Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) (12 page)

In 1988, having adopted photocopying, he published a story entitled
“The Ostrich” in an edition of fifty booklets. It is, at least in principle, a
homage to the soldiers of the military coup, yet in spite of the Schiaffino’s
evident admiration for order, the family and the Fatherland, he was unable to
refrain from sallies of caustic, cruel, scatologically humorous sallies,
intemperate, caricatural, parodic, irreverent outbursts—the Schiaffino trademark
in short. The following year
The Best of Argentino Schiaffino
appeared,
without a publisher’s imprint or date: a selection of his poems, stories and
political writings. The cognoscenti were quick to surmise that the book had been
produced by The Fourth Reich in Argentina, a mystagogically inspired venture,
which kept popping up and then vanishing again in Buenos Aires publishing
between 1965 and 2000.

Gradually Schiaffino began to acquire something of a media profile. He
took part in a television program on soccer gangs, and was the first to defend
their right to violence, on grounds such as honor, self-defense, group
solidarity, and the pure and simple pleasure of street fighting. Invited as a
defendant, he assumed the role of prosecutor. He participated in radio and
television debates on all sorts of subjects: fiscal policy, the decadence of the
young Latin American democracies, the future of the tango on the European music
scene, the state of opera in Buenos Aires, the exorbitant prices of couture
fashion, public education in the provinces, widespread ignorance about the
nation’s extent and borders, Argentinean wine, the privatization of the
country’s leading industries, the Formula One Grand Prix, tennis and chess, the
work of Borges, Bioy Casares, Cortázar and Mújica Lainez (about whose work he
made bold pronouncements, although he swore he had never read it), the life of
Roberto Arlt (for whom he professed his admiration, although the novelist had
“belonged to the enemy camp”), border incidents, how to end unemployment,
white-collar crime and street crime, the inventiveness of the Argentineans, the
sawmills of the Andes, and the works of Shakespeare.

He attended the 1990 World Cup in Italy, one of a group of thirty
Argentinean fans classified as potentially dangerous aliens. Prior to the trip
he had expressed a wish to meet with the British hooligans for a reconciliation
ceremony consisting of a mass for the casualties of the Falklands War, followed
by a barbecue. Although it was never anything more than a wish, the news spread
around the world, and by the time he returned to Argentina, Schiaffino’s renown
had increased considerably.

In 1991 he brought out two books:
Chimichurri Sauce
(self-published, forty pages, 100 copies), an unfortunate imitation of
Lugones and Darío, lapsing occasionally into pure plagiarism, which left all but
a few readers wondering why he had written and, having written,
published
it; and
The Iron Boat
(La Castaña, 50 pages, 500
copies), a series of thirty prose poems whose central theme is the phenomenon of
friendship between men. The book’s trite message, that friendship is forged in
danger, seems in retrospect to foreshadow the life that Fatso was to lead in the
coming years. In 1992, commanding a substantial group recruited from his gang,
he orchestrated the ambush on a public highway of a bus carrying River Plate
supporters, resulting in two deaths from gunshot wounds and numerous injuries. A
warrant for his arrest was issued; Argentino Schiaffino disappeared. In phone
calls to various radio stations he vigorously declared his innocence, although
he did not condemn the ambush—on the contrary—and several witnesses, including
more than one ex-member of Schiaffino’s gang, said they had seen him near the
scene of the crime. In the media he was soon identified as the mastermind and
instigator of the incident. Here begins the shadowy phase of his life,
especially propitious to all kinds of speculation and mystification.

While on the run, he is known to have attended soccer matches: photos
he set up himself showed him rooting for the team like any other fan. The gang,
the inner circle of the gang, those who had stood by the Schiaffino boys from
the start, protected him with a fanatical devotion. His life on the run inspired
awe among the youngsters. A few read his works; some imitated him and tried to
follow his literary lead, but Fatso was inimitable.

