Woes of the True Policeman

rape of Rimbaud by a group of soldiers while the poet was on his way to Paris to join the dream of the Commune, Amalfitano, turning over in his head a text that could be read many different ways, saw the end of his heterosexuality, stifled by the absence of something he couldn’t put his finger on, a woman, a heroine, a superwoman. And sometimes, instead of just thinking about Rimbaud’s poem, he recited it aloud, which was a habit that Amalfitano, like Rosa, had inherited from Edith Lieberman: Mon triste cœur bave à la poupe,
    Mon cœur couvert de caporal:
    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 …

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    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.

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    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