DIARY OF THE FALL
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VINTAGE
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London SW1V 2SA
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Copyright © Michel Laub 2013
English translation copyright © Daniel Hahn 2017
Cover: Apple © Private Collection / Bridgeman Images
‘Drain You’, words and music by Kurt Cobain © 1991 Primary Wave Tunes and The End Of Music. All Rights Administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC.
Michel Laub has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Harvill Secker in 2017
First published with the title A maçã envenenada in 2013 by Editora Companhia das Letras, São Paulo
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
A suicide changes everything its author ever said, sang or wrote. For the millions of fans of Nirvana, the band that led to his being considered the spokesman of a generation, Kurt Cobain is not a childhood in Aberdeen, the beginnings of a career in Seattle, the premature stardom that would end up changing musical history with the album Nevermind, nor the alcohol and the drugs and the spiral of despair followed relentlessly by the media, including the stormy marriage to the singer Courtney Love and the birth of his only child, his daughter Frances Bean. Or rather he is all these things, but only as a collection of symptoms, a mirror which, through lyrics and ill-matched accounts, reveals a scene that has never been clearly explained, at Lake Washington, April 1994, hours or days before an electrician found his body with a shotgun bullet in the head.
To me, Kurt Cobain will always be the man who got up onto the stage of the Morumbi Stadium, in 1993, for what he would later call the worst show of Nirvana’s career. I was living in Porto Alegre at the time, I was eighteen and in the barracks: my first shift on guard, with my first instructions for overnight duty, standing there one Thursday in front of a fat sergeant who was talking about rifle care. He couldn’t say the word password, he’d say pathward, and what was the correct procedure? He would answer his own question: say halt and ask for the pathward.
I was in the Centre for Reserve Officer Training, known as the CPOR, the barracks assigned to those university students who’d escaped having to clean out manure in a cavalry unit or take a drubbing in the Army Police. It didn’t make much difference: I still had to submit myself to the orders of the fat sergeant, and it hardly mattered that I took sociology classes with a Jungle Warfare major, or that I attended lectures on venereal diseases and the Union budget. The 1964–85 dictatorship didn’t matter either, nor did the impeachment of President Collor in 1992, nor the fact that military life in Brazil was of no interest to anyone, least of all to someone like me who lived with his parents and had a guitar and was in a band, because every morning I still had to be in my uniform at seven, with bugle and bucket and broom, and the technical name for clearing the weeds from the basketball court is cri-cri.
I ended up at the CPOR because a friend of the family had said my name would be on a list of exemptions at the conscription bureau. But when I showed up at the desk a corporal asked my address, date of birth and whether I was at college. Law school. Where? The Federal Uni. I’d come to the end of my second semester and I was doing an internship at a nearby law firm, where I was intending to go after getting my exemption certificate and killing some time in a café in the Public Market. It was all planned, I even knew which tape I’d listen to on my walkman to celebrate, but the corporal looked for my name on the list and laughed and gave the answer that every corporal dreams of giving to a student with a smart shirt and leather briefcase and headphones round his neck: so I guess it looks like you’re just going to have to defer your course.
The tape was a recording of Nevermind. Over the last twenty years I may have listened to the album hundreds, possibly thousands of times, and it’s as though each time has the power to bring 1993 back: my walking out of the conscription bureau, the dirt and humidity and a Porto Alegre summer, the noise of the buses and a pregnant woman with a rubbish bag being followed by a line of dogs while I stared at the document informing me that I was now under the jurisdiction of the Army Discipline Regulations. Mine was platoon 6, under Lieutenant Pires. There were five columns of six men, with the tallest at the head, the others lined up behind them in rigid single file using the back of the neck of their fellow in front as a reference point. Thirty students, and I haven’t kept in touch with any of them. I don’t have a photo of any of them. I don’t know if any of them still lives in Porto Alegre, has children, is still alive. I might not remember anything at all that happened when we were together beyond the most general military lore, the platoon learning to march, doing moves with their guns, singing in time to the right-foot step while the company parades before the platform where the officers stand, were it not for a story that begins with Kurt Cobain coming to São Paulo.
Truth is, the story really starts earlier, the night I met Valéria. I was at a bar in the Independência district, a place with a metal staircase and sweat condensed on the walls. She was my age, her mother had died when she was four, her father paid the rent on a one-bedroom apartment for her two blocks away, but those were things I only learned later because that first conversation was completely direct: they say you’ve got a band and you’re looking for a girl to sing with you, someone who can get up there and tell everyone to go fuck themselves.
I looked at her: tattoos in the days before having tattoos was in fashion; she noticed my glass and I said, you like bad vodka? I’m a masochist, she replied. I asked how many bands she’d been in before. She asked what kind of music I listened to. I ordered another shot, she said this is our first drink together, enjoy it because it might be all downhill from here, there’s no turning back now, and I kept looking at her mouth and at her hair and at the way she moved her shoulders and her hips and before I’d noticed she was pressed right up next to me.
