Return to the Dark Valley

by Santiago Gamboa

  His dreams of wealth were becoming so remote from his real life that, with time, Rimbaud started to content himself with amassing at least a small amount of money. He became enormously thrifty and austere. He ate little and badly. He stopped frequenting the cafés and taverns of Harar. He moved about on foot. A French priest in Harar, Monsignor Jarosseau, quoted by Starkie, says that he lived “soberly and chastely, like a Benedictine monk, and should, by rights, have been a Trappist.” He was a hard worker, he got up early to open the store and was already very busy by the time his staff arrived. This priest gives us a key testimony about Rimbaud. He says that he often went to see him for a chat: “We talked about serious things and never about him. He read a lot and always appeared distant.”

  He read a lot.

  When it is said of someone that he reads a lot it never refers to practical manuals about field irrigation or the maintenance of canals. It is said of those who read literature and the humanities. In a letter to Paterne Berrinchon—the husband of Isabelle Rimbaud—his former employer, Bardey, said that Rimbaud wrote constantly. It is possible that with the passing years and the tranquility that age brings, Rimbaud took stock of his life and went back to certain things that had been important to him, such as reading and writing.

  There was another new, and apparently contradictory, attitude: during his last years, according to those who had dealings with him, including his employers and associates, he became extremely generous. Perhaps the realization that the fortune he had dreamed of was completely out of his reach had liberated him and helped him put his feet back on the ground. He was now surrounded by normal people, with whom he had to get along. That angry young man who hadn’t cared what he did or said to satisfy his whims; that young man who had been kept by Verlaine or by his mother, whom he blackmailed emotionally; that young man whose poetic ideas had to be carried out to the letter now gave way to an adult somewhat more accustomed—thanks to the repeated blows he had received—to the painful contradictions of life, which may be why he started to be good-natured and loyal.

  His biographers say that not only was he generous in material matters, but also in words and gestures. He helped everyone; he received in his house whatever explorer or trader happened to pass through Harar and offered his advice. These visitors commented on Rimbaud’s friendliness and his verbal brilliance and inventiveness.

  “I’ve never hurt anybody. I try, on the other hand, to do what little good I am able and that, in fact, is my one satisfaction.” He wrote this to his mother and sisters in 1890, during his last year in Harar.

  There is an episode that is very revealing about who Rimbaud was in those last years, and the way he evaluated his past. It is a letter that he preserved and always had with him, in which the editor of the review La France moderne, Laurent de Gavoty, praised his poetry and suggested he become a contributor. In February 1891, the review announced that it had located the whereabouts of the young genius. “We know where Rimbaud is, the great Rimbaud, the one true Rimbaud, the Rimbaud of the Illuminations.”

  That means many things, but the most important of them is that this little book, Illuminations, published by Verlaine in 1886, had been received as Rimbaud would have liked A Season in Hell to be received. What a strange destiny, for poetry and for life. While he was trying to make his fortune in Abyssinia and Somalia, his poems, circulating far from him, had carved out a huge reputation for him, and he was now acclaimed in his absence. The fact that he kept this letter means that, deep down, he had been touched. No poet, however arrogant or implacable, can ignore praise. Rimbaud may even have thought of using that contact later, but this plan was cut short by illness and sudden death.

  His life in Harar, the fact that he had settled in a house of his own—a place in the world—led him again to think about marriage. Apart from the young woman he had taken to Aden he is known to have had relationships with other local women, but none became established, as far as is known.

  On August 10, 1890, he wrote to ask his mother if she thought it possible he might marry the following year, and in particular if there was any woman in Charleville or Roche willing to follow him to Abyssinia: he recognized that he could not stay in France because of his work. This hypothetical woman would have to accustom herself to his constant wanderings. Does anyone like that exist? That is what he wondered. Rimbaud was an unrepentant traveler, who associated travel with freedom and fulfilment.

  To travel, to live, to be free.

  He had already written that on his departure, in the final text of A Season in Hell. “At dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid Cities.” What are these cities?

  I have wondered that a thousand times. In her analysis, Starkie speaks of magic and alchemy, the struggle between Satan and Merlin that would mark the end of his claim to equal God. Others mention the cities of God, whose gates had suddenly closed to him but would now open, which is a cause for joy.

  But I think he is referring to something much simpler. The desire to mark out a literary path: the path of mysterious cities. It is here that the best stories happen and unknown people live. Much of the twentieth-century novel followed that line. With that phrase, Rimbaud sealed forever the union between writing and traveling, between freedom and the mystery of creation, that particular solitude that is only found in hotels and at border posts.

  To travel, and to go farther each time.

  And occasionally, to return.

  Rimbaud’s life in Harar was peaceful, for all his constant complaints. One of his best friends was none other than Ras Makonen, the king or governor of Harar, who was Menelik’s nephew. There was also his servant Djami, of whom Rimbaud was very fond. He was a young man of twenty, a constant companion in his adventures. According to his sister Isabelle, when Arthur was dying, Djami was one of the few people the poet remembered with affection.