In 1994, when the World Cup was being played in the United States,
Fatso gave an interview to a Buenos Aires sports magazine. Where was he? In
Boston. A major scandal broke out. The Argentinean sportswriters became
suspicious after being subjected to special security measures—slights, so they
felt, to their professional dignity—and commented sarcastically about the North
American police procedures. The other Latin American journalists, plus a few
from Spain, Italy and Portugal, echoed their mockery. The story, just one of the
many generated by the event, was repeated around the world. The Boston police
and the FBI swung into action, but Schiaffino had disappeared.

For a long time, his whereabouts were entirely unknown. The gang even
publicly admitted to being in the dark, until Scotti Cabello, who was in prison,
received a long poem entitled “Terra autem erat inanis” in a letter from Fatso,
postmarked Orlando, Florida. The epistle, which Dr. Morazán hastened to publish,
obliging the Boca fans to pay a subscription, begins with a comparison, in
rhythmic free verse, of the open spaces of North America and those of Argentina,
at opposite extremes of the continent, continues with detailed reminiscences of
the prisons that “the author and his friends” have come to know through their
“enthusiasm and innocence” (a clear allusion to the two-year sentence that
Scotti Cabello was serving at the time) and ends in a chaotic blend of threats
and idyllic visions of a childhood paradise regained (mamma, the smell of fresh
pasta, brothers laughing around the table, playing soccer in vacant lots with a
plastic ball until nightfall) and irreverent, off-color jokes, a characteristic
trait of Schiaffino’s late manner.

There was no further news of him until 1999. The gang observed an
absolute and perhaps ingenuous silence. In spite of Dr. Morazan’s
insinuations—his deliberately enigmatic utterances and ambiguities—it is
probably the case that no one in Argentina had any idea what had become of
Fatso. It was all speculation. Even so, in 1998 the die-hard fans set off to
France for the World Cup, convinced that they would find him cheering on the
boys in blue and white, as always. But they were entirely mistaken. Fatso had
turned away from the first of his two great loves and devoted himself to the
second: he read everything he could lay his hands on, especially history books,
crime novels and best-sellers; learned English to a rudimentary level (which he
would never surpass); and married a North American, María Teresa Greco, from New
Jersey, twenty years his senior, thereby obtaining US citizenship. He was living
in Beresford, a small town in southern Florida, working as chief barman in a
restaurant owned by a Cuban, and unhurriedly concocting what was to be his first
novel, a five-hundred page thriller set in various countries over several years.
His habits had changed. He had become orderly, and was leading an almost
monk-like existence.

In 1999, as mentioned above, he reemerged. Scotti Cabello, who was out
of prison and had more or less withdrawn from the turbulent world of the soccer
gangs, received not a letter but a telephone call from Fatso. He was
flabbergasted. Fatso’s voice, sounding just the same as ever, reeled off plans,
projects and strategies for revenge, with the undiminished enthusiasm of his
early years, giving Scotti the disturbing impression that, for his old hero,
time had stopped. Fatso didn’t seem perturbed by the news that he was no longer
the leader of the Boca gang. He had instructions still, and hoped that
Scotti would carry them out. First, let the boys know that he
was alive; second, trumpet the news that he was coming home; third, start
looking for someone to publish his great North American novel in Spanish . .
.

Scotti Cabello loyally satisfied the first two demands, but could find
no takers in Argentina for Fatso’s literary opus. In the end it was Schiaffino
who failed to fulfill his promise: after raising hopes of his return—if only
among a few followers—he lapsed once again into sullen silence.

During the 2002 World Cup in Japan, a few Argentinean supporters
scanning the Osaka stadium with binoculars thought they saw him in a side row,
near the south end. They made their way towards the spot, uncertain and excited,
but when they got there, he had gone. Three years later the Bucaneros publishing
house in Tampa brought out his
Memoirs of an Argentinean
(350 pages), a
book full of gangsters, car chases, gorgeous women, unsolved murders, bars where
private eyes meet with honest cops, adventures in the ghetto, corrupt
politicians, movie stars receiving threats, voodoo rituals, industrial
espionage, etc. The book was relatively successful, at least among the Hispanic
community in Miami and in the U.S. Southwest.

