Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey Read online

  All through history, people have been switching languages as a way of surviving. They are invaded, they are conquered, they are enslaved, their homes are smashed, their small or vast kingdoms turned to ruin: and inside the seeds of violence, almost like a gentle brother on another horse, barely a bit behind the fist holding the sword, is the verb. A captive always ends up being a captive of somebody else’s words.

  But if you look more closely at those countless victims who were forced, in far more traumatic circumstances than mine, to learn the language of those who held power over them, you will remark how many of them decided to become bilingual. Some of them succeeded and others were only able to secretly blend the forbidden and hidden language into the new and dominant one, infiltrate its rhythms, its grammar, its sounds, make it more familiar. But most of them, I am sure, tried to keep their first language alive, warm, close by. While they could, for as long as they could, those converts comforted themselves in their misery with the promise that the past was not entirely dead, that it would someday resurrect. They dared risk being double, the anxiety, the richness, the madness of being double.

  It was a risk I was not willing to take there, at my beginning.

  Instead, I instinctively chose, the first time I was truly alone with myself and took control of the one thing that was entirely my own in the world, my language, I instinctively chose to refuse the multiple, complex, in-between person I would someday become, this man who is shared by two equal languages and who has come to believe that to tolerate differences and indeed embody them personally and collectively might be our only salvation as a species. I refused to take a shortcut to the hybrid condition I have now embraced.

  Why? Why is it that at some point, one day, one hour, one minute, during the infinity of those three weeks in that hospital, the boy I once inhabited found himself crossing a line of apparently no return and decided to suffocate the person he had been, to kill the language in which he had built the house of his identity?

  I don’t remember.

  No matter how hard I try, I am unable to return to the mind of that boy forgotten in the first of his many exiles.

  We all desire to find out how we began, force the legs of memory open. That obsession: go back as far as you can to your origins, try to be there before you are submitted to any look, any name, the shade of a vocabulary. Be there to watch yourself being watched into existence. But the species has decreed by law that we will be present at, but never be able to remember, the two most important events of our life: when we are born and when we die. And why should I be any different? But I was, I presumptuously thought I was. I thought I could bypass that law, access what had been my second birth, the moment when I had mothered and fathered myself. I had been present then, both of me—the Spanish child I had been and the English child I had become. I had witnessed that event in two languages and one of them would have to reveal what had happened, would open the door so I could spy on the moment when I had created myself, made myself into the person who can write these words in either language fifty years later.

  And so, during the far too many years it has taken to write this text, I puzzled that event, interrogated it like a dead prisoner, rolled it around and around in my mind like a talisman or a curse. But the stone of my past became smoother and more enigmatic the more I fingered it. The harder I tried to access those children who occupied my body, see through their dual eyes what they saw, the further I drifted from what they witnessed that day. One of them, the child inside who speaks Spanish, will not respond, because I left him to die in the dark, atrophied the language with which he might have transmitted these memories to me; and the other child, the one who speaks English, he was present of course, but he was swept that moment from the fierce abscess of his mind, preferring to pretend that his start with me was painless and splendid and immaculate, that when he caught me as I fell I had no previous language.

  I am left to ponder and milk that foundational moment of my life for meaning, forced to drag from the cracked black mirror of my past the story of how I invented myself that day.

  I had behaved, I had obediently learned all the ropes, imitated all the right gestures, made sounds into syllables. I had baby-talked my way into the language that Borges, a few blocks from me in Buenos Aires, was using, almost like a dagger, to explore what it means to an Argentinian at the edge of the earth desiring to be someone else—and just as I was getting over the trauma of my first banishment from the womb, just as I was surfacing into articulation, here I was, subjected to another journey, another expulsion, another hospital, another doctor, here we go again, falling again, a repeat performance, entangled again in designs drawn up by people I could not control. With only my mother tongue to stave off the mouth of despair, to remind me who I was, the tongue my mother had bequeathed me with the promise never to desert me and speak me out of any pain, the tongue of my mother that now proved useless, as absent as my mother herself. And my father.

  He had also abandoned me, I thought. For the second time. One day, barely a year after my birth, he had simply disappeared from our Argentine home, turned into a photograph next to my parents’ bed, a blurred and vague phantom whose absence I probably lamented and simultaneously celebrated. I was left alone with my mother’s overwhelming love: an Oedipal fantasy come true without any need of bloodshed, no soiled sense of guilt. Until abruptly, a year and a half later, in a foreign land where everything was cold and unknown, the photo materialized into a real body and those large male hands picked me up at the railway station in New York. I cannot really have recognized the man who had been my father and who had come back to protect me from loneliness but also to threaten me with it. Did I desire to keep my mother all to myself again? Did I fear he could read my guilty thoughts, magically be able to punish me? Did I punish myself before he could? Did I let myself grow sick to protest my exile, recuperate my mother, force her to tend me as she had done in Buenos Aires when my rash kept me awake all night, her hands holding mine lovingly all night? Did I let pneumonia into my lungs the first night they went out in almost two years and left me with a baby-sitter? And when I found myself alone again, this time without my mother or father, this time with no one between me and death, alone with the child and the language that child spoke, did I lash out at that Spanish language to deflect the impossibility of lashing out at my Spanish-speaking parents? Did I subscribe to a pact with my English self? Was that the price he had demanded for coming to the rescue that day I had found myself wordless in a roomful of alien adult voices with the power of life and death over me? The price that had to be paid for his protection: to sew up the abortive mouth of my Spanish self, to starve the little shit, brick by brick, like Fortunato being buried alive in “The Cask of Amontillado,” brick by brick walling off my mother tongue from all contact with the world? To make love while he died?

