Return to the Dark Valley

by Santiago Gamboa

She suddenly grabbed her tablet and said, look, I want to read you a poem I came across the other day that expresses what I’m feeling, it’s by a French poet called Paul Verlaine, do you know him?

  I told her no and she started reading:

  It weeps in my heart

  As it rains on the city;

  What is this languor

  That penetrates my heart?

  Oh, soft sound of the rain

  On the ground and the roofs!

  For a heart that is dull

  Oh, the song of the rain!

  It weeps without reason

  In this heart that sickens.

  Is it not betrayal? . . .

  It is the worst pain

  Not to know why

  Without love or hate

  My heart has such pain!

  “I’m sure a woman had just left him,” Rafaela said, “although he’s so sensitive it sounds as if it was written by a woman.”

  “Yes, it’s very beautiful,” I said. “Where did you find it?”

  “In an anthology of love poems my mother has,” she said, and her eyes again watered.

  I poured her another glass of whiskey, and without thinking that I was getting ever more closely involved in the very problem I wanted to avoid, I said to her, wait for things to pass, you don’t know why he went, maybe what he wants is to leave her and he thought he’d tell her that while they were traveling, like a kind of honeymoon in reverse.

  I’d only just said that when my cell phone vibrated. It was on the table and I saw out of the corner of my eye that it was a message from Araceli, so I grabbed the telephone and read:

  “Your advice was wise, my darling. We’re having a great time in London and I’m already feeling very calm. I wish I had you beside me to kiss you. I love you.”

  Rafaela said nothing, but I turned red with shame. What madness was this?

  “What you have to do is take this time for yourself, go out, enjoy yourself, take advantage,” I said to her. “When he comes back, things will be different.”

  She said yes, that’s what she wanted to do, but there was a problem, which was that she didn’t feel like going out with anybody. Suddenly she knocked back a drink in one go and said:

  “Dammit, I have a brilliant idea, why don’t the two of us go out tonight? Do you like dancing?”

  I thought this might be a solution: maybe Rafaela would meet someone else before Araceli and her husband returned, so I said to her, look, since I arrived in Bogotá I haven’t been out much, do you know any cool places?

  Suddenly Rafaela seemed euphoric.

  “Cool? Bogotá is full of great places. Let’s go.”

  It struck me as strange that her mood had changed so much, but I told myself, that’s what these women’s tragedies are like. Araceli was exactly the same. We went out and a long night began. First she took me to El Goce Pagano. Hearing that classic salsa, the kind my mother liked, I felt something in my legs, as if they were moving by themselves. We danced for a while and she was great. She moved well and I noticed that she liked it. Several guys grabbed her, and from one of the tables they bought her drinks. I was invited onto the dance floor by a very amusing guy from the Caribbean coast. I enjoyed myself dancing and had a few rums. But Rafaela soon got tired of the place—I could happily have stayed there—and suggested going somewhere more modern and elegant, with English music, and there she danced alone on the floor and said hello to a whole lot of people. Half the bar were friends of hers. After a while, she forgot all about me, which was understandable. I felt like a fish out of water. My mood wasn’t especially friendly and nobody was in a hurry to engage me in conversation. Nor do I think I had much to say to them, not that I was there for that. When I saw from a distance that Rafaela was sitting at a table and pouring herself a drink from a bottle, I decided to go out and get a taxi. It was two in the morning. When it came down to it, I told myself, I was there to report back to Araceli, not to make friends. When I got home I felt more cheerful. It was great to go out but I’d learned my lesson: some worlds just don’t mix with others. You just have to know it.

  15

  The year 1871, the year of the French surrender at Versailles, saw France lose the border territories of Alsace and Lorraine, as well as being obliged to pay the Prussian Empire five thousand million francs in war reparations. Even in those days, those who lost paid. In addition, Paris experienced the defeat of the Commune, and for young Arthur it meant the brutal experience of rape in that dark barracks on Rue Babylone.

  For Rimbaud it meant the end of many things: of his mimetic, celebratory poetry; of his adolescence, with its illusions of purity and consistency typical of that age, which tries at all costs to escape the pain of contradiction; and of something we might call a “nervous truce” with reality. From now on, he would attack and challenge reality, hoping to destroy it. The rape—as we have already said—was the talon that lifted him in the air and dropped him on the high seas, where the most dangerous monsters swim, where you not only have to look evil in the face, but also sustain its gaze. That was what Rimbaud did from now on: contemplate wickedness, challenge it, provoke it. Like snakes that raise their heads before attacking, so the young poet started to live, believing that life was at risk with every throw.

  This was also the beginning of his hatred for the Church. Proudhon’s words “God is evil” echoed loudly in his brain and he started to write it on park benches. “Merde à Dieu!” Shit to that god who had left him alone, who did not protect him when he was hurt. What else did the young genius do, apart from walking the streets of the small provincial city, unwashed, his hair tangled, scandalizing everyone?

