Nazi Literature in the Americas

by Roberto Bolaño

  Following the coup, as the flimsy power structure of the Popular Unity government was being torn down, I was taken prisoner. The circumstances of my arrest were banal if not grotesque, but as a result I was able to witness Ramírez Hoffman’s first poetic act, although at that stage I didn’t know who Ramírez Hoffman was or what had befallen the Venegas sisters.

  It happened late one afternoon—Ramírez Hoffman was fond of twilight—while I was killing time along with the rest of the prisoners at the La Peña detention center, on the outskirts of Concepción, practically in Talcahuano, playing chess in the yard of our makeshift prison. A few strands of cloud appeared in the sky, which had been absolutely clear. The clouds, shaped like cigarettes or pencils, were black and white at first, then pink, and finally bright vermillion. I think I was the only prisoner looking at them. Then, among the clouds, the airplane appeared. An old airplane. At first a spot no bigger than a mosquito. Silent. It was coming from over the sea and gradually approaching Concepción. Heading for the city center. It seemed to be moving as slowly as the clouds. When it flew over us it made a noise like a damaged washing machine. Then it turned its nose up and climbed, and soon it was flying over the center of Concepción. There, high above the city, the plane began to write a poem in the sky. Letters of grey smoke against the rose-tinged blue of the sky, chilling the eyes of those who saw them. YOUTH . . . YOUTH, I read. I had the impression—the mad certitude—that they were printer’s proofs. Then the plane swung around and flew towards us, before turning again to make another pass. This time the line was much longer and must have required great expertise on the pilot’s part: IGITUR PERFECTI SUNT COELI ET TERRA ET OMNIS ORNATUS EORUM. For a moment it seemed the plane would disappear over the horizon, heading for the mountains. But it came back. One of the prisoners, a man called Norberto, who was going mad, tried to climb the wall that separated the men’s yard from the women’s, and started shouting: It’s a Messerschmidt, a Messerschmidt fighter from the Luftwaffe. All the other prisoners stood up. The pair of guards at the door of the gymnasium, where we slept on the floor, had stopped talking and were looking at the sky. Mad Norberto, clinging to the wall, laughed and said that the Second World War had returned to the earth. It has fallen to us, the people of Chile, to greet and welcome it, he said. The plane came back over Concepción: GOOD LUCK TO EVERYONE IN DEATH, I managed to make out. For a moment I thought that if Norberto had tried to jump the wall, no one would have stopped him. Everyone else was frozen, staring up at the sky. Never in my life had I seen so much sadness. The plane came back and flew over us again; it veered around, climbed and returned to Concepción. What a pilot, said Norberto, Hans Marseille himself reincarnate. I read: DIXITQUE ADAM HOC NUNC OS EX OSSIBUS MEIS ET CARO DE CARNE MEA HAEC VOCABITUR VIRAGO QUONIAM DE VIRO SUMPTA EST. The last letters trailed off to the east, among the clouds proceeding up the Bío-Bío valley. The plane itself disappeared completely from the sky for a moment. As if the whole thing were simply a mirage or a nightmare. I heard a miner from Lota say, What’s he written, brother? No idea, came the reply. Someone else said, Just some crap; but his voice quavered. There were more policemen at the entrance to the gymnasium now: four of them. In front of me, Norberto was gripping the wall and whispering: Either this is the blitzkrieg, or I’m mad. Then he took a deep breath and seemed to calm down. The plane appeared again. We hadn’t seen it turn around. Heaven forgive us our sins, said Norberto. He said it out loud, and the other prisoners and the guards heard him and laughed. But I knew that no one really felt like laughing. The plane flew over our heads. The sky was darkening; the clouds were no longer pink, but black. Over Concepción, the silhouette of the plane was barely visible. This time it wrote only three words: LEARN FROM FIRE, which quickly faded into the darkness and disappeared. For a few seconds no one said anything. The policemen were the first to react. They ordered us to get in line and began the nightly head-count before shutting us in the gymnasium. It was a Messerschmidt, Bolaño, I swear to God, Norberto said to me as we went in. Sure, I said. And it wrote in Latin, Norberto said. Yes, I said, but I didn’t understand anything. I did, said Norberto, it was about Adam and Eve, and the Holy Virago, and the Garden of our heads, and he wished us all good luck. A poet, I said. Polite, anyway, said Norberto.

  That joke or poem, as I was to discover many years later, cost Ramírez Hoffman a week in the guardhouse. When he got out, he kidnapped the Venegas sisters. During the festivities at the end of 1973, he put on another display of skywriting. Over the El Condor air force base, he drew a star that seemed to be one more among the early stars of dusk, and then he wrote a poem that none of his superior officers could understand. One line was about the Venegas sisters. To an informed, attentive reader, it would have been clear that the girls were already dead.

