Return to the Dark Valley

by Santiago Gamboa

  I was tired of checking my messages in the hope of news of Juana. Like a jealous lover, I analyzed her e-mail, the time she had sent it, looking for some clue. Was she in Spain? I became convinced that she wasn’t, since it had said, “Go to Madrid,” not “Come to Madrid.” Better to work on something, focus my brain in another direction.

  So I sat down at the desk with my notebooks.

  5

  For quite some time now I had been making notes about Rimbaud, reading and rereading his poems and letters, collecting editions of his books in various languages, and above all, thinking about him, trying to imagine his voice when he said:

  Allez tous vous faire foutre!

  That’s what little Arthur yelled at his classmates in the school in Charleville when they came and pestered him while he was in the library, reading. He would later yell it at Charleville itself, when he left for Paris, and finally at all of Europe, when he decided to abandon it forever.

  Allez tous vous faire foutre!

  Those who knew him say that as a boy he had ice-cold eyes, even though his appearance was that of a frail, helpless child. A strange combination. When he sat in the front row of the class, the teacher would feel uncomfortable, as if he were being judged. It wasn’t long before they all realized that he wasn’t like everybody else. At the age of thirteen, he composed a poem in Latin of sixty hexameters and sent it as a birthday gift to the Prince Imperial, Louis Napoleon, who congratulated the school and ordered his letter of gratitude to be published.

  Arthur’s father, Frédéric Rimbaud, was a strict and somewhat melancholy military man who rose to the rank of captain and spent his life in garrisons in North Africa. Especially in Algeria, in a town named Sebdou, which barely figured on the maps, not far from Oran, the city where Albert Camus’s The Plague is set.

  In Sebdou, France was fighting the sultan of Morocco and various rebel tribes led by Muslim ascetics known as marabouts. To combat them, Rimbaud’s father proposed calling on the services of the magician Robert-Houdin, who challenged the marabouts to a conjuring show in which he used hypnotic suggestion and his famous trick of “the light and heavy chest.” First he asked one of the marabouts to lift a very light cardboard box, which the man did with one finger. Then Robert-Houdin performed hypnosis and asked him to lift it again, but this time he couldn’t do so, even using both hands and all his strength. This impressed the tribes so much that the revolts died down for a while in the region.

  Lieutenant Rimbaud was a key figure in the colonial authorities, with the post of chef du bureau arabe, and had a more than respectable military career: he was awarded the Crimea medal and the Sardinia medal, and a little earlier, in 1854—the year his son Arthur was born—he was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. In other words, the young poet was born into the household of a hero of the fatherland, a hero of France! And as often happens, in such a place there is no room for anybody else. Even more so in the case of Frédéric, who in addition to being a soldier was a literary man. Two of his works were entitled Military Eloquence and Book of War and, to cap it all, he even translated the Quran into French!

  Frédéric had learned Arabic in those slow afternoons in barracks. This suggests that he did not sit in his office swatting flies and watching the ceiling fan turn, as most officers may have done. He was an intellectual and a lone wolf. And as a good soldier, he was severe and very strict. Useful qualities when it came to performing laborious tasks.

  In 1853, Frédéric the Hero of France married a woman who by the standards of the time was already quite old. Her name was Marie Catherine Félicité Vitalie Cuif and she was twenty-eight. She was the daughter of rich peasants from the Ardennes, implacable and straitlaced, and above all very Catholic. Their first child was born that same year, as was traditional, and was given his father’s name: Jean-Nicolas-Frédéric. The second—the hero of this story—arrived on October 20, 1854, and was christened Jean-Nicolas-Arthur.

