Return to the Dark Valley

by Santiago Gamboa

  What happened?

  A group of drunken soldiers raped him in the toilets of the military barracks on Rue Babylone, in Paris. Was it in April or June 1871? It hardly matters. It was a dark, gloomy place, and the rebellious youth had disguised himself as an older man in order to be accepted by them. His political passion was strong and perhaps sincere, and being a barracks it provided food and shelter. The young man had traveled to Paris without a sou, as was his custom, and the barracks was a good solution, given that his ardent desire was to join the Guard. Many of the soldiers who were there had been involved in trench warfare against the Germans and had witnessed their comrades’ bodies rotting beside them or beneath their boots. They were hardened men. The smell of death in those fields was fresh in their memory. Ten thousand bodies lie fallen in the mud, while above them, another twenty or thirty thousand are still fighting, still alive. The bodies become deformed. Blood accumulates in the lower parts of the body and suddenly something bursts. A foul-smelling stream gushes out on top of the mud. The birds circle, pulling out eyes, the worms rise to the surface. That’s what the soldier sees in battle: the bare bones of his friend, the amputations, the perforated skulls. What he has seen remains on his retina. Nobody who has contemplated such horror can ever be the same again. Anyone who survives a war, even unscathed, bears a war wound. He is someone who not only has looked death in the eyes but has lain down with death and kissed it on the mouth, has held it in his arms and sung it lullabies.

  These damaged men were sleeping on camp beds in the barracks on Rue Babylone. I imagine that on closing their eyes these scenes of horror came back into their minds, so the best thing to do was to fill up with wine or moonshine until you fell into a stupor. A lot of alcohol in those stomachs that, by some miracle, were still connected to their bodies. And suddenly a kind of hallucination, what is this, shining forth amid the camp beds? An angelic youth, with curly fair hair tumbling over his shoulders. He has blue eyes and a soft innocent look that, to these other eyes, polluted with horror and evil, represents life in the bud. This adolescent looks like a young nymph. The soldiers see him come in and lie down on a straw mattress at the far end. The following day he is given a crust of bread, a cup of coffee, and a spoonful of lard. There are already eyes following him, watching him, and, gradually, desiring him. On one side, bodies sated with war; on the other, this asexual angel. On the third night, they have already been talking and because of all the wine they’ve drunk they start to ogle him. They make up their minds, although they’ll still drink a little more. Then something happens, which is that the curly-haired young man approaches them and asks to drink with them. They give him a few sips. Time passes, it’s bedtime, so they go to the dormitory. But the young poet wants to smoke one last pipe and he heads for the toilet. Many pairs of eyes watch him, on the alert like wild beasts.

  Il est là bas! Allons-y . . . !

  Arthur sees them coming, with their alcoholic laughter, and offers them his pipe. The men look at each other, puzzled, until one of them, the shortest one, approaches the young man, takes his hand and twists it, grabs him by the neck, and forces him to his knees. Arthur struggles, but the man, toothless, wild-eyed, hits him in the face with his open hand, just as he would do to his wife. That makes them laugh. A trickle of blood emerges from his nose and he jumps back, but two others grab him by the legs, lift him, and pull down his pants. There is a murmur when they see that pink backside, although it’s a little dirty. This, too, makes them laugh. They clean it from a bowl of water and he feels them digging into his flesh. Someone puts a finger in his anus and says, it’s dry! Gobs of spittle rain down on him. Filled with revulsion, Arthur starts shaking, not from fear but from anger. Another finger pushes that disgusting spittle inside him. The soldiers pass each other a jug of bitter, perhaps diluted wine. He feels something tearing and sees a few drops of blood roll down his legs.

  Il est vierge, bravo!

