Return to the Dark Valley

by Santiago Gamboa

  Perhaps never.

  Every now and again I’d think about Araceli’s book and feel as if I’d been kicked in the stomach and couldn’t breathe. They were my poems! The words with which I’d somehow managed to tame my past, that sad wretched life I’d been forced to live. Was that what she’d wanted to steal? My anger was eating away at me, and the second night things got worse, because I found a number of reviews on the Internet, all very favorable, as well as interviews with Araceli in which she spoke with great self-confidence about my poems, as if they were hers, explaining them with a faraway look in her eyes, evoking mysteries and sufferings that she had never experienced.

  I cried and cried, but this time with rage. With a sense of being powerless, too, because I couldn’t do anything.

  I went back to Bogotá and concentrated on preparations for the journey. I already had the papers and the ticket. I just had to wait for the date. Cristo Rafael gave me the contact numbers of some friends of his and recommended some things I should see in Madrid.

  The day before the journey I went to a restaurant and had dinner on my own. It was my farewell. I didn’t try to call Araceli, nor did she call me, even though she knew the date. It was understandable. The following day, before closing the door on the apartment, I left the bank card on the table. I handed the key over to the doorman and asked for a taxi.

  In the airport I walked nervously up and down. I checked in my bags and headed for the international departure lounge. It was full of emotional people taking photographs of each other. Families saying goodbye to their children. I, on the other hand, was alone, but my strength derived from having nothing. I passed through the middle of this tearful crowd and felt strong again, as if I were the first living being to get up and walk after a great conflagration.

  Go to hell, all of you! I thought.

  Drug traffickers, rapists, murderers, thieves . . . Stay here with your damned fake god, in your country of blood and shit.

  I’m leaving forever.

  On the plane I thought once again about Araceli and in a fit of anger I grabbed my cell phone, the same one she had given me. I looked for Rafaela’s photographs and found the one from El Sisga. It had the date and the hour, plus the text saying: “I’m with him in El Sisga, on a beautiful ranch. I’m making him eat dirt, because of the way he behaved. We’re talking a lot about our pregnancy. I’ll tell you about it.”

  And then the photograph of the two of them naked on a wicker couch, with the caption:

  “This one I took in secret, with the camera pointed at the mirror, while he was fucking me, you can see he really loves me, can’t you? He’s already told me so in every way possible.”

  I pressed Forward and looked for Araceli’s number. Before forwarding, I wrote her a laconic farewell. “Thank you for your help. I left the bank card on the table in the apartment and the keys with the doorman. Congratulations on your new book, which I’ve just read. I read the reviews, too. You’re a great artist. Goodbye.”

  The message was sent with the photographs and Rafaela’s texts attached. This was my last gift to her.

  That’s what I thought.

  Then the plane taxied along the runway and when it eventually took off I felt quite dizzy. Rising through the clouds and plunging into the dark, murky sky, away from that country that had hurt me so much, I realized that at last I was free. And that’s how I ended up in Madrid, Doctor. And the rest, my life here, you already know.

  Thank you for reading this.

  19

  Although this happened in Paris—modern, cosmopolitan Paris—Europe at the end of the nineteenth century was a straitlaced, intolerant world. The strange, almost marital bond between these two men, who apart from anything else were of widely different ages, was hard to swallow for everyone, even poets.

  Even half a century later.

  Rimbaud’s principal biographer, Enid Starkie, whom I admire so much, uses terms like “sodomite” to refer to Verlaine, and describes the nights on Rue Campagne-Première as “orgies.” She also says of Verlaine that he is “weak and depraved,” and in mentioning the scandal in Paris speaks of “the most monstrous immorality” (the quotation marks are mine, not hers). Of course, Starkie was writing in the 1940s, not all that long after the events, and she was an Irish Catholic.

