The last work of Fernández-Gómez to come to public notice (although there is no reason to fear that it is really the last) was the erotic novella The Countess of Bracamonte, which appeared under the Odin imprint in the Colombian city of Cali in the year 1986. The informed reader will have no trouble identifying the protagonist of this story as the Duchess of Bahamontes, and her two antagonists as the inseparable Zubieta and Fernández-Gómez. The novella is not without humor, which is remarkable, given the place and date of its composition: Paris, 1944. Fernández-Gómez no doubt indulged in a certain amount of embellishment. His Duchess of Bracamonte is 35 years old, not forty-something, the estimated age of the real Duchess. In Fernández-Gómez’s novel the two young Colombians (Aguirre and Garmendia) share the noble lady’s nights. During the day they sleep or write. The descriptions of Andalucian gardens are meticulous and, in their way, interesting.
FORERUNNERS AND FIGURES OF THE ANTI-ENLIGHTENMENT
MATEO AGUIRRE BENGOECHEA
Buenos Aires, 1880–Comodoro Rivadavia, 1940
Owner of a vast ranch in the province of Chubut, which he ran himself and to which few of his friends were granted access, Mateo Aguirre Bengoechea was a living enigma, oscillating between two poles: bucolic contemplation and titanic activity. He collected pistols and knives, admired Florentine but detested Venetian painting, and had an excellent knowledge of English literature. Although he ordered books regularly from stores in Buenos Aires and Europe, his library never held more than a thousand titles. A confirmed bachelor, he nourished a passion for Wagner, a few French poets (Corbière, Catulle Mendès, Laforgue, Banville) and a few German philosophers (Fichte, August-Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling, Schleirmacher). In the room where he wrote as well as dispatched the business of the ranch, there were many maps and farming implements; on the walls and shelves, dictionaries and handbooks jostled peaceably with faded photographs of the first Aguirres and bright photographs of his prize animals.
He wrote four well-wrought novels, spaced out over the years (The Storm and the Youths, 1911; The Devil’s River, 1918; Ana and the Warriors, 1928; and The Soul of the Waterfall, 1936), as well as a brief collection of poems, in which he complained that he had been born too soon, in a country that was too young.
He wrote a great many detailed letters to literary figures of all persuasions in America and Europe, whose works he read attentively, although the tone of the correspondence always remained formal.
He detested Alfonso Reyes with a tenacity worthy of a nobler enterprise.
Shortly before his death, in a letter to a friend in Buenos Aires, he foresaw a radiant epoch for the human race, the triumphant dawn of a new golden age, and he wondered whether the Argentinean people would rise to the occasion.
SILVIO SALVÁTICO
Buenos Aires, 1901–Buenos Aires, 1994
As a young man Salvático advocated, among other things, the re-establishment of the Inquisition; corporal punishment in public; a permanent war against the Chileans, the Paraguayans, or the Bolivians as a kind of gymnastics for the nation; polygamy; the extermination of the Indians to prevent further contamination of the Argentinean race; curtailing the rights of any citizen with Jewish blood; a massive influx of migrants from the Scandinavian countries in order to effect a progressive lightening of the national skin color, darkened by years of promiscuity with the indigenous population; life-long writer’s grants; the abolition of tax on artists’ incomes; the creation of the largest air force in South America; the colonization of Antarctica; and the building of new cities in Patagonia.
He was a soccer player and a Futurist.
From 1920 to 1929, in addition to frequenting the literary salons and fashionable cafes, he wrote and published more than twelve collections of poems, some of which won municipal and provincial prizes. From 1930 on, burdened by a disastrous marriage and numerous offspring, he worked as a gossip columnist and copy-editor for various newspapers in the capital, hung out in dives, and practised the art of the novel, which stubbornly declined to yield its secrets to him. Three titles resulted: Fields of Honor (1936), about semi-secret challenges and duels in a spectral Buenos Aires; The French Lady (1949), a story of prostitutes with hearts of gold, tango singers and detectives; and The Eyes of the Assassin (1962), a curious precursor to the psycho-killer movies of the seventies and eighties.
He died in an old-age home in Villa Luro, his worldly possessions consisting of a single suitcase full of books and unpublished manuscripts.
His books were never republished. His manuscripts were probably thrown out with the trash or burned by the orderlies.
LUIZ FONTAINE DA SOUZA
Río de Janeiro, 1900—Río de Janeiro, 1977
A precocious author, whose Refutation of Voltaire (1921) was hailed by Catholic literary circles in Brazil and admired by the academic community on account of its sheer bulk (it was 640 pages long), its critical and bibliographical apparatus, and the author’s evident youth. In 1925, as if to fulfill the hopes generated by his first book, Fontaine da Souza published A Refutation of Diderot (530 pages), followed two years later by A Refutation of D’Alembert (590 pages), thus establishing himself as the country’s leading Catholic philosopher.
In 1930, A Refutation of Montesquieu (620 pages) appeared, and in 1932 A Refutation of Rousseau (605 pages).
In 1935 he spent four months at a clinic for the mentally ill in Petropolis.
In 1937 The Jewish Question in Europe Followed by a Memorandum on the Brazilian Question came out: a characteristically capacious book (552 pages), in which Fontaine explained the threats that widespread miscegenation would pose to Brazilian society (disorder, promiscuity, criminality).
