Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

by Dorfman, Ariel

  With power seemingly within reach, I threw myself into the campaign with an enthusiasm that had even my Marxist father daunted. I organized rallies, helped win back the student federation of our Faculty from the Christian Democrats with a sophisticated publicity strategy (the irony of my using Madison Avenue techniques to serve the revolution was lost on me). I painted walls and made up slogans and shouted myself hoarse in street demonstrations and cajoled undecided voters and registered toothless women to vote and knocked on doors Saturdays and Sundays and went down to Valparaiso to do volunteer work with Angélica and hundreds of other students up in the hills and one day I convinced the great Neruda himself to come to our Faculty to read poetry as a way of protesting the destruction of our propaganda by our rivals and in general made a nuisance of myself. I was everywhere, vociferous, exhorting, convincing, boundless in my energy and my convictions, using to the hilt the traits of a personality formed during my Yankee childhood, my exuberance and exhibitionism contrasting with the modest, over-formal, slightly meek way in which most Chileans acted. Placing at the service of the socialist revolution my obsession with responsibility and individual effort learned in America.

  One day, in late August, a few days before the elections, as I was devising slogans for our Faculty for the upcoming final march of the Allende forces, I had a rude awakening. I opened one of the left-wing newspapers (Ultima Hora, directed by Augusto Olivares, the man who was to become my friend, and my inadvertent savior on the 11 th of September of 1973) and read that Allende had demanded that a Nazi Czech exile (purportedly paid by the CIA), caught illegally intervening in Chilean politics, be immediately expelled from Chile. I showed the news to my mother and chortled: they caught the bastard, out he goes.

  And then the phone rang.

  My mother handed me the receiver, perplexed. “It’s Jorge Ahumada,” she said.

  Jorge Ahumada was the dad of Queno, one of my closest pals, one of the few I had kept from my Grange days. Jorge, a friend of my father’s from the UN, was now Eduardo Frei’s chief economic adivisor.

  “Eddie,” Jorge said, using my Grange-school name, “I’m calling you from the Christian Democratic Party headquarters. I was in the middle of a meeting on economic policy and quite by chance I happened to overhear—just plain luck—that my comrades had found a way of countering the accusations against the Czech exile, by asking the government to expel a young left-wing agitator who’s intervening in our internal affairs. He’s from Argentina. His name’s Vladimiro Dorfman. A Russian-sounding name.”

  He let that sink in. Then he said: “I told them that I’ve known you since you were a boy and I can vouch for you, and they agreed not to proceed. I gave my word that you would cease all political activity right away.” There was a pause. “Are you listening?”

  “Yes, Jorge.”

  “If they so much as take a photograph of you in a march, if they catch you in any sort of public event that has a hint of politics, the next day they’ll plaster your name all over the papers and a day later I won’t be able to stop the police from running you out of Chile. Do you understand?”

  “I understand. And thanks. Thank you, Jorge.”

  I hung up.

  The following days were hell. I had to withdraw from all activities, improvise substitutes, and, worse still, I had to reveal my dirty secret, that I wasn’t really Chilean, that I was Argentinian, I had to see the eyes of my collaborators slant in puzzlement, I had to walk away from them, once again a stranger, left out, rootless. I was so frustrated with my inability to contribute to the upcoming victory I had worked so hard to secure that, like so many Allendistas of the time, I made a wager with a Christian Democrat friend from the neighborhood: if my candidate lost, I would cut off the fledgling scraps of what I took to be my revolutionary beard; and if Allende won, my friend Gastón would jump naked into the fountain in front of La Moneda, braying like a donkey. (He was a prudish sort of guy and must have been convinced that Frei was heading for a landslide.)

