Return to the Dark Valley

by Santiago Gamboa

  But on the way to the railroad station, Verlaine began to wake from the spell and told them that before leaving he would like to say goodbye to Rimbaud. He swore he would join them in time to catch the train. Careful! The women heard these words with dismay, but Verlaine managed to persuade them and he left, nervous and inflamed.

  When it was time for departure, with the train already puffing on the track, the women waited anxiously. Mathilde scanned the crowd from the running board of the railroad car. There’s Paul! he’s come back! she cried. Yes, he had kept his promise, but he was no longer the same person. Far from it. He was very drunk and avoided Mathilde’s eyes. Getting on the train, he sat down in his place without paying any attention to what they were saying to him, muttering through his teeth. The train left and the women heaved a sigh of relief. For now, the battle was won.

  When they reached the French border, the passengers had to go through customs, which forced them to get out and go to an office of the gendarmerie. Once this was over, Verlaine refused to get back on the train. He slipped away amid the bustle and when the women finally saw him, standing there motionless, they yelled at him to get on, but he did not move. Then the train pulled out and he watched impassively as they left, without making the slightest gesture.

  That image was the last that Mathilde had of her husband. She never saw him again. As if it were a trivial matter, two days later Paul sent her a message insulting her: “I’m back together with Rimbaud, if he still wants to know me after the betrayal you forced me to commit.”

  And so she returned to Paris, finally alone. Consumed with grief, hatred, and jealousy.

  But let us go back to the poem “The Spiritual Hunt”.

  If Rimbaud had written it in Charleville, three people might have read it, since he was in the habit of making fair copies of his work with the help of his friend Delahaye. But it is strange that Delahaye does not mention it, even though he was his first biographer. The other person, apart from Verlaine, might have been Mathilde herself, if it is true that she took the trouble to read the correspondence and sniff around in her husband’s papers before destroying them. This is very possible; in fact she found various documents that helped her in her divorce petition.

  It isn’t hard to imagine the scene: Mathilde, filled with hate, alone and knowing that Paul was getting drunk and fornicating with the young devil, goes into Verlaine’s study and, without making any noise, embarrassed at the thought of being caught by her parents, starts to open drawers, searching through the chest of drawers, the bookcase, the secrétaire; spying in silence, opening sealed notebooks, trying not to wake the baby in the next room. The silence of the night makes the pain more intense, the anger and jealousy more urgent. The night is a bad counsellor, and so, when she finally finds something tangible, she avidly reads these words she has been looking for, these words she prefers to see written down so that they might stop echoing in her head. She wants to put an end to that noise and there they are, there they are! She reads them again and again, in floods of tears, managing to blot out the noise.

  She finds the young man’s letters, yes, and she tells herself that at least they aren’t her husband’s, but she can imagine them, too, bathed as she is in tears of pain. Where did she go wrong? She thinks of her son and fears that one day he may read them, and she imagines the torment if she doesn’t do something. She has to destroy them, to make sure they do not exist in the same world in which she wanted to be happy with him, and so, little by little, she throws the letters and papers in the fire. It is legitimate to think that “The Spiritual Hunt” took a fleeting step into the world: it was written, read with admiration and hatred by its three sole readers, and then returned to nothingness.

  “The Spiritual Hunt” is thus the great nonexistent poem. The work of genius that may return one day. Such was the life of the vagabond poet, the clochard of letters named Rimbaud, which is why it is reasonable to ask, how many other poems disappeared? The Illuminations were about to meet a similar fate. Verlaine mentions them for the first time in a letter from August 1878. It seems clear today that this collection of poems—we do not know if Rimbaud conceived them as a book—only survived oblivion thanks to him. What the biographers do not know is the reason they were in the possession, not of Verlaine, but of his brother-in-law Charles de Sivry. Why? It is a mystery. The fact remains that in a letter, Verlaine tells Charles that he has read them again and will very soon return the manuscript to him. Later, he asks for it again, but to no avail.

  The letters of Verlaine in which he tries to get the Illuminations back continue until September 1, 1884. At last, after a series of bizarre and very mysterious changes of ownership, the Illuminations are published in 1886 in a poetry review called La Vogue, edited by Gustave Kahn.

  The poems were published from the fifth to the ninth issues of that year. After the ninth issue, it was announced that they would continue, but in the following issue nothing appeared. Months later, another five appeared, and at the end of that same year Verlaine himself published the first edition of the Illuminations in book form, with an introduction by himself in which he says, among other things:

  “Arthur Rimbaud is from a solid middle-class family in Charleville (Ardennes), where he was an excellent if somewhat undisciplined student. By the age of seventeen, he had already written the most beautiful verses in the world, from which not long ago I gave an extract in a little book entitled The Cursed Poets. He must be thirty-six by now and is traveling through Asia, where he deals in works of art. He is like the Faust of the Second Faust, a brilliant engineer after having been Mephistopheles’ great poet and the blonde Marguerite’s lord and master!