By then Schiaffino had been widowed and married again. According to
some sources, he had links with the Ku Klux Klan, the American Christian
Movement and the Rebirth of America group. But in fact he was dividing his time
between business and literature. He owned two barbeque restaurants in the Miami
area, and was immersed in the elaboration of a major work in progress, which he
was keeping strictly under wraps.

In 2007 he self-published a book of prose poems,
The Horsemen of
Repentance
, in which he relates, although in a muddled or deliberately
hermetic manner, some of his adventures in North America, from his arrival as a
wanted man up to the moment when he met Elisabeth Moreno, his third wife, to
whom the book is dedicated.

Finally, in 2010, the long-promised, long-awaited novel appeared. Its
title was laconic and suggestive:
The Treasure
. The plot is a thin
disguise for a memoir in which Argentino Schiaffino discusses and analyses his
life, taking it apart, weighing good and bad, seeking and finding
justifications. In the course of the book’s 535 pages, the reader is made privy
to undisclosed aspects of the author’s existence, some of which are genuinely
surprising, although as a rule Schiaffino’s revelations are restricted to the
domestic sphere: we learn, for example, that since they were unable to have
children of their own, he and Elisabeth adopted a six-year-old Irish boy named
Tommy, and a four-year-old Mexican girl named Cynthia, whom they renamed
Cynthia-Elisabeth, in accordance with Fatso’s wish, etc. Schiaffino makes his
political position clear. From his own point of view, at least. He is neither on
the right nor on the left. He has black friends and friends in the Ku Klux Klan
(among the photos in the book, one shows a barbecue in a back yard; all the
guests are wearing Klan hoods and gowns, except for Schiaffino, who is in chef’s
garb, using a spare white hood to wipe the sweat from his neck). He is against
monopolies, especially cultural monopolies. He believes in the family, but also
in a man’s “natural right to have a bit of fun on the side.” He trusts in the
United States, of which he has become a citizen, while drawing up a long list of
trivial things that ought to be improved.

The chapters devoted to his life in Argentina, and especially to his
leading role in the soccer gangs, are sketchy compared to those about his
experiences in North America. The book contains historical inaccuracies, which
may, however, be deranged metaphors for truths of another kind. For example, he
says that he took part in the Falklands War as a private, was awarded the San
Martín Medal for his bravery in various engagements, and promoted to Sergeant.
His description of the battle of Goose Green is full of blackly humorous details
but is not always believable from a strictly military point of view. He says
almost nothing of his long career as the head of the Boca fans. He does,
however, complain that in Argentina his books were never given much attention.
On the other hand, his life in the United States, both real and imaginary, is
recounted with zest and in minute detail. Many chapters of the book are devoted
to women, among whom a place of honor is reserved for his second wife, the
“beloved and sorely missed companion” who opened the doors of “her personal
library” to him. As to sports, he is interested only in boxing, and the
characters who haunt the boxing world provide him with a wealth of material:
Italians, Cubans, melancholic old black men, friends and tireless storytellers
one and all.

After the publication of
The Treasure
, Schiaffino seemed to
have settled down for good. But it was not to be. Bad management or bad friends
bankrupted him. He lost his two restaurants. Divorce was not long in coming. In
2013 he left Florida and moved to New Orleans, where he worked as the manager of
a restaurant called El Chacarero Argentino. At the end of that year, he
self-published his last book of poems:
A Story Heard in the Delta
, a
collection of melancholic but nonetheless outrageous jokes, in the vein of the
best verse from his Boca period. In 2015, he left New Orleans for reasons that
have not been ascertained, and a few months later an unidentified individual or
individuals killed him in the backyard of a gambling den in Detroit.

THE INFAMOUS
RAMÍREZ HOFFMAN

C
ARLOS
R
AMÍREZ
H
OFFMAN

Santiago de Chile, 1950–Lloret de Mar, Spain, 1998

T
he infamous Ramírez
Hoffman must have launched his career in 1970 or 1971, when Salvador Allende was
president of Chile.

He almost certainly attended the writing workshop run by Juan
Cherniakovski in the southern city of Concepción. At that stage he was calling
himself Emilio Stevens and writing poems of which Cherniakovski did not
disapprove, although the stars of the workshop were the twins María and
Magdalena Venegas, seventeen- or perhaps eighteen-year-old poets from
Nacimiento, who were studying sociology and psychology respectively.

