But the journey that leaves from youth is forever and there is no turning back. The adult who returns after many years is a stranger. He no longer has the desire for purity of the young man who left, which is why he is also a traitor: like the catcher in the rye who abandoned his post and left the others alone. Poetry and the novel have revolved around this idea to the point of exhaustion. It is the endless story of art, which is why it recurs constantly. It is happening now, in any of the dawns of the world: a young artist journeying to the end of night, groping his way to the supreme solitude of writing. There is no way back, but he doesn’t know that yet. The fate of his writing is his own fate and he will believe, in vain, that poetry will save him in the end.
May God have mercy on his soul.
Paris awaited him eagerly, with a sense of expectation created by Verlaine, but young Arthur surprised everyone, and not in a good way—far from it. In fact, most people went from surprise to indignation. Things went wrong from the start. As luck would have it, when the young man got off the train, he did not see anyone waiting for him, which was odd, since Verlaine and the poet Charles Cros had indeed gone to the Gare de l’Est to meet him. They must have gone to the wrong platform or arrived a little late. But Rimbaud, accustomed to walking, left the station and set off on foot for Rue Nicolet, in Montmartre, the address to which he had sent his letter. It was the Verlaine residence, although it was actually owned by his in-laws: a very bourgeois house with a garden, what the French call a “hôtel privé.”
Verlaine’s wife, Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville, a member of Parisian high society, was proud of her marriage to Verlaine, one of the most famous poets in France, in spite of his liking for drink and for the darker side of life. Mathilde believed firmly in the healing qualities of love, and so far, Verlaine had indeed managed to put aside his bohemian lifestyle and turn into an obedient and docile poet. In addition, they were expecting their first child.
The day Rimbaud arrived, Mathilde was burning with curiosity to meet the genius described by her husband, and she was not the only one. Her mother, too, who played the piano and was a well-known music teacher. One of her pupils was none other than Claude Debussy!
They had organized a welcome dinner for the poet with some relatives and close friends. And they were busy with this, checking the dinner service and the cutlery, when the butler announced that a very strange individual had called at the door and was asking for Monsieur Verlaine. The women looked at each other in surprise: what had happened? shouldn’t Paul have come with him? Of course, they ordered the servants to bring him in. Their first sight of him was somewhat unsettling: he was not so much a man as almost a child, a dirty young provincial, with long hair and clothes that were not only far from being fashionable or from ever having been fashionable, but which in addition were too small for him, having been mended many times. They also saw that he had brought no luggage except for a bag over his shoulder. Is this Paul’s genius? thought Mathilde. They greeted him politely, but Rimbaud sensed the two women’s embarrassment; their false manners started to grate on him.
By the time Verlaine and Clos arrived, he was on a couch, replying in monosyllables and looking at the floor. They, too, were surprised at his appearance. He was a child! In his writings, Verlaine described him as an extraordinarily beautiful young man who was not yet fully grown, and his voice was only just changing.
The dinner was a disaster. It is considered polite in France to ask a guest many questions, as a way of expressing interest. But Rimbaud, as a provincial, hated this custom. He hated them and answered in monosyllables. Finally, says Starkie, he lit his pipe and filled the drawing room with disgusting smoke, which horrified the ladies even more: although they might have been able to live with some of the normal contradictions and eccentricities of an artist, they had their minimum social requirements. To be honest, they did not see the slightest trace of genius in this young man.
So the welcome dinner was a fiasco. It came to quite a quick end and left a sense of foreboding in the air. But not even in her worst nightmares could poor Mathilde have imagined what kind of devil had entered her house. Within a few days, the neighbors began asking troublesome questions about the guest, troubled by his appearance. On October 30, Paul and Mathilde’s son Georges was born, which eased the atmosphere a little, although after just a few hours Paul went back to his old ways, going out drinking in the bars and cafés of Paris—with Rimbaud, of course. When they got back, both very drunk, Verlaine lay down next to his wife and the baby smelling of alcohol and tobacco, muttering incoherently. The next morning, Mathilde’s father made up his mind to throw the intruder out, accusing him of leading his son-in-law into vice. This wasn’t true. On the contrary, it was Verlaine who seemed to drive Arthur to bars, to that liquor of the poets known as absinthe, and perhaps also to drugs like hashish.
