Free Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) by Roberto Bolaño Page B

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.

D ANIELA DE M ONTECRISTO
    Buenos Aires, 1918–Córdoba, Spain, 1970
    D aniela 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

F RANZ Z WICKAU
    Caracas, 1946–Caracas, 1971
    F ranz 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