Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

by Dorfman, Ariel

  I could hesitate no longer.

  I picked up the phone and called my friend Antonio Skármeta (readers might recognize him as the writer whose novel inspired the prize-winning film Il Postino). He had been trying to convince me for months to join the MAPU, a party which had split off from the Christian Democrats and which purportedly combined the discipline of the Communists (without their dogmatic Stalinism) and the freedom of the socialists (without their chaotic factionalism), a young movement that was somewhere between the Old and the New Left, just about where I felt myself to be. Besides, I liked the name: it was an acronym for the Movimiento de Accion Popular Unitaria and also the Mapuche Indian word for land. Another way of making myself appear more authentic and indigenous than I could ever really be.

  I told Antonio: Aquí estoy. Espero órdenes. Here I am, awaiting orders. A soldier of la revolución.

  Thinking to myself with melodramatic seriousness: ready to die, so death will not rule over us.

  Antonio told me to wait for instructions. And as I hung up the phone, the same phone on which I had heard Jorge Ahumada six years before tell me that I could under no circumstance participate in Chilean politics, I knew that I had crossed into a dimension from which there was no return, that I had conquered the fear of changing myself and was finally ready for the jubilant adventure of changing the world.

  It is true that at that point I did not, and would not until the coup, really comprehend what death meant. But I did understand that a war is carried on with soldiers. Soldier: miles, militis in Latin, the origin of militant, a soldier of the revolution, somebody who defines his life not by the cultivation of the self but by the willingness to give that self up for the common good.

  Where are you from?

  More than half a century before, my grandparents had crossed the ocean in search of a land of equality and justice where their children could live in peace. Those children, my parents, had been forced into exile and the link had been broken. And now, after a lifetime of vacillation, I was finally ready to reconnect to that dream of my immigrant ancestors, make this place my home, fight for it.

  Strange that it should be the America of the North which I had just severed ties with that would thwart my decision to return to the America of the South which my grandparents had chosen as their New World. Strange that at the very moment when I was reinventing myself as a pioneer for whom what matters is the future and not the accident of birth or landscape, on the other side of the hemisphere Richard Nixon, the President of a land settled by pioneers, a man whose power derived, as Allende’s did, from the free votes of his people, was meeting with his security advisors and with the heads of ITT, planning the death of the Chilean democratic revolution.

  Many years before, as an aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy, Nixon had been instrumental in my family’s flight from the United States. Now he would cause me to lose the country we had escaped to, he would cause me to lose my country for a second time.

  But not before we put up one hell of a fight.

  FIFTEEN

  A CHAPTER DEALING WITH THE DISCOVERY OF DEATH INSIDE AND OUTSIDE AN EMBASSY IN SANTIAGO DE CHILE IN EARLY NOVEMBER OF 1973

  The woman from the United Nations clears her throat, barely throws a glance at me sitting across from her at a resplendent antique table in the Argentine Embassy, and proceeds to read from the UN statute of 1951. A refugee, she drones, is any person who, “owing to well-found fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, nationality, membership of a particular group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.”

  She looks up briefly. “Is that understood?”

  I nod, saying nothing. What is there to understand?

  “What I’m asking”—she enunciates each word in Spanish as if explaining something to a baby, just today she had read the same paragraph to others in this embassy, she has made a career out of reading it out loud—“what I need to know is if you intend to avail yourself of refugee status.”

  Again, a split second to decide. Not who I am, but who I intend to be. Undoubtedly I was that person, I had that fear, the country that did not want to give me a passport or a safe-conduct was Chile. The woman from the UN dryly delineates the advantages of being a refugee: training and job placement, language courses in the country of asylum, preferred housing, free medical attention, social security, no need to renew visa approval each year from the local immigration authorities. Well?

  I hear myself saying no, I see the surprise in the woman as her head startles upward and, for the first time, she looks at me as if I were somebody different, somebody distinct, somebody real.