When Verlaine’s father-in-law entered the guest room with the intention of kicking out the provincial poet, he discovered that Arthur had gone. Where? For a couple of weeks, Paul was unable to detemine his whereabouts. Nobody knew a thing: he did not appear in the bars they had frequented nor had he gone to any of their acquaintances to ask for help. Verlaine almost went crazy looking for him, until he met him by chance on the street. He barely recognized him.
A true beggar!
For Rimbaud, surviving in Paris by begging or doing small jobs was quite natural. Verlaine took him to see the editor of the Parnassian review, Théodore de Banville, who let him have an attic room on Rue de Buci—I assume a chambre de bonne—near the Odeón and Boulevard Saint Germain. He also persuaded a group of poets to provide the young genius with a daily allowance. But Arthur, like the God Shiva, had a gift for destruction, so within a few days the best thing he could think to do was to walk out naked onto the balcony and stand there touching his balls, which horrified the neighbors. Naturally, he was thrown out. After trying a number of artists’ studios, Verlaine rented him a room on Rue Campagne-Première, near Boulevard Montparnasse.
Needless to say, all this solidarity on the part of the poetic and artistic world was due to their sympathy for Verlaine, because the truth of it was that Rimbaud’s poetry was diametrically opposed to what was considered good at the time: in other words, classical themes, rhyme, and the celebration of beauty. To understand how far Rimbaud was from the taste of the Parisian salons, we just have to know that, among the Parnassians, the great poets of the time were Leconte de Lisle and José María de Heredia. But the urban voice, looking for alternative worlds and describing the miseries and virtues of the ego, was still unknown in French poetry in 1871.
It is worth recalling that in the novel, the abandonment of romantic themes had been happening for some time. Balzac, in about 1832, had perhaps been the first to write about what was happening in the cities, using people from the streets, ushers and vendors and judges, instead of legendary beings, pointing out in his stories how much it cost to bring a court action or the level of agricultural production of the Vendée. Victor Hugo, who was very famous, had established his fame with stories in a Romantic style, like Notre-Dame de Paris, set in the twelfth century, and then, influenced by Balzac—whom he watched grow, kept an eye on, and ended up assimilating—produced his masterpiece, Les Misérables.
This change, which had already been made by the Impressionist painters, Monet and Cézanne, then Van Gogh and Degas, was only just coming about in poetry, but when it came it was even more radical. Especially with Rimbaud and Isidore Ducasse, the other great adolescent poet who did not have time to grow and become disenchanted, since he died at the age of twenty-four in 1870.
He could almost have met young Arthur on the streets of Paris!
By the time Rimbaud was writing his first poems, Ducasse, who called himself the Comte de Lautréamont, had already published much of his work. The first of the Chants de Maldoror dates from 1868, but it made no impact and Arthur could not possibly have read it. In 1869, an edition of the
complete works was produced but did not see the light of day because of a problem with the publisher. Then the Franco-Prussian war broke out, and in 1870 Ducasse died. Arthur could not have known his work and the curious thing is that the theory of the seer has much in common with the aesthetic credo of the Comte de Lautréamont.
All this meant that Verlaine was one of the few who admired Rimbaud at the time of his arrival, which may have been why, in poetic circles, it was said that the little devil from Charleville had bewitched him. This, of course, hardly bothered Rimbaud, whose behavior was increasingly offensive and rejectionist toward the Parisian poets. He no longer cared if he was recognized by them. Banville, Clos, even Lepelletier, who was a friend of Verlaine. He even made fun of Albert Mérat, whom he had admired before coming to Paris. The famous Sonnet to an Asshole, co-written with Verlaine, is a parody of Mérat’s poetry.
When the painter Fantin-Latour proposed a group portrait of the most important contemporary poets, Verlaine insisted on Rimbaud being included, as a result of which Albert Mérat withdrew, saying that he didn’t want to be portrayed for posterity together with such a rascal (he was referring, of course, to our young poet). In his place was a vase of flowers. The painting, Un coin de table, is on display at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The only two figures still recognizable today are Verlaine and Rimbaud.
