Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) (14 page)

His passage through literature left a trail of blood and several
questions posed by a mute. It also left one or two silent replies.

Rather than sinking into oblivion with the passing years, he became a
mythic figure and his ideas found a wider following. His traces petered out in
South Africa, Germany, Italy; some even went so far as to claim that he had gone
to Japan, as if to be Gary Snyder’s dark double. His silence was absolute. Yet
the winds of change blowing through the world were favorable to him and his
work, and some came to see him as a precursor. Young, enthusiastic writers set
out from Chile in search of him. They returned from their long pilgrimages broke
and empty-handed. Ramírez Hoffman’s father, presumably the one person who knew
his whereabouts, died in 1990.

As the years went by, it was gradually supposed in Chilean literary
circles that Ramírez Hoffman was dead too, a reassuring thought for many.

In 1992, his name appeared prominently in a judicial report on torture
and the disappearance of prisoners. In 1993 he was linked to an “independent
operational group” responsible for the deaths of various students in and around
Concepción and Santiago. In 1995, Zabaleta published his book, one chapter of
which described the photographic exhibition. In 1996, a small press in Santiago
published Cecilio Macaduck’s lengthy study of Fascist magazines in Chile and
Argentina between 1972 and 1992, in which the brightest and most enigmatic star,
without a doubt, is Ramírez Hoffman. Naturally there were people who spoke out
in his defense. A sergeant from Military Intelligence declared that Lieutenant
Ramírez Hoffman was a little strange, slightly unhinged and prone to unexpected
outbursts, but exemplary in his commitment to the fight against Communism. An
army officer who had taken part in a number of counter-subversive operations
with Ramírez Hoffman in Santiago went further still and affirmed that he had
been absolutely right to say that no prisoner who had been tortured should be
left alive: “His vision of History, you understand, was, how can I put it,
cosmic, in perpetual motion, with Nature in the midst of it all, devouring
itself and being reborn, repugnant but nothing short of brilliant. . . .”

Ramírez Hoffman was called as a witness in a number of trials,
although no one expected him to show up. In other cases he was indicted. A judge
in Concepción tried to obtain a warrant for his arrest, unsuccessfully. The few
trials that went ahead were conducted in his absence. And soon they were
forgotten. The Republic had too many problems to concern itself for long with
the fading figure of a serial killer who had disappeared years ago.

Chile forgot him.

This is where Abel Romero appears on the scene and I make my
reappearance. Chile had forgotten us as well. During the time of Allende, Romero
had been something of a celebrity in the police force. I vaguely remembered his
name in connection with a murder in Viña del Mar, a “classic locked-room
murder,” as he put it himself, neatly and elegantly solved. And although he
always worked in homicide, he was the one who went into the Las Carmenes estate
to “rescue” a colonel who had staged his own kidnapping, and was being protected
by several thugs from the right-wing group Patria y Libertad. This operation
earned Romero the Medal of Valor, awarded by Allende in person: the high point
of his professional life. After the coup, he was imprisoned for three years, and
when he got out he went to Paris. Now he was on Ramírez Hoffman’s trail. Cecilio
Macaduck had given him my address in Barcelona. How can I help you, I asked him.
By advising me on poetic matters, he said. This was his reasoning: Ramírez
Hoffman was a poet, I was a poet, he was not. To find a poet, he needed the help
of another poet. I told him that in my opinion Ramírez Hoffman was a criminal,
not a poet. All right, all right, maybe in Ramírez Hoffman’s opinion, or anyone
else’s for that matter,
you’re
not a poet, or a bad one, and he’s the
real thing. It all depends, don’t you think? How much are you going to pay me? I
asked. That’s the way, he said, straight to the point. Quite a bit: my client
isn’t short of money. We became friends. The next day he came to my apartment
with a suitcase full of literary magazines. What makes you think he’s in Europe?
I know his profile, he said. Four days later he turned up with a television and
a VCR. These are for you, he said. I don’t watch television, I said. Well you
should, you don’t know what you’re missing. I read books and I write, I said.
And it shows, said Romero. I don’t mean that as an insult, he added immediately,
I’ve always respected priests and writers who own nothing. You can’t have known
many, I said. You’re the first. Then he explained that he couldn’t really set up
the television in the boarding house where he was staying, in the Calle Pintor
Fortuny. Do you think Ramírez Hoffman writes in French or German, I asked.
Maybe, he said, he was an educated man.

