Return to the Dark Valley

by Santiago Gamboa

  Rimbaud was kept in the hospital for a week, because of the operation on his wrist and his bad state of nerves. In his statement for the court, he said that Verlaine had been blind drunk and had gone mad. On leaving the hospital, on July 19, he withdrew the charge and asserted that it had been an accident, but the legal process was already under way and it was not possible to stop it. To make matters worse, Mathilde now arrived in Brussels looking for evidence that would help her in the divorce proceedings. Verlaine was found guilty on August 8 and sentenced to two years’ hard labor, plus a fine of two hundred francs. During the trial, the relationship between the two poets had been made public, which contributed to the judge being inflexible.

  Rimbaud returned on foot to his mother’s house in Roche, although others say that the Belgian police took him to the border. Whatever the case, he arrived at his mother’s farm and announced to his family that he needed rest and understanding to finish a book. His mother decided to support him, so Arthur took refuge in the barn with his notebooks and pencils.

  He was a young man of eighteen, alone, sick, and frail, facing a colossal task, struggling with the oceanic tide that is a great work of art. But Rimbaud lived up to the task, since that was his destiny: place himself in front of the bull and confront it. His sister Isabelle said that some nights they heard him screaming, yelling insults, and weeping. Perhaps that is how Rimbaud’s work had to be written: in an old barn, howling with pain. He only came out to eat. Starkie says that on finishing A Season in Hell, a month later, he gave his mother the manuscript to read. Vitalie took it to her room. After a few hours she came out, brandishing the sheets of paper in her hand, and asked Arthur:

  “What does it all mean?”

  The young poet replied:

  “It means exactly what it says, literally and point by point.”

  3

  The plane rose into the air, took a panoramic turn over Madrid, and headed in a southwesterly direction, toward that area of the world where so many of us had unfinished business and that was now awaiting us with its best face.

  A journey back to a newly pacified country.

  Tertullian, with his usual humor, or his usual cynicism, said that our journey could be called Theory of Returning Souls. He was saying it for us, not for him. We were going to the country of peace.

  Because the government and the guerrillas had finally signed an agreement that had turned Colombia into a fashionable country. Everyone wanted to come to Bogotá and stroll through Plaza de Bolívar with a Colombian friend or girlfriend, read local authors, enjoy the local food, and learn to dance their rhythms. Newspapers like Tokyo’s Asahi Shimbun, Delhi’s Times of India, Beijing’s Renmin Ribao, Riyadh’s Al Riyadh, and Jakarta’s Kompas sent permanent correspondents and set up offices in Bogotá. Japanese, Korean, and Russian businesses opened branches in a number of cities and the new TV soap operas, focused on forgiveness and reconciliation, sold widely around the world.

  In addition, Northern Europeans prepared to spend their vacations on the Caribbean coast, to buy vacation homes in the coffee-growing area, to visit the heritage sites and the wonders of nature. Dutch, French, and Norwegian left-wing intellectuals sought houses in the Candelaria district of Bogotá, in Barichara or Villa de Leyva. Others in Providencia or the Pacific islands. The Nobel Prize–winning French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio bought a house facing the Pacific Ocean and came back to live in the Darien jungle. Widowed German pensioners sought Colombian wives between forty and fifty, preferably with grown-up children.

  Real estate became big business. The price of a square meter in cities like Bogotá or Cartagena surpassed that in New York and Copenhagen.

  The director Oliver Stone announced his intention of filming the story of the guerrilla leader Tirofijo, and traveled to Bogotá to meet with members of FARC in their offices in Congress. The rumor circulated that he was thinking of Willem Dafoe for the leading role.

  The actor Sean Penn bought a huge colonial house in the center of Cartagena de Indias and it became common to see him out for a night on the town with Bono and Benicio del Toro. A project by the Canadian architect Frank Gehry was chosen for the Great Museum of Memory and Reconciliation in Bogotá.

  Colombia was on the crest of a wave.

  If Europe was on the ropes, Africa mired in poverty and a humanitarian crisis, the Middle East ablaze with wars of religion, the Caucasus and the Ukraine still confronting Putin’s neo-Tsarist Russia, and other Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Mexico, or Argentina had severe problems, Colombia was the light at the end of the tunnel. With its peace process complete, it was one of the few areas of the world with a plan that looked as if it might gradually become reality.

  The question was: could she do it?

  Ordinary foreigners, fugitives from kingdoms shaken by the crisis, arrived to invest their meager savings, because they saw excellent opportunities and a reasonable level of security. And not only the prosperous. Even Europeans impoverished by the debacle came to seek work, which led the writer Fernando Vallejo to say—or rather, to cry—that they were very welcome, but that they had to start by cleaning toilets. Gradually, the foreigners blended into this new, optimistic, but still wary society—wary because it dreaded what might happen later. A collective psychoanalysis that might help to digest the new situation was impossible.

