Among Strange Victims (14 page)

He had reached Mexico after a journey full of mishaps, fleeing the Great War, and found himself faced with another war, equally incomprehensible, equally cruel, although luckily, thought Foret, a little less rational, a little more from the gut, or at least so it seemed to him. And this was, when you came down to it, what mattered. In Paris he had battled, with his own guts, against the castrating intellectualism of the Apollinaires, the soulless Cubists, the Marinettis of this world. Where in the work of these people was love, the unmoving motor of all the stars, fixed point and vertex of the actions of men of real daring? Nothing of that was left, only the pantomime of art, and Foret shat a million times on art. (He would express it in those very words in his
Considerations.
)

In New York, as an illegal immigrant, he had received his draft papers and had started out on a two-month trek through Quebec until he found a schooner bound for Mexico. The United States was, by that time, too dangerous for him, especially after the trap laid by that son of a bitch Marcel Duchamp, the calculating, sham-timid pig who had deliberately gotten him drunk and put him up on a stage, like a circus monkey, in front of two hundred people, just to have a laugh at his expense. He should have floored Marcel with one of his powerful jabs. After all, it was that lecture that had brought him to the attention of the
U.S.
draft board, in whose view he was a strong soldier and an undesirable alien, a man worth more in the trenches, shouldering a bayonet, than sleeping in parks and stripping down in front of upper-middle-class ladies. But Foret feared the war because of his height; he used to say he might at any moment
forget where he was, stand up in a trench, and get a bullet between the eyes. The war was for short, inconsistent people, he said. For dwarves convinced a weapon made them powerful. He was powerful without the use of arms, even if the smell of gunpowder in a small theater was one of his secret pleasures.

With Bea in Mexico, he at last felt calm. When he was with her, he regained the conviction that he could do anything with his life. Write poetry, for instance, and hang up his gloves for a time to dedicate himself to reading and trying to articulate his emotions. Bea had brought him a chest of books from New York: not only
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
by Lord Byron, which Richard had explicitly requested, but also a pile of offerings from Bea herself that would reveal to him a whole new world: James Joyce, the poetry of Ezra Pound, Eliot, and Williams in grubby magazines. Foret had never been a great reader. His references were scarce, though very intense.

If there was one disadvantage to Foret's tender savagery, thought Bea, it was his jealousy. Mention of Marinetti and his manifestos was banned in the house; in New York, Bea had hidden them under a mattress and had, to avoid arguments, decided not to bring the books with her to Mexico. Bea had been Marinetti's lover during the time she lived in Florence, and that, added to the fact that many of her Parisian colleagues constantly compared the two men's impassioned natures and tendency to violence, was enough to make Foret feel persecuted by the famous Futurist. Aside from jealousy, the comparison offended him: Marinetti's passion was cold, haughty, mathematical; Foret considered himself to be a gentleman of the old style, the last emissary of spleen in a world proud of its unthinking iconoclasm. Even his violent character was misinterpreted: Foret had spent years escaping from the war, that same war to which Marinetti composed odes.

He had, however, not read Pound. For him, the world of literature ended with Rimbaud; everything afterwards had been imposture. He knew almost nothing about
U.S.
literature. The only things he respected in North America were the locomotives. But anything Bea gave him was sacred, so he sat down in a corner of the room to browse through one of the new books. Bea watched him tenderly: her
enfant sauvage,
her great big little brute, her sensitive boxer.

Outside were the sounds of ambulances, street sellers, packs of warring dogs, the usual noises of the center of Mexico City on a sunny afternoon in 1918.

A

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