In Valéria’s apartment there was a bookcase with cassettes, band names drawn with a ballpoint pen, in a variety of characters and fonts with shading and Gothic symbols and the tips of letters made to look like lightning bolts. There was also a cat and a poster of Kurt Cobain. In the living room there was a threadbare sofa and a converted fridge used for storing books. I like old-lady décor, she said. Do you like old things? Have you ever screwed an older woman? I’m your age, but decades older than you.
Like everybody did back in the nineties, Valéria shouted when she sang. The band wasn’t all that original either, arrangements that alternated between light and heavy, melody and distortion, simple four-chord bass lines of drums and bass guitar and then the guitar exploding with the three lower strings into the chorus. If you take the basic elements of Nevermind, the major chords, the fingerings and strummed percussive riffs, the modulating of beats and pauses and vocals reiterating the hammering percussion, you’ll have the sum total of the resources we used for our songs in those first few practices. Except that Valéria had a kind of sweetness to her, even if it was restricted to her performances at the microphone, and the very first time I heard her I knew it would make a difference.
Between the night at the bar in Independência and the coming of Nirvana to São Paulo there were eleven months. Comparing the day before I met Valéria to the day after the show is like talking about different eras, worlds in opposition to one another. I’ve kept no photos of Valéria either, nor a single item of clothing, I didn’t keep a tape with some song or other of the band’s, but it’s as though she were still eighteen in an eternal present, and each time I see the videos of Morumbi I know she’s there, in the darkness among the first few rows, right in front of where they filmed Kurt Cobain’s appearance in the middle of the blue light.
Nirvana was the main attraction at Hollywood Rock, closing the Saturday-night programme after performances by Dr Sin, the Engenheiros do Hawaii and L7. Kurt Cobain was staying with Courtney Love at the Maksoud. In one report the hardcore punk singer João Gordo described the night he spent with the couple. He claimed that Courtney Love had an attack of jealousy and paid three hundred dollars to a transvestite over on Amaral Gurgel. When João Gordo complained of having a stomach ache, Kurt Cobain offered him a vial of something. The vial was kept as a trophy, and when the reporter sent it to a lab he learned that it was a treatment for heroin addiction.
During the show Kurt Cobain shouted, cried, moaned, complained, stopped several songs when they’d only just started, spat and rubbed his trousers up against the cameras. He also made a hole in one of the speakers with the neck of his guitar and fell over on the stage. At the end, he crawled off. One critic described the performance as long, undisciplined and self-indulgent. And he thought the most representative moment of the show was when the singer, with a mixture of despair and doom, destroyed all the instruments almost delicately, beneath the silence of the audience and the stars.
During the week of Hollywood Rock, nobody at the CPOR even mentioned Kurt Cobain. Our subject was Thursday night, the first that we would be spending on a three-shift guard operation, four hours of rest after two hours attending to each of our posts: gate, backup, hillside, lateral zone and storeroom. The storeroom guard covers a large area of scrubland full of capybaras, and the fat sergeant referred to this in his preliminary briefing: you’re not to shoot at every sound, it’s not the little critter’s fault if he’s wandering around without knowing the pathward.
Over the course of the year a CPOR student learns to shoot a light automatic rifle, the LAR, and a 9mm pistol. At these instruction sessions we are taught basics, accuracy and safety standards. The basics are how you position your body, the way it slots into your shoulder, the lightness of your finger on the trigger until the feeling of the weapon’s recoil like a shock. Accuracy is gauged relative to the sights, and a good session is one where the holes from the bullets are close to one another rather than to the centre of the target. Safety standards include loading procedure, the safety catch, getting the all-clear, and the protocol in case of weapon failure or a companion getting hit.
It was Lieutenant Pires who gave the shooting classes. In field exercises, command for the patrols always fell to an officer. The fat sergeant would, at most, spend his day at a desk overseeing the supply of firearms. At most, he would do deals with students who’d forgotten to return their shells, recording one mark less in the book of faults in exchange for a bag of mate tea and a sweet quindim. In his office there’s a calendar, a roll of sellotape, a small basin with the Grêmio team emblem done in pyrography. On the night of our first guard duty, though, everything changes: the preliminary briefing is given in an authoritative tone of voice, by a large figure who walks about with his hands behind his back as though he were in a cross-examination. I don’t want any disturbance today, the sergeant says. I haven’t come out just to deal with losers. A student who keeps his nose clean will have an easy ride. Don’t make me have to crap all over your life.
