Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey Read online

  I myself witnessed such a display when, around ten days before the coup, I trekked, with a group of Unidad Popular militants, into some hills twenty miles to the north of Santiago. There, under the Andean cordillera, on an isolated knoll that our group leader had supposedly explored and deemed sufficiently remote, we were supposed to receive our first lesson in handling firearms, part of a clumsily improvised training program meant to prepare us for what seemed an imminent civil war.

  Not only too little (we had one pitiable gun among the seven of us), but too late as well.

  Looking back, I realize that those of us who supported Allende were always a step behind our adversaries in our willingness to use violence. While we subscribed to the idea of a peaceful, democratic revolution, without bloodshed, while we danced along the avenues, they were taking lessons in martial arts. I can remember my surprise when, in 1971, a year after Allende was inaugurated President, right-wing thugs made their appearance on the streets of Santiago, in military formation, swinging chains and lashing out with linchacos, as if they had come out of some perverse Bruce Lee film. We responded belatedly by starting to take karate lessons ourselves—I would sweat and strain with a group of friends at six in the morning, ready to take back our city. But by the time we were grunting and kicking and chopping away, our civilian enemies had graduated to firearms and were shooting at us, while the more adventurous among them blew up high-tension towers, sabotaged government television stations, and assassinated Allende’s aides. And now here we were, holding a real gun in our hands for the first time, whereas they had already enlisted the Armed Forces; they would soon have tanks and planes and battalions at their command.

  But we didn’t know that then, and if we had, we still would have had no alternative but to “train” and pray that some sympathetic god would grant us the time to really learn: we pointed the solitary lonely-hearts gun by turns at a tin can on a nearby rock and hit the rock more times than we did the can and soon exhausted the two rounds of ammunition which was all we had been able to negotiate on the black market and the seven of us were left with a smoking gun and no bullets and a battered rock and more courage than confidence on that beautiful sunny afternoon under those mountains. And time on our hands. So we sauntered down to the other side of the hill to scout the area, almost like children on a holiday instead of would-be guerrillas, and discovered that the slope where we had been practicing was, in fact, not as secluded as our group leader had irresponsibly suggested.

  In a nearby clearing, behind some scraggly trees, some fifteen to twenty truck drivers were roasting meat over a colossal fire, drinking away, laughing their heads off, while a smaller gaggle of women seasoned a prodigious salad. A dozen trucks were parked below on the road itself, blocking it: these men, with thousands of other drivers, were staging a transportation strike that had paralyzed Chile in the last few weeks by cutting off many of the main highways, interrupting the country’s economic lifeblood in the hope that the chaos and confusion would pressure the Armed Forces into intervening to restore order.

  The truck drivers recognized us at once. They had probably heard the shots. But even if they hadn’t, it would have been enough to see us materialize out of the hills, like seven amateur Che Guevaras, to realize immediately that we were their enemies, that we would gladly have torched their trucks and sent them all to hell. They, on the other hand, didn’t send us to hell, not at all: they were going to win, they were already winning, they were the owners of a future that they could envisage even if we couldn’t, and they felt, therefore, as people often do when they have the upper hand, charitable and deadly calm. Maybe that’s why their leader, without standing, motioned us, with a Neanderthal joint of meat in his hand, to come closer, to join in the banquet. It was remarkable to see that much food; by then the strike itself, plus economic sabotage, a financial blockade by Washington, and quite a bit of government incompetence, had made provisions scarce.

  We came closer, though we did not want to share the meal. I guess we were superstitious: never accept food from someone you might have to kill. We stood there, watching them eat and drink and be merry, mesmerized by their presence. And then their leader put an oversized hand into his pocket and took out a wad of bills—American dollar bills—as if he were a gangster in a movie, and waved them at us knowingly and counted them in our presence and made a signal and the other truck drivers took out their greenbacks as well. I realized that we were the audience for their triumph, that they wanted us to understand how things stood, how incredibly screwed we were, they were showing us, right then, a day that was not far off, when we would be hunted and they would be back on the road. Above all, they wanted their women to see our humiliation. Chile had become a country where we, who defended the legitimate government elected by the people, had to hide our training, while these men, who were being paid by a foreign power to overthrow that government, had no need to hide their financing. And adding to the personal irony of the situation was something that neither the truck drivers nor their women nor my companions knew, because I had done my best to conceal it: that of all those present that day, I was the most “American,” the only one who could have spoken in their own language to the CIA operatives who had provided that money and planned the whole damn thing; I would have understood their jokes, their references to Dagwood and Blondie.

  But I had renounced my United States identity, I wanted nothing more to do with that country of my childhood. Chile was my land, it belonged to me, I thought, more than to those drivers willing to sell it off to the highest bidder. They could display their dollars all they wanted, because very soon I would be promenading my own weapon against them in every home in the country: Susana la Semilla, my cartoon character.

  I had, in fact, conceived her as an answer to their transportation strike or, to be more precise, as a way of dealing with the most devastating of its many side effects: those thousands of trucks blocking the roads had left thousands of tons of fertilizer rotting in the ports, endangering next year’s harvest. Because of my post at La Moneda, I had been asked by Jaime Tohá, the Minister of Agriculture, to contrive an angle for an advertising campaign that would put the blame on our anti-patriotic adversaries.

