A dose costs 150,000 pesos, 75 dollars in the United States. When it is sold to the public, it is mixed with amphetamines. Pure, it would be very powerful—and dangerous.
In Colombia it’s not easy to get hold of the ingredients. They are extracted from pills like Rivotril, which contains clonazepam, an anxiolytic and anticonvulsive used in neurological treatment.
We served ourselves another round of drinks. The Bombay gin coursed pleasantly through my body.
I told Víctor the story the priest Ferdinand Palacios had told me in the police hospital in Madrid and his connection with the paramilitary Freddy Otálora. What role did Freddy play in the pink cocaine trade?
Víctor looked in his files and couldn’t find the name, which meant he wasn’t one of the big bosses. He called a friend who worked in the crime and narcotics section of a weekly paper, who confirmed to him that yes, he was a rising drug trafficker, with quite a long criminal past behind him, a whole series of previous crimes as a paramilitary. He operated between Antioquia, Caldas, and Cauca. He was indeed involved with pink cocaine and had made a deal with the bigger bosses to keep part of the trade for himself. He was close to various families who managed the retail side. He had good contacts and although he was still in the category of “local mafioso,” he was considered a key element of the Mexican cartels in Colombia. That’s what gave him his power of negotiation.
“Do you know Quitzé Fernández?” Víctor asked.
“No,” I said, “who is he?”
“A journalist from the Diario de Sinaloa. The cartel kidnapped him last year and almost killed him for something he’d written. They kept him for about a month and eventually let him go, but in pretty bad shape. He was considered a survivor, and the Mexican government and the newspaper wanted to send him to Europe, but he refused. He didn’t want to give up writing about secret tunnels and throat cuttings to write about Aztec ceramics in the Louvre. They offered him the United States and he refused again. ‘Stupid gringos,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t be seen dead there for how they treat Mexicans.’ The only thing he accepted was Colombia, to study the cartels’ branches and alliances here.”
“That’s the guy for me,” I said.
Víctor took out his phone and called him. He spoke for a while, and finally said to me:
“He’s coming here.”
When he saw me, Quitzé hit his forehead with the palm of his hand and said:
“I know you, man, a friend of mine gave a seminar on you at Ibero University in Mexico City. And I went to see you when you came to the Book Fair in Sinaloa two years ago.”
He poured himself a long glass of whiskey and came and sat down. Without beating about the bush, Víctor brought him up-to-date and asked him about Freddy Otálora.
“Well, he’s starting to make a name for himself. The Mexicans trust him because he finds them good suppliers of coke and crack. What the cartels are trying to do is control the whole chain, from production through to retail. It’s one of the most obvious expressions of capitalism, except that it’s illegal; no restrictions placed on it by the State. That’s why they need to have people here. They know that those who have the best contacts in Colombia will be the strongest here. It’s a matter of time. The cartels were working with some elements of FARC, especially in Putumayo, but the peace process has screwed that up: the rules changed, they lost control of the territory, and the guerrillas who continued in the business had one big problem: the others, the ones who agreed to the amnesty, knew where the labs were, knew the routes, knew how they worked with the growers and pickers. Obvious, right? After the process, a lot of people were arrested and a lot of fields bombed. The very same people who were demobilized showed the army where to go. The amount sent to México fell by forty percent, and on the border things started to heat up, not because of the shortage of coke, but because of the prices, which started rising. And then came the disaster: what they received was already very cut, inflated with all kinds of crap, and so by the time they sold it, which is when they cut it again, there was nothing left. It was chaos! And chaos causes a standard reaction, which is that heads roll, and not in a figurative sense. It’s our way of killing. The Mexican Revolution was made by cutting heads, like with the Aztecs.”
Quitzé knocked back what remained in his glass and poured himself another drink. Víctor handed him a bowl of potato chips and peanuts.
“That’s why the cartels started working with the ex-paramilitaries. As exporters say: you have to make sure of the supply in the off-season. They didn’t give a damn that they were the enemies of their previous partners in FARC. Their motto is: ‘Don’t get involved in other people’s problems.’ They do their own thing, they pay, they transport. If you have problems with your mother that’s your business, and as they say: as long as you give us what we want, fine, if later you want to kill each other, you’re perfectly within your rights, but first things first, okay? It’s the morality of capitalism. Colombia is their promised land! The term they use for this practice is ‘disintermediation,’ an aggressive modern management model; it’s a strange word, and I hate to write it, but it means exactly what it says: do away with external intermediaries and keep the whole chain under your control. They use the same system with arms: they don’t buy from a Mexican gang that brings the arms in from the United States, they have people themselves who do the job. It’s a very sophisticated business model, unlike other organizations like the Zetas, who still control the Caribbean area around Veracruz, while Sinaloa is stronger on the Pacific.”
Quitzé drew long lines in the air with his fingers as he spoke. He was a short man, and slightly overweight; he had a slight limp I didn’t feel like asking about.