  In another line he mentioned a Patricia. Pupils of fire, he wrote. The generals watching him release smoke to form those letters assumed that he was writing the names of his sweethearts, his friends or whores from Talcahuano. Some of his friends, however, knew that Ramírez Hoffman was conjuring up the shades of dead women. Around the same time, he participated in two further air shows. He was said to have been the most intelligent cadet in his class, and the most headstrong. He could fly a Hawker Hunter or a combat helicopter without the slightest difficulty, but what he enjoyed most was to load the old plane with smoke canisters, climb into the Fatherland’s empty skies, and write out his nightmares, which were our nightmares too, for the wind to obliterate.

  In 1974, having obtained the support of a general, he flew to the South Pole. It was a long and difficult voyage, but at each of his numerous refueling stops he wrote poems in the sky. According to his admirers, those poems heralded a new age of iron for the Chilean race. The Emilio Stevens who had been so reserved and unsure of himself in literary matters had disappeared without a trace. Ramírez Hoffman was confidence and audacity personified. The flight from Punta Arenas to the Arturo Prat Antarctic base was beset with dangers, which almost cost him his life. On his return, when the journalists asked him which had been the greatest danger, he replied: The stretches of silence. The waves of Cape Horn licking at the belly of the plane; huge but soundless waves, like in a silent film. Silence is like the sirens singing to Ulysses, he said, but if you resist it like a man, nothing bad can happen to you. In Antarctica everything went well. Ramírez Hoffman wrote ANTARCTICA IS CHILE, his exploit was recorded on film and in photographs, and then he returned to Concepción, on his own, in his little plane, which according to mad Norberto was a Messerschmidt from the Second World War.

  He was at the height of his fame. He was called upon to undertake something grand in the capital, something spectacular to show that the new regime was interested in avant-garde art. Ramírez Hoffman was only too pleased to oblige. He stayed in the apartment of a friend from the air force academy, and spent his days training at the Captain Lindstrom airstrip, devoting his evenings to the solitary preparation of a photographic exhibition, to be held in the apartment and opened on the same day as his display of aerial poetry. Years later, the owner of the apartment declared that he had not seen the photographs Ramírez Hoffman was planning to exhibit until the night of the opening. As to the nature of the photos, he said that Ramírez Hoffman wanted to surprise the guests, and would only say that it was visual poetry—experimental, quintessential, art for art’s sake—and that everyone would find it amusing. Naturally the invitations were limited: pilots, young army officers (the oldest hadn’t reached the rank of commander) endowed with a certain aesthetic sensibility, a trio of journalists, a small group of civilian artists, a young society belle named Tatiana von Beck Iraola (apparently the only woman to attend the exhibition), and Ramírez Hoffman’s father, who lived in Santiago.

  Things got off to a bad start. On the morning of the air show, bulging black cumulus clouds rolled down the valley, heading south. Some of Ramírez Hoffman’s superior officers advised him not to fly. He ignored the bad omens. He took off and the spectators watched
with more apprehension than admiration as he executed a few preliminary stunts. Then he climbed and disappeared into the belly of an immense grey cloud that was moving slowly over the city. He emerged far from the airstrip, over an outlying suburb of Santiago. That was where he wrote the first line: Death is friendship. The he flew over some railway sheds and what appeared to be disused factories, and wrote the second line: Death is Chile. Then he headed for the city center. There, over the presidential palace of La Moneda, he wrote the third line: Death is responsibility. Some pedestrians saw him. A beetle-like silhouette against the dark and threatening sky. Very few could decipher his words: the wind effaced them almost straight away. On the way back to the airstrip he wrote the fourth and fifth lines: Death is love and Death is growth. When the strip came into sight he wrote: Death is communion. But none of the generals or their wives, or the senior officers, or the military, civil or cultural authorities present could read his words. A thunderstorm was brewing in the sky. From the control tower a colonel told him to hurry up and land. Ramírez Hoffman replied “Received” and immediately began to climb. Then came the lightning—the first bolt fell on the far side of Santiago—and Ramírez Hoffman wrote: Death is cleansing, but so unsteadily, given the adverse weather conditions, that very few of the spectators, who by now had started to get up from their seats and open their umbrellas, could understand what had been written. All that was left in the sky were dark shreds, a child’s scribble. The few who did manage to make it out thought Ramírez Hoffman had gone mad. It started to rain and the crowd hurriedly dispersed. The cocktail party had to be shifted to a hangar, and by that stage, what with the delay and the downpour, everyone was in need of refreshment. In less than twenty minutes all the canapés had been devoured. Some of the officers and ladies discussed the aviator-poet’s eccentric performance, but most of the conversations had moved on to questions of national and even international significance. Meanwhile Ramírez Hoffman was still up in the sky, struggling with the elements. On the airstrip glistening with rain (the scene was worthy of a Second World War film), only a handful of friends remained, and two journalists who wrote surrealist poems in their spare time, their eyes fixed on the prop plane veering around under the storm-clouds. Ramírez Hoffman wrote, or thought he wrote: Death is my heart. And then: Take my heart. And then: Our change, our advantage. And then he had no smoke left to write with, but still he wrote: Death is resurrection and the spectators were bewildered, but they knew that he was writing something. They understood the pilot’s will and knew that although they couldn’t make head or tail of it, they were witnessing an event of great significance for the art of the future.