  The situation is so embarrassing for some critics that, out of admiration for Rimbaud and Verlaine, they have opted to deny it. As if accepting their homosexuality would detract from their genius. But to claim that their relationship was not romantic and sexual is like trying to blot out the sun with one finger, since even among their contemporaries it was common knowledge. Starkie herself quotes a report on the first night of a play by Coppée in which another writer, Lepelletier, a friend of Verlaine’s, wrote the following:

  Among the men of letters present at Coppée’s first night was the poet Paul Verlaine, on the arm of an enchanting young lady, Mademoiselle Rimbaud.

  There is also the divorce of Mathilde and Paul, which was dealt with expeditiously on the basis of Madame Verlaine accusing the poet of “ill treatment,” something we will examine in detail further on. Mathilde had in her possession at least forty letters from Rimbaud to Verlaine in which everything was so obvious that she preferred to destroy them rather than ever let them fall into the hands of her son Georges. There is, in addition, a curious medical test performed on Verlaine in Brussels in 1873, after his imprisonment for the attempted murder of Rimbaud. In the report, the doctors claim that they “observed on his person recent signs of active and passive sodomy.” What can this be referring to? One of Verlaine’s biographers, a man named Porché, disagreed with the medical report and wrote the following:

  The observations that may have been made of the deformations of the virgula viri and the antrum amoris have no value as evidence today from a medical or legal point of view.

  The easiest thing, when it comes down to it, is to look at the poems. Verlaine wrote in “The good disciple” the following:

  You, the

  Jealous one who beckoned to me, here I am, here is all of me!

  Toward you I crawl, unworthy!—

  Climb on my back and plunge in!

  As for Rimbaud, there is the section of A Season in Hell entitled “The Foolish Virgin/The Infernal Bridegroom,” the first of the Deliriums, which describes the sufferings of a relationship and which, as far as Starkie is concerned, leaves no room for doubt. Anyway, does it matter whether or not we have conclusive proof of the kind of relationship that united them? We should be content with the poetry they left and the slight aftershock of those other poems we know existed but which have been lost, as is the case with “La Chasse spirituelle”, which Rimbaud entrusted to Verlaine and which Mathilde probably destroyed along with his correspondence.

  Oh, Mathilde. Posterity, which still reads Rimbaud today, understands your anger. How could you know the incredible value of what you threw on the fire? How can we blame you when in fact the history of poetry, and of all literature, is full of small incidents, manuscripts burned, lost, or stolen, or even worse: young poets or novelists who died after having a glimpse of something brilliant that would never again be seen? Literature is at once what existed and what no longer exists, what might have existed and what was has not yet been written.

  By the end of 1871, Verlaine was madly in love with Rimbaud. That love was a mixture of two things: admiration, a great deal of admiration, for the young man from Charleville, but also a desire to assert his own talent and his art. Arthur considered him a great poet, but at the same time told him it was ridiculous to see him subjected to such pointless tribulations as having to think about a wife and child or leading a bourgeois life like that of any ordinary person. Poetry was a fluke of human oligarchy and the poet an aristocrat. That is why daily life is futile and the poet who surrenders to it is merely a puppet. This is what Rimbaud told Verlaine.

 
Before Rimbaud’s arrival in Paris, Verlaine not only aspired to recognition, but above all to respectability, which is the worst enemy of any artist. Rimbaud hated all that and Verlaine let himself be won over. Talent was incompatible with the obligations of a good husband and father. Arthur, in his construction of what a poet should be, was coping with the absence of his own father, and it was Verlaine who paid for the smashed plates, since in spite of the difference in age it was the younger man who called the shots, the one who imposed the way the two of them were to live.

  Is there a better or more appropriate way of life for a poet? The twentieth century would give many examples of this idea, some supporting it, others refuting it. Is the poetry of someone who lives a “poet’s life,” in Rimbaud’s words, better? Some were obedient functionaries or submissive husbands. Kafka, who wrote the best literature of the twentieth century, was an obedient citizen. Any life can lead to literature, by the most convoluted and unexpected paths. “Literature is the sad path that takes us everywhere,” wrote Breton. And not only that: in addition, it welcomes everyone, without an entrance test or letters of recommendation. Only what each person carries in his folder.

