Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

by Dorfman, Ariel

  Nor was it an ordinary form of repression that was being exercised against us that day in 1965 in front of the embassy. Along with the new teargas and the new vehicles with their resplendent water cannons, the police put into practice unprecedented and precise crowd-control tactics. Until then, brutality by the state in Chile had always been haphazard. This was different, we sensed: systematic, planned, scientific. The first step, we realized later, much later, when it was too late, in the modernization of repression: we might be backward in our economic structure and our old-fashioned social habits, but in this one area Latin America was rushing into the future ahead of everybody else, a future we caught a quick glimpse of right there, that day.

  I remember how, when our protest was quickly broken up, the crowd scattered and I grabbed Angelica’s hand and we ran off across the Parque Forestal toward the habitual safety of the river. We had resorted to the same maneuver dozens of times: the police attacked, we dispersed, we regrouped, they attacked again and then we all went home. But not this time: a black-and-white police van veered wildly onto the lawn and started to chase us through the gardens. We stopped behind a hundred-year-old tree and the truck roared past us, only to brake abruptly and hurtle back. We got out of the way just as it rammed the tree. The tree shook with the impact and I could feel the template of Angelica’s body quivering against mine. The truck screeched into reverse, throttled past, and turned once more to try to pin us down. Another ramming. This time, though, several burly policemen jumped out of the back of the van swinging their nightsticks—and we were on the run again. We finally reached a bridge that crossed the Mapocho and managed to find refuge, breathless and aghast, in a friend’s nearby studio, cursing Johnson and his aid program.

  But along with this anger directed at the Americans who had provided the training that had almost crippled us, I also felt justified in having broken all contact with the United States; indeed, I felt that my public stance had been resoundingly vindicated. My outrage at the violation by Marines of Latin American soil had not only been expressed in the streets: a few days before our protest in front of the embassy, in fact as soon as I heard of the invasion of Santo Domingo, I had furiously fired off a letter to the Cultural Attache, which the other professors subscribed to, proclaiming that we would not sit down to lunch or to dinner or to breakfast or to tea with Ned O’Gorman or any other person brought to Chile with U.S. funds, nor would we attend any other embassy activities—until Lyndon Johnson withdrew his troops. Cultural interchange between the Americas was unthinkable while the Armed Forces of the U.S. were violating our brothers’ territory and lives.

  That letter, need I add, was completely ineffective. It was aimed at President Johnson and instead squarely hit poor Ned O’Gorman, who had been looking forward for years to this tour of Latin America and was now munching a solitary lunch inside the embassy grounds, hearing the anti-imperialist chants of the multitude and the thwack of stones against the walls, and the screams of Chilean would-be poets being clubbed by the police. If I mention this letter at all, it is because it marks the first time I had personally stepped forward openly to proclaim my anti-Americanism. Not that I hadn’t participated in a good share of protests against U.S interventions around the world, but I had always been lost in the crowd. Now I had gone public, put myself in the limelight. I even deliriously imagined that somewhere in Langley a file was being opened at the Central Intelligence Agency under my name, right next to the voluminous pages filled with innocuous data about my father.

  I thought I would never be able to come anywhere near United States territory again.

  I was wrong. The CIA had bigger fish to fry, and as for me, that letter—for all its pledges of integrity—did not stop me, less than two years later, from applying for a one-year grant from the Universidad de Chile—University of California exchange program, nor, when I was selected, did it keep me from going into the very building I had refused to enter for lunch to submit to fingerprinting and to being photographed for a visa and thereafter to travel in 1968 with Angélica and Rodrigo to the country I had vilified, in order to engage in the very cultural interchange that I had pronounced as unconscionable.

  I should have suspected that it would end up like that. After all, back in 1965, even as I stridently denounced the mere possibility of a dialogue with the States, I was in fact engaging in one, through that incendiary letter breaking relations. Instead of forcing the Cultural Attache and the mythical CIA to translate my sovereign Spanish words, instead of establishing my Latin American cultural autonomy, I sat down at my desk and automatically reached out for the personal and intimate language I shared with the attache and the Marines and the CIA operatives as well as Updike and Baldwin and Bellow and Flannery O’Connor and a hundred others in my library, and which I did not share with the protesters on the street.

  The very fact that I felt the need to show off my linguistic fireworks to the only people who could appreciate them—even if it was to insult them and even if they were my political enemies—conveys how isolated I felt my literary language to be, my lack of a wider audience with whom to elegantly communicate in English. My parents diligently read my stories and poetry and my metaphysical plays and dutifully found them wonderful, and Angélica was also supportive. She had been majoring in English at my university when I met her (which is in itself significant, that of all the possible Chilean women, I should have fallen in love with one who was planning to make English her profession), but her language skills had not developed to the point where she could deal with my overly elaborate and hermetic texts. A couple of friends at the university read English well enough to offer faint praise and fainter criticism, but their hearts weren’t in it. Too much was going on in Spanish in the world we inhabited to waste time discussing work that seemed so removed from our everyday circumstances.

