Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) (2 page)

When the reconstruction of the room was complete, Edelmira judged that
the time to write had come. The first part of “Poe’s Room” is a detailed
description of the same. The second part is a treatise on good taste and
interior design, which develops a number of Poe’s precepts. The third part is
devoted to the building of the room on a lawn in the garden of Edelmira’s ranch
in Azul. The fourth part is a meticulous account of the search for the
furniture. The fifth part is a description of the reconstructed room, similar to
but also different from the room conceived by Poe, with a particular emphasis on
the light, the color crimson, the origin and state of conservation of various
pieces of furniture, the quality of the paintings (every one of which is
described, without sparing the reader a single detail). The sixth, final and
probably briefest part is a portrait of Poe’s friend, the dozing man. Certain
perhaps over-ingenious critics identified that figure as the recently deceased
Sebastian Mendiluce.

The book made little impact at the time of its publication. On this
occasion, however, Edelmira was so sure of what she had written that the general
incomprehension hardly affected her.

According to her enemies, during 1945 and 1946 she made frequent
visits to deserted beaches and little-known coves, where she welcomed the
clandestine travelers arriving in what was left of Admiral Doenitz’s submarine
fleet. It has also been claimed that she financed the magazine
The Fourth
Reich in Argentina
and, subsequently, the publishing house of the same
name.

A revised and enlarged edition of
Poe’s Room
appeared in
1947. It included a reproduction of Franchetti’s painting, showing a view of the
room from the doorway. The sleeping man is dimly visible in profile. It could,
in fact, be Sebastian Mendiluce. It could also be any heavily built man.

In 1948, while continuing to publish
Modern Argentina
,
Edelmira launched a new magazine,
American Letters
, giving her
children, Juan and Luz, editorial control. Shortly afterward, she left for
Europe, where she would remain until 1955. It has been suggested that an
irreconcilable enmity between Edelmira and Eva Peron was the cause of this long
exile. Nevertheless, many photographs from the period show the two women
together at cocktail and birthday parties, receptions, opening nights, and
sporting events. Evita, in all likelihood, could not get beyond page ten of
Poe’s Room
, and Edelmira would certainly not have approved of the
first lady’s social background, but documents and letters written by third
parties indicate that they had embarked upon shared projects, such as the
creation of a major museum of contemporary Argentinean art (to be designed by
Edelmira and the young architect Hugo Bossi), including artist residences, with
a full catering service, a feature quite unique among the great museums of the
world, the aim being to facilitate the creative work—and daily life—of young and
not-so-young exponents of modern painting, and consequently to prevent their
emigration to Paris or New York. Some people claim to have seen a film script
drafted by the two ladies, about the life and misfortunes of an innocent young
Don Juan (to be played by Hugo del Carril), but like so many other things, the
draft has been lost.

What we know for certain is that Edelmira did not return to Argentina
until 1955, by which time the rising star in literary Buenos Aires was her
daughter, Luz Mendiluce.

Edelmira’s later years were not prolific. Apart from her
Collected
Poems
(the first volume appeared in 1962, the second in 1979), she was
to publish only three more books: a volume of memoirs,
The Century as I Have
Lived It
(1968), written with the help of the ever-faithful Carozzone;
followed by a collection of very short stories,
Churches and Cemeteries of
Europe
(1972), distinguished by the author’s abundant common sense;
and, finally, a gathering of unpublished early poems,
Fervor
(1985).

