Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey Read online

  Spanish received my father with open arms, a smoother welcome than my mother’s. Either because he had already had previous experience with the language as a child or because his parents were polylingual themselves, he was soon speaking and writing Spanish brilliantly, so well that, soon after graduating from the university, the Russian emigre Dorfman wrote and had published the first history of Argentine industry, becoming his country’s leading expert on the subject. More books, many articles and essays followed, all of them focusing on Argentina and its tomorrow, all of them in Spanish: apparently an absolute commitment to his new land and language.

  My father was bilingual and remains so to this day. That he kept his Russian intact can be attributed to his having spent his formative years in Odessa, to the fact that Russian contained within its words the full force of its nationhood and literature and vast expanses—unlike the language that my mother discarded, a Yiddish that occupied no territory, possessed no name on the map of nations, had never been officially promoted by a state. But my father’s retention of Russian may signal something else: a doubleness that did not plague my mother. She rid herself of Yiddish as a way of breaking with the past, bonding forever with the Argentina that had taken her by the hand the day when she was three and offered her an ice cream in Spanish. She could easily segregate her first, her original, language, relegate it to the nostalgia of yesteryear, a gateway to a land that no longer existed except in the shards of hazy family anecdotes. Her monolingualism was a way of stating that Yiddish had become irrelevant to the present, to her present.

  My father could never have said that of Russian. The language of his youth, the language his parents spoke with him at home, was to embody, for many in my father’s generation—in Argentina and all over the world—the language in which the future was being built: the first socialist revolution in history, the first socialist state, the first place on the planet where men would not exploit men. Always vaguely leftist and rebellious, by the early 1930s my father had joined the Communist Party and embraced Marxism. Like many men and women his age, he saw no alternative to what he was sure were the death throes of capitalism reeling from the Depression. It is one of the ironies of history that those ardent internationalists who were so suspicious of nations and chauvinism and proclaimed that only the brotherhood of the proletariat of all countries would free mankind should have ended up subjecting their lives, ideas, and desires to the policies and dictates of one country, the Soviet Union. They perceived no contradiction: to defend real socialism in the one territory where it had taken power would mean sustaining a state that, by its shining example—and later by armed force—would help bring freedom and equality and justice to every corner of the globe.

  And the Moscow trials? And Stalin’s purges? And the famine and destruction of the peasantry? And the Kronstadt massacre? And the gathering bureaucratic power of a new elite speaking in the name of the vast masses?

  Few Communists at the time protested or even seemed to care. My father was no exception. Though I have wondered whether my father’s love affair with the Soviet Union was not also buttressed and even hardened by his romance with Russian, the circumstance that the language that had caught him as he fell into the abyss of birth happened to be the very language that he believed was destined to redeem the whole of fallen humanity. The language of his dead cousin, the language of the streets of Odessa, the language of the Revolution: my father’s past was not something to be thrown away, as my mother threw away her Yiddish. It could coexist with his Argentine present and inseminate it and bring together the two sides and periods of his life, Russia and Latin America, to create a nationless future, socialism in Argentina.

  But there is, in fact, no need for this sort of pop psychology, no need to resort to linguistic explanations for my father’s blind adoration of the Soviet Union. History was furnishing reasons enough: the consolidation of Mussolini and the rise of Hitler and then the Civil War in Spain convinced innumerable revolutionaries to swallow their doubts (if they had any) and embrace the one power ready to stand up to the Nazis. And even after my father was expelled from the Party at the end of the 1930s—but not, I am sad to report, because of ideological or political differences, but due to a slight divergence about some abstruse question of internal democracy—even then, even after the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, he adhered steadfastly to Marxist philosophy and politics.

  Up to the point that when I was born in 1942 my father gave me a name I would disclaim when I was nine years old, for reasons that will be revealed: the flaming moniker of Vladimiro. In honor of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution, which, my father felt, was fast approaching the pampas.

  What was really approaching those pampas was Fascism—at least, a deformed and mild criollo version of it. A year after my birth, in June 1943, the military headed by General Ramírez toppled the conservative government of Ramón Castillo. It was a pro-Axis coup and behind it was the enigmatic figure of then Colonel Juan Domingo Peron.

  My father would soon run afoul of these men. When the new military government took over the Universidad de la Plata, where my father taught, he resigned indignantly, sending them a letter of protest, à la Emile Zola. A copy, unfortunately, does not exist: but I have been told that in it my father insulted the military, their repressiveness, ignorance, clericalism, extreme nationalism, and, above all their infatuation with Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini. The authorities reacted by expelling him from his position (a first in the history of Argentina) and then decided to put him on trial, demanding that his citizenship be revoked. I have taken out the old boxes in my parents’ Buenos Aires apartment and leafed through the yellowed pro-government tabloids of the day, and there they are, the headlines calling for the “dirty Jew-dog Dorfman” to be shipped back to Russia, “where he belonged.”