“They had and still have ex-FARC people around Caquetá and Meta,” he continued, “and especially around Catatumbo, to pass it to Venezuela through Táchira, and from there, with the help of the guys in red caps, get it out to the north. Then the army took out Megateo, who was their ally in the area, and they had to reorganize. And every setback like that costs them millions! Around Cauca they worked with Macaco, the paramilitary who was extradited, but that was a few years ago. Since then the Sinaloa boys have started to take over Lower Cauca. Their people buy cocaine from the highest bidder, make half-ton bundles, and launch them on the Pacific in fast boats. Then once out at sea, a ship picks them up and takes them to Central America or straight to Mexico. Doing it all themselves triples their profits, and they don’t have to give a cut to any of the Colombian cartels, who would end up being their competitors. I’ve calculated that here in Colombia a kilo of cocaine is worth twenty-four hundred dollars, but once over the border with the United States it goes up to thirty-three thousand, three hundred dollars. And then, divided into small doses in New York or Houston, it produces a hundred twenty thousand dollars. Do you know any other business in the world where there’s such a huge gap between the cost of production and the selling price?
“That’s where Freddy Otálora comes in, because he runs the Urabá area and has contacts in Cauca. In addition, he serves them as a double agent, because the Sinaloa boys are in the middle of a narco-revolution, successfully diversifying into synthetic drugs. They have labs in Culiacán, where they do the synthesizing on an industrial scale and from there distribute around the country and across the border. Being well established in the ports, they bring in the ingredients really cheaply from China or India. Here in Colombia it’s more difficult, and that’s why Freddy is winning the game of pink cocaine against his competitors in Cauca. The Sinaloa boys pay him in chemical supplies or even give it to him and then charge him a percentage on the sales. The other groups have to find the ingredients in medicines whose sale is reserved for psychiatric patients. That’s not so easy, and the profit margins are small.”
The doorbell rang and Víctor said, ah, that’s the delivery, I ordered us some takeout food. He soon returned with a tray of barbecued chicken wings and spicy sauce
in plastic cups.
“What about the tortillas, you lousy Colombians, when are you going to learn how to eat?”
Víctor wagged a finger in his face. “If you don’t shut up about the food, I’ll tell your paper you’re drinking whiskey, not tequila.”
“For your information, my favorite drink isn’t tequila, or even mezcal. Don’t you know sotol, from Coahuila? The indigenous people drink it in rituals and celebrations. The tequila you get here is very bad, and the good stuff is very expensive.”
We ate the chicken wings with our hands. To be honest, the gin we’d been drinking had been begging for company. Quitzé continued with his story:
“Because of that advantage he has with the Sinaloa boys, Freddy Otálora has carved out a space for himself and is growing, and now what he’s looking for is a larger structure. He comes from the paramilitaries in Urabá. Since that organization was financed by ranchers and landowners, when demobilization happened most of the fighters, the foot soldiers, either went back to their lands or continued the fight as criminal gangs. Some even joined the guerrillas. Having learned to get what you want with a gun spoils you, and then it’s not so easy to get out. That’s why Freddy was left alone, he didn’t even have money to maintain all those people. And that’s why he’s looking for alliances with larger groups. That’s where he is now. The Sinaloa boys give him a free hand to do as he pleases, as long as his schemes work, because the day he makes a mistake he’ll show up in a barrel of cement or with his skull in such a bad state that only his lousy dentist will be able to recognize him.”
I felt dizzy from the gin and called a taxi. The information I’d learned from Quitzé made me realize that I had to persuade Manuela, at all costs, to go back to Madrid, finish her psychoanalysis, and get on with her life. It was too dangerous a game for a young literature student. And the first victim could well be Juana. I didn’t want to lose her again.
6
His African period began in 1880, with a prologue on the island of Cyprus, where he returned to work as a foreman in a construction company in the great port of Limassol. Ever since the British had taken the island, there had been a great deal of public building, and it was easy to find work. He could have stayed and progressed in that position, but young Arthur already belonged to that anxious legion of those who dream every day of being rich the next day. Where did that ambition come from? Perhaps from his mother’s social expectations.
Rimbaud had a somewhat messy relationship with money. For several years, he was maintained by Verlaine and didn’t have to worry; his drinking bouts were paid for, as was his food. Both important things for a poet! When he was left alone, he managed to find small jobs that allowed him to get by, but he did not persevere in any of them. Two weeks, a month, two months at the most. His longing for financial success was such that he saw the passing of time as a prison sentence.
He had to be rich now, this minute!
It was an obsession that led him to hate his employers, who never paid him what he thought he deserved. Because another characteristic of this legion of the anxious is to consider themselves eternally undervalued. Their own estimation of themselves is, alas, never shared by anyone else. Their rebellious dignity conspires against them and leads them to make disastrous decisions. Rimbaud would always end up insulting those above him and slamming the door.
So Rimbaud left Cyprus, with his head held high, but without a cent in his pocket. He crossed the Red Sea and looked for work in a number of ports, eventually arriving in Aden, which today belongs to Yemen, where he found work as a commercial agent for a French coffee exporter named Pierre Bardey.
He settled in the city.
