evanescent presence on that ship, far more interesting than that accidental flicker of envy at success, was a question, provoked by Mann’s thick, strange accent in English, that I fired at my father as soon as we were out of earshot.

  “In what language does he write?”

  The answer, that Mann’s language was German and that he had continued to produce extraordinary works in his native tongue when he had been forced to flee the Nazis was simple enough and would have meant nothing to me a year before, but I was to return to it often in the following months as I traveled through Europe, rehearsing for that other, longer voyage that I saw coming.

  And when it did arrive, when another ship, three years later, approached the port of Valparaiso, a twelve-year-old boy found himself ready to confront the terrors of Spanish and Latin America, armed with literature as his ultimate defense. It would take me less than a decade to start thinking of myself as a Chilean. The distance that the politics of the Cold War had created inside me would grow into a divorce from North America. But English’s alliance with writing, its merging with literature, that was to be another matter. By the time I disembarked in Chile, English had become the efficient instrument of my intimacy, the inner kingdom I could control, and also the foundation for what I already called my profession, convinced as I was that my place in the world and in history would be determined by the way in which I affected and shaped that language permanently.

  Spanish and history had different plans for me.

  SEVEN

  A CHAPTER DEALING WITH THE DISCOVERY OF DEATH ON SEPTEMBER 13 AND 14, 1973, IN SANTIAGO DE CHILE

  Almost as soon as Allende dies, I begin to run.

  But do I need to? Is this really the only way of saving my life?

  My name is not on the most-wanted list. In the late afternoon of the 11th of September I listen to the names on the radio, the infamous Bando Número Cinco, the men and women who yesterday were Ministers and senators and trade-union presidents and chairmen of the governing parties and today are fugitives and outcasts, who are being asked to give themselves up to the proper authorities or face the consequences. I am at Manuel’s house. We had agreed, with the other members of our Party cell, that this would be the place to gather in an emergency. I made my way here when I realized that I would not be able to make it to La Moneda. Six others turn up. All of us awaiting instructions.

  When our Party contact arrives, he has one word for us from above: Retreat.

  “What does that mean?” we ask him.

  “That means what it means,” he says. We wait for something more. “It means we’re fucked,” he says. “It means we lost. It means we don’t get ourselves killed unless we have to.”

  He reviews the channels through which we will communicate with him, which we have been setting up for the last two months, and promises more information and analysis when it comes. Anything else? “Yes,” he says, “one more thing. The Party says to make sure Ariel is all right, that you can all go home now, except Ariel.”

  There is something perversely satisfying about being singled out. A bit later, however, when the names of the new public enemies of Chile are read out on the radio, it becomes clear that I am not as notorious as I presumed. And along with relief at the fact that nobody is hunting me down at this very moment, I acutely feel the humiliation of being denied the sick mark of distinction that comes from being included among those most wanted by the military Junta, my enemies’ refusal to validate me as a supreme pain in the ass. Years later, when the first prisoners from the Chilean concentration camps were freed and began straggling to Europe, I heard of a similar sort of bizarre masochism: “When we read the list of those who were about to be released,” they told me, “those of us who were favored felt—well, it was shame, a grotesque shame at the fact that we weren’t being kept there for a longer time, that this somehow reflected on our manhood, that the ones who remained behind had suddenly become more legendary and intrepid. We wanted to be the most dangerous. Even if it meant not being free.”

  These men had been imprisoned for three years
without a trial, they had been put in front of mock firing squads, they had been tortured, but they still needed additional proof of how much the fascists hated them—little wonder, then, that I should have desired my selection by the new rulers of Chile as public enemy number one. Though in my case, it was not only a matter of having my revolutionary persona recognized. What Pinochet was in effect refusing me, and thousands and thousands of Allende supporters who were not on the list read over the radio, was the most precious piece of knowledge under a dictatorship: clarity about how much danger you are really in, an answer to that most vital of questions, what to do?

  Should I go home? Proclaim to my neighbors and colleagues that Allende had betrayed us and led us to disaster and that I had learned my lesson and would now work for the greater good of the patria? Maybe the Junta would heed the call of the Church, of the Christian Democrats, to be merciful to the fallen adversaries. Or perhaps it would be better to leave? But why panic? Why remove ourselves from the country out of unfounded dread, do Pinochet’s dirty work for him? Wasn’t this, the gray zone of uncertainty we had been thrust into, already a sign of our enemies’ victory, their ability to force us to internalize their power, bringing them into our minds and houses and beds, wondering who’s next?

  Unless you are on that list, there is no certain answer.

  And so I go on the run. More than from real danger, I run because I need time to figure out if I really am in danger, I run until I can be certain that I don’t need to run anymore.

  The first signals I get will not be promising.

  On the afternoon of September 13, as the curfew is lifted for a few hours, I leave Manuel’s house. It’s not safe for me to stay there anymore, so one of our group, a lab technician whom I will call Alberto, has suggested that I spend the next week at his small apartment with his wife, three kids, and mother-in-law, in the sort of unassuming neighborhood where people mind their own business. Before I leave, Manuel takes me to a nearby house, where there is a phone. I am able, for the first time in two days, to speak to Angelica. She has spent yesterday, her birthday, under curfew, alone with Rodrigo and my parents, unable to leave the house, mourning Allende, fearful for me and all our friends. The city, she tells me, is wild with rumors: factories have been bombed, prisoners are being executed, the embassies are besieged by people seeking asylum. One piece of good news: our own house hasn’t been raided—maybe a sign that they won’t come for me or track us down to my parents’ home. But she really doesn’t know, for once my sorceress wife who seems to fathom the future and see through people and situations as if they were transparent is at a loss. Her best guess is that I’m probably in danger, but we should wait and see.