Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) (6 page)

WANDERING WOMEN
OF LETTERS

I
RMA
C
ARRASCO

Puebla, Mexico, 1910–Mexico City, 1966

A
Mexican poet inclined to
mysticism and tormented phraseology. At the age of twenty she published her
first collection of verse,
The Voice You Withered
, which bears witness
to a stubborn and sometimes fanatical reading of Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz.

Her grandparents and parents were supporters of Porfírio Díaz. Her
elder brother was a priest who embraced the cause of the Cristeros and was
executed by firing squad in 1928. In her 1933 collection,
The Destiny of
Women
, she confessed that she was in love with God, Life and a New
Mexican Dawn, to which she also referred indiscriminately as
resurrection,
awakening, dreaming, falling in love, forgiveness
and
marriage
.

Being open-minded, she frequented the salons of Mexican high society
as well as the haunts of the avant-garde, where her charm and frankness
immediately won over the revolutionary painters and writers, who welcomed her
warmly although they were well aware of her conservative ideas.

In 1934 she published
The Paradox of the Cloud
, fifteen
sonnets in the style of Góngora, and
A Tableau of Volcanoes
, a series
of highly personal poems, specimens of Catholic feminism
avant la
lettre
. She was boundlessly prolific. Her optimism was contagious. Her
personality was delightful. She radiated beauty and serenity.

In 1935, after a five-month engagement, which at the time was
considered too short, she married Gabino Barreda, an architect from Hermosillo,
Sonora, who was also a semi-covert Stalinist and a notorious Don Juan. They
spent their honeymoon in the Sonora desert, where both husband and wife found
the lonely expanses inspiring.

On their return, they moved into a colonial house in Coyoacán, which,
thanks to Barreda, became the first colonial house with steel and glass walls.
Outwardly they made an enviable couple: both were young; they were not short of
money; Barreda was the prototype of the brilliant, idealistic architect, with
grand plans for the new cities of the continent; while Irma was the prototype of
the beautiful, upper-class woman, self-assured and proud, but also intelligent
and serene, endowed with the ballast of good sense required to keep a marriage
of artists on an even keel.

Real life, however, was a different matter, and for Irma it was not
without disappointments. Barreda cheated on her with common chorus girls. He had
no time for niceties and beat her almost every day. He used to put her down in
public, and held her family in contempt, referring to them, in conversations
with friends and strangers, as “a bunch of Cristero assholes . . . good for
nothing except target practice.” Real life can sometimes bear an unsettling
resemblance to nightmares.

In 1937 the couple traveled to Spain. Barreda went to save the
Republic, Irma to save her marriage. In Madrid, while Franco’s air support
bombed the city, in room 304 of the Hotel Splendor, Irma was subjected to the
most brutal beating of her life.

The next day, without a word to her husband, she left the Spanish
capital, bound for Paris. A week later Barreda set off in search of her, but
Irma had already left Paris, and gone back across the Spanish border to Burgos,
in the nationalist zone, where she was welcomed by the mother superior of a
discalced Carmelite convent, to whom she was distantly related.

The life she led for the rest of the war is legendary. According to
various reports she worked as a nurse in first aid stations on the front lines,
wrote and acted in
tableaux vivants
to raise the soldiers’ morale, and
befriended the Colombian Catholic poets Ignacio Zubieta and Jesús
Fernández-Gómez. General Muñoz Grande is said to have cried on seeing her for
the first time, because he knew she would never be his. She was, it seems,
affectionately known to the young Falangist poets as
Guadalupe
or
The Angel of the Trenches
.

In 1939, a pamphlet entitled
The Triumph of Virtue or The Triumph
of God
was printed in Salamanca, containing five or her poems,
celebrating Franco’s victory in finely wrought, symmetrically balanced lines. In
1940, having moved to Madrid, she published another book of poetry,
Spain’s
Gift
, and a play,
A Tranquil Night in Burgos
, which was soon
successfully staged and later adapted for the screen (it explores the joyous
vacillation of a novice about to take the veil). In 1941, she traveled around
Europe with a group of Spanish artists on a triumphant promotional tour
sponsored by the German Ministry of Culture. She visited Rome and Greece,
Hungary and Rumania (where she visited the house of General Entrescu, and met
his fiancée, the Argentinean poet Daniela de Montecristo, to whom she took an
immediate dislike: “Everything about her suggests that this woman is a wh—,” she
wrote in her diary); she traveled by boat on the Rhine and the Danube. Her
talent, previously dulled by insufficient stimulation and by a lack or an excess
of love, emerged and shone again in all its splendor. This rebirth nurtured the
seeds of a new and fervent vocation: journalism. She wrote articles, portraits
of political and military figures, described the cities she visited in vivid and
picturesque detail, attended to Paris fashions and to the problems and concerns
of the Roman Curia. Magazines and newspapers in Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia and
Paraguay published her features and stories.

