Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

  This story, seemingly fictitious, really happened. It happened to us, to Angélica and to me, exactly as written here, exactly as I wrote it many years later. Except for the ending. They did not take her away, not for a day, not for a month, not for all time. But the rest is true. By the end of September I had taken temporary refuge in the residence of one of my mother’s friends, the wife of the Israeli Ambassador, waiting during the next week for a chance to slip into one of the heavily guarded Latin American embassies that could guarantee me safe-conduct out of the country. And when Angélica came to visit me, to spend the night, she was detained the next morning by two secret agents of Pinochet who had been watching the house under the impression that Senator Carlos Altamirano, the fugitive head of the Socialist Party, thin and bespectacled like me, had sought refuge there. An absurd notion, given his pro-Palestinian sympathies. But Angélica managed to outwit those detectives without discussing international affairs and escaped the fate the character in the story was unable to avoid.

  When many years later I came to write about the experience, I ended it differently, tragically, partly because that is the way most episodes like this one do end, but mainly, I think, because that was the only way of conveying to myself and to others the horror of what went on in my mind during the hour when the woman I loved was in the hands of men who could do anything they wanted to her, anything they wanted, and I could do nothing to stop them. That ending did not take place in reality, but it did repeat itself over and over in my imagination as I watched from a window, praying I would not have to see it over and over in my memory in the days and years to come, praying that I would not have to imagine a world without Angelica.

  Discovering, after so many days obsessed with my ever increasing distance from the country, that I would rather lose Chile than lose Angelica, that I could live without Chile but I could not live without Angelica, beginning to understand that the private home I had made with her was more important and would outlast the public home I had sought to build with Chile and its people.

  It was then, I think, that for the first time in my life I clearly separated my wife from the country where she had been born.

  Ever since I had met her, Angélica had been confused, in my mind, with Chile. All the readings and all the trips and all the protests and all the snow on all the mountains did less to attach me to the country than this one frail human being.

  There I was in early 1961, a stranger in a land that I had inhabited for seven years without finding a real gateway, whose songs and customs and people I hardly knew, no matter how much I had come to admire them, regard them as potential avenue for liberation. And then, one day, Angelica. To be quite frank, what enchanted me to begin with were her dazzling looks and fiery spirit and joy of life, the hot sexual thought of a lithe moreno body under her dress, that charming smile of hers that the gods of advertising couldn’t have coached out of a woman if they had had a thousand years and a ton of Max Factor makeup. How much of this I identified with the exotic Chile, the exotic Latin America that I had been secretly and transgressively hungering for all these many years, is anybody’s guess. I experienced love through the metaphors available to males in Latin America—and elsewhere—at the time, no matter how suspect and gendered I may consider them now, more than thirty years later: the woman as the earth, the earth goddess to be excavated, a territory to be explored by a pioneer, a land in which to root your manhood like a tree—those were the images that surged inside me as we made love, I could never entirely rid myself of the feeling that I was somehow making mine something more than an individual woman, that I was making love to a community that was inside her, that through her body and her life I was binding myself to a permanent place on this planet.

  Now that I write this, I have come to understand that it was ultimately not Chile that I desired in her. What attracted me most deeply in the woman who would become my wife were qualities that transcended national origins or boundaries, things I would have treasured in her even if she had been Lithuanian or from Mars. Her fierce loyalty, her bewildering ability to see through people, her stubborn (and often exasperating) tendency to speak her mind without caring about the consequences, her almost animal loyalty, her fearlessness, her unpredictability—none of these was necessarily typical of Chile, and some of them, such as her undiplomatic directness or her rejection of compromises, could indeed even be construed as extremely un-Chilean.

  And yet, if it was not Chile that finally joined us, without Chile, the Chile I imagined inside her, it is probable that our love would not have lasted. Angélica is wonderful, but she was not then and certainly is not now, in spite of her name, an angel. Without going into details (she is, after all, the first sharp reader of my works and I do want to get this past her), it should be sufficient to state that she was, well, difficult. Not that I was that easy, either. We were attracted to each other precisely because we were opposites, and if life was never boring and never will be while she is around, it was a constant clash. Given these circumstances and our immaturity, it is quite possible that we wouldn’t have made it to marriage and beyond merely sustained by the dim intuition that each of us had found the long-lost half of the soul. An additional something was necessary for our love to survive those rough and desperate breakups that all young lovers flounder through, and that something, for me, frequently seemed the vast Chile that I felt Angélica contained within herself. I could feel the country bringing me back to her for more, my need for the identity she gave me fastening me to her, Chile secretly cementing us together. It is the perverse logic of love that the reverse was true for Angelica: what kept her by my side when things didn’t seem to be working out was, she has told me, the very fact that I came from some other place, her intuition that I would not treat her the way Chilean males treat women, that I could be totally trusted, that I was transparent, that I was naive: in other words, that I was a gringo. A gringo who happened to be searching frantically for a country that would be the answer to his loneliness and transience.