Emilio Stevens was going steady (an expression that gives me goose
bumps now) with María Venegas, although in fact he often went out with both
sisters, to the movies, concerts, plays or lectures, that sort of thing;
sometimes they went to the beach in the girls’ car, a white Volkswagon Beetle,
to watch the sun sink into the Pacific and smoke some dope. I suppose the
Venegas girls went out with other guys, and Stevens probably had other friends
too; at the time, we all thought we knew what there was to know about each
other’s lives, a fairly stupid assumption, as events were soon to demonstrate.
Why did the Venegas sisters get mixed up with him? It’s a trivial mystery, an
everyday accident. The man known as Stevens was, I suppose, handsome,
intelligent, sensitive.

A week after the coup, in September 1973, in the midst of the reigning
confusion, the Venegas sisters left their apartment in Concepción and went back
home to Nacimiento. That was where they lived with their aunt. Their parents,
both painters, had died before the girls turned fifteen, leaving them the house
and some land in the province of Bio-Bio, which provided a comfortable living.
The sisters would often speak of them, and their poems often featured imaginary
painters lost in the wilds of southern Chile, embarking on hopelessly ambitious
works and hopelessly in love. Once, and once only, I had the opportunity to
examine a photo of them: the father was dark and thin, with a certain look of
sadness and perplexity peculiar to those born on this side of the river Bío-Bío;
the mother was taller, slightly chubby, with a sweet, easy-going smile.

They went to Nacimiento and shut themselves up in their house, one of
the biggest houses in town, on the outskirts, a two-storey wooden house that had
belonged to the father’s family, with more than seven rooms, and a piano, and
the powerful presence of the aunt, who kept the twins safe from all harm,
although they were not what you would call faint-hearted girls, quite the
opposite.

And one fine day, say two weeks or a month later, Emilio Stevens
turned up in Nacimiento. It must have happened something like this. One night,
or perhaps it was earlier, one afternoon, one of those melancholic southern
afternoons, in mid-spring, someone knocks at the door, and it is Emilio Stevens.
The Venegas girls are pleased to see him; they bombard him with questions,
invite him to dinner and then say he’s welcome to stay the night; and after
dinner they probably read out poems, not Stevens, he doesn’t want to read
anything, he says is working on something new, smiles in a mysterious, knowing
way, or perhaps he doesn’t even smile, just flatly says no, and the Venegas
girls approve; in their innocence, they think they understand, but they don’t
understand at all, and yet they think they understand, and they read their
poems, which are dense and very good: a blend of Violeta and Nicanor Parra and
Enrique Lihn, if such a thing is conceivable, a mind-blowing distillation of
Joyce Mansour, Sylvia Plath and Alejandra Pizarnik, the ideal cocktail with
which to bid the day farewell, a day in 1973, fading irretrievably. And during
the night Emilio Stevens gets up like a sleepwalker, perhaps he has slept with
María Venegas, perhaps not, at any rate he gets up without hesitation, like a
sleepwalker, and goes to the aunt’s room, hearing the motor of a car approaching
the house, and then he cuts the aunt’s throat, no, he stabs her in the heart,
it’s cleaner, quicker; he covers her mouth and plunges the knife into her heart,
then he goes down and opens the door, and two men come into the house that
belongs to the stars of Juan Cherniakovski’s poetry workshop, and the fucked-up
night comes into the house and then it goes out again, almost straight away, the
night comes in, and out it goes, swift and efficient.

