Prepared to frustrate the perverse siege, I enter the apartment and, with great presence of mind, shout out in as deep a voice as I can manage, feigning heroic, baritone, burglar-proof manliness. But at least in the living room, there is no burglar or anyone of a profession akin to that. I head for the bedroom with a crepuscular presentiment but on opening the door don’t immediately see anything out of the ordinary. But this apparent calm masks a more serious perversion: in the geometric center of the bed lies a coiled piece of shit. A perfect turd on the tiger-striped bedspread.
II
FUNDAMENTAL CONSIDERATIONS ON SOMETHING
A
Marcelo Valente was sitting on the balcony of his Madrid apartment, marking the final exams of the academic year while mentally running through the objectives of his trip. And although he wanted, at all costs, to escape from that pallid tableland, he also knew he would end up, however unwillingly, missing many of the things that were just then triggering a profound sense of boredom.
This wasn’t to be just any old year. Despite having dedicated as many as four consecutive months to academic tourism (exchanges, conferences, symposia, periods of research in Eurozone countries), he had always traveled with the notion of a quick return in mind. In contrast, he knew his stay in Mexico could become almost indefinite, and spending a year in a remote third-world university, traveling around small, out-of-the-way towns, at the mercy of the sun and the narco wars wasn’t the same as, for example, having breakfast on a comfortable Parisian terrace and walking tranquilly to the small, confined office he had been assigned.
He had only been in Latin America once before, in Buenos Aires. His time in that city had left him favorably disposed toward the whole continent, which had perfectly satisfied his expectations of moderate quaintness, somehow gratifying his vanity and reining in his belief that it was possible to know a little about everything. A three-month stay had been long enough to cover the entire spectrum of the emotions a city could inspire in him, from the blind enchantment of the first weeks to the final relief of watching through the plane window as Ezeiza Airport grew smaller, plus a number of intermediate stages: the shameless wooing of a married woman, the embarrassing bout of drunkenness in a stranger’s home, and the untimely shove given to a dean of philosophy (with the accompanying cry of “Not everyone in Spain is a pompous ass!”). In short, a story he wasn’t sure he could be proud of.
This was something that seldom occurred to him in relation to his past; his usual procedure was to brag, on every possible occasion, about the versatility of his CV: arrogantly list the nationalities of his lovers and the ideological diversity of his thesis advisors, many of whom had asked him, a posteriori, to contribute to books they were editing. The perfect mixture, in short, of an unresolved inferiority complex and a pretty face, which rather than getting uglier with age was becoming more interesting. Marcelo Valente was, even in the words of his friends, “a cretin with a PHD.”
He was aware that his personality inspired not a little reticence. He was no longer on nodding terms with more than one professor. The academic staff of the philosophy department were on the whole, by comparison, much more serious-minded: elderly, blind seminarians who were tangled up in the thousand and one proofs of the existence of God, hangover Marxists who organized independent study groups and papered the chapel of the law department with pro-Chavist leaflets, jaundiced mathematical logicians who put their faith in the advent of the cyborgs and, to some extent, anticipated that arrival with their own mechanical existences. Marcelo didn’t belong to this realm. He had, in fact, studied art history, and only after a PHD in aesthetics at the Sorbonne had he definitely switched departments. For many academics that showed, to say the least, a lack of respect.
Part of Marcelo’s misunderstood charm consisted of treating everyone with the same effusiveness, as if turning a deaf ear to rebuffs. This technique of overpowering friendliness ended by softening the hearts of his declared enemies. They once again invited him to congresses on the construction of aesthetic thought during the frenzied interwar years, the only area of study in which he displayed relative assurance—and disproportionate pretensions.
Marcelo had an emotional relationship with his object of study that made him stand out among other philosophy professors. While some—the majority—dedicated themselves to the tediously monotonous repetition of anyone else’s ideas, Marcelo was convinced that thought could be used to know something new about the world, even if that world was the limited field of the aesthetics of the avant-garde. His was not the optimism of the ignorant but that of the egomaniac, though anyone who didn’t know him could easily confuse the two.
Marcelo Valente’s story—as should be kept in mind henceforth—has two strands: his love life and his theoretical enthusiasms. These two spheres, in his case, cannot be separated. Any attempt to narrate his Mexican experience without taking this into consideration will be unsuccessful.
B
In December 1917, Edmund Belafonte Desjardins—poet and boxer, boastful jewel thief, con man, art dealer, serial deserter, Australian logger, light-heavyweight champion of France, Canadian challenger in Athens, Russian exile in New York, stowaway, teenage orange picker in California, exhibitionist, Irishman living in Lausanne under a false identity, fisherman, conference lecturer, editor of a five-issue magazine, ballet dancer, dandy, boxing coach in Mexico City’s Calle Tacuba, expert on Egyptian art, buffoon, lover, liar, front man for nobody and for himself on innumerable occasions, nameless shadow, witness, minor personage in a time brimming over with great names, friend, wretch, brute—convinced Beatrice Langley to join him in Mexico, where he was scraping together a living under a pseudonym that would make him celebrated and despised, in equal measure, in the artistic milieus of Montmartre and New York: Richard Foret.
