Nazi Literature in the Americas

by Roberto Bolaño

  In 1935, after a five-month engagement, which at the time was considered too short, she married Gabino Barreda, an architect from Hermosillo, Sonora, who was also a semi-covert Stalinist and a notorious Don Juan. They spent their honeymoon in the Sonora desert, where both husband and wife found the lonely expanses inspiring.

  On their return, they moved into a colonial house in Coyoacán, which, thanks to Barreda, became the first colonial house with steel and glass walls. Outwardly they made an enviable couple: both were young; they were not short of money; Barreda was the prototype of the brilliant, idealistic architect, with grand plans for the new cities of the continent; while Irma was the prototype of the beautiful, upper-class woman, self-assured and proud, but also intelligent and serene, endowed with the ballast of good sense required to keep a marriage of artists on an even keel.

  Real life, however, was a different matter, and for Irma it was not without disappointments. Barreda cheated on her with common chorus girls. He had no time for niceties and beat her almost every day. He used to put her down in public, and held her family in contempt, referring to them, in conversations with friends and strangers, as “a bunch of Cristero assholes . . . good for nothing except target practice.” Real life can sometimes bear an unsettling resemblance to nightmares.

  In 1937 the couple traveled to Spain. Barreda went to save the Republic, Irma to save her marriage. In Madrid, while Franco’s air support bombed the city, in room 304 of the Hotel Splendor, Irma was subjected to the most brutal beating of her life.

  The next day, without a word to her husband, she left the Spanish capital, bound for Paris. A week later Barreda set off in search of her, but Irma had already left Paris, and gone back across the Spanish border to Burgos, in the nationalist zone, where she was welcomed by the mother superior of a discalced Carmelite convent, to whom she was distantly related.

  The life she led for the rest of the war is legendary. According to various reports she worked as a nurse in first aid stations on the front lines, wrote and acted in tableaux vivants to raise the soldiers’ morale, and befriended the Colombian Catholic poets Ignacio Zubieta and Jesús Fernández-Gómez. General Muñoz Grande is said to have cried on seeing her for the first time, because he knew she would never be his. She was, it seems, affectionately known to the young Falangist poets as Guadalupe or The Angel of the Trenches.

  In 1939, a pamphlet entitled The Triumph of Virtue or The Triumph of God was printed in Salamanca, containing five or her poems, celebrating Franco’s victory in finely wrought, symmetrically balanced lines. In 1940, having moved to Madrid, she published another book of poetry, Spain’s Gift, and a play, A Tranquil Night in Burgos, which was soon successfully staged and later adapted for the screen (it explores the joyous vacillation of a novice about to take the veil). In 1941, she traveled around Europe with a group of Spanish artists on a triumphant promotional tour sponsored by the German Ministry of Culture. She visited Rome and Greece, Hungary and Rumania (where she visited the house of General Entrescu, and met his fiancée, the Argentinean poet Daniela de Montecristo, to whom she took an immediate dislike: “Everything about her suggests that this woman is a wh—,” she wrote in her diary); she traveled by boat on the Rhine and the Danube. Her talent, previously dulled by insufficient stimulation and by a lack or an excess of love, emerged and shone again in all its splendor. This rebirth nurtured the seeds of a new and fervent vocation: journalism. She wrote articles, portraits of political and military figures, described the cities she visited in vivid and picturesque detail, attended to Paris fashions and to the problems and concerns of the Roman Curia. Magazines and newspapers in Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay published her features and stories.

  In 1942, Mexico declared war on the Axis powers, and although the decision struck Irma Carrasco as a blunder, or at best a ridiculous joke, she was, above all, a Mexican, so she decided to return to Spain and await further developments.

  In 1946, the day after the première of her play The Moon in her Eyes, which was greeted with discreet enthusiasm by the critics and the public, there was a knock at the door of her simple but comfortable apartment in Lavapiés. It was Barreda, reappearing on the scene.

  The architect, who was living in New York, had come to make a new start. On his knees, he begged forgiveness, and made all the promises and oaths that Irma was longing to hear. The embers of their first love were rekindled. Irma’s tender heart did the rest.

  They returned to America. Barreda had, indeed, changed. During the voyage he was tirelessly attentive and affectionate. The ship on which they had embarked in Europe took them to New York. Barreda’s apartment on Third Avenue had been specially prepared for Irma’s arrival. Their second honeymoon lasted three months. In New York, Irma experienced moments of great happiness. They decided to have children as soon as possible, but Irma did not get pregnant.

  In 1947, the couple returned to Mexico. Barreda took up with his old friends, seeing them every day. Those friends or the air of Mexico City transformed him: he reverted to his former self, the fearsome husband of the bad old days. His behavior became erratic; he started drinking again and seeing chorus girls; he stopped listening and talking to his wife. Soon the verbal abuse began, and one night, after Irma, in conversation with some friends, had defended the honor of Franco’s regime and praised its achievements, Barreda hit her.

