The Revolt of the Pendulum (23 page)

With all that said, however, Sábato, more than anyone else, is, for me, the most fascinating essayist of the recent Spanish world: the modern Unamuno, the Ortega of our time. One of the
many reasons he qualified for those titles is that he so thoroughly took in the lesson of the philologist Pedro Henríquez Ureña. (It was literally a lesson, because they were master
and pupil.) Ureña said that the one-time colonial countries were not on the edge of the Spanish world, but at the centre – the centre of its future. From the literary angle,
Sábato was the living expression of everything that Ruben Darío had ever dreamed of, and for a younger would-be critic from an outpost of a different vanished empire, Australia, his
style was a constant lesson in how to pack a complex argument into a natural-sounding sentence. ‘Mankind is conservative,’ said Sábato. ‘When this tendency weakens,
however, revolutions devote themselves to its renewal.’ A mature and tragic historical view could scarcely be put better. (When young Spanish-speakers tell me that Sábato sounds no
more natural than a cranky old man abusing the passing traffic, it makes me wonder: how bad is my Spanish?) One by one and two by two, I bought all of Sábato’s slim volumes of essays,
and finally the big compendium called
Ensayos
, and over the years I made a point of reading them in the coffee-shop of the book-store where I first bought them, Gandhi in the Avenida
Corrientes. I also read Bioy Casares there, and Cortazar, and wondered, as I read her memoirs, how Victoria Ocampo could ever have climbed into bed with Drieu la Rochelle. Even more thoroughly than
when I tried to steer Aurora Firpo through a
media luna
while Jorge, with folded arms, frowned at me in despair, it was when I was reading in the Buenos Aires cafes that I felt tied to the
city, to the country, to the continent, and beyond that to the miraculous unfolding new reality of an intellectual
reconquista
– the restoration of the Spanish world to the world
itself, to the culture of the liberal, democratic, humanistic universe that Vargas Llosa, when praising Darío, hailed as
cosmopolitanismo vital
. We haven’t really got, in
English, a term as unblushingly exultant as that. Reason enough, all on its own, to learn a language.

I hope some of the readers of this book might get the urge to start learning English, if only to find out what I really sound like. But finally I sound like the mentality underneath the prose. I
hope that sounds like a liberal democratic mentality, of the type which, in the twentieth century, each of the two most virulent totalitarian forces thought was a worse threat than the other. The
ideas constituting that mentality were hard won by people who paid a higher price to hold them than I ever did. All I ever did was learn to write them down. I’m proud of having worked hard at
the intricacies of the English language, my means of expression, but the effort was wasted if the things I have expressed don’t translate into other languages as well. A language matters but
it isn’t everything, whereas the liberal democratic idea very nearly is everything.

Let me end this short introduction – I can feel it already threatening to grow as long as the book – by mentioning another writer from Buenos Aires who affected the course of my life
almost as much as the writers I have mentioned above. But he didn’t write in Spanish. He was the Polish exile Witold Gombrowicz, and most of his marvellous journals I read in French.
Suspicious of all art forms, he nevertheless treated his journals – really they amount to a vast collection of essays – as an art form, and his ability to charge the merest paragraph
with meaning was the final evidence I needed that my seemingly incidental prose might be at the heart of what I could hope to achieve. There was a Polish bookshop in the Boulevard Saint-Germain and
I used to buy the latest volume of Gombrowicz every year and sit reading it at my unknown but welcoming cafe in the Rue de l’Universite´. Paris, like Buenos Aires, is a magic city, but
only if the magic is in you. And finally, for me, the books are where the magic comes from. They don’t need a city. They are a universal city in themselves. In Dante’s time, the writers
blessed their new book when it set off on its travels. If this book should be fortunate enough to travel through the Spanish world – if it should travel all the way to Spain – I hope it
will bring its readers just a touch of the excitement that their beautiful language brought me when I began to learn it, when I was still a stranger among strangers.