  History does repeat itself, first as tragedy and then as farce: almost half a century later, ultra-conservative anti-Semitic right-wingers in the United States would suggest that I do the same thing, following me around with signs screeching VLADIMIRO ZELICOVICH (sic) GO HOME TO RUSSIA whenever I gave a lecture about Chile at a university, waving copies of a twenty-minute speech Jesse Helms had delivered against me on the Senate floor, brimming with information provided to him by the Chilean Secret Police. But those people in America in the 1980s couldn’t do anything to me. The men who threatened my father in Argentina in 1943 were somewhat more powerful.

  Again, my father was falling.

  But this time it wouldn’t be Russian that would catch him, save him. Or the Russians, for that matter. It would be their arch-rivals.

  Before he could be jailed, my father skipped the country on an already granted Guggenheim Fellowship. My anti-imperialist father fled in December of 1943, to the United States, the most powerful capitalist country in the world, protected by a foundation built with money that had come out of one of the world’s largest consortiums. Money that had come from tin mines in Bolivia and nitrate in Chile and rubber plantations in the Congo and diamonds in Africa saved my Leninist dad.

  But the Americans were preparing Normandy and Stalingrad was raging and Auschwitz was burning Jews and homosexuals and Gypsies and Roosevelt had created the New Deal and anyway, even if my father had not been able to offer himself all these expediently progressive reasons for journeying to the center of the empire, there was a more practical one: he had to escape. And America was the only place he could go.

  And therefore the place where, over a year later, in February of 1945, the rest of the family joined him.

  First, we hopped across Latin America, Santiago and Lima and Cali and Barranquilla, and then finally Miami, each flight delayed for a day or two because of the war, as if Spanish was saying goodbye to me very slowly, as if it were reluctant to let me depart on what would end up being a bilingual journey. Though what may have been most significant about that initial trip North was that the first night of my first exile was spent in the neighboring country just across the Andes, the place
that still symbolizes the South for me, there, in that city of Santiago de Chile which was to become my home so many years later. Wondrous may be a better word than significant: that my first night in that city should have been in a hotel, the Carrera, facing the Presidential Palace of La Moneda, where I was to spend so many nights in the last days of the Allende revolution, looking out onto the plaza, catching a glimpse of men behind the windows of that hotel looking back at me, perhaps from the very room where I had slept as an infant. A mysterious symmetry which would have been even more amazing if I had died at La Moneda—because, in that case, my first childhood voyage to Santiago could have been construed as truly premonitory, that two-and-a-half-year-old child visiting the site of the murder that awaited him twenty-eight years in the future.

  If the gods existed and if they were inclined to literary pastimes, they would have organized precisely that sort of ending for their enjoyment, they would have taken my life and harvested one hell of a metaphor. Fortunately, in this case at least, nobody powerful enough to intervene was playing a sick practical joke on me.

  Instead, I was the one playing jokes—on my mother and older sister, who spent most of the one afternoon they had for sightseeing shut up in that hotel room searching for the baby shoes, my only pair, that I had mischievously hidden in a pillowcase. With such skill and malevolence, according to my mother, that we almost missed the chance to tour the city before it grew dark. I like to think that the boy I used to be knew what he was doing, that he was in fact trying to intercept my innocent eyes from seeing Santiago for the first innocent time, from crossing the path of Angelica, the woman of my life, who was that same afternoon breathing those very molecules of air under those same mountains. I like to think he recognized Santiago, he had heard the city or its future calling quietly to him to wait, to hold himself in reserve, to hide the shoes. Or maybe it was the city that recognized him.

  New York, however, did not recognize me at all. Or maybe sickness is a form of making love, tact, contact, the winter of New York seeping into the lungs of the child still immersed in mind, if not body, in the sultry heat of the Buenos Aires summer, New York blasting that child inside his simulacrum of a snowsuit, inside the garments that had been hastily sewn together by his mother in the remote southern tip of the hemisphere to simulate a snowsuit, New York claiming that child, telling him that things were not going to be easy, no hiding shoes in this city, no guided tours: in this city we play for keeps, kid.

  Our family descended from the train onto the platform in Grand Central Station, and there was no one there to greet us but the cold. We had crossed the South of the United States during the night. I have no memory, again, of that trip, except that years later, when I read Thomas Wolfe and his long, shattering train ride to the home toward which the angel was fruitlessly looking, the home he said you could never return to, I felt a shudder of acknowledgment—I had been on that train, I had crossed that U.S. South leaving my own Latino South. So I do not remember the moment when I stepped for the first time in my life onto the concrete of the North, there in New York, holding my mother’s hand.

  My father was not there waiting for us.

