Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) Read Free Page B

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even over her own unpublished manuscripts.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