  Perhaps that is why I have refused to be classified as a refugee: so that people like her, so people in the outside world, will recognize me as an individual and not part of the helpless masses that flood the newsreels and the TV screens and appear in photos in far too many books and newspapers, overwhelmed by forces outside their control that they do not seem to comprehend. Inside me, milling around inside, are the Jews during and after Hitler, the Palestinians that those Jews displaced, the endless straggling lines from Pakistan and Biafra and Southeast Asia moving across frontiers and rivers and time, holding on to their suffering as if it were their only identity, their sole weapon. When the woman from the UN had said the word refugee, that is what came to mind: the camps in which people without a country stagnate amid the filth and the flies.

  I knew, of course, that Chilean refugees would not be sent to camps. But having just denied myself history as heroism by seeking asylum in this embassy, I was now being offered a future in history as a victim. Now that I had escaped the physical danger of death, this was the more permanent face of our defeat: to have one’s life decided by other people. The humiliation of those long weeks in the embassy had marked me: we did not trust these functionaries who reigned over us and yet we depended on them for our food, our safety, our contact with the outside world. They could resell part of that food, and did, they could delay our departure, and did, they could block messages from our relatives and did; they did, they could, and we could not and did not dare to complain. Understand: I was living in utter destitution in that embassy, as if I had just crossed a border to escape a famine.

  Yes, that definition of refugee might fit me perfectly; but I did not fit snugly into its image, the self it suggested I was to become. It is true that my existence had been swept up in a historic catastrophe which differed only in degree from those that had uprooted and would continue to dislocate millions of others in this miserable century of ours; yes, but I had the means, no matter how slight, to rescue a certain control—or was it the illusion of control?—over my existence, over my self-image.

  “I’m not a refugee,” I said to the woman, aware of the hundreds like me waiting their turn in the next room, right there, behind me, waiting to be accepted by Holland or Ireland or the Soviet Union or … anywhere. I blurted out: “I’m an exile.”

  The term had no legal significance, no international or technical meaning, no guarantees, no protection.

  I chose it automatically because I wanted to see my emigration as part of another tradition—a more literary one, perhaps. There was something Byronic, defiant and challenging, about being an exile, something vastly more romantic and Promethean than the fate embodied in that recently coined word refugee that the twentieth century had been forced to officialize as a result of so much mass murder and wandering. I was, of course, just as much a victim, just as doomed, as the blurred constellation of anonymous beings who had preceded me, but by rejecting the passive term and opting for the more active, sophisticated, elegant one, I was projecting my odyssey as something that originated in myself and not in the historical forces seething outside my grasp. Instead of formulating my future in terms of what I was seeking, refuge, I conceived myself as excluded, expelled, exiled, as if I had absolute freedom to choose which of the many countries
of the world my free person would wander. Not for me to be a speck in the dust of history, a statistic in a yearbook: I was going off into the wilderness like a rebellious, solitary, persecuted angel.

  I could already sense what lay ahead, years of pleading, jobs offered to me out of pity, customs officials ripping through my bags, I was anticipating that the list of friends tortured back in Santiago would grow while the space to defend them in the newspapers would shrink into indifference, I was sensing many more defeats before me, and I chose to salvage the one thing that could guarantee me safe passage through the desert I was facing: that I was my own person, that I would rise up, that I did not need any help from anybody to survive. I had spent so much energy demolishing and denouncing the myth of individualism in books and articles and here I was, clutching on to it as the one element of stability in a world that was disintegrating. It did not dawn on me then that, having taken pride in my proximity to the poor, having found peace when I might have been killed just like them in that shack in that working-class neighborhood, I had, nevertheless, at the first opportunity, set my egalitarian convictions aside, refusing to be classified with my homeless brothers and sisters abroad. I had chosen instinctively to exploit my difference, thankfully reached out for the first jetsam that washed up from my personality, tried to set myself mentally apart from the multitudes I had sworn to fuse with forever.