  Rich Venezuelans, fugitives from Chavism, had crossed the border before the peace treaty was signed, but now a second and even a third wave arrived. Like the previous ones, they brought their thick checkbooks and opened businesses. They created oil companies and taught the locals how to sink diagonal extractor pipes in order to reach those huge pockets of the subsoil where the borders existing on the surface no longer matter. There was a great bonanza that later collapsed, along with the price of crude, but they had realized that if there are two countries in the world that are essentially similar, and whose differences are merely formal, they are Colombia and Venezuela.

  There was another group: the millions of Colombians who had gone to live in Europe from the eighties onward and who were now returning, little by little, as the crisis reached them in their respective countries.

  But not everything in Colombia smelled of roses.

  The signing of the agreement made it possible to lift the great national carpet, and many terrible things that had been hidden under it jumped out like scorpions. People realized how important it was to resolve that age-old conflict before it was possible to deal with the new problems. Those of today and those of tomorrow. Those of the present.

  That same present in which we were now traveling, since the plane was advancing into the semi-static sunset of those moving westward at six hundred miles an hour. But the sun is always faster and night falls in the end. Then the plane turns into a point of light that might be confused with a star.

  I had asked for seat C, the aisle seat, which would allow me to go to the bathroom frequently. On my left, in A, was Carlos Melinger, alias Tertullian, and in D and E, respectively, Manuela and Juana. Manuelito Sayeq, my great companion, was in seat F, beside his mother. They had given him a child’s kit and now he was drawing on a huge page full of puzzles and line drawings to be colored in.

  I haven’t yet said how we came to be on this plane and that’s what I’m now preparing to do, as soon as I finish this gin and tonic the stewardess was kind enough to serve me, although rather low on gin and in a plastic cup, which is understandable.

  I need to go back a few weeks—six perhaps?—to the moment Juana called Tertullian and asked him to come to the apartment on Calle de San Cosme y San Damián.

  That’s where I met him.

  An immensely fat man, although not in the sense of morbid obesity, but of someone strong and at the same time voluminous. Like a rugby player or even a sumo wrestler. A solid mass of flesh. Breathing heavily and constantly sweating. Endlessly mopping his forehead with a handkerchi
ef.

  Seeing him come into Juana’s apartment, I got worried. What kind of favor did he owe her? His skull was shaved on the sides, with a very short, almost monkish island of hair in the middle. It was a hairstyle a lot of soccer players adopt. There were also dozens of pendants, hanging from his ears, his neck, his wrist, even his huge waist. I later found out that each one had a meaning, which was worse. I hate symbolic people, but I didn’t tell Juana.

  Now, sitting next to me on the plane and ceaselessly eating, with his pockets full of M&M’s, getting up more or less every half hour to go to the bathroom to clean his teeth, he provokes a certain sympathy in me. Soon after meeting him, when Juana explained the problem to him and asked if he could help us, Tertullian spent two whole days telling me his strange life story and his incredible project.

  But let me go back to that first evening, when I met him.

  Juana explained Manuela’s situation and then she herself told him the details: the rape, the murder of her mother. Tertullian, like an FBI agent, took notes and asked questions:

  “Age of the target?”

  “Height? Approximate weight?”

  “How dangerous, from one to ten, ten being the maximum?”

  “Men under his command?”

  “Possible weapons?”

  Whenever he uttered a long sentence, he blinked more than usual, which is why I preferred not to look him in the eyes. It was very unpleasant. He constantly got up to go to the bathroom and I thought he was going there to take drugs, but he himself explained it.

  “I have a little nervous problem with dental hygiene and that’s why I clean my teeth frequently. Oh, nothing strange: weak gums that absorb germs, and we’re surrounded by them!”

  As proof, he took from his pocket a small bag with a brush and three medium-sized tubes of toothpaste.

  “I get through three of these a day, can you imagine? It’s the only way to keep it under control. It’s called automysophobia: a fear of being dirty, combined with bacillophobia and dentophobia, which is a fear of dentists. Try to imagine that for a second. No, you can’t, can you? It’s hell, but it’s my hell. I have to accept it. I’ve been through others that were far scarier.”

  Juana had first heard about him from a Colombian woman who told her about Tertullian’s lectures and suggested they go to hear him. He gave them in second-class movie theaters that were rented for conferences or religious events. And although they were genuine political meetings, Tertullian called them “lectures.” He introduced himself as a romantic philosopher, a defender of nature and his country. He was an incredible guy.

  During those weeks he came a lot to the house. On each visit, he gave us news of what he called “the target.”

  “My people are looking for him, apparently he’s moved from the Aguacatal area to the Pacific. We’re trying to get close to him.”

  Another day he arrived and told us:

  “We almost have him located, he’s a very dangerous animal, isn’t he, Manuelita? We’ve learned a few things about him.”

  One day I asked him:

  “How far can your people in Colombia go with this?”

  “As far as I tell them to go, Consul, but don’t worry. I’ll sort it out and take care of everything. I owe it to our friend, it’s a matter of honor.”

  Manuela practically came to live at Juana’s, the three of us forming a strange triumvirate alongside the child. It’s unusual to live with two women, I think it alters your perception of time. Luckily, there were no neighbors on the same floor, but there was a doorman who asked questions and whom I decided to ignore completely.

  One night something woke me. On opening my eyes, I recognized Juana. She had sat down beside me and was watching me sleep. I asked her if something was happening.

