Daniel Saldaña París - Among Strange Victims

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.

And this is another important point: for all the pseudonyms, the multiplicity of carnivalesque masks he invented for himself, Foret had, against all odds, a consistent style. This isn’t a Pessoa on amphetamines, capable of mutating in his writing like a chameleon walking over a Newtonian wheel. Foret’s pseudonyms allowed him to change genre, to flirt with the fictional chronicle and return to the familiar space of satire and from there back to poetry, but all these texts have a certain something in common; the violence of the opinions is the same, as is the demoniacal gratuitousness of his inventiveness, which shines through in his Fundamental Considerations on Something, where it is unconstrained by any form of textual coherence.