Prayer to the Dark One
I am the dark one, the widower, the unconsoled.
—Gérard de Nerval
Gautier says the last pages of Aurélia were found in your pocket—Aurélia, that most pessimistic of your novels, in which you declared your purpose.
My god, Gérard, what storms and tempests roiled inside you.
It’s strange how your hat stayed on. For that last rite you chose a gloomy alley, the dirtiest and saddest one.
Your patent leather boots balanced on a black water pipe.
You’d worn everyone out with declarations of disaster, this one, that one, the eternal night that had already begun, that before death each person would see their own image dressed in mourning.
Everyone knew about your fixations and let you talk without paying you much mind.
Did you look in the mirror, see yourself in black, and take it as an omen?
The sign that made you shout, “Today’s the day!
” and go out to the street in a gray coat, olive-green trousers, and a hat, that top hat that despite everything stayed on your head.
Before you closed the door, you left your aunt, bless her, a note telling her not to expect you back that night.
I suppose that on reading it she immediately suspected what you carried in your hands, at the end of the day it was clear: In the thick of your usual strangeness, she’d seen you be even stranger lately.
Maybe for days, or months, you’d irrevocably entered the spiral of that uncontrollable force Alvarez has called the savage god.
Before that there was your father, the doctor.
Your stern, distant father, who wanted you to inherit his profession, and you studied medicine to please him and followed him through the sewers of smallpox and disease until you finally said, Enough, and defied him to become a poet and pariah.
But some part of that inheritance stayed with you, and when you got sick you became your own therapist, and your writing was a madness that looks inside to reveal something outward, you the lunatic, you the analyst, you the cure and the pain, a burning conversation with yourself.
Your friends, did they know? Maybe they believed—or still believe—that some part of it was for show: You’d learned to get something out of your mental illness because it brought a dark shine to your poetry and your persona, and you were part authentic phenomenon and part impostor, as perhaps they all were, in fact, perhaps that particular blend was how things were, in those times.
You were one man with them—trickster, partier—and another on the street, scared and pursued, afraid of furious shadows that screamed like birds.
“What’s the matter with you?” people would ask, seeing you slap and fight the wind.
“I don’t know,” you’d reply. “I’m lost.”
Each stone you gathered was thrown at some victim.
You picked up stones and hurled them at yourself.
Before your eyes, apparitions took the shape of sacrifice.
It was enough for you to fix your gaze somewhere to quickly see some tragic vision unfold.
It happened over and over, with this and that woman, one wretched love after another.
That’s where the Queen of Sheba comes in, as the dark object of your desire—the lost thing, Kristeva says, or the archaic thing—that starts growing and multiplying, taking shape in a thousand faces and as many names.
All your beloveds were one.
The first one, and perhaps also the last: your own mother.
You invoked her under various ancient, divine names.
But she was called Marie Antoinette. No surprise that she bore the name of a queen: a beheaded queen.
They say names mark our destinies, and in your mother’s case it could be true, because she too would lose her head, though to a brutal meninges infection that took her life.
It happened far away from you. She’d abandoned you when you were a baby, just a few months old, leaving you with a nanny whom you didn’t love and who didn’t love you.
You could say that from then on you carried inside you the noble cadaver of that mother who was doubly absent from you, through abandonment and death.
You carried the murderous dead thing within you,3 Alvarez had said to you.
Inside you grew a two-faced monster, the irritation of loss on one side, the fear of reunion on the other.
Some, in keeping with psychology texts, have called that inner monster the cause of your tendency toward idolatrous passion, that TNT of love and bitterness that bound you to all the women you adored, who did not adore you.
And you blamed yourself—you were a fierce self-flagellant—for not being able to forgive them, for going around cursing them and wishing the worst on them and yourself too.
I think of the neurotic child you must have been and kept on being, and I let my imagination loose: At around midnight, Marie Antoinette appears to you—Queen of Sheba and eternal mother—wearing a dirty rag as blindfold, and right there before you she uncovers her marble breasts, and in her hands she holds her own head, cut off by the guillotine or swollen with meningitis.
It’s enough, Gérard, to drive anyone mad.
The matter of the wall happened for the first time—it would be repeated later—at one of the many mental institutions in which you were locked up.
You’d been seized by wild ideas and had gone around declaring that humanity was on the brink of bloody destruction.
Your deliriums were melodramatic, Gérard, historical, cosmic, always apocalyptic.
It’s known that you’d grab a piece of coal or brick and mar the walls with morbid drawings.
Some swore they saw, in Montmartre, in the clinic of a certain Dr. Blanche, the traces of a half-erased scene you’d scrawled on the wall.
In it appears an enormous dismembered body, that of the Queen of Sheba, surrounded by a chaos of limbs and many women of many races, all wounded and mutilated by someone (who, if not you?) who’d knifed them in the cruelest way.
You spared nobody, Gérard, not empresses nor country peasants, nor daughters, nor mothers, all of them fell prey to your zeal to kill.
When I read you at night, I take the book out of my room before turning off the light; something pulses in what you write, a pain and horror that terrify me, your verses are spells, I don’t want them near me while I sleep.
Some people can’t tell, you’re such a fine poet that the poison can go unnoticed, but I’ve always seen the beast that makes its home behind your gracious words, knowing that under your gentle modesty lurks a serial killer’s soul.
You lose your head and your avatars multiply, Jack the Ripper, Hannibal Lecter, the Terminator.
You love so desperately that, in the end, you massacre your poor objects of affection in the most lurid fantasies, slaughters that enthrone the Queen of Sheba as a sovereign of holocausts, with devouring eyes, long hair loose in the wind, and a spiked wheel spinning under her feet, perhaps the same wheel of martyrdom that crushes witches or saints.
You kneel and pray before those walls, Gérard, adoring that ancient queen, the carnivorous goddess and long-suffering mother, all of them fused into one, whom you raise as a supreme idol: cursed virgin, resurrected death, impossible beloved.
You confess that sometimes you shape her immense body out of clay, that each morning you resume the task because the other madmen, jealous of your joy, gleefully destroy it.
You’re the demonically possessed lover who licks his own wounds and inflicts them on his beloved, who sacrifices himself and her in the fire of his passion.
Schopenhauer would have said, of you: In the Hell of the world, you’re both the tormenting demon and the tormented soul.
Then comes remorse. The fit gives way to calm, you’re horrified by what you’ve done, and you feel guilty, impotent, submerged in freezing water, you say, as even colder drops stream down your forehead.
After the massacre, the queen disappears, dead and mutilated along with the others.
You’ve done something wrong, Gérard, and you know it, something terribly wrong, and you’re dammed, and you dissolve into tears and surrender to the altar of the goddess you’ve offended, kneeling, begging forgiveness.
She, proud and merciless, is no angel of forgiveness, and she damns you, even when you burn your most treasured possessions to try to make amends.
Nothing can be done. The beloved has escaped, and you seek her in vain, sniffing around cemeteries and chasing the funeral retinues of strangers.
Thinking you’ll find her in death rather than in life, you go to the alley.
I shouldn’t judge you harshly, docile and tormented Gérard, blushing like a damsel, the side of you whose voice is warm, as your buddies from literary social circles have said.
In the end, the violent scenes on those walls were just pictures, the truth is that your crimes were as unreal as your loves; you were only pursuing an image.
Your kingdom for an image. Extreme phantasmagoria, sublime and suicidal. For an image, you gave your life.