  Angélica possessed that country within her merely by virtue of having been born here, simply because her forefathers and foremothers had made love under these mountains and intermingled their many races, their Iberian and Mediterranean and Indian and African stock, at a time when mine had never even dreamed of emigrating. She possessed this country in the nursery rhymes in Spanish she had sung when I was reciting Old Mother Hubbard, she possessed it in the peasant proverbs she had absorbed in the dusty plaza of the small countryside town in the Aconcagua Valley where she had been brought up, she possessed it in every Chilean spice, every Chilean fruit, every Chilean meal that had nurtured her. That was Chile, all of that and more. She had been accumulating every drop of experience inside herself like a reservoir. At some point early in our fumbling and fearful and expectant movements toward each other, I sensed that reservoir, sensed that I could drink from its waters, drink Chile in her waters.

  How vast were those waters and how insatiable my thirst was brought home to me the first night we became pololos—a word with which Chileans designate boys and girls who are going steady, a word that comes from a butterfly-like insect that goes from flower to flower dizzying itself with their sweetness. We had slipped into a sort of discotheque and began timidly exploring one another, the way you do when you are under twenty and the universe has everything to teach you and an orchestra is remotely playing a bolero, Bésame, bésame mucho, como si fuera esta noche la última vez. Kiss me, keep on kissing me, as if tonight were the last night, and Angélica took her mouth from mine and began to sing (a bit off-key, but who cared) the words to that song of Latin American love that I had bypassed so often on the radio as I rushed to hum along with Frankie Avalon and that was followed by a tango which she also knew by heart, and inside that brain of hers, behind those freckles, was the whole repertoire of popular Latin America that I had despised, and which I now wanted to learn by heart to prove my newfound identity. It may have been that very night when I asked her
if she danced cueca, the Chilean national dance, and she smiled mischievously and grabbed a napkin from the table and waved it in the air and hid her face behind it and suggested that she teach me some steps, that it was a matter of imagining a rooster out courting. I had to try to corral her, corner her, this was the game. She was the treasure and I was the hunter. She would hide and I would seek.

  It may have been the next day, when we went down to the center of Santiago together, that I realized that Angélica had within herself a treasure she barely knew she had, a treasure that I was seeking and that she was not even trying to hide. Her presence by my side as we strolled through the center of the city I had lived in for seven years suddenly transformed me into a tourist arriving at this foreign destination for the first time. I had often passed this café, for instance, and it meant absolutely nothing to me, but for Angélica it was the place where in the forties her journalist father, after he had put the paper to bed, would meet her mother and a group of Popular Front friends and drink and discuss how to fix the world till dawn. As Angélica casually told me the story of the night her father had waited for the news of the Allied landing in Normandy, we were interrupted by a pretty young woman. She came up to us, pecked Angelica’s cheek, and was introduced to me as the daughter of her “Mami Lolo,” the woman who had brought Angélica up in the countryside, when she was a little girl. The two of them chatted for a while about people I did not know and places I had never been. When the young woman said goodbye and we continued on our way, Angélica sketched out the story of her nanny, who had been brought very young into the family house as a helper and later had cared for the grandchildren—who, it would turn out, was in fact the illegitimate daughter of Angelica’s grandfather. “You have to come to Santa María,” Angélica said, “where I was raised, and meet my Mami Lolo.” Half a block later, Angélica was greeted by someone else, and so it went and so it would go. So many people and so many conversations and so many stories. Perhaps it was then that I began to understand that Angélica was a network of stories, a lineage of stories, a wellspring of stories that had made her, that she was full to the brim with people, with Chileans, who had made her. It may have been then or it may have been later, but at some point early in our relationship I realized that Angelica’s connection to Chile was the opposite of mine, that it was not and never could be willed, that she could not discard it as I was in the process of discarding the United States, that it was as much part of her as her lungs or her skin. In the months and years to come, as she guided me into her life and her body, she also guided me into the mysteries of a continent that should have been mine by birthright but that I had cut myself off from, a country I had seen for years as nothing more than a stop on the road to someplace else.

  And when I was faced with the loss of that country after the coup, when I finally told Abel yes, I would seek refuge in an embassy, what ultimately made that decision tolerable like a secret silhouette inside me was the promise of Angelica, the certainty that I could wander the earth forever if the woman who had taught me Chile was by my side.

  Now she was in a car with those two men and I had come face-to-face with the possibility that she would not accompany me on my wanderings, that she would not be there at all. I told myself that maybe this was the cruel, the hidden reason behind my miraculous survival: death had spared me because all along it was going to take Angélica instead. Death would punish me for having refused its gift, for having stayed in this country all month. I was going to be punished for not having left immediately, for not having sent my family away—this was what I deserved for pretending that I was untouchable and immortal.

  But again I was given a reprieve.

