Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

  If the pseudo-ascetic rejection of mass-produced goods had only a marginal attraction for me, the way in which a wide array of young men and women around us in Berkeley were contesting the conventional, repressive, clockwork rationality of contemporary society, the way in which they echoed what millions of others around the world were proclaiming—that the system was bankrupt—the fact that they were not going to wait for somebody else to come from below or from outside to liberate them tomorrow, they intended to start right now, right here, experimenting with their own lives, that movement which insisted on personal freedom as the basis of any change in society, was to have a profound impact on my existence.

  When we arrived in Berkeley, Angélica and I considered ourselves extremely revolutionary in our politics, though our lives, the way we lived and the rules we obeyed and our personal aspirations, were relatively conventional and might even be called bourgeois. In spite of our fiery proclamations of a different future, and though our families and most of our friends considered us eccentrically bohemian, the Chilean world we inhabited was staid and placid and boring, our existence had not really extricated itself from the sleepy rhythms of the past, though we were consumers of countercultural artistic products, trends and ideas and fashions and music and books and films trickling in from abroad. And now we were in Berkeley, one of the hippest places on the planet, and from here Santiago, quite frankly, looked like a provincial backwater, a timid, dull city at the farthest edge of the world where, culturally, nothing very exciting ever happened. It is one thing to hum the Sacco and Vanzetti song in Santiago as a record scratches along and quite another to sing, along with Joan Baez in person and ten thousand brothers and sisters, that very song, or for these ears to absorb the sad, hopeful voice of Pete Seeger asking us where have all the flowers gone or these legs to jolt to the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore West or these lips to smoke a joint and pass it on to Country Joe, not to mention the Fish, one, two, three, four, what are you waiting for? It is one thing to read Marcuse in a plush Chilean armchair and a quite different thing to watch his theories come alive in a multitude of young people who, one by one, enact the idea that pleasure can be revolutionary in a society that represses itself, people who, one by one, defy you to act out the same idea if you dare. This was the first time we had ever lived, either of us, away from home, the first time we were free of the constraints of family and jobs and studies and friends and timetables and the-way-things-are-done. As our new American friends invited us into their freewheeling existence with openness and generosity, we felt both truly liberated and truly scared.

  Suddenly we were confronted with men and women who were rebelling against authority in all its forms, daring to question the way everything was structured, from the family to the market to the brain to the rearing of children, asserting their right to do what they wanted with bodies that were not the property of their parents or of their bosses, asserting their right to fuck whom they wanted when they wanted and to insert into those bodies anything that would intensify their rapture and camaraderie. There was no doubt about the danger of what they were attempting but that was part of the magnetism they exerted on me, a terrifying attraction that was enhanced by the playful irreverence with which they were dancing at the edge of the cliff, of themselves, dancing right at the edge of the cliff of history, willing to risk death and self-destruction and radiantly enjoying every moment of it.

  During that year and a half, we plunged into that whirlwind, but not so wildly that we were unable eventually to extract ourselves. It may have been the fact that we knew we would be returning to Latin America or that the vision of the bare feet of the millions who could not engage in our games continued to fester in me and spoil the parry, or perhaps it was simply Angélica’s caution and pragmatism that held me back from going further. She had been able to establish in Berkeley relationships that were much more authentic and challenging and democratic than anything she had ever found in hypocritical, repressed, middle-class Chile, but not even that enchantment made her lose her down-to-earth perspective. She suspected that you could not live permanently like this, on the edge, that our life in Berkeley was artificial and transitory and that it needed to be tested back home, that only when we returned there would we find out what was deep enough in us to survive the clash with our country, which after all was, in its customs, very conservative.

  And yet there was a moment, perhaps halfway through our stay in Berkeley, when the idea occurred to both of us—almost simultaneously we looked up from whatever we were doing that day and wondered what if we stayed, what if we did not return? We’re happy here, our eyes said to each other, I said to Angélica silently as I watched her blossom and dance, she said to me silently as she watched me so at home with all these gringos who knew who Mickey Mantle was.

  If that idea never went beyond a formless, unexpressed hint of a possibility, it was because of two developments, one of them political and the other literary.