  After those two years, the father returned to North Africa, moving from garrison to garrison, and on his visits home regularly made his wife pregnant. She was to give birth to three more children, all daughters. The first died young; the two survivors were christened Vitalie and Isabelle. Once Lieutenant Rimbaud decided that his procreative labors were over, he simply disappeared. The Arabian deserts sucked him in. They threw a fine layer of sand over him that blurred the lines of his face, except in the memory of his second son. Arthur was six years old at the time. And when Frédéric finally returned to France, he didn’t go to live with them. These were harsh times. Things as simple as compassion, filial love, or fidelity to a woman had no place in a soul forged in steel. They were attributes excluded from military life. That distance, those dreams of the absent father would perhaps—no, almost certainly—have something to do with the young poet’s future quest.

  In the meantime, what was the boy doing? At the age of nine, Arthur wrote a composition that begins with the following words:

  Le soleil était encore chaud; cependant il n’éclairait presque plus la terre; comme un flambeau placé devant les voûtes gigantesques ne les éclaire plus que par une faible lueur, ainsi le soleil, flambeau terrestre . . .

  His favorite expression in those days was saperlipotte de saperlipopette! which meant something like “boring old nonsense.” He said it about his studies of Latin and Greek, which he would later master, and about history, geography, and even spelling.

  Saperlipotte de saperlipopette!

  He read adventure novels and admired the king of the genre, James Fenimore Cooper, as well as a very curious French imitator of Cooper named Gustave Aimard, who traveled all over America—North and South—where he lived with indigenous tribes, and who then, on his return, spent time in Turkey and the Caucasus. Among other things, Aimard was one of the pioneers in the art of plagiarism, making a word-for-word copy in French of the novella Amalia, by the Argentinian José Mármol, under the strange title La Mas-Horca. Arthur was drawn to the fact that Aimard was a fugitive: an orphaned child, he had fled his adoptive family and set sail for South America. Fugitives, adventurers, writers. The budding young writer does not know that right from the start, in his reading, he is sowing the seeds, not only of his future work, but of his whole life. But who lives with hindsight?

  At the age of twelve, Arthur wrote a historical text about Babylon and Egypt. “He’s a prodigy!” exclaimed the principal of the school in Charleville-Méziers. Vitalie sighed, full of pride. This son would bring the family what people in the provinces long for: respectability and social status.

  The gods of poetry know how to arrange things, so in 1870, when the young man was fifteen, a new teacher arrived at the school. His name was Georges Izambard, and he also wrote verses. He had heard the legend of the genius and was curious, but when he saw him for the first time he found it hard to believe this shy, bright-eyed young boy could possibly be the monster of erudition he had been told about. Arthur was won over by Izambard, immediately recognizing him as a kindred spirit. They began meeting outside school to talk about poetry, literature, and life.

  It is easy to imagine them walking along some path on the outskirts of Charleville, perhaps following the waters of the Meuse. Arthur with his hands in his pockets, shy, occasionally throwing a stone into the current, and by his side, Izambard, telling him of past literary adventures or quoting lines of verse. Two young men casually discussing literature and reinventing the world. Judging by the letters he later wrote, Izambard was one of the people he loved most in the world. These walks allowed him to assert his identity as a poet, which is the most difficult thing of all at the start: to follow your intuition, to believe in something that cannot be seen or touched because it has not yet taken shape, and to do so with intensity, in the same way that others believe in and even love gods that they have never seen either.

  Izambard had a good library containing books by famous rebels, who would show him where to direct tho
se flames that were devouring Arthur. He gave him François Villon, Rabelais, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau. He gave him the Parnassian poets, who at the time were holding the torch of poetry in Paris. He also gave him Victor Hugo, the great seer, who in spite of his fame was much vilified by respectable society. In fact, when Vitalie found him reading Hugo, she tore the book from his hands. She did not look kindly on this enthusiasm of Arthur’s. Basically, she tried to do what any responsible mother would have done: get him away from poetry! But that was impossible. She merely produced the opposite effect, which was to strengthen him in the idea that this was the life he wanted to lead. This and no other. A touching decision, and a risky one too, since it would give him access to the most beautiful but also the most brutal aspects of experience.