  It would be misleading, nevertheless, to state that English was merely my private kingdom at a time of intense public engagement in Spanish, a space of reflection and repose segregated from the uncertain daily pandemonium of a Latin America on the road to revolution. It was also a way of making a living, an advantage in the marketing of myself. At the very time when I was shouting obscenities in Spanish at the Americans who had dared to encroach on the sacred soil of Latin America, I was working on what were to be my first major works of criticism, both rooted in my knowledge of English: a thesis on Shakespeare’s pastoral comedies, and a book on Harold Pinter’s Theatre of the Absurd. And the fact that I could read English (and had a father willing to import all the books and magazines from abroad that I desired) plugged me into the latest developments in literature, philosophy, history, theory, criticism, years before most people in Chile heard of it—an up-to-datedness that, by the way, landed me a job at Ercilla, Chile’s most prestigious magazine, though it undoubtedly helped that Angelica’s father was the editor in chief when I was invited to contribute. My income from the puny assistantships in Spanish and Spanish-American literature that I held in the mid-sixties was supplemented by classes I taught in English poetry and American fiction in our Faculty. And I worked with students of all kinds in the practice of the English language, along with regular classes at the School of Psychology, and remedial lessons to laggard high-school truants, as well as private lessons to young widows and recalcitrant children. I might find it politically suspect that English was expanding imperially around the world, but this did not impede me from using it to keep bread on the table.

  Or dance to it.

  The night after dozens of my friends joined me in cursing Johnson in Spanish for his intervention in Santo Domingo, we all reconvened in my parents’ house to celebrate my birthday with a wild rock ‘n’ roll party where all the songs that electrified our bodies were sung in the language in which I had just written that letter, the language that many of the young Latin-American macho revolutionaries were using to warm up their lady loves and convince them to spend the night together, as the Rolling Stones would soon urge, or to do it on the road,
in the immortal words of Lennon and company. English was being transformed into the lingua franca of McLuhan’s global village and it would not have been easy to escape it even if I had so desired.

  But I didn’t so desire. At a time when I was throwing everything else in my life into the frantic public caldron of Latin America and remaking it at a furious pace, keeping my receding English intact was a way of secreting some private part of my past and person away from the overly political world I inhabited, my way of recognizing that not everything can be reduced to partisan ideological conflict. Maybe I needed one unchanging island of identity that, as I transmogrified myself into a Latin American, linked me to the gringo I had once been.

  If I managed to accommodate these blatant contradictions, my private English-language self and my gesticulating public Spanish-American persona, my vanguard writings in the language of Richard Nixon and my revolutionary speechifying in the language of Che Guevara, if I managed to keep both these psyches side by side in relative harmony, it was because I had discovered a strange justification for my schizoid conduct in—well, in the history of Latin America as it searched for a language with which to express its hybridity.

  I knew that there was something monstrous in the way I was becoming Latin American without fully divorcing myself from the United States, the back and forth in my mind as I delved deeper into Chile, the painstaking digging of ditches in a población one afternoon to build a playground for poor kids and the even more painstaking quest that same evening in the luxury of my room, probing for the right adjective I recalled from some poem by Wordsworth or Dickinson. There was something monstrous and bizarre and twisted in my journey. But wasn’t that also the story of Latin America, what it had baroquely permitted, admitted, submitted, remitted since its origins?

  It was, in fact, in those origins that I found a key image that was to accompany me all through the sixties as I intellectually worked out my uneasy halfway relationship with the two continents I straddled.

  I became fascinated with the moment in history when other explorers such as myself had come upon this land and translated it for the first time into a Western language and for a Western gaze. The seminal text for me had been written at the beginning of the sixteenth century by a Spanish colonizer called Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. The book was the Sumario de la Historia Natural de las Indias, and in it Oviedo tried to describe the New World to his faraway compatriots and, specifically, to the King of Spain. One of the first attempts to transfer into words what the sword had subjugated in a place not yet called America.

  The chapter that caught my eye dealt with Oviedo’s struggle to translate to his European counterparts the tigre americano, an inadequate term, he said, because the etymology of tigre referred to an arrow and to speed, whereas this never before seen creature he was attempting to transmit was slow. And Oviedo went on to compare the New and Old World animals, reluctantly concluding that he could not really name the American tigre. It escaped his linguistic snares, he could not domesticate it, classify it, make it part of his system: it kept slipping away from Europe, did not fit into the preexisting rational order of the universe. And Oviedo ends with a warning: on a visit to Toledo, he had seen one of those so-called tigres on a leash in His Majesty’s gardens and it was being treated with far more familiarity than was prudent, so that he was not surprised later when he heard that the beast had one day gone wild and its captors had been forced to kill it. The sword intervening again, I thought to myself as I puzzled ominously over the text more than four hundred years later, the sword putting to rest and to death the unsettling barbarian reality that language had failed to seize and fix and understand Latin America, I said to myself, savaged from abroad, resistant, unpredictable.