Somebody once said that military justice is to justice what military music is to music. Life in the barracks means getting punished: there isn’t a man who hasn’t paid for his fellows, a whole platoon set to lug rocks because one student doesn’t have a crease in his trousers, a whole company doing two hundred sit-ups in the mud because someone hasn’t had his vaccination. When you’re on guard duty it’s even easier for this to happen, everything is recorded in the Internal Report, so the first stroke of luck you can have relates to who your companions on duty chance to be.
One of my companions that night was called Diogo. He was the one who talked most on the bench in the sentry box. He would spend the shift explaining how to fake a student card, how to throw a punch without hurting your wrist, how to get into a car with a nail and a bit of string, and it’s OK, nothing’s gonna happen because those Military Police are all fags, but after we heard the briefing from the sergeant Diogo didn’t tell any more stories. I never heard another word out of him. We were called away by the deputy, we took our mugs and walked over to dinner, he was sitting at the next table along and we spent the whole meal avoiding each other’s eye. We finished around nine thirty, returned to our quarters, then the corporal of the guard sent out the column who were to relieve the ten o’clock shift.
The earliest shift is a reasonable one compared to the others. You get to sleep three hours in a row during the night. More than for the second, which keeps watch from two to four and at five you’re back on your feet for cleaning duties, or the third, which gets the worst of the cold and fog in the winter. During guard duty the students listen to music, they drink, they sleep with their arms hugged around their rifles, and one time a cavalryman was caught with a copy of the photo magazine Sodomia, but on my first night I spent my shift trying to concentrate, thinking about what I could and should do in the coming days.
One option was to leave the barracks on Friday, take a plane Saturday morning and be at Guarulhos airport in São Paulo by lunchtime. I’d have to cross the whole city to get to Morumbi, but that was no problem. I’d have to leave my rucksack somewhere, but that could be arranged somehow, too. I’d have to find Valéria in the middle of the crowds, ninety thousand people in Kurt Cobain goatees and flannel shirts, but even here I’d find a way. The problem was that before any of that, because of Diogo and the fat sergeant, and this was the doubt that assailed me in the storeroom, the chances were that I was under arrest.
Or the story may begin somewhere else instead, on a dirt road where there are chickens, cows, a container lorry, sweet-seller stands. Gradually the landscape changes, the right-hand side of the road opens onto plantations, ibises and egrets, hippopotami and flocks of birds and antelopes and wild pigs until the vast marshes appear – the slime in the middle of the fog, the hours spent with water up over your knees and the long walks at night to find food, the first rays of sunlight and men in the distance drinking and cutting the branches just the same way you cut anything with a machete.
In April 1994, engineering student Immaculée Ilibagiza had dinner with her family in Mataba, Rwanda. With her at the table were her father, her mother, her brother and a friend who had come for the Easter holidays. Her mother talked about the harvest, her father about a grant programme from the coffee growers’ cooperative, and conversation continued along these lines until her brother mentioned he had come across some Hutus carrying guns and grenades. Immaculée’s family was Tutsi, the ethnicity that had been in power during the colonial period and which had been replaced by the Hutu majority following independence, in the 1960s.
Immaculée’s brother had heard rumours about a kill list with the names of the Tutsi families in the area. It was nothing new in Rwanda: there had been scattered ethnic attacks right through the three decades of Hutu rule. Government radio stations compared the Tutsis to cockroaches. A song sung at schools advocated trampling them to death. All the same, the father rejected Immaculée’s brother’s suggestion: that they get hold of a boat, cross Lake Kivu and escape with the family to Zaire that very night.
Today Immaculée is a writer who travels the world giving talks. Recently she was in São Paulo. It was a promotional event organised by her publisher, in which she had coffee with journalists on the PUC campus, did a photo shoot and gave a lecture on what happened after the dinner in Mataba: how she helped her mother with the washing-up, then retreated to her bedroom where she prayed before a small altar she had set up with an image of Christ and the Virgin Mary. She was awoken in the small hours by her brother with the news that the president’s airplane had been brought down. Immaculée leaped out of bed, put on a pair of trousers, the first time she’d ever changed clothes in front of her brother. When she opened the window she saw what looked like a yellowish halo over the village.
Immaculée’s father and mother were already out on the patio. The BBC read the names of the first dead on the radio. One of them was an uncle who lived in Kigali. There’d been an attempt on the prime minister. Phone lines had been cut, the highways were blockaded, and as soon as an opportunity arose Immaculée’s father sent her to the house of a Hutu pastor who had agreed to hide her.
The president’s death unleashed a civil war that in three months killed eight hundred thousand Tutsis, almost twenty per cent of Rwanda’s population, most of them hacked to death with machetes by Hutus who had been their neighbours, their teachers, their colleagues. Foreigners fled the country in the first few days. The UN withdrew their security forces soon afterwards. There were mass rapes, decapitations, bodies left out in the open air to begin rotting before the animals ate them.