Among Strange Victims (22 page)

“You're not going to Los Girasoles, are you?” she asked with what seemed to Marcelo almost authentically Castilian brusqueness.

B

There is among Richard Foret's eventful wanderings a chapter that eludes simple interpretation. The few students of his uneven work know this, and so prefer to leave it to one side or play down its importance in the offhand manner academics habitually reserve for anything they consider incomprehensible. This episode is, moreover, fundamental in terms of Foret's biography since it coincides with the writing of his most intriguing work, the
Considerations,
and the first suspicions, on Bea's part, that her lover is as mad as a hatter.

Richard and Bea, as all accounts indicate, met in New York at the beginning of 1917, although their mutual fame may have conceded them a brief glimpse of the other's personality (in the form of gossip) while Bea was living in Florence and Foret reeling drunkenly between Berlin and Paris in those epic years before the Great War. But it is generally agreed that the rumors flying across Europe
were not strong enough to awaken in either of them a particular fascination for the existence of the other; yet the scraps of information they did obtain would form a firm basis, in the New World, for embarking on a first conversation that would, as the hours passed, become an enthused monologue on the part of Richard to which Bea listened with a smile of equal parts complicity and sheer delight.

When Foret reaps the same hatred in New York that he harvested in France, his few friends turn their backs on him, and Duchamp, as has been said, plays a joke of questionable innocence that attracts the attention of the draft board to him, or so the boxer-poet records in his bissextile magazine, perhaps pursued by more profound ghosts. And so his flight recommences (his whole life had been one); his unfounded hope for a home switches from the illuminated New York night to the muddy streets of Buenos Aires, the city toward which Foret sets the needle of the impetuous compass that could have pointed toward any other place. But despite being an indefatigable traveler—or perhaps precisely because of this—his understanding of world geography is somewhat dreamlike: Foret persuades himself of the convenience of making a discreet stopover in Mexico City before going on to Buenos Aires. Later he would discover to his great disillusionment that, given the distance and the paucity of the marine schedule, to get to Argentina from Mexico, he would either have to pass through Spain or embark in Florida, with the great risk of being either recruited or going out of his mind due to ridiculous suspicion.

But let us not get ahead of ourselves: that has yet to come. For now, Foret departs from New York disguised as a cadet on leave and, incomprehensibly, tries to reach the northern frontier. The reason: he wants to go to Canada in order to leave behind as soon as possible a country that, in his frazzled consciousness, is pursuing him with the intention of sending him to his death. His plan is confused, but from his letters it can be deduced that he intends to board a ship bound for Mexico at some point on the Canadian coast.

This is where matters become complicated. From the moment Foret first meets Bea until he flees to the north, only three months pass. Months that are definitive in the history of nations (the United
States enters the war), and months in which Foret and Bea cohabit, it can be assumed pleasurably since, from that point on, the letters between them reveal a plan in which their lives are entwined.

For Foret, those three months are enough for him to decide he wants to be with that woman forever. And Beatrice cannot ignore the evidence that something great is happening, and that if she wants to be true to the paths fate is laying out before her, she has to sacrifice the stability of her New York life to follow that madman wherever he leads. Yet in spite of that reciprocal conviction, Foret undertakes a delirious journey that separates him from Bea for a period of eight months.

During his first days in Canada, Foret travels around Quebec because he believes it will be simpler for him to mingle with the French-speaking natives, that being his first language, and so easier to find work as a merchant seaman on some ship bound for Mexico. But putting those plans into action takes two months. On his first afternoon in Montreal, he takes part in an antiwar demonstration, gives a spontaneous speech (he is expelled by two guards), and fornicates in a park with a prostitute. He then spends a week in an alcoholic stupor, sleeping in the room of a psychic. After that, he makes an effort to regain his lucidity and writes to Bea every day. Little is known of his actions for the following month and a half because his letters do not include anecdotes. In them, he attempts to sketch out for Bea his most personal creed: there are paragraphs of great theoretical density, many of which reiterate themes philosophers have already addressed, but which Foret has not read. (Some scholar or other has established a forced parallel between these scribblings and Spinoza's concept of
conatus.
)

These letters, written to Bea from Montreal, are the origin of
Fundamental Considerations on Something,
which Foret began to write at that time and continued to compose without interruption until his disappearance in Mexico a year and three months later. A fragment of the
Considerations,
which also forms part, literally transcribed, of a letter sent to Bea on July 19, 1917, is unusually autobiographical and offers a detailed narrative of the “elusive chapter” of Foret's life that his researchers generally prefer to ignore. In that fragment, the author tells of a walk through the port area of
Montreal, in the shade of the factories, and his meeting with a person he christens Mr. X, who spontaneously sits down next to him on a bench to talk. This person, whom Foret compares to “a sly fox,” immediately says he knows the conflicts that are disturbing Foret's soul. The latter expresses his incredulity, and Mr. X softly murmurs the name “Beatrice.” Livid, Richard asks if he knows her and if he has been sent to give him some piece of bad news about his lover, but Mr. X calms him, explaining there is nothing to fear, that he is just doing a favor for a mutual friend. On asking the name of this friend, Foret receives only an evasive gesture, so he decides to allow the strange character to say what he has come to say.

And that is where the problems start. According to Richard's letter and the earliest manuscript of the
Considerations,
Mr. X tells him a fictional story, clarifying that he only intends, by means of allegory, to share a “moral discovery.” But the “innocent” story—as Foret transcribes it—summarizes in broad brushstrokes the political history of Europe in what remained of the twentieth century (remember that we are in 1917), including the Great War, the Weimar Republic, the rise of Nazism, the Holocaust, the Cold War, the student protests of the sixties, the Berlin Wall and its fall. Of course this is all narrated as fictitious speculation, without names or excessive detail, almost in the manner of a fable, and although Foret is impressed by the man's strange alienation, he doesn't believe a word of what he hears, nor extract any moral lesson from it. He merely assigns it to his letter and to the note that will later form part of the
Considerations.

With the passage of time, after Foret's death, Bea will remember this letter, take it from her dark trunk in the iconic year of 1945, and be stupefied to see the absolute correlation with the world at that exact moment. Bea will, quite rightly, fear she would be taken for a lunatic or a fraud if she shows the letter to anyone, so she does not. As for the identical paragraph in the
Considerations,
there was not much chance of its being read as a timely prophecy: after a first edition in 1920, the book falls into an oblivion, only relieved by the death of Bea toward the end of the sixties, when Foret's first readers in five decades, believing the false prophecy to be a posthumous addition of the widow or the editors, refuse to credit such an absurdity.

Mr. X does not reappear as a character or reference in the rest of the
Considerations
or in Foret's letters to Bea. His prophecies, taken by many as amusing apocrypha (which they may be), leave Foret in a state approaching a trance, and under this influence he writes some of the most celebrated sections of his
Considerations,
or such is suggested by the chronology of the letters. Bea dies, taking with her to the grave the secret of the authenticity, or otherwise, of Mr. X's prophesies.

Traditional scholars of Foret's work, fearful of the consequences, pour fervent scorn on the affair. It's impossible to know what they think at night, away from their offices, their classrooms, and their university publishers, when doubt or suspicion or irrational vacillation seep through their sleepless eyelids. None of them have written anything on the subject.

A