In her roles as patroness of the arts and promoter of young talent,
however, Edelmira remained as active as ever. Countless volumes included a
foreword, a preface or an afterword by the widow Mendiluce; she also personally
financed the first editions of innumerable works. Of the books for which she
wrote prefaces, two deserve a special mention:
Stale Hearts and Young
Hearts
by Julián Rico Anaya, a novel which provoked a heated
controversy both in Argentina and abroad on its publication in 1978, and
The
Invisible Adorers
, by Carola Leyva, a collection of poems intended to
put an end to the sterile poetry debate that had been going on in certain
Argentinean circles since the
Second Surrealist Manifesto
. Among the
books she subsidized, two titles stand out indisputably:
The Kids of Puerto
Argentino
, a perhaps somewhat exaggerated memoir of the Falklands War,
which catapulted the ex-soldier Jorge Esteban Petrovich to literary prominence,
and
The Darts and the Wind
, an anthology of work by young, well-bred
poets whose aesthetic objectives included avoiding cacophony, vulgar
expressions, and ugly-sounding words, and which, with its preface by Juan
Mendiluce, sold unexpectedly well.

Edelmira spent the last three years of her life on her ranch in Azul,
either in the Poe room, where she would doze and dream of the past, or out on
the broad terrace of the main ranch house, absorbed in a book or contemplating
the landscape.

She remained lucid (or “furious,” as she liked to say) to the end.

J
UAN
M
ENDILUCE
T
HOMPSON

Buenos Aires, 1920–Buenos Aires, 1991

A
s the second child of
Edelmira Thompson, Juan realized at an early age that he could do whatever he
liked with his life. He tried his hand at sports (he was a passable tennis
player and an appalling race-car driver), patronized the arts (or rather
fraternized with bohemians and criminals, until prevented from doing so by his
father and his vigorous older brother, whose prohibitions were backed up by
threats and occasional violence), and studied law, before turning to
literature.

At the age of twenty he published his first novel,
The
Egoists
, a tale of mystery and youthful exaltation, set in London,
Paris and Buenos Aires. The events are precipitated by an apparently
insignificant occurrence: a mild-mannered family man suddenly shouts at his
wife, ordering her to take the children and leave the house immediately, or put
them in a room and lock the door. He then locks himself in the bathroom. After
an hour the woman emerges from the locked room in which she has obediently taken
refuge, goes to the bathroom and finds her husband dead, with a razor in his
hand and his throat slit. This suicide, which seems at first an open and shut
case, is investigated by a Scotland Yard detective with a passion for
spiritualism, and by one of the dead man’s sons. The investigation takes more
than fifteen years and serves as a pretext for introducing a gallery of
characters, including a young French neo-royalist and a young German Nazi, who
are allowed to discourse at length and seem to serve as the author’s
mouthpieces.

The novel was a success (by 1943, four editions had sold out in
Argentina, and sales were strong in Spain, as well as in Chile, Uruguay and
other Latin American countries), but Juan Mendiluce decided to forego literature
in favor of politics.

For a time he considered himself to be a Falangist and a follower of
José Antonio Primo de Rivera. He was anti-USA and anti-capitalist. Later he
became a Peronist and held important government posts at the capital and in the
province of Córdoba. His career in public service was impeccable. With the
demise of Peronism his political inclinations underwent a further
transformation: he turned pro-USA (in fact, the Argentinean Left accused him of
publishing twenty-five CIA agents in his magazine—an exaggerated figure, by any
reckoning), became a partner in one of the major legal firms in Buenos Aires,
and was finally appointed ambassador to Spain. On his return from Madrid he
published a novel,
The Argentinean Horseman
, in which he bewailed the
spiritual poverty of the contemporary world, the decline of piety and
compassion, and the incapacity of the modern novel, particularly in its crude
and aimless French manifestations, to understand suffering and so to create
characters.

He became known as the Argentinean Cato. He fought with his sister,
Luz Mendiluce, over control of the family magazine. Having won the fight, he
tried to lead a crusade against the lack of feeling in the contemporary novel.
To coincide with the publication of his third novel,
Springtime in
Madrid
, he launched a campaign against francophilia, the cult of
violence, atheism and foreign ideas.
American Letters
and
Modern
Argentina
served as platforms, along with the various Buenos Aires
dailies, which were keen to publish, although sometimes flabbergasted by, his
denunciations of Cortázar, whom he described as unreal and bloodthirsty, and
Borges, whose stories, so he claimed, were “parodies of parodies” and whose
lifeless characters were derived from worn-out traditions of English and French
literature, clearly in decline, “repeating the same old plots ad nauseam.” His
attacks took in Bioy Casares, Mujica Lainez, Ernesto Sabato (who, in his eyes,
personified the cult of violence and gratuitous aggression), Leopoldo Marechal
and others.

