Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

by Dorfman, Ariel

  I used that novel to get the Chilean authorities to give me the safe-conduct they were refusing me. They had informed the attache who was in charge of getting us all out of there as soon as possible that I could rot in that building for all they cared, that they wanted to put me on trial for subverting the youth of the country. (I could envisage the trial in mock-Perry Mason style: Is it true, Mr. Dorfman, that you accuse Donald Duck—Donald Duck?!—of being pernicious to our children?) And I might have withered in that embassy, still be there for all I know, if I had not told the ambassador’s wife that my novel was scheduled to be published in Buenos Aires in a few weeks’ time. She judiciously passed the information to the staff with the suggestion (which I had slipped into our conversation) that we could use this to turn up the pressure on the adamant Chileans. Let this Dorfman go to Argentina, the Argentines said to their colleagues, as reported back to me by my Lady of the Embassy. Neutralize him, she said that they said. Exiles are a dime a dozen and nobody cares a damn about them; but a prize-winning author detained in an embassy surrounded by soldiers ready to kill him commands almost heroic stature. Why promote his damn book?

  They had seen the absurd logic of that argument and had let me leave Chile.

  So this figment of my imagination had helped me to escape my adopted country, and now maybe it would impress this Police Commissioner enough to help me escape the country of my birth. “If you wouldn’t mind,” I said, “I’d like to inscribe this novel to you”

  He nodded and watched as I wrote a few devoted and hypocritical lines in the book, and received it from my hands without a smile.

  “I’ll read it,” he promised.

  I hoped not. It was the first time in my life, I think, that I prayed that someone would not read me. I wanted him to have it in his hands, admire it, but not open it and delve into what I was narrating. I didn’t want him to read that hymn to the brilliant future of the revolution, and I didn’t want him to read the signs of foreboding and violence and death that had crept into the text unawares, that belied its sunny vision of a victory that had not happened. I didn’t want this man who held my fate in his hands to think I might be dangerous.

  “It’s a bit experimental,” I said, to see if that discouraged him. He said nothing. Waited for me to exlain myself. “It’s a series of book reviews,” I said, “by nonexistent authors about novels that I made up. And the reality of the texts themselves interrupts the reviews.”

  “A bit experimental,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Not like your book on Donald Duck.”

  My heart sank. My Disney diatribe was hounding me. It was futile to try to hide who I was, make believe I was a confused Argentinian writer who happened to lurch by mistake into a political swamp on the other side of the Andes. I could tell it: this man wasn’t going to help me.

  And then that Police Commissioner surprised me. He carefully put my book away and turned to me and for the first time he smiled. And said the words I had been waiting to hear, which I had lost all hope of hearing.

  “And what,” he asked, “can I do for you?”

  One week later, I had a passport. Just in time. The day I was leaving for the airport, my father informed me that the Police Commissioner who had saved my life had been relieved of his duties. Maybe he had been as blind to his future as I had been to mine.

  As the plane rose up from Buenos Aires, I fought the weary certainty that history was repeating itself endlessly, that perhaps I was meant for exile. For the second time in my life I was being forced to leave the city of my birth, except that this time I was the one who was fleeing death and by my side was a son who was losing his country because of me, this time it was my wife who, like my mother, was following her husband into exile. Maybe this was the fate of my family, maybe this was a curse I couldn’t escape. Twice I had made the attempt to settle down, twice I had adopted a country and a culture and a language, and both times I had found myself fleeing, I had found myself homeless in spite of all my efforts, and now it was all going to begin again, all over again. Except that this time I was no longer innocent. My first act of exile back then had been mischievously to hide my baby shoes in a hotel in Santiago. Nothing was left of that child. His adulterated older self had passed by that hotel, by the plaza that hotel overlooked, I had passed through there on my way to another exile, trapped in a police van, about to be expelled, forcing my eyes to drink in that jagged hole in the balcony of La Moneda, saying goodbye to that child I had been, to what had been left of that child inside, saying goodbye to the country that was now forbidden to me.