  “I only wanted to be here for a while, Consul. I’m sad.”

  She lay down next to me. I embraced her.

  “What I like about being with you is that you don’t ask pointless questions,” she said. “That makes me feel good.”

  She fell asleep without our touching. I hung on her breathing as if both our lives, both our fates were contained in it.

  At dawn, with the first light of morning, I saw through her pajamas that she had a new tattoo on her lower back: a huge butterfly with a snake’s head and outspread wings.

  I got up cautiously, in order not to wake her, and went to have a coffee, thinking about butterflies: they change place, flutter about, seem to slide and roll through the air. Why is the goddess Psyche represented with butterfly wings? She wanders the world searching for Eros, her lost lover. I thought of the word in other languages I know: papillon, farfalla, schmetterling, babishká, húdié, farashá . . . A legend says that the rings on the wings—the eyespots—are the eyes through which the gods keep watch on what’s happening in the world. I remembered that one day Tertullian had greeted Juana with the words: “What do you say today, Madame Butterfly?” I felt a pang in my heart; had they been lovers? You didn’t have to have slept with her to see her tattoos. I knew them myself. Madame Butterfly? I don’t know much about opera, so I looked for information. It’s the story of an abandoned woman in Japan. She loves an absent man with whom she had a son. When they ask her about the child, she says: “His name is Sorrow.”

  I returned to the bedroom with the two cups in my hand. On waking, Juana saw that her pajamas had ridden up to her waist.

  “Were you looking at my ass, Consul?”

  I laughed. I said good morning.

  “You’d never seen this tattoo,” she said, touching the butterfly. “It’s the latest. Do you like it?”

  “I like it a lot,” I said. “Madame Butterfly.”

  She laughed. She had a quick sip of her coffee.

  “Why are you so good to me?” she asked.

  I remained silent, unable to get rid of the lump in my throat, until I noticed from her anxious look that she was really waiting for an answer.

  “I don’t know.”

  The morning sun struck her face and her skin looked like porcelain. So I dared to ask her:

  “Why did you want me to come to Madrid?”

  She looked at me with a strangely weary expression. Then she walked to the window and said:

  “I thought that if, for some reason, you’d forgotten all about me, you wouldn’t come. I just wanted to know.”

  “Well, here I am.”

  She remained there with her back to me, looking at a blurry sky against which a jumble of aerials and poles, and beyond them the hazy and irregular outlines of distant buildings, stood out. I had a strong desire to embrace her and repeat in her ear, “here I am,” but I restrained myself. I was afraid that something would shatter. What hung in the air was a confused mixture of the words “love” and “compassion.” Or something even more unsettling: as if you could desire what the other person is and has been when he or she is alone, far from you, in that implausible world that is someone else’s life, whose echo sometimes reaches us. I also realized that when we were together we were safe from harm.

  From then on, she came to sleep beside me every night, although without anything that could be seen as sexual happening. I felt great desire, but she had to be the one to take the first step.

  Madame Butterfly.

  A week later, in the middle of the night, she said:

  “Remember my story, Consul? I told you about a lawyer I worked with in Bogotá, the one who helped me to get out of Colombia.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is his apartment,” she said. “He doesn’t use it because he lives in Paris and doesn’t often come to Spain. I’ve occasionally gone traveling with him, particularly to Washington or Geneva.”

  Then she continued:

  “That’s how I came to know Tertullian. Something terrible happened at one of his lectures, one of his followers fell from the cei
ling and killed himself. I never knew if it was some kind of crazy suicide, deliberately staged in public, or if he was a common drug addict who climbed up there and fell by accident. Tertullian was accused of exercising psychological control over his listeners and bending them to his will. I thought he might be useful to me at some point, so I called my friend and we found him a lawyer who didn’t charge him a penny and got him off scot-free. Ever since, he’s been sending me gifts and inviting me to all his lectures.”

  The days passed.

  What was happening in Spain got in through the windows. The big news was again connected with the Irish embassy siege. One morning I switched on the TV and saw that the assault had started. The lower part of the screen kept flashing red:

  BREAKING NEWS! BREAKING NEWS! POLICE ATTACK EMBASSY!

  The TV cameras were broadcasting live the advance of the SWAT teams, or their Spanish equivalents. Smoke was billowing from one of the windows, and shots could be heard.

  Helicopters circled overhead.

  The whole of the surrounding area, considered a “war zone,” had been evacuated. What the police feared was that the building might be blown up, but the assault method didn’t allow the terrorists to activate the explosives.

  BREAKING NEWS! BREAKING NEWS! POLICE ATTACK EMBASSY!

  As it happened, three hostages died and five others were wounded. Six of the fifteen terrorists were killed in the first charge, shot very accurately and simultaneously from the other side of the avenue. Another five fell in the following minute. The snipers studied each person’s moves through the windows and fired blindly, guiding themselves by sounds and voices. Two more special forces teams went in through a hole in the roof and others through the windows. They also demolished a side wall, so that by the time the terrorists realized, they were already overwhelmed. Three police officers were killed and four wounded.