He was to publish three more novels:
Youthful Ardor
, a look
back to the Argentina of 1940;
Pedrito Saldaña the Patagonian
, a story
of adventures in the south, a cross between Stevenson and Conrad; and
Luminous Obscurity
, a novel about order and disorder, justice and
injustice, God and the Void.

In 1975, he gave up literature once again in favor of politics. He
served the Peronist and military governments with equal loyalty. In 1985, after
the death of his elder brother, he took over the running of the family
businesses, a task he delegated to his nephews and his son in 1989, in order to
work on a novel, which he did not finish. This last work,
Sinking
Islands
, was published in a critical edition prepared by Edelmiro
Carozzone, the son of his mother’s secretary. Fifty pages. Conversations among
indistinct characters and chaotic descriptions of an endless welter of rivers
and seas.

L
UZ
M
ENDILUCE
T
HOMPSON

Berlin 1928–Buenos Aires 1976

L
uz Mendiluce was a lively
pretty child, a pensive plump adolescent, and a hapless alcoholic adult. That
said, of all the writers in her family, she was the most talented.

Throughout her life she treasured the famous photo of her baby self in
Hitler’s arms. Set in a richly worked silver frame, it had pride of place in
each of her successive living rooms, along with portraits by Argentinean
painters, showing her as a child or a teenager, generally accompanied by her
mother. Some of those paintings were very fine works of art, yet had a fire
broken out in her house, had there been time to save only one thing, it is
conceivable that she would have left them to burn and chosen the photograph,
even over her own unpublished manuscripts.

She had various stories for the guests who inquired about that
remarkable snapshot. Sometimes she simply said that the baby was an orphan: the
photo had been taken at an orphanage, during one of the visits that politicians
frequently make to such institutions in a bid for votes and publicity. On other
occasions she explained that it was one of Hitler’s nieces, a heroic and
unfortunate girl, who had died in combat at the age of seventeen, defending
Berlin from the Communist hordes. And sometimes she frankly admitted that it was
her: Yes, she had been dandled by the Führer. In dreams, she could still feel
his strong arms and his warm breath on the top of her head. She said it had
probably been one of the happiest moments of her life. And perhaps she was
right.

Her talent bloomed early; she published a first collection of poems
when she was still seventeen. By the age of eighteen, with three books to her
name, she was living more or less on her own, and had decided to marry the
Argentinean poet Julio César Lacouture. The marriage proceeded with the family’s
blessing, in spite of her fiancé’s evident deficiencies. Lacouture was young,
refined and stylish, as well as remarkably handsome, but penniless and a
mediocre poet. For their honeymoon the couple went to the United States and
Mexico, and in Mexico City Luz Mendiluce gave a poetry reading. The problems had
already begun. Lacouture was a jealous husband. He took revenge by cheating on
his wife. One night in Acapulco, Luz went out to find him. Lacouture was at the
house of the novelist Pedro de Medina. During the day, a barbecue had been held
there in honor of the Argentinean poetess; by night, the house had been
transformed into a brothel, in honor of her husband. Luz found Lacouture with
two whores. At first she remained calm. She drank a couple of tequilas in the
library with Pedro de Medina and the social-realist poet Augusto Zamora, both of
whom tried to calm her down. They talked about Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Claudel and
Soviet poetry, Paul Valéry and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Sor Juana was the
straw that broke the camel’s back; Luz exploded. She grabbed the first thing she
could find and returned to the bedroom in search of her husband. Lacouture was
attempting to get dressed, in an advanced state of inebriation. The scantily
clad whores looked on from a corner of the room. Unable to restrain herself, Luz
struck her husband on the head with a bronze sculpture of Pallas Athena.
Lacouture had to be hospitalized for fifteen days with a severe concussion. They
returned to Argentina together but separated after four months.