But there was more to come before the final expulsion of Rimbaud from the literary world was decided on. The problem started at a dinner at the Café du Théatre du Bobino, where young Arthur, who was drunk, had the idea of adding the word merde to the end of every verse that the poet Jean Aicard read out loud, in front of the crème de la crème of Parisian poetry. Heredia, Banville, Coppée, and Clos were all present.
“Merde,” Rimbaud said at the end of every verse. “Merde, merde.”
The dinner guests paid no attention, thinking he would tire of this, but the young man continued:
“Merde, merde . . . ”
The photographer Carjat’s patience had reached its limit. Furiously, he gave him two options: “Either you shut up or I’ll smash your mouth in!” In response, Arthur took out Verlaine’s swordstick, brandished it in the air, and, from his side of the table, flung it at the photographer, who managed to dodge the blow by a hair’s breadth. This episode sealed Rimbaud’s expulsion from the poetic coteries of Paris and, in a way, Verlaine’s, too. In spite of all the scandals, Verlaine continued to protect him, because they were already lovers. All those nights of revelry ended with the two of them together in the room on Rue Campagne-Première. Months after the rape, and without Rimbaud having ever been with a woman, it was Verlaine, who was known to be bisexual, who showed him the path of sexual pleasure.
There is a curious fact about the events of those days: there are few images of Rimbaud, but perhaps the best known is a photograph in which he is in an oval, looking to one side with an expression that is a mixture of the seductive and the cold, wearing a suit and a thin tie. This photograph was taken by the very same Carjat he almost wounded at the dinner in the Café du Théâtre!
Verlaine’s life, it goes without saying, was in ruins. His wife Mathilde, with a newborn child to attend to, did not have sufficient strength to throw him out of the house, but it was hardly necessary. Verlaine’s mind was a long way away. It was as if he had already left, fascinated by the talent and the irrational force emanating from the little devil from Charleville.
The poetic establishment did not forgive Verlaine for his addiction to the poet genius, which is why in 1872 he was excluded from the annual anthology in which Le Parnasse Contemporain presented the year’s best work. His own friends, Banville and Coppée, soiled his reputation, claiming that his way of life was licentious and his verses “disgusting and immoral.” What must the selfless Mathilde have thought of this as she breastfed her little son Georges Verlaine? What must the in-laws, the Mauté de Fleurvilles, have thought?
For Rimbaud, it was time to put his theory of the seer to the test with daily binges on absinthe, in search of what he called “the long and reasoned disordering of all the senses,” a prerequisite for aspiring to the most profound poetry, the sacrifice he must make to become a seer and blaze a trail for the human spirit. This is when he becomes what he called a supplicié du vice, a “martyr to vice.” Seeing a spiritual path, a path of redemption, in excess was what, according to some scholars, allowed him to maintain his angelic expression.
16
The German guys I got to know in Berlin respected me because I was Argentinian. Argentina was a country toward which they felt enormous gratitude. And you know why? According to them, Hitler didn’t die in the bunker of the Chancellery, as the official version has it, but escaped in a submarine via the Baltic, went halfway around the world, and ended up in Argentina. They’re convinced that he landed in Patagonia with Eva Braun, and went to live by a lake near Bariloche, in one of the safe houses built by the Third Reich in case of defeat. He changed his name to Adolf Schütelmayor and died at the age of seventy-one. There’s a documentary—I don’t know if you know it, Consul—in which they show the luxurious mansion you could only reach from the lake, with watchtowers and vast rooms in the imperial style of Speer. Did you know that? Then, when Perón died in Argentina, he moved to Paraguay and changed his name again, to Kurt Bruno Kirchner. He traveled throughout Latin America, he even visited Colombia.
But let me pick up the story where I left off, in Berlin.
As I said, being Argentinian made me popular in political circles. I was still young, still a novice, so I had to bring myself up-to-date on the basics, and in spite of being in Germany I became interested in American groups. The first was a kind of great universal convention called Aryan Nation, but from there I moved on to something much more interesting called The Order, a kind of secret society founded in the United States in 1983 by two amazing guys, David Lane and Robert Jay Mathews.
