Roberto Bolano - Nazi Literature in the Americas

Irma received him in the lounge, wearing her best suit. Barreda had come with his two-year-old son; outside, waiting in the car, was his new woman, a North American twenty years younger than Irma, and six months pregnant. Their final meeting was tense and, at certain moments, dramatic. Barreda inquired about Irma’s health, and even about her poetry. Are you still writing? he asked. Irma replied gravely in the affirmative. Barreda was at first bothered and inhibited by the presence of his son. Then he recovered his nerve and adopted a distant tone, which gradually became more ironic and covertly aggressive. When he mentioned the lawyers and the necessity of obtaining a divorce, Irma looked him in the eye (him and his son) and flatly refused once again. Barreda did not insist. I’ve come as a friend, he said. A friend? You? (Irma was regal.) You are my husband, not my friend, she declared. Barreda smiled. The years had mellowed him, or he was pretending they had, or perhaps Irma meant so little to him that he was not even annoyed. The child did not move. Irma took pity on him and timidly suggested that he go and play on the patio. When they were alone, Barreda said something about how important it was for children to be raised by a proper married couple. What would you know, retorted Irma. True, admitted Barreda, what would I know. They drank. Barreda drank Sauza tequila, and Irma drank rompope . The boy played on the patio. Irma’s servant, who was almost a child herself, played with him. In the half-light of the lounge, Barreda sipped his tequila and made banal remarks about the upkeep of the house, then announced that it was time for him to go. Irma got up first and, quick as a flash, refilled his glass. Let’s drink a toast, she said. To us, said Barreda, to good luck. They looked each other in the eye. Barreda began to feel uncomfortable. Irma screwed up her lips in a grimace of contempt or irritation, and flung the glass of rompope onto the floor. It smashed, and the yellow liquid ran over the white tiles. Barreda, who for a moment thought she would throw the glass at his face, stared at her, surprised and alarmed. Hit me, said Irma. Go on, hit me, hit me, and she presented her body to him. Her cries grew louder and louder. Yet the child and the servant went on playing on the patio. Barreda watched them out of the corner of his eye: they seemed to be immersed in another time, no, in another dimension. Then he looked at Irma, and for a second he had a vague (and immediately forgotten) sense of what horror is. As he was walking out the front door with his son in his arms, he thought he could hear Irma’s stifled cries coming from the lounge, where she was still standing, indifferent to everything but her last conjugal act, deaf to everything but her own voice softly repeating an invitation or an exorcism or a poem, the flayed part of a poem, shorter than any of Tablada’s haikus, her only experimental poem, in a manner of speaking.

There were to be no more poems or little glasses of rompope , nothing but a religious, sepulchral silence until her death.

Daniela de Montecristo was a woman of legendary beauty, surrounded by an enduring aura of mystery. The stories that have circulated about her first years in Europe (1938–1947) rarely concur and often flatly contradict one another. It has been said that among her lovers were Italian and German generals (including the infamous Wolff, SS and Police Chief in Italy); that she fell in love with a general in the Rumanian army, Eugenio Entrescu, who was crucified by his own soldiers in 1944; that she escaped from Budapest under siege disguised as a Spanish nun; that she lost a suitcase full of poems while secretly crossing the border from Austria into Switzerland in the company of three war criminals; that she had audiences with the Pope in 1940 and 1941; that out of unrequited love for her, a Uruguayan and then a Colombian poet committed suicide; and, that she had a black swastika tattooed on her left buttock.

Her literary work, leaving aside the juvenilia lost among the icy peaks of Switzerland, never to appear again, consists of a single book, with a rather epic title: The Amazons , published by Quill Argentina, with a preface by the widow Mendiluce, who could not be accused of restraint when it came to lavishing praise (in one paragraph, relying solely on her feminine intuition, she compared the legendary poems lost in the Alps to the work of Juana de Ibarbourou and Alfonsina Storni).

The Amazons is a torrential and anarchic blend of all the literary genres: romance, spy novel, memoir, play (there are even some passages of avant-garde dramatic writing), poetry, history, political pamphlet. The plot revolves around the life of the author and her grandmothers and great-grandmothers, sometimes going back as far as the period immediately following the foundation of Asunción and Buenos Aires.

The book contains some original passages, especially the descriptions of the Women’s Fourth Reich — with its headquarters in Buenos Aires and its training grounds in Patagonia — and the nostalgic, pseudo-scientific digressions about a gland that produces the feeling of love.

Franz Zwickau tore through life and literature like a whirlwind. The son of German immigrants, he was perfectly fluent in his parents’ language as well as that of his native land. Contemporary reports portray him as a talented, iconoclastic boy who refused to grow up (José Segundo Heredia once described him as “Venezuela’s best schoolboy poet”). The photos show a tall young man with blond hair, the body of an athlete, and the gaze of a killer or a dreamer or both.

He published two books of poetry. The first, Motorists (1965), was a series of twenty-five sonnets, rather unorthodox in their rhythm and form, dealing with subjects dear to the young: motorcycles, doomed love, sexual awakening and the will to purity. The second, The War Criminals’ Son (1967), marked a substantial shift in Zwickau’s poetics and, it could be said, in the Venezuelan poetry of the time. A dire, horrifying, badly written book (Zwickau espoused a peculiar theory about the revision of poems, somewhat surprising in a poet who had cut his teeth on sonnets), full of insults, imprecation, blasphemy, completely false autobiographical details, slanderous imputations, and nightmares.

A number of the poems are noteworthy:

—“A Dialogue with Hermann Goering in Hell,” in which the poet, astride the black motorcycle of his early sonnets, arrives at an abandoned airfield, in a place known as Hell, near Maracaibo on the Venezuelan coast, and meets the shade of the Reichsmarschall, with whom he discusses various subjects: aviation, vertigo, destiny, uninhabited houses, courage, justice and death.

—“Concentration Camp,” by contrast, is the humorous and at times touching story of Zwickau’s life as a child, between the ages of five and ten, in a middle-class neighborhood of Caracas.

—“Heimat” (350 lines), written in an odd blend of Spanish and German — with occasional expressions in Russian, English, French and Yiddish — describes the private parts of his body with the detachment of a pathologist working in a morgue the night after a multiple murder.

—“The War Criminals’ Son,” the book’s long title poem, is a vigorous and excessive piece, in which Zwickau, bemoaning the fact that he was born twenty-five years too late, gives free rein to his verbal facility, his hatred, his humor, and his unrelieved pessimism. In free verse of a kind rarely seen in Venezuela, the author depicts an appalling, indescribable childhood, compares himself to a black boy in Alabama in 1858, dances, sings, masturbates, lifts weights, dreams of a fabulous Berlin, recites Goethe and Jünger, attacks Montaigne and Pascal (whose work he knows well), adopting the voices of an alpine mountaineer, a peasant woman, a German tanker in Peiper’s brigade who was killed in the Ardennes in December 1944, and a North American journalist in Nuremberg.