  If I had discovered that English was still the basis for my identity, maybe, who knows, I might have tried to stay on. In Chile, Spanish had been my companion in travels and travail, the place where I met my friends and loved Angélica and figured out with my Latin American generation who the hell we were and dreamed of changing the world, while English was increasingly relegated to a private conversation I held with myself. In Berkeley, that situation was almost symmetrically reversed: the language which, against all odds and against all logic, I had kept alive in Chile flourished joyously in my everyday Berkeley life while Spanish receded to the secluded desk where I labored over my essays on the contemporary Latin American novel. All the six months it took me to complete the book in Spanish, I could feel English calling to me, promising me that the new energy infused in it by the bubbling vernacular of America would spill over into my fiction. So when I finally finished the essays and packed them off to my editor in Santiago, I sat down to work on my stories, expecting a resplendent renaissance. What stared back at me was a stilted, suffocating, stagnant prose, an excessively bookish English that inhabited some remote rudderless no-man’s-land, like a coughing cancerous guest in a Samuel Beckett novel, a relative nobody dares to evict, hoping that he will eventually die on his own. There was only one way to invigorate my English and that was to lay it open to the rambunctious creativity of the language exploding in the streets, in the bedrooms, at the picnics, in the marches, in the discussions of real-life California, lay myself open to my gringo self, my American self. But, instead of that, I said to my typewriter: instead of trying to plunge deeper into English to express my Latin American experience, instead of one more monstrous artificial step, what if I … what if I … and when the decision came, abruptly, in the middle of a phrase I was writing in English, when that revelation burst into my consciousness, it was not to be denied.

  All the energy that these long years had marshaled to constrict my Spanish now manifested itself in a fierce and fanatical determination to banish what had been the love of my life. Repeating more than twenty years later my childhood gesture in that hospital, reacting in Berkeley just as I had back in New York, I drastically broke off relations with the language in which I had sought refuge from solitude all my life, I embraced a tongue that would link me to the community that was imagining a different history for itself and for me, I chose to become a contiguous human being. I told myself, and anybody else who cared to listen, that I would never again write another word in English as long as I lived.

  Where was I from?

  Sitting at my typewriter in Berkeley, California, that day, precariously balanced between Spanish and English, for the first time perhaps fully aware of how extraordinarily bicultural I was, I did not have the maturity—or the emotional or ideological space, probably not even the vocabulary—to answer that I was a hybrid, part Yankee, part Chilean, a pinch of Jew, a mestizo in search of a center. I was unable to look directly in the face the divergent mystery of who I was, the abyss of being bilingual and binational at a time whe
n everything demanded that we be univocal and immaculate. All around the world, people were dying for their right to bread, housing, dignity, they were dying for the right someday to afford the luxury of asking themselves that sort of question. This was the sixties of extreme nationalism, the all-or-nothing, the either-or sixties. It was not a time for shades of difference, for complexity, for soul-searching about the enigma of heterogeneous identity. You were one thing or you were another, you had to be on this side or on that side of the conflict for the soul and wealth of the world, and the mental maneuvers whereby I had disassociated my love for English from my everyday existence and political options had finally become inoperable. I was not willing to be a young man in between, not knowing his own name, adrift in a world torn by the two Americas inside and outside him. I was not even willing, at that point, to ask myself how the two languages differed, how each of them might complement or oppose each other, the subtle way in which English made me one kind of writer, one kind of person, and Spanish somebody else. The rival languages had been kept separate throughout my life, and now that I was switching again, that is where, more than ever, I wanted them to remain, exiled from one another, supposedly belonging to unconnected and compartamentalized universes, as if the very act of comparing them would force me to accept that I was indeed irremediably dual, that there was a tainted middle ground that they both shared and from whence each language would examine and touch the other, demand to know what changed when I said se me fue la micro instead of “I missed the bus,” the fact that in Spanish the bus was leaving me blamelessly behind, had gone off on its own, whereas in English … But I did not want to know, I did not want to think. I was not ready to look too closely at the way I spoke and wrote the Spanish I was embracing then with such unilateral ferocity, for fear, I suppose, that I would discover the subterranean, contaminated influence of English persisting, flooding my consciousness, judging every word as if it were remote and foreign. But there may be more to my automatic decision not to probe how those languages affected me, because even now, in fact, even now that I swim merrily in them both, the mere attempt to establish where one ends and the other begins and how they overlap causes me acute discomfort, as if I were transgressing a taboo, getting too close to the mysterious center that unifies me in spite of language.

  Then it was even more imperative to stay away from any comparisons. I needed to be whole, intact, seamless; that is the way, I told myself, you go into war and survive. That, I told myself, es lo que mi pueblo necesita—what my people need from me.

  This political realization was the second link holding me to Chile, and it was helped along by my coming to understand, one night in late October of 1968, why the U.S. revolution was doomed to failure, a night when the real limitations of the New Left movement were revealed to me.

  Early that morning, I had found myself approaching a picket line that stretched in front of University Hall, where a wonderful class I was attending on late Shakespearean tragedy was supposed to meet. I can’t for the life of me remember the occasion for the boycott of classes called by student activists—if was something related to the Free Speech Movement or a Third World Studies Program—but I do remember that I hesitated at the picket line, fully aware that if I honored the strike I could not go to that Shakespeare class I so immensely enjoyed, aware that back in provincial Chile I would regret the loss of that intellectual space of free discussion, and aware also that I would have to quit the karate lessons scheduled for later that day, which I was taking as an exercise in meditation and self-discipline.