  But not for long.

  I was not going to let that sorrow destroy me. I was not going to let that hole claim me. On that plane, high above the pampas, I told myself that I would be back, I told myself that nothing could stop me from returning to my land.

  I was consoling myself with one of the basic myths of the species, a story that every civilization has told itself since the beginning of history: there is a place, one place, where you truly belong, a place that is often but not always the place where you were born, and that place is akin to paradise. Paradise, a word that, originally, meant a walled-in garden, full of fruit. To lose that promised land is like dying, and to return there is to be redeemed. I swore to myself, up there above Latin America, that I would return, that I would, like the outcast son or daughter in the fairy tales, return and save the kingdom which was in grave danger, I swore that I would be back.

  That was the myth of my return with which I tried to keep sane and whole on that plane that was taking me farther and farther away from my origins.

  And yet I was being tempted, right then and there, at that very moment, by another myth that is just as pervasive. This story goes—and once again, all nations have told it—that to create a new society, to give a real start to anything worthwhile, one must leave the place of one’s birth. One cannot grow unless one breaks out and learns and opens up to what is strange and foreign and fertile. Every founder of every new civilization has been a hero who has been expelled from his home. In this myth, salvation can only be attained through wandering.

  In one myth, you find immortality by connecting with the past, with the ancestors who have died. In the other, you defeat death by creating a new dynasty somewhere else, imagining the generations yet to be born.

  Which will be my story?

  Look at me there, above the clouds, above a Latin America where death is spreading, poisoning the waters of the Argentine city of my birth and waiting at the gate to the Chilean city of my dreams, look at me almost twenty-nine years to the day when I set off from Buenos Aires to the United States as a child, there I am at the end of this journey into life which has also been a parallel journey into death, look at me with my two languages and my two cultures, look at me swearing to go back, look at me excited to have the world in front of me, look at me as those two myths of human existence dispute me, the myth that promised me that I would return for good, the myth that whispered that I would wander forever, there I am, unable to divine which of these two contains the ultimate truth of my life.

  I don’t know the answer then.

  One circle in my life is ending and another circle is about to begin and the answer is not clear, as the plane goes up and up and up into the swirling blue sky of exile, as I head North again and the South begins to recede into memory, I do not know then as I do not know now if that circle will ever close.

  November 1, 1996

  ALSO BY ARIEL DORFMAN

  How to Read Donald Duck (with Armand Mattelart)

  The Empire’s Old Clothes

  Widows

  The Last Song of Manuel Sendero

  Mascara

  Last Waltz in Santiago and Other Poems of Exile and Disappearance

  Hard Rain

  My House Is on Fire

  Some Write to the Future

  Death and the Maiden

  Konfidenz

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing is t
he loneliest of activities—but even in the most solitary moments, most authors are aware that we labor with others nearby nurturing our existence as well as the words themselves. If this is true of every book, it is even more so of a book which also happens to be a life.

  To mention the many men and women who made both this book and this life possible would sorely test the patience of readers who by now may have had enough of the author’s incessant inspirational encounters with other members of the species. I cannot end, however, without at least naming those who have been closest to me during all the long years it has taken me to complete this project. No one will be surprised that I start with Angelica. She is my first reader, my best reader, my best friend—and my existence and my words could not have been shaped without her frank, careful, stubborn probing of the first draft, the second draft, the third one, the many versions and revisions and added paragraphs and recomposed chapters with which I would come running to her, in search of a blessing. I could never have made sense of how it was that I escaped death if I had not been protected by my Angelica, who, quite simply, kept me alive.

