Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

by Dorfman, Ariel

  But could it bring together my confused dual life?

  Could my writing in English make sense of this journey of identity into Latin America that was, of course, being carried out, primarily, in Spanish?

  Incredibly, my delusionary answer back then was that yes, it could.

  A delusion that was nourished paradoxically by the success that Latin American literature was having abroad. The outstanding talent of the “Boom” authors, combined with a smart marketing campaign, took Europe and the United States by storm in the 1960s. One part of me felt pride: we might not be able to compete with developed nations economically and we were for the moment—with the exception, we thought, of Cuba, ignoring that island’s increasing dependence on the Soviet Union—politically subordinate to their whims; but that did not mean we could not outshine them culturally, establish this one area of accomplishment where we were not behind but ahead. Another part of me felt, well, I suppose envy would be the best word: my Latin American masters had elbowed their way into those prestigious foreign peaks that I aspired to, that my writing sought to reach, and they had done so using the Spanish I still refused to consider the language of my literary destiny. But instead of taking that success as proof that if I wanted to be universally recognized, Spanish was as advantageous an instrument as English, I construed the whole phenomenon quite differently. These were the facts: there existed, for the first time in the history of Latin America, a literature that could speak to its own readers while simultaneously appealing to a vast public abroad, and this literary movement asserted that in order to be Latin American you did not have to reject the international. I interpreted these facts as a green light for my bizarre experiment, the peculiar way in which I combined the native and the foreign, the national and the transcultural, the Spanish everyday experience and the English reelaboration at night. I thought that I could become the first Latin American writer to address the United States and Europe directly in English, without any need of translation.

  Perhaps that was the ultimate attraction of the United States for me, the one place in the world where the boy I still had inside me whispering in English could meet on equal terms the adult breathing in Spanish, the one place where I would be able to test one against the other, measure how much, how irrevocably, if at all, I had changed.

  And the one place that was willing to pay for this eccentric personal odyssey.

  Nor was this merely a matter of finding my self existentially. It was a voyage that also responded to other needs, of a more material kind. Angélica and I had married tempestuously in early 1966 and a few months later she was happily pregnant—though our joy was constrained by our financial difficulties. No matter how much I worked like a madman at a plurality of jobs, I could not scramble together enough money to rent a house of our own. We ended up uneasily living with my parents. To make matters worse, my chief source of income, my job as literary critic and reviewer at Ercilla, dried up a few months before the baby was due. The owner of the magazine had censored an interview with Nicolás Guillén, Cuba’s greatest poet (he had ripped the page from the hands of the Linotype operator, vowing that no fucking nigger Communist Cuban would be interviewed while he was paying the bills), and I had resigned. When soon afterwards the possibility of finishing a book on Latin American literature at the University of California came up, I saw that as a miraculous opportunity to solve our financial—and my cultural—dilemmas, even if it meant obeying the same historical law of the brain drain that had begun luring minds up from the South since the time my father had won his Guggenheim and that in theory I deplored. Like him, I headed for the States because there was no place else that wanted me.

  Besides, I told myself, trying to wave away my discomfort at a trip that was so inconsistent with my professed beliefs, hadn’t Adorno written that if you wanted to understand where the world was headed you had to visit the center of imperial power? And had not Marti himself stated that you only understood the beast from its belly, that you had to be swallowed by the Leviathan to slay it? And wasn’t that Leviathan being corroded from the inside by our allies, the anti-war movement, the black liberationists, the chicanos, the thousands of Americans who sympathized with the revolution, wasn’t it important to visit them?

  In effect, I had stayed in touch with this contentious version of America even as I had become more and more Latin American, I had thrilled as that America the truly beautiful flexed its muscles and spilled blood in Selma and Montgomery and forced its South to desegregate, I had watched it march on Washington with Martin Luther King, galvanize the ghettos with Malcolm X, organize the farm workers and boycott the grapes with César Chavez, I had applauded from Santiago as it spilled into the streets to stop the war in Vietnam, I followed closely the growth of a movement that questioned not only America’s government but its life-style, I had shadowed from afar its intellectual contest of power and enjoyed the Beats and Arthur Penn and Janis Joplin.

