Return to the Dark Valley

by Santiago Gamboa

  After two weeks, I decided to tell Juana. At first she looked at me incredulously, so I showed her my notes. The name wasn’t a common one, and everything else matched. After discussing it, we both reached the conclusion that it was the same person. There was no more room for doubt.

  “You have to tell her, Consul. These unsettled accounts grow with time. It would be the best thing for her.”

  “I’m worried about her reaction and what she’s going to do afterwards,” I said. “Let me think it over.”

  Two more weeks passed until one night, after a great deal of preamble, which merely increased her curiosity, I made up my mind.

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” I said. “You remember the Colombian priest who was with me in the hospital? He told me about a group of paramilitaries operating in the western part of Antioquia. At one point in the story he mentioned a guy from Cali who was there because he had to hide, and he stayed to fight alongside them. His name was Freddy Otálora.”

  Manuela turned pale.

  “Freddy Otálora . . . ?” she said.

  “Not so long ago, he was on a ranch near Aguacatal called Gaviotas.”

  Manuela closed her eyes. Her face was transformed. I started to fear her reaction. She opened her eyes again and said, “I have to go back to Colombia and find him.”

  “Find him?” Juana said, surprised.

  Manuela stood up and walked nervously to the window. A cloud promised rain. A big ugly bird, motionless on a TV aerial, looked interested in our conversation. Then she came back to the table.

  “Find him and kill him,” she said, biting her lip. “But not just like that, no, kill him in the cruelest way possible.”

  “You couldn’t do a thing like that, he’d kill you first,” I warned her.

  “I don’t care. It’s him or me.”

  It was time for a few drinks, so I fetched a bottle of Gordon’s.

  “We should confirm that it’s the same person,” I said, “and then report him to the authorities.”

  Manuela took a large swig of gin. “I don’t think there are two sons of bitches with the same name. Report him? Sorry, Consul, don’t make me laugh. What else did the priest tell you?”

  I took out my notebook and read the parts where Freddy was mentioned.

  “It’s the priest speaking, I wrote down what I could remember of his story.”

  Manuela finished her drink and crushed an ice cube with her teeth. “The man’s a murderer. I’m going to get him.”

  We went to the kitchen and served dinner. Juana took the boy a plate so that he could eat in front of the TV set.

  “It’ll be much more dangerous with those people around, don’t you think?” Juana said. “He’ll be armed and he’ll be surrounded by killers.”

  “I’ve heard that for three hundred euros you can hire a hit man in Cali,” Manuela said.

  “That may be so,” I said, “but you’d still have to go there and find one. It’s impossible.”

  “I’m going to do it,” Manuela said. “I have to do it.”

  When Manuela had gone, Juana came to my room.

  “I understand her. What she wants to do is a bit crazy, but I understand her. We should help her.”

  “She won’t achieve anything except getting herself killed,” I said. “And what could we do anyway?”

  “I can help her,” Juana said, “those killers don’t scare me, I know them, I know their weak spots.”

  I didn’t dare say anything, so we remained silent until she said: “Have you taken your pills?”

  She still insisted on maintaining the role of nurse. I said good night to her.

  The next day Manuela didn’t come, or the day after. I started to get worried. She finally appeared on the Friday night.

  “I’ve been looking on the Internet to find out about the paramilitaries in that area. There are articles about the massacres, but nobody mentions him.”

  “Maybe the priest got it wrong,” I said. “Or maybe he made it all up.”

  “I don’t think so, Consul,” Manuela said. “That priest isn’t stupid. Plus, I checked the other names in his story and they all exist.”

  “Really? That changes things. Have any been arrested?” I asked.

  “No, they were all investigated, but according to the articles there was never any conclusive evidence.”

  “Rather than think about killing him,” I said, “we should check if he’s still alive. Maybe they killed him. Or maybe he’s been arrested recently. After all, the police in Cali are after him, aren’t they?”

  Juana grabbed her cell phone and started searching through her contacts list.