  I resist the interpretation that it all boils down to a trauma, that I can’t access that moment because I am both abuser and victim, Cain and Abel rolled into one, Oedipus gouging out the eyes of his languages and his memory to atone for a sin he did not commit, he could not possibly have had the knowledge of committing. It can’t all be in the psychology, the mythology, the archetypes, the twisted contortions of the personality. History also intervened.

  Outside the hospital, ready to heal and possess my soul, was the most powerful nation in the world: the United States of America was waiting for me as I toddled out of that building, a two-and-a-half-year-old Argentine child babbling away in English to his Spanish-speaking parents, clutching his mother’s hand, his father’s hand, either in anguish or with the cheerful confidence that he had paid his dues, that they would never disappear again.

  But they did. A few months later, they did disappear. And America was there this time, inside the English language, behind the English language, ready to work its enchantment.

  Again, it wasn’t my parents’ fault. There was another sickness. This time, my mother’s: ever since that tense welcome at t
he railway station the day of our arrival, she had been sinking into a depression which the House of Death and the winter of New York and the near-death of her son did nothing to allay. But what she especially remembers from those grim months is how voiceless and vulnerable she felt. Every morning she would trudge through the alien snow to the butcher shop and there she’d watch the American ladies reap the choicest morsels of beef, watch them cracking jokes with the butcher and his assistant, inquiring about each other’s families or the latest news from the front, my mother outside the circle of that vocabulary, excluded from that community, and when her turn finally came, she would stutter and stumble and collapse her way into negotiating a nice piece of meat for her carnivorous Argentine family and the impatient man in the smeared white apron on the other side of the gleaming counter would invariably hand her a hunk of nerves and fat and blood unfit for a dog—take it or leave it, lady—and she had to take it, day after day after day, swallow that and other humiliations, regressing to that moment as a girl when she had been told she could not open a door because she was foreign and Jewish and different, again feeling herself shunned, a stranger in Babylon.

  But not every gringo was slamming the door shut on her: through all those difficult times, she felt protected, she would say later, by one American, a man who, though crippled and in a wheelchair, would somehow, she was sure, miraculously find the way to make things right for her and a fearful world: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And when the President she adored died on April 12, 1945, my mother’s grief sent her over the edge. Her depression turned into a mental and emotional breakdown. That death became emblematic of something deeper, something darker, in her life, some loss, in herself and in the life of the planet, which knew no relief, had no answer. The Nazis were retreating in Europe, the Japanese would soon surrender, the war was coming to an end, but my mother felt as if Roosevelt’s death were wresting a father from her, as if what was about to end was not the war but the world, as if nothing would ever be sane again. And maybe she was right, maybe she sensed what Auschwitz was closing, what Hiroshima was about to open. She could not deal with what the orphaned world was sending her way.

  There was no other solution. My father reluctantly placed his wife in an institution and, unable to care for us and keep his job, found a foster home just outside New York where my sister and I could be lodged along with other kids who had trouble in their families. I have the vaguest recollection of that place: summertime, swings, lemonade, perhaps those are my hands in my memory catching a firefly. But all this may be drifting back from some later zone in time. Nothing in my later development would signal any sort of abuse, the slightest hint that I may have been horribly unhappy. On the contrary. According to my father, who visited us frequently, I was much loved, ebullient and energetic as ever. I adapted and smiled and put on the best face I could, what else was I to do? I beguiled my caretakers, did everything I could to please them, deepened what must have been a preexisting inclination to be malleable and sunny, learned that if you are somebody’s prisoner you can always try to turn the tables and imprison your warden in the net of your charm, amuse yourself into survival.

  In English, of course.

  So that by the time my mother was well enough to resume a normal life and my parents came to gather their two kids and move with us to a delightful apartment on Morningside Drive—on November 1, 1945, the Day of the Dead, the day after Halloween, what other day would have served the purposes of this tale?—by the time my Spanish-speaking parents were finally able to do battle for the Latino soul of their son, they discovered that they had lost me to the charisma of America, that what had begun in that hospital as a childish linguistic tantrum had, in the foster home, hardened into something more culturally permanent and drastic: the question of language had become ensnared in the question of nationality, and therefore of identity.

  It is true that, even if I had possessed a language and an identity of my own to interpose between my self and America when it came calling, it still would have been hard to resist its allure. All over the world, people in those years were dazzled by the American dream of life. Why should I, living there, have bucked that trend?