  He appeared fifteen minutes later, explained that he had made a mistake or the train had arrived at a different platform, but my mother felt something else was wrong, she felt the mix-up was ominous, because my dad was distant, unfamiliar, his eyes avoiding hers. What my father could not bring himself to tell her was that just before our arrival, at around the time I was hiding my shoes in a Chilean pillow, he had been conscripted into the U.S. Army, and unless he could get a deferment or change his 4A classification, he would be off to the European Front and my mother, who didn’t know a word of English, would be stranded in a foreign city with two small children, forced to live on a fifty-dollar-a-month GI salary. Four days later, still without telling his wife the truth, my father departed early from the hotel where we were lodged and reported for duty in downtown Manhattan, fully expecting to return in uniform to break the news to my mother; the uniform would tell the news he dared not utter himself. He showered with dozens of other conscripts, he slipped into the Army clothes and then, at the very last moment, was informed that he had been reclassified because the sort of work he was doing at the newly established office of Inter-American Affairs had been deemed “essential.” David Rockefeller, who had created that office in the State Department to fight the advance of fascism in Latin America had intervened. Again, the tricks and treats of history: a Republican saved my philo-Communist father from being sent to war against the allies of the fascists he had just escaped from back home. The point is that my father was able to make a cheerful trip back uptown and tell my mother the reason why he had seemed so remote since our arrival, assure her there was nothing to worry about, from now on happy days would be here again.

  But they wouldn’t, at least not for me, at least not immediately.

  The first order of business was to move out of our prohibitively expensive hotel, not easy in a New York where no new housing had been built since the start of the war. A savvy Uruguayan friend suggested my parents read the obituaries in the newspapers and nab a vacated apartment. Implausibly, that stratagem worked. They rented what in the folklore of the family would always be called la casa del muerto, the Dead Man’s House. It was, according to my mother, the most depressing, run-down joint she had ever inhabited: a two-room dump, airless under a weak dim bulb hanging like a noose from the ceiling, with small slits of windows gaping onto a gray desolate inner courtyard, three beds in each room, as if several people had died there, not just one.

  That was the place, the house of death. That’s where I caught pneumonia one Saturday night in February of 1945, when my parents had gone out by themselves for the first time since we had arrived in the States—and I carefully use that verb, to catch, aware of its wild ambiguity, still unsure, even now, if that sickness invaded me or if I was the one who invited it in. But more of that later. To save his life, that boy was interned in a hospital, isolated in a ward where nobody spoke a word of Spanish. For three weeks, he saw his parents only on visiting days and then only from behind a glass partition.

  My parents have told me the story so often that sometimes I have the illusion that I am the one remembering, but that hope quickly fades, as when you arrive at a movie theater late and never discover what really happened, are forever at the mercy of those who have witnessed the beginning: te internaron en ese hospital, my mother says slowly, picking out the words as if for the first time, no nos acordamos del nombre, there is a large glass wall, it is a cold bare white hospital ward, my parents have told me that every time they came to see me, tears streamed down my face, that I tried to touch them, I watch myself watching my parents so near and so far away behind the glass, mouthing words in Spanish I can’t hear. Then my mother and my father are gone and I turn and I am alone and my lungs hurt and I realize then, as I realize now, that I am very fragile, that life can snap like a twig. I realize this in Spanish and I look up and the only adults I see are nurses and doctors. They speak to me in a language I don’t know. A language that I will later learn is called English. In what language do I respond? In what language can I respond?

  Three weeks later, when my parents came to collect their son, now sound in body but in all probability slightly insane in mind, I disconcerted them by refusing to answer their Spanish questions, by speaking only English. “I don’t understand,” my mother says that I said—and from that moment onward I stubbornly, steadfastly, adamantly refused to speak a word in the tongue I had been born into.

  I did not speak another word of Spanish for ten years.

  THREE

  A CHAPTER DEALING WITH THE DISCOVERY OF DEATH IN THE EARLY MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 11, 1973, IN SANTIAGO DE CHILE

  If it had not been for Susana la Semilla, a cartoon character I invented, I would not have survived the coup against Allende.

  At least, that is the story I like to tell. Partly because it’s bizarrely true
, but above all, I think, because this less solemn version of my survival gives me the illusion that I somehow created the conditions whereby I thwarted death, that I had a hand in it. When oblivion breathes down your neck, takes you for a ride to the outskirts of emptiness and then yanks you back to the shores of reality trembling and intact, you need to find a reason, you need to find a meaning. Why me? Why was I spared? Questions that burn through the lives of survivors, questions we ask ourselves because the people who might hold the answer are all dead. So we answer as best we can, we try to find one thread in the absurd chain of circumstances which leads to our deliverance and say: Here! This is it! This is of my making!

  And for many years my answer, to myself and anyone who made the inquiry, was Susana la Semilla, the smiling character I had concocted as my contribution to forestalling the coup, my secret weapon against the CIA.

  An admittedly puny weapon against the gigantic conspiracy financed by Nixon, Kissinger, and ITT to “destabilize” the government the people of Chile had freely elected in 1970. This aggression was eventually to be exhaustively documented in 1975 by a Senate Investigating Committee headed by Frank Church, but by 1973 it was already being openly discussed in newspapers in Chile and abroad. What had begun as a covert operation was, by then, not a secret at all. In fact, as the end approached, many of those benefiting from American meddling and money were, instead of hiding the intervention, flaunting it.