  In 1891, fate took a hand and forced him to return to France. Not definitively, of course. Nothing is definitive at the age of thirty-seven, especially considering young Arthur’s dreams and desires. A volcano that any little spark could reignite.

  Around February, he started to feel discomfort in his right kneecap. What was it? A man of action like him, accustomed to walking twelve miles a day, could find a thousand explanations before considering the possibility of serious illness. Let alone that it might be anything fatal!

  Oh, young Arthur, you have defied death for so long.

  The pain in his knee persisted, so he resorted to home cures. He put on a tight bandage, thinking it was a question of circulation, varicose veins, and continued with his normal life. But it kept getting worse: now his thigh and shin were swollen. The swelling went all the way down to his calf. He developed a fever.

  His commercial duties kept him busy and he put off seeking medical attention. In Harar, the last doctor had left a couple of years earlier. His leg got worse. He could no longer bend it, and it was very swollen. In spite of this, it was two months before he made up his mind to go to Aden. He had to close the store, which of course meant incurring substantial losses. The journey to the port of Zeila, in a litter with a canopy and sixteen porters, was agonizing.

  He left Harar on April 7, 1891.

  He would never return.

  Starkie reconstructs the journey: the rain, the camels scattering because of the storms, the lack of food, the heat, the swaying of the litter, the unbearable pain. All this for three agonizing weeks, until he got to Zeila and embarked for Aden, suffering another three days of torture on deck.

  In the hospital in Aden, the doctor’s first thought on seeing the leg was to amputate it, but then, afraid the patient would die, he had second thoughts and decided to treat him in the hope of achieving some improvement. Another week of suffering without any result. When it was finally decided to repatriate him, Rimbaud liquidated his remaining assets. He was sent on the next boat to Marseilles, where he was immediately admitted t
o the Hospital of the Conception and given the registration number 1427. After being seen by the doctors, on May 22, he sent the following telegram to his mother:

  One of you must come to Marseilles today by express train. On Monday morning they amputate my leg. Risk I might die. Very important matters to settle. Hospital Conception. Reply promptly.

  Rimbaud

  The die was cast by the time Vitalie got to him. The leg was amputated, but very soon he began to feel stabbing pains in the other leg. His mother had to go back to the farm in Roche, because her younger daughter, Isabelle, had fallen ill. The pain and desolation she must have felt, having lost her elder daughter and now having her son in hospital, one leg gone, and her younger daughter suffering health problems! The sad journeys she must have taken, alone, traveling up and down France!

  Rimbaud tried to overcome the pain of the amputation and come to terms with the fact that it was forever. Alas, he did not know that the only “forever” he could count on was a few months. Death was already sitting at the foot of his bed, watching over him and passing its icy fingers through his hair as he slept. Caressing him. That painful amputation was a defeat, pure and simple. He himself had led his life down that strange path that, after many vicissitudes, had driven him to that sad hospital in Marseilles.

  “My life is over, I am nothing now but an immovable trunk,” he wrote his sister Isabelle.

  At the end of July Arthur left the hospital and, a convalescent on crutches, returned to the farm in Roche to rejoin his mother and his sister. Twelve years had passed and now he returned prematurely aged, without a leg and without wealth. He was not unaware that in Paris he was acclaimed, but he bypassed it and hid on the family farm. He did not want to see anyone, not even Delahaye, to whom he had written so many letters.

  For Isabelle, her brother’s arrival was the central event of her life. She had been just nineteen when Arthur had left, which means she was a woman of thirty-one when he returned. She went to a lot of effort to arrange the best room on the farm, adorning it with flowers, sprucing it up with intense love. If we could look inside her head we would see a young woman burdened by the death of her sister when she was in her adolescence, with an older brother, Frédéric, who was the idiot of the family, and with this other strange, remote creature, a poet and a rebel, whom she had heard from in letters that turned him into a myth, a palpable extension of that distant father, the other Frédéric, whom she had barely known and who had abandoned her.

  That is why it was she and not the strict, severe Vitalie, hardened by life, who took it upon herself to look after Arthur in Roche. Isabelle became his shadow and his nurse. And more important still: his friend. They talked endlessly and he told her all about his adventures in Abyssinia. With the passing of the days, it was to her that he confided his desire to return to Harar, which was his true home. In spite of being on the verge of death, when he had left Abyssinia he had thought to take with him a collection of rugs and objects that he considered special and that would remind him of his home wherever he was. These things were now spread about his room.

  The pain continued, as did the fevers and the insomnia. His right arm, on the same side as the amputation, was frequently numb. Something strange was eating away at him from inside. His only relief from the pain and the fevers was to shut himself up in his room, lower the blinds to shut out the sun, and play an Abyssinian harp in a melancholy fashion while he told stories to Isabelle.

  In Paris, his fame was growing and many already considered him the greatest poet of the century, but nobody knew that he was so close, recovering from an operation. If the poets of Paris had known, they would have come to acclaim him, which might have given him a new lease on life. We cannot know that. His presence was a little secret in Roche, although an open secret, since Starkie says that some inhabitants of the town came to his window at night to hear him playing and singing, as if he were an Eastern holy man.

