Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

  These innocent and fearless activists had a surplus of vehemence and ingenuity, decency and courage. What they lacked was something that they could not invent, conjure up from their imagination, no matter how they tried: through no fault of their own, they lacked a working class that could ground their revolution in reality.

  As for me, I had the good fortune of coming from Chile, I had inside me the memory of the working poor of my country, I belonged to a movement that had a very different strategy for taking power.

  Ever since my arrival, I had been fervent, even ecstatic, about the existence of this contestatory wave of Americans, this vindication of my own opposition to the United States, but the fact that I was growing tired of their egocentric rebellion and its exhibitionistic streak and the unbearable naïveté, meant really that I saw the need to go beyond those infantile tendencies in myself, what I called, rightly or wrongly, the American part of myself, the part that America had always stimulated in me and that, having been given free rein on this visit, practiced to excess, now was ready to submit to the discipline, the purpose, the order, that a real revolutionary movement needs in order to succeed. Listening to the American men and women of my generation ramble on during a whole long night and arrive absolutely nowhere, I felt nostalgia for the place I was lucky enough to call home and its older, more trusted and tried, methods and principles. I was, I discovered, not really American anymore.

  And yet, the person who was to return to Chile and its less flamboyant but more effective form of political struggle was not the same person who had arrived in Berkeley. My willing seduction by the ideals of the New Left was obviously helped by the American zone of my existence, the fact that I could identify with its protagonists in ways that Angélica and other Chileans who were on the same exchange program could not even begin to approach; but to reduce this fascination to a mere question of identity is to misinterpret the reasons why that movement in Berkeley proved so compelling and its effects so long-lasting in spite of my misgivings.

  The rebellion of enormous numbers of young people all around the world was trying to address issues and problems that the socialist revolutions of the twentieth century, in spite of taking power in myriad large and small countries, had not been able to solve. My SDS comrades had good reason to suspect organizations and hierarchies because the coherent, overly militant Leninist structures that revolutionary parties engendered in order to free humanity had ended up creating monsters in the name of purity and bureaucracies in the name of abolishing the state and repression in the name of liberty and chauvinism in the name of international solidarity.

  Those revolutions, in their first phase, when they had just triumphed, had stimulated liberating artistic and sexual and life-style practices, and had ended up, just as invariably—Russia and Cuba came to mind—clamping down on those experiments. Besieged by enemies from the left and from the right, they sacrificed their quest as irrelevant or counterrevolutionary or merely wasteful, and proceeded to militarize society in order to survive. A direct result, I thought, of the circumstance that these revolutions had always come to power in the poorest, least-developed parts of the planet, and had been forced to catch up with their enemies, had to impose discipline (and the resulting solemnity) in order to modernize and capitalize and defend themselves. If power were ever to change hands in a society that was itself rich and developed, then it might be possible to destroy all forms of authority simultaneously, change the ways in which the economy produced goods, along with ways in which the body produced joy, change the human heart along with the human organization of labor.

  It was this joining of the personal and the political, the social and the aesthetic, which most appealed to me and to so many members of my generation worldwide, this possibility of bringing together two strands of rebellion that had coexisted uncomfortably for centuries. That this project, toward the end of the tumultuous year of 1968, seemed destined for failure in the European and North American arenas did not invalidate the need to infuse the old revolutionary struggles with the questions and needs of the new movement. I was to be permanently affected by those libertarian and anti-authoritarian and hedonistic urges, by the need to see the revolution as a territory of freedom that could not be forever put off. The New Left also helped confirm me in my anti-Stalinism, my suspicion of bureaucracy, my almost automatic mistrust of the robotic, dogmatic Soviet-inspired practices that the working-class movement I so valued was mired in, though it would only be later that I realized that the very fragmentation and chaos of the U.S. struggle that I so deplored that night in Berkeley was the necessary precondition for a series of social and cultural battles that had been postponed or ignored by the traditional left. There was no place in the revolutionary parties of Chile, or practically every other country, for the questions that feminism and ecology were beginning to ask, no way of fitting the search for new models of sexuality and of aboriginal rights and artistic experimentation into the world as it was conceived by those traditional organizations. I brought many of these questions (though few answers) back with me to Chile. And if at that point in my life I had been forced to choose between addressing them or constructing a society that addressed the scandal of children deprived of milk and workers without jobs and women with legs bloated with veins about to pop because they had borne too many children, if I had to choose between my liberty and the old people who died in ditches with nobody to hold their hand, if it had come down to that choice, then I would have decided, reluctantly, that first came the poor and then the concerns of the more well-to-do, even if I suspected that those concerns, if not attended to, might lead the new society to an impasse which would make it unable to relieve the sorrow and misery all around us. But I returned to a revolution that did not ask me to make that choice, whose originality and wonder was precisely that it stated that it could resolve that contradiction by doing both things at the same time. I came back to a country where I could quote Chairman Mao, who couldn’t make it with anyone anyhow, and go on to sing that we all lived in a yellow submarine, sing the stanzas at the top of my lungs in the gardens of the university ripe for revolution.