And the bodies vanish, but no, years later one will appear in a mass
grave, that of Magdalena Venegas, but only hers, as if to prove that Ramírez
Hoffman is a man and not a god. Many other people disappeared at that time, like
Juan Cherniakovski, the Jewish poet of the South, and no one was surprised that
he had disappeared, the Red son of a bitch, although later, following in the
footsteps of his putative Russian-Jewish uncle, he turned up in all the trouble
spots of Latin America, becoming a legend, the model of the itinerant Chilean:
there he was in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, with his rifle and his fist
in the air, as if to say Here I am, you bastards, the last Jewish Bolshevik from
the forests of southern Chile, until one day he disappeared for good, possibly
killed during the FMLN’s final offensive. And Concepción’s other poet, Martín
García, Cherniakovski’s friend and rival, who held his workshop in the medical
faculty, also disappeared. The two of them were always together, talking about
poetry. If the sky over Chile had begun to crumble and fall, they would have
gone on talking about poetry: the tall, fair-haired Cherniakovski and the short,
dark Martín García; Cherniakovski mainly interested in Latin American poetry,
while García was translating French poets no one else had heard of. This of
course infuriated a lot of people. How could that ugly little Indian presume to
translate and correspond with Alain Jouffroy, Denis Roche, and Marcelin Pleynet?
Michel Bulteau, Matthieu Messagier, Claude Pelieu, Franck Venaille, Pierre
Tilman, Daniel Biga . . . who
were
these people, for God’s sake? And
what was so special about this Georges Perec character, published by Denoîl,
whose books García was always toting around, pretentious bastard. Nobody missed
him. Many would have been glad to hear of his death. Writing this now it seems
hard to believe. But García reappeared in exile, like Cherniakovski (whom he no
doubt never saw again), first in East Germany, which he left as soon as he
could, then in France, where he scraped together a living teaching Spanish and
translating for small presses, mainly books by offbeat, early twentieth-century
Latin American writers obsessed with mathematical or pornographic quandaries.
Later on Martín García was killed too, but that is an entirely different
story.

Following the coup, as the flimsy power structure of the Popular Unity
government was being torn down, I was taken prisoner. The circumstances of my
arrest were banal if not grotesque, but as a result I was able to witness
Ramírez Hoffman’s first poetic act, although at that stage I didn’t know who
Ramírez Hoffman was or what had befallen the Venegas sisters.

It happened late one afternoon—Ramírez Hoffman was fond of
twilight—while I was killing time along with the rest of the prisoners at the La
Peña detention center, on the outskirts of Concepción, practically in
Talcahuano, playing chess in the yard of our makeshift prison. A few strands of
cloud appeared in the sky, which had been absolutely clear. The clouds, shaped
like cigarettes or pencils, were black and white at first, then pink, and
finally bright vermillion. I think I was the only prisoner looking at them.
Then, among the clouds, the airplane appeared. An old airplane. At first a spot
no bigger than a mosquito. Silent. It was coming from over the sea and gradually
approaching Concepción. Heading for the city center. It seemed to be moving as
slowly as the clouds. When it flew over us it made a noise like a damaged
washing machine. Then it turned its nose up and climbed, and soon it was flying
over the center of Concepción. There, high above the city, the plane began to
write a poem in the sky. Letters of grey smoke against the rose-tinged blue of
the sky, chilling the eyes of those who saw them. YOUTH . . . YOUTH, I read. I
had the impression—the mad certitude—that they were printer’s proofs. Then the
plane swung around and flew towards us, before turning again to make another
pass. This time the line was much longer and must have required great expertise
on the pilot’s part: IGITUR PERFECTI SUNT COELI ET TERRA ET OMNIS ORNATUS EORUM.
For a moment it seemed the plane would disappear over the horizon, heading for
the mountains. But it came back. One of the prisoners, a man called Norberto,
who was going mad, tried to climb the wall that separated the men’s yard from
the women’s, and started shouting: It’s a Messerschmidt, a Messerschmidt fighter
from the Luftwaffe. All the other prisoners stood up. The pair of guards at the
door of the gymnasium, where we slept on the floor, had stopped talking and were
looking at the sky. Mad Norberto, clinging to the wall, laughed and said that
the Second World War had returned to the earth. It has fallen to us, the people
of Chile, to greet and welcome it, he said. The plane came back over Concepción:
GOOD LUCK TO EVERYONE IN DEATH, I managed to make out. For a moment I thought
that if Norberto had tried to jump the wall, no one would have stopped him.
Everyone else was frozen, staring up at the sky. Never in my life had I seen so
much sadness. The plane came back and flew over us again; it veered around,
climbed and returned to Concepción. What a pilot, said Norberto, Hans Marseille
himself reincarnate. I read: DIXITQUE ADAM HOC NUNC OS EX OSSIBUS MEIS ET CARO
DE CARNE MEA HAEC VOCABITUR VIRAGO QUONIAM DE VIRO SUMPTA EST. The last letters
trailed off to the east, among the clouds proceeding up the Bío-Bío valley. The
plane itself disappeared completely from the sky for a moment. As if the whole
thing were simply a mirage or a nightmare. I heard a miner from Lota say, What’s
he written, brother? No idea, came the reply. Someone else said, Just some crap;
but his voice quavered. There were more policemen at the entrance to the
gymnasium now: four of them. In front of me, Norberto was gripping the wall and
whispering: Either this is the blitzkrieg, or I’m mad. Then he took a deep
breath and seemed to calm down. The plane appeared again. We hadn’t seen it turn
around. Heaven forgive us our sins, said Norberto. He said it out loud, and the
other prisoners and the guards heard him and laughed. But I knew that no one
really felt like laughing. The plane flew over our heads. The sky was darkening;
the clouds were no longer pink, but black. Over Concepción, the silhouette of
the plane was barely visible. This time it wrote only three words: LEARN FROM
FIRE, which quickly faded into the darkness and disappeared. For a few seconds
no one said anything. The policemen were the first to react. They ordered us to
get in line and began the nightly head-count before shutting us in the
gymnasium. It was a Messerschmidt, Bolaño, I swear to God, Norberto said to me
as we went in. Sure, I said. And it wrote in Latin, Norberto said. Yes, I said,
but I didn’t understand anything. I did, said Norberto, it was about Adam and
Eve, and the Holy Virago, and the Garden of our heads, and he wished us all good
luck. A poet, I said. Polite, anyway, said Norberto.