  Then Ramírez Hoffman landed without the slightest difficulty, was reprimanded by the officer from the control tower and certain other high-ranking officers who were still wandering among the remnants of the cocktail party, after which he went back to the apartment to prepare the second act of his Santiago gala.

  The foregoing account of the air show may be reliable. Or not. Perhaps the generals of the Chilean Air Force were not accompanied by their wives. Perhaps the Captain Lindstrom airstrip was never set up for a display of aerial poetry. Perhaps Ramírez Hoffman wrote his poem in the sky over Santiago without asking permission or notifying anyone, although that seems unlikely. Perhaps it didn’t even rain that day in Santiago. Perhaps it all happened differently. The following account of the photo exhibition in the apartment is, however, accurate.

  The first guests arrived at nine in the evening. At 11:00, twenty people were present, all of them moderately drunk. No one had yet entered the spare bedroom, occupied by Ramírez Hoffman, on the walls of which were displayed the photos he was planning to submit to the judgment of his friends. Lieutenant Curzio Zabaleta, who years later was to publish the self-denunciatory book Neck in a Noose, relating his activities during the early years of the military régime, informs us that Ramírez Hoffman behaved normally, attending to the guests as if he were in his own home, greeting friends from the air force academy whom he hadn’t seen for a long time, good-naturedly commenting on the morning’s incidents, cheerfully cracking and tolerating the jokes that are invariably prompted by such gatherings. Now and then he disappeared (shutting himself in the spare bedroom) but he was never gone for long. Finally, on the stroke of midnight, he called for silence and said (these are his actual words, according to Zabaleta) that it was time to plunge into the art of the future. He opened the bedroom door and began to let the guests in one by one. One at a time, gentlemen; the art of Chile is not for the herd. According to Zabaleta, he said this in a jocular tone, looking at his father and winking first with his left eye, then with his right. The first person to enter the room, logically enough, was Tatiana von Beck Iraola. The room was well and normally lit. No blue or red lights, no special atmosphere. Outside, in the corridor, and back in the living room, the guests all went on talking or drinking immoderately, like the young men and the victors that they were. The smoke was thick, especially in the corridor. Ramírez Hoffman stood by the doorway. Two lieutenants were arguing in front of the bathroom. Ramírez Hoffman’s father was one of the few who patiently kept his place in the line. Zabaleta, as he admitted in his confession, kept pacing nervously back and forth, filled with foreboding. The two surrealist reporters were talking with the owner of the apartment. At some point Zabaleta caught a snatch of their conversation: travel, the Mediterranean, Miami, tropical beaches, and voluptuous women.

  Less than a minute after going in, Tatiana von Beck emerged from the room. She was pale and shaken. She stared at Ramírez Hoffman, then tried to get to the bathroom, unsuccessfully. After vomiting in the passage, Miss von Beck staggered to the front door with the help of an officer who gallantly offered to take her home, although she kept saying she would prefer to go alone. The second person to enter the room was a captain. He remained inside. Standing by the door, which was left ajar, Ramírez Hoffman smiled with an air of growing satisfaction. In the living room, some of the guests asked what on earth had got into Tatiana. She’s just drunk, said a voice that Zabaleta didn’t recognize. Someone put on a Pink Floyd record. How can you dance when there are no women? It’s like a fags’ convention here, someone said. The surrealist reporters whispered to each other. A lieutenant proposed they all go and find some whores straight away. Meanwhile there was hardly any talking in the hallway, as if it were a dentist’s or a nightmare’s waiting room. Ramírez Hoffman’s father made his way forward and went in. The owner of the apartment followed him. Almost immediately he came out again, went up to Ramírez Hoffman, and for a moment it looked as if he would hit him, but then he turned away and stormed off to the living room in search of a drink. Now everyone, including Zabaleta, pressed into the bedroom. The captain was sitting on the bed, smoking and reading some notes; he seemed calm and absorbed. Ramírez Hoffman’s father was contemplating some of the hundreds of photos with which the walls and part of the ceiling had been decorated. A cadet who happened to be present, though what he was doing there Zabaleta could not explain, started crying and swearing, and had to be dragged out of the room. The surrealist reporters looked disapproving but maintained their composure. All the talking had suddenly ceased. Zabaleta remembers that the only sound was the voice of a drunken lieutenant, who hadn’t yet joined the others, making a phone call in the living room. He was arguing with his girlfriend and incoherently apologizing for something he had done a long time ago. The rest of the guests went back to the living room in silence and some left hurriedly, barely taking the time to say goodbye.

