Fear And The Word

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By the time of my return to Chile in 1983, an array of alternative media, legal and semi-legal radio, newspapers, magazines, had cautiously made their appearance in the country. Because they were constantly being shut down, harassed, confiscated, because the journalists were threatened, jailed, murdered, or sent into internal exile, those who worked in these noble enterprises had to be extremely careful with their words. It was a process of steadfastly testing how far they could go in their critiques, of pushing back the borders of what was permissible and facing the consequences when they overstepped the limits. The challenge was to find a way to cultivate a language of double-speak, saying one thing and signifying another, outwitting the censors and creating second and third and fourth meanings below the apparent innocence of what was being expressed. In the last few years, I had also participated marginally in such work, sending supposedly innocuous commentaries from abroad that readers in Chile could decipher and decode.

But what I was now dictating into the phone in Santiago was not at all ambiguous: It was seditious and rebellious, calling for the overthrow of the regime. As I spoke my lethal words into the receiver, I caught the eye of my eldest son, Rodrigo, who was 16 at the time. He was standing in the threshold of that tiny room, looking at me with a mixture of admiration and alarm. Suddenly, I realized where I really was. These words were meant for the world beyond Chile, but I was spouting them in Santiago, where some secret police agent might at that very instant be jotting them down not far from where I was sitting.

I waved my hand nonchalantly, trying to calm my beating heart and convince both my son and me that I was protected. If the authorities in Chile tried to do anything to me, they would incur the wrath of the international press; any action against me would be perceived as a reprisal for my opinion in The New York Times.

But my efforts to reassure myself disappeared as soon as I had finished my dictation. "I'm sorry, Mr. Dorfman," the man in charge of the recorder said, "but something went wrong with this machine. Would you mind repeating the words one more time?"

The next 15 minutes were hell. I repeated my commentary word for word, but this time I was sweating and trembling as I listened to myself accusing the generals of torture. My confidence had evaporated: An inner voice hissed at me that if Pinochet's agents rushed into the room and captured me, that article would never be printed and I would have no shield. It was absurd and egocentric to suppose that the secret police were that interested in me, but I could not deny my inner apprehension.

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