Interview with the vampire of Paul Verlaine

... Finally the afternoon of the 6 of May of 1894, after several days prowling by the ruinous bars of the centre of Paris where I knew I'd find him, I found Paul Verlaine

cunt...

he was seated on a sofa, beside a table full of medicines and cheap drugs... there was a bottle or flask there, and a grotesque cup, from which the poet drank something espantoso with slow and hesitating sips.

The tremulous movements of his lips, hummingbirding from that unidentified, drugging nectar, undermined by the dependence Verlaine... a sad figure, a figurine, una figurita de cartón

out there the solar and patrician light was like a white hand on the front of the bar, the light of the afternoon entered deformed, polishing his semi bald head, his little eyes sunk in the cavities

Verlaine looked like those white mouses used to experiment in laboratories, swollen his eyelids by the sedatives.

To his left, on the table, a greasy hat, stained with nicotine and badly removed dandruff... he was 46 or 47, but he looked as if he was 70:

an impulse almost made my right leg move, to enter, but I repressed the compulsion, and stayed looking at him from the outside for a while, through the window of the bar
he didn't see me.

Alone, like the rats, his semi reclined back was laid against the irregular sofa, which was cornered against a wall of the café
his eyes of rodent seemed to be lost in himself... that scary and sad introspection seen in certain inveterate alcoholics without redemption

that stare that seems to be dreaming of an escape, an escape, always an escape.


 

He was obviously -and shamelessly- intoxicated, in public, in the middle of the afternoon, it was 2:50 PM, I entered.

The bar smelled like hot pizza and gas:

"Hello" -I said, with false niceness- "I'm Juan Verdaguer, his Basque admirer... I sent you several letters, monsieur Verlaine, but you neve..."

"Ah!" -he exclaimed, as he fixed his eyes on mine brusquely, like someone who returns all of a sudden from a deep sopor, or a nightmare.-

"Who?" -he added, agitated-

I, still standing beside him, observed minutely his hands, the right one fallen with careless abandon on the sofa, inert almost, comme main de mort, covered with a black glove; the left one, on the table, naked and trembling with a slight, almost imperceptible tremor which made the veins palpitate... a pale blue vein on his middle finger was beating with special vigour:

Verlaine moved his head with two noncohesive turns, looked at me once again in the eye, and invited me to sit down

he was numb and doped, but still conserved a finely adjusted sense of alarm in his nervous system -alarm which I perceived
he mistrusted
his golden moustache dyed by the smoke of the pipe was disatrously irregular and erect when Verlaine hurled -unexpectedly- a phrase

"You... yes, yes... cough, cough... the Basque essayist... cough! I forgot, sorry, to respond your... cough, cough... my life, see, it's a bad lif... cough! A ba... cough!"

I served him more of that drink and passed him the cup, his throat was assaulted by a sort of dry and convulsive toux, like that frequent in cases of white lung, which echoed into his thorax with a hollow noise

Verlaine held the cup with shaking hand and downloaded the green-ish liquid into his open mouth with mechanical desperation
I realized it was absinthe -the liquor descended through his throat with cavernous gargarisms, while his small and round eyes obtained a reddish fire; Verlaine re-directed his pupils on mine again

"Merci... cough... and how's Hendaye? Cough, cough, aaggghhh! I'm fed up of Paris, I need countryside, vert, je veux vert..! Cough, aaajjhhsshuffttt!"

-he said, spitting a thick projectile of yellow phlegm in a small basin of copper or spittoon settled ad hoc on the floor, under the table, close to his right foot

once he cleared his respiratory tract Verlaine extracted a pipe from his pocket filling it with tobacco, passing it to me, as he picked the pipe laid on the table:

as we lit them, I explained

"H-Hendaye is fine monsieur, but it's a small town... I been hoping to move, lately... in fact m-my intentions were to send you some of my texts, monsieur Verlaine, for you to examine them and tell me what you think... your advice and help would be highl..."

"My friend, I don't know a thing!" -he interrupted- "Nothing..! I don't write anymore, if I ever did... I'm retired, all I had to do, it's done, now... now I just survive. Intoxicate myself to forget..."

"To forget... what?" -I dared

his stare acquired a frightened aspect of alarm, as the whole osseous structure of his face experienced a commotion, like a transformation: the wrinkles of his forehead got momentarily smoothed and disappeared in an involuntary muscular contraction

"To forget love and the beauty... and the beauty, my friend... la beauté est fragile!"

In silence, my eyes were fixed on his stare, which was lost in the air again
his humid and turgent eyeballs were pregnant with dark-pink, ultra-thin venous filaments that seemed to run, all and together, toward the grey iris.
Like multiple pink legs of two spiders of perfectly spherical and grey torsos

as the wrinkles on the forehead returned, the external commissures of his eyes seemed to be about to jump off the ocular fossas that contained them; his pupils appeared abnormally dilated:
suddenly, an illumination was ejected from his salivated lips

"I want... the gold of Majorca!
Do you have it?"

His brown eyebrows got almost joined in a gesture of anguish, while his mouth was twisted in the excessive smile of the insane

his stare was empty now. Completely devoid of life or emotion.


As an indefinite feeling of terror and pity invaded me, I tried to articulate some answer

"No, I don't monsieur" -I said with an electric flux of shame running through my brain



I left the pipe, slow and courteously on the table, and standing up, with a forced smile, tried to reach his right gloved hand -which remained immobile- to grasp it in a formal handshake and leave that depressing place as soon as possible.

Stretching my right hand I held his, and saluted him with some mediocre word of courtesy that cannot remember, the gloved hand barely moved. Paul Verlaine was looking at something on the table, maybe himself.









Once on the sidewalks of May, I realized that the initial antipathy toward that man who didn't reply my letters... toward that spectre seated in that café, turned into sympathy -sympathy in the English sense-: compassion, commiseration almost.

 


The solar and patrician light was like a white hand on the front of the bars, of every bar of Paris... I walked away through that silvery fervor to never return.

 




























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