  Betting my beard did nothing, however, to assuage my feeling of abandonment, which reached its peak the day the Allende forces set out on their final march. I had waited so long for the relief and reward that marching offered, the excitement of the crowd, the fraternity, the humor, the beauty of the women’s legs and the unfurled, defiant banners, the intermingling of words in the air and words on the signs, the adrenaline of the collective beast. I loved to march because it was the easiest way of abjuring for a couple of hours the curse of individuality, making believe you are not different from everybody else, an almost Nirvana-like boundlessness, all those lives so sure of where they are going and sweeping me along. Or rather: on this occasion, sweeping me into the sawdust of futility. Angélica had offered to stay home with me and miss the march, but I told her to join her classmates, I wanted to go on my own to brood and blame myself. I deserved this punishment. Wasn’t this seclusion, reduced to a pair of lifeless eyes, here, on the sidelines, confused with all these detached, indifferent bystanders, a truer expression of who I was than if I had been in the crowd, dancing and shouting and cavorting and pretending I was Chilean when, in truth, I had not defined this as my country, I had spent my high school years in Chile gazing nostalgically abroad instead of exploring this magnificent collective that was now surging past me on the way to a future that did not include me? Wasn’t I, in effect, a foreigner? And wasn’t I destined to be one forever?

  I was rescued from these harsh thoughts by Taty Allende and her sister, Isabel. The daughters of Salvador Allende were marching past me like ordinary citizens and they recognized me there on the sidewalk, watching them like some sort of crucified scarecrow. They waved, I waved back, and they must have seen something desolate and forsaken in my gesture, because they rushed out of the crowd.

  “Hey, Ariel,” Isabel called. Thank God she didn’t call me Eddie, that she saw me as a Latin American. “You waiting for somebody?”

  “Join us,” Taty said. “Ven.”

  I explained briefly why I couldn’t, glancing nervously over my shoulder as if a horde of imperialist photographers was ready to snap me in this compromising pose, the demonic daughters of Salvador Allende pulling me into the march. I could already visualize some minor functionary inspecting the incriminating evidence with a magnifying glass, reaching out for the expulsion order. I explained why I couldn’t join them.

  “Hijos de puta!”Taty growled.

  They started to go. Their group was a block away. I watched them leave, feeling sorrier for myself than ever. Then I saw Isabel turn, come back. “Tell you what,” she said. “Come to our house tonight, after the march. There’s some work that you can do that won’t put you in any sort of danger.”

  I spent that night and the following nights working at Salvador Allende’s residence till dawn. We were compiling lists of voters that needed help in getting from the district where they lived to the district where they voted. Just a group of young revolutionaries, Taty and Isabel and a couple of their friends and Angélica and I, sprawled on the living-room floor, with a gigantic map of Chile spread before us. I saw Allende himself only once during those few nights. I remember him coming in a bit past midnight, just as September 3 was turning into election day, the fourth. He watched us from the threshold, standing there weary but upright, I see him take off his glasses and rub his eyes and then he smiled at us, his daughters and their friends.

  “¿Qué tal, muchachos?” Allende said. “How’s it going, kids?”

  We murmured something about how great things were and he nodded and came over and looked at the lists and then smiled again, perhaps thinking of his campaign, perhaps thinking that he had been in each of those cities and towns and villages of Chile, that he had been to every corner of this country that he was hoping to govern. Perhaps aware that he was going to lose the election. But he didn’t reveal what he was thinking, just nodded one more time and then bid us good night and went off to sleep.

  We stayed till dawn, preparing what we th
ought would be our victory.

  It didn’t come. Allende lost the election and I lost my beard. On the morning of September 5, 1964, I shaved it off. “I will never grow another beard,” I swore, “until there is socialism in Chile.”

  But I swore something far more important that day as well, something that seemed more within my reach: six years from now, Allende would try again to become President of Chile, and this time nobody in the world would be able to stop me from participating. Next time, I would be a Chilean citizen. I would have a country.

  My naturalization process was not as easy as I thought: it turned out that I had been in Chile all these years on my father’s diplomatic visa, and in order to become a citizen I would have to apply for residency, which meant leaving the country and then coming back on a temporary basis, and even then at least five more years would have to lapse before I could ask for citizenship, and so on and so forth.

