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Roberto Bolaño

Nazi Literature in the Americas

for Carolina López

If the flow is slow enough and you have a good bicycle, or a horse, it is possible to bathe twice (or even three times, should your personal hygiene so require) in the same river.

Augusto Monterroso

THE MENDILUCE CLAN

EDELMIRA THOMPSON DE MENDILUCE

Buenos Aires, 1894–Buenos Aires, 1993

At fifteen, Edelmira Thompson published her first book, To Daddy, which earned her a modest place in the vast gallery of lady poets active in Buenos Aires high society. And from then on, she was a regular presence in the salons of Ximena San Diego and Susana Lezcano Lafinur, dictators of taste in poetry, and of taste in general, on both banks of the Río de la Plata at the dawn of the twentieth century. Her first poems, as one might reasonably have guessed, were concerned with filial piety, religious meditation and gardens. She flirted with the idea of taking the veil. She learned to ride.

In 1917 she met the rancher and entrepreneur Sebastian Mendiluce, twenty years her senior. Everyone was surprised when they announced their engagement, after only a few months. According to people who knew him at the time, Mendiluce thought little of literature in general and poetry in particular, had no artistic sensibility (although he did occasionally go to the opera), and his conversation was on a par with that of his farmhands and factory workers. He was tall and energetic, but not handsome by any means. There was, however, no disputing his inexhaustible wealth.

Edelmira Thompson’s friends considered it a marriage of convenience, but in fact she married for love. A love that neither she nor Mendiluce was ever able to explain and which endured imperturbably all the days of her life.

Marriage, which ends the careers of so many promising women writers, quickened the pen of Edelmira Thompson.

She established a salon in Buenos Aires to rival those of the redoubtable Ximena San Diego and Susana Lezcano Lafinur. She took young Argentinean painters under her wing, not only buying their work (in 1950 her collection of paintings and sculptures was, if not the best in the Republic, certainly one of the largest and most extravagant), but also inviting them to paint at her ranch in Azul, far from the madding crowd, all expenses paid. She founded a publishing house, The Lamp of the South, which brought out more than fifty books of poetry, many of which were dedicated to Edelmira herself, “the fairy godmother of Argentinean letters. ”

In 1921 she published her first book of prose, All My Life, an idyllic and rather flat autobiography, devoid of gossip, full of landscapes and poetic meditations. Contrary to the author’s expectations, it disappeared from the bookshop windows in Buenos Aires without leaving so much as a ripple. Disappointed, Edelmira set off for Europe with her two small sons, two servants, and more than twenty suitcases.

She visited Lourdes and the great cathedrals. She had an audience with the Pope. A yacht took her from island to island in the Aegean. She reached Crete one midday in spring. In 1922, in Paris, she published a book of children’s verse in French, and another in Spanish. Then she returned to Argentina.