Sobre el Discutidor de Saint-Michel (versión imprimible y de libre distribución)

Escribo estas páginas en parte por recordar a alguien que, tras un solo encuentro, logró dejar una impresión duradera en mí, y en parte con la esperanza de que alguien en París (o sus alrededores) lo vuelva a encontrar. La vaga culpa que sentí tras nuestro altercado se ha desvanecido. Poco importa si algún lector se enfurece por lo que hice: la reacción del Discutidor era imprevisible y la conciencia no me pesa.

Oí de él por primera vez en The Abbey Bookshop, en la rue de la Parcheminerie, a menos de cinco minutos del lugar donde el Discutidor trabajó. Ametrano, un amigo que frecuentaba ese quartier y con quien yo me topaba en circunstancias cada vez más sospechosas, me comentó que acababa de mantener un magnífico debate sobre Baudelaire con el hombre de la Place St. A- des Arts. A mí me sorprendió el uso del artículo definido, le pregunté qué hombre. Fue entonces cuando mi amigo cesó de escanear las estanterías y me miró con genuina sorpresa.

-Mais, ¡el Discutidor de Saint-Michel! –dijo. Me encogí de hombros.

Me explicó con mucho ripio dónde se situaba el hombre, luego se despidió sin elucidar nada más allá de su ubicación, aunque urgiéndome que fuera a visitarlo de inmediato. Pero se me hacía tarde, así que hube de esperar un par de días antes de conocerlo.

Llegué a la plaza especificada una tarde. Dos hombres charlaban sentados en pequeños taburetes plegables. Esperé. A los pocos minutos uno de ellos se levantó, le estrechó la mano al otro, y se marchó. El hombre restante levantó un letrero de cartón que leía:

Débat

Argument

Debate

// 2eu – 5min.

Charles Baudelaire, Parisian Sisyphus

-‘D'où vous vient, disiez-vous, cette tristesse étrange,

 Montant comme la mer sur le roc noir et nu?’

The Man

When Charles-Pierre Baudelaire was but six years old, his father died, leaving his mother a substantial inheritance. To this misfortune others would follow, all losses and defeats neither extraordinary –as the youths of Rimbaud or Genet were to be replete of— nor commonplace. Some twenty months after becoming a widow, Catherine Archimbaut-Dufays, Baudelaire’s mother, remarried: this time to a neighbor who held the title of Lieutenant Colonel. Young Charles felt betrayed and predictably turned his ire against his stepfather, whom he would always despise. These opening facts, when transferred to the ambit of his works, translate into a sense of rebelliousness, dissatisfaction and an ardent longing for escape.

As a young man, he was expelled from boarding school for systematically disobeying its rules. He showed habile avoidance of his stepfather’s schemes. He wanted for young Charles a diplomatic career: instead, the latter declared he would pursue literature, and soon after started abusing drugs and frequenting brothels. It was during one of these idylls with prostitutes when he most likely contracted the syphilis that would, in time, end his life. Indeed, sex and narcotics being a characteristic circumvention of tormented men, Baudelaire lived in a cloud of ephemeral pleasures. The effect these vices create, namely a displacement of consciousness outside the subject, will be examined afterwards in the context of one of his poems. For Baudelaire, these addictions were as normal as they were necessary. Yet his quest was not a circular one –as the search of pleasure for pleasure’s sake would be—, rather, it was propelled by the terror of the other, which under his pen takes the name of Ennui.

In the poem “To the Reader”, he writes:

There is one uglier, more wicked and more foul than all!

Although he does not make great gesture or great cries,

He would gladly make the earth a shambles

And swallow the world in a yawn;

It is boredom! His eyes weeping an involuntary tear,

He dreams of gibbets as he smokes his hookah.

You know him, reader, this delicate monster,

-Hypocrite reader –my twin- my brother![1]

These last stanzas of the poem are an approximation, by use of antithesis, to the central Baudelarian problem of boredom, inasmuch as they reflect the poet’s dichotomic view: if not Vice, then Ennui; if not excess, then lethargy. For Baudelaire, everything existed and revolved around one of the two extremes of Horror.