Among Strange Victims (15 page)

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.

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.

A

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.