  When the two men released her and she came back into the residence and we trembled against each other, when I was able to hold my love, my best friend, my companion for life, in these arms that had despaired of ever touching her again, my hand going through her hair over and over, my eyes closing and then opening to make sure that it was still true, that she was still here, I was finally ready to learn the lesson that death had sent me one more time, perhaps one last time. It was then that the coup finally caught up with me, that it descended on me as it had descended on La Moneda, exploding silently inside me like the bombs exploding all over the city, making me understand, for the first time since Allende’s overthrow, the full and irreversible reality of the evil that had visited us and that would not go away. In that working-class shack, at the moment of mind-wrenching fear when I anticipated my own death, I thought I had discovered what the Inferno is: the place where you suffer forever, from which you are not able to escape. Now I knew I had been wrong: the Inferno is the one place in the world where the person you most love suffers for all eternity while you are forced to watch, unable to intervene, responsible for her being there.

  And that Inferno was here, the country I had associated with Paradise.

  It was time to get the hell out of Chile.

  TWELVE

  A CHAPTER DEALING WITH THE DISCOVERY OF LIFE AND LANGUAGE DURING THE YEARS 1965 TO 1968 IN SANTIAGO DE CHILE

  On May 6, 1965, I celebrated my twenty-third birthday by declaring my independence from the United States of America.

  It was an aggressive celebration: I stood in front of the U.S. Embassy in Santiago, under the canopy of old trees from the narrow Parque Forestal, hurling threats and insults at the American government. And not alone in my invective: thousands of demonstrators surrounded me in the streets of Santiago, while beyond our borders hundreds of thousands of other Latin Americans protested from Guadalajara to Cochabamba, united as much by our radical politics as by our common Spanish language.

  My voice, trained to speak English in that exclusive Upper East Side private-school way, honeyed with attempts to imitate Paul Anka, my voice that had assumed a pretentious British accent while reciting Keats at the Grange, was at that moment joining in the raucous and proverbial shout of the Latin American left, inspired by the Cuban revolution and its firing squads: Al paredón, yanqui lad-rón —up against the wall, you yankee thief.

  Appropriately, the police replied to these words of goodwill toward our neighbor to the North with a barrage of new repressive weapons supplied by the very Americans who were being so virulently denounced. A colossal black-and-white police van that we had never seen before had been idling its motor in front of the embassy. On its top was a strange round, funnel-like contraption which, as soon as the vehicle sprang into action, turned out to be a water cannon from which spewed a sickening red liquid. We then sampled a good dose of teargas, which burned in our lungs longer than usual. I use the word sample deliberately, because instead of tasting the teargas provided by the United States aid program to Chile, I should have been inside the ivy walls of that embassy sampling a rather more enticing shrimp cocktail and other delicacies which also would have come to me courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer. Indeed, at that very moment I should have been sitting down with the Cultural Attache and other U.S. functionaries to a lunch in honor of the poet Ned O’Gorman.

  I had met O’Gorman a week before when he visited the English Department at the University of Chile, where I was an assistant to several professors, teaching English and North American literature. He was a charming man, a talented poet (as far as I can remember now) and his politics seemed fine: his radical Catholic views had led him to leave a life of comfort and serve the poor in the most abandoned parishes of New York—which was more than any of us, with all our socialist convictions, had ever done. His visit to our Faculty had gone so splendidly that the embassy had invited us all to have a midday meal with him on May 6—a free banquet which we enthusiastically agreed to attend.

  If I found myself hurling curses outside the embassy rather than petals of praise to O’Gorman for his metaphors or to the Cultural Attache for his selection of wines, it was because four days before my birthday, on May 2, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson had ordered twenty-two thousand Marines (with a token one thousand OAS support troops) into
the Dominican Republic to quash a popular rebellion that was meant to reinstall Juan Bosch as President. Bosch had won the election fairly a few years back but had been overthrown in a Putsch supported by Washington. Johnson was not going to allow, he said, a “Communist dictatorship” to take hold there, though, as Senator William Fulbright and public opinion later learned, there was no evidence of the pitifully weak Dominican Communists influencing the movement that supported Bosch. The U.S. government was obsessed with Cuba and the 1961 failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, where a ragtag group of anti-Fidelista expatriates had failed to repeat the scenario that had ousted Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. As long as the Armed Forces inside each Latino country could guarantee order (as in the 1964 coup in Brazil against President João Goulart engineered by the U.S. Embassy), the Americans would let them do the dirty work. Otherwise, the Marines themselves would make sure that no dominoes fell in Latin America. It was the beginning of the Johnson Doctrine: the President claimed the right to send his “boys” anywhere in the hemisphere if it seemed that “another Cuba” was about to materialize.

  It was also the effective end of the Alliance for Progress. The carrot had been devoured by the Latin American rich and what was revealed glaringly with the invasion of Santo Domingo was the crude reality of the Big Stick that was now, as it had been for the last hundred years, America’s principal way of dealing with the turbulent South, mercilessly applied not only to the Caribbean that the U.S. had always treated as its own private lake but also to those who, in faraway Chile, protested that treatment.