  I had come up with more than an angle. I had come up with a love story, an epic, a saga. I conjured up sexy, luscious, loquacious Susana, Susan the Seed, a sort of Chilean version of Chiquita Banana, pining away in the lonely countryside, eager to bear fruit and be a mother. Her aspirations to multiply were, however, being frustrated by the fact that her faraway lover, Federico el Fertilizante, Fred the Fertilizer, is being held captive in a faraway port.

  And I had proceeded to write the story of how Federico escapes his captors and goes on the road and foils the saboteurs and finally joins Susana and makes her germinate. I had scripted twenty-five one-minute TV spots to be aired week after week, starting in September of 1973 and culiminating in an orgasmic finale, my two lovers coupling under the stars of March 1974. Now I realize that this socialist soap opera was my utopian version of a future where the people defeated hunger: the shining anticipation of a victory of love over terror that was about to be resoundingly denied by history.

  But in order to give birth to Susana, to move my harvest of visions from my own private page onto the screens of millions of my compatriots, I had to persuade one man to sign on: Augusto Olivares, the congenial director of National Television—and I was supposed to make the pitch on … “Let’s say Tuesday, September 11,” he had suggested to me nonchalantly when I had told him in early September that it was urgent that we get together. He had smiled at me through his bushy, overgrown mustache, looking somewhat like a walrus, perhaps thinking that I was a bit loony, but then—so was he. Discussing seeds and fertilizers when the ship was about to sink. “Let’s say—ten-thirty. I’ve got an opening around ten-thirty in the morning. Not at La Moneda. At my office. Okay?”

  Of all the days he might have chosen, he unwittingly chose the day when the coup against Allend
e was to be launched, and of all the times, he chose, again without the slightest prescience, the time of the day that would keep me away from La Moneda in the morning, which allowed me to oversleep, to be wakened late on the morning of September 11 by the drone of military planes flying low over our house, buzzing the neighborhood.

  It was only then that I found out that the coup was under way. When I switched on the radio and the station was playing a military march and I changed stations and that one was also playing a march, and on and on, flipping the dial, and I heard the first proclamation of the Military Junta that had taken over Chile, and at the end of the proclamation the name of General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, who was supposed to be heading the forces loyal to the democratically elected government, and I knew that the revolution had failed, that’s when I knew, that exact moment, that death had finally caught up with me, that all my fears from childhood were about to materialize savagely in real life. And a few minutes later, with Angelica’s hand in my trembling hand, I listened to Allende’s últimas palabras from the Presidential Palace, his farewell speech in which he told his people that he would not resign, that he would die defending democracy, die so others might live. Later I’d find out that next to him as he spoke was his old friend Augusto Olivares, readying himself for death at the President’s side. Augusto never heard how Susana la Semilla was supposed to save his life, how in my delirium I had her symbolically saving the nation. He never knew that, implausibly, the only life my cartoon character ended up saving was mine.

  But is that true? I have told the story so many times that I may have ended up believing it, comforting myself with the notion that somehow I had evaded my own death through the efforts of my own invention, that some fiction I had saved from nothingness saved me from that same nothingness, from becoming fictional. It’s symmetrical and a bit cute and makes a great story. But is it true?

  As far as it goes, yes: it was enough for Claudio Gimeno to have said no, for Olivares to have said another day, for Susana not to have said anything, to have been silent and not inspired me—one slight variation and I would be dead, I would have made it to La Moneda the night of the coup or the dawn of the coup or the early morning of the coup.

  Essential as they were, however, none of these happenstances really guaranteed my survival. Dozens of other activists who were close to Allende or worked at the Presidential Palace did no guard duty on September 10, and many of them had, like me, activities planned elsewhere that morning, appointments far from Allende’s side—and that did not save them from being killed at La Moneda. They ended up there because they were called sometime during the night: there’s an emergency, they were told, the coup has started, they were told, they were told to report immediately. Their names were on a list, I had held that list in my hands on the nights when I myself was sleeping at La Moneda, I had read my own name and phone number on that list just two nights ago, I was one of those who were supposed to be summoned in case of an emergency.

  But nobody gave me a call.

  Why? Had it been just one more crazy coincidence? One more chaotic incident in a chaotic day, a misunderstanding that had, once again, favored me instead of somebody else? Is that all? Is that it? No more than a series of arbitrary intercessions had spared me? Could the difference between living and dying really just grind down to this: destiny or fate or sheer dumb wonderful idiotic luck or whatever you want to call it? And life is just one more accident in an accidental universe? And we are no more than insects played with by a demented, impenetrable, faceless force that offers no reasons because there are none?

  Or is there an explanation? Is there a meaning in all this, a message being sent, something I was being taught? Agnostic that I am now, agnostic that I was then, how to make sense of this sudden reprieve: I had deliberately placed myself in harm’s way, almost challenging violence to come and ravish me, and that violence, when it had exploded in all its fury, had ignored me. How to avoid wondering, with humility, perhaps with terror, that there might have been a design, a deeper miraculous meaning to my deliverance from death? How to avoid the temptation of a mystical interpretation, that some sort of power was trying to rescue me, redeem me, forbidding death to come closer, saying to that reckless man: No you don’t—you’re needed elsewhere. Your time hasn’t come yet.