  And yet I cannot dismiss the idea that my life did not have to turn out the way it did. I tell myself that if it had not been for those two accidents, my sickness and my mother’s, I would most certainly have evolved into a bilingual child, might have spent those ten years in the North at least partly anchored in the South, preparing myself for a return to a legendary Latin America that I would never have lost contact with. So that when the time came for history to play more games with me, when yet again forces I did not control sent me hurtling southward in 1954, I could have seen that experience as a homecoming for a bilingual Latino and not an exile for a monolingual would-be American.

  But that’s not how it turned out.

  Without their language as an ally inside me, my parents didn’t stand a chance against the country that, during their six-month absence, had welcomed me from sea to shining sea. With all its vibrancy, its optimism, the buoyant certainty of its people who thought they were the greatest ever to breed on the face of the earth.

  And I thought so, too.

  Listen to me in the car as we drive home, listen to me in the following days: I was coming around the mountain when she comes, I was coming from Alabama with a banjo on my knee, I was rowing the boat ashore, I was working on the railroad all the live-long day, even if sometimes I felt like a motherless child, still, Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah I had the whole world in my hands, my soul was marching on and it was marching on to the green green grass of home.

  Home. That’s where I was, where I had chosen to be: I was swinging low sweet chariot, come to carry me home, I was home, home on the range, I was in the land of the free and the home of the brave, this land was my land and it was made for you and me, but especially, I felt, it had been made for me.

  The friendly story the United States told me about myself could not have been more suited to the needs of a child who wanted to remake himself, free himself from who he had been. It was the story that America had told itself, had already used to convert to nationhood the teeming millions that had come to its shores in hopes of a better life, the story that had treated those huddled masses of foreign adults from underdeveloped lands as if they were children and needed to grow up. It was the story of modernization and virtue and zest, the get-up-and-go story that the United States was preparing to sell to a shocked world, a world terrified of its own powers of destruction, a world split apart like the atom, a world in dire need of a global system of values and standards and unity—the mythical American success story about to be exported, with its products and its dreams, to every corner of the globe by the “sleeping giant” (Admiral Yamamoto’s fateful words after Pearl Harbor) that had awakened from the Second World War as the dominant technological, economic, military, and cultural force of the century, perhaps the most powerful nation in history.

  The story that tells every human being to be like America itself and every problem will be solved.

  And so it came to pass that the English language adopted me at that crucial crossroads in twentieth-century history when its main carrier was embarking on its God-given mission to deliver the whole of humanity.

  Just as I had been delivered in that Manhattan hospital. Because America whispered to me the same message, reinforced the same message I had whispered to myself so only I could hear it in that hospital: You can become someone else, you can give birth to your self all over again. You can reinvent yourself in an entirely new language in an entirely new land. I had taken a dangerous step, a step that must have filled me with guilt and apprehension, a leap into the unknown: and then America appeared on its shining horse and turned on me the full force of its power, the very power it was unleashing on the globe, and with the same energy and the same cheap and accessible and cheerful culture convinced me, as it was right then trying to convince the world, that tomorrow is another day, tomorrow
will always be better. America reassured me that my act of betrayal of a useless past and useful parents was an act of rebellion, of self-reliance, of dignity, inevitable in any march to the future. America, made of immigrants and pioneers and entrepreneurs, told me that I was free, that I should not let others determine my life.

  America told me I could be innocent again.

  America, which had just won the Second World War and was out to save and possess the whole planet, promised me that, in return for my total loyalty, it would never abandon me.

  I had nowhere else to go and no one else to turn to.

  Bereft of a past and a language that told me who I was, what else was I to do?

  I became an American.

  FIVE

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

  For many years, I refused to believe that Salvador Allende had committed suicide.

  As soon as the Junta headed by General Pinochet had announced, the night of the coup, that the President had taken his own life, I knew they were lying. My only evidence was that, at that very moment, they were lying about killing hundreds of innocent patriots and lying about the death of Chile’s democracy, the fact that they had betrayed Allende and the Constitution they had sworn to defend. Later, during my exile, the certainty that they were trying to cover up his murder congealed into a story about good and evil that we repeated over and over again as we campaigned across the world. Because Allende’s death was the first death of the dictatorship, the preeminent death with which the terror had been inaugurated, we needed it to be an archetypal death, one from which all the other deaths would flow, we needed this to be an epic tale, tragic only in its simplicity, the good king assassinated by the generals who had sworn allegiance to him. And in this story we cast ourselves as the metaphorical sons and daughters of Allende, who would come out of the shadows, bent on revenge, determined to bring him back from the dead. It is a story that still greets me today everywhere I go, like an echo from people who are not—as I was not, during my years of exile—ready to face the tangled ambiguity of a hero who takes his own life, and prefer to return to my ears the stirring version that my mouth repeated for so long even as I suspected that it was false. Myths do not die as easily as human beings.