Lane was a fantastic guy, a genius. He wrote something wonderful called the 88 Precepts. Did you know that double 8 means Heil Hitler? H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, you see. He was a crazy guy. The son of an alcoholic and a drug addict, he was sent to an orphanage that gave him up for adoption by a Lutheran pastor. That’s why he grew up with an extraordinary anger and resentment, but since he was an intelligent kid he wanted to do something with that hate and eventually founded The Order. The guys had balls, and very soon it turned into a well-structured and financed organization. They raised more than four million dollars through robberies and assaults and organized military training camps. I mean, they weren’t playing with water pistols! They had a plan of defense, and then, in the end, they blew it. It always happens. Lane died in 2007 while in prison, in Indiana, from an epileptic fit. He was due for release in 2035. His most famous saying is the fourteen words: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
There was another very crazy and very beautiful thing I learned about. It was called Wotanism, an idea that came from Jung, you know Jung, don’t you? It was in an essay entitled Wotan, about the Norse God Odin, the Aryan God, and of course, Lane liked it because Wotanism was an ancestral vision of the world similar to the archetype of racial purity in National Socialism, and in addition it had similarities to his idea of man’s natural savage condition.
He even managed to create something called the Temple of Wotan, with his Sacred Book of the Aryan Tribes. They’re crazy when it comes to the subject of race, I agree, but they have a mysticism that I really like; out of all that, as I’ve said, what mattered to me were the methods. The last thing that Lane did before he died, to show the kind of guy he was, was to write a kind of short novel called KD Rebel, which is set in a mountain refuge where there’s a colony of Wotanists who go down to the cities to persuade blonde white girls to come to the colony, and once there force them to serve as “polygamous procreators,” in order to keep the production line of the Aryan race going permanently.
Anyway, I continued my education in Berlin, noting down what I saw, learning a lot about the groups I saw on the streets. To me they seemed well intentioned but very superficial. That could be seen, for example, in their dependence on something so frivolous and baseless as the craze for soccer. Let me talk a little about this. I have nothing against the game itself, which is entertaining, but how can you sustain a political ideal that depends on whether a group of men manage to put the ball into the opposite net? Do you think that demonstrates anything? Especially when the teams include blacks, Russians, Latin Americans, and even Arabs, where’s your race worship then?
Look, being Argentinian, I like soccer, of course I do. I follow Messi and Di María and especially Tévez, who’s a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, you can see the scars of poverty on him. Him, I do like. The boy’s a gem. He comes from Fort Apache, one of the most run-down suburbs of Buenos Aires. When he was six months old his mother abandoned him, and when he was five his father was murdered, twenty-three bullet wounds. Can you imagine? When he was a baby he spilled boiling water on his face and neck, that’s where he gets those horrible scars from. They are the traces of his life and I think they’re beautiful. The boy is like a god.
Look at me, getting off the subject again.
As I was saying, these German guys channeled their anger badly, did superficial things with it, made violence a mere outlet for hate. You never get anywhere that way! It’s good to feel anger, but you have to use it for something intelligent. How do you think nations were formed? Through anger and hate, of course, but with a plan in mind. All human wars are based on that. From hate and anger heroes are born. They are the people who succeed in leading a collective to victory. You can’t fight against someone you love. Respect, yes. You can respect your enemy and honor him, but if you have him in front of you, you put a bullet in his chest. That’s the law of human history. How do you think revolutions have been made? To invent the guillotine you have to have real anger, don’t you think? The Bolsheviks in Moscow, too, and the English bombing Dresden and the Crusaders in the Holy Land and the Turks in Gallipoli and the Japanese in Manchuria and the Chinese in the Boxer Rebellion and the Spanish in America and the Aztecs cutting up the Toltecs and the Chichimecs with knives. Hate is everywhere, without it wars wouldn’t work. How can you tell someone to go out and kill people he doesn’t know, people he’s never seen in his life and who’ve done nothing to him, if you haven’t instilled hate in him? The really dangerous people are those who kill without feeling hate. That’s the most inhuman thing there is!
Return to the Dark Valley Page 18