Eight years before the publication of ‘Recortes de prensa’, Julio Cortázar travelled from his home in Paris to Brussels, to participate in the second session of the Second Russell Tribunal. The first such tribunal had been initiated by Bertrand Russell, anxious to investigate and publicize North American war crimes in Vietnam at a time when ‘human rights’ did not yet feature in official U.S. policy. The second was charged with scrutinizing the record of Latin America’s armies; and the assembled writers and scholars were quick to voice their concern over abuses that threatened to engulf whole states. Without the backing of any current government, however, ‘the Tribunal was not able to put into effect recommendations’ – or condemnations – of conditions in countries as diverse as Paraguay and Guatemala, as distant as Chile, Brazil and Haiti.498 Its best hope
was to have an impact on those who maybe one day could. And Cortázar decided to contribute to that cause by appending Tribunal documents to his next publication,
Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales, a work whose Argentine narrator, likewise, goes to Brussels, whose narrator, likewise, laments torture’s range and spread.
Pensó en el pasado y el presente de su país, en el retorno de un estado de cosas en el que las peores torturas parecían moneda corriente. Muy atrás, en la pantalla alargada del siglo pasado, galopaban en el recuerdo los mazorqueros de Juan Manuel de Rosas, un primer plano mostraba sus facones en la garganta de los prisioneros unitarios … Cosas así sucedían diariamente en Buenos Aires, en las provincias, con música de radio apagando los alaridos, con noticias de diarios amordazados por el miedo que lo reducían todo a términos como mutilaciones, apremios y vejámenes, la misma Mazorca elogiada en actos públicos, la misma barbarie presentada como reconquista de una patria en la que se hundían hora a hora los cuchillos de la desgracia y el desprecio (I).499
498 Jean Franco, ‘Comic Stripping: Cortázar in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Alonso, pp. 36-56
(p. 54, n. 48).
The inquiry into contemporary violence, in this text, is also patently an inquiry into that which recurs, ce qui revient. The figure of the mazorquero, the sadistic vigilante, slides like a Derridean spectre ‘between’ genealogy and history, between synchrony and diachrony, between now and then. Fantomas, to reprise a phrase from my first chapter, tells us stories of one specific ‘apparition’ – the apparition of institutionalized brutality in the mid 1970s – and of a string of others too, of atrocities perpetrated in the name of Juan Manuel de Rosas’s despotic government, la Mazorca, of nineteenth-century Unitarians slain in the name of unity. Yet the form Cortázar lends his narrative is neither docudrama nor novel, neither realist nor (entirely) fictional. Events here will be related half in prose, and half in graphic comic strip. The eponymous protagonist, indeed, is not the author’s own creation, but a progeny of pulp paperbacks, of cheap cartoons: an arch- villain turned arch-hero who made his début, in 1911, with the memorable words,
— Fantômas! — Vous dites? — Je dis … Fantômas. — Cela signifie quoi? — Rien … et tout!
— Pourtant, qu’est-ce que c’est?
— Personne … mais cependant quelqu’un! — Enfin, que fait-il ce quelqu’un?
— Il fait peur!!!500
It is to Fantomas that Cortázar’s narrator (or, to quote Jean Franco, ‘Cortázar-as- narrator’) turns for assistance when his train journey home is interrupted, when a ‘new’ terror comes to compliment the crimes that the Tribunal’s delegates had heard of and denounced.501 This terror, broadly speaking, is an assault – an onslaught even – upon
learning, a wave of manuscript-thefts, then arson. The Bibliothèque nationale loses its Prousts, the British Library, its Chaucers, and serial views of Tokyo, Moscow, Washington show libraries on fire across the globe. There are, captions announce, no Bibles left on any shelves. Worse still, once the narrator reaches Paris, he finds a pile of Aires: GenteSur, 1989), pp. 26-28.
500 Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, Fantômas (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1911; repr. Paris: Presses Pocket,
1977), p. 7. The circumflex was dropped from ‘Fantômas’ in Spanish versions of this novel and its sequels.
death-threats awaiting him, and a telephone ringing off the hook as Borges, Paz, Sontag, Moravia all call to say they too will die if they insist on writing books. With Fantomas on the case, moreover, it rapidly proves clear that litera-phobia is just the tip of the iceberg, a harbinger of other ills. ‘Ahora él y muchos más sabemos que la destrucción de las bibliotecas no es más que un prólogo. Lástima que yo no sea buena dibujante, porque me pondría en seguida a preparar la segunda parte de la historia, la verdadera’ (II).502
What the ‘second half’ of the tale, the ‘true half’, might be never explicitly emerges.
Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales is a perplexing text from start to finish, a ‘who- dun-it’ without motives, evidence or successful ‘sleuths’. The nearest we are given to a clue, perhaps, lies in the title – for vampires feed on blood not ink. The nearest we are given to a moral, perhaps, is ‘Susan Sontag’’s flip comment, ‘¿Qué son los libros al lado de quienes los leen?’ (III). Whilst Fantomas does apprehend one criminal, who confesses to the book-burnings, his mission appears incomplete, his victory a fleeting triumph in a war with many fronts. ‘Cayó’, observes Sontag, ‘en la peor trampa, la de creer que su misión había terminado’ (IV). ‘Los diarios’, adds the narrator, noticing public interest in Fantomas wane, ‘pasaron rápidamente a temas tales como las últimas performances de Emerson Fittipaldi, el precio del bife, las ejecuciones o atentados de turno, la mode retro y el nuevo boom de Hollywood’ (V). The ill-defined combat ‘against the multinationals’, it is implied, must render one-man tactics like his anachronistic; the challenge to corporations that are complicit in oppression is too much for him alone.
