I Left Them with the Nazis in San Carlos de Bariloche

As the cold here numbs me
I see in Patagonia the dim attraction
for these people I´ve followed here
to escape the fears that can live
like bacterian off of a single year.

A lot of Nazis made Bariloche their Israel.
Humbert and I looked for them. "A school girl!"
he says, pointing to a thin, skirted lat-tanned child
waiting alone on a canvas of snow, adding, "I mean,
it could be her father...." I explain the whole
blue-eyed and blonde-haired Aryan thing
and he laughed with word ´naive´ thrown in
and suggested with haughty images a German
spreading into the love-light of some Mapuche nymphet
on a stark-starred almost Alpine Andean night.
But as a constant companion, these kinds of asides
can get boring, so I opened the door and sent him packing.

Unable to sleep, I got up and also threw out Dylan Thomas.
It´s boring and dense. And I had the semi-awake thought:
shared enthusiasm is as important as common sense.

So now without Humbert and Dylan, I decided to give in
on the Nazi hunting and go for a walk in the woods.
There was snow and trees and not a single sound,
I climbed a mountain and found Israelis - no,
I didn´t bring up the topic. We talked about skiing.

I looked out over all the lakes bullied by the pines,
the ruins of a nuclear miracle that wasn´t, the bland
arrogance of the superiority mountains remind me of
and I thought about how to love at all
is to fire the entire marketing team
whose job in Argentine is called ´propaganda´
but I don´t think it´s as clever as it seems.

There´s the likeness of Europe retarded
in Bariloche´s faces and in the buildings,
but it´s the invisible things (smell and sound)
that remind me of a million waiting threats,
little seeds starting to sprout in Springfield´s ground.

A friend of a friend died - I didn´t know him,
but I´ve never touched half the trees around
my house, either, though I´ve stared at them often
moving in the breeze. Now I see that life is like this:
a diminishing forest.

---------------------Disagree? You´ve got a point.
But a forest grows into a place that´s done.
The people gone, Mama´s won.
Now that I´ve thrown Dylan Thomas out the door,
I´m going to use plain English, with phrases like
´that fucking whore´who stole my karaoke mind
in the darling blossom of the morning whose roots
suck yet for the life in that gone lolita-thrilled night.

----------

Here are the photos of the things that inspired this poem in Bariloche.

These are pictures of the houses in the neighborhood where the Nazis lived. I have notes on which ones somewhere, but won´t do that now. If I remember correctly, Erich Röhmer was one of them. The neighborhood is called Belgrano and the ski club you see was taken over by them, as it was established by fascists in 1931.

Notice the´Centro Atomico´ in this panaroma map, this was built by a leftover German scientist that the Argentinians got after the war. As in the poem, it didn´t work. It was meant to do turn water straight into nuclear power and then power the entire country.

Photos from the mountain hike. This one below was taken by those Israelis I met on the mountain.

This from just before I went into the woods, only to find that there was too much snow to pass. I made it to the ´Bosque Arpayán´ below, but no further.

The center of town.

And here are pictures of what is actually Nabokov being interviewed in the 70s on French TV. It was just on the public TV channel and was an incredible coincidence because I´ve been rereading Lolita during this trip and so, as you can tell from his appearance in the poems, he´s been on my mind. It was amazing, though I was really tired and didn´t follow as well I should have.

Lago Nual Hupeul.


Another notorious exile on a train further south yet.

My image of perfect happiness!

The same lake I mispelled above. I´ll check my notes and correct in due course.

My Malargüe Nothing

In Malargüe, it was hard to see

and all my Argentinan girls didn´t help,

they just rubbed themselves some more

on my nervous tourist´s knee.

The sun came and went somewhere else.

When it goes, it´s cold like the difference

between a book on the bookstore shelf

and the one you buy, the one you´re sold.

I watched myself arrange the wood

so that fire might happen. The food

I wanted to swallow, hiding in the membrane

of some pig´s innards, lost

the meal´s plot, slurring in my proud flames.

The sausages fell apart - it was the witches´ fault.

Their waiting in the fine slime growing

in that lightless hole of the touthless hag

curling a blurry nail, her subject proposing

my object a date.

I did not, in the end,

see Las Cavernas de las Brujas in Malargüe.

-------------------

More pictures from Malargüe:

These two pictures are to show a thing unique to the province of Mendoza. Everywhere there are little canals the channel the water from the mountains to water parks, trees and whatever else needs water. We used this method on the farm to irrigate the crops and Luis told me that originates from the agricultural methods of the Mapuche tribe, who were just conquered by the Incas before the Spanish arrived.

