by Bruce Duffy
So many children there were in these old poems!—O Childhood days—wasn’t the body a treasure to spend?—wasn’t love the peril or strength of the Psyche?… Children laughing, children running; a troupe of child actors and children at dawn, waving their arms at the sky, thrilled to be alive, freed, in the first air and rainbows after the Flood, which had wiped clean away the old, dead world of ogreish parents and their pious falsities. Here, confounding and confabulating, were new fables, tales of many things, including love:
A Prince was tired of merely spending his time perfecting conventionally generous impulses. He could foretell amazing revolutions of love, and suspected his wives of being able to give him more than their complacency, enhanced with ideals and wealth. He wanted to see truth and the time of full desire and satisfaction. He wanted this, even if it was a misuse of piety. At least he possessed a large reserve of human power.
All the wives who had known him were murdered. What slaughter in the garden of beauty! They blessed him when the sword came down. He did not order any new wives. The wives reappeared.
So ran the fugitive phantasmagoria of the now old prince’s thinking. Now, many years later, having fallen into the well of love—and with no recourse to magic swords—the prince was trying to think of an honorable way, of any way, out. When, with great prescience, matched by his equally great experience in such matters, much like writing, Arthur Rimbaud, trader, simply forgot. Quite simply, he … forgot.
13 Amnesia Anesthesia
That was it, forgot. It wasn’t a conscious or a cruel thing; it was a kind of thing, a mercy, really, to forget. A powerfully powerless male kind of thing, forgetting until one morning when at last he told her—out.
As in OUT.
Arrogant man. Did he think he could just rid himself of her by saying biblically, three times, I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee? Explaining didn’t work. Coaxing didn’t coax. And when she again became hysterical, grabbed for the knife, and threatened to cut her throat, well, that settled the matter. Proved his whole point—the girl had to go. With money and all amenities, obviously—but go. Out. So spoke the prophet who once foretold the time when the endless servitude of woman would be broken.
Ah, but his canny mother five thousand miles away—who somehow had her suspicions about all this—for some time, like a soup, Mme. Rimbaud had been stirring her son with specious claims about having “someone in mind” for him. Honestly now, Mme. Rimbaud casting herself as l’entremetteuse—the go-between—the doyenne of New Romance! She knew her son was distractible, and on this point she was correct. For her ridiculous offer, this bluff, produced in Rimbaud even more fantasy and drift and ambivalence, especially when the French-learning Tigist found the letter and exploded. At Ice Woman, as she called her prospective mother-in-law. At her and his stupid, silent sister, barren cow!
“You lie with me now,” the girl ordered, spreading her tasty yam for him. “Come! Yes, you come, and I will make you hard. Stupid Ice Woman. Ugly woman. Now be a man. Be hard for me. What is wrong with you? Look at you hanging like a dead chicken. Do you want people to talk? To call me barren? Give me child.”
But now as he is being carried out of town on this great gurney, this seems so long ago. Ages ago. And who am I now to you, a cripple—who, he thinks in shame.
Fool!
Waving her horsehair flyswatter, Tigist, with those spidery dark pools of eyes, Tigist just fans him away like bad smoke—go. Then she, too, turns away, while he, lying on his back, transported as through the afterlife, passes under the great gate, then down the sun-pounded road, down the great Harar massif, past staring wooly-haired men holding tall spears. Vacant-eyed men. It was they who owned the night, and they who would be watching, intensely, as Rimbaud’s party pushed east toward the sea.
14 Sticky Burrs
Gone! Free! But alas, not quite. For behind the column there remains that very discombobulated man now running and ballyhooing, his family struggling behind him as he rushes to catch the camel-clod train. It is, in fact, the very same man at whom the chaps had their big laugh. The same gent who, on Tuesday last, Bardey had sacked in his office.
“Hallo! Halloooooo! Monsieur Rimbaud! Monsieur, will you kindly hold up?”
And so it stops, this vast mammalian centipede, the camels looking at the horses and the horses at the men, at this man now bellowing and sprinting.