  They pour a little wine over his buttocks and he feels the burning of it, but in all this humiliation he hasn’t gifted them a single moan or groan. Rather, he insults them, but a hand of steel presses on the back of his neck, making it hard for him to breathe. Already, a first soldier has put his cock in and is about to finish; then comes a second, brandishing something enormous that curves to the left. Quel petit sabre! they say, laughing their heads off. Again they fill him with wine-flavored spittle and the man replies: Petit sabre? C’est une bayonette! Vous allez voir.

  Putting it in abruptly, the soldier cries, Jocelyn, c’est moi! or something like that, and Arthur feels the blood still running from his torn anus and the men still spitting saliva and wine at him, and another of them takes his turn and then another, there are lots of them, someone wants a repeat go and they fight, he hears a punch and someone falls to the floor, then the man who’d already his turn goes back to the dormitory muttering insults, he’s very drunk, just like the others, and yells at them as he goes out, J’en ai marre de partouzer des gonzesses avec vous, je vous emmerde!

  And so they get to the last one, who holds him down by the neck, he thinks, because suddenly he releases him, but the young man can no longer move. A small stream of blood and wine with nauseating white lumps in it flows to the drain. To finish off, they hit him, and when he falls to the floor they say to him, see you tomorrow, petite pute, and leave him.

  Arthur crawls until he finds his pants. He tries to stand and falls, twice, three times. At last he manages to support himself on a water tank and with great effort regains his balance. He walks toward the door. In place of a mirror there is just a broken sheet of glass, a fragment that reflects him for a second and Arthur sees a strange gleam in his eyes. He recognizes something overpowering, perhaps the most intense feeling he has ever had: hate.

  For now he holds back, although he wants to kill.

  He leaves the toilet with effort and walks toward the door of the dormitory. A guard is smoking pensively and on seeing him makes a gesture, as if to say, what’s the matter? Nothing, Arthur says with his hand. He waits for dawn crouching in the yard and by the time first light comes he is already leaving the barracks, walking along Rue Babylone toward Saint-Denis. By noon he has already walked two and a half miles in a northerly direction. He is returning to Charleville, to his hated mother’s house. He has no other refuge and the world is brimming with wickedness. His young body will recover as he advances, but nothing will be the same again.

  Before, he had played with words whose meaning life had barely had time to reveal to him, but now they had become real: he had been beaten, humiliated. Out of that pain he heard a strange rhythm, a crazy tom-tom beat that he had never known before. When night fell, still hurting and very hungry, he took notebook and pencil from his bag and began to write, his eyes glowing with that new light he had seen in the broken mirror, and these lines poured out:

  Mon triste coeur bave a la poupe

  Mon coeur couvert de caporal.

  Ils y lancent des jets de soupe.

  Life and its strange gods had seen him, had followed his childhood rituals and his dangerous games. And they had decided to strike him. By his third day of walking, he had realized that he was no longer a child, not even an adolescent. It was the moment of destruction and truth. Life might have decided to strike him, but he knew how to return the blow. The young angel had to crouch to give way to the Lucifer they had caused to grow in him.

  He reached Charleville and his mother greeted him without the slightest show of affection, but with reproaches and questions. Did she think she had given birth to a devil? The only thing she did, apart from feeding him and helping him to wash, was to ask him about Paris.

  “Is it true it’s about to fall?”

  He looked at her contemptuously and said:

  “No, no. It’s a cursed city but it’s my city.”

  Then he wrote Izambard a long letter and included the poem about the rape. Everything was new in these verses,
starting with the strange music, but Izambard did not understand it. He thought Arthur was making fun of him and by way of response parodied the poem, making him see that these games were within anybody’s reach.

  “Anybody’s?” Arthur asked himself, once again wounded to the core. The only person who could evaluate that disturbing melody that human barbarity had left him with . . . wasn’t capable of appreciating it! Not just that, he made fun of it. Arthur’s response was silence.

  The savage poet was digging his claws into the soil of France with all the cruelty and intolerance of youth. Ready to spit, vomit, ejaculate his verses of destruction.

