Disaster Was My God

by Bruce Duffy

  And Emily Dickinson? Ah, but she was her own century.

  Not so Rimbaud. Indeed, by his teens, at his height, the boy had rid himself of the florid, bowdlerizing earnestness of his time, with its pieties and fripperies and oddities of punctuation. In fact, with one shrug, he pretty much had freed himself from the prevailing notion of poetry, which, however artfully, was finally written in the language of common sense. Meaning, at least on a basic level, that pretty much anybody could read and understand it, just as anybody could see what typically was all too evident. True, there were exceptions to the boy’s harsh judgments—precious few, like Albert Mérat and Paul Verlaine. But otherwise, what was the point? the kid wondered. Where was the power and mystery? Who would ever want to be that kind of poet? An obvious poet. Really, a butler poet with white gloves holding a silver tray for the reader.

  Never! Being a wild child, an immortal, he was more than ready to die for the cause. Which, being a kid, was to revolutionize love and transform life. In this great cause, he was elliptical and irrational. Dissonant. Obscurantic. Crazy. Throw in scatological, too. And so he was alone. Out of his mind with his mind. The Pied Piper had outrun even the rats.

  Still more unsettling, the lad was a peasant savant, a hick, why, a Belgian, almost. Indeed, as Baudelaire had warned, “The over-egoed and over-arted Belgians are so civilized / They are sometimes syphilised.”

  And, worse, born to this bullheaded plough woman of no particular education. Odder still, there was the case of Arthur’s brother, Frédéric, a virtual twin. Who, until almost the age of sixteen, the mother had dressed like a doll, just as she had Arthur—her two doily boys. Indeed the next year, when the Hedgehog and Otter begged to examine poor Frédéric’s noggin, the mother summarily dismissed the idea—as preposterous, ridiculous.

  “That one?” she said of her second son. “Don’t waste your time. There is a muck fork in that boy’s future.”

  Our Arthur, then, was not only a bona fide miracle but her miracle, about whom she was—early on, at least—extraordinarily, if secretly, vain: that this boy of hers could be so brilliant; that of nothing she could produce something—amazing, even if it was of the testicular male subspecies. Pride, then. This was Mme. Rimbaud’s sin of choice. And as a realist, she recognized it and suffered terribly because of it, and then in a way our age will never comprehend.

  Pride was her weakness. And pride was precisely what she prayed against and confessed to, even as she hotly blew on it like a coal, into full and dangerous effulgence. Others knew of her outsized pride. Around Charleville her pride was legendary, second only to her ability to sense, and pounce upon, distress.

  When trouble made its rounds, over the hill the unfortunate soon would see Mme. Rimbaud’s black buggy. Before the gendarme and le croque-mort—the undertaker—before even the worm, she was the early bird.

  A woman had to be alert, she said. To drunks being carted home. To public notices. To gendarmes at the door, to distressed crops, women weeping at the pawnshop, and the like. Obviously, unlike the males, she couldn’t get her news at the various “troughs,” the tavern and cafés.

  And make no mistake: in her way, Mme. Rimbaud could be charming when she wanted to. Very, when money was involved, and especially with the desperate or blithely unsuspecting. The Rimbaud children would hear, “The Rivières are having trouble.” Or still more vaguely, “There is trouble up the road—don’t speak of it.” Crossing herself. Actually shivering, lest she contract the human disease she most dreaded—failure.

  And yet: she was a midwife of failure, Mme. Rimbaud. Made house calls, too. At the first whiff of bad news, she would tie her black bonnet into a big bow, then climb into her black gig. Spokes spinning, away she went, first to the boulangerie to pick up the pain de campagne—that resilient country loaf nested so fetchingly in a napkined basket in which the unsuspecting would find a pot of fresh butter and her pungent black cherry jam.

  Odd thing, though. Cut loose from her children, Mme. Rimbaud was a woman set free on these strange excursions. Indeed, when the prize presented itself, she could be playful, shameless, even getting down on her knees to hypnotize a rooster.

  Hush, children. Cluck-clucking, she flattens old Red in the dirt, sweetly jibbering the chickenish of sexy hen talk. Now observe: again and again she draws, before Red’s crossed eyes, a line in the dirt. Line after line after line, until even her young audience grows sleepy. When—

  “Voilà!”