Previously unpublished

Postscript

The biggest publishing house in Buenos Aires flatteringly sent me a message announcing that they wished to publish a comprehensive selection of my essays, and asked me to
write an introduction for it, which they would translate into Spanish. I wrote the above piece with some care and sent it off. I heard nothing for a year. Then they sent me a message announcing
that they wished to publish a comprehensive selection of my essays, and asked me to write an introduction for it. I sent off the same piece again, and again heard nothing. Two more years have gone
by and I have begun to understand why the potholes in the sidewalks of that beautiful city are never filled in, and why the missing tiles in the floor of the
Ideal
tango salon are never
replaced. Last year the biggest publishing house in Shanghai sent a message announcing that they planned to publish a translation of
Cultural Amnesia
. I was relieved to note that they did
not ask me to write an introduction.

WHITE SHORTS OF LENI RIEFENSTAHL

A brazen shout from long trumpets held high at the angle of a Hitler salute. Cut to medium close-up of young Aryan faces with puffed cheeks. Dolly back as two new biographies
of Leni Riefenstahl appear virtually at once. Ju¨rgen Trimborn’s book has the better pictures, Steven Bach’s the better text. Though neither is precisely adulatory, put them
together and they add up to an awful lot of attention. She might be dead, but she won’t lie down.

The same was true for much of the time she was still alive. Born in 1902, she lived for a hundred years. In less than half that time, she acquired a brilliant reputation. But she had to spend
the rest of her life mounting a posthumous defence of it. She might have made a more convincing job of exploiting her victim status if she had ever shown a single sign of caring about millions of
other victims whose relationship with the regime she helped to glorify had been rather less privileged.

Already nationally famous in the pre-Nazi period German cinema as an actress and director, in the Nazi period she grew world famous by giving the new, globally ambitious political movement a
screen image of overwhelming authority, glamorous even to those who sensed its evil. A duly grateful Hitler indulged her whims, granted her total access, and financed her from his personal
funds.

Some spectators thought even at the time that her cinematic gift had served to legitimise a murderous ideology, but almost nobody belittled her artistic talent. She was thus able, when the Nazis
lost, to invoke the principle that art trumps politics. Photographed too often with her raised hand pointed in Hitler’s direction, quoted too often on the subject of his transformative
vision, she was unable to deny that she had held her mentor in high regard, but she nevertheless did deny – spent more than another half century denying, and never stopped denying until her
last gasp – that she had ever known much about what the Nazis were really up to. She had been too busy being a great artist.

To make this line stick, she had the help of her two big movies from the Nazi-dominated 1930s,
The Triumph of the Will
and
Olympia
. Though the first now stands revealed as a
gruesomely choreographed hymn to naked power and the second spends too much of its time weighing sport down with a neoclassic gravitas that feels like being hit over the head with the Parthenon,
there were, even after the end of the Thousand Year Reich’s twelve-year run, plenty of knowledgeable critics in the victorious democracies who called her portentous epics masterpieces. For
her cineaste admirers, the aesthetics left the ethics nowhere. It seemed a fair guess that anyone so wrapped up in creating an imaginary world would be bound to miss the odd detail about what was
going on in the real one. The Holocaust? Forget about it.

To assist in the forgetting, she also had the help of her histrionic abilities, which might never have been subtle, but were always in a good state of training, because there had rarely been a
moment of her conscious life when she had not shown her emotions as the only way of having them. (In her early phase as a film star, she hammed it up even in the stills.) Leni would act indignant
when she was asked an awkward question. If you asked it again, she would storm out, fall down, shriek, weep. The effect, fully as bogus as a child’s tantrum, was just as unnerving to any
surrounding adults.

Above all, however, she had the help of time. After the trap-door stopped rattling and banging at Nuremberg, it got harder and harder to find a Nazi with a famous name. The ones in Argentina had
unlisted telephone numbers. But Leni Riefenstahl’s new shyness was all a pose. She had a way of hiding only where she could be found, and she never ceased to assure the world that although
she and Hitler had spent a lot of time talking in private the Jews had never got a mention.