Bea arrived in Mexico in early January 1918, and twenty-four hours later they were married. Richard had already had enough of the city, the adjoining towns, the constant altercations with gringos and locals. He had had enough of that country full of thugs where he had, due to the painful process of missing Bea, plumbed the deepest abysses of his melancholy. He had been in Mexico for just six months, but he had had enough. He was mistaken for a spy wherever he went. In San Luís Potosí, the caudillo Saturnino Cedillo had held a gun to his head, threatening to shoot if he didn’t confess whom he was working for. His muscular physique, his accent, his tattoos all made him untrustworthy: who was going to believe he was an eccentric writer waiting in Mexico for his wife—an English poetess residing in New York—who would be coming by train to rescue him, to save him from himself? They listened and thought he was insane. And for this reason he began to feign insanity, to exaggerate it to the point of losing himself in it, convinced that only in that way could he survive in a country of gunmen and anarchists.
He had reached Mexico after a journey full of mishaps, fleeing the Great War, and found himself faced with another war, equally incomprehensible, equally cruel, although luckily, thought Foret, a little less rational, a little more from the gut, or at least so it seemed to him. And this was, when you came down to it, what mattered. In Paris he had battled, with his own guts, against the castrating intellectualism of the Apollinaires, the soulless Cubists, the Marinettis of this world. Where in the work of these people was love, the unmoving motor of all the stars, fixed point and vertex of the actions of men of real daring? Nothing of that was left, only the pantomime of art, and Foret shat a million times on art. (He would express it in those very words in his Considerations.)
In New York, as an illegal immigrant, he had received his draft papers and had started out on a two-month trek through Quebec until he found a schooner bound for Mexico. The United States was, by that time, too dangerous for him, especially after the trap laid by that son of a bitch Marcel Duchamp, the calculating, sham-timid pig who had deliberately gotten him drunk and put him up on a stage, like a circus monkey, in front of two hundred people, just to have a laugh at his expense. He should have
floored Marcel with one of his powerful jabs. After all, it was that lecture that had brought him to the attention of the U.S. draft board, in whose view he was a strong soldier and an undesirable alien, a man worth more in the trenches, shouldering a bayonet, than sleeping in parks and stripping down in front of upper-middle-class ladies. But Foret feared the war because of his height; he used to say he might at any moment forget where he was, stand up in a trench, and get a bullet between the eyes. The war was for short, inconsistent people, he said. For dwarves convinced a weapon made them powerful. He was powerful without the use of arms, even if the smell of gunpowder in a small theater was one of his secret pleasures.
With Bea in Mexico, he at last felt calm. When he was with her, he regained the conviction that he could do anything with his life. Write poetry, for instance, and hang up his gloves for a time to dedicate himself to reading and trying to articulate his emotions. Bea had brought him a chest of books from New York: not only Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by Lord Byron, which Richard had explicitly requested, but also a pile of offerings from Bea herself that would reveal to him a whole new world: James Joyce, the poetry of Ezra Pound, Eliot, and Williams in grubby magazines. Foret had never been a great reader. His references were scarce, though very intense.
If there was one disadvantage to Foret’s tender savagery, thought Bea, it was his jealousy. Mention of Marinetti and his manifestos was banned in the house; in New York, Bea had hidden them under a mattress and had, to avoid arguments, decided not to bring the books with her to Mexico. Bea had been Marinetti’s lover during the time she lived in Florence, and that, added to the fact that many of her Parisian colleagues constantly compared the two men’s impassioned natures and tendency to violence, was enough to make Foret feel persecuted by the famous Futurist. Aside from jealousy, the comparison offended him: Marinetti’s passion was cold, haughty, mathematical; Foret considered himself to be a gentleman of the old style, the last emissary of spleen in a world proud of its unthinking iconoclasm. Even his violent character was misinterpreted: Foret had spent years escaping from the war, that same war to which Marinetti composed odes.
He had, however, not read Pound. For him, the world of literature ended with Rimbaud; everything afterwards had been imposture. He knew almost nothing about U.S. literature. The only things he respected in North America were the locomotives. But anything Bea gave him was sacred, so he sat down in a corner of the room to browse through one of the new books. Bea watched him tenderly: her enfant sauvage, her great big little brute, her sensitive boxer.
Outside were the sounds of ambulances, street sellers, packs of warring dogs, the usual noises of the center of Mexico City on a sunny afternoon in 1918.
A
In Argentina, Marcelo’s personality was more jarring than usual. In general, he considered his Buenos Aires experience to have been a failure. Except perhaps for the vaguely tragic liaison with that married woman, Romina, in a house on the delta of the River Plate, where they had spent a whole week eating apples and hoping the husband’s return would, for whatever reason, be delayed.