“Aden is the crater of an extinct volcano with the bottom covered in sea sand. Nothing can be seen but sand and lava, incapable of producing any vegetation. The surroundings are a desert of sand, absolutely arid. And inside, the walls of the crater stop the air from coming in so that we roast at the bottom of this hole as if we were in a lime kiln.” (Letter of August 25, 1880.)
This is the fearful description he sends his mother, since even though he wanted to leave Europe forever, excoriating it in his poetry, the truth is that he felt no great love for the places he visited, or at least never expressed it. Perhaps he did not do so in his letters to his mother in order to keep her anxious and on his side.
His modest job in Aden got him a little closer to Abyssinia. Years earlier, in the reading room of the British Museum, he had read Burton’s writings about Harar, the sacred city of Islam, with its eighty-two mosques, walled and shut off from Europeans for decades and opened to trade only since 1875, when it was conquered by Egypt.
I can imagine Rimbaud’s surprise on hearing his employer mention Harar. It was a key city on the trade route from the interior of Abyssinia, and through it coffee, ivory, hides, and rubber circulated. Indeed, Bardey decided to go there and investigate for himself. Enthused by the possibilities, he rented a huge building and transformed it into a store and warehouse. And in November 1880, he sent Rimbaud to take charge of the branch.
The young poet—no longer so young and no longer a poet, as far as he himself was concerned, even though he was already the greatest poet in France—set off.
Harar! Passing through the gates of the walled city and entering that maze of dark streets, Rimbaud once again let himself be carried away by his own dreams of greatness. He was the only Frenchman in the city and had to take advantage of the situation. He could establish a monopoly over what was produced in the area. This fired his imagination, and he asked his mother to send him books about the strangest professions. He wanted to learn it all, to be a merchant and at the same time a builder. But as usual, this sudden enthusiasm faded, and young Rimbaud was left to face reality, which is that he was merely an agent for someone else’s business, while life in Harar was unbearably tedious as soon as darkness fell.
In a letter to Vitalie from February 1881 he says that he is dying of boredom and that he will be leaving very soon, when he has saved enough money, because he has already realized that life in Harar will not lead him to the wealth he longs for. Looking for alternatives, and a place that would allow him to realize his dreams, he remembered that strange Polish sailor with whom he drank Chinese rice liquor in the harbor of Samarang before leaving for Java. Could America be the continent where he would be able to achieve his ambition? Could that young man named Józef Konrad have been right when he told him that it was the “new world?” What is certain is that in the same letter in which he complains about the lack of opportunities offered him by Harar, he asks his mother the following:
“Send me news of the works in Panama. As soon as they begin I’ll go there. I’d like to leave immediately.”
He is referring to the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique in Panama, a French company that had bought the concession and was getting ready to execute the plans conceived by Ferdinand de Lesseps, the engineer of the Suez Canal, who had been in the isthmus since 1879, preparing to start.
This is how Rimbaud learned of the project. Lesseps was to take to Panama many of those who had worked on the Suez Canal, and throughout the region, including in Aden, rumors must have been circulating widely about this new enterprise, which was due to get under way in 1881.
But Rimbaud was incapable of maintaining the morning’s enthusiasms until evening, and the idea was quickly forgotten and replaced by new delusions.
After contracting syphilis—how? from whom?—he again spent some time in Aden. He was already anxious to leave Bardey’s company, but unable to settle on anything else, he found himself reluctantly obliged to continue in his current job.
One of his intentions was to work for the Société de Géographie de France, sending accounts of his travels through as yet unexplored areas. The Société showed no interest in him for the moment, although some years later, in 1884, they did publish a report on his journey to the province of Og
aden, as far as the river Web, on the southern outskirts of Harar.
According to Starkie, the report was very well received and the Société wrote to him asking for biographical information and some photographs to be included in an album of famous explorers, but Rimbaud did not deign to reply. Rather than lack of interest, his attitude concealed something deeper. He was still smarting from the contemptuous reception of A Season in Hell and did not want to be seen as a mere travel writer. He imagined one of the Parisian poets he detested saying sarcastically: “Well, well, look at this, young Rimbaud is now busy writing travel reports!”
His life in Harar continued, although he would never stop complaining and conveying to his mother and sister his feelings of being abandoned, of being the victim of something he did not know. As if he were threatened by some strange, uncontrollable metaphysical conspiracy.
On May 6, he writes to them:
“I am sorry I never married and had a family. ( . . . ) What is the point of all these comings and goings, all this weariness, all these adventures among strange races, all the languages that have accumulated in my memory? What is the point of all these nameless sufferings if it is not going to be possible for me, after a few years, to rest in a place I like, have a family and bear at least one child? ( . . . ) Who knows how long my days in these mountains will continue? I could disappear, in the middle of these tribes, without the news ever reaching the outside world.”
It is far from certain that Rimbaud was sincere in writing this about the place where he lived for ten years and was reasonably happy, but he liked to keep his mother feeling sorry enough for him to help him in his wild schemes. Vitalie continued sending him books on the most varied subjects: not a small expense if one adds in the shipping costs. Curiously, we know the lists of the books he asked for and not one is a literary work. Does that mean that he not only abandoned the writing of literature, but also the reading of it?
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