Mon cœur couvert de caporaclass="underline"
Ils y lancent des jets de soupe,
Mon triste cœur bave à la poupe:
Sous les quolibets de la troupe
Qui pousse un rire général,
Mon triste cœur bave à la poupe,
Mon cœur couvert de caporal!
Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques
Leurs quolibets l’ont dépravé!
Au gouvernail on voit des fresques
Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques.
Ô flots abracadabrantesques,
Prenez mon cœur, qu’il soit lavé!
Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques
Leurs quolibets l’ont dépravé!
Quand ils auront tari leurs chiques, Comment agir, ô cœur volé?
Ce seront des hoquets bachiques
Quand ils auront tari leurs chiques: J’aurai des sursauts stomachiques,
Moi, si mon cœur est ravalé:
Quand ils auront tari leurs chiques
Comment agir, ô cœur volé?
It all made sense, thought Amalfitano, the adolescent poet degraded by brutish soldiers just as he was heading-on foot!-toward an encounter with the Chimera, and how strong Rimbaud was, thought Amalfitano (he had given up any idea of consolation and was filled with excitement and astonishment), to write this poem almost immediately afterward, with a steady hand, the rhymes original, the images oscillating between the comic and the monstrous…
22
What Amalfitano would never know was that the corporal of “mon cœur couvert de caporal,” the son of a bitch who raped Rimbaud, had been a soldier in Bazaine’s army in the Mexican adventure of Maximilian and Napoleon III.
In March 1865, unable to learn anything about the fate of Colonel Libbrecht’s column, Colonel Eydoux, commander of the plaza of El Tajo, which served as supply depot for all of the troops operating in that part of the Mexican northeast, sent a detail of thirty horsemen toward Santa Teresa. The detail was under the command of Captain Laurent and Lieutenants Rouffanche and González, the latter a Mexican monarchist.
The detail arrived in Villaviciosa on the second day of March. It never made it to Santa Teresa. All the men-except for Lieutenant Rouffanche and three soldiers who were killed when the French were ambushed as they ate at the only inn in town-were taken prisoner, among them the future corporal, then a twenty-two-year-old recruit. The prisoners, gagged and with their hands bound with hemp rope, were brought before the man acting as military boss of Villaviciosa and a group of town notables. The boss was a mestizo addressed alternately as Inocencio and El Loco. The notables were country folk, most of them barefoot, who stared at the Frenchmen and then withdrew to a corner to confer. Half an hour later, after a bit of hard bargaining between two evidently opposed groups, the Frenchmen were taken to a covered corral where, after being stripped of their clothes and shoes, they were raped and tortured by a group of captors for the rest of the day.
At midnight Captain Laurent’s throat was cut. Lieutenant González, two sergeants, and seven soldiers were taken to the main street and forced to play chasing games by torchlight. They all died, either run through or with their throats slit by pursuers on the backs of the soldiers’ own horses.
At dawn, the future corporal and two other soldiers managed to break their bonds and flee cross-country. Only the corporal survived. Two weeks later he reached El Tajo. He was decorated and remained in Mexico until 1867, when he returned to France with Bazaine, who retreated with his army, abandoning the emperor to his fate.
23
Sometimes Amalfitano saw himself as the Prince of Antioch or the homesick Knight of Tyre, the King of Tarsus or the Lord of Ephesus, adventurers of the Middle Ages once upon a time read or misread-with equal enthusiasm-by a luckless God-fearing lord in the midst of pandemonium and exile and untold confusion, accompanied by a beautiful daughter and an aura intensified by the ravages of time. As in the story by Alfonso Reyes (God rest his soul, thought Amalfitano, who truly loved him), “The Fortunes of Apollonius of Tyre,” from Real and Imaginary Portraits. A dethroned king, he thought, wandering the Mediterranean islands painted by that so-called Michelangelo of comic strips, the creator of Prince Valiant, those divine and infernal islands where Valiant met Aleta, but also where the Knight of Epirus bewailed his unjust persecution, and the giddy vagabond of Mytilene told the story of his misfortunes, these characters who, as Reyes noted, sprang from the Greek or Roman depths of our memory, and this was precisely what was false about it all, what was disturbing and revelatory: the vagabond prince was a stand-in for Ulysses and the Baron of Thebes was a stand-in for Theseus, though both were God-fearing knights who prayed morning and night. In this masquerade, Amalfitano discovered unknown regions of himself. In the Greek king who fled with his daughter from monastery to monastery, from desert island to desert island, as if he were traveling backward from the year 1300 to 500 and from 500 to 20 B.C. and onward, ever deeper in time, he saw the futility of his efforts, the basic naïveté of his struggle, his spurious role as scrivener monk. Now all I need is to go blind, with Rosa as my cherished guide leading me from classroom to classroom, he thought gloomily.
24
When Amalfitano learned that his daughter had disappeared with a black man, he thought randomly of a line from Lugones that he had come across years-many years-ago. Lugones’s words were these: “It is well known that youth is the most intellectual stage of an ape’s life, as it is of the Negro’s.” What a brute, that Lugones! And then he remembered the story, Lugones’s plot: a man, a neurotic, the narrator, labors for years to teach a chimpanzee to talk. All his efforts are in vain. One day the narrator senses that the ape can talk, that he has learned to talk but hides it cleverly. Whether he hides it out of fear or atavism, Amalfitano can’t remember. Probably fear. So unrelenting is his master that the ape falls ill. His sufferings are almost human. The man cares for him as devotedly as he might care for his own child. Both feel the pain of their imminent separation. At the final moment, the ape whispers: Water, master, my master, my master. This was where the Lugones story ended (for a second, Amalfitano imagined Lugones shooting himself in the mouth in the darkest and coolest corner of his library, swallowing poison in an attic strung with cobwebs, hanging himself from the highest beam of the bathroom, but could Lugones’s bathroom possibly have had beams? where had he read that or seen it? Amalfitano didn’t know), giving way-one ape leading to another-to the story by Kafka, the Chinese Jew. What different viewpoints, thought Amalfitano. Good old Kafka puts himself without hesitation into the skin of the ape. Lugones sets out to make the ape speak; Kafka gives him voice. Lugones’s story, which Amalfitano thought extraordinary, was a horror story. Kafka’s story, Kafka’s incomprehensible text, also took wing through realms of horror, but it was a religious text, full of black humor, human and melodramatic, unyielding and inconsequential, like everything that is truly unyielding, in other words like everything that is soft. Amalfitano began to weep. His little house, his parched yard, the television set and the video player, the magnificent northern Mexico sunset, struck him as enigmas that carried their own solutions with them, inscribed in chalk on the forehead. It’s all so simple and so terrible, he thought. Then he got up from his faded yellow sofa and closed the curtains.