  Though my sympathies were with the tigre, stolen from its home, shipped thousands of miles away to be paraded in front of uncomprehending European eyes and trying to communicate, ultimately, through those eyes with the only weapon left to it, its own evasion through death of the categories in which the invader had been trying to trap it, I could also discern, stirring in me, Oviedo’s fascination with the power and vibrancy of what he had witnessed and what his compatriots back in Spain could not begin to verbalize. I could see how he had been seduced by his new home and admired even its danger, how he had begun to feel, opening under his feet, an abyss of distance separating him from Europe which made him into something other, wrenchingly like the very tigre he wanted to net and carry off. And if he was beginning to grasp that he was an Indiano, a man of the Indies, that this was his home, then he was as much a Latin American as the elusive tigre. So maybe Latin America was both of them, or neither, or rather the fantastic composite that had come out of their clash, the irreconcilable tension between the nature of the New World and the linguistic and cultural drive of the Old World to capture that nature and remake it in its own paternal image, the dissonant gap between a savage reality and a supposedly civilized language that never managed totally to bag and apprehend it.

  And through the centuries the pursuit of meaning continued, this world which now beckoned to me had given itself a history and a literature and a people that were in fact too vast and variegated to fit in a name. Every definition was incomplete and incoherent: Latino was a term imported from France that did not even pretend to include the multiple non-European races which were mixed into the bloodstream and the culture; Hispanic was based on language and excluded Brazil and the multiple tongues of the Antilles and, of course, the Indians; Indo-American did not even try to register the millions of enslaved blacks who called this their home; South did not include Mexico and all of Central America; and so on. But that was the real meaning of the continent, the condition for its existence, I thought, quoting Sartre and the existentialists, who were the rage at the time: it did not have an essence; it exasperatingly escaped all definitions and furiously demanded more visions, more communication. Simultaneously colonized and rebellious, it had a history that was never sufficiently autonomous of foreign forces to be really free but also never so submissive and subordinate as to be blotted out, so that the struggle itself for a story that made sense ended up being the sole defining element, its heart.

  It was this imagination that captured me both as tigre and as incessant translator, that sucked me into its whirlwind. Of course the voyages of the imagination were supplemented by an exploration of real space: hitchhiking to Machu Picchu and working my way down to Tierra del Fuego and smelling the burnt smoke of the sugar plantations of Tucumán and letting myself be overwhelmed by the eternal cataracts of Iguazú and above all by Chile, with its abandoned nitrate ghost towns in the north and its emerald-green rivers dashing against white rocks beneath the volcanoes of the south. At every turn, it seemed, there was someone to greet me: the Indians in Lake Titicaca holding on to their Quechua language almost half a millennium after the conquest, and the miners who took me down the shaft in Curanilahue, telling me how they waited for the haunted subterranean hiss of the grisú that comes when the mine is about to collapse, and landless migrant workers who took to the road and could not read but had learned Latin America with their hands and their backs in a way that my many books could not begin to fathom. I met an explosion of human beings on the move, ardent poets and philosophers in a bar in Lima who would someday become the gurus of the terrorist organization Sendero Luminoso and a slick black con man in a shantytown in Montevideo who tricked me out of my watch and a fisherman who gave me shelter on a stormy night on the island of Chiloe and told me tales of the imbunches who kidnap children and sew their eyelids and mouths and ears shut. Nothing binds you as much to a land as to fall in love with its inhabitants. But let me qualify that: nothing bound me to Latin America as much as the extraordinary renaissance of literature that coincided with my journeys and gave them a frame of reference. That space I crossed and those people I touched were seen by me through the prism of visions and words that existed in an intellectual adventure that had anticipated them, made them significant, captured
them with a success that had eluded Oviedo as he pursued the tigre, the coming of age, I thought, of a continent where culture was starting to be synchronous with the social and political body.

  It was a giddy time to be alive for anyone who believed as deeply as I did in the power of words, that novels and poems and stories should not be separate from life. Relevant and urgent and provocative, these cultural offerings from Latin America immediately resonated in everything I did and saw, accompanying the surge of energy and joy and doubts of millions on the move, naming the continent that I could not yet name myself, liberating the territory of the imagination as a way of paving the way for the liberation of the real space and the real inhabitants of that territory. Latin America, I felt, could solve the dilemma of the modern artist, merge the intellectual and the social, the vanguard and the masses, the heroism of the writer and the heroism of the people.

  It was a time when I lived in wait for the next book, which was going to answer the questions I was grappling with, the next Cortazar or Garcia Márquez or Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, or the verses of Parra, Gelman, Dalton, Mistral.

  I was not alone in being captivated by this illusion that our literature would make us free. An elite generation of young, educated Latin Americans who were themselves at the crossroads of their identity recognized their image in that vanguard language of experimentation and socially conscious concerns, that meeting place of the metaphysical and the social, the fantastical and the documentary, a literature that, like the reality of the continent itself, jumbled together in uneasy coexistence the modern and the pre-modern and the primitive.