  A Christian Democrat had saved me from being expelled from Chile and another Christian Democrat was to rescue me from this legal imbroglio. A friend of Angelica’s mother contacted Bernardo Leighton, Frei’s Minister of Police, who, without asking for anything in return, cut the bureaucratic Gordian knot and gave me my citizenship.

  During the years of exile, Leighton was to be an ally and a friend. He even survived, in Rome, an assassination attempt by Pinochet’s secret police working with the Italian neo-fascists. But at this point I knew him chiefly as the man we had pelted with tomatoes in a student demonstration in 1964. Yes, I had derided the man who would eventually make me a citizen, the man who would open the door of Chile to me and allow me to participate in a revolution that considered him to be its enemy, because, we proclaimed, he was a pawn of the true enemy, the United States of America, in its plan to stop the Latin American revolution.

  In 1961, in answer to Fidel Castro’s revolution, John F. Kennedy had launched the Alliance for Progress, a financial-aid program intended to persuade the republics south of the Rio Grande to adopt reforms that would drain the swamp of social and economic injustice. Three years later, the Alliance seemed to have fizzled pathetically, partly because the local elites were pocketing the money, but mostly because real change would have meant attacking the U.S. stranglehold on the national economies. The Christian Democrats in Chile, however, seemed determined to carry out the program, steering a middle course between Allende’s revolutionary left and the reactionary conservatives of Alessandri. They embraced the Alianza para el Progreso. We jeered back at them that it was in reality the Alianza que para el Progreso, the Alliance that stops progress, another Yankee maneuver to keep Latin America subdued and the people divided.

  By the time of the 1964 campaign, I had begun to demonize the land which I had called my home for so long, I was already blaming it for every evil that befell my newly adopted country and continent.

  And yet I continued writing in English, continued to feel, through the language, a tug of loyalty toward the country where I had learned it, all the time trying to ignore the worm of an idea that would not go away, the voice whispering and twisting in my brain that said that until I severed my relationship with that primary language in which I continued to dream my future, I would never be completely Latin American.

  That was to be the challenge that awaited me in the second half of the sixties.

  But at least now I was not alone.

  I was in love.

  Not a metaphor. Not with a country. Not with a pueblo. Not with the syllables of a tongue created by millions of other tongues.

  I was in love.

  Her name, as the reader knows, was Angelica.

  ELEVEN

  A CHAPTER DEALING WITH THE DISCOVERY OF DEATH OUTSIDE AN EMBASSY IN SANTIAGO DE CHILE IN THE YEAR 1973

  It is late in September.