  He read and read, obsessively, to nourish both his strength and his disenchantment; he tried to work as a journalist and took up bohemianism, becoming a great drinker and smoker. Sex, which had made a violent entrance in his life, now became part of his repertory. Is it true, as some believe, that he frequented brothels and slept with women? It’s quite likely. All young men do. He may have had crushes on women who probably did not understand him, but we do not know this for certain. What we know is his writings, in which there is an enormous rejection of women, almost a sense of revulsion. What would Freud have said about this? Was he rejecting his mother and seeking and idealizing his absent father?

  His desire for rebellion shot off in all directions: against God and the bourgeoisie, against social rules, education, the family, politics, and the State; it involved the sexual and, of course, poetry, which he was about to transform forever.

  The year 1871 was one of his most prolific.

  According to Delahaye, Rimbaud spent much time in the library reading philosophy and even Satanic texts, as well as Baudelaire, whose influence would be crucial. It was during this period that he started imagining a poetic theory that would be refined over time and which he would explain in his letters. The theory of the seer. As far as Arthur was concerned, the poet had to recognize and anticipate the signs of the future to transmit them to the reader. Poetry is a manifestation of spirituality and must blaze a trail, no matter where it leads. The previous models, poetic or spiritual, have to disappear. There is in all this a longing for the absolute, a mystical calling that gives reality a certain symbolic radiance, since Rimbaud yearned to believe in something. His one faith was poetry, and poetry had to expand until it provided all the answers. He had already seen how it allowed him a curious alchemy: to transform the sorrows and corruption of life into the finest metal.

  Oh, young Arthur, this is where things get complicated.

  Whoever has poetic concerns can only resolve them with more poetry, but this, in its turn, clarifies his ideas and increases his understanding of the world. But not everything has to be understood, young Arthur. As St. Augustine suggested: on occasion, man is obliged to sleep while the deity is dying. “Beyond certain limits, human curiosity becomes inap
propriate,” as someone once said.

  You have to know when to stop in time!

  Rimbaud could not ignore the flames rising around him. Poetry was pursuing him. Filled with books and reading to the point of sickness, he took from the Kabbalah the idea that everything was a symbol of something else and that man, in his pettiness, was nothing more than a string for the deities to play their music on. Understanding this gave him a degree of arrogance, and he asserted that since the ancient Greeks, Western poetry had been nothing more than a rhymed diversion without the slightest significance. It had died with the advent of Christianity.

  “Rhyme, rhyme, the insubstantial search for the beautiful word, bah!” he said, “it is just an imitative and banal art practiced by countless generations of idiots.” But the truth was that Rimbaud lived at a faster pace than his contemporaries. He was an antenna that attracted the most fearful rays, increasingly charged with electricity.

  And so, in Charleville, he became friendly with a strange character called Charles Bretagne. Arthur was like one of those rockets that loses parts as it rises in order to increase its speed. Izambard, his best friend from the previous year, had been eliminated. In a letter, he accused him of “walking the straight and narrow path” and writing a “horribly insipid” kind of intimist poetry.

  Having dismissed Izambard, young Arthur was able to devote himself fully to his great new human influence, who was crucial to his definitive arrival in Paris.

  Rimbaud was already someone else.

  Je est un autre.

  What interested him in Charles Bretagne was the drinking companion. Bohemia in a deeper sense. He wasn’t exactly a teacher, but a friend. Bretagne laughed at the poet’s ideas, but praised his verses. They drank together in the Café Dutherme in Charleville, where Arthur discovered that after enough wine and beer his shyness evaporated and the most outlandish words and ideas tumbled unhindered from his mouth. Everyone celebrated them, and he felt like the king of the world. He started to believe that through alcohol and drugs he could free himself, establishing a closer contact with the spirit.

  Similarities have been sought between Rimbaud’s theory and Buddhism, and some wonder how he could have known about Eastern philosophy when he only knew French, Latin, and a little Greek. According to Starkie, who presents the most striking evidence, there were already translations into French of the Rig Veda, the Ramayana, and the Baghavad Gita, but the knowledge that Rimbaud had of that world could also have been gained through other French writers. The Parnassians and the Romantics were strongly influenced by Eastern thought, hermetic ideas, and the occult. And of course there was also Baudelaire, whom he himself called the “king of poets.” Baudelaire had incorporated into his poetry the occult theories of Swedenborg, Joseph de Maistre, and Höené-Wronski. It is quite possible that Rimbaud absorbed them through Baudelaire, since he claimed to be beginning where Baudelaire had left off.

  For Baudelaire, all that exists in the world is a secret metaphor for something: the world is a forest of symbols and the poet is the person who can read in it, get to the heart of things, and make it comprehensible through his art. The poet is a decipherer.

  When Rimbaud read this, he felt as if he was looking at himself in a mirror. His enthusiasm is clear in two famous letters, one from May 13, 1871, to Izambard and the other from May 15 to Paul Demeny, in which he outlines his theory of poetry:

  Since examining the invisible and hearing the unheard is not the same as recapturing the spirit of dead things, Baudelaire is the first seer, the king of poets, a true God.