  Red rises, his comb a spastic asterisk. Sputters, crows, flaps, and quakes—this as his harem, pantaloons bouncing, dives beneath the chicken house. Hypnotizing Red, Mme. Rimbaud almost hypnotizes herself. Look at her, laughing with a gaggle of children. However briefly, some hidden school-mistress self appears; she experiences actual mirth, even pleasure, to the point that she must wipe her eyes. But of course the Rimbaud children never see this side of their mother, ever.

  Once this bit of tomfoolery is over, it’s back to business. She returns to her defeated neighbor crouched in the doorway, elbows squeezed between his knees. “Monsieur, save what you can, while you can,” she says helpfully. “This will be your last chance.”

  When the rot is on the wheat and the pox is on the herd, who can argue with this? He can’t. And even then, walking through house and barn, pointing at things, no sooner does she name her price than her captives, almost hypnotized, silently carry them to her gig. Then away, black horses! Away from this contagious house! Spit on a sou. Pull out a hair. Toss it over your left shoulder, snap the reins, and never look back.

  And so, driving away in her overburdened gig, she would be clucking, thinking what a pity that “pauvre Arthur” in Africa did not have her as his partner—someone smart and tough. Heh. She’d make them pay up! Even the fat black king!

  But now to have to wait upon Arthur’s return from Africa—to be cast as the powerless old woman, this is beyond Christian; it is superhuman, unbearable. And with each week, towering and funneling up, her anger only grows. Indeed, the only thing greater is her dread at his impending return, blackening the skies like the locust clouds over Pharaoh’s Egypt.

  5 Old History

  Worse, it all feels so familiar, bailing him out again. It takes Mme. Rimbaud back to the old days, his poet days, twenty years before, when for months at a time, perhaps forever—perhaps dead this time—he would run away to Paris. Back to the arms of Paul Verlaine, whose teenage wife, saddled with child and social humiliation, began to write to Mme. Rimbaud. Heart-wrenching letters. Scandalous letters, horrors beyond her comprehension. And yet, inevitably, six months or a year later, something would blow up and, like a homing pigeon, back the kid would come to Roche, always back, and then as blindly and arbitrarily as he had left. Often this would mean walking clear from Paris, some two hundred kilometers, traipsing from village to village and farm to farm with no money, no blanket, no kit. Nothing but his pencil and penknife and a soggy wad of paper upon which, toward sundown, a hunched-over boy rocking and murmuring and blowing into his hand wrote:

  The Wolf Howled

  The wolf howled under the leaves

  And spit out the prettiest feathers

  Of his meal of fowl:

  Like him I consume myself.

  Lettuce and fruit

  Wait only to be picked;

  But the spider in the hedge

  Eats only violets.

  Let me sleep! Let me boil

  On the altars of Solomon.

  The froth runs down over the rust,

  And mingles with the Kedron.

  Well, one may say that poetry is pure thinking, or pure feeling, or memories recollected in tranquillity. But this was not merely thinking, feeling, or memory, much less tranquillity. It was, if anything, the search for invisibility, pure oblivion, as he hurled himself back to the blind fear of home.

  Dogs barking. Moon in streams. For days he would barge headlong down deserted roads, resolutely not thinking, a will and a walker, a bum and a stalker, with his big
, rough hands, burr-studded coat, and rumpled hat. Raiding fruit trees. Sucking eggs and sleeping in barns—running, walking, jerking off when necessary. Keep going don’t sleep don’t stop. Never stopping until at last his boots reached the roiling, silvery weeds of the river Meuse, dark-braiding, propulsive river, his home river, gleaming like a blade under the moon. The rocks were treacherously slippery and the water, especially in spring, was too fast and deep. Frantically, like a dog on scent, he turned left, then right, then clambered up the bank to the humped stone bridge, where for some time he could be seen, standing in the middle, peering down at the muscular black water, water unending sweeping beneath him, pure blind will, like a sheet of liquid iron.

  Then, on the other side, dropping down the culvert, he fell into waist-high wheat, whirring burrs that scraped his coat, first wheat, then hoof-pocked, boot-sucking bottomland, until at last he saw the slate roof of the white house shining in the distance. Roche: wide, well-tended lanes of rye and hay and oats for which he, lord of no account, had never once lifted a finger.