  I brought the modern world back with me, the new United States, when I returned to Chile.

  How this new America inside me interfered with my merging with a Chile still slumbering in its stuffy traditions can be best understood in the obstacles, physical and cultural, I encountered on the streets of Santiago when I started jogging.

  It was a habit I had picked up among my health-conscious California friends, along with Frisbee and marijuana-spiced brownies. So, not long after we arrived back in Chile, one early morning I put on my fluorescent sneakers.

  Angélica raised herself groggily from sleep. “Oh, God. You’re not going to jog, are you?”

  I grinned, told her to go back to sleep.

  “This isn’t Berkeley,” she said, propping herself up on an elbow. “You’re going to run into trouble.”

  “Las calles pertenecen al pueblo,” I answered. “The streets belong to the people.”

  And off I went to prove my point.

  Angélica was able to follow my progress through the neighborhood by the indignant barking of dogs. Neither the dogs nor their owners had ever seen such a spectacle—a lanky, long-legged gringo with glasses and blond hair trotting by their well-to-do houses, disturbing the peace. The streets were for beggars, tramps, the homeless—or placid grandmothers walking toddlers and maids primly off to purchase bread at the corner store; most certainly not for someone to run berserk in outlandish athletic gear.

  That was exactly Angelica’s point every time I came home from my calisthenic sessions. She was worried (and always was and still is) that I was not ubicado—that I was unable to place myself, put myself in the place and the moment as I should, which meant, basically, that I was always doing something outrageous by the rather rigid rules and codes she had learned to live by. Her reaction to my running, sweating, in full public view represented the typical Chilean pe
rspective. Don’t show yourself, hide any extravagance, be moderate, don’t “expose” who you are. As the days went by, however, and nothing drastic occurred, she seemed to acquiesce in my democratic pounding of the streets, even going so far as to state that she had begun to enjoy following my route by the diminishing or increasing din the dogs made—knowing when I had already headed back.

  One morning, if she had listened carefully, she would have heard a different sort of barking.

  There was one house in particular with an exceptionally ugly mutt that always gave me a hard time, and I made a point of always passing by that residence, almost as a provocation.

  That day, someone had left the gate open on purpose and as I puffed by, the dog leaped out at me, furiously sinking his teeth into my jogging pants. I tried to shake him off, but he wouldn’t let go. He snarled and salivated until a man in a bathrobe appeared at the door, calling the loathsome creature off and insulting me for disturbing him, his dog, the peace, his mother, his grandmother, everybody.

  As soon as his fanged pet was safely behind the gate, I countered his aspersions with some of my own. I threatened to sue him and his quiltro, a disparaging Chilean term for a dog, and he’d better make sure that this was the last time this happened because I would run by there tomorrow at the same time, but this time I’d be carrying a club—which further incensed him. I was the one who should be clubbed, me and my mad foreign habits. It was obscene, he shouted, I remember that word, and how fed up he said he was with foreign-inspired, hippie, Commie attitudes, next time he’d put me on a leash.

  And then, all of a sudden, I realized who my adversary was: Chino Urquidi, a crooner who had become popular by peddling, in gushy oversweetened songs, a paradisiacal Chilean countryside. I had been forced to tolerate his falsified folklore on the radio, an endless series of musical postcards in which rural dwellers were faced with unrequited love as their only problem in life. No ravenous peasants or pesticides in his songs. Or in his political speeches. He had made a run for alderman on a far-right-wing ticket and, having failed to convince the rather stuck-up conservative constituency that his musical talents would serve him well in the filling of potholes, was now engaged in a virulent campaign against Allende. Although he had not yet accused the left of planning to devour the country’s children (a Swiftian ploy that had been used against us in 1964), he did warn his listeners that if we won, nobody would have anything to eat at all. Maybe his cur attacked me out of hunger, its master starving it to prepare for the dire days of the socialist victory. If I hadn’t been so flustered (and scared), I might have enjoyed the irony of the situation: a man who swore that the United States was the best friend Chile had in the world was offended by an American habit as ordinary as jogging in the streets, imported by a socialist who proclaimed that the gringos were exploiting Chile. He rejected me and my jogging shoes in the name of the old Chile he had always lived in and did not want to change; and I rejected him and his fascist hound in the name of the new Chile I hoped to build, to fill with the freedom I had experienced on the glorious streets of Berkeley.

  The irony would get even more elaborate, and less funny, when Allende won the elections half a year later: then Chino’s conservative life-style and property would be protected by the Yankee country that had taught me as a child to respect the rights of others and stand up for the oppressed. What a travesty. Chino and his anti-democratic allies were going to be coddled, sustained, and rescued by the country that called itself the greatest democracy in the world, that had itself been born out of a rebellion against a foreign power.

  To be fair, this suppression of our democratic revolution was facilitated by the East-West conflict. It is true that we were on an entirely different road to socialism than the totalitarian states that ruled half the globe, but they were our allies—without their aid, we had no alternative to the West—and we ended up identified with the behavior of the Soviet Union and the countries it had pressed into a Stalinist, bureaucratic version of socialism. We ended up satanized and imprisoned by proxy in the parameters of the war the two nuclear giants were playing out in the Third World. Just like the Czechs in 1968, we were not given the breathing space we needed to survive by the superpower under whose sphere of influence we fell.