It was a rather predictable love story, seasoned with every cliché of the Argentinian character: Italian family, hysteria, an almost genetic tendency for orgasm. From the very first, Marcelo set out to attract her: he invited her to dinner, took her to a small apartment near Retiro that a professor at the University of Buenos Aires had lent him during his visit, and uttered outrageously imprudent words. Romina, faced with all this, feigned resistance to his Madrid charms, professing a sense of remorse that in the hours dedicated to the bedchamber and its delights made no appearance whatsoever. Until the inevitable occurred: Romina began to utter words possibly even more imprudent than Marcelo’s, mentioning future trips to Finland and Venice. That was when he returned to the path of virtue; subtly, he suggested to Romina the possibility—however remote—that none of those plans would come to fruition since they shouldn’t forget she was married to a man of strong character, and he, Marcelo Valente, would soon be returning to Spain.
The breakup and related emotional outburst took place on a train taking them from Retiro to Tigre: they both shouted, Romina cried, and a pair of down-and-outs threatened Marcelo in an argot he found incomprehensible, promising to crack his head open if he didn’t leave the lady alone. Obviously, such was exactly Marcelo’s intention at that moment, so he left the lady alone and got off two stations early, to then take the next train in the opposite direction and never see her again.
Romina was, for Marcelo, the embodiment of a stereotype that was not merely Argentinian but, thanks to his willful ignorance, Latin American. In his imagination, the entire subcontinent was a place populated by women like that, capricious and laxly Catholic, determined to “give pleasure” to the men in their lives. Perhaps for that reason, with the prospect of living in Mexico for a year in view, Marcelo Valente clearly sensed every drop of blood in his body flowing to the tip of his cock.
B
In a person with such varied interests as Richard Foret, it would be impossible not to find contradictions. While reason is confined to a monosemous logic, and the most sensible people choose their actions based on cause-and-effect calculations—thus acquiring a certain continuity and direction in their lives—sentiment, as is well known, is at the mercy of climatic changes and tends to move between one extreme or the other with a naturalness that only the most valiant of men would call their own. And there is no doubt about it: Richard Foret was a valiant man.
If we are surprised by the absurd plurality of the lives he lived in so short a time, if the list of his occupations, nationalities, and hazardous deeds sounds ridiculous, it is because a degree of rationality greater than his beats within us, a stronger desire for identity. Only for those who exist between two separate forms of life, for those who accept fluctuation, is it possible to approach the life of Richard Foret without being absorbed by it. If our preference for reason is absolute, seamless, then we will never hear his name, never know anything of his greatest love, never—even by mistake—read the string of absurdities that make up his work. We will live in another universe, a universe where Richard Foret has no place, where the Richard Forets who have lived in the world don’t exist.
A midpoint has to be found for Richard Foret to matter for us without our being blown away by the hurricane of his dementia. His is a personality—as many of those who suffered the vehemence of his friendship know—capable of sinking any story.
In the end, the only way to approach Foret without condemning his changeable nature is to speak of his relationship with Beatrice. In Bea Langley, Richard finds the axis mundi he is lacking. He organizes his obsessions around a woman with whom he lived for barely a few months, and she appears to return his feelings. The merit for this obsession does not only rest with Foret: Bea had already captivated other lovers of undeniable spiritual vigor. Forged in the fire of a love triangle with Marinetti and Papini—a triangle that sparked the enmity between the two Italians in the years before the Great War—Bea Langley’s attraction belonged to the realm of terrifying love: falling in love with her meant, if one didn’t have the determination and misogyny of a Futurist, that all the intellectual and emotional activity of the lover would, sooner or later, be centered on her gray eyes.
The relationship between Foret and Langley is the definitive point of inflection in both their lives. His, after Bea, comes to an abrupt end; hers, after Foret’s death, traces out a path increasingly distant from worldly passion. Bea, dedicating herself to the creation of a form of free verse stripped of punctuation, becomes an ethereal woman who, until the sixties, divides her time between the England she had renounced and the Paris she loves. He destroys himself, hounded by all the wars, among strange victims, with the grace of a seagull hunting for fish, sinking his head in the rough sea.
It is a commonplace to talk of an impossible love that, notwithstanding its impossibility, achieves success and yet, in its passage, destroys the agents of that attainment. But
although some historian or person of letters, carried away by cliché, may have attempted to understand it in this way, Foret and Langley’s love was something different. Her confidence, the strength of her protofeminism, makes it impossible for us to imagine a tragic end for Bea. Richard, in contrast, had just such an end tattooed on his brow, and his life consisted of the uninterrupted search for a death worthy of his megalomania. That he may have found in love the detonator of his katabasis should surprise no one: the most timid lover feels his chest swell and the most circumspect becomes epic; in someone like Foret, such an emotion could only exacerbate a nature that tended to be extreme—in the sense where the adjective is used to describe a climate that alternatively scorches and freezes, without any neutral point. Perhaps the only surprising thing is that Foret had not fallen in love before, that he had survived to the age of thirty-one despite the mark of his condemnation, that he had written an incomprehensible book—Fundamental Considerations on Something, composed of not always illuminating notes—and a couple of good articles on art criticism. It seems improbable that such a hyperactive spirit could have found time to sit down and write, in solid prose, an indictment of the Salon des Independants, but this unexpectedly sane exploit is typical of our hero: his lives were several and parallel; this is the only way to explain how he could have been capable of having a German prostitute on either arm during a memorable night of debauchery and at the same time editing a literary magazine, written by himself alone, under a variety of pseudonyms.
Among Strange Victims Page 7