Eldorado

Eldorado is an impoverished suburb of São Paulo where Josef Mengele’s flight in Brazil contracts into a life of isolation, illness, and fear. After the Stammers end their thirteen-year arrangement with him, he moves to a decaying bungalow on Alvarenga Street. The place he had imagined as a refuge becomes a stark measure of his diminished circumstances: he is no longer a protected guest in someone else’s household, but a sick and increasingly solitary fugitive whose days are shaped by the house and the neighborhood around it.

A Forced Move into Eldorado

The move follows the sale of Caieiras. The Stammers have already left for a sumptuous villa in São Paulo, and Mengele and his dog Cigano have two months to vacate the property; otherwise, they will be on the street by the end of January 1975. With his avenues of escape narrowing, Mengele faces the prospect of living alone for the first time since leaving Buenos Aires. Geza Stammer makes the separation humiliating as well as practical: although Mengele bought a bungalow with his share of the Caieiras sale, he must pay Geza rent to live in it. He has no legal recourse.

The bungalow stands in Eldorado, in an impoverished suburb of São Paulo, on Alvarenga Street. Its condition is the opposite of the refuge its purchase might suggest. The stucco house is gloomy, its walls covered in mould; the bathroom is shabby and tiny, the cooker is a portable butane-gas stove, and the roof leaks. When Wolfram Bossert leaves Mengele there, he disappears without a word. Mengele staggers inside, while Cigano barks. The trapdoor to the damp cellar seems to open, in Mengele’s imagination, onto an abyss. He thinks of prison or the cemetery as the next stop. The repeated contrast between the name Eldorado and this deteriorating dwelling turns the promised refuge into an irony: his last base is in a chaotic, poor enclave, not a haven beyond the reach of consequence.

The House and Its Narrowing World

At first Mengele plans to improve and secure the house. He starts tiling the bathroom and working on the kitchen, but finishes neither. He begins installing bars at the windows, yet his solitude drains the energy needed to complete even that task. Instead, he lies naked on the concrete floor with his revolver within reach, staring for hours at the revolving fan blades. The house is not simply a shelter; its unfinished repairs and exposed vulnerabilities give physical form to a life increasingly organized around fear and inaction.

His daily circumstances register in small, stubborn discomforts. Water filtered through a device he has fixed on the roof still tastes of iron, the rooms retain a musty smell despite his attempts to air them, and cockroaches proliferate. Once an early riser, he now gets up late and sometimes returns to bed with his throat tight. His physical complaints accumulate: high blood pressure, rheumatism, insomnia, fear of prostate surgery, and damaged vertebrae that make walking difficult. Money is also short. Alois does not send enough; Karl-Heinz supplements Mengele’s meagre pension, but the end of the month remains difficult. Even the decision to buy a tape recorder gives him pause.

The house becomes the center of a constricted social life. The Stammers come only to settle accounts, with Gitta waiting in the car while Geza collects the money. Bossert is the exception: he visits for dinner every Wednesday, listens to Bach, and hears Mengele complain about Germany, Hitler, his family, and his health. In these visits the bungalow offers company, but not release from the grievances that fill it. The neighborhood outside presses on him as noise, disorder, and perceived danger: traffic, power cuts, motorcycles, rubbish, makeshift shacks, and nighttime disturbances. His descriptions of the area reveal his contemptuous racial outlook, while the narrative makes clear the distance between his grandiose self-image and his position there as a disgruntled, dependent old man.

Pedro in the Neighborhood

To local residents, Mengele is Pedro, an eccentric and deranged old man. He rarely leaves the area after interpreting a moment in the subway as a possible act of recognition: a man whispering to a woman seems, to him, to have stared. From then on, even a trip to the grocery store becomes charged with the possibility of being unmasked, insulted, captured, or beaten. He fixates on his prominent forehead and the gap between his upper front teeth, and walks with Cigano following behind him.

The newspapers he buys each day intensify rather than calm his fear. He reads stories depicting him as powerful in the Paraguayan jungle or wealthy in Peru, accounts of Simon Wiesenthal nearly finding him in Spain, reports of a large reward for his capture, and news of a film featuring a Nazi dentist loosely based on him. Against these public stories of the fugitive’s reach and notoriety stands the private reality of Eldorado: a man unable to remember what the women who loved him look like, troubled by a cat’s mew, and largely confined to his home. His terror of exposure coexists with a sense of being forgotten and alone.

For a time, he finds a small companionship with Luis, a sixteen-year-old local gardener. They tend flowers and talk about botany while eating ice cream beneath the cannonball trees in the municipal square behind the bungalow. Mengele thinks Luis likes him. He opens his front door to the boy, offers sweets and chocolate, teaches him about classical music, and buys a television to please him. These gestures give the house a brief connection to the neighborhood, but they do not undo the isolation that defines his life there; the account ultimately presents the old man as someone from whom people increasingly keep their distance.

Encounters and Final Rejections

Eldorado is also the destination of Rolf’s long-delayed visit. After landing in Rio de Janeiro, Rolf travels alone to São Paulo and reaches his father by a deliberately indirect series of taxi rides: one to point A, another to point B, and a third to Bossert’s home. From there, the two men go on to Alvarenga Street. The approach through the favela—its smell of burning meat, dangling electrical wires, scavenging dogs, and shacks—makes the gulf between father and son visible before they meet. At the bungalow, an old moustached man stands in the doorway: Josef Mengele.

Their encounter does not reconcile them. After two days and two nights of relentless discussion, Rolf concludes that his father is stubborn, unrepentant, and a war criminal. The walks, photographs with Bossert, and picnic on Bertioga Beach that follow cannot change that judgment. Rolf leaves earlier than planned. At the airport, Mengele says he hopes they will meet again; Rolf walks toward the boarding area. Eldorado has brought the family confrontation into Mengele’s daily world, but it cannot restore the relationship he wants.

The same setting contains his attempt to draw Elsa Gulpian de Oliveira, a gentle and caring woman, into his last years. He asks her to move in with him; she refuses unless they marry, citing what the neighbors and her mother would think. Mengele cannot agree. He is afraid to present the false papers supplied through Gerhard to the municipal civil registrar in Eldorado. Elsa leaves, and his efforts to retrieve her—visiting her mother, offering her a better life, sending flowers, and pleading—only deepen the discomfort of the separation. In October 1978 she tells him she is going to marry and asks him to leave her alone. His attachment cannot overcome either his fear or her decision. In Eldorado, the house that was meant to be a refuge becomes the setting for repeated departures: the Stammers have gone, Rolf leaves, and Elsa refuses the future Mengele wants.