  My extraordinary parents, Fanny and Adolfo, provided me with many of the memories and stories in this book—not to mention the life of its author. I am glad that they are still around, and very lucid, at eighty-eight and ninety, respectively, to read these pages that they have been instrumental in creating. Nor would this book have existed without the vitality and encouragement of my two sons. Rodrigo, who has become my collaborator on films and plays, offered many suggestions and was always there to help me think my way out of a dilemma, keep it simple, he would say, make it absolutely concrete, all his generous advice—even though he was the first to warn me that anybody who attempts to write his own life must surely be insane or will be before it is over. Joaquín, who was living with us while this book was crawling its way into the light, managed to keep me upbeat through the whole damn gut-wrenching process and was the first to suggest—and then continually remind me—that I would be unable to finish it if I did not play more rock music while I was working. His hints were always welcome—as was his freewheeling insomniac fellowship at four o’clock in the morning. And, of course, the newest member of our family, Melissa, Rodrigo’s wife, was the merriest company I could hope for. What would I have done without her eternal dada optimism?

  My editor, John Glusman, has volunteered his constant support and intelligence since I first told him in his office—sometime in 1994, I believe it was—about the frenzied project I was about to embark upon. His initial enthusiasm never flagged—and when it came to the editing process, his detailed comments and observations, invariably constructive and sensitive, were crucial in shortening, clarifying, sharpening this text, forcing me always to do better. My thanks to him for believing in this intellectual adventure and calming me down when all sorts of crises and calamities descended upon me.

  Bridget Love, my agent at the Wylie Agency, who has represented me and this book with dogged loyalty and infinite forebearance, deserves more than these few words of gratitude. She stood by me, patiently, efficiently, during these years. And she did so with a great sense of humor. I am also grateful to Deborah Karl, my former agent, whose belief in me and the possibility of this book never wavered. I deeply appreciate her support during almost a decade, as I do the backing of Andrew Wylie himself, whose advice has always been crucial when needed.

  Most of this volume was written during a prolonged sabbatical from my duties at Duke University, where I teach each spring semester. Without the understanding of Deans Roy Weintraub and Bill Chafe, of Provost John Strobehn, and of my dear colleagues and friends Fred Jameson, chair of the Literature Program, and Walter Mignolo, chair of Romance Studies, as well as the quiet company of Rob Sikorski and Josefina Tiryakian of International Studies, this book would have been much more difficult to conceive and write. Not to mention the invaluable help—and amistad—of Debbie Jakubs in the library.

  Margaret Lawless, my assistant, has been central to this enterprise, as well as to so many others. She has provided material support—and resolute cheerfulness—beyond the call of duty. Day after day, she made sure I had the time to deal with this text. If I was able to concentrate and write and rewrite, it was because I knew she was there, shielding me, taking care of a multitude of problems.

  Nor can I forget the hospitality of John, Cathy, and Julia Friedman, who gave Angélica and me refuge one summer in their ranch in New Mexico and discreetly never even asked to see the pages I was pounding out. Elizabeth Lira and Deena Metzger, like sisters to me, provided me with other sorts of sanctuary and advice during these years.

  And all the others? My friends in Durham, in Chile, in Holland, in England, in Frankfurt, in Washington, D.C., and, yes, in New York, the ones who heard me out, who were simply smiling by my side—what can I say, except that I hope that when you have read Heading South, Looking North, you will feel that the cariño, the affection you gave me all this time, was worth it, that the book I can now give you in gratefulness and joy was, after all, worth writing.

  June 1997

  POSTSCRIPT

  When this book was finished and in the process of being edited, my mother died.

  If readers find gentleness in my words, if you find gentleness in my life, think well of her.

  Notes

  1 From John Berger’s review of the English-language edition of a few years later.

  Copyright © 1998 by Ariel Dorfman

  All rights reserved

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  19 Union Square West, New York 10003

  Designed by Debbie Glasserman

  eISBN 9781466819047

  First eBook Edition : April 2012

  First edition, 1998

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dorfman, Ariel.

  Heading south, looking north : a bilingual journal / Ariel Dorfman.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-374-16862-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

  1. Dorfman, Ariel—Biography. 2. Authors, Chilean—20th century—Biography. 3. Authors, Exited—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  PQ8098.14.07Z468 1998

  863—dc21

  97-37364

  [B]