  Not that at the time I was worried about this sort of breathing space. Bent on claiming my territorial right to breath and space, the next day I stubbornly jogged by Chino Urquidi’s house again and, noting that the dog was chained and the gate locked, decided never to venture near the place on my morning rounds. That was not to be our last encounter, however.

  The night Allende won the election, that September 4 of 1970 that I have described as the moment when I realized I had finally come out of my exile, I met Urquidi again.

  With a group of Allendista friends, we had gone up to the barrio alto, the wealthiest neighborhood of Santiago, to honk our horns at the shuttered windows of our defeated adversaries, to confiscate for one night the streets that had belonged to them and their families forever.

  All of a sudden, we saw in the middle of one of Santiago’s broadest avenues some thirty to forty people gathered in a circle, apparently celebrating la victoria. Or were they holding some sort of soap-box discussion at three in the morning? We got out of our cars to join the fun, and there he was, Chino Urquidi in person, holding forth with all those Allendistas, spouting about democracy and the need to become friends now that the election was over. Everybody around him seemed to be in complete agreement. Yes, one woman said to him, that’s it, Chino, let’s sing the national anthem, let’s all sing together of a new Chile. And the owner of the dog that had assaulted me put the very hand that had opened that gate, he put it on his fascist heart, and opened the very mouth that had denied me the peaceful streets of Santiago and had insulted Allende day after day on the radio, that very crooner started to sing the Puro Chile, the Star-Spangled Banner of Chile.

  He did not get far. Before the others could join in, I jumped like a lunatic into the circle, and pointing a finger in his direction, I addressed all the comrades who were getting ready to join the chorus. “Are you crazy?” I said. “Have you lost your sense of history? No les da vergüenza? Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?”

  The crowd quieted down and Chino’s voice warbled a few more notes before grinding to a halt.

  “This man,” I continued, and of course my political indignation was inflamed and fanned by my personal vendetta against his mutt, “hates us, has spent the last years attacking everything we believe in. Look at him, he’s the enemy. The people who pay him and love him are behind those windows”—and I gestured toward the mansions where, in effect, the owners of Chile were at that moment conspiring to destroy us and our liberation movement, were planning the currency scare which the very next day emptied half the banks in the country—“wondering how to kill us. He smiles now, sings now, but tomorrow he’ll be singing for them, preparing our death. Don’t go near him, don’t even speak to him. Just pray that he leaves Chile and never comes back. Que no vuelva nunca más.”

  I was met by a round of applause and the militants formed a circle of hands and left Chino Urquidi out of it, I had the immense satisfaction of watching him forlornly watch us dance without him.

  Should I have forgiven Chino his past, his dog, his ferocious assaults? Did I make one of those mistakes which, symbolically at least, represent what went wrong with our revolution, our incapacity to reach out to those we disagreed with and build a coalition that was strong and ample enough to really conquer power?

  Given that all too soon, just a few days later, that pseudo-folk crooner was back on the airwaves spewing hateful words against us, my assessment of who he was turned out to be prophetic. Though I have always wondered if it was not precisely my sectarian exclusion of his peace offering which set him off on the wrong path, whether similar scenes were not occurring at that very moment all over the country and someone like me was saying to someone like him: We don’t need you. I am not sure how
many of those others who were rejected as they offered reconciliation and brotherhood that night might, indeed, have been potential allies that we disdained out of misplaced pride, the belief that we could in a few quick years transform centuries of Chilean history without their help.

  I certainly did not stop to think about such strategic matters that night of victory, how to tell when to accept the hand of friendship thrust toward us by an adversary and when to revile it as I had just done.

  I did not stop to wonder about such dilemmas. Unnecessarily infuriated as I might be against Chino because of our misencounter in front of his house on a Santiago dawn, I was absolutely right about what was happening inside those mansions, the conspiracy that was on its way to denying Allende the Presidency and the people their freedom.

  Chino and his cronies were out to kill us.

  And I do not mean this metaphorically.

  A month and a half later, at the end of October 1970, I switched on the radio and heard the news that General René Schneider had been murdered by an ultra-right-wing commando financed and masterminded by the Central Intelligence Agency, part of wundermensch Kissinger’s destabilization plan. As commander in chief of the Chilean Army, Schneider had rejected offers from the conservatives and from the U.S. government to stage a preemptive coup against the triumphant Allende.

  The response of the Allende forces was total mobilization, all militants on maximum alert, todos a defender la revolución, everyone at the ready to defend the revolution. But not me. I was floating again, useless, empty, rhetorical; for one last time I was adrift, with nowhere to go. So much love of the people, so many inflammatory fists in the face of the Chino Urquidis of Chile, so many incessant revelations about the foundational and transgressive power of the people. And none of it had meant a fundamental change in the way I organized my life.