Among the many magazines that Romero left me were two in which I
thought I could see the hand of Ramírez Hoffman. One was French and the other
was published in Madrid by a group of Argentineans. The French one, no more than
a fanzine, was the official organ of a movement known as “barbaric writing”
whose major exponent was a retired Parisian concierge. One of the movement’s
activities was to hold black masses in which classic books were mistreated. The
ex-concierge began his career in May 1968. While the students were building
barricades, he shut himself in his cubicle-like caretaker’s apartment and
devoted himself to masturbating onto books by Victor Hugo and Balzac, urinating
onto Stendhal novels, smearing shit over pages of Chateaubriand, cutting various
parts of his body and spattering the blood over handsome editions of Flaubert,
Lamartine or Musset. That, so he claimed, was how he learned to write. The group
of “barbaric writers” was made up of sales assistants, butchers, security
guards, locksmiths, lowly bureaucrats, nursing aides and movie extras. The
Madrid magazine, by contrast, was of a higher standard and its contributors
could not be lumped together under a specific tendency or school. In its pages I
found texts on psychoanalysis, studies of the New Christianity, and poems
written by prisoners in the Carabanchel jail, preceded by an ingenious and at
times extravagant sociological introduction. One of those poems, clearly the
best, and the longest, was entitled “The Photographer of Death” and was
dedicated, mysteriously,
To the explorer
.

In the French magazine the works of the “barbarians” were accompanied
by a few enthusiastic critical texts, in one of which I thought I could see the
shadow of Ramírez Hoffman. It was signed by a certain Jules Defoe and argued, in
a jerky and ferocious style, that literature should be written by non-literary
people (just as politics should be and indeed was being taken over by
non-politicians, as the author was delighted to observe). The impending
revolution in writing would, in a sense, abolish literature itself. When poetry
is written by non-poets and read by non-readers. Anyone could have written that
text, I knew, anyone determined to set the world alight; but something told me
that this particular apostle of the Parisian ex-concierge was Ramírez
Hoffman.

The poem by the prisoner from Carabanchel cast a different light on
the matter. In the Madrid magazine there were no texts by Ramírez Hoffman, but
there was one about him, although it did not mention his name. I thought the
title, “The Photographer of Death,” might have been borrowed from an old film by
Powell or Pressburger, I couldn’t remember which, but it might also have been an
allusion to Ramírez Hoffman’s onetime hobby. Essentially, in spite of the
subjectivity clogging its lines, the poem was simple: it was about a
photographer roaming the world, the crimes retained forever in the
photographer’s mechanical eye, the planet’s sudden emptiness, the photographer’s
boredom, his ideals (the absolute) and wanderings through unknown lands, his
experiences with women, and interminable evenings and nights given over to the
observation of love in all its varied configurations: pairs, threesomes,
groups.

After I told Romero about this, he asked me to watch four movies on
the VCR he had brought. I think we have located Mr. Ramírez, he said. At that
moment I felt scared. We started watching the movies together. They were
low-budget porn. Halfway through the second one, I told Romero I couldn’t take
four porn movies in a row. Watch them tonight, he said on his way out. Am I
supposed to recognize Ramírez Hoffman? Is he one of the actors? He smiled
enigmatically and left, after noting down the addresses of the magazines I had
singled out for him. I didn’t see him again until five days later. In the
meantime I watched all the movies, and I watched them all more than once.
Ramírez Hoffman didn’t appear in any of them. But I could feel his presence in
them all. It’s very simple, Romero said when we met again, the lieutenant is
behind the camera. Then he told me the story of a crew that used to make
pornographic films in a villa on the Gulf of Tarento. One morning they were all
found dead. Six people in all. Three actresses, two actors and the cameraman.
The prime suspect was the director-producer, who was taken into custody. They
also arrested the owner of the villa, a lawyer from Corigliano who was
associated with the underworld of violent hard-core: porn showing real criminal
acts. Both had alibis and had to be released. And what did Ramírez Hoffman have
to do with all this? There was a second cameraman. A certain R. P. English. And
he had never been tracked down.

Would you be able to recognize Ramírez Hoffman if you saw him again?
asked Romero. I don’t know, I replied.