Fantomas himself has other views – and in those views, I would suggest, lie the traces of a conclusion which ‘Julio Cortázar’ and his friends do not draw: an inference that the ‘glass’ may be half-empty, but it may also be half-full. ‘La soledad es mi fuerza, Julio’, proclaims the hero. ‘La soledad y mi don de transformarme infinitamente, llegar al enemigo bajo las aparencias más dispares’ (VI).503 There has, for all that, been one
constant in the changing presentation of this master of disguise: a mask that functions, as Hamlet’s father’s visor did, to show up an ‘intangible’ which would otherwise (in Fantomas legend) remain ‘shrouded in mist’, to clothe and cast a someone who is no- one, and nothing.504 ‘Personne … mais cependant quelqu’un!’ He is, to put it differently,
a metaphor for the in-between, the spectral, the ‘hauntic’, a glamorous counterpart to Kateb’s errant Keblouti or Djebar’s alouettes. And though Fantomas cannot win the war
502Fantomas contra los vampiros, pp. 33-34. 503 Ibid, p. 35, p. 42.
on torture, on abduction, he too provides a focus and a locus for resistance to their use, a reminder that some small battles may sometimes be won.
A
PPENDIX:
TRANSLATIONS FROM THES
PANISHINTRODUCTION
(I) Me gustó que en el trabajo del escultor no hubiera nada de sistemático o demasiado explicativo, que cada pieza constuviera algo de enigma y que a veces fuera necesario mirar largamente para comprender la modalidad que en ella asumía la violencia; las esculturas me parecieron al mismo tiempo ingenuas y sutiles, en todo caso sin tremendismo ni extorsión sentimental. Incluso la tortura, esa forma última en que la violencia se cumple en el horror de la inmovilidad y el aislamiento, no había sido mostrada con la dudosa minucia de tantos afiches y textos y películas que volvían a mi memoria también dudosa, también demasiado pronta a guardar imágenes y devolverlas para vaya a saber qué oscura complacencia. Pensé que si escribía el texto que me había pedido el escultor, si escribo el texto que me pedís, le dije, será un texto como esas piezas, jamás me dejaré llevar por la facilidad que demasiado abunda en ese terreno.
I was glad there wasn’t anything systematic or too explicative in the sculptor’s work, that each piece had something of an enigma about it and that sometimes one had to look for a long time in order to understand the modality that violence assumed there; […] the sculpture seemed to be at the same time naïve and subtle, in any case without any sense of dread or sentimental exaggeration. Even torture, that last form in which violence takes the place of the horror of immobility and isolation, had not been shown with the doubtful trifle of so many posters and texts and movies that returned to my memory, also doubtful, also ready to hold the images and give them back for who knows what kind of obscure pleasure. I said to myself that if I wrote the text the sculptor had asked me to, if I write the text you ask me to, I told him, it will be a text like these pieces, I’ll never let myself be carried away by the facility that all too often abounds in this field (pp. 82-83).
(II) De cuerpos y [de] cabezas, de brazos y de manos. [Of] bodies and heads, arms and hands (p. 82).
(III) Domiciliada en Atoyac, número 26, distrito 10, Colonia Cuauhtémoc, México 5. Domiciled at No. 26 Atoyac, District 10, Colonia Cuauhtémoc, Mexico 5 (p. 83).
(IV) Hecho: A las diez de la mañana del 24 de diciembre de 1975 fue secuestrada por personal del Ejército argentino (Batallón 601) en su puesto de trabajo [Aída Leonora Bruschtein Bonaparte] […] Hecho: el 11 de junio de 1976, a las 12 de mediodía, llegan [al] departamento de [Santiago Bruschtein] […] un grupo de militares vestidos de civil. […] Le obligaron a levantarse, y […] lo subieron a un automóvil. […] Hecho: El día 11 de marzo de 1977, a las 6 de la mañana, llegaron al departamento donde vivían [Irene Mónica Bruschtein Bonaparte de Ginzberg y su marido, Mario Ginzberg] fuerzas conjuntas del Ejército y la policía, llevándose a la pareja y dejando a sus hijitos: Victoria, de dos años y seis meses, y Hugo Roberto, de un año y seis meses, abandonados en la puerta del edificio.
Fact: At ten o’clock in the morning of December 24, 1975, [Aída Leonora Bruschtein Bonaparte] was kidnapped by personnel of the Argentine army (601st Battalion) at her place of employment. […] Fact: on
June 11, 1976, at 12 noon, a group of military men in civilian clothes came to [Sanitago Bruschtein’s] apartment. […] They made him get out of bed, and […] put him into a car. […] Fact: On March 11, 1977, at six in the morning, a joint force of army and police came to the apartment where [Irene Mónica Bruschtein Bonaparte de Ginzberg and her husband, Mario Ginzberg] lived, taking the couple away and leaving behind their small children: Victoria, two years, six months old, and Hugo Roberto, one year, six months, abandoned at the door of the building (pp. 83-87).
(V) Todo esto no sirve de nada.
Where a published version of the text exists, I have given a page reference to the edition listed in the
bibliography. Where it does not, the translation is my own. Film quotations are transcribed from the subtitles used in U.K. distribution.