Daniel Saldaña París - Among Strange Victims

As is the case in a large part of the avant-garde in the early twentieth century, during the years before the Great War, Foret oscillates between frenzied humanism (“Tell me where my fellow man is before I amputate my leg”) and a vicarious enthusiasm for great machines (“Give me back that locomotive, you great son of a bitch. It belongs to my spirit.”)

When war broke out and his mobilization seemed immanent, Foret embarked, with forged travel documents, on an adventure that took him to Paris, Greece, then Barcelona, and finally New York. His rejection of the war cannot be read as pacifism (a stance that is rare among the artists of the period) or simple fear of death: he felt it beneath his dignity to be dragged hither and thither by an army; in his freedom of movement — epitomized by his love of railways — Foret found the moral sticking point beyond which he would not cede to society’s desire for control. The erratic nomadism he practiced was the end point of his discussion with totalitarianisms: he was unimpressed by any frontier, not even coastal ones. His submission to other norms is debatable, but his love of movement was incorruptible.

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Marcelo couldn’t help but identify with the objects of his study, like a child who, during a movie, is unable to stop himself from producing a noise when he sees an explosion. As his career would suggest, his writings ranged from the typical anecdotes of art historians to lingering descriptions of the avant-garde environment and highly intellectualized conclusions: impenetrable paragraphs on the aesthetic project of Futurism, the political drift of the movement, the penetration of art by technology.

Obviously, his was not a comfortable role, and not only philosophers but also historians derided his work, which seemed only to be enjoyed by the wider public — a couple of his monographs had been rewritten in more amenable form by some anonymous copy editor and were now available in Spanish bookstores as mere novels. This circumstance delighted Marcelo. He was able to pride himself on being a “writer of the people,” on having escaped to the uncouth language and loudmouthed autoreferentiality of the crudest form of academia to become a “spreader of profound thought,” as he put it.

His figure had gradually begun to take on that air of celebrity only granted to two or three professors in each department. First-year students, unaware of Marcelo’s complete lack of vocation for teaching, would get up at sunrise on registration day to put their names down to be included in the small group able to take his elective class: The Aesthetics of the Avant-garde and the Birth of Postmodernity. It would be no exaggeration to say that over the preceding years, a number of students had changed majors — from philology to philosophy, for example — at the last minute with the ambition of becoming belatedly postmodern writers under Marcelo Valente’s tutelage.

The face of Spanish fiction was finally, against all predictions, changing. After decades of polished, correct, and boring prose, the return of the idea, of experimentation, of the essay, was timidly showing its face. In this tessitura of rapidly changing fashions, Marcelo’s pallid work had undeservedly acquired cult status. Of course he didn’t read a word of contemporary fiction, and he couldn’t have cared less what his students did with the knowledge he plastered over them like mud, just so long as they retained a degree of devotion to his words and continued to recommend his Duchamp: Mysticism and Lies (Ediciones Canela en Rama, 2007) to their friends.

It is fair to say that Professor Valente’s sense of self-esteem didn’t rest on that single professional and ultimately superfluous conquest, but on his success with women. At the age of forty-five, Marcelo had attained the dubious of pleasure of “not tying himself to anyone” and carried his bachelorhood with the same air of self-sufficiency with which he defended his vegetarianism.

“It’s a question of ethics, Pombo; there’s no hidden scam. Nowadays the European man can get by without meat, and in his decision to do so, he is affirming himself as the heir to a tradition of renunciation whose roots can be traced back to Augustine of Hippo, the motivation for which is simply the recognition of personal finitude.”

“Finitude doesn’t get it up for me,” responded Professor Pombo while chewing on a pork bone.

Naturally Marcelo didn’t believe the half of this. A famous Asturian gastroenterologist, a family friend, had told him six years before that his extremely delicate digestive system would not be able to withstand the negligence involved in his taste for roast suckling pig much longer. And although the doctor had not suggested a radically vegetarian diet, Marcelo had taken up the cause as one of the few modern preferences he would allow himself the luxury of incorporating into his lifestyle just before reaching forty — the age at which, in his view, a man should have a well-defined, immutable character — so he had for some time been living on an abundance of green vegetables and pulses, with the occasional lapse he didn’t mention to anyone. He was, in general, a person of firm, if arbitrary, principles.

Marking exam papers bored him, but he occasionally had to laugh at the notions that occurred to his students, whose little brains appeared to be as lost on the paths of contemporary aesthetics as their bodies were on the plains of Castile, rambling without rhyme or reason through the corridors of a department that displayed a portrait of a king in every classroom. (Marcelo, a man who managed to have an opinion about almost everything, didn’t care one way or the other about the monarchy. In his younger days, he had been a fervent defender of the Republic, without this — in his megalomania — stopping him from identifying himself with His Majesty, perhaps because the tabloids of the heart had taught him that He too was a man tormented by a multifaceted passion. But after a certain moment, he had lost interest in the king. Now Marcelo was one of those few Spaniards who felt themselves, as he himself expressed it whenever the occasion allowed, “closer to Europe than to his native soil,” and in the subtle clockwork mechanism that kept his convictions ticking, this was sufficient reason for pretending to ignore the Great National Issues.)

The exam papers he was marking were truly pitiful. He had the feeling none of his students had understood, not just the general sense of the module, but even his writing on the whiteboard. The majority limited themselves to repeating, with imbecilic exactitude, odd phrases extracted at random from the list of required reading, out-of-context fragments that could as easily pass for irrefutable maxims as pieces of graffiti scrawled on a bathroom wall. One more original student attempted to explain — without ever coming to the point — why Surrealism and its theoretical consequences led, unhindered, to the legitimization of female circumcision. (Marcelo predicted for this student a notable future as a newspaper columnist and gave him a top grade: he always tried not to be hard on the most idiotic ones, absolutely convinced they would go far.)

Faced with the flagrant stupidity of the new generations of philosophers he was supposedly educating, Marcelo Valente felt depressed. Who, in that future filled with the derision of thought and cellular phones with an increasing number of functions, would make the effort to understand the greatness, the originality of his essay on Richard Foret? Marcelo had put the last scrap of enthusiasm in his career into this project. Afterwards, it would be all total indifference, the inane repetition of the same old class for thirty years, the acts of homage to this or that departing dean in the university auditorium, the tranquility and shame of knowing yourself to be protected by your tenure and a right to the professorial freedom you do not exercise.