  You have said goodbye to me, my love, and now you are going down the stairs. Soon the sound of the door to the embassy will be heard closing, your small figure will pass to the other side of the gates, and then you will cross the street. That’s where the two men come up to speak to you. The conversation hardly lasts what it takes for a cigarette to be lit by the shorter man, the one with the checked jacket. The other one looks you in the eyes and your eyes must feel distant and startled. Then they invite you to get into the car. One of them takes your arm, but he does so with discretion, almost courteously. The motor is running, humming like a well-fed cat, but the car will not move. Now you’re getting in, you and the shorter man in back, and the other one in front. His strong, decisive shoulders form a contrast to his apologetic lips, to the thin impoverished wisp of a mustache. It will not be possible to see you. Only, all of a sudden, your hand which accepts a cigarette and then cups the flickering flame of the lighter. Your other hand can be seen only on one occasion, for a moment fluttering on the top of the back seat, fingers that hesitate, the glitter of a wedding ring. Then it withdraws. The man in the front, seated next to the empty driver’s seat, is the one asking the questions. Because the car is parked facing the embassy, his whole body can be seen through the front window. Now, with his left hand, he turns off the engine and pockets the keys. That means they do not plan to leave right away. He will remain half hunched up against the door, one leg raised, the shoe pressing against the upholstery, fingers entwined at the knee. Once in a while, he scratches behind his sock, rubs the skin within the sock. They will not be in a hurry. Children will pass by on bikes, calling each other by the names their parents gave them years ago; the mailman will cross this spring day that seems like summer, bringing news and ads and maybe letters from lost loves; mothers will go for a morning stroll, teaching their kids how to stand on two feet, take a step or two instead of crawling. Now a bird perches itself on the warm roof of the car and, without even a trill, flies off like an arrow. Maybe, inside, you’ve detected that slight presence, that slighter absence, like a leaf that falls from a tree out of season, a bit too late, maybe you’ve understood that a pair of wings opened up and then were gone. The man extracts a small notebook from a pocket in his jacket, and then a pencil. He passes it to you. During the briefest wave of time, your hand can be seen receiving the pencil, the notebook. Then, as if you were not really there in the back seat of the car, that extension of your body disappears and nothing more can be seen. The man tosses his keys up in the air and catches them neatly. He smiles. He points a key at you and says something, it must be a question. Impossible to know what you answer. No passerby hesitates as his shoes shuffle by the car, nobody looks inside. A beggar woman stumbles down the street, a flock of ragtag kids in her wake, she approaches the car to ask for something, and then she’ll back off, half understanding, or not wanting to understand. Now the car window opens and the swarthy face of the shorter man appears, the man who has been sitting next to you. He hasn’t slept much, hasn’t slept well: there are bags under his eyes and his features are puffy. He blinks under that implacable daylight. Then he looks toward the embassy for a moment, giving the windows the once-over to see if there is anyone watching, if there is anyone behind the half-drawn curtains trying to register and remember each movement, each gesture. He stays like that for a good while, motionless, as if he could guess what is happening behind those walls. He takes out a handkerchief and wipes it across his forehead, cleans the sweat off the rest of his face. He needs a shave, he needs to get home for a good shave. Maybe all night while he waited he’s been thinking of a bathtub full of hot water. The air dances with white spores; he blinks heavy eyelids. The breeze has begun falling asleep under the spell of the day’s heat. He emerges from the car quickly. A stream of sunlight slides down his body. Now he gets back into the car, into the driver’s seat. He holds his hand out so the other man can give him the keys. The sound of the back door that opened and closed, the front door that opened and closed, does not disturb the quiet. It’s almost like the sound of harmony, sweet metal. The car revs up, passes the house, passes the curtained windows, for an eternal white instant your petite face can be seen, the way the sho
ulders breathe, the dress which presses to your body like the skin of a lover. You pass like a body of lightning that will never end, like a birth that will never end, you will pass without looking toward the house, your face will pass, your eyes sinking into the abrupt horizon of the street which connects with other streets. But they will not take you away. Now the car brakes a bit farther on, under the generous shade of that tree you have come to know so well, that you have heard moaning and dancing its branches under the weight of the wind last night, it brakes half a block from the house. All that can be seen is the back of the car, and in a hollow opened by the leaves gently swaying in the rays of this spring that has quickened into summer, a blur of color that could be your hair or the neck trembling behind your hair or the stubborn flurry of your head under your hair. If it were not for the leisurely, merciless progress of the minute hand on your wristwatch, where the slow blood inside your arm finds and flows along with the mysterious blood inside your hand, if it were not for the imperceptible rotation of this planet, it might be thought that time had stagnated, that all movement is paralyzed, that silence is definitive, and that you will stay there forever, you, the men, the car, the street. No beggar will pass. The mailman will not come back again. The children will have put away their bicycles to go eat lunch. When the sun begins again to invade the top of the car, when midday has finally come to an end and the afternoon has finally begun, when once more the intolerable heat forces the driver to seek another refuge, nothing in the world will be able to stop, neither the buzzing of bees nor the cheerful yellow burst of the flowers, nothing can stop that engine from starting up again, that car from inching away from the curb, and this time it will not pause under the shade or in the sun, this time the car will go on and on and on, nothing can stop it from losing itself there, far away down the street which connects with other streets, taking you to that place from where you will never return.