  “I know who can help us,” she said. “Let’s see if I can find him. Here he is. He’s a rather strange guy, but he knows that world well and he has contacts in Colombia. He owes me a favor. If your mind is made up, I’ll call him. He’ll help us find him and confirm whether or not he’s the same one.”

  Manuela replied quite calmly, “My mind is made up. Who is your friend?”

  “A crazy and eccentric Argentinian,” Juana said. “His name’s Carlos Melinger, but they call him Tertullian.”

  2

  After the melodramatic episode in Brussels between Mathilde and Paul Verlaine, the pair of fugitive poets headed for London. Thanks to the war the previous year, and the crushing of the Paris Commune, the city was full of French refugees: politicians, journalists, writers, deserters. Many had been sentenced to death in France.

  On their arrival they were received by the artist Guillaume Regamey, who helped them to find lodgings at 35 Howland Street. The place was somewhat seedy, especially for Verlaine, who had refined tastes. And it was still summer. The fog and the cold had not yet made their appearance. Rimbaud, on the other hand, felt fine. It was his first contact with a different culture and in another language.

  They soon adapted to their new life, and the truth is that, surrounded by so many exiles, the two poets felt increasingly in their element, united in the idea that they, too, were also somewhat marginal. They met Swinburne and a young English poet named Oliver Madox Brown, who was even younger than Rimbaud and was considered a poetic genius in literary circles. But Madox Brown died at the age of nineteen, which was considered a great loss. In spite of this, his works have been forgotten, as was his name.

  In London, Rimbaud and Verlaine lived a life of immigrants: they learned English, they took countless walks through the city, expressed surprise at the differences, felt nostalgia for France and at the same time joy at being far from her, and discovered many things that were beautiful, along with others that were unpleasant or disappointing. Like anyone who attempts to settle in a new place, it is possible that they dreamed of another life. Of being other people.

  As Rimbaud said, Je est un autre.

  Before long, Verlaine learned of the legal proceedings that Mathilde had set in motion in Paris to gain a divorce. A bad omen. The news unsettled him, and once again his mood changed. Deep down, he didn’t want a divorce, let alone to lose his son. As often happens with artists, Paul wanted to have his cake and eat it. He started writing passionate letters to Mathilde and, surprisingly, she replied.

  In November 1872, Rimbaud also had a change of mind and suddenly began worrying about the fate of his manuscripts, those that had remained in Verlaine’s house and, hélàs!, were in Mathilde’s possession (or had been destroyed). The idea he had for getting them back was the strangest and most illogical imaginable: he wrote to Vitalie, his long-suffering mother, and begged her to go to Paris and talk to Verlaine’s mother-in-law. Given all that had gone before, the idea was pure nonsense. But young Arthur was clever and knew which strings to pull. He told his mother that these manuscripts were valuable and that if they were published they might bring in quite a lot of money. Vitalie did as she was asked and traveled to Paris. There sh
e met with Verlaine’s mother and asked for a letter of introduction to the Meuté de Fleurys. As was to be expected, the errand was unsuccessful. Mathilde’s family refused any agreement or concession, and of course didn’t hand over the manuscripts (did they still exist? “The Spiritual Hunt” was among them!).

  I try to imagine that encounter: on one side, Rimbaud’s mother, proud and very nervous, intimidated by the luxury of the drawing room in the hôtel privé, and on the other, the scorn and harshness of Verlaine’s parents-in-law. It was a brutal collision between the provincial bourgeoisie and Parisian nobility, made even worse by the previous experience the Meuté de Fleurys had of the Rimbaud family thanks to the young devil. The discussion must have been so tense and full of threats that Vitalie, on leaving there, immediately wrote to Arthur asking him to return to Charleville and get far away from Verlaine, or they would all be in trouble.

  The incredible thing is that Rimbaud agreed.

  That Christmas, after all that Verlaine had done to be with him, young Arthur returned alone to Charleville, leaving his friend to suffer the cold and drizzle of London. Verlaine, deeply depressed and feeling betrayed by his friend, wrote one of his best known poems:

  Il pleure dans mon coeur

  Comme il pleut sur la ville

  Quelle est cette langueur

  Qui pénètre mon coeur?

