Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) by Roberto Bolaño Read Free Book Online Page A

(Havana, 1930), a nightmare with Kafkaesque
echoes, written at a time when the work of Kafka was little known in the
Caribbean, and ending with the abrasive, caustic, embittered prose of
Don
Juan in Havana
(Miami, 1979).
    A rather atypical member of the group that formed around the magazine
Orígenes
, he maintained a legendary feud with Lezama Lima. On three
occasions, he challenged the author of
Paradiso
to a duel. The first
time, in 1945, the affair was to be decided, so he declared, on the little field
he owned outside Pinar del Río, which had inspired him to write numerous pages
about the deep joy of land ownership, a condition he had come to see as the
ontological equivalent of destiny. Naturally Lezama spurned his challenge.
    On the second occasion, in 1954, the site chosen for the duel, to be
fought with sabers, was the patio of a brothel in Havana. Once again, Lezama
failed to appear.
    The third and final challenge took place in 1963; the designated field
of honor was the back garden of a house belonging to Dr. Antonio Nualart, in
which a party attended by painters and poets was under way, and it was to be a
fist fight, in the traditional Cuban manner. Lezama, who by pure chance happened
to be at the party, managed to slip away again, with the help of Eliseo Diego
and Cintio Vitier. But this time Pérez Masón’s show of bravado landed him in
trouble. Half an hour later the police arrived and, after a short discussion,
arrested him. The situation degenerated at the police station. According to the
police, Pérez Masón hit an officer in the eye. According to Pérez Masón, the
whole thing was an ambush cleverly contrived by Lezama and Castro’s regime, in
an unholy alliance forged with the express purpose of destroying him. The upshot
of the incident was a fifteen-day prison term.
    That was not to be Pérez Masón’s last visit to the jails of socialist
Cuba. In 1965 he published
Poor Man’s Soup
, which related—in an
irreproachable style, worthy of Sholokov—the hardships of a large family living
in Havana in 1950. The novel comprised fourteen chapters. The first began:
“Lucia was a black woman from . . .”; the second: “Only after serving her father
. . .”; the third: “Nothing had come easily to Juan . . .”; the fourth:
“Gradually, tenderly, she drew him towards her . . .” The censor quickly smelled
a rat. The first letters of each chapter made up the acrostic LONG LIVE HITLER.
A major scandal broke out. Pérez Masón defended himself haughtily: it was a
simple coincidence. The censors set to work in earnest, and made a fresh
discovery: the first letters of each chapter’s second paragraph made up another
acrostic—THIS PLACE SUCKS. And those of the third paragraph spelled: USA WHERE
ARE YOU. And the fourth paragraph: KISS MY CUBAN ASS. And so, since each
chapter, without exception, contained twenty-five paragraphs, the censors and
the general public soon discovered twenty-five acrostics. I screwed up, Pérez
Masón would say later: They were too obvious, but if I’d made it much harder, no
one would have realized.
    In the end, he was sentenced to three years in prison, but served only
two, during which his early novels came out in English and French. They include
The Witches
, a misogynistic book full of stories opening onto other
stories, which in turn open onto yet others, and whose structure or lack of
structure recalls certain works of Raymond Roussel;
The Enterprise of the
Masons
, a paradigmatic and paradoxical work, saluted on its publication
in 1940 by Virgilio Piñera (who saw it as a Cuban version of
Gargantua and
Pantagruel),
in which it is never entirely clear whether Pérez Masón is
talking about the business acumen of his ancestors or about the members of a
Masonic lodge who met at the end of the nineteenth century in a sugar refinery
to plan the Cuban Revolution and the worldwide revolution to follow; and
The
Gallows Tree
(1946), written in a dark, Caribbean Gothic