Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) (3 page)

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.

I
GNACIO
Z
UBIETA

Bogotá, 1911–Berlin, 1945

T
he 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 Colombia. 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.

J
ESÚS
F
ERNÁNDEZ
-G
ÓMEZ

Cartagena de Indias, 1910–Berlin, 1945

U
ntil 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.

The last work of Fernández-Gómez to come to public notice (although
there is no reason to fear that it is really the
last
) was the erotic
novella
The Countess of Bracamonte
, which appeared under the Odin
imprint in the Colombian city of Cali in the year 1986. The informed reader will
have no trouble identifying the protagonist of this story as the Duchess of
Bahamontes, and her two antagonists as the inseparable Zubieta and
Fernández-Gómez. The novella is not without humor, which is remarkable, given
the place and date of its composition: Paris, 1944. Fernández-Gómez no doubt
indulged in a certain amount of embellishment. His Duchess of Bracamonte is 35
years old, not forty-something, the estimated age of the real Duchess. In
Fernández-Gómez’s novel the two young Colombians (Aguirre and Garmendia) share
the noble lady’s nights. During the day they sleep or write. The descriptions of
Andalucian gardens are meticulous and, in their way, interesting.