  My role in the American protest movement had until then been that of spectator, not varying fundamentally since the moment I watched Lyndon Johnson announce on TV that he was not running for reelection. I had cheered then and kept right on cheering later, participating circuitously, encouraging the political action with occasional sideline cries, taking mental notes or filming with my super-8 camera. I grieved over the death of Martin Luther King and repudiated the repression in France and in Prague and in Mexico and the police brutality that greeted so many protests in the United States, but I had been extra-careful to stay out of the way of the security forces.

  This seemed to be my fate. In Chile, I had been Argentinian; here, I was Chilean; always the danger of deportation, my foreign passport weighing down on me. So I looked on while heads were broken, sit-ins were disrupted, and damsels in distress were dragged off by the “pigs” (as I uneasily called them, not sure if such linguistic dehumanization, rather than truly describing the enemy, did not end up numbing our own minds). My participation was always surreptitious and oblique, my enthusiasm inevitably dampened by my awareness of the pain that some of the protesters were enduring. It had been easy in the remote safety of Chile to feel good every time I read about a baby-boomer burning his draft card, but here in Berkeley those cards belonged to friends, here in Berkeley those friends were agonizing over a moral quandary that had no easy solution. One decided at the last moment to accept the draft rather than risk jail; another was desperately trying to get into a post-graduate study program he wasn’t interested in and couldn’t afford; and another one, whom I had met at a march (I loved marching!) came knocking at our apartment one midnight, trying to scramble together some money to help him get to Canada. History was being made right here, right now, and my contribution was to join my voice faintly to the chorus, add one more body to the human wave, fork over some spare change when it was needed.

  So that picket line was the first time I was allowed to offer something—minimal, it is true—in expiation, and I virtuously stepped back and went home. When I told Angelica, she said I was a fool—an ethical one, she added, but still a fool. Nobody cared or even knew, for that matter, if I stayed away from class, and by tomorrow the campus would be opened up again anyway. Better to reserve yourself, she said, for more important struggles. But that night my wife said nothing when I told her I was going to check out an open meeting of the striking students, not to worry if I didn’t come home till dawn. She understood that I needed to measure whether it had been worth flushing Shakespeare and Japanese martial arts down the toilet.

  There were a couple of hundred activists loosely scattered behind a barricade close to Sather Gate, discussing how to react when, the next day, the police came to clear the campus. Should they resist with violence? Or was passive resistance called for? Or no resistance at all? Was there room for negotiation? Were the majority of the students with the movement, or had they turned against it? How to reach out to the blacks in Berkeley and Oakland and bring them into the struggle? And so it went, all night long, five, six, seven hours. Some of those who talked were pissed off because the tactics had not gone far enough, and others were equally pissed off because they had gone much too far, had ended up alienating the liberals, the unions, the professors. There were almost as many groups and factions and fragments of factions as there were people, Socialist Youth and Black Panthers and Trotskyites of different stripes and Communists and SDS representatives and many others I cannot recall, and none of them agreed on anything, except that they were all wary of coordinating their actions with one another, they all feared surrendering their individuality and all were obsessed with how to communicate their message, how to ensure that the cameras picked up what was happening.

  I sat to one side, listening carefully, biting my tongue, wanting to stand up and shout at them to look at the enemy and learn that the monster they were fighting was rational and functional and organized and that, with no plan, no strategy, no clear goal, they had no chance whatsoever of winning. These activists, I thought, had fallen into a very American trap, too much in love with themselves and their own righteousness, orchestrating everything for the image it projected, confusing that image with reality, so desperate to become the first revolution to be televised that they ended up serving up photogenic moments that they no longer controlled. I wanted to tell them that fervor and moral superiority were not enough, were never enough. But it would have been useless
: they were only mirroring a debate that, nationwide, was tearing the whole movement apart.

  I watched them with admiration and sorrow. This was not a revolution. It might have enough strength and integrity to help end the war that the faraway Vietnamese were winning, but it was centuries away, I thought, from taking power. I was aware that my critique of this New Left movement was remarkably similar to how the old American left reacted to this astounding explosion of energy, the generation of the Lincoln Brigade who, like my father, had come of age in the thirties and had managed to survive the repressive fifties and were now confronted by this totally unexpected renewal of social unrest from a quarter they had never even conceived of as potentially revolutionary. My physical age had me sharing with my hippie and SDS and Black Power buddies a generational disgust with authority and an understanding of the role of the media in the shaping of public consciousness, but my mental age made me older, my experience of mass movements, my education by the Allendistas of Chile, made me feel almost like a grandfather to these people born when I was born.

  The next day I watched them being routed by the police, I filmed them from the roof of one of the halls and anticipated how their figures would look projected on a wall in Chile. I heard them shout, “We are the people,” and from my distance and my parallel desire to become one with the masses, I mourned the disaster that awaited them, I understood that it was make-believe, that they were not the people, that they were pushing themselves to excesses and rage precisely because they were not the people. I understood that they were punishing themselves for not being the heroes of this movie. They were punishing themselves for not being Vietnamese.