Fortunately for him, he has help, this queer pilgrim. For after him, walking smartly but with considerably more dignity, comes a stoutly handsome, resolute woman in a dun-colored dress and prim hat, carrying—wisely, against the piercing sun—a battered black umbrella. And after her, scuffing and scowling comes a grumpy, unwilling girl of perhaps ten, pulling an equally unenthusiastic boy of eight or so.
Children, Rimbaud thinks, white children, strangest of all creatures wearing crudely woven straw hats that resemble enormous mushrooms. Their shoes are broken, entirely inadequate. And after them here rumbles their belongings, or what remains of them. Piled in a creaky cart with wheels the size of barn doors, their evicted life groans along, drawn by a dog-sized donkey led, in turn, by an even tinier manservant, an ancient, bent-over, turbaned man with a long switch. Obviously, all they can afford.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you, sir,” cries the young Englishman.
Having succeeded in stopping this exodus, he changes step. Look at him striding up, pouring sweat, but now more smartly, as if buoyed by a pumping military band. He is a slim man but strongly built, strung like a bow. About him there is something bumptiously martial, palpably religious, and distinctly ridiculous. For here he comes, thanking one and all. Why, all but thanking the camels and Rimbaud’s scowling band of killers, with their spears and daggers and repeater rifles.
“Thank you! Lovely day. Fan-tas-tic. And thank you, sir …”
His teeth flash. Strong teeth. Two rows of grimacing desperation as he peers up at Rimbaud, already seasick on this rocking trampoline. “Mr. Rimbaud, sir,” he says, swatting his lifeless slouch hat. “Fergus MacDonald! Mr. Bardey sent us, if you will recall, sir. Hem, a little tagalong to Zeila? Surely you remember, sir.” Then, to seal the deal, he proffers a wide, flat hand. Incredible, thinks Rimbaud. As if MacDonald’s pulling him into the lifeboat.
“Do you not remember?” he continues, still more desperate, trying to break Rimbaud’s cold stare. “Mr. Bardey, his grace, kind soul, he was so very kind as to ask you on my behalf. On our behalf, rather.” Pointing behind him. “There, you see my wife, Adelaide. And there are our two children, Lolly and Ralph. Do you not see, sir? The, um, extremity of our situation?”
Rimbaud is still looking at these four—no, five—liabilities, counting the old wretch with the donkey cart.
“Easy, sturdy children, too,” he adds. “Oh, have no care there, sir. All able. All ready. And I know Mr. Bardey,” he labors, “he will appreciate your munificence on our behalf, what with the poor children, you know. Especially since we are, shall I say, at this unfortunate time, well, rather low on resources. But what with your sterling reputation, sir, and your many acts of kindness, well, I know that you worry about the children—I can see that. But sir, if I may say so, without you it might be weeks otherwise. Without your generosity, I mean to say. Upon receipt of which I will bless you, sir. And pray for you. Depend on it, sir. Fergus MacDonald, servant of the Lord, shall forever be in your debt. And Mr. Bardey’s.”
MacDonald is thirty, perhaps. His face is sunburned and wind scraped, and as he pulls off his hat, his balding forehead is shockingly white, embossed with a livid red crease from the rotting sweatband of his hat. He is wearing a white boiled shirt, now dirty. His suspenders are frayed and sagging, his brown trousers are dusty and his pull-on boots have thoroughly stretched-out elastics—hardly the equipage for a long desert trek. But to Rimbaud, the thing most amazing—shocking, in fact—is that, even in his desperation, the man seems happy, serenely so.
And yet, for one who despises helplessness—who finds it
horrifying, as his mother does—Rimbaud experiences the man as queasy-making. Embarrassing, as the bearers lower Rimbaud to the ground. Swatting his hat, Mr. MacDonald is like a dog on his back, banjoing his hind leg that you might further scratch his belly.
“Bless you, sir. Do you imagine? Do you think?”
It is then that Rimbaud recalls the fatal promise he made—stupidly, in the haste of leaving, on that same day in which Bardey had saved him by buying him out. Such that Rimbaud feels, for him, a very strange urge, the tug of gratitude.