The year 1938 saw the publication of A Refutation of Hegel Followed by a Brief Refutation of Marx and Feuerbach (635 pages), which many philosophers and even a few general readers considered the work of a lunatic. Fontaine was, irrefutably, well versed in French philosophy (his command of the language was excellent), but not, by any means, in the work of the German philosophers. His “refutation” of Hegel, whom he confuses with Kant on several occasions, and, worse still, with Jean Paul, Hölderlin and Ludwig Tieck, is, according to the critics, a sorry affair.
In 1939, he surprised everyone by publishing a sentimental novella. In a mere 108 pages (another surprise), the book tells how a professor of Portuguese literature set about wooing a rich, young and almost illiterate woman from Novo Hamburgo. Entitled The Conflict of Opposites, it sold very few copies, but its delicate style, its intellectual acuity, and the perfect economy of its construction were not lost on certain critics, who praised the book unreservedly.
In 1940, Fontaine was interned again in the Petropolis clinic, where he would remain for three years. During that long stay, broken by Christmas holidays and vacations with his family (always under the strict supervision of a nurse), he wrote a sequel to The Conflict of Opposites called Evening in Porto Alegre, whose subtitle (Apocalypse in Novo Hamburgo) sheds light retrospectively on his work as a whole. The story takes up where The Conflict of Opposites left off. Roughly written, with none of the previous volume’s delicacy, acuity or economy, Evening in Porto Alegre adopts various points of view without changing the narrative voice, which is that of the professor of Portuguese literature, who recounts an interminable yet hectic evening in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, while simultaneously in Novo Hamburgo (hence the subtitle) servants, family members and later the police are confronted with the body of a rich, illiterate heiress, found in her bedroom, under the large canopied bed, with multiple stab wounds. The novel remained unpublished until well into the sixties, for family reasons.
A long silence ensued. In 1943, Fontaine published an article in a Rio newspaper, protesting Brazil’s entry into the Second World War. In 1948 he contributed an article to a magazine called Brazilian Woman on the flowers and legends of Pará, especially the region between the rivers Tapajoz and Xingu.
And that was all until 1955 an
d the publication of his Critique of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Volume I (350 pages), which deals only with sections two and three of Sartre’s introduction, “In Pursuit of Being”: “The Phenomenon of Being and the Being of the Phenomenon” and “The Prereflective Cogito and the Being of the Percipere.” In his denigration, Fontaine ranges from the pre-Socratic philosophers to the movies of Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Volume II (320 pages) appeared in 1957, dealing with the fifth and sixth sections of the introduction to Sartre’s work, “The Ontological Proof” and “Being-in-Itself.” It would be an exaggeration to say that either book sent so much as a ripple through philosophical and academic circles in Brazil.
In 1960, the third volume appeared. In exactly 600 pages it broaches the third, fourth and fifth sections (“The Dialectical Concept of Nothingness,” “The Phenomenological Concept of Nothingness” and “The Origin of Nothingness”) of the first chapter (“The Origin of Negation”) in Part I (“The Problem of Nothingness”) and the first, second and third sections (“Bad Faith and Falsehood,” “Patterns of Bad Faith,” “The ‘Faith’ of Bad Faith”) of the second chapter (“Bad Faith”).
In 1961, a sepulchral silence, which Fontaine’s publisher made no effort to break, greeted the publication of the fourth volume (555 pages), which tackles the five sections (“Presence to Self,” “The Facticity of the For-Itself,” “The For-Itself and the Being of Value,” “The For-Itself and the Being of Possibilities,” “The Self and the Circuit of Selfness”) of the first chapter (“Immediate Structures of the For-Itself”) of Part II (“Being-for-Itself”) and the second and third sections (“The Ontology of Temporality” and “Original Temporality and Psychic Temporality: Reflection”) of the second chapter (“Temporality”).
In 1962, the fifth volume (720 pages) appeared, in which, passing over the third chapter (“Transcendence”) of Part II, almost all the sections of the first chapter (“The Existence of Others”) of Part III (“Being-for-Others”), and the whole of the second chapter (“The Body”), Fontaine makes a wild and reckless leap to the third section (“Husserl, Hegel, Heidegger”) of the first chapter and the three sections (“First Attitude Toward Others: Love, Language, Masochism,” “Second Attitude Toward Others: Indifference, Desire, Hate, Sadism” and “‘Being-With’ (Mitsein) and the ‘We’”) of the third chapter (“Concrete Relations with Others”) of Part III.
In 1963, while he was working on the sixth volume, his siblings and nephews were obliged to have him interned once again in the clinic, where he remained until 1970. He never resumed his writing. Death took him by surprise seven years later in his comfortable apartment in the Leblon neighborhood of Rio, as he listened to a record by the Argentinean composer Tito Vásquez, and looked out of the window at night falling over the city, passing cars, people chatting on the sidewalks, lights coming on and going out, and windows being closed.
ERNESTO PÉREZ MASÓN
Matanzas, 1908–New York, 1980
The reputation of Ernesto Pérez Masón, realist, naturalist and expressionist novelist, exponent of the decadent style and social realism, rests on a series of twenty works, beginning with the splendid story “Heartless” (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 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.