  And that process made me wonder if perhaps I was not that crazy all these years to persist in writing in the language that had rescued me as a child, maybe back in that country I had considered home for so long there were people—readers, by God!—who were beginning to be as politically aware as I was and also happened to speak and eat and write in English. Maybe I was not as isolated as I thought, maybe there was an audience for what I had been writing all these years, an audience that had been waiting for me with the same loyalty I had shown toward the English language. I fantasized about crossing the Bay Bridge to San Francisco and wandering into a bar not far from the City Lights bookstore to talk all night about race relations in America and about Buddhism and about Walt Whitman and about the bomb and show somebody, anybody, what I had scribbled ten thousand miles away.

  And so, carrying all these conflicting reasons and desires and fears as my essential baggage, the sort of contraband you do not declare at customs, so secret that you hardly dare admit it to yourself, I boarded a plane to the United States of America with my young wife and our baby son, and twelve hours later arrived in the country of my childhood dreams.

  History was ready to play one more trick on me.

  Of all the years I could have chosen to try to find out how American I still was, I chose the year 1968.

  And of all the places, Berkeley chose me.

  Welcome home, Vlady. Or is it Eddie? Or are you really Ariel?

  Whoever you are and whatever your name is, you’re in for one heck of a surprise.

  I had been gone for fourteen years.

  THIRTEEN

  A CHAPTER DEALING WITH THE DISCOVERY OF DEATH INSIDE AN EMBASSY IN OCTOBER OF 1973, IN SANTIAGO DE CHILE

  So here I am, when all is said and done, in this building that most of the people, peasants and workers whose lives I have sworn to join, here I am in this embassy that most of those people do not even imagine exists, here I am on this piece of territory that is legally considered Argentina, here I am, returned to the protection of the country where I was born, caught in the vicious, saving circle of my origin, here I am with no place to go but back to Buenos Aires.

  I know my escape is justified, I know that there was no alternative, but I feel demeaned here, with the innumerable other refugees who have fled to this embassy, I have been stripped naked by the fear that I share with them, humiliated for all the world to see, suddenly homeless, my commitment to the revolution less important than my love of life.

  It is here that I meet, face-to-face, the first torture victims of my life. During the last weeks, the rumors have reached me, they say that … , you know what they’re doing in the Estadio, have you heard what happened to … but it was all hear this and hear that and hearsay. Now, a few hours after I manage to be smuggled into the embassy, they are there, these men who have been laid out on a table, stripped naked, not metaphorically as I have, but in the cold reality of a room that smells of piss and vomit and sweat, and their genitals have been connected to a clamp and a hand has pulled a switch, and they are fortunate to have
escaped that room and find themselves here, shivering in the sweet October sun of Chile, shivering under a blanket, staring into nothingness, their lips twitching, trying to smile back at me, at anybody who approaches, cringing suddenly, crying out in their nights as we all try to sleep in an air thick with the breathing and the farts and the sighs of almost a thousand people laid out side by side in the great ballroom of the embassy, where only a month ago tuxedoed men leaned forward to murmur compliments to women in long, shuffling dresses, where one of the fugitives himself, Allende’s Secretary of the Treasury, sipped a cocktail next to this very piano under which he now tosses and turns, trying to get some rest.

  I do not have a blanket. By the time I arrived, it was too late: they had all been handed out to the over nine hundred people who had rushed here before me, and the sadistic charge d’affaires of the embassy, a tall, flint-eyed man called Neumann, whom we all suspect of Nazi sympathies, has informed the refugees that there is no item in the budget to cover additional blankets. So a friend, known as El Gitano, shares his with me. He is a singer and for the last two years in all our gatherings we have belted out his most famous song, “Ha llegado aquel famoso tiempo de vivir”—It’s come, that much-awaited time to start living—and now that his song has proven to be less a prophecy than a wish, he keeps me warm at night with half his blanket.

