“Daniela de Montecristo”
by
Roberto Bolaño
translated by Chris Andrews
from Nazi Literature in the Americas
Daniela de Montecristo
Buenos Aires, 1918–Córdoba, Spain, 1970
Daniela de Montecristo was a woman of legendary beauty, surrounded by an enduring aura of mystery. The stories that have circulated about her first years in Europe (1938-1947) rarely concur and often flatly contradict one another. It has been said that among her lovers were Italian and German generals (including the infamous Wolff, SS and Police Chief in Italy); that she fell in love with a general in the Rumanian army, Eugenio Entrescu, who was crucified by his own soldiers in 1944; that she escaped from Budapest under siege disguised as a Spanish nun; that she lost a suitcase full of poems while secretly crossing the border from Austria into Switzerland in the company of three war criminals; that she had audiences with the Pope in 1940 and 1941; that out of unrequited love for her, a Uruguayan and then a Colombian poet committed suicide; and, that she had a black swastika tattooed on her left buttock.
Her literary work, leaving aside the juvenilia lost among the icy peaks of Switzerland, never to appear again, consists of a single book, with a rather epic title: The Amazons, published by Quill Argentina, with a preface by the widow Mendiluce, who could not be accused of restraint when it came to lavishing praise (in one paragraph, relying solely on her feminine intuition, she compared the legendary poems lost in the Alps to the work of Juana de Ibarbourou and Alfonsina Storni).
The Amazons is a torrential and anarchic blend of all the literary genres: romance, spy novel, memoir, play (there are even some passages of avant-garde dramatic writing), poetry, history, political pamphlet. The plot revolves around the life of the author and her grandmothers and great-grandmothers, sometimes going back as far as the period immediately following the foundation of Asunción and Buenos Aires.
The book contains some original passages, especially the descriptions of the Women’s Fourth Reich—with its headquarters in Buenos Aires and its training grounds in Patagonia—and the nostalgic, pseudo-scientific digressions about a gland that produces the feeling of love.
Biblioklept 