“How shall I put this, Rimbaud?” the ever-tactful Bardey had explained, laboring to convey Mr. MacDonald’s bizarre saga. “We want him—off the boat. Oh, the chap tried, good heavens he tried. Early on, I counseled him. Strongly, I advised him. And then for a while, and I mean a very little while, I even held out some dim hope for him. Or rather, hope based more on the strength of his wife. Poor woman. As you’ll see, a fine woman. Commanding, even. Can’t see why she stays with him. And so,” he sighed at last, “it did not work out. Utter disaster. A menace, actually. And all, you understand, in his exceedingly nice way. Too nice.”
At this Bardey’s face reddened. “Well, we can’t have some, well, nitwit killing our profits. And all because of God, of course. In this self-deluded friar’s mind, he thinks God frowns on too much profit. And so we have a man, in my employ, virtually giving things away—by the handful.” He sighed again. “His grateful flock, they looted his wagon. Burned his Bibles. Stole his boots. Lord, you should have seen him. Half naked. Job emerging from the desert.”
“And?”
“Well,” ker-hemmed Bardey, “it is most unfortunate—criminal, really—but he brought his whole family with him. Young children, too. Here. Can you imagine? And what I cannot understand, well, that the wife seems quite able, really.”
Bankrolled on the fumes of a modest, now vanished inheritance, Fergus MacDonald was, irredeemably, Fergus the Failed, Friar Fergie, etc. “Well,” Bardey concluded, “finally I sacked him, of course. And this, mind you, after conferring with the local clergy. Who, to a man, agreed most heartily that the lad was ‘done,’ as they say.”
Pity Mrs. MacDonald; pity the children, too. For their father could neither convert nor barter. Nor did he drink, or smoke, or curse, or carry a gun. Or believe in quinine and inoculations. And worst, he was so frighteningly sincere. This is what made him so very dangerous in an already dangerous place. But before Rimbaud can send him packing, here’s the wife, an attractive woman, in fact the first European woman he has seen in several years. The children, though, are another matter. Scowling, they are none too happy to see their father pleading with some sunburned cripple lying in the road.
It must be fever, thinks Rimbaud. Propped up now, shotgun across his lap, weirdly famished, Rimbaud is looking at the children, then at Mrs. MacDonald, at her thick blond hair coiled and pinned beneath a once primly stylish but now chipped straw hat. And yet to him she feels strangely elegant—elegant in a bypassed way—in her long gray dress and starched white shirt, draped in a white shawl of native cotton. But what especially recommends her are her sturdy boots, man’s boots, much worn. Such competence—but with him, poor thing! Indeed, it spurs in Rimbaud an old nursery rhyme from his days in England: “Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater had a wife and couldn’t keep her …”
“But, Mr. Rimbaud,” pleads MacDonald, “we’ve no place to go. And as for the children, sir, don’t you worry. Little soldiers, these two. Five months here. Hard months. Believe me, sir, they know the ways here.”
“And you’ll have a trained nurse,” adds Mrs. MacDonald, invisibly but decisively taking over. “Monsieur Rimbaud, you should know that I have worked in a hospital, and you, sir, need attention. The children will be fine, and if you will kindly notice, over there, sir,” she pointed, “over there you can see our cart. We have the food and necessary water. I’ve seen to that …”
Nursed, though. The idea of being nursed strongly appeals to him in his present state. Touched by a woman’s cool hand. And there is something about her—her plump arms, her competence. Fine, he consents.
“Up now. Let’s go,” he tells his grumbling litter bearers. “On your feet.”
So, with a jog, up he goes, our difficult hero. High as an elephant, as behind him, compressing and expanding, here comes the smelly train, an accordion of men and beasts, oozing and undulating at a funereal creep through the slow-slithering heat. The lad, though, Ralph, already he has his doubts about their ailing host. In the boy’s mind, clearly he’s the liability.
“But, Daddy,” he hisses, pulling at his father’s hand. “Well, really, Daddy, look at him. How bad is he?”
“Mind your tongue. He is Mr. Rimbaud to you.”
“Well, I feel sick,” frumps Lolly. “Daddy, what, walking ten days? Daddy, I want to ride in the cart.”
“Come on, Lolly,” he moans. “You can see the poor old beast. Now, please. No more dawdling.”