  But it was a cold summer and his health deteriorated. By now, he could barely move his right arm and the fevers and discomfort continued. He was horrified to think that he would remain paralyzed for life, and despite the care of his sister Isabelle, who fed him as if he were a baby, he decided he had to go. Where was his beloved Harar? Why so far? The cold of the north made him feel that he was in danger and he devoted his remaining strength to the dream of returning.

  In Abyssinia the sun would give him back his life!

  Against the better judgement of Vitalie, who could stand it no longer, Arthur decided to return to Marseilles. There were hesitations and tears. His insomnia had made him irascible, unable to make up his mind. But about one thing he never wavered: he had to get close to Africa. On August 23, he and his sister took the train. He was in unbearable pain. Reaching Paris, they transferred in a horse-drawn carriage to the Gare de Lyon to continue the journey south.

  It was raining in Paris.

  The images of that damp, half-deserted city at nightfall were his last of the great capital. None of those who saw the carriage passing in the rain could have suspected that inside it was France’s greatest poet, let alone that he was on his way to an appointment with the Grim Reaper, who was sitting waiting for him in a bed in the Hospital of the Conception in Marseilles.

  On his arrival, the doctors told him he had a carcinoma. It was thought that the illness might be related to the syphilis he had suffered years earlier. With the passing of the days his body became more paralyzed. He was incapable of getting out of bed alone. For Isabelle, this time by her brother’s side was a strange mystical journey. The doctors gave him morphine for the pain and he indulged in profound daydreams.

  When Arthur was delirious, he talked about Harar.

  About Djami and the caravans, the cool air of the mountains, the indigenous Hararis. He would say words in Amharic that she did not understand. Isabelle’s final struggle was to convert him, to save his soul. Arthur, paralyzed and stuffed full of morphine, agreed to receive the last rites and apparently, according to Isabelle, converted at the last minute. It was her greatest joy. The letter in which she tells her mother is euphoric. I saved him! she seems to scream. But immediately, in a flash of lucidity, Rimbaud again cursed religion.

  He tried to escape death one last time, on November 9, 1891. He asked his sister to write a letter to the shipping company in Marseilles, asking them to take him immediately to Aden, insisting even on the hour when they could move him on board, taking into account the fact that he was sick and paralyzed.

  It was his last attempt at escape, but it was futile.

  He died the following day, November 10.

  His supreme and final escape was death, distancing himself from the life he could not keep hold of, the life that slipped through his fingers.

  He never fully returned, because coming back to France, getting to his family home in Roche, passing briefly through Paris, he realized that his only possible return was to Harar.

  That remote valley was his only place in the world.

  That Man should Labour & sorrow,

  & learn & forget, & return

  To the dark valley whence he came,

  to begin his labours anew.

  It is possible that before dying, still harboring hopes of returning, he recalled these lines from Blake, which he had read in the reading room of the British Museum. This clinging to life with all his might concealed the same words: return, sorrow, forget. To start all over the following day, doubtless at dawn.

  In Harar, only in Harar . . .

  There, in his dark valley.

  9

  The newspapers the following day carried photographs of the “slaughterhouse,” as they called it, to the south of Cali and in their digital editions showed a detailed galley of images with the legal warning “not for those of a sensitive disposition.”

  Juana and I looked through them, and as we did so she told me who was who. Some, in addition to
being wounded in the chest, had received the coup de grâce in the back of the neck. The explanation that was given for what had happened can be summed up in this press cutting:

  “A revenge attack, a settling of accounts, or a turf war: these are the hypotheses offered by the criminologists of the Prosecutor’s Department’s technical investigation team, in collaboration with technical units of the Criminal Investigation Department, after inspecting the property in this exclusive area to the south of Cali in which early yesterday morning, during a party, a gun battle took place that left six dead and three seriously wounded. Among the bodies found was that of Néstor Pombo Holguín, also known as Cusumbosolo, second in command in the organization led by Freddy Otálora, the ex-paramilitary and head of an organization specializing in the production and sale of pink cocaine, who may have escaped. Among the dead are other members of the criminal gang, such as Belisario Córdoba Garcés, also known as Maluco, Andrés Felipe Arias Carvajal, also known as Palmasoya, Enrique Gómez, also known as Pelaíto (a minor), and the women Esperanza Echeverri Santamaría (from Medellín), also known as Mireya, and Martina Vélez Uribe (a minor, also from Antioquia), also known as Pussy.

  The place has been cordoned off and surrounded by police cars. A special prosecutor has been coordinating the investigation into these multiple murders.”

  Now we had to wait for Manuela. Another long wait.

  I felt guilty for not being like most of my compatriots: optimistic, energetic, looking to the future, hoping to contribute in my own way to the construction of the new man.

  When my phone vibrated, indicating another message, I immediately thought of Manuela. Maybe she was trying to communicate this way, but it wasn’t her.