  This religious reading of my survival alternately fascinates and disgusts me. What sort of joy can I derive from imagining a God who condemns so many innocents to death and saves me? What sort of comfort is there in assigning responsibility to some equally precarious higher entity for what happened? Isn’t randomness preferable, less cruel, than a supposedly superior consciousness playing haphazardly with our lives? And yet let me confess that for many years I could not rid myself of the suspicion that some benevolent deity had intervened on my behalf. Some benevolent deity had decided to counter the malevolent gods of the Central Intelligence Agency, the demons of the Chilean Armed Forces, the men in the shadows who were determining my death.

  It turned out that there was a benevolent deity, a secret hand, a message: but luckily for my stubborn atheistic convictions, it was not the hand of a God but that of a real human being of flesh and blood. By the time he gave me the message, many years later, I had more or less figured it out for myself, had confronted the loneliness of survival and had puzzled out on my own why I had been blessed by the random insane finger of the universe.

  The man to whom I owed my life was Fernando Flores, the very Minister who had originally given me the job at La Moneda. He was the one who, in the hours before dawn on that September 11, had decided to cross me off the list of people to be called. When the news of the uprising was confirmed, his bodyguard reached for the phone, started to dial—and Flores interrupted him, asked him for the list and read it carefully, taking his time. When he came to me, he took out his pen and carefully eliminated my name.

  I was to hear this story a long time later, when we both met in exile, when I visited him in the United States, I think it was in early 1978. During the previous years, he had been in prison. The military had arrested him in mid-morning the day of the coup, when he left the Presidential Palace to negotiate a truce with the seditious troops on Allende’s behalf. They ignored his white flag and packed him off to the brutal Military Academy for a few days, after which he was dispatched, along with other surviving Ministers of the former government, to a prison camp on Dawson Island, off Tierra del Fuego, one of the most barren, forsaken sites on the planet, and later was detained for several more years in a scattering of other concentration camps, awaiting a trial that never came. So it was only after he had been deported that he was able to tell me how he had intervened to save my life.

  Why? I asked him. Why had he done it?

  He paused, he turned inward as if consulting some person he had once been, he thought a bit and then said, in the same offhand way in which he probably had crossed my name off the list: “Well, somebody had to live to tell the story.”

  During the Allende years, from 1970 to 1973, I had constructed my identity as primarily political: fused with Chile and its cause and its people through the revolution that would, we thought, liberate the country. And so, as the end approached, I had accepted working with Flores at La Moneda because that is where I felt I belonged if the revolution failed, because I could not imagine myself surviving that failure, because it was a way of confirming who I was and who I wanted to be. Flores, in that desolate September dawn when it became clear that we had lost, saw things differently. Maybe he already knew that the tasks of defeat are not the tasks of victory. Maybe he knew that some of us would die, some of us would be jailed, some of us would turn traitor; and if that was going to happen, a witness would be needed who could escape the conflagration and tell the world the story. He thought I was that person, and at the last moment he had used his power over life and death to correct what he considered had been his error in offering me the job, what he considered my error in accepting it.

  It is a comforting
idea, that I was spared because I was to be the storyteller. It does not explain why a friend switched places with me, why a TV executive asked me to come to see him at the one time that would save me, why Susana la Semilla came to me as if in a childhood dream to insist there was salvation. It does not explain, in fact, any of the fortuitous coincidences that pulled me back into life as I was hurtling toward self-destruction. It does not explain why so many of my brothers and sisters, just as talented, as much in love with life, had to die. It does not assuage the mystery that still gropes and crawls in the center of my existence, does not entirely beat back the fear that life is blind and hazardous and that we stumble in the tender darkness and try to fool ourselves into believing there is a pattern to all this.

  But what Flores decided that day, without consulting me, merely because he thought he had to put history right and not let it take its mad course—what he decided for me that day, that does make sense. Principally because of what happened later: who I became. It makes sense of what I forged with the life that had been given to me, loaned to me, chosen for me by chance or providence or whatever you want to call it the day I should have died.

  If it is not true that this was why I was saved, I have tried to make it true.

  In every story I tell.

  Haunted by the certainty that I have been keeping a promise to the dead.

  FOUR

  A CHAPTER DEALING WITH THE DISCOVERY OF LIFE AND LANGUAGE IN THE YEAR 1945 IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Please understand: it is not the quick and complete surrender to lease understand: it is not the quick and complete surrender to English that surprises me today. In that nameless hospital in Manhattan the new language coming at me from all directions had, after all, been transformed into the sudden vocabulary of food and affection, warmth and punishment, the doorway into the hearts of the people who held me hostage. That painful experience only accelerated a learning process that lay in store for me anyway, like any child of immigrants, like my parents before me, like my own sons in their own uprooted lives when it would become their turn to change countries the way others, perhaps most of those who read these words, change brands of cereal.