  But let us return to that Paris of 1871.

  Mathilde relates that when her husband came home at night, she felt terrified, and that just from hearing his steps on the stairs she already knew if he was drunk or not. Once, Paul tried to burn her hair and then slapped her. Another night, he punched her and broke her lip, but the worst episode was when he tore the child from her arms and threw him against the wall. “I’m going to put an end to this once and for all!” he cried in his drunken rage, and the baby was only saved thanks to the blankets in which he was wrapped. Then he tried to strangle her. Alerted by the screams, his father-in-law came into the room and put an end to the fight.

  The next day Verlaine begged for mercy, got down on his knees before his son and implored his in-laws to forgive him, arguing that he had been out of his head on alcohol. Mathilde pardoned him once again and hoped that things might improve, but only on condition that the devil-poet leave Paris and go back to Charleville. Maddened by guilt, Paul accepted and went to beg Arthur to return to his hometown. What a scene! Rimbaud in a rage and Verlaine imploring him. What promises could he have made for the young man, unable to understand anything that did not coincide with his desires, to go back to Charleville? What could he have said for him to accept the unacceptable? Rimbaud did indeed return to Charleville. But Verlaine did not keep his promise to break with him. Quite the contrary: his love became ever more of a pressing need.

  During this time, Rimbaud wrote him dozens of letters, sending them to a temporary address. Messages full of lyricism, crazy ideas, nostalgia. Verlaine asked him for time: he promised that in a couple of weeks he would settle the problem of his family and then he would be free. In a letter from May 1872, Verlaine assured him that soon they would be together and would never again be parted, and this, for the implacable young man, incapable of forgiving or being won over, had the taste of victory.

  This is where we come to one of the most incredible and tragic legends concerning young Arthur, or even French poetry in general. It is the story of a poem entitled “La Chasse spirituelle” (“The Spiritual Hunt”). According to Verlaine, it was the best thing Rimbaud ever wrote, which is tantamount to saying that it was one of the greatest poems in Western literature, but unfortunately, it disappeared.

  How could something like that have happened?

  Rimbaud had returned to Charleville, a bitter, ignominious return. He had been expelled from that arrogant city, Paris, the very city he had planned to conquer. He was seventeen years old, and of course would have preferred to return with a medal of some kind. We see his feelings of unease in the mournful, pessimistic poems he wrote at this time, populated with images of flight and contempt, metaphors for solitude and exile.

  Meanwhile, in Paris, Verlaine was in hell. Everything seemed to him dull and meaningless. The life he had promised his wife Mathilde wounded him constantly. He felt humiliated and he missed Arthur. He loved him. In one of his letters he begs: “Write to me and tell me what my duties are and what life you think we must live.” He longed for the freedom that Rimbaud inspired in him, as well as the intense pleasure of self-destruction that only the younger man could give him. He needed to see him soon. He suggested another address where Rimbaud could write to him without any risk of being discovered, and when he could no longer stand it he sent him money and begged him to come back.

  Rimbaud returned in May 1872.

  He settled in a room on Rue Monsieur Le Prince, and then in the Hôtel de Cluny on Rue Victor-Cousin. For both men, it was like emerging from a sarcophagus: the drinking bouts resumed, as did the poetic and philosophical discussions—and the mood swings. It is believed that it was during these frenzied days that Rimbaud wrote most of the poems that Verlaine would later publish under the title Illuminations. It was a prodigious summer for his poetry, and in that state of euphoria he had written “The Spiritual Hunt”, which Verlaine read early in July 1872.