“And think, children,” chimes in Mrs. MacDonald, her contralto voice rising like the road. “Now you must think,” she says, “now we all must think of how lovely it shall be once we reach the sea. Imagine that, bathing your toes in sloshing warm seawater. And sand, my dears. Not this sand, but beach sand squishing between your toes.” And then with the proffered sweet came the firm push, “Now walk.”
Book Two
Monsters Together
I AM CHOSEN, I AM DAMNED.
—PAUL VERLAINE
15 A Whiff of Immortality
Let us leave them for now in the desert. Fame beckons! Paris awaits!
For on news of Rimbaud’s encroaching fame, the Paris papers and revues were all in a lather, unable to find the great poet, lost of all places in the wastes of blackest Africa. Which left only one option: to find instead the man who had made known to the world what otherwise might have been Rimbaud’s lost and willfully unpublished writings.
By then, however, our peerless guide was no mere mortal. For in Paris only two years before this time—in none other than the neoclassical, gilt-encrusted Olympian hall of the Académie française—he had been called to join the company of such immortals as Montesquieu, Boileau, and Fénelon.
But just who was there to advance our poet’s case when he came before literature’s hanging docket? Almost no one, for he had behind him no powerful patrons, or salon, or school. He’d abandoned all that, burned his bridges, too. He did, though, have several critics—young but influential men who passionately cited his unique tonal ability to create music of rain and mist. Of gnawing regret and fugitive suffering, and—one suspected—of a suffering that was both deserved and entirely self-inflicted. In short, the music and angst of our modern fallen state:
Falling Tears
Soft rain falling on the town.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Falling tears in my heart,
Falling rain on the town
Why this long ache,
A knife in my heart?
Oh, soft sound of rain
On the ground and roof!
For hearts full of ennui
The song of the rain!
Tearfall without reason
In my sickened heart.
Really, no treason?
This grief has no reason.
By far the worst pain
Is not to understand
Why without love or hate
My heart has such pain
In a time when most poems were still earnestly literal and picturesque and “about” things—and written in a profusely fussy antique style—here was a poet modern in his vertigo and anomie, modern in tone, and modern, indeed, before anyone precisely knew what modern was. To more hidebound sorts, all this was new and raw, if not wrong. For certainly, the poet did not insist on being a “poet,” say, like Wordsworth standing exalted in his cape on a windswept crag overlooking the moors. His words could have been set to music. They drummed like rain and pulled against reason; they ached like real pain in the dark, almost
dumb way of deep sadness. His true themes, then, were loss and murk, guilt and dread and, yes, moments of unalloyed joy and pleasure, even lust, so much like our own. It was—what? More mortal. More destructive and confused and conflicted. More something. But new, that was the thing—new.
This man, our guide—shameless, penniless, and a convicted criminal—was, by most norms, the last one whom any sensible person would have picked for the role of “Prince of Poets.” Indeed, once so named, our hero was plucked from the gutters, washed, flea-dipped, and shorn. Then, in a set of borrowed tails, our Lazarus was stuffed in a horse cab and off he went, bleakly sober, to a glittering dinner, where he was formally declared Immortal.
Oh, never mind that later that night he hocked the tails for a piece of tail—indeed, for a three-day howl in the lowest scuppers of the Left Bank. It was too much. In much the way hunting hounds are so deliriously compelled to roll in dung and dead things, somehow, the poet had to throw the pack off his scent.
And what a howl it was, to see this new-minted Caesar carried on all fours by four whores, laureled, lewd, and pink. And by the way, just to set the record straight, it is historically inaccurate that on the third night of these escapades, it was Toulouse-Lautrec—alone—who rode the bard’s hairy back, waving the moist brassiere of a nursing mother—a “milker,” as they say, for those who relish that sort of kink. For in fact, there were two little people bucking on the poet’s back. The second, a she, was none other than that celebrated dwarf Mouée-Mouée, an intimate of Tom Thumb’s and une fille aux pieds, so-called, with her almost prehensile, penis-plying feet. Succulent perfection, with just a hint of crud in the petal-like moons of her toenails. Whiff! Ah, this put hot spunk into our poet’s pen! Sweet inspiration!