In 1942, Mexico declared war on the Axis powers, and although the
decision struck Irma Carrasco as a blunder, or at best a ridiculous joke, she
was, above all, a Mexican, so she decided to return to Spain and await further
developments.

In 1946, the day after the première of her play
The Moon in her
Eyes
, which was greeted with discreet enthusiasm by the critics and the
public, there was a knock at the door of her simple but comfortable apartment in
Lavapiés. It was Barreda, reappearing on the scene.

The architect, who was living in New York, had come to make a new
start. On his knees, he begged forgiveness, and made all the promises and oaths
that Irma was longing to hear. The embers of their first love were rekindled.
Irma’s tender heart did the rest.

They returned to America. Barreda had, indeed, changed. During the
voyage he was tirelessly attentive and affectionate. The ship on which they had
embarked in Europe took them to New York. Barreda’s apartment on Third Avenue
had been specially prepared for Irma’s arrival. Their second honeymoon lasted
three months. In New York, Irma experienced moments of great happiness. They
decided to have children as soon as possible, but Irma did not get pregnant.

In 1947, the couple returned to Mexico. Barreda took up with his old
friends, seeing them every day. Those friends or the air of Mexico City
transformed him: he reverted to his former self, the fearsome husband of the bad
old days. His behavior became erratic; he started drinking again and seeing
chorus girls; he stopped listening and talking to his wife. Soon the verbal
abuse began, and one night, after Irma, in conversation with some friends, had
defended the honor of Franco’s regime and praised its achievements, Barreda hit
her.

The initial relapse into conjugal violence was immediately followed by
a rash of similar incidents, occurring almost daily. But Irma was writing and
that was what saved her. In spite of beatings, insults and humiliations of all
sorts, she persisted in her work, holed up in a room of her house in Coyoacán,
while Barreda succumbed to alcohol and the Mexican Communist Party’s endless
internal debates. In 1948, Irma finished
Juan Diego
, a strange and
subtle play in which the Indian who saw the Virgin of Guadalupe and his guardian
angel make their way through Purgatory, on what seems to be an eternal journey,
since Purgatory itself, the author seems to be suggesting, is eternal. After the
premiere Salvador Novo came backstage to congratulate Irma. He kissed her hand
and they exchanged elaborate compliments. Meanwhile Barreda, who was talking or
pretending to talk with some friends, watched her every move. He seemed
increasingly nervous. Irma was taking on gigantic proportions in his eyes. He
began to stutter and sweat profusely. In the end he completely lost control of
the situation: shoving his way across the room, he insulted Novo and slapped
Irma repeatedly, to the astonishment of the onlookers, who might have been
quicker to separate husband and wife.

Three days later, Barreda was arrested, along with half of the
Communist Party’s Central Committee. Once again, Irma was free.

But she did not abandon Barreda. She visited him, took him books on
architecture and detective novels, made sure that he was eating properly, had
endless discussions with his lawyer, and looked after the running of his
business. In Lecumberri, where he spent six months, Barreda quarreled with the
other Communist prisoners, who found out for themselves just how hard it could
be to share a confined space for a long time with a man of his temperament. He
narrowly escaped summary justice at the hands of his comrades. On his release
from prison, he quit the Party, publicly abjured his former activism, and left
for New York with Irma. Everything seemed to bode well: they would begin a new
life, once again. Irma was confident that, away from Mexico, their marriage
would recover its former happiness and harmony. It was not to be: Barreda was
embittered and he took it out on Irma. Life in New York, where they had known
such joy, became hellish, and one morning Irma decided to leave it all behind.
She took the first bus she could find, and three days later she was back in
Mexico.

They would not see each other again until 1952. In the meantime, Irma
had two new plays staged,
Carlotta, Empress of Mexico
and
The
Miracle of Peralvillo
, both of which dealt with religious themes. She
also published her first novel,
Vulture Hill
, a recreation of the last
days in the life of her only brother. The book divided the critics in Mexico.
According to some, Irma’s message was that the only way to save the country from
impending disaster was simply to turn the clock back to 1899. For others,
Vulture Hill
was an apocalyptic novel prefiguring the disasters
awaiting the nation, which no one could forestall or counteract. The Vulture
Hill of the title, where her brother, Father Joaquín María (whose reflections
and memories occupy the greater part of the text), was executed, represents the
future geography of Mexico: barren, desolate, a perfect scene for further
crimes. The firing squad’s commanding officer, Captain Álvarez, represents the
PRI, the governing party steering the nation towards disaster. The soldiers of
the firing squad are the misguided, dechristianized Mexican people,
imperturbably attending their own funeral. A journalist from a Mexico City
newspaper represents the country’s intellectuals: hollow, faithless individuals,
interested only in money. The old priest, disguised as a farmer, watching the
execution from a distance, exemplifies the attitude of Mother Church, exhausted
and terrified by the violence of mankind. The Greek traveling salesman, Yorgos
Karantonis, who learns of the execution in the village and climbs the hill out
of curiosity, simply to kill time, is the incarnation of hope: Karantonis falls
to his knees weeping as Father Joaquín María is riddled with bullets. And,
finally, the children who are playing on the other side of the hill, facing away
from the execution, throwing stones at each other, represent Mexico’s future:
civil war and ignorance.