  It has often been said that he is dead. Of that we have no details, but if it were true it would sadden us greatly. May he know that, if it is the case that nothing has happened to him! I was his friend and from a distance I continue to be so.”

  There has been a great deal of juicy theorizing about the chronology of the collections. Biographers and critics have become entangled in debate, supporting or refuting one another on the basis of the tiniest details. You could write a novel with these characters, who seem not so much critics as self-appointed guardians of Rimbaud. Some actually knew him. One of them is Paterne Berrinchon, who in 1912 published a Complete Works that was the basis of later twentieth-century editions. His authority comes from having been Arthur’s brother-in-law, the husband of Isabelle, the youngest of the Rimbauds and her brother’s favorite. This volume had an introduction by Paul Claudel, who claims to have recovered his religious faith on reading the Illuminations.

  According to Starkie and Delahaye, the Illuminations date from 1872 and 1873, although Starkie goes farther and asserts that they were written over a slightly longer period, perhaps extending into 1874, since the poems reflect very different states of mind. The “Starkie theory” is that in 1874 Rimbaud decided to make a fair copy of the Illuminations in order to publish them, and entrusted them to Verlaine at the end of February 1875, when they met in Stuttgart. Verlaine himself says that they were written between 1873 and 1875, when Rimbaud was travelling through Europe. This theory has the support of Bouillon de Lacoste, another critic and Rimbaud scholar. Graphologists who have had access to the manuscripts assert that he wrote them in 1874, in London. But for Lacoste, the poem “Dawn” in the Illuminations can only date from 1875, including as it does a word in German, wasserfall, which, according to him, Rimbaud could only have learned during his trip to Stuttgart in 1875. Starkie counters this by saying that if Rimbaud had learned the word in Germany he would have written it correctly, in other words, with a capital letter, as it should be written in German. Lacoste also refers to the line “You are still close to the temptation of Antony,” claiming he could only have written it after reading Flaubert’s novel The Temptation of Saint Anthony, which was published in 1874. Starkie points out that Flaubert was not the only writer to treat the theme of St. Anthony, and that
in any case fragments of the novel had been circulating since 1857.

  Two more Rimbaud sleuths, De Graaf and Adam, in an article published in the Revue des Sciences Humaines in October 1950, assert that the Illuminations were written from 1878 to 1879. One of their arguments is that the expression “les pays poivrés” (lands of spices), in the poem “Democracy”, can only refer to Java, which Rimbaud became familiar with during those years.

  20

  After the Theory of Mutilated Bodies operation, I moved to Spain. Here, the Far Right was closer to my ideas because it wasn’t obsessed with race, like that in Germany. Yes, there had been the idea of a Spanish nation of pure and uncontaminated blood since Don Fadrique, but in practice it was only a concept, since the Spanish are very mixed and it’s not easy to decree the purity of the blood without leaving out three quarters of the population, do you follow me? You can talk all you like about pure blood, you have to adapt. Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand already had that idea of purity, but ever since that time things have not been at all easy. They expelled the Moors and the Jews, which was fine, but the Moors had been living there for seven hundred years, which means they were Spanish, with descendants, and the Jews . . . They arrived in Spain before Christ was crucified! Can you imagine how mixed they were?

  Not long ago, the diaries of a very interesting character from the Third Reich came to light: Alfred Rosenberg, author of the second most important book of Nazi doctrine, The Myth of the Twentieth Century. When he talks about Spain, Rosenberg says that Franco “preferred to turn a blind eye to the subject of anti-Semitism, out of respect for his Moroccan Jews, or because he still does not understand that Judaism is taking its revenge on Isabel and Ferdinand.”

  What did I tell you?

  Compared with the Social Democrats or the Left, the government of Franco was racist, but compared with the Nazis it wasn’t anti-Semitic at all, which is understandable, how can you get rid of a third of your own blood? That’s what happened in Spain and it’s why I decided to come here, where my ideas might be better understood.

  And anyway, I was getting to know the most interesting groups, and I actually encountered something very different. The subject of World War II isn’t such a big thing! Franco, who was quite screwed up, sent fifty thousand Falangist volunteers to fight with Hitler in Russia, but it was his way of getting rid of a group of radicals who were stepping on his toes. Did you know that here in Spain the Fascists are called “Falangists”? Curious name, falange, isn’t it? It means the joints of the fingers. Anyway, go read any of the novels about what they call “historical memory” and you’ll understand, although you have to get to know them.

  Soon after I arrived in Spain I chose Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Spanish Falange, as my point of departure. From his founding speech I took two quotations:

  “Let the political parties disappear. Nobody was ever born a member of a political party; on the other hand, we are all born members of a family; we are all neighbors in a municipality; we all struggle in the exercise of a job . . . ”

  And the second:

  “If our objectives have in some cases to be achieved by violence, then let us not hesitate before violence. [...] Dialectic is good as a first instrument of communication, but there is no more acceptable dialectic than the dialectic of fists and guns when there is an offense to justice and the Fatherland.”