  He always came in past midnight, and each time was the same. The kitchen door was unlocked, and no sooner did he lift the latch than a raging, cored-out hunger drove him to the larder, there to wolf down half a ham, stale bread, raw eggs, even her preserves, a whole jar, pawed out as if by a starved bear. When, suddenly, he would wake up sickened, panicked like an overheated child who had spent the day playing, only to realize he had a body.

  Not that la vieille rombière was fooled, ever, with her freak ears. At the sound of the floorboards creaking upstairs, groaning with the sodden weight of his ingratitude, one ear would perk up. It was almost reassuring. Exactly like the kid’s father, years ago, when he would stumble home drunk.

  The next morning, however, the prodigal was masterful. Near noon, when he tumbled down the stairs, already the tension was such that he’d never left. Arrogant lout. Filling the doorway, he was larger than she remembered, the protuberant planes of his broad blond face now misshapen, as if his bones had outgrown his own skin. And the toll on him. Knuckles cut up. Bruises on his face. Clothes a shambles. Standing back, she realized that she was now frightened of him, much as he, too, was afraid—afraid she might try to strike him, in which case he’d have to break her stupid neck.

  “Bien,” she said with a sarcastic tremor, “we are back.”

  Icily, awaiting the onslaught, “That’s right, Mother, I’m back.”

  “Well, I’m not supporting you. No.”

  “God.” In a stagy voice he narrated his saga. “For days he walks home. To her. And yet when she first lays eyes on him, his own mother, what does she do but threaten him. God.”

  “You! Don’t you dare turn your back to me, Arthur Rimbaud! Why did you return? Why? Don’t touch that. What? Can I expect the gendarme this time?” Like barks, her questions followed him through the house, “So your pig friend, he threw you out? Eh?”

  “I threw myself out.”

  “Et voilà!” How she adored being right. “Heh, even he didn’t want you! And with that big brain of yours, what then did you think? That you would roll unannounced into my home? Your big brain, it told you that all this is open to you? Of course. Please, come in with your muddy boots. Please, put up your feet. Eat everything. Do nothing. Watch your mother slave for you, eh?”

  Maybe he wanted this inquisition. Needed it. Perhaps in a sense he returned home to feel again, to be slapped awake. The chair honked back. Look. He was a giant, invulnerable; her words, her vituperation, her primitive fear, they slid right off him, like ice off a slate roof. No matter. Clear to his lair at the top of the house, she dogged him, while in the room below, his two sisters huddled in fear, hearing:

  “What? You who refuses to work! You, with no prospects! Who just shows up here with your open jaws, uninvited!”

  Slam.

  Then she was slapping his door, beating it like a man’s chest, her voice magnified by the narrow stairway. Barking, “How dare you? Do you know what Madame Verlaine writes to me, the awful things? Are you insane? I ask myself. Possessed? Do you know what she tells me while you cavort around Paris, you and that devil, stealing the food from her poor child’s mouth! Do you know what the Church says about such—arrangements? That you are now abominable in God’s eyes.”

  Vicious little prick. Suddenly, he snatched the door open, so she almost fell in. Then stood over her. “Go on, bloody scream, you old axe—you’re good at that. And what about you? Do you think that you did not drive my father away? That he was not revolted at the sight of you?”

  “Me? Your father abandoned you! All of you, with your endless squalling and needing! And you with the devil in his flesh! The devil, do you hear me?”

  But this was too powerful, too close. As might have been predicted, the old woman reversed course. Fell to her knees, seized his fingers, hot tears running down her neck, begging, “Pray with me, please. Do you not see what I am doing for you, my child? That I would get down on my knees before you? Before God? Do you not see?”

  “Get up!” He starts to drag her, then drops her; it is all he can do not to slug her, clinging to his legs, “Jesus—there’s your man! A bloody corpse.”

  At this, again she flips, ripping and scratching at him. “Condemned before God! Does this mean nothing to you? Do you care how your little sister cries, always thinking you are dead? Do you care about the shame you heap down upon us? That the whole town laughs at you—laughs! The great genius. Just like his father, another big talker. And doing what in Paris? Used comme un chiffon, by an older man, un chiffon!”

  Or maybe he returned to see how far he had fallen, that he might fall further, faster, more heedlessly. Damned was the plan. The plan was, there was no plan. Publication—but what on earth would that have proved? Or the university—the trough. The law? Even more ridiculous. In his new order, all laws would be abolished. A job? Never. He was a poet. Let the world pay.