The failure of her marriage plunged Luz into despair. She took to
drinking in dives and having affairs with some of the most unsavory individuals
in Buenos Aires. Her well-known poem “I Was Happy with Hitler,” misunderstood by
the Right and the Left alike, dates from this period. Her mother tried to send
her to Europe, but Luz refused. At the time she weighed more than two hundred
pounds (she was only five foot two inches tall) and was drinking a bottle of
whisky a day.

In 1953, the year in which Stalin and Dylan Thomas died, she published
the collection
Tangos of Buenos Aires
, which, as well as a revised
version of “I Was Happy with Hitler,” contained some of her finest poems:
“Stalin,” a chaotic fable set among bottles of vodka and incomprehensible
shrieks; “Self Portrait,” one of the cruelest poems written in Argentina during
the fifties, which is no mean claim; “Luz Mendiluce and Love,” in the same vein
as her self-portrait, but with doses of irony and black humor, which make it
somewhat less grueling; and “Apocalypse at Fifty,” a promise to kill herself
when she reached that age, which those who knew her regarded as optimistic:
given her lifestyle, Luz Mendiluce would be lucky to reach the age of
thirty.

Little by little there gathered about her a clique of writers too
peculiar for her mother’s taste and too radical for her brother.
American
Letters
became an essential reference point for Nazis and the
embittered, for alcoholics and the sexually or economically marginal. Luz
Mendiluce assumed the roles of mother figure and high priestess of a new
Argentinean poetry, which a fearful literary community would thenceforth attempt
to suppress.

In 1958 she fell in love again. This time the object of her affections
was a twenty-five-year-old painter. He was blond, blue-eyed and disarmingly
stupid. The relationship lasted until 1960, when the painter went to Paris on a
fellowship that Luz had obtained for him, through the good offices of her
brother Juan. This new disappointment fuelled the elaboration of another major
poem, “Argentinean Painting,” in which Luz revisited her often stormy
relationships with Argentinean painters in her various capacities—as collector,
wife and (from an early age) model.

In 1961, having obtained the annulment of her first marriage, Luz took
as her wedded husband the poet Mauricio Cáceres, a regular contributor to
American Letters
, and an exponent of what he himself called the
“neo-gaucho” style. Having learned her lesson, this time Luz decided to become a
model helpmeet and homemaker: she let her husband take control of
American
Letters
(which led to numerous disputes with Juan Mendiluce, who
accused Cáceres of appropriating funds), gave up writing and dedicated herself
body and soul to her wifely duties. With Cáceres in charge of the magazine, the
Nazis, the embittered and the sociopaths unanimously espoused the neo-gaucho
style. Success went to Cáceres’ head. At one point he came to believe that he
could do without Luz and the Mendiluce clan. He attacked Juan and Edelmira when
he saw fit. He even allowed himself the pleasure of belittling his wife. New
muses soon appeared on the scene: young female converts to the manly cause of
neo-gaucho poetry who succeeded in catching the master’s eye. Until one day Luz,
who had seemed completely unaware of her husband’s activities, suddenly exploded
once again. The incident was extensively covered in the crime pages and gossip
columns of the Buenos Aires newspapers. Cáceres and an editor from
American
Letters
ended up in the hospital with bullet wounds. While the editor’s
injuries were minor, Cáceres was not discharged for a month and a half. Luz did
not fare much better. Having shot her husband and her husband’s friend, she shut
herself in the bathroom and swallowed the contents of the medicine chest. This
time, there was nothing for it; she had to leave for Europe.