More than half a century went by and she was still there, popping up at film festivals to keep her cinematic legend in trim, conspicuously disappearing into Africa to build a new career as a
photographer, steadily acquiring the validation that comes automatically with endurance. ‘Of what am I guilty?’ The martyred look that went with that refrain made it seem as if the
suffering had all happened to her. She showed no remorse, saying that she had no reason to. Those who were all too well aware that she did have reason to died off faster than she did, so finally
there were whole new generations to take her genius for granted.

We might as well do the same, because over the question of her talent it isn’t worth fighting a battle. Finally every geriatric artist is a genius, and especially if the artist is a woman.
Among the people who run the movie business anywhere in the world, women are a minority even today, and still under pressure to exercise feminine wiles. When the lowly born Leni was starting out,
the minority, even in go-ahead Weimar Germany, was the merest handful. Luckily for her, she had feminine wiles to burn: until she was old and grey, she met few men who didn’t fall for her on
the spot. It could be said that she had looks and energy but no real brain. The evidence was overwhelming that she didn’t need one. What marked her out was her ambition, which was always
boundless.

As a young actress, she was so beautiful that other women could find nothing bad to say about her except that her eyes were too close together. But her acting on screen was strictly frown,
laugh, bubble and jump. She made it as a star because she was good at climbing rocks. There was a whole genre of German movies about clambering around daringly at high altitude. In a string of
mountain pictures culminating in
The White Hell of Pitz Palu
, Leni proved that she could do that stuff without a double. There was no peak, however vertiginous, that she could not sprint to
the top of wearing very few clothes. On the other hand there was no director, however illustrious, whom she could not hurl herself beneath wearing no clothes at all. Or at least she gave him the
illusion that she might: a power of suggestion that we can usefully regard as her most persuasive thespian gift.

Fixed on becoming a director herself, she applied the same gift when bending producers and studio bigwigs to her triumphant will. Her real originality was in setting her sights high, up there
where the men were making the decisions. All the right potentates duly succumbed to her allure. ‘I must meet that man’ was an exhortation often on her lips. Before the Nazis came to
power, some of the men she felt compelled to meet were Jews. Afterwards, none of them were. It could be said that she never came out as an anti-Semite, but it could also be said that there is a
green cheese moon.

Made on the eve of the Weimar Republic’s final agony, her film
The Blue Light
– she was producer, director, writer, editor and star – was a critical dud. She blamed the
Jewish critics. She might have had a case. After the Nazis came to power, her co-writer on the movie, Bela Balazs, was too insistent about getting paid. Balazs was a Jew. Eventually she got him off
her back by turning his name over to Julius Streicher. For that, she had no case at all. Everybody knew what Streicher stood for. Gauleiter of Nuremberg, editor of the lethally scurrilous
Der
Sturmer
, he was the most famous Jew-baiter in Germany.

But she had a bigger buddy than Streicher. Hitler had liked
The Blue Light
, so when she once again said, ‘I must meet that man,’ her wish was easily answered. Coy for the rest
of her endless life on the subject of whether she threw him one, she always wanted it to be thought that only his total dedication to the cause held him back. Given her track record with men, the
mere fact that she spent time alone with him was enough to confer on her all the power of the Fu¨hrer’s public darling. (Hardly anybody knew about Eva Braun. Everybody knew about Leni.)
She was given full access to film the 1934 party rally. After a year of editing – possessing almost no sense of story, she invariably overshot by a hundred miles – the film appeared in
1935 as
The Triumph of the Will
.

Hitler loved the movie. Critics who still feel the same way are apt to underrate the part played by Albert Speer, whose lighting and de´cor were all his own idea. The camera had to look up
at Hitler because Speer put him there. But Leni undoubtedly did a thorough job of making what was already frighteningly impressive look more frighteningly impressive still. If ten thousand men
marching in lock-step are what turns you on, Leni could make them look like twenty thousand. Her style was computer-generated imagery
avant la lettre
.