  The death which had brought me so close to them was already beginning to drive a wedge between us, whispering that in order to avoid its grasp, I would start to float away.

  It is not something I am aware of at the time.

  On the contrary. In the embassy, every day, I renew my pledge to serve the Chile of the workers that is being assailed by forces considerably more dangerous than my self-doubts and equivocations. No, not the obvious repression of the military, but a more perverse sort of peril that I begin to brood about at that time. At the end of my UN interview, as I am about to get up from the table, I am approached by another UN official, who surreptitiously slips me a note. It is from Angelica, the first direct communication I have had from her in weeks. She writes that, before leaving Chile with Rodrigo and my parents to wait for me in Argentina, she will try to pass in front of the embassy to say goodbye.

  To say goodbye, in a manner of speaking.

  Relatives of those of us confined in the embassy have discovered that they can be sighted by their loved ones if they take a paseo, a stroll, on the sidewalk across the street from the building that shelters us, and these sightings constitute one of the ways to pass the time during the endless days, hundreds of us honeycombed like bees at the window watching for hours to catch a faraway glimpse of a friend, a member of the family, even an acquaintance fleeting by. I say we and us, but I had not joined the exercise: it was too depressing to scrutinize the country I had lost.

  Now I join the other refugees in the hope of spotting Angélica and I’m finally rewarded by a brief flash of her presence, with Rodrigo ambling along in tow. He does not look toward the window. I pray that he might, but he has not been told by his mother that his father is behind those walls which the police and the Pinochet spies guard; no sign must be given that those who walk out there are related to the castaways who watch from in here. The relatives never stop, never acknowledge who they are—only a slight movement of Angelica’s hips now, a smile that lightens the air in my direction, and she is gone. A few minutes later she is back again, tugging at Rodrigo, I can see that he is complaining about something, probably the fact that they are plodding back and forth along this desultory avenue; and now they are out of sight and I wait a while longer and it is clear that they will not return, that I have just said goodbye to my family for who knows how long. I cede my place at the enormous curtained windows to someone else, one who has made relative-spotting a vocation.

  I try not to look out those windows again.

  During the days when I stood there waiting for Angelica’s brief passage, I was visited by a vision of Chile that was too painful to contemplate. Hundreds of people walk by the embassy every hour. It is impossible to know who is there as part of a ceremony that secretly contacts us and who is there simply in an ordinary way, going about their lives, but that is precisely the point: life out there in the city flows on as if nothing had happened. In order to survive, those who care for us and mourn for our violated nation must imitate the many who do not care at all, who mourn nothing or who have mourned their share and now want to go on with whatever life is left to them. There at the window, I have a vision of a tribe of zombies sleepwalking past the embassy, my seminal glimpse of the Chile where I myself cannot walk but where, if I were free to do so, I would also walk in the same inhibited, detached way; I have seen Chile as a country of the dead, where you have to kill yourself in order not to be killed, split yourself in two, smother whoever you have been, create an outer shell of indifference to match the other shells around you. I have seen that Chile and I wonder how long people can live this madness before the outside person you pretend to be implodes, before the mask becomes the face, before the country is corrupted and lost.

  It will be brief, I say to myself, I lie to myself as I turn from the window, we will be back soon and they will remain pure under their simulated lives. I turn from that window and the vision of my child who is not even able to wave to his father, my Angélica who can do no more than smile in my direction and then disappear, I turn from that Chile because I do not want to admit that it is not only people who can die, but countries as well, I do not want to tell myself that a country can also die.