  Then Verlaine fell sick, which allowed him to write to friends telling them what a bad condition he was in, and to his mother, begging her to come, and asking in passing that she bring Rimbaud to be with him on his deathbed. The ploy worked, and in January 1873 he was back with his beloved Lucifer and ready to resume a Bohemian lifestyle: what he himself called “our shameful life in London in 1873.”

  There is an important aspect that Starkie emphasizes, which is Arthur’s fascination with the docks of London. “Tyre and Carthage in one!” That is what he called them, enthused by the variety of faces coming from the four corners of the world. It was something he had never seen before, and may have been an early premonition of the remote places where he would spend the rest of his life.

  He was a young man watching a mass of men getting off boats with sacks on their backs and feeling a slight tremor of anxiety, knowing that one day he would be among them, going a long way away. It is as if he recognized his destiny: to escape from a world that, with the weak body but thunderous voice of an adolescent poet, he was already cursing, already defying.

  Starkie says that Rimbaud spent hours at the docks, trying to talk with the sailors coming off the ships, managing to understand them in some language known to him, and asking them about what they had seen on their travels, from which remote places they had come, and what fantastic or salacious things they had experienced. It was the first time he had seen such large boats!

  He was already possessed by the tremor of travel. Once again, he heard the beating of distant drums. During that time in London, Rimbaud and Verlaine frequented the opium dens of the East End, near the dock area. It is no surprise that they were regular customers. Arthur was still searching for alternative worlds, seeing his hallucinations in a poetic light, and poor Paul, with his addictive personality, was a slave to anything that could at least offer him a little pleasure.

  Rimbaud, on the other hand, even though he went to the limit, always managed to keep a clear head, and to maintain poetry at the center of his life. It is believed that it was during this time that he started to conceive A Season in Hell. How much in these verses derives from the hallucinations of opium? It is an irrelevant question, since, as Baudelaire said, drugs only reveal what the poet already has inside him. Rimbaud himself wrote about this in A Season in Hell: “Excess is stupid, vice is stupid.” The young man is about to conclude a new stage and judges himself ruthlessly. He rejects his old ideas about poetry and life. In “Alchemy of the Word” he says: “Now I can assert that art is nonsense.”

  This is a fundamental part of young Arthur’s brilliance: the speed with which he burned his bridges, the way his poetry constantly projected him forward, feeding on the ruins of his previous ideas. A process that, in other writers, might take decades, in him was a matter of months.

  His poetry was heading toward either obscurity or the future at the speed of a rocket.

  In April 1873, they left London. Verlaine wanted to avoid divorce from Mathilde at all costs, but he did not dare go to Paris. He was afraid he would be arrested for his participation in the Commune and his contacts with French exiles in England. That is why from London they decided to go to Brussels. Soon after arriving there, Arthur continued alone as far as Roche, in the French Ardennes, to join his mother and sisters on what had once been the farm owned by Vitalie’s parents.

  Green mountains, meadows, trees standing out against the twilit sky . . . And in the middle of these placid images, the ruins of war. According to his future brother-in-law, Paterne Berrinchon, Arthur showed up unexpectedly, was pleased to see his mother and sisters, but was insensible to anything else and spent the time lying half-asleep on a rickety bed, without saying a word, or else shut himself up in the barn and spent the evenings alone. This is how this period is remembered by his sister Isabelle, who was twelve at the time.

  Starkie says there are two likely causes for his somber mood: either he was recovering from the drugs he had taken in London, or he was reexamining his life, prior to beginning the frenzied composition of A Season in Hell. In a letter to Delahaye, he tells him that he is writing some short stories in prose, which he will entitle something like Pagan Book or Black Book.

  “My fate depends on that book,” he says.

  While passing through Brussels on his way to Roche, Rimbaud had even spoken with a printer and reached an agreement to publish it.