  When I read this for the first time, it made me jump with excitement. I realized I had found something tangible, something based in reality and not in romantic theories about tradition, which was what pissed me off a little about the guys in Berlin. These people had their feet on the ground, I thought, so I devoted myself to following them and understanding what they were doing. Theirs was an eminently political struggle against Communism and its various metamorphoses, because the Communists were opposed to the Fatherland, which was the most sacred thing, and that’s why they had to be fought. The other thing about the Falangists that struck me as good was their embrace of religion; you know I’m not a believer, but great political ideas have to be combined with great spiritual propositions, whatever they are, otherwise they don’t work. Look at today. Without a spiritual dimension, politics has turned into a satellite of economics and statistics.

  In Spain, the unity between Fatherland and spirituality through religion has been very natural. For God and Spain! they used to say. The Generalísimo and the Bishop of Burgos and the Church in Andalusia and in Galicia went hand in hand, in procession, with the generals and the Falange and the Civil Guard. Franco kept on his night table a piece of the thigh bone of St. John of the Cross, and had himself called the Caudillo, an appellation that’s both religious and heroic.

  When I arrived in Madrid these groups had been decimated and had lost all their prestige. After three decades of democracy, it was no time for heroic projects or great exploits. People had other things on their minds. Prosperity changed the Spanish, not that I knew them before, but I’ve read a lot and I know that the Spaniard had a peasant or provincial spirit, which was more restrained and austere, more cautious. But once they joined Europe, people said, dammit, we’re Europeans now! and they caught the consumer bug. They not only wanted to be rich, they wanted to be seen as rich, and not only modern, but aggressively modern, and so the country filled up with fashionable and glamorous boutiques and people started going to restaurants not just to eat but to be seen in such and such a place, and the thing you have to remember is that this is when they forgot all about Latin America. They turned their backs on us because they felt rich and European, why should they look south, to countries with political and economic problems? Spain, our Spanish brother, replaced us with a dish of goodies from Europe, which gave it money to feel beautiful and shiny, and to believe that now at last the future they’d long been waiting for was coming. And what they told us was more or less this:

  “Bye-bye, poor cousins, arrivederci, au revoir, see you in the future, when you stop being small fry and can sit down at our marble table with its silk tablecloth. This is the exclusive banquet of modernity and civilization! We’ll follow your lives from a cautious distance and if you need anything let us know and we’ll send it to you, there’s everything here so don’t be too shy to ask, okay?”

  That’s what the newly rich Spanish seemed to be saying to a Latin American community that was stewing in its own spicy sauce. And when they went to our countries, do you remember how they arrived at the airport? Like John Wayne sitting on his horse, looking through binoculars. When they turned on the faucet to clean their teeth, they thought twice about it, did these bastards have drinkable water? In restaurants they felt uncomfortable: have they washed the lettuce with mineral water? And then they threw themselves headlong at the women, as you know, because they took it for granted that any Latin American woman was ready to kiss the hairy ass of a Spaniard in return for a promise of papers. The sad thing is that for many of them, it worked.

  With things like this happening, do you think anyone was going to listen to a message of national dignity and unity? Of course not! I observed it all from a distance, because when it comes down to it what was happening in Spain was secondary. My concern is Latin America.

  My rejection of democracy was growing, with increasingly good arguments and with a deeper understanding of the processes that it hides: a mockery of people, cynicism, the desire to seize control of the public purse. In a future Arcadia, in a society of fully educated and reasonable people, democracy will be the best system for living together. But not in a world like ours. Here, democracy is a process of decay, in which weakness leads to anarchy.

  Look at the extreme case: Africa. Do you really believe that, just because there are elections in Africa, we can talk about democracy? In countries like Kenya or Rwanda or Burundi, people vote for the candidate of their tribe and that’s why those with the largest numbers always win. What’s the only way to correct this injustice? We’ve already seen it, the sol
ution is to reduce the rival tribe’s electoral numbers with machetes, as happened in Rwanda. Do you think the blacks are stupid?

  Or take Latin America: there, it’s not a question of tribes, but of financial interest. The political parties don’t exist anymore, they’re just power groupings; nobody believes anymore in ideas about how society should be. Or rather, those who still believe in something are either scattered in tiny parties or they’re the weak part of large, already formed parties. Look at your country. There, the people who vote are something like a third of the population, am I right? And many sell their votes for fifty thousand pesos. That means that with twenty million dollars you can get yourself elected mayor, where you’ll handle enormous budgets, and that’s why to get into power you have to play dirty if you want to recover your investment, otherwise what kind of business would it be?

  The politics I support is the work of an enlightened minority with a vision of the future, a minority that agrees to take on the task of leading the others, the great masses: those whose lights are broken or dim and who, because of the circumstances of life, don’t have sufficient education to understand what the hell a community is or anything about the res publicae. The leader is a great father who guides with affection but can be merciless toward betrayal or laziness or theft. An energetic father who leads his children along the thorny road of life, that’s what the world lacks! And such a person, begging your pardon, never emerges from a democratic process.