Rolando Graña: "Between 1938 and 1940, Argentina was a spy capital."

After decades dedicated to journalism , Thirty Tons of Banknotes (Penguin Random House) is the first novel by Rolando Graña , who in addition to his work in the profession also holds a degree in Literature. Through research into historical documents , the journalist constructs a fiction set in Buenos Aires in 1938 , when the city was a hotbed of spies, political conspiracies, and dirty money crossing the Atlantic. In its pages, Nazis, anarchists, Francoists, communists, and unscrupulous businessmen intersect in a dizzying plot where there is also room for love and betrayal.

Graña was an editor in the culture section of the newspaper Página/12 , where he shared a desk with Miguel Briante, Osvaldo Soriano, and Juan Gelman . In this fiction, he creates a masterful reconstruction of the period. And in this interview with Clarín , he reviews the key elements of his novel, the research process behind it, and how a family revelation about his father—a political editor for the newspaper Crítica —prompted him to write this story. He also reveals that he is already working on the second part of this local thriller.

–Why write about the Nazis in Buenos Aires in the late 1930s?

–I've been reading about the Nazis in Argentina for 20 years, and one day I had a realization and said, I'm going to write a novel, because there wasn't a novel about that period. There are many historical books, but no novels. I started to think about it in terms of, I'd almost say, literary theory, because Argentina in those years, between '38 and '40, was a spy capital, according to what these essay books tell us. Neither Borges, nor Bioy, nor Mallea had written fiction about that; the only one who had written anything, but in newspaper chronicles, was Roberto Arlt. All the Aguafuertes from that period are extraordinarily lucid, demonstrating that Arlt wasn't just a chronicler, but an intellectual with a very important vision.

–In our country, pro-Nazis were building schools and public buildings, but there was nothing written about that in fiction, so I thought about writing a political intrigue, and in 2017 I sat down to write. I set the novel in 1938. Why that year? Because, based on a true story, I discovered I'd found a kind of hole in time. On July 9, 1938, the king of 20th-century spies, the Englishman Kim Philby, was supposed to meet with his superior, and his superior was none other than Alexander Orlov, the man who had collaborated in stealing the gold from the Spanish Republic and sending it to Moscow—the famous gold of Moscow. And that man, as part of Stalin's purges, was going to be killed. So, on July 9, 1938, Orlov decided not to meet with him, who was his agent on the other side of the Atlantic. And from then on, historical documents say that Philby lost contact with the Soviet spy network.

–Is it a local thriller?

–Yes, it's also about money laundering, which was very different from how it's done now. Back then, they sent physical money, and that's where the title of the novel comes from, because the 30 tons of banknotes were bills, paper money, physical. It was the money they were stealing from the Austrians, the Jews, and the Czechoslovak Republic. A good part of that money was sent to Argentina so that it would re-enter Swiss banks from Argentina. Why Swiss banks? Well, because Switzerland was neutral, and through shell companies they bought weapons for the war that was about to begin in a year. I discovered all of this through research, so I had a factual record. And another factual record is that my father was a journalist for Crítica during those years.

–You found out about this relatively recently?

–Yes, my dad died when I was 10, and I always thought he was an office worker. There was a family legend that my dad was a big gambler. And that legend said that my dad won the living room set in my family home, at the legendary Maple furniture store. And one day, I asked my mom, who was already 80, why my dad had won that set in a poker game (I'd already been in the profession for 30 years). And my mom told me he'd won it in a round of gambling with politicians and said, 'Your dad was an editor for the political section of Crítica .'

–Were those the ingredients to start writing it?

–Yes, I wanted to write a popcorn novel, one that wouldn't fall out of my hands, because I hate having to force people to focus on something. When I was young, I was editor of the Culture section of Página/12 for several years, and in that office I met those who, I believe, were the last great Argentine writers. On one side of the desk was Miguel Briante, and for a very brief period, Juan Gelman sat next to me. Also Tomás Eloy Martínez, who briefly came to edit a culture supplement called Primer Plano, and Osvaldo Soriano, with whom we became very good friends. It was like a postgraduate degree with the great masters of writing: I also met Galeano and Umberto Eco, among others. And everyone asked me: 'When are you going to write?' And I got fed up and went out to work on television. I left print media and literature, until one day I said, well, it's time to write (it had been 36 years).

–Was Argentina a very important country on the world stage at that time?

–Yes, super important. It had power, it had money, it was a contested place. It's still not clear what happened in the relationship between that pre-Peronist government and the Nazis. The most important spy network outside of Germany was in Argentina; there's a very interesting work called Nazi Buenos Aires, which is an architectural guide and tells how many of the downtown buildings in Buenos Aires had been built by the Nazis, from the German Bank, which was expropriated when Peronism came to power, to the construction company that built the Obelisk, which was also expropriated by Peronism. The northern diagonal was full of buildings belonging to pro-Nazi German companies. German schools, especially in Patagonia, had portraits of Hitler, and when inspectors arrived, they turned them over and put up Perón's. At that time, Neruda, Cortázar, Borges, Bioy walked through Buenos Aires, everyone was here, it was a cultural beacon for Latin America, but also a nest of spies.

–And what are you working on now?

–I’m writing the second part of the story.

Thirty Tons of Banknotes , by Rolando Graña (Penguin Random House).