I’m not nothing, Rimbaud. Want a cigarette?
I’ll never be nothing. I can’t want to be nothing.
Besides, I’ve got all the pills in the world inside me.
Rimbaud, I’ll always be the one ‘who wasn’t born for this’, I’ll always be the one who waited for a door to open up for him in a wall without a door.
Rimbaud, we’re bored of this party now, right? Baudelaire even wrote a poem. As for us, nothing. Although that story about New York might be interesting. What do you think?
The fat girl who danced with me explodes à la Mr Creosote.
Her body, her guts, displayed on my chest. Her chest on my chest. She keeps dancing. Just her legs. Granny keeps dancing and I try to keep up. I’m not good at this. I miss Mr Creosote’s daughter. Miss Creosote.
I didn’t want to dance with her, but I didn’t want her to explode like that.
Her bits spread about all over the place.
I want a milkshake.
People who eat a lot don’t know what they’re eating. People who travel a lot don’t know where they live. Every time I take a trip I mess up. I throw shit into the fan of sanity. One time I went down to Rio Grande do Sul. A friend of mine lived there. He played drums in my rock band. He was fat just like I am today. He had a love hotel there in Rio Grande do Sul. His hotel was quite different from the asylum. He went to all the brothels.
I’d already swallowed the cricket quite some time before that. I was twenty-one. It was my second sneak preview of hell.
On the first day, Rimbaud, we went to the local brothel. Back then whores didn’t kiss.
Nowadays they do everything. They might even pay you to have sex with them.
Why are whores so clingy and so needy for love? I don’t like whores very much.
I like to give and feel pleasure.
I had a girlfriend at the time. She had blue eyes. They were the most beautiful blue eyes in the world. Even so, I went down to Rio Grande do Sul. When I tried to kiss the whore she blocked my hand. You can’t mess with my stuff. You have to pay. Paying for sex wasn’t part of my plan. I’d planned on flying the aeroplane of pleasure with her.
We left the brothel with four whores. Acugêlê banzai!
A long, long time ago I went to Korea. It was really different from Rio Grande do Sul. Every place I went looked like an asylum. There was a nuclear bomb there. One hell of a mess.
My friend wanted to have a drunken orgy. I wasn’t really into that. I was a bit of a prude. Maybe today, after many orgies with Rimbaud and Baudelaire, I could have one with my friend. But I was barely in my twenties, just a kid. I wanted to have the whore all to myself. I wanted that whore with the feather touch. We got in the car. How many rooms does your house have? What does your mum do? I had my eye on the hotel maid, too.
While the hands of the least pretty whore ran up and down me, in my friend’s Ford Landau, I got paranoid, because her hands were rough. I started to think she was a transvestite. What had happened to the feather touch? Pure paranoia.
Paranoia. My psychiatrist at the time had given me Melleril.
But I didn’t like the colour of the pill. A sort of peanut brown, a shit brown. Roberto Carlos14 used to dress in brown, then he started wearing blue and his luck changed. What had he done to lose his OCD? I have my own. I don’t like three, I prefer four.
When I told Rimbaud that story about Roberto Carlos and the one about my numbers, he recommended two books of poetry to me: Trilce and Quaderna15. One for three, another for four.
For God’s sake, Rimbaud, don’t put me in a bind. I’d rather use numbers for Kabbalah, not for poetry.
Unfortunately he only taught me what he knew, and he didn’t know much. That was when he told me about maybe going back to Africa, for his leg to get better.
Let’s get back to the hotel.
My friend told me that I had to vacate one of the rooms and stay where the staff sleep.
Tonight you’re going to sleep here in the same room as Stallion. He’s going to hang you up by your little tits. Stallion was a big black man standing over six and a half feet tall. Rumour had it that Stallion had a dick so big he could have been a porn star. I just dabbled in sex with my little 15-cm-edition, PG-rated knob. I trembled the first time I saw Stallion. I wasn’t going to sleep next to that guy. He could easily rape me. When I saw Stallion again, I thought about getting out of there. I told myself: I’m not waiting for the third time, or else I won’t see anything ever again, just the spirit of the god of evil moving upon the face of the waters of Lake Guaíba.
I left the hotel and went to the bus station. I was possessed by a fertile spirit of modern madness, one that had helped twentieth-century poetry many times and had put contemporary literature in its rightful place. My persecution complex had reached the pinnacle of its glory. I ran through the streets of Porto Alegre. The police saw me running. Police are automatons. They’re like scarecrows. Scarecrows with no eyes. And ravens peck at scarecrows. I was a solitary raven that night. Cops are the same all over the world. They shot at me. Mint bullets, peanut bullets, soft bullets. And rubber bullets.
Stop, for fuck’s sake!
I stopped. There was a police station close to the bus station.
Own up, you piece of shit. You got drugs on you?
What’s the problem? None. I was embarrassed to tell the police about the god of evil. I was embarrassed to tell them the truth about the fertile spirit of modern madness, the one that had already written a very important chapter in that century’s literature. I still had a drop of discretion at that point.
You’re not from around here. I’m from Rio, but I’m a big fan of Getúlio Vargas’ southern accent.
Are you a poet? For fuck’s sake! Out with it! Or are you too delicate to talk?
Sir, I was going to be raped at the love hotel.
The police called the hotel. They quickly saw that it was unfounded. A delicate flower, said one. Anyway, they told me to go back there.
I couldn’t do it. I spent the night at the police station and went back home the next day by plane.
My first and only plane trip. The trips to China, Japan and Korea were all by television. Now I’m here to stay, I told myself.
Rimbaud appeared out of the crowd. There was a crowd behind me. I hugged Rimbaud for the first time. I hugged the world and kept quiet.
Yes.
No.
I walked on and on. Wandering. Singing. Rimbaud by my side. He missed Verlaine. I missed Marina. People often miss when the match gets tight. He tripped me up. Rimbaud really was a bastard. I couldn’t deny that he was one of my own.
The party was still going strong.
I ate black coconut sweets. Black things are so pretty, except for Stallion. There weren’t any black pills. Black is just a lot of things. The black morning that devours me as I write my obituary. It’s better to leave everything ready. Someone might forget I died. On a rainy day, I died like Vallejo. As a matter of fact, Rimbaud really insisted that I read Trilce. On a sunny day, a Thursday I think, I woke up in a bad mood. Every goal is a medal on your breast. The general has lots of medals and no wars. In São Paulo one time, a really powerful woman told me I’d been a soldier in another life. Many wars to be won. A kid who loved the Beatles and the Rolling Stones like me. Vietnam. It was in his blood. Helicopters all around. Napalm. Mustard gas. Bayonets stuck into bodies. Injecting some ferocious chemical.