In 1964, after sojourns in various clinics, Luz surprised her scarce
but faithful readers once again with a new a collection entitled
Like a
Hurricane
: ten poems, one hundred and twenty pages, with a preface by
Susy D’Amato (who could hardly understand a line of Luz’s poetry but was one of
her few remaining friends), brought out by feminist publishers in Mexico, who
would soon come to regret having gambled on a “well-known far-Right activist,”
although, at the time, they had been unaware of Luz’s real allegiances, and the
poems themselves were free of political allusions, except for the odd
unfortunate metaphor (such as “in my heart I am the last Nazi”), always in the
context of personal relationships. The book was republished a year later in
Argentina, where it garnered a number of favorable reviews.

In 1967, Luz returned to Buenos Aires, where she was to remain for the
rest of her life. An aura of mystery enveloped her. In Paris, Jules Albert Ramis
had translated practically all of her poetry. She was accompanied by a young
Spanish poet, Pedro Barbero, who acted as her secretary and whom she called
Pedrito. This Pedrito, as opposed to her Argentinean husbands and lovers, was
helpful, attentive (although perhaps a little uncouth) and above all loyal. Luz
took control of
American Letters
once again and set up a new publishing
house, The Wounded Eagle. She was soon surrounded by a host of followers who
laughed at all her jokes. She weighed two hundred and twenty pounds. Her hair
came down to her waist. She rarely washed. Her clothes were old and often
ragged.

Luz Mendiluce’s emotional life now entered a calmer phase. In other
words, she ceased to suffer. She took lovers, drank to excess and was prone to
occasional cocaine abuse, but always maintained her spiritual balance. She was
severe. Her reviews were feared, and eagerly anticipated by those who were not
the targets of her venomous, barbed wit. She entered into bitter, public feuds
with certain Argentinean poets (all male and famous), cruelly satirizing their
homosexuality (a practice of which she disapproved in public, although many of
her friends were gay), their humble social backgrounds, or their Communist
convictions. Many women writers in Argentina admired her and read her work,
although not all of them would admit to it.

The struggle with her brother Juan over the control of
American
Letters
(the magazine in which she had invested so much, and the source
of so many disappointments) took on epic proportions. She was defeated, but the
young remained loyal. She divided her time between a large apartment in Buenos
Aires and a ranch in Paraná, which became an artistic commune over which she
could reign unopposed. There, by the river, artists conversed, took siestas,
drank and painted, unaffected by the political violence beginning to ravage the
rest of the country.

But no one could remain safe from harm. One afternoon, Claudia Saldaña
visited the ranch with a friend. She was young, she wrote poetry and she was
beautiful. For Luz it was love at first sight. Quickly arranging an
introduction, the hostess lavished attention upon her visitor. Claudia Saldaña
spent an afternoon and a night at the ranch, returning to Rosario, where she
lived, the next morning. Luz recited poems, displayed the French translations of
her books and the photo of herself as a baby with Hitler, encouraged the young
woman to write, asked to read her poems (Claudia Saldaña said they were no good,
she was just a beginner), insisted that her guest keep a little wooden figure
she happened to pick up, and finally tried to get her drunk, hoping to make her
too ill to leave, but Claudia Saldaña left anyway.

After two days spent in an utter daze, Luz realized that she was in
love. She felt like a girl. She got hold of Claudia’s telephone number in
Rosario and called her. She was almost sober; she could barely control her
emotions. She asked if they could meet. Claudia agreed: they could meet in
Rosario in three days’ time. Luz was beside herself; she wanted to see Claudia
that night or the next day at the latest. Claudia stood firm: she had binding,
prior engagements. What cannot be cannot be, besides which, it’s impossible. Luz
accepted her conditions with a joyful resignation. That night she cried and
danced and drank until she passed out. No doubt it was the first time that
anyone had made her feel that way. True love, she confessed to Pedrito, who
agreed with everything she said.

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.