“The only political system in which I have complete confidence,” she
told an interviewer from the women’s magazine
Housework
, “is theocracy,
although Generalísimo Franco is doing a pretty good job too.”

The literati of Mexico, almost without exception, turned their backs
on her.

In 1953, after another reconciliation with Barreda, who had become a
renowned architect, the couple traveled to the Orient: Hawaii, Japan, the
Philippines and India inspired Irma to write the new poems of
The Virgin of
Asia
, steely sonnets fearlessly probing the open wound of modernity.
The solution, it now seemed to her, was to return to sixteenth-century
Spain.

In 1955 she was hospitalized with various broken bones and extensive
bruising.

Barreda, now a self-declared libertarian, had reached the height of
his fame: his reputation as an architect was international and commissions from
all over the world came flooding into his firm. Irma, by contrast, gave up
writing plays and dedicated herself to her house, the social life she led with
her husband, and the painstaking construction of a poetic work that would only
come to light after her death. In 1960 Barreda tried to divorce her for the
first time. Irma refused, using all the resources at her disposal. A year later
Barreda walked away from the marriage, leaving the matter in the hands of his
lawyers, who put pressure on Irma, threatening to cut off the money and create a
public scandal, appealing to her common sense, and her good heart (the woman
with whom Barreda was living in Los Angeles was about to have a child), but to
no avail.

In 1963, Barreda visited her for the last time. Irma was ill, and it
is not entirely unreasonable to suppose that the architect was moved by pity, or
curiosity, or some such sentiment.

Irma received him in the lounge, wearing her best suit. Barreda had
come with his two-year-old son; outside, waiting in the car, was his new woman,
a North American twenty years younger than Irma, and six months pregnant. Their
final meeting was tense and, at certain moments, dramatic. Barreda inquired
about Irma’s health, and even about her poetry. Are you still writing? he asked.
Irma replied gravely in the affirmative. Barreda was at first bothered and
inhibited by the presence of his son. Then he recovered his nerve and adopted a
distant tone, which gradually became more ironic and covertly aggressive. When
he mentioned the lawyers and the necessity of obtaining a divorce, Irma looked
him in the eye (him and his son) and flatly refused once again. Barreda did not
insist. I’ve come as a friend, he said. A friend? You? (Irma was regal.) You are
my husband, not my friend, she declared. Barreda smiled. The years had mellowed
him, or he was pretending they had, or perhaps Irma meant so little to him that
he was not even annoyed. The child did not move. Irma took pity on him and
timidly suggested that he go and play on the patio. When they were alone,
Barreda said something about how important it was for children to be raised by a
proper married couple. What would you know, retorted Irma. True, admitted
Barreda, what would I know. They drank. Barreda drank Sauza tequila, and Irma
drank
rompope
. The boy played on the patio. Irma’s servant, who was
almost a child herself, played with him. In the half-light of the lounge,
Barreda sipped his tequila and made banal remarks about the upkeep of the house,
then announced that it was time for him to go. Irma got up first and, quick as a
flash, refilled his glass. Let’s drink a toast, she said. To us, said Barreda,
to good luck. They looked each other in the eye. Barreda began to feel
uncomfortable. Irma screwed up her lips in a grimace of contempt or irritation,
and flung the glass of
rompope
onto the floor. It smashed, and the
yellow liquid ran over the white tiles. Barreda, who for a moment thought she
would throw the glass at his face, stared at her, surprised and alarmed. Hit me,
said Irma. Go on, hit me, hit me, and she presented her body to him. Her cries
grew louder and louder. Yet the child and the servant went on playing on the
patio. Barreda watched them out of the corner of his eye: they seemed to be
immersed in another time, no, in another dimension. Then he looked at Irma, and
for a second he had a vague (and immediately forgotten) sense of what horror is.
As he was walking out the front door with his son in his arms, he thought he
could hear Irma’s stifled cries coming from the lounge, where she was still
standing, indifferent to everything but her last conjugal act, deaf to
everything but her own voice softly repeating an invitation or an exorcism or a
poem, the flayed part of a poem, shorter than any of Tablada’s haikus, her only
experimental poem, in a manner of speaking.