  The initial relapse into conjugal violence was immediately followed by a rash of similar incidents, occurring almost daily. But Irma was writing and that was what saved her. In spite of beatings, insults and humiliations of all sorts, she persisted in her work, holed up in a room of her house in Coyoacán, while Barreda succumbed to alcohol and the Mexican Communist Party’s endless internal debates. In 1948, Irma finished Juan Diego, a strange and subtle play in which the Indian who saw the Virgin of Guadalupe and his guardian angel make their way through Purgatory, on what seems to be an eternal journey, since Purgatory itself, the author seems to be suggesting, is eternal. After the premiere Salvador Novo came backstage to congratulate Irma. He kissed her hand and they exchanged elaborate compliments. Meanwhile Barreda, who was talking or pretending to talk with some friends, watched her every move. He seemed increasingly nervous. Irma was taking on gigantic proportions in his eyes. He began to stutter and sweat profusely. In the end he completely lost control of the situation: shoving his way across the room, he insulted Novo and slapped Irma repeatedly, to the astonishment of the onlookers, who might have been quicker to separate husband and wife.

  Three days later, Barreda was arrested, along with half of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. Once again, Irma was free.

  But she did not abandon Barreda. She visited him, took him books on architecture and detective novels, made sure that he was eating properly, had endless discussions with his lawyer, and looked after the running of his business. In Lecumberri, where he spent six months, Barreda quarreled with the other Communist prisoners, who found out for themselves just how hard it could be to share a confined space for a long time with a man of his temperament. He narrowly escaped summary justice at the hands of his comrades. On his release from prison, he quit the Party, publicly abjured his former activism, and left for New York with Irma. Everything seemed to bode well: they would begin a new life, once again. Irma was confident that, away from Mexico, their marriage would recover its former happiness and harmony. It was not to be: Barreda was embittered and he took it out on Irma. Life in New York, where they had known such joy, became hellish, and one morning Irma decided to leave it all behind. She took the first bus she could find, and three days later she was back in Mexico.

  They would not see each other again until 1952. In the meantime, Irma had two new plays staged, Carlotta, Empress of Mexico and The Miracle of Peralvillo, both of which dealt with religious themes. She also published her first novel, Vulture Hill, a recreation of the last days in the life of her only brother. The book divided the critics in Mexico. According to some, Irma’s message was that the
only way to save the country from impending disaster was simply to turn the clock back to 1899. For others, Vulture Hill was an apocalyptic novel prefiguring the disasters awaiting the nation, which no one could forestall or counteract. The Vulture Hill of the title, where her brother, Father Joaquín María (whose reflections and memories occupy the greater part of the text), was executed, represents the future geography of Mexico: barren, desolate, a perfect scene for further crimes. The firing squad’s commanding officer, Captain Álvarez, represents the PRI, the governing party steering the nation towards disaster. The soldiers of the firing squad are the misguided, dechristianized Mexican people, imperturbably attending their own funeral. A journalist from a Mexico City newspaper represents the country’s intellectuals: hollow, faithless individuals, interested only in money. The old priest, disguised as a farmer, watching the execution from a distance, exemplifies the attitude of Mother Church, exhausted and terrified by the violence of mankind. The Greek traveling salesman, Yorgos Karantonis, who learns of the execution in the village and climbs the hill out of curiosity, simply to kill time, is the incarnation of hope: Karantonis falls to his knees weeping as Father Joaquín María is riddled with bullets. And, finally, the children who are playing on the other side of the hill, facing away from the execution, throwing stones at each other, represent Mexico’s future: civil war and ignorance.

  “The only political system in which I have complete confidence,” she told an interviewer from the women’s magazine Housework, “is theocracy, although Generalísimo Franco is doing a pretty good job too.”

  The literati of Mexico, almost without exception, turned their backs on her.

  In 1953, after another reconciliation with Barreda, who had become a renowned architect, the couple traveled to the Orient: Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines and India inspired Irma to write the new poems of The Virgin of Asia, steely sonnets fearlessly probing the open wound of modernity. The solution, it now seemed to her, was to return to sixteenth-century Spain.

  In 1955 she was hospitalized with various broken bones and extensive bruising.

  Barreda, now a self-declared libertarian, had reached the height of his fame: his reputation as an architect was international and commissions from all over the world came flooding into his firm. Irma, by contrast, gave up writing plays and dedicated herself to her house, the social life she led with her husband, and the painstaking construction of a poetic work that would only come to light after her death. In 1960 Barreda tried to divorce her for the first time. Irma refused, using all the resources at her disposal. A year later Barreda walked away from the marriage, leaving the matter in the hands of his lawyers, who put pressure on Irma, threatening to cut off the money and create a public scandal, appealing to her common sense, and her good heart (the woman with whom Barreda was living in Los Angeles was about to have a child), but to no avail.

  In 1963, Barreda visited her for the last time. Irma was ill, and it is not entirely unreasonable to suppose that the architect was moved by pity, or curiosity, or some such sentiment.

  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

  Buenos Aires, 1918–Córdoba, Spain, 1970

  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.

  TWO GERMANS AT THE

  ENDS OF THE EARTH

  FRANZ ZWICKAU

  Caracas, 1946–Car
acas, 1971

  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.