  From that moment on, he stopped washing or cutting his hair, and was to be seen begging on the streets of Charleville. People muttered, isn’t that the young genius from high school? C’est lui, c’est lui! That’s him, but he’s gone crazy now! And his mother, the proud mother of the previous year, had been reduced to a shadow, who went out as little as possible, tired of hearing stories about her son.

  Vitalie knelt before him and begged him to go back to school, but Arthur stood firm. He had nothing to learn in that mediocre place. Instead he went to the library every morning to read and make notes. At least there was that! But in the afternoons he would sit on the café terraces, drinking, smoking his pipe, and arguing on any subject under the sun with whoever he had in front of him. He hated the idea of God, hated the Church and priests. How could anyone believe, faced with the wickedness and barbarity of the world? If there was a god, even just a small god, he should be able to protect the frail.

  At other times Rimbaud would adopt the voice of that cruel god, curse death, challenge it, and laugh uproariously at the sufferings of others. He was hurt in the deepest part of himself and in his tortured heart (coeur supplicié) there was no room for anybody. Perhaps not even for himself.

  12

  Tertullian here, with the voice of reason and the future, emerging into the ether from the caves of hyperconsciousness to bring you the words of the ancient masters and sages, broadcasting from obscure and forgotten highways.” Do you like that? It’s how I begin my radio show, and you have no idea the audience it gets! We don’t have much money and that’s why, if you ask around, they’ll tell you it’s an underground thing, something that’s classified as “garage radio,” but how can it be, when our advertisers are delighted with us.

  Of course, you asked me why I call myself Tertullian. Well, I liked that name ever since I first read it. I know he’s a father of the Church and that’s a subject that, as I told you, isn’t really me. But I read some phrases of his that I later copied and which I use frequently in my speeches. Referring to the fact that man had murdered Jesus, Tertullian says the following: “The son of God was crucified, that is not shameful because it is shameful. And the son of God died, that is even more credible because it is incredible. And after he died he rose again, that is certain because it is impossible.” These words, Consul, are among the most profound that any human being has ever spoken in the whole history of human life on this planet. I took away the Catholic aspect and kept only what you might call the political part. “It is certain because it is impossible” is an image you could found a world with, don’t you think? That’s what I’m doing. I have thousands of followers, take a look at my Facebook page, Twitter too. I’ve been making what they call a community, to which I give a wider meaning. As I told you, at first nobody took any notice of me. Now thousands of people come to my talks, Latin Americans especially: many Ecuadorians and Peruvians; the Bolivians are a little harder but they come; Paraguayans, Argentinians and Chileans, people from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Also Colombians like you, and Mexicans, even Venezuelans!

  And there’s something else that I don’t think I told you before: from the start I realized that this was something I had to do with our cousins in the North, otherwise it won’t work; there, most people, whether white or black, respect their territory. Do you understand me when I tell you that this struggle isn’t racist? You have to look at the present with the eyes of the present! Present-day diseases can’t be treated with the obsolete medicine of the twentieth century, let alone that of other periods. You have to start by understanding what’s going on, sometimes it’s enough to open your eyes and look in front of your nose every day, as soon as you get up, open your eyes! Look here in Spain; I understand that in Spanish blood there are all bloods, including Arab and Jewish, and I have no problem with that; but you’ve already seen what Boko Haram have done in Madrid or ISIS in France, tried to blow us up!

  The Europeans, with their left-wing laws and their sense of historical guilt, have already given up and are lost, and I don’t know if you’ve read this, but in Europe it won’t be long now, in a country like France, for example, before an Islamic government comes to power. I’d like to see you when that happens: goodbye l’amour à la française, goodbye to free sex and the pill and pink Viagra, that whole slow and painful acquiring of civilization that’s led us to be increasingly complex and free. Don’t you think I’ve read Nietzsche? Of course, I know that religion has been attacked intelligently. If religion wasn’t a solid edifice, presided over today by my father, it wouldn’t have withstood those devastating criticisms from the most lucid minds in history. Nietzsche says that the only point of religion is to help man to solve the problems it itself has created for him, and do you think it’s easy to respond to that? Or when Lev Shestov, who was a Catholic, says that man is forced to sleep while the deity is dying, do you think it’s easy to swallow something like that? These are major questions that mankind as it grew decided to overlook, because philosophies move and advance and the Church doesn’t always produce ideas capable of responding, of building defenses against such powerful attacks.