  The encounter with Izambard was the final step in his education, and in 1870 he began writing poems that would remain part of his definitive oeuvre: “Sensation,” “Le Forgeron,” “Credo in unam,” “Ophélie,” “Le bal des pendus,” and so on.

  Such was his self-belief that he dared to send a couple of his poems to the review produced by the Parnassians in Paris, the Parnasse Contemporain. Rimbaud’s Complete Works in the Pléiade edition include this letter addressed to Théodore de Banville, editor of the review. It is his second letter, dating from May 24, 1870. What he writes in it are not so much statements as outbursts, such is the young man’s overwhelming elation at having taken the decision to dive unprotected into the shark tank, where the wildest, fiercest poetry is to be found. I imagine him scarcely able to breathe. And then, rereading them, amazed and fearful at what he is about to do: send two of his poems to the most important review in France!

  What temerity!

  With the letter, he enclosed handwritten copies of “Credo in unam” and “Ophélie.”

  In the letter he says:

  I love all poets and all good Parnassians, since every poet is a Parnassian, in love with ideal beauty.

  And later he adds:

  In two years, or perhaps even one, I’ll be in Paris. I, too, gentlemen, will be a Parnassian. I don’t know what I have in me, something longing t o come out. I swear to you, dear master, that I will always worship the two goddesses: the Muse and Freedom.

  And he ends with a postscript that is almost a plea:

  I am not well known, but what does that matter? All poets are brothers. These verses believe, love, hope. That is all. Dear master: Help me, I am young. Hold out your hand to me.

  I can imagine him a few weeks later, prowling about the newsstand, waiting for the latest publications to arrive from Paris, until finally he sees it, and then the nervous way he must have leafed through the pages looking for his poems, his name . . . in vain.

  The poems had not been published.

  It is the first and hardest lesson for any writer starting out on his career: an editor’s rejection. A door abruptly closing, taking with it what he believes will be his only opportunity. It isn’t, of course, but he is not to know that. The clamor of the moment generates bewilderment, frustration, anger. Arthur tells Izambard, who tries to console him.

  “They’re rejecting me because I’m from the provinces,” Arthur says.

  As far as he is concerned, he is already a full-fledged poet, and he can’t wait to reach the salons of Paris and conquer what he believes already belongs to him. He alone knows it, but he’s right: they are already his. The poems the Parnasse Contemporain refused to publish are still read today, unlike those of Théodore de Banville, the man who rejected them. That’s literature. These first poems may lack the bitter stamp characteristic of the mature Rimbaud, but he is already head and shoulders above most of his contemporaries.

  When the school year came to an end in 1870, Arthur won the annual competition of the Academy, on the following subject: a speech in Latin verse that Sancho Panza might have addressed to his donkey—what young student today could do something like that? The jury was astonished by the young man’s talent, but any joy he may have felt was spoiled by an unwelcome piece of news: that his beloved teacher and friend Izambard was leaving. That same month the Franco-Prussian War had started and, his situation being uncertain, he preferred to be closer to his family home in Douai, near the Belgian border.

  For Arthur it was a catastrophe. He felt abandoned, as if he had lost a father for the second time. When he found out, he wrote that as far as he was concerned, the idea of spending a single day in Charleville without Izambard was “simply unbearable,” and he threatened to run away to Paris as soon as he received the prize medal. The day Izambard left, Arthur went with him to the station. It was a warm morning. Before Izambard got on the train, they embraced desperately. When the locomotive began to move, Arthur felt his soul fall to his feet, and there he stood, motionless, until the train was no more than a thin line on the horizon. Now his friend was gone. He may have thought that this was what life was like: a series of desertions and a great deal of loneliness. Or he may have told himself that attachments make us weak. In any case, there he stood for some time, until the platform was empty.

  A few days later he received his prize from the Academy with contempt. Vitalie and his sisters were proud. His brother was not very effusive, but congratulated him. To Arthur, such pompous honors seemed empty, laughable, contemptible. He was furious. What is a medal? A piece of tin. Nothing in comparison with what he had lost.