  I like not having a blanket. It tells everyone that I did not dash to this embassy, it hints to those who came before me that for a few weeks I had stupidly and perhaps even courageously tried to get myself killed.

  My unshielded existence is a way of warding off the guilt of having survived, a way of dealing with my decision to go into exile which will remain with me for many, many years, which will really disappear the day fourteen years from now when, with my eight-year-old son Joaquín, I am arrested at the airport in Santiago and deported, when with that violence done to me I can finally, masochistically, feel that I have paid my dues. But here in this embassy it’s a way of hurting myself because the Junta hasn’t hurt me enough, hasn’t hurt me as it is hurting those who remain on the outside of this sanctuary.

  I am not to be left in this state of blanketless distinction for long. Some days after I arrive, I am walking in the large garden enjoying the afternoon sun. I have been told to stay away from the eight-foot walls that surround us, but I cannot help it. I am fascinated by the proximity of Chile, just outside, the bustle of the city which I cannot see from here but which I can hear, the sudden singsong conversation of a child and his mother, the throttle of a micro changing gears, a man who sharpens knives trundling his cart there on the streets of Santiago, calling out his services.

  Suddenly a bundle falls at my feet. For a moment I can’t tell where it comes from, but now I see two hands grip the top of the wall—only the fingers, whitened with the effort. Somebody is trying to climb over the wall into the embassy! But now two shots ring out and—no scream, no shout, not even a grunt—just a sort of dull thud on the other side. The police have just killed the man. Why did I imagine it was a man, why have I never pictured a woman? Why did I think he had been killed and not merely wounded or simply stopped in his tracks by the shots? I am cut off from that world out there, at the mercy of my imagination.

  In the bundle I find a blanket and a sleeping bag. No passport, no identification papers, nothing to let me know who has offered me these gifts. Because they are gifts. The tragedy of this victim will mean warmer nights for me—and less lonely days, because I will turn the blanket, Linus-like, into an inseparable companion. Whenever I picture myself roaming those halls where Argentine diplomats had hosted the national and international glitterati, I automatically see the blanket of the failed seeker of asylum wrapped comfortingly around my shoulders.

  The real blanket that protects us, of course, is the embassy itself. The distance between security and death at this point is a trifling few feet, the negligible distance between fingers reaching out for a wall in despair and eyes that helplessly see those fingers torn from the wall, to be buried or broken, eyes that swear never to forget. Soon enough another sort of distance, another sort of helplessness, will put those eyes to the test: I know that these eyes of mine will travel far away, into the remote haven of foreign lands, the ultimate blanket and immunity that the embassy foretells.

  I am already starting to learn the rules that govern the loss of a land. I am already starting to realize that my existence will be like that of all exiles who survive, like the multitude of Latin American exiles around me in the embassy, who came to Chile from their own frustrated revolutions, who have already lived the future that awaits me, all of us mercilessly defined by those who remain behind, our existence contrasted to that of those who did not or could not flee, our existence justified by the help we can bring to those who died in our stead yesterday or who risk death in our stead tomorrow. Exiles are haunted by the fingers grasping at a wall, grasping at a distance that has become immense and almost insurmountable.

  That distance allowed me to bear witness to the outrage being perpetrated back home; indeed, demanded that I carry out that task. And yet, from the moment of departure, that witnessing would inevitably be indirect. Even before I depart, the embassy wall has insulated me from the person who was trying to escape. I cannot say who he was, what was his fate, how it was that he came to throw his bundle over the wall. Later, as the space grows, as miles and time zones separate me from the Chile where men reach a wall and then die before they can jump over it, I will have contact only through newspaper articles, letters, cassettes, a fleeting photo, a guarded voice on the phone, stories murmured by the newest refugees or released prisoners or, eventually, friends who come to visit, everything far, lived and told by someone else. This is one of the great paradoxes of exile: the sanctuary I have found, the very sanctuary that guarantees that a voice has survived, simultaneously cuts that voice off from direct access to the land it is responsible for keeping alive, the land that demands to be transmitted to others.

  But you do what you can.

  And now, more than twenty years later, I tell the story of the blanket that someone I never saw sent me as if from heaven. I tell his story even if I will never know what became of him. I tell his story because it is the only way I can thank him for keeping me warm, the only way I can mourn him and keep him alive, send him this blanket of words that cannot save him from whatever happened, what already happened to him and to me so long ago.

  FOURTEEN

  A CHAPTER DEALING WITH THE DISCOVERY OF LIFE AND LANGUAGE DURING THE YEARS 1968 TO 1970, IN BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA

  I saw my first real live hippies the afternoon we arrived in Berkeley. We’d gone out, the three of us, Angélica and Rodrigo and I, into the crisp sunny breeze of the Bay Area and there, on Shattuck, in front of Oscar’s Hamburgers, were two flower children. Or maybe flower adults would be a better term, because they were in their mid-twenties, about my age. But they had the proverbial flower in their hair and had, as well, all the other accoutrements that hippies were supposed to possess according to what we had gleaned from news photos and films and songs—almost a caricature, in fact. She had a long, flowing gypsy dress of the sort you buy in secondhand thrift stores and was covered with jangles and baubles, and he had ripped jeans and an open shirt like a pirate’s and skin so white it could have been used in a deodorant ad, and a cascade of golden hair fell down both their backs toward feet which were shoeless. He was finishing up a song on his harmonica and she was swaying to it gently, dancing in those bare feet as if she were a spirit in a meadow, oblivious of the hard pavement of California or the nearby cries of a fat newspaper vendor hawking the Berkeley Barb, almost as if the nearby traffic spit-full of people hurrying to their jobs did not exist. They smelled of incense and oranges mixed in with another pungent odor I could not identify, but which would turn out to be marijuana.

  We stopped in front of them, tarried there awhile, all three of us, drinking in the joy of that man and that woman at being alive, the calm ple
asure they took in their bodies, serene and radiant in the midst of their idleness, greeting us, so recently arrived on these shores, making us feel that we somehow fit into this foreign afternoon and its waning sun. The girl arched her back like a wild sexual Botticelli Madonna and still without opening her eyes smiled at the harmonica player, at his soft beard and his forgiving Jesus Christ face—both of them belying the description that Ronald Reagan, Republican Governor of California, had disparagingly given of a hippie as “someone who dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.” What had probably provoked his remark was not their appearance as much as their rejection of the American dream. If they chose, they could have been one of those Bay Area couples driving a car from work, they could be managing Oscar’s Hamburgers, they could be planning new outlets for those hamburgers all over the nation, they could be doing the sort of post-graduate work that I had come to do at the University of California, writing a book or listing one more essay on their resume, but they had turned their backs on a life of affluence and worry and grind, they had rejected the suburban America of lawns and quiz shows, the get-up-and-go American freeways and the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses’ washing machine. They didn’t want to be imprisoned in objects or the money and the workload and the life-style these objects entailed. They had dropped out, tuned out, let it all hang out—out, out, out, they were far out, outside society and its norms, outcasts with no desire to be allowed back in or to assume responsibility in it or even think of taking political power.

  And then the man took his lips off the harmonica and began to sing the words to the melody he had been playing, Bob Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man, and that song I had never heard before pierced me with its melancholy twang, it reached right into me like a gentle claw and twisted at my heart, that voice called out to Mr. Tambourine man to “sing a song for me / I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to.” Without warning, I found myself adrift in that music, returned for a moment to the many years in my wandering life when I had been unanchored, I was the one asking Mr. Tambourine Man, I was the one who did not know where he was going, and in the midst of a deep sorrow there surged an astonishing pang of desire, I could feel the unbridled freedom of the lives of that man and that woman, that Jesus and that Madonna calling to me, asking me to hang out with them, explore with them their own quest for identity, I could feel them offering their lives and bodies like a bridge to a land I had always wanted to visit, I felt something stir deep in me and that something must have been the American part of me which I had thought I had suppressed and supplanted but which was still there, which knew who these people were and understood where they were coming from and how they had got there. For an impossible instant, something in me and in them whispered to me, invited me to join them on their quest.