Nazi Literature in the Americas

by Roberto Bolaño

  The meeting in Rosario was not as marvelous as Luz had hoped. Claudia clearly and frankly set out the reasons why a closer relationship between them was impossible: she was not a lesbian; there was a significant age difference (Luz being more than twenty-five years older); and, finally, their political convictions were deeply dissimilar if not diametrically opposed. “We are mortal enemies,” said Claudia sadly. This affirmation seemed to interest Luz. (Sexual preference was a triviality, she felt, in a case of real love. And age was an illusion. But she was intrigued by the idea of being mortal enemies.) Why? Because I’m a Trotskyite and you’re a Fascist shit, said Claudia. Luz ignored the insult and laughed. And there’s no way around that? she asked, desperately lovesick. No, there’s not, said Claudia. What about poetry? asked Luz. Poetry is pretty irrelevant these days, with what’s going on in Argentina. Maybe you’re right, Luz admitted, on the verge of tears, but maybe you’re wrong. It was a sad farewell. Luz had a sky-blue Alfa Romeo sports car. Easing her rotund physique into the driver’s seat was no simple task, but she undertook it bravely, with a smile on her face. Claudia looked on from the doorway of the café where they had met, unmoving. Luz pulled away, with the image of Claudia fixed in the rear-view mirror.

  In her position anyone else would have given up, but Luz was not anyone. A torrent of creative activity swept her away. In the past, falling in or out of love had dried up the flow of her writing for long periods. Now she wrote like a mad woman, driven perhaps by a presentiment of what destiny had in store. Every night she called Claudia: they talked, argued, read poems to each other (Claudia’s were downright bad but Luz was very careful not to say so). Every night, without fail, she begged: when could they meet again? She made wild plans: they could leave Argentina together, go to Brazil, or Paris. At these suggestions the young poet burst out laughing, but there was nothing cruel in her laughter; if anything, it was tinged with sadness.

  Suddenly Luz found the countryside and the artistic commune on the Paraná stifling. She decided to return to Buenos Aires. There she tried to resume her social life, see her friends, go to the movies or the theater. But she couldn’t. Nor did she have the courage to visit Claudia in Rosario without her permission. It was then that she wrote one of the strangest poems in Argentinean literature: My Girl, 750 lines full of love, regrets and irony. She was still calling Claudia every night.

  It is not unreasonable to suppose that a sincere, mutual friendship had developed in the course of all those conversations.

  In September 1976, bursting with love, Luz leapt into her Alfa Romeo and sped off to Rosario. She wanted to tell Claudia that she was willing to change, that she was, in fact, already changing. She arrived to find Claudia’s parents in a desperate state. A group of strangers had kidnapped the young poet. Luz moved heaven and earth, mobilized her friends, used her connections, then those of her mother, her elder brother and finally Juan’s connections too, all in vain. Claudia’s friends said the army had taken her. Luz refused to believe anything and waited. Two months later Claudia’s body was found in a garbage dump in the north of Rosario. The next day Luz set off for Buenos Aires in her Alfa Romeo. Halfway there she crashed into a gas station. The explosion was considerable.

  ITINERANT HEROES

  OR THE FRAGILITY OF MIRRORS

  IGNACIO ZUBIETA

  Bogotá, 1911–Berlin, 1945

  The only son of one of Bogotá’s best families, Ignacio Zubieta was destined for pre-eminence from the start, or so it seemed. A good student and an outstanding sportsman, at the age of thirteen he could write and speak fluent English and French. By virtue of his bearing and manly good looks he stood out wherever he happened to be; he had a pleasant manner and a remarkable knowledge of classical Spanish literature (at the age of seventeen, he published a monograph on Garcilaso de la Vega which was unanimously praised in Colombian literary circles). He was a first-rate horseman, the best polo player of his generation, a superb dancer, always irreproachably dressed (although with a slight tendency to favor sportswear), a confirmed bibliophile, and lively but free of vices; everything about him seemed to foretoken the highest achievements, or at least a life of valuable service to his family and the nation. But chance or the terrible historical circumstances in which he happened (and chose) to live warped his destiny irreparably.

