Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) by Roberto Bolaño Page B

he’s not Mandrake any more, or anybody else. But
he would gladly have changed places with Fonseca, if only for a week. He also
thought that Fonseca’s gaze was harder than his own. I live among pirañas, he
wrote, but Don Rubem Fonseca lives in a tank full of metaphysical sharks. He
wrote a letter to his hero, but received no reply. So he wrote another novel,
The Last Word
, published by Black Pistol, in which the return of
Paulinho is a pretext for Couto to bare his soul to Fonseca, shamelessly, as if
saying, Here I am, alone with my pirañas, while my colleagues drive around the
city center in the small hours of the morning, like the Tonton Macoute who come
to take bad children away . . . such are the mysteries of literature. And
although he probably knew that Fonseca would never read his novels, he went on
writing. In
The Last Word
more skeletons appear. Paulinho is a skeleton
almost all day long. His clients are skeletons. The people he talks to, fucks
and eats with (although he usually eats alone) are also skeletons. And in the
third novel,
The Mute Girl
, the major cities of Brazil are like
enormous skeletons, while the villages are like little children’s skeletons, and
sometimes even the words are transformed into bones. After that Couto stopped
writing. Someone told him that his colleagues from the patrol had begun to
disappear, and fear took hold of him, or rather tightened its grip and entered
his body. He tried to retrace his steps and find familiar faces, but everything
had changed while he was writing. Certain strangers began to talk about his
novels. One of them could have been Fonseca, but wasn’t. I had him in the palm
of my hand, he noted in his diary before disappearing like a dream. He had gone
to Paris, where he hanged himself in a room at the Hôtel La Grèce.

C ARLOS H EVIA
    Montevideo, 1940–Montevideo, 2006
    A uthor of a monumental and
largely unreliable biography of San Martín, in which, among other inaccuracies,
the general is said to have been Uruguayan, Hevia also wrote stories, collected
in the volume
Seas and Offices
, and two novels:
Jason’s Prize
,
a fable suggesting that life on Earth is the result of a disastrous
intergalactic television game show; and
Montevideo—Buenos Aires
, a
novel about friendship, full of exhaustive all-night conversations.
    He worked in television journalism, discharging lowly tasks for the
most part, with occasional stints as a producer.
    For some years he lived in Paris, where he became acquainted with the
theories espoused by
The Review of Contemporary History
, which were to
make a deep and lasting impression on him. He was a friend of the French
philosopher Étienne de Saint Étienne, whose work he translated.

H ARRY S IBELIUS
    Richmond, 1949—Richmond, 2014
    H arry Sibelius was
prompted to write one of the most complex and dense works of his day (and
possibly also one of the most futile) by his reading of Norman Spinrad and
Philip K. Dick, and perhaps also by reflecting on a story by Borges. The novel,
since it is a novel and not a work of history, is simple in appearance. It is
founded on the following supposition: Germany, in alliance with Italy, Spain and
the Vichy government in France, defeats England in the autumn of 1941. In the
summer of the following year, four million soldiers are mobilized in an attack
on the Soviet Union, which capitulates in 1944, except for pockets of sporadic
resistance in Siberia. In the spring of 1946, European troops attack the United
States from the East, while Japan invades from the West. In the winter of the
same year New York falls, then Boston, Washington, Richmond, San Francisco and
Los Angeles. The infantry and German Panzers cross the Appalachians; the
Canadians withdraw to the interior; the United States government shifts its seat
to Kansas City; and defeat is imminent on every front. The capitulation takes
place in 1948. Alaska, part of California and part of Mexico are handed over to
Japan. The rest of