Among Strange Victims (24 page)

For Bea, Richard's working life debacle was the end of an era. It was not that her instincts were telling her to put distance between them until he calmed down, but that from a financial viewpoint, she found herself forced to do so. She, therefore, suggested a two-stage plan: she would go immediately to Buenos Aires, where she could pick up the money that had been accumulating in London and find a decent place for them to live while he stayed in Mexico for a few months longer, until he could make enough money to cover their debts and buy a passage to Buenos Aires. It might also be simpler to get money to Richard from Argentina than from London.

Bea, who was much more practical than her husband, discovered it was possible to travel from Veracruz to Cuba and, from there, to Buenos Aires, and had made inquiries about the dates: she would sail in two weeks. The news hit Richard like the blade of a guillotine. He went around for several days with a corpse-like face, tramping along Calle Tacuba until the traders became suspicious. Bea tried to calm him, to explain the practical advantages of the plan she had outlined, but it was all in vain: the very idea of being separated from
her again weighed down on Foret's tattooed shoulders like a cedar wardrobe. At the same time, he was, at heart, conscious that the decision had already been taken. He knew Bea was a determined woman, and he also knew financial problems worried her in a way he would never understand. For her, it was important to establish herself in Buenos Aires and have a home, not a pokey hotel room in a city full of bandits (a situation that was more tolerable for him).

The day Bea set off for Veracruz, Foret cried like a baby. He clung to her with occlusive force until the driver of the car that was to take her to the railway station completely lost his patience. Bea's arrangements were quite clear: she would solve the problem and be responsible for ensuring that Richard arrived in Buenos Aires as soon as possible. There, they would live happily among other European immigrants until the war was over, and they would have hordes of children and both write unbearably beautiful poetry. This was the mantra Richard repeated to himself, even though he was convinced it would be the last time he touched Bea.

Maybe if he had not been so moved, so immersed in his own feelings, Richard would have noticed, during that final embrace, Bea Langley's slightly swollen belly.

On the day following his wife's departure, in despair at being suddenly alone, Foret repented having given in to Bea's pressure, having allowed her to leave, and abandoning all his possessions, he boarded a goods train at nightfall, hoping to arrive in Veracruz in time to stop his beloved from sailing.

A

Marcelo Valente lies very uncomfortably on the bed, looking at the ceiling of his small house in the Puerta del Aire residential estate. Beside him, recently abandoned on the rumpled sheets, lies the book
Fundamental Considerations on Something
by the admirable Richard Foret. He has been reading the whole day, snacking on grated carrots and turnip (a simple culinary discovery he is addicted
to), and later he will go down to Adela's house in the center of Los Girasoles to have dinner with her.

He looks over the sections he has highlighted in fluorescent yellow in the Foretian
Considerations
and thinks they are an impossible collection of incoherent, hallucinatory axioms:

“The person who talks to himself knows the First Person does not exist.”

“I warn you, my scant readers, that I have perceived a blossoming of my social concerns. At least once a week, I get the impulse to go out and plant bombs.”

“When you begin to judge days according to the consistency of your excrement, you know you have done something bad in your life.”

“My inclination toward murder, while impressive, is below average.”

“All things are moving, only some of them move too slowly.”

“I am surprised not to have written more frequently about sex, that elephant in the room of my head.”

“The sea is for those who are far away.”

“The person who talks to himself,” Marcelo Valente says aloud, “knows the First Person does not exist.” And he takes a short nap before leaving the house.

B

Foret, as his notes confirm, arrived in Veracruz too late. Bea had sailed three days earlier, and it took Richard quite some time to understand that there were sixty hours, of which he had no recollection, missing from his life. He had been robbed of the last of his money, his shirt was covered in vomit, and he had absolutely no memory of where he had obtained the hat he was wearing. He talked to strangers in the street and had the fevered gaze of those who have watched an era collapse around them.

Little is known of those final days. Bea Langley's later reconstructions suggest he was employed in a brothel, ejecting impertinent
drunks in exchange for room, board, and a limited dose of violent entertainment. He had left a hefty bill behind in Mexico City, and the owner of the hotel would soon be sending someone to look for him; this was one of his main worries. He started to suspect an international conspiracy to discover his whereabouts; he imagined the
U.S.
draft board was in cahoots with Duchamp, with Marinetti, with his creditors in Germany, Paris, and Barcelona. They were all plotting to keep him away from Bea, to bury him at the bottom of a trench, to drive him mad.

Pursued by these and other visions, none of them realistic, Foret lived like a vagabond, trying unsuccessfully to pass as a seaman, for almost two weeks. But impatience was one of the crosses he had to bear, and he convinced himself of the immediate need to go to Buenos Aires, where Beatrice would greet him with kisses and exotic fruits. He wrote a couple of letters to his wife, telling her of his latest plan: to sail single-handed to the coast of Argentina in a sturdy boat. But he had no address to send the letters to and had to content himself with keeping them in a wooden box one of the prostitutes—driven by irrepressible tenderness—kept for him out of sight of the brothel keeper.

One Sunday afternoon, as if to gild the lily of a week of excess, Foret staggered to the port. He picked out a small boat that could be handled with a crew of one. He had some knowledge of sails, knots, and winds, and thought it would not be too hard for him to set out to sea and come ashore on the southern coast of Argentina. He imagined himself arriving in his boat at the very door of the house Bea would have prepared for their future life together, a house that would look directly out to sea or onto the River Plate. He stole the boat.