  SIXTEEN

  A CHAPTER DEALING WITH THE DISCOVERY OF LIFE AND LANGUAGE DURING THE YEARS 1970 TO 1973, IN SANTIAGO DE CHILE

  In front of me as I write, staring straight at me, is a photograph of the balcony of the palace of La Moneda in Santiago. The Chilean photographer Luis Poirot snapped it on November 4, 1970, the day Salvador Allende was inaugurated President of the Republic. In that photo, he waves a handkerchief from the balcony, greeting an unseen crowd that is gathered in the plaza below him. Behind the President is his wife, Tencha, and we can catch a glimpse of the goateed, mischievous face of Jose Toha, a Minister in Allende’s government.

  Next to that photo I have hung another one, of the same balcony, snapped by the same photographer almost three years later, a few days after the Hawker Hunters attacked the Palace on September 11, 1973. Their bombs left a black yawning gap where the balcony stood. Where the President once waved his handkerchief, there is nothing. Allende is dead, Tencha is in exile, Tohá is in prison, where he will be killed by guards some months later. And we can sense that outside the frame, below where the balcony jutted out, there is only emptiness, that only the cold, implacable solitary lens of the camera witnesses the scene. Nothing else. All too soon, I will be forced to face the black hole of that photo.

  For now, I want to return to the day when that balcony was as intact as our dreams, when these eyes of mine and all the thousands of other eyes in the crowd did not have an inkling of the destruction that awaited us. There was no room for absurd premonitions: this was a turning point in history, the first peaceful, democratic revolution the world had ever known. Who could stop us? Who would dare to even try?

  It was then, in the midst of that multitude of men and women I had never met and did not know, it was then, as I breathed in the air that they were breathing out, that I had an experience which I hesitate to call mystical but which was as near to a religious epiphany as I have had in my life.

  Allende was making a brief speech, something about how we were now going to be the masters of our own destiny, the owners of our own land and the metals under the ground and the streets we walked through, how we would have to fight for the possession of everything in Chile, from the state to the city to the fields, how this country belonged to the people who had suffered in it, something like that, I can’t remember the details, but at some point during that speech I stopped listening and let my eyes wander over the crowd, thousands
and thousands of hopeful faces as far as I could see, and all of a sudden I knew what my mission was to be in the years to come. These men and women who held my destiny in their hands might be an absolute mystery to me but they were also, I realized, a mystery to themselves. The story of their lives had never been told, the words had belonged to somebody else. That was going to change. I could almost feel their stories struggling to come out, spill into that plaza, right then and there. Since their birth, those men and women had been told the limits they could not cross, the questions they could not ask. They had been told that their failure in life was deserved, that the very fact that they had not found a way out of their destitution proved that they deserved it, that they were by nature subhuman, incompetent, inferior, worthless, lazy, all their lives treated like something disposable and defective, all their lives taught to bow their heads and lower their eyes so as to survive, warned to obey or else, the doctrine of submission drilled into every nerve of their bodies, taught that the only road out of their misery was individual and solitary, each person scratching his way to the top, where, if he was lucky or ruthless enough, he could then become the exploiter of his brothers. But above all, they had been warned that any collective attempt to change their lot was doomed to failure and pain. And they had defied that warning, they were about to break out of the script dreamt for them, they were about to start telling their own lives in their own way after having lived endlessly under the shadow of somebody else’s story. And if they could do it, so could I, so could I, and then it was as if I had stepped out of that space and inhabited some other zone where I could watch myself and the multitude as well, suddenly all the voices went silent and in the silence I felt reality begin to crack open, literally, under my feet, as if a real, physical crack had opened in the very architecture of the universe, and that was when, peering into the crack that my own life had become, immensely vulnerable and open, I felt life quicken and accelerate, I felt the giddiness of those few great moments in your existence when you know that everything is possible, that anything is possible. I felt as if I were the first man on earth and this was the first day in history and the world was about to begin in all its beauty and that all it would take to give birth to that beauty which was just within our reach was to dare to invent it, dare to name it, and I believed for one transparent moment that I could merge with el pueblo, I believed that their story and my story could be told simultaneously, I believed that a time would come when no distance would separate us, when our stories would be the same story.