Two months went by before I saw Romero again. I’ve tracked down Jules
Defoe, he said: Let’s go. I followed him without saying a word. I hadn’t
ventured out of Barcelona for a long time. To my surprise, we took the train
that runs along the coast. Who’s paying you? I asked him. A Chilean, said
Romero, looking out at the Mediterranean appearing in flashes between empty
factories and then behind the first building sites of the Maresme. A lot? A fair
bit; he’s made a fortune, he sighed. Apparently quite a few people are getting
rich in Chile these days. And what are you going to do with the money? I’m going
back; it’ll help me to start over. Your client wouldn’t be Cecilio Macaduck by
any chance? (For a moment I thought that Cecilio Macaduck, who had stayed in
Chile, and now published a book every two years, contributed to magazines all
over the continent and occasionally gave guest lectures at small North American
universities—for a moment, as I say, I thought that Macaduck, as well as
becoming an established writer, had become wealthy. It was a moment of idiocy
and justifiable envy.) No way, said Romero. And when we find him, what are you
going to do? I asked. Ah, Bolaño my friend, first you have to recognize him.

We got off the train in Blanes. At the station we took a bus to
Lloret. Spring had only just begun but already there were groups of tourists
gathered around the doors of the hotels and sauntering along the main streets of
the village. We walked towards a neighborhood full of apartment buildings. In
one of them lived Ramírez Hoffman. Are you going to kill him? I asked as we
walked down a spectral street. The tourist shops wouldn’t open for another month
yet. Don’t ask me questions like that, said Romero, his face creased with pain
or something similar. All right, I said, no more questions.

This is where Ramírez Hoffman lives, said Romero, as we walked past an
apparently empty, eight-story building, without stopping. My stomach clenched.
Hey, don’t look back, he scolded, and we kept walking. Two blocks further on
there was a bar open. Romero came to the door with me. He’ll come here for a
coffee in a while, I can’t say when exactly. Have a good look at him and then
you can tell me. Yes, I said. See you soon, and remember, it’s more than twenty
years ago.

From the front windows of the bar, there was a view of the sea, with a
few fishing boats at work near the coast, under an intensely blue sky. I ordered
a coffee with milk and tried to concentrate. The bar was almost empty: there was
a woman sitting at a table reading a magazine and two men talking with the
bartender. I opened my book,
The Complete Works of Bruno Schulz,
translated by Juan Carlos Vidal. I tried to read. After a few pages I realized I
wasn’t understanding anything. I was reading, but the words went scuttling past
like incomprehensible beetles. Nobody came into the bar; nobody moved. Time
seemed to be standing still. I started to feel sick; the fishing boats on the
sea had turned into yachts; the beach was uniformly grey and every once in a
while someone walked or cycled past on the broad, empty pavement. I ordered a
bottle of mineral water. Then Ramírez Hoffman came in and sat down by the front
window, three tables away. He had aged. Like me, I suppose. But no, much more
than me. He was fatter, more wrinkled; he looked at least ten years older than I
did, although in fact there was a difference of only three years between us. He
was staring at the sea and smoking. Just like me, I realized with a fright,
stubbing out my cigarette and pretending to read. But Bruno Schulz’s words had
taken on a monstrous character that was almost intolerable. When I looked again
at Ramírez Hoffman, he had turned sideways. It struck me that he had a hard look
peculiar to certain Latin Americans over the age of forty. A sad, irreparable
sort of hardness. But Ramírez Hoffman did not appear to be sad, and that is
precisely where the infinite sadness lay. He seemed
adult
. But he
wasn’t adult, I knew that straight away. He seemed self-possessed. And in his
own way, on his own terms, whatever they were, he was more self-possessed than
the rest of us in that sleepy bar, or most of the people walking through the
streets of Lloret or working to get ready for the imminent tourist season. He
was hard, he had nothing or very little, and it didn’t seem to bother him much.
He seemed to be going through a rough patch. He had the face of a man who knows
how to wait without losing his nerve or letting his imagination run wild. He
didn’t look like a poet. He didn’t look like he had been an officer in the
Chilean Air Force. He didn’t look like an infamous killer. He didn’t look like a
man who had flown to Antarctica to write a poem in the sky. Not at all.