  Excuse me if I again talk about myself.

  I don’t claim or believe that it has any meaning to answer all these criticisms, although there is one incontrovertible fact, demonstrated by science and by Stephen Hawking: the scientific explanation of the creation of the universe makes the idea of God unnecessary and obsolete. That’s pretty strong, isn’t it? It’s why I’m not a believer, although I respect the theoretical and philosophical framework behind the idea of God, and it’s that work that I’m rescuing and in which I believe, because when it comes down to it, it’s human. Here, nobody is the son of any god. We are all equally stupid or wise because we are real, solid people. Even life and the existence of love in the world or profound experiences like generosity or goodness can be questioned, which doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. Sometimes reason is so bedeviled that it obscures your own life, and then you start to doubt the things your fingers can touch and even what you can bite with your teeth. There’s a whole philosophy that says that the world disappears with you! It’s a beautiful idea, of course, but completely far-fetched.

  The problem of the human being, and this you know from having read and written, is that he can doubt everything, even himself. Plato says that reality is a reflection, how can you respond to that? And we’re talking about the beginnings, the dawn of thought! Even the Church: if you follow its doctrine it turns out that it was God himself who gave man the tools to doubt Him. That’s brilliant, isn’t it? I’d like to discuss it one day with my father. In a way, it’s quite democratic. My fight is not at that level, because we’d be bound to lose. If the ignorant masses read more Nietzsche than the Bible we’d be in another dimension. But I suspect that even there, in that cold and somewhat psychotic world, the idea of God would exist, because it’s such a complex intuition that it can only be human. It’s born out of the lack of knowledge we have of death, which when it comes down to it is pure forgetfulness. We already knew what death is, but we’ve forgotten. Before birth, we were dead.

  I can’t explain this to you rationally, I simply know.

  I know because I know.

  That’s what thought is in religion and in faith, either you believe or you don’t. And that’s
it. It consists of making stories that explain human affairs. Have you heard of the Kanas? They’re an indigenous Peruvian tribe living in the valley of Vilcanota, near Lake Titicaca. One of their ancient stories relates that the man who’s ambitious and wants to get rich without working can go to the house of the demon, but before that he has to undergo a series of tests: undress and enter a pool of green water and another of red water, light lights in the four corners of the room, open a pan of mud where there’s a snake, kiss it on the mouth, hit it on the nose, and allow it to drink his blood. On leaving the room he has to take hold of some lighted candles, put one in each nostril, another in his anus, and the last one in his mouth. With that, he’ll grow wings and a wind will carry him to the house of the demon. When he gets there, he has to kneel before the deity, who is lying on his back. And this is the really incredible part, because if he genuinely wants to be rich the ambitious man has to kiss the demon’s anus, but when he does that the demon will let out a huge fart, an unbearably foul-smelling gas. The ambitious man will have to inhale it and even make gestures of pleasure. If he manages that, the demon will shit through that same anus a huge quantity of gold and silver, but if he can’t stand it he’ll have to go to hell as a slave for the rest of his life, or his death. Do you understand, Consul? It’s the native version of Faust!

  But that’s not my game. I’m a bit more advanced, or maybe a bit behind. My struggle is in the real world, not in the immaterial and contradictory space of ideas. My space is strength and defense. I’m a soldier. My duty is to convince others that their lives, which fade with time like all lives, can have a meaning. To escape biology and enter culture, isn’t that right? It’s a cyclical idea of the world, do you know the poet Rimbaud? It’s what he called “necessary destructions”—necessary if we want to create new worlds.