That joke or poem, as I was to discover many years later, cost Ramírez
Hoffman a week in the guardhouse. When he got out, he kidnapped the Venegas
sisters. During the festivities at the end of 1973, he put on another display of
skywriting. Over the El Condor air force base, he drew a star that seemed to be
one more among the early stars of dusk, and then he wrote a poem that none of
his superior officers could understand. One line was about the Venegas sisters.
To an informed, attentive reader, it would have been clear that the girls were
already dead.

In another line he mentioned a Patricia.
Pupils of fire
, he
wrote. The generals watching him release smoke to form those letters assumed
that he was writing the names of his sweethearts, his friends or whores from
Talcahuano. Some of his friends, however, knew that Ramírez Hoffman was
conjuring up the shades of dead women. Around the same time, he participated in
two further air shows. He was said to have been the most intelligent cadet in
his class, and the most headstrong. He could fly a Hawker Hunter or a combat
helicopter without the slightest difficulty, but what he enjoyed most was to
load the old plane with smoke canisters, climb into the Fatherland’s empty
skies, and write out his nightmares, which were our nightmares too, for the wind
to obliterate.

In 1974, having obtained the support of a general, he flew to the
South Pole. It was a long and difficult voyage, but at each of his numerous
refueling stops he wrote poems in the sky. According to his admirers, those
poems heralded a new age of iron for the Chilean race. The Emilio Stevens who
had been so reserved and unsure of himself in literary matters had disappeared
without a trace. Ramírez Hoffman was confidence and audacity personified. The
flight from Punta Arenas to the Arturo Prat Antarctic base was beset with
dangers, which almost cost him his life. On his return, when the journalists
asked him which had been the greatest danger, he replied: The stretches of
silence. The waves of Cape Horn licking at the belly of the plane; huge but
soundless waves, like in a silent film. Silence is like the sirens singing to
Ulysses, he said, but if you resist it like a man, nothing bad can happen to
you. In Antarctica everything went well. Ramírez Hoffman wrote ANTARCTICA IS
CHILE, his exploit was recorded on film and in photographs, and then he returned
to Concepción, on his own, in his little plane, which according to mad Norberto
was a Messerschmidt from the Second World War.