  Still, to be fair, he was then all of eighteen, a hormone-mad former collégien who, half the time, would give his poems away. Away like cooties, lest these hallucinations perish with him during these frightening periods when his cycloning brain would not desist and sleep refused to come.

  Had he merely been consistently sullen and hateful, this would have been one thing for his poor mother, but of course he had no such coherence. Witness his sisters, both famished for him, starved for any male presence, as in their room he played the hero, the long-lost brother and confidant. Listen to them, thought Mme. Rimbaud, laughing and having fun. Never! She did not approve of males, even siblings, being in the rooms of young ladies. To hear their laughter. His casual male duplicity. That behind their doors he could act almost normal, putting on the Arthur Theater, as she called it. How the girls shrieked as he played the part of the train conductor flipping his lid at this kid, this ticket jumper rummaging through his pockets … Ticket, my ticket, wait, wait! I know I have it. Then, grabbing his own belt, theatrically, he hurls himself off the train, rolls across the floor, then comes to rest by their puckered, wide-eyed dolls, before whom he is just a kid laughing hysterically, his big red hands flopping. And from the other side of the room, his two sisters, the canaries in this air shaft, they stare at him in wonder—at his male power to shrug it off and leave without a second thought. To leave. Imagine that!

  6 Pilgrims

  This was 1872, Rimbaud’s eighteenth year, two years into his siege of the Muse. It was then that the first blow fell, at breakfast one morning when Vitalie coughed into her napkin, then shrieked. Blood, it was covered with a bright mist of blood, and when Mme. Rimbaud examined it, although she said nothing, she saw everything. It was Veronica’s veil, perfect in every detail, the bloody visage of Christ who died on Calvary, the hair, the lips, and cored-out eyes of suffering. Hope did not blind her. She had no doubt what was coming.

  There were of course mountain sanitariums and other places for consumptives, well-known places, good places, and certainly Mme. Rimbaud had the means to s
end her baby to such a place. But to avail herself of the usual recourses, this would have presumed that Mme. Rimbaud herself had the usual power to leave—that she was able to seek the help of other mortals, to change direction, even to hope.

  Pas question. Home was the best cure. Open windows, cold air, camphor rubs, mustard plasters, and of course long bouts of prayer. This was the way, God’s way, even as the girl, hacking and wheezing, began to expel leechlike spots, then bubbly white spots of lung foam, small caterpillars at which she would placidly stare, as if then they might move.

  Vitalie knew, of course: the dead-to-be always know. Her body was in insurrection and she was leaving for heaven, and with an odd thrill she knew, devout girl that she was, that her mother knew that she knew. No secrets now. Why, everybody in Charleville knew. Pathetic, horrifying, to see Mme. Rimbaud firing one doctor, then another, helpless before the inevitable. And Arthur? As a male, naturally, he was absent for this part, though Mme. Rimbaud wrote to him her usual long, prayerfully disconnected letters. She wrote to him repeatedly, but at this point the two so-called roommates were in London, self-exiled and successively evicted, such that almost nothing reached him, not even through the normally reliable school chum channels.

  But then late one night while praying, Mme. Rimbaud had a vision. It was a vision of Chartres, of a family pilgrimage to the great cathedral, a place of miracles built during the feverish outpouring of Mary worship that swept France in the late twelfth century.

  The passion in those days, the fear. Death had ears and sickness had wings, and yet, miracle of miracles, in an ornate golden box the town of Chartres had—and don’t ask how—Mary’s tunic, her actual tunic seen by the actual eyes of Christ. And so from all across Europe, pilgrims and cripples and the blind and the dying, they all came to bask in its holy radiance. A wooden cathedral was built around it. The cathedral burned down, then a second, and when the tunic didn’t perish in either fire, its survival was declared a miracle. And so on that blessed site, over fifty years amid ever-rising tides of darkness and evil, stone upon stone, the great cathedral rose, until it could be seen like a great Ark itself, beached on those vast level plains of hay and barley and oats. Fortunate thing, too, for the devils were so thick, the witches were so crafty, and sickness was so rampant that the poor, fleeing this plague, actually took to living in the church, they and their animals, all taking shelter in Mary’s vast stone barn. In similar fashion, some six hundred years later, the Rimbaud women also sought shelter in the great cathedral of Chartres.