  Rimbaud and Verlaine left for Belgium on July 7, and the poem remained in Paris, together with other papers that Verlaine had in his family home. That is why the poem disappeared. The strange thing is that Verlaine should have left it behind when he considered it so valuable. What were the circumstances of that flight to Belgium? It was somewhat improvised and almost fortuitous, like so many things in the lives of these two poor lovers. It was Rimbaud who gave Verlaine the idea on seeing him leave his in-laws’ house that morning. He approached him on the street and said: “Let’s get out of here now!”

  Verlaine had gone out to buy some medicines for his wife, and told him so, but Rimbaud exclaimed: “Let her go to hell!” Verlaine did not need much persuading, and so it was that they took a train north, to Arras, near the border with Belgium. Verlaine went in the clothes he was standing up in, which was unusual for him. At some point, he must have thought about the letters and poems he had left at home, and may have told Arthur. “Leave it all there, it’s better not to take anything from that damned place,” the younger man must have said to him. “Let’s go now and forever.” It may also be that when Verlaine said, “what about your poems?” Rimbaud replied: “My poems are inside me, let’s go.”

  And so “The Spiritual Hunt”, of which there was no copy, was lost forever.

  This is speculation, of course. But we can still dream that one day, in a forgotten drawer somewhere in the world, the correspondence and the poems may be found, and we will be able to read “The Spiritual Hunt”. The final reference to it is in a letter Verlaine sent from London in which he asks for help in recovering the papers he had left in his father-in-law’s house. He indicates that “The Spiritual Hunt” was “in a separate envelope.”

  The story of what happened next, when Mathilde found out that her husband had fled with Rimbaud, demonstrates how far she was prepared to go to save her marriage.

  Let us examine the facts.

  Seeing that time was passing and Paul had not returned from the pharmacy, Mathilde started to worry. Of course a voice in her head warned her: the little devil has something to do with it! But first she thought that something serious might have happened to him, so she visited hospitals, police stations, and morgues, all to no avail. How anxious she must have felt and how afraid that the very thing she so dreaded was actually happening!

  A few days later, she received a message from Paul, its tone one of guilt. He told her that he was in Brussels with Rimbaud, and he begged her not to cry. In an outburst of pride, Mathilde said to herself: “I have to free my husband from the spell of that provincial Satan.” She told her mother, and the two women decided to go into action. They planned their strategy. It is not known how they discovered his whereabouts, but what is certain is that they found the hotel where the two poets were staying in Brussels, made a reservation, and set off. On arriving, Mathilde announc
ed herself to her husband and arranged to meet him in her room. When Verlaine entered, he found her lying on the bed, naked and perfumed.

  It is likely, in fact almost certain, that Verlaine was very drunk, so without thinking twice he threw himself on her. They made passionate love. In a much later poem, Verlaine describes the embraces and laughter, the many kisses. Once it was over, in a fit of remorse, Paul confessed to her the truth about his relationship with Rimbaud (which she had already assumed). Nevertheless, he swore that he would return with her to Paris.

  Poor Paul Verlaine, a frail canoe caught between two hurricanes! His two lovers were breaking down his will. The spell of one dissipated somewhat under the influence of the other. Mathilde, still naked and damp with sweat, whispered in his ear that after they got back to Paris they would go on a long journey together, very far from France. She mentioned New Caledonia. Her father would give them the money and her mother would look after the baby in their absence. A second honeymoon. Verlaine, playing with her pink nipples, running his fingers through her abundant pubic hair, let himself be swayed by these images, he dreamed of remote places and the poems he could write in those ports, watching savage dawns rise over the ocean.

  There, perhaps, lay the cure for his uncertainties.

  “Yes, of course, ma chérie,” he said. “We’ll go to New Caledonia together and we’ll be happy.”

  And what of Mathilde’s mother? Fully aware of the ruse, she must have been close by, huddled in some café or in another room, waiting for a sign. Perhaps she was spying through a crack and telling herself: silence is a good omen. Silence the procurer, the accomplice. She’ll know how to convince him. He’s a man and he’ll respond to what she brings him.