  At the age of eighteen he published a book of verse in the style of Góngora, recognized by the critics as a valuable and interesting work, but which could certainly not be said to bring anything new to the Colombian poetry of the time. Zubieta realized this, and six months later left for Europe accompanied by his friend Fernandez-Gómez.

  In Spain he frequented the high-society salons, which succumbed to his youth and charm, his intelligence and the aura of tragedy already surrounding his tall, slender figure. It was said (by the gossip columnists of the Bogotá newspapers at the time) that he was on intimate terms with the Duchess of Bahamontes, a rich widow twenty years his senior. That, however, was sheer speculation. His apartment in La Castellana was a meeting place for poets, dramatists and painters. He began, but did not finish, a study of the life and work of the sixteenth-century adventurer Emilio Henríquez, and wrote poems, which few people read, since he made no attempt to publish them. He traveled in Europe and North Africa, and from time to time described his journeys in sharp-eyed vignettes dispatched to Colombian periodicals.

  In 1933, impelled, some say, by the imminence of a scandal that never finally came to light, he left Spain, and, after a short stay in Paris, visited Russia and the Scandinavian countries. The land of the Soviets made a contradictory and mysterious impression on him: in his irregular contributions to the Colombian press, he expressed his admiration for Muscovite architecture, the wide open, snow-covered spaces, and the Leningrad Ballet. Either he kept his political opinions to himself or he had none. He described Finland as a toy country. Swedish women struck him as caricatural peasants. The Norwegian fjords, he opined, were still awaiting their great poet (he found Ibsen revolting). Six months later he returned to Paris and took up residence in a comfortable apartment in the Rue des Eaux, where he was joined shortly by his faithful companion Fernández-Gómez, who had been obliged to remain in Copenhagen, recovering from a bout of pneumonia.

  The Polo Club and artistic gatherings occupied much of his time in Paris. Zubieta became interested in entomology and attended Professor André Thibault’s lectures at the Sorbonne. In 1934 he traveled to Berlin with Fernández-Gomez and a new friend, whom he had, more or less, taken under his wing: the young Philippe Lemercier, a painter who specialized in vertiginous landscapes and “scenes of the end of the world.”

  Shortly after the outbreak of the civil war in Spain, Zubieta and Fernández-Gomez traveled to Barcelona, then to Madrid, where they stayed for three months, visiting the few friends who had not fled. Then, to the considerable surprise of those who knew them, they went across to the nationalist zone and enlisted as volunteers in Franco’s army. Zubieta’s military career was meteoric, rich in acts of bravery and medals, though not without a number of lulls. He was promoted from second lieutenant to lieutenant, and then, almost immediately, to captain. He is thought to have participated in the closing of the Mérida pocket, the northern campaign, and the Battle of Teruel. Nevertheless, the end of the war found him in Seville, carrying out more or less administrative duties. The Colombian government unofficially nominated him as cultural attaché in Rome, a post he declined. He took part in the somewhat diminished but still delightful Fiestas del Rocío in 1938 and 1939, riding a spirited white colt. The outbreak of the Second World War caught him by surprise in Mauritania, where he was traveling with Fernández-Gómez. During that voyage the Bogotá press received only two articles from the pen of Zubieta, and neither referred to the specific political and social events that he had the opportunity to witness at close range. In the first article, he described the life of certain Saharan insects. In the second, he discussed Arab horses and compared them to the purebloods bred in Colombi
a. Not a word about the Spanish Civil War, not a word about the calamity looming over Europe, not a word about literature or himself, although his Colombian friends went on waiting for the great work that Zubieta seemed destined to write.

  In 1941, at the request of Dionisio Ridruejo, who was a close friend, Zubieta was one of the first to join the Division of Spanish Volunteers, commonly known as the Blue Division. During his training period in Germany, which he found unspeakably dull, he busied himself with translations of Schiller’s verse, aided by the ever-faithful Fernández-Gómez. Their versions were published jointly by the magazines Living Poetry in Cartagena and The Poetic and Literary Beacon in Seville.

  In Russia, he took part in various engagements along the Volchov, as well as the battles of Possad and Krassnij-Bor, where his acts of heroism earned him the Iron Cross. In the summer of 1943 he was back in Paris, alone, Fernández-Gómez having remained in Riga, recovering from his wounds in a military hospital.