  Then the captain made everyone leave the room and shut himself in with Ramírez Hoffman for half an hour. According to Zabaleta, eight people were left in the apartment. Ramírez Hoffman’s father didn’t seem particularly disturbed. Slumped in an armchair, the owner of the apartment looked at him resentfully. If you like, said Ramírez Hoffman’s father, I’ll take my son away. No, said the owner of the apartment, your son is my friend, and friendship is sacred in Chile. He was complet
ely drunk.

  A couple of hours later three military intelligence agents arrived. Zabaleta thought they would arrest Ramírez Hoffman, but what they did was go into the bedroom and clear away the photographs. The captain left with the agents, and for a while no one knew what to say. Then Ramírez Hoffman emerged from the bedroom, walked over to the window and lit a cigarette. The room, Zabaleta recalls, felt like the looted cold-storage vault of a giant butcher’s shop. Are you under arrest? the owner of the apartment finally asked. I guess so, said Ramírez Hoffman, without turning to face them, looking out at the lights of Santiago, the sparsely scattered lights of Santiago. With painfully slow movements, as if he had to gather his courage, Ramírez Hoffman’s father drew near and finally gave him a quick hug. Ramírez Hoffman did not respond. Why the drama? asked one of the surrealist reporters beside the ashen hearth. You can shut up, said the owner of the apartment. What do we do now? asked a lieutenant. Sleep it off, replied the host. Zabaleta never saw Ramírez Hoffman again. But that last image was indelible: the big living room a mess; bottles, plates and overflowing ashtrays, a group of pale, exhausted men, and Ramírez Hoffman at the window, showing no sign of fatigue, with a glass of whisky in his perfectly steady hand, contemplating the dark cityscape.

  The reports of Ramírez Hoffman’s activities from that night on are vague and contradictory. His shadowy figure makes a number of brief appearances in the shifting anthology of Chilean literature, always enveloped in mist, elegant as a dragon. According to some rumors, he was expelled from the air force. The most unbalanced minds of his generation claimed to have seen him wandering around Santiago, Valparaíso, and Concepción, working at a variety of jobs and participating in strange artistic projects. He changed his name. He was associated with various ephemeral literary magazines, to which he contributed proposals for happenings that never happened, unless (and it hardly bears thinking about) he organized them in secret. A theatrical magazine published a short play by a certain Octavio Pacheco, who was a mystery to everyone. This play is odd, to say the very least, and the action unfolds in a world inhabited exclusively by Siamese twins, where sadism and masochism are children’s games. Ramírez Hoffman was said to be working as a pilot for a commercial airline whose flights linked South America with certain cities in the Far East. Cecilio Macaduck, poet and shoe-store salesman, followed his trail thanks to a document-storage box he happened to discover at the National Library, containing the only two poems published by Emilio Stevens, photographic records of Ramírez Hoffman’s aerial poems, Octavio Pacheco’s works for the theatre, and texts that had appeared in various magazines in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Chile. Macaduck was flabbergasted: he found at least seven Chilean magazines published between 1973 and 1980 that he’d never heard of. He also came across a slender octavo volume entitled Interview with Juan Sauer. The book bore the imprint of The Fourth Reich in Argentina. It didn’t take long to ascertain that Juan Sauer, who spoke in the interview about photography and poetry, was none other than Ramírez Hoffman. In his replies he sketched out a theory of art. Disappointing, according to Macaduck. Yet in certain literary circles, both in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America, his poetic career, brief and dazzling as a lightning bolt, inspired a kind of cult, in spite of the fact that few devotees had an accurate idea of what he had written. Finally he left Chile behind, along with public life, and disappeared, although his physical absence (he had, in fact, always been an absent figure) did not put a stop to the speculations and interpretations, the passionate and contradictory readings to which his work gave rise.