  He also found in Baudelaire another very important thing, something that already haunted his own experience: confirmation that, through alcohol and drugs, he could gain access to dream states in which “man communicates with the dark world that surrounds him,” elevating his perception and his capacity for knowledge. I imagine him reading Baudelaire’s Les Paradis artificiels in a state of exaltation, taking notes, struck by the force of the words, finally understanding something that he himself was ready to continue. There was everything in Les Paradis artificiels: “We must be drunk, drunk on virtue, poetry . . . But drunk.” The only difference is that for Baudelaire these artificial paradises simply showed man what he already had inside him, that is, they were not a path toward further revelations. He also pointed out that these visions did not seem so beautiful on awakening.

  Rimbaud wanted to go much further. He was ready to renounce himself, to sacrifice everything to reach that lost heart of the world. To go to heaven or hell, if necessary, as in the universe of magic and the occult, which, according to Starkie, he knew from reading Eliphas Lévi, who had said: “Work means suffering,” “Every pain borne is an advance,” and “Those who suffer live more.”

  As Rimbaud wrote:

  Unspeakable torture in which he needs all his faith, all his superhuman strength, in which he becomes, among all men, the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed one, and the supreme Sage!

  Another writer who was important in his quest was Schopenhauer, who wrote: “Art, like philosophy—with which it has much in common and is intimately linked—only exists in the disinterested contemplation of things. The ability to present them in that way is the essence of genius.” This confirmed to him that humanity was not yet completely awake, and that the poet had to be not only Baudelaire’s decipherer, but someone who made a definitive spiritual liberation possible. Rimbaud wrote his theory of poetry in a matter of weeks, between March and May 1871, while he roamed Charleville dressed like a beggar, his hair tangled and dirty. It was the result of his stubborn determination not to go back to school, while poor, inconsolable Vitalie implored God to save her son and bring him back.

  But Rimbaud was burning the stages of his life at great speed, constantly on the move like a butterfly in a field. He would soon set off to conquer Paris, in September 1871, although not before he had time to write one of the greatest of French poems: “Le Bateau ivre.”

  He was not yet seventeen.

  Charleville was finished, but was he ready to return to Paris like a beggar? to live on charity and to eat scraps out of trash cans? Ready, yes, that we already know, although he had nothing to lose by trying to do things another way. That was why he sent a number of letters asking for help, including one to Izambard’s friend Paul Demeny, who did not seem very enthusiastic about the young man’s plans.

  “Why don’t you write to Paul Verlaine?” his friend Charles Bretagne said to him one day, quite casually, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to write a letter to the famous poet.

  Rimbaud was stunned by the idea. Bretagne took out pen and paper and then and there wrote to Verlaine asking him to help the young man.

  “You never told me he was your friend!” he said to Bretagne.

  Arthur considered Verlaine the successor of Baudelaire, the new seer, so he could not believe what was happening. Then, with the help of Delahaye, he made fair copies of some of his poems. He put everything in an envelope and waited. He had sent a bottle out to sea, but the message reached port and was read.

  Verlaine was on vacation. It was August. On his return to Paris, he found the letter with the poems and was intrigued by them. Before replying he consulted other poets among his friends and showed them Rimbaud’s texts. All were surprised at their great originality. There was something there, a new voice, they all said.

  One day in September the postman in Charleville handed the young man an envelope postmarked Paris. His heart skipped a beat. He opened it on the street and sat down to read the note on the steps of a house.

  “Come, dear, great soul. We await you, we desire you,” said Verlaine.

  He enclosed money for the train fare and offered him hospitality in his own home.

  Rimbaud ran like a madman through the streets of Charleville until he got to Bretagne’s study. “Read this!” Then, happy like the child he still was, he
crossed the town again in the opposite direction to get to Méziers and show the letter to Delahaye.

  It was under the impulse of this great enthusiasm that he wrote “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”). As Rimbaud says: “From that point on, I bathed myself in the Poem of the Sea.” And who is in this drunken boat? The sailors have died and the poet is alone, trying to steer it. The dawns are depressing. The moons are terrible and the sun is bitter. The poet is on the verge of taking a great leap and, like the seer that he is, announces his future movements. Europe is already, as early as this poem, a pool of black water on which a sad child places a toy boat, “as frail as a butterfly in May.”

  Having finished the poem, he decided the time had come to leave.

  Resigned, Vitalie let him go. At least this time Arthur was good enough to announce his departure. As he got on the train, what were his thoughts? Poetry had revolutionized his life and forced him to decipher the world. Now that same poetry was taking him away from his hated town, the town he had compared in a number of letters to hell or a penal colony. It is the secret story of a young artist who leaves home forever and, in doing so, realizes that the nets of his art are all he has. Will they be sufficiently strong to cushion a fall? The vertigo produced by life when it breaks with absolute freedom and in torrents into the brief time of youth. Like a crazed train plunging into the night and the depths of a mountain to come out, soon afterwards, on the other side. The time of adolescence is coming to an end. The inconsistency of adult life and that mysterious “other” of which he knows nothing and to which we are strangers.

  Sitting on the train, Arthur thinks that his journey to solitude or to poetry must take him even farther, perhaps to those distant garrisons through which the shadow of his father roams. The eros of distance and its vertiginous drumbeat, which calls on some young people to leave. To go a long way forever. Why? Where? Perhaps there, in that territory he longs to reach, is true creation. The work of art to which he aspires.