  In Paris, Zubieta resumed his social life. He traveled to Spain with Lemercier. Some say he saw the Duchess of Bahamontes again. A publisher in Madrid brought out a book of his Schiller translations. He was feted, invited to all the parties, and doted on by high society, but he had changed: unrelieved gravity veiled his expression, as if he could sense the imminence of death.

  In October, when the Blue Division was repatriated, Fernández-Gómez returned to Spain and the two friends were reunited in Cadiz. With Lemercier they travelled to Seville, to Madrid, where they gave a reading of Schiller’s poems to a large and appreciative audience in a university lecture hall, and then to Paris, where they finally settled.

  A few months before D-Day, Zubieta made contact with officers from the Brigade Charlemagne, a French unit of the SS, although his name does not appear in the archives. Enlisted as a captain, he returned to the Russian Front, accompanied by the steadfast Fernández-Gómez. In October 1944, Lemercier received a parcel postmarked in Warsaw, containing papers which were to constitute a part of Ignacio Zubieta’s literary legacy.

  During the last days of the Third Reich, Zubieta was in Berlin, holding out against the siege with a battalion of diehard French SS. According to Fernández-Gómez’s diary, he was killed in street fighting on April 20, 1945. On the 25th of the same month, Fernández-Gómez entrusted his friend’s remaining papers to the diplomats of the Swedish legation along with a case of his own manuscripts, which the Swedes passed on to the Colombian ambassador in Germany in 1948. Zubieta’s papers finally reached his relatives, and in 1950 they published an exquisite little book in Bogotá: fifteen poems, with illustrations by Lemercier, who had decided to settle in his friend’s beautiful South American homeland. The collection was entitled Cross of Flowers. None of the poems was more than thirty lines long. The first was entitled “Cross of Veils,” the second “Cross of Flowers” and so on (the second to last was “Cross of Iron” and the last “Cross of Ruins”). Their content, as the titles quite clearly suggest, was autobiographical, but had been subjected to hermetic verbal procedures which rendered the poems obscure and cryptic for a reader attempting to retrace the arc of Zubieta’s life or penetrate the mystery that would always surround his exile, his choices and his apparently futile death.

  Little is known about the remainder of Zubieta’s work. According to some, nothing more remained, or only a few disappointing squibs. For a while there was speculation about a diary totaling more than 500 pages, which Zubieta’s mother had burned.

  In 1959, a far-Right group in Bogotá published a book entitled Iron Cross: A Colombian in the Struggle Against Bolshevism (clearly Zubieta was responsible neither for the title nor the subtitle), having obtained the authorization of Lemercier, but not of Zubieta’s family, who took the Frenchman and the publishers to court. The novel, or novella (80 pages long, including five photographs of Zubieta in uniform, one of which shows him smiling coldly in a Paris restaurant, exhibiting the only Iron Cross awarded to a Colombian during the Second World War) is a hymn to friendship among soldiers; it balks at none of the clichés that recur in the voluminous literature on that theme, and was described at the time by a critic as a cross between Sven Hassel and José María Pemán.

  JESÚS FERNÁNDEZ-GÓMEZ

  Cartagena de Indias, 1910–Berlin, 1945

  Until The Fourth Reich in Argentina published two of his books, more than thirty years after his death, the life and work of Jesús Fernández-Gómez remained entirely obscure. One of those books was The Fighting Years of an American Falangist in Europe, a 180-page quasi-autobiographical novel, written in thirty days, while the author was recovering from his war wounds in the Riga military hospital; it recounts his adventures in Spain during the Civil War and in Russia as a volunteer in the Division 250, the famous Spanish Blue Division. The other book is a long poetic text entitled Cosmogony of the New Order.