  The patriotic fervor aroused by the war with Germany was strong in Charleville, which was close to one of the fronts. In his first letter to Izambard, Arthur writes: “My native town is the stupidest of provincial towns.” He says that all the retired shopkeepers have put on uniforms and now march beside the shoemakers and fruit vendors.

  Saperlipotte de saperlipopette!

  His old battle cry echoed again. He was about to strike his first menacing, well-aimed blow.

  On August 28, less than two weeks later, Arthur escaped his mother’s vigilance and boarded a train for Paris. I imagine him once again sitting in a railroad car, alone, his nose glued to the window, watching the meadows along the Meuse grow ever more distant, until he has left his hometown far behind. Paris is 145 miles from Charleville. A modern express covers the distance in two and a half hours, but at that time it must have been closer to seven.

  Final stop: Paris, Gare de l’Est!

  There he was, his mind about to explode with what he was doing. I imagine his emotion on seeing the first rooftops of the city, the streets alive with trade meandering around the railroad tracks. It was already so close. The capital of poetry. Paris, at last.

  There was a problem, though: as he had been unable to carry out his original escape plan—which involved selling some medals before setting off—he didn’t have a centime on him to pay for his journey. And so, when he got off the train, the ticket collectors took him to a police station, and after a brief, fruitless interrogation, he was transferred to Mazas Prison, where he spent a week, since he had no papers on him and had refused to give his name.

  What did Vitalie think? In the middle of a war, his poor mother must have imagined the worst: that her son had joined the army and was facing God alone knew what dangers. So many things could happen to an adolescent!

  When he saw there was no way out, Arthur turned to the man he considered his father, Georges Izambard, begging him to come to Paris. Izambard sent money and a letter to the public prosecutor, enough to get him released. But instead of returning to Charleville, Rimbaud took a train to Douai and showed up unannounced at Izambard’s house.

  According to his best biographer, the Irish critic and scholar Enid Starkie, the poem “The Seekers of Lice” alludes to this period in Douai, when Izambard’s aunts set about washing his beautiful curly blond hair, and above all removing from his scalp the elusive lice and nits he had picked up during his time in a Paris prison.

  6

  The days at Santa Águeda went by calmly, with a lot of de
lirious praying as well as a great deal of what might be thought of “lower activities.” It was an explosion of hormones, the final holocaust of the hymen. We were young, we were discovering freedom and the power that came from our bodies. If we had been outside, in a public school, we would have done the same, which is why there are so many teenage pregnancies.

  My group of rebel novices established itself and became my new tribe. Time passed and I turned sixteen, and we celebrated it with a big party, held in secret, of course, at the bottom of the garden and in the middle of the night, fucking two young social studies teachers on loan from the Esculapian community, and a couple of police officers, too. All drinking and doing coke out of cans. Well, I was doing coke, being the most concerned about my health among us, while Vanessa and Estéfany each smoked at least half a dozen pipes of crack from a huge bag that the police officers brought them as a gift, in return for what I don’t know but I can imagine. That was the beginning of the end, because after the party there was some left over and Vanessa started selling it to other girls in the convent. She gave it to them to try and then sold it.

  Soon afterwards, one day when we were in the gym, the nuns went to the dormitory and searched it. They looked in suitcases, trunks, and overnight bags, and that’s how they found Vanessa’s rucksack filled with small bags of crack, along with coke, condoms, and anal lubricant. In another case they found a whole lot of money in cash and half a bottle of aguardiente.

  All hell broke loose.

  The first thing the mother superior did was call the police, and since they knew we were a group they immediately separated us, each of us alone in an office while they went through all our things with a fine-tooth comb. Then the police sniffer dogs arrived, and one of them practically swallowed one of Vanessa’s G-strings. In Estéfany’s things they found six boxes of contraceptive pills and in Lady’s overnight bag some condoms, but nothing serious. In mine they didn’t find a thing, because I didn’t have anything. I never kept anything with me.