  Again it was Verlaine who persuaded him to return to London, and on May 27 they again set sail for England. Rimbaud already had much of A Season in Hell in his bag.

  Here they were again, in a room at 8 Great College Street, Camden Town. But the situation was not easy. Verlaine’s constant mood swings exasperated Rimbaud. Paul was racked with guilt and remorse, from which he escaped with alcohol and probably sex or drugs, which in turn engendered more guilt, and so on in a vicious circle that had no end.

  Weary of all this, unable any longer to stand his sentimentality, Rimbaud began to humiliate him pitilessly. He made fun of his appearance, his mood swings. It should not be forgotten that while Verlaine was suffering these terrible psychodramas of his, Rimbaud continued writing A Season in Hell. In other words, Rimbaud was in a position of strength: he was creating a work of art, something he could touch with his fingers, while Paul, unhappy Paul, was only writing letters to his mother complaining of his bad luck and making an endless list of all the things he lacked.

  The situation led in the end to a psychotic scene, very much in the style of Verlaine. After Arthur had made fun of him, Paul left the room and ran down the stairs. When Rimbaud reacted and ran after him, he found that he had boarded a boat on the Thames, bound for Antwerp. Arthur signaled to him to come back, but Paul, very dignified, looked away. What followed was the biggest breakdown in Paul Verlaine’s life so far. From the boat he wrote a letter to Mathilde with a strange ultimatum: If she did not join him in Brussels within the next three days, he would shoot himself.

  On Rimbaud’s part, the drama also now became intense. What we know for certain is that after being abandoned by his lover he started drinking, and while drunk wrote him a letter begging his forgiveness and imploring him to come back. “If I don’t see you again I’ll enlist in the army or the navy. Come back, all I do is cry,” he says.

  Verlaine replied with a letter that is already the height of melodrama:

  “As I have loved you intensely, I want you to know that if within three days I haven’t reconciled with my wife in a satisfactory way, I’ll blow my brains out. Three days in a hotel and a revolver are expensive, hence my past auster
ity.”

  Not content with this, Verlaine made the same announcement of suicide to his mother and various friends in Paris, in the hope that Mathilde would get to hear of it. He even wrote to Rimbaud’s mother, and Vitalie replied, trying to dissuade him. “Do as I do, be strong and courageous in the face of suffering.”

  Mathilde did not go to Brussels—the letter was intercepted by her father—and when his ultimatum expired, Verlaine again changed his plan. He no longer wanted to kill himself. He wired Rimbaud and begged him to come to Brussels on July 8 to see him for the last time before he left for Spain and joined the Carlist army.

  And of course, he succeeded.

  But on arrival, Arthur did not find a man convinced of his destiny and packing his bags to go off to war, only the same drunken, sentimental poet as ever, now accompanied by his mother. Verlaine asked that they go back to London together, and took the matter as settled, but this time it was Rimbaud who refused. The atmosphere became heated. Sparks flew and Verlaine, now very drunk, begged and begged. Rimbaud tried to tell him that he could no longer stand this life. Verlaine drank until he lost consciousness.

  Two days later the arguments continued. Verlaine wouldn’t stop drinking. Finally, Rimbaud told him he was leaving. Verlaine stopped him. He locked the door and sat down in front of it. There was a struggle, insults were hurled. Then Verlaine took out the pistol with which he had been planning to kill himself and fired at Arthur three times. One bullet hit him in the wrist and the other two lodged in the wall. Seeing what he had done, Paul took fright, left the room, and ran to his mother’s room—incredibly, she was still there, in the same hotel—and collapsed on the bed, weeping, saying that he had been on the verge of killing Rimbaud.

  Soon afterwards, Arthur arrived, and Paul’s mother, worried, bandaged his wound. Then they went to the hospital but it was not possible to extract the bullet, so Rimbaud decided to return to his family in Roche, and this upset Verlaine, who again took out the pistol in the middle of the street. A policeman who was nearby stopped him and took him to the police station, but since the crime was a serious one, they transferred him to L’Ami Prison and then to Petits Carmes Prison, accused of attempted murder.