  This second volume is composed of three thousand verses, each with a note to indicate where and when it was written: Copenhagen 1933—Zaragoza 1938. A poem of epic aspirations, it tells two stories, constantly juxtaposing them and jumping from one to the other: the story of a Germanic warrior who must slay a dragon, and the story of a South American student who must prove his worth in a hostile milieu. One night the Germanic warrior dreams that he has killed the dragon and that henceforth, in the kingdom it had long tyrannized, a new order shall prevail. The South American student dreams that he must kill someone, and in his dream obeys the order, obtains a gun, and enters the victim’s bedroom, in which he finds only “a cascade of mirrors, which blind him forever.” The Germanic warrior, reassured by his dream, goes unsuspectingly to the battle in which he is to die. The South American student will spend the rest of his life wandering, blind, through the streets of a cold city, paradoxically comforted by the splendor that caused his blindness.

  The first pages of The Fighting Years of an American Falangist in Europe relate the author’s childhood and adolescence in the city of his birth, Cartagena: the “poor but honest and happy family” in which he grew up, the first books he read, the first poems he wrote. Fernández-Gómez goes on to recount how he met Ignacio Zubieta in a Bogotá brothel; how the two young men became friends; the ambitions they shared; and their desire to see the world and break free of family ties. The second part of the book tells of their early years in Europe: the apartment they shared in Madrid, new friends, their first quarrels (occasionally they came to blows), dirty old women and men, how it was impossible to work in the apartment, the long hours Fernández-Gómez spent holed up in the National Library, and travels that were generally pleasant but occasionally wretched.

  Fernández-Gómez marvels at his own youth: he writes of his body, his sexual potency, the length of his member, how well he holds his liquor (although he detests alcohol and only drinks to keep Zubieta company), and his ability to go for days without sleep. He also marvels gratefully at the ease with which he can withdraw into himself at moments of crisis, the solace he finds in the practice of literature, the great work he hopes to write, which will “ennoble him, wash away all his sins, endow his life and his sacrifices with meaning,” although he declines to divulge the nature of these “sacrifices.” He tries to write about himself and not Zubieta, in spite of the fact that Zubieta’s shadow “clings around his neck like an obligatory tie or a lethal bond of loyalty.”

  He does not expand on political themes. He deems Hitler Europe’s providential savior, but says little more about him. Physical proximity to power, however, moves him to tears. The book is full of scenes in which, along with Zubieta, he attends soirées, official functions, medal ceremonies, military parades, church services and dances. The men in positions of authority, almost always generals or prelates, are described in lingering detail, with the tenderness of a mother describing her children.

  The Civil War is his moment of truth. Fernández-Gómez throws himself into it with enthusiasm and courage, although he realizes at once, and informs his future readers, that the constant companionship of Zubieta will
be no small burden. His evocation of Madrid in 1936—a city where he and Zubieta move like ghosts among ghosts, in search of friends hiding from the Red Terror, and visit Latin American embassies where they are received by demoralized diplomats who can tell them little or nothing—is vivid and striking. It does not take Fernández-Gómez long to adapt to the extraordinary circumstances. Army life, the hardships of battle, the marches and countermarches do not dull his keen fighting spirit. He has time to read and write, to help Zubieta, who is largely dependent on him, to think of the future and make plans for his return to Colombia, plans he will never put into practice.

  Almost as soon as the Civil War is over, Fernández-Gómez volunteers for the Blue Division’s Russian adventure, along with Zubieta, to whom he is closer than ever. The battle of Possad is recounted realistically, in harrowing, unflinching detail, without a trace of lyricism. The descriptions of bodies destroyed by artillery fire occasionally bring to mind the paintings of Francis Bacon. The final pages evoke the sadness of the Riga Hospital, the solitude of the bedridden warrior, far from his friends, left behind to endure the melancholy Baltic evenings, which he compares unfavorably to the evenings of his distant Cartagena.

  Although unedited and unrevised, The Fighting Years of an American Falangist in Europe has the power of a work based on extreme experience, as well as containing various colorful observations on lesser-known aspects of Ignacio Zubieta’s life, over which we shall pass in discreet silence. Among the numerous grievances addressed to Zubieta by his brother in arms convalescing in Riga we note only one, of a purely literary nature, regarding the authorship of the Schiller translations. In any case, and whatever the truth of that matter, we know that the two friends met again, albeit in the presence of a third party, the painter Lemercier, and that together they resumed the struggle, this time in the controversial Brigade Charlemagne. It is hard to know who led whom into that final adventure.