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

epiphanies and the miraculous images that appear at the
ends of tunnels. He explains how, having worked until nightfall in his little
country school, feeling very sleepy and hungry, he tried to get up and go home.
Unsuccessfully, at least in part, as far as one can tell from his account. An
hour later he woke up in a nearby field, lying on the ground, face up, under an
exceptionally starry night sky, with all of the poems, from the first word to
the last, in his head. Having read the copy of
Iron Heart
sent by
González along with his letter, Capó advised his friend to make an urgent
request for a transfer, or else the solitude would end up driving him crazy.
    González took his advice about the transfer but stubbornly continued
to exploit his peculiar poetic vein. The next three poems he published (not in
Iron Heart
, which had folded, but in the cultural supplement of a
Santiago newspaper) are free of surrealist images, symbolist baggage and
modernist vagaries (González, it must be said, knew almost nothing of the three
schools in question). His verse has become concise, his images simple; the
figures that recurred in the six previous poems have also undergone a
transformation: the Merovingian warriors have become robots, the women are now
dying beside putrid streams of consciousness, and the mysterious tractors
plowing the fields without rhyme or reason are either secret vessels sent from
Antarctica, or Miracles (with a capital letter). And now these figures are
counterbalanced by a sketchy presence, that of the author himself, adrift in the
vast spaces of the fatherland, observing the apparitions like a registrar of
marvels, but unenlightened finally as to their causes, phenomenology or ultimate
purpose.
    In 1955, at the cost of great personal sacrifice and tremendous
effort, González financed the publication of a chapbook containing twelve poems,
printed by a press in Cauquenes, capital of the province of Maul, where he had
been transferred. The little book was entitled
Twelve
, and the cover,
which was the author’s own work, is noteworthy in its own right, as it was the
first of many drawings he produced to accompany his poems (the others came to
light only after his death). The letters of the word
Twelve
on the
cover, equipped with eagle talons, grip a swastika in flames, beneath which
there seems to be a sea with waves, drawn in a childlike style. And under the
sea, between the waves, a child can in fact be glimpsed, crying, “Mom, I’m
scared!” The speech bubble is blurred. Under the child and the sea are lines and
blotches, which might be volcanoes or printing defects.
    The twelve new poems add new figures and landscapes to the repertoire
developed in the previous nine. The robots, the streams of consciousness and the
ships are supplemented with Destiny and Will, personified by two stowaways in
the holds of a ship, as well as The Disease Machine, The Language Machine, The
Memory Machine (which has been damaged since the beginning of time), The
Potentiality Machine and The Precision Machine. The only human figure in the
earlier poems (that of González himself) is joined by the Advocate of Cruelty, a
strange character who sometimes speaks like a regular Chilean guy (or rather,
like a grammar school teacher’s
idea
of a regular guy) and sometimes
like a sibyl or a Greek soothsayer. The setting is the same as for the earlier
poems: an open field in the middle of the night, or a theater of colossal
dimensions situated in the heart of Chile.
    González sent the chapbook to various newspapers in Santiago and the
provinces, but in spite of his best efforts, it made almost no impression. A
gossip columnist in Valparaiso wrote a humorous review entitled “Our Rural Jules
Verne.” A left-wing paper cited González, along with many others, as an example
of the growing Fascist influence on the nation’s cultural life. But in fact no
one, on the Right or the Left, was reading his poems, much less supporting