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

vein,
unprecedented at the time, in which the author reveals his hatred of Communists
(although, oddly, he devotes a whole chapter, the third, to the military
fortunes and misfortunes of Marshall Zhukov, the hero of Moscow, Stalingrad and
Berlin, and that chapter, taken on its own—it has in fact little to do with the
rest of the book—is one of the strangest and most brilliant passages in Latin
American literature between 1900 and 1950), as well as his hatred of
homosexuals, Jews and blacks, thus earning the enmity of Virgilio Piñera, who
always admitted, nevertheless, that the novel, arguably the author’s best, had a
disquieting power, like a sleeping crocodile.
    Until the triumph of the revolution, that is, for almost all of his
working life, Pérez Masón taught graduate-level French literature classes.
During the fifties he tried unsuccessfully to cultivate peanuts and yams in his
inspiring little field near Pinar del Río, which was eventually expropriated by
the new authorities. There are endless stories in circulation about his life in
Havana after getting out of jail, most of them pure fiction. He is said to have
been a police informer, to have written speeches and tirades for one of the
regime’s well-known political figures, founded a secret society of fascist poets
and assassins, practiced Afro-Cuban rituals, and visited all the island’s
writers, painters and musicians, asking them to plead his cause with the
authorities. All I want is to work, he said, just work and live doing the only
thing I know how to do. That is, writing.
    At the time of his release from prison he had finished a 200-page
novel, which no Cuban publisher dared to take on. The action took place in the
sixties, during the early years of the literacy campaign. It was an impeccably
accomplished book, and the censors sifted its pages searching for encrypted
messages, but in vain. Even so, it was unpublishable, and Pérez Masón finally
burned the only three manuscript copies. Years later, in his memoirs, he would
claim that the whole novel, from the first to the last page, was a handbook of
cryptography, a “Super Enigma,” although of course he no longer had the text to
prove it, and the exiled Cubans of Miami, who had not forgotten his early and
somewhat hasty hagiographies of Fidel and Raúl Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos and Che
Guevara, received his assertion with indifference, if not disbelief. Pérez Masón
answered them by publishing a curious novella under the pseudonym Abelard of
Rotterdam: an erotic and fiercely anti-USA fantasy, whose protagonists were
General Eisenhower and General Patton.
    In 1970, or so Pérez Masón claims in his memoirs, he managed to found
a group called Artists and Writers of the Counterrevolution. The group consisted
of the painter Alcides Urrutia and the poet Juan José Lasa Mardones, two
entirely mysterious individuals, probably invented by Pérez Masón himself,
unless they were pseudonyms used by never-identified pro-Castro writers who at
some point went crazy or decided to play a double game. According to some
critics, the acronym AWC secretly stood for the Aryan Writers of Cuba. In any
case the Artists and Writers of the Counterrevolution or the Aryan Writers of
Cuba (or the Caribbean?) remained entirely unknown until Pérez Masón, who by
that stage was comfortably settled in New York, published his memoirs.
    The years of his ostracism are shrouded in legend. Perhaps he was
jailed again, perhaps not.
    But in 1975, after many failed attempts, he managed to get out of Cuba
and settle in New York, where he devoted his time and energy—working more than
ten hours a day—to writing and polemics. He died five years later. Surprisingly,
his name figures in the
Dictionary of Cuban Authors
(Havana, 1978),
which omits Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

POÈTES
MAUDITS

P EDRO G ONZÁLEZ C ARRERA
    Concepción, 1920–Valdivia, 1961
    A few hagiographies of
Pedro González Carrera have come down to us; all concur in