I always was a fan of the concern for the practical in Camus´s philosophy.

I saw a lot of these little homages to Perón in Mendoza. As much of Argentina was won by military efforts, and through much in-fighting between generals, which played right through to the series of dictatorships in the 20th century, there is a lot of homages to generals and military officials.

Peron, in a nutshell, was the biggest political personality in Argentina during the 20th century. A general himself, he transformed the country into what was essentially a version of national socialism. Sympathetic to the Nazis and Italian Fascists, it´s a good reason why so many exiled here after the war.

La Stala in Tunuyán

The viento zonda approached
from over the empty minder
mountains gazing at the farmer
below looking into the pen
where seven squeling piglets seemed
happy or sad or anguished.
The weight the buyer mentioned
floats a moment above each pig´s head,
then the sharp call of big fat reality
hanging the chosen unwilling feetwise
and fed to the suck of the measurement sack.

What tables need mention for martyrdom
so knives crave for the smile they afford
somewhere above every satisfied belly.
Oh, but the taste! What death isn´t necessary?
But, don´t worry, there´s nothing all that funny
about that terrible (sudden or slow) fading
that may be as subtle as this insect´s struggle
with the bleeding tip of my ball point pen.
It´s wing stuck in the thick of the ink, I examine:
there the confused contortion of the figure
and the shape of what wills my harm - a bite.
I watch the thing recuperate again into order.
Calm, it flies into what seems Mendoza´s dry blast
but for the glass, isn´t. Again my blood radiates
into the heaving becoming lull that it can´t resist.
My mammellian crown and its repititious task.

There is a brain ticking behind
each chanco´s brow that smiles
in the quiet between the human and the sow.

There is no fast thing about
as the vacas dull in the sun.
´Pasto´is all hollow tubes,
some make it through to the dung.

Silence is the dim waiting
deep within the fluffy core
where all Easter´s children
wait for the bunnies they so adore.

Dumb-struck and idiotic
the gallinas call and call and call,
sound leading to nothing real
but an empty hall of bouncing balls.

The animals on the farm are all busy like this,
playing out the plot my tepid mind gives.
The mooing clings to the laughs
and the grunts to Papa Fear´s grin.

But all that awful could be world
wasn´t - there was the Family Agostini:
Jorge-Luis, Mo-Mo Mauricio, the struggling
but always happy;


the Laura who from
an email became
a reason to trust;

Antonella whiling away
like Alice in some kingdom;

Sofia the amused
watching unfold
what she doesn´t want,
but loves the same
quiet way
her brother Nico does.

This was all on a farm in Tunuyán
where I saw a life worth living.
I suspect it will always carry on
in me in ways I can´t predict
like the melodies that steal
from one into another
of our favorite songs:
time changing anew
what memory needs
to stay the same.

--------------------------

Here are some more pictures :

This is the Agostini forty year old Jeep (Estacionero) that runs on pressurized gas (not liquid). It worked and you could hear it working miles away, too!

This Sofi with Dulce, who is an Argentina breed. The dog loved to cry. There was some story I didn´t completely understand where she got runover by the above Jeep (on accident) and began to cry for the pain. However, or so suggests Luis, the attention she won from this convinced her that crying was a good thing to do.



This the Agostini house. Luis is a master builder, in every sense of the title, and built this house buy himself. And it´s the third he´s built for them!

This is the cow whose name was something like Esperanza, but I never called her that because I called her ´Mala´, which means ´the naughty one´. Why? Because on two occasions she prodded me with her horns and I had huge bruises on my leg and my ribs! And I only was trying to feed her! The reason she was probably ´pissy´, as I kept happily saying, was because she was pregnant. And lo and behold, the calf was born the day before I left! I even got to name it - Momo. Why? A French guy that was there when I first arrived kept calling Mauricio this name. This had other connotations for me, namely that it came from an inside joke that started with Joe Pesci in Casino clubbing a guy in a bar and then calling him a ´f****** momo´.

It was also Mauricio´s birthday, so all these kids were there.

Here´s Antonella, this neighbor I kept calling Rodriguez whose father could talk for the heavens and was stocked with lots of licquor, namely this stuff called fernet that they claimed was the most genuine Italian stuff you can get. They mixed it with Pepsi. Tasted like medicine.

This is me with Luis and Laura´s mother. He had a joke that he told by telling me that word for ´suegra´, which is mother-in-law, in German is ´aaaahkkk´ or something and I believed him until he pointed out the humor in front of the lady.

And here´s more random ones: