Disaster Was My God

by Bruce Duffy

And so it ends as it always ends. How drunkenly Frédéric stumbles around, axe limp at his side. How, beaten, he stares at the stupefying sun, then at her, bathed in holy victory. Wiping his face on a muddy sleeve, Frédéric Rimbaud then slogs down into the undergloom of the barn, where le veau can be heard, Eee-yaHHHHH.

  And from this attic roost, Arthur Rimbaud, poet inviolate, utterly removed, he watches all this happen, helplessly happen, quite as if he had written it. And look, the last fraying gusts of spring snow—a sugaring that blew so briefly over the ice-glazed puddles—all vaporized in a blast of sun, leaving only the torn black loam and the blacker woods. Woods where, if you were Frédéric Rimbaud, you could scream and hear only … wind. Where you could raise your axe and hit only … trees.

  Or you could count the trees, then the fence posts, as his sister Isabelle often does, walking alone, up and down the road. Or, like Vitalie Rimbaud, you could write in your diary. Or, as in Arthur’s case, you could gaze at your own reflected brilliance and waste stamps on unanswered letters—you and le veau, both still licking the bloody nail.

  19 Prayers Answered—It’s War!

  But, O Holy Day, several months later—on July 19, 1870, to be exact—the Rimbaud children are delivered. War breaks out!

  Had only they known what to pray for.

  For although the French emperor, Napoleon III, is indeed the nephew of the diminutive scourge who once terrorized Europe, it must be said that this sickly, opiate-addicted second-generation heir has none of his uncle’s martial bearing or tactical brilliance. But Napoleon III heeds his generals, just as he points to the reflected glory of his ideas in the jingo press, parroted by the same feuilletonists and writers whom he pays to whip up the French public and give him a casus belli. In the thrall of Darwin and Wagner and Ranke, these writers concoct a whole stew of theories—perverted in the case of Darwin and magnified in the case of Wagner and Ranke—all supporting national destiny and the clash of nations. Necessitating the racial hygiene of periodic bloodlettings waged on a continental scale.

  It is high August, harvest season. Dry roads, long days, splendid time for marching, and so the emperor has declared war not only on Prussia but—Mme. Rimbaud is almost convinced—on her, Mme. Vitalie Rimbaud de Charleville! Only miles from the Belgian border, Roche, like Charleville, is right on the Hun invasion route to Paris. Dead center, in fact.

  Les sales Boches! cries the French press. Hah!

  This time, promises the French press, this time they will go through the meat grinder, these sausage snappers. And just look at them in their ridiculous spiked helmets and brown uniforms—brown in a continental army, well, really! No color! No horsehair flourishes! No plumery! No sartorial sense whatever.

  In the lull before the first glorious battle, there is great ferment and excitement in Charleville. On the parade grounds of Mézières, Charleville’s sister city, can be heard swelling bands and, far in the distance, the whu-ump of the French artillery tuning up. As for the kid, wading streets filled with soldiers, why, to hear him carrying on, one might think that this vast human spectacle had been undertaken entirely for his amusement. And at fifteen perhaps this is true, as Charleville’s armed yokelry muscles past him, fat grocers and beery butchers of Charleville’s ferocious home guard, their jowls puffed out in their itchy old woolen uniforms. Now on holiday, many are already packing picnic baskets, eager to see the Huns get a good hiding. And so the young Ezekiel can be seen fomenting in the bars, all but taking bets on his country’s defeat, just as he can be found rabblerousing in the park, sneering at the laboring military band and his fool contemporaries, all racing to sign up. Not him!

  “Christ, this is France. Are you out of your minds? You’ll only get walloped!”

  “You oughtn’t to talk like that!” cries an old man. Garlanded with medals, he rises indignantly from the bench where he sits with two other old gentlemen. “You, Monsieur, you could find yourself under arrest if you continue with such seditious, cowardly talk!”

  “Ah, tu m’emmerdes, pauvre pépé.”

  “What!” cries the old hero, medals atremble, “What do you dare to say to me?” Abruptly, his rage turns to a leering smile. “Wait. I know you, you little turd. You’re one of the Cuifs. Boilers of entrails! I know of your mother, too, the old horror. And you know what, boy? I think you’re a chicken.”

  How can he answer this? Already a crowd is gathering, so he has to bolt, and not just out of fear of arrest. Chicken! The man has struck him where he lives, and as he melts through the throngs, the young egotist burns with shame—shame both for who he is and for being stuck with the Bouche d’Ombre, the Mouth of Darkness. A mama’s boy. A chicken. That’s all he is. Enlisting, at least the other kids will get away.

  Not that the kid is wrong about France’s recklessness declaring war on the nation with continental Europe’s most formidable army. Indeed, he is not daunted in the least by news of the first meaningless skirmish, when les Boches, outnumbered three to one, are repulsed. With trains snarled and the tracks blown up to slow their invasion, the first Prussian units are nowhere near full strength, but now Charleville, like the rest of France, knows with moral certainty that God stands with the French.

  “To Berlin! To Berlin! All the way!”

  And indeed at Saarbrücken, as the French generals review their forces, they are satisfied, more than satisfied, to see their crack marching infantry, their glorious horse cavalry, their frightful artillery, and a wondrous new contrivance, the lead-spitting, multi-barreled Gatling gun, hand-cranked like a meat grinder, and to much the same effect. In great excitement, these and other strategic advantages are conveyed to His Munificence, astride his magnificent high-tailed black stallion, the same upon which he had been hoisted that morning hors de combat. Alas, His Eminence is a bit under the weather. It’s not just the usual constipation from the opiates to which he is addicted. It’s also the camp trots running through his army, a result of the now overflowing latrines.

  And so, three hours later, with what growing outrage, with what dismay do the emperor and his leaders watch the swirling, mounting confusion as yet another adjutant on another sweaty mount gallops back with yet more bad news. Then rout and panic: the Germans punch through, and His Royal Highness escapes—by a whisker—the gleaming sabers of the crack German cavalry. Worse the frightful rumors, too true, that the ignoble emperor had escaped—escaped through pure ruse, riding out under the white flag while hidden in a medical wagon.

  In little more than three weeks, it all collapses, humiliation upon humiliation … in Wissembourg, Spicheren, Reichshoffen, and others. Until finally, in Sedan, utter collapse, followed, within hours, by the emperor’s surrender and abdication—raus.

  Kaput, then, for the emperor. But victory for the seditious young Arthur Rimbaud. One of the people, he is now a nonlaboring, capital W Worker—indeed, a nonrevolting revolutionary still hiding in his room and jumping each time his mother barks. Yet, without knowing it, under this relentless pressure, the boy is turning coal to diamond. All with two of the most powerful forces known: rage and humiliation.

  20 Monster Boy

  But back to the days just before France’s defeat. Days when, feeling herself losing control, Mme. Rimbaud is wearing out the floors. Rape! Ruin! Men … Hun men in hobnailed boots would soon be stomping her glorious fields of rye. The Huns are close, too. One can hear the field guns, the howitzers, and great siege mortars:

  Whu-ump. Whu-ump-ump.

  “Get inside! Stay inside!”

  For here in the blue night sky—red blooms reverberating off the clouds—it’s raining down, the promised eighty-seven trainloads of Hun retribution. The Rimbaud children, however, see a very different picture.

  War! Change! Anything!

  Why, in France’s last crushing weeks, even the girls are thrilled, ready to flee like horses from a burning stable. As for the chief saboteur, the unlikely Frédéric Rimbaud, he is now known as the Viper. At supper, brazenly swilling beer from a take-ho
me bucket, he is openly defiant, the swine, upending the beer bucket, braying like a bullfrog, then wiping his unshaven chin with the back of his hand. And when the mother attempts, finally, to slap sense into him, this time he seizes her hand, bends it back, then grins as she drops to her knees in pain. “Viper! Hateful sinner!” she sobs, then rages out. For even as she drives her sons away, here, paradoxically, is her greatest terror: being left. Knowing this on some level, later that same night, drunk, the Viper steals money, then takes off. So what if the ship of France is going down? The next morning, following in his father’s footsteps—and then, so drunk he can scarcely stand or sign his name—the Viper enlists.

  Whuuuuu-ump. Whuu-ump-ump-ump.

  The next night, as Arthur watched from his room, the red flashes of the siege guns could be seen in the rain-swollen thunderheads, a death system rolling over the eastern rump of France. Was he scared or thrilled? Truly was there any difference? Well, his stiff peter, it sure knew how it felt as it rose, his big asparagus, then thickened in his coaxing hand. Thus began his stropping strophe, his bed going ump-ump-ump-ump-ump as his head sang the Angelus, Marie, Marie—Marie with the big-big-big-tits. But once done, once the rocking subsided, in that twinkling after-daze, he thought, Tonight’s the night.

  To Paris, that’s where he’d go, he who had never been more than twenty kilometers from Roche. To Paris, where there were street barricades and pretty girls and poets wearing red kerchiefs—poets with guns! But how? He was just what his mother said he was, a born tit-sucker. Why even stupid, spineless Frédéric, even he had the courage to leave.

  “Look at the sky!” howled his sisters in their room directly beneath his. “Maman, don’t you see? We need to go!”

  “And do what?” she cried. “Hand Roche over to the Huns?”

  “But we’ll be blown up!”

  “Pipe down. Have you no faith in the Lord?”

  “But, Maman, look—look at all the wagons. Everybody’s getting out of here.”

  “Timid people! Faithless! They’re not even close, sales Boches.”

  Then he heard Vitalie hissing up the stairs, “Arthur, Arthur—”

  Hissing, because of course their mother did not want him ruining them, influencing them, doing you don’t want to know what. So finally, screwing up his mangled courage, the boy snuck down and found the two girls rolled in a ball on the bed, so scared even their hair was snarled together. So he freed their hair. Then he got their brush and did the forbidden: sat on their bed, beside their packed valise and the dolls all dressed to go. Sitting down, he did what he’d seen only the girls or his mother do: brush hair, girl hair, in long, soft strokes. “It’s all right,” he whispered, happy for once to be a brother and not his mother’s dog. “Ha!” he bluffed. Snuggling down with them in their little blanket, he felt cozy, normal for once, a real brother. “Who’s afraid of the Huns?” he said. “Maman will attack them with her rug beater! They’ll run for their lives!”

  But of course, even these innocent whispers pierced her nightcap, and so there came the dreaded broom handle, pounding the ceiling. What sickened him, though, was how he bounded back up the stairs, you tit-sucker, you baby. Throwing himself on his bed, he was now defenseless, crushed between his two brains. There was the spasmodically happy, powerfully instinctive, but too easily quashed child brain. And, for better or worse, there was his adult brain, steely and critical, cutting and cynical. Just as the Germans were crushing France, so his adult brain now pounced upon his cowardice, his puerile and pathetic dependency. And, between these two, hammer and anvil, came a poetry so often distanced from the facts of his life or personal feelings, that is, beyond mockery and rage. Had ever a fifteen-year-old been less prone to “poor me” or personal heartache? All was objective—outer. All was observed—mimicked. There was no mask, or need for one, no conscience, no baggage. None of these things that only blind adults. In fact, only one thing still stuck to him—her.

  Lying there, in the womb of himself, the kid was sobbing—imprisoned like the Count of Monte Cristo.

  A freak, he thought, that’s who you are, a helpless, stupid freak. Like the Monster Boy, he thought suddenly. This was the carnival freak he’d seen earlier that summer at a circus sideshow. Piss-smelling straw, the licking torches, wild-looking gypsies banging drums—it was a scene irresistible to men and boys. No females allowed.

  Come! Dare! See the Monster Boy! challenged the man in the bowler hat strutting the boards, beneath the licking torches. For here, high above him, flapping in the wind, heraldlike, were lurid, crudely drawn canvas backdrops. Towering images old as the Middle Ages, picturing—around the Monster Boy—the Worm Man, the Human Bat, and a geek who bit the heads off live chickens.

  “Alors, alors, I warn you, gentlemen, this show is not for the weak of heart!”

  The drums picked up the beat. Swilling from a bottle, the barker blew real fire, and the wind picked up, causing the great placard-sized canvases to inflate in horror like flabby cheeks. So the boy did it, bought a ticket, then entered the torch-lit darkness, where, squinting, he saw this skinny apparition, chained to the floor. Stooped, the size of a small ape. Quelle farce! cried the man behind him, a heckler demanding his money back. A fake? thought the boy. As mangled as the poor kid was?

  Deflated dark angel. Disfigured as he was, it was hard to imagine he’d ever been born or been a child or had a mother. Curled long nails. Flayed nose. Hideous curled-up lips. And worst of all, the flapping gills cut deep into his neck—gills! And his acute, trembling terror—this seemed real. With his jagged hair and his teeth filed to points, he hissed and spat to keep people away, and just as freely the audience, men and soldiers, gibbered and raged back at him. “Connard,” asshole! cried one—and out it shot, a long, brown whip of chewing tobacco that snagged the kid, then ran down his face to loud guffaws. Acid. The Monster Boy shrieked and jerked at the chain. Howls of laughter. Another shower of stinging nuts.

  Connard! Connard!

  Nobody stopped it. The barker laughed, too, laughed even as he sold them the nuts bulleting across the room. But look, thought the kid. The bloody iron collar around the kid’s neck, it was paint, not blood; it was just red paint. Fake, absolutely it was fake, and yet even as the muscleman threw out the heckler, the man yelled back that the Monster Boy was just a comprachico, just a child mutilated, purposely mutilated. “Mutilated?” asked the kid, as the muscleman hauled the heckler up by the belt. “But who did that?”

  Was he stupid? “By his parents, of course,” said the heckler. “They mutilated him, then sold him like a pig.”

  Sold! At this word, the kid burned with rage and embarrassment, to think of parents mutilating their own child. Selling him to be exhibited along with the pickled cock of Alphonse le Géant. Probably off a stallion, before which the woman with the quivering breasts now moaned and shimmied. A freak show, he thought. Why, this was the biggest veal pen going. Grab a torch! Set fire to the place, burn it down. But then what? What would Monster Boy do in life? Trapped between childhood and adulthood, the Monster Boy was now so lost, so terrorized, that all he was, was the role.

  Well, innocence wasn’t going to save anybody—not that night. Realizing this, the boy shot up, bolted through the crowd, then dove into the greasy summer darkness—late, desperately late. Running down the road, he could think only of escape, that when it got really bad, he’d run away, then if that got bad, he’d run away from that, and then from the that of that—until here’s Roche. When right in front of the house, flat on his back, to trip over, here’s Frédéric. Dead drunk. Right where his friends dumped him as a joke, grass and bits of vomit on his lips. But then, as he tries to haul Frédéric up—blackout. Down he goes with a rabbit chop to the neck.

  “Leave him.” On his back, dazed, he sees her peering down at him in her billowing nightgown, her long gray hair blowing free and scentless for no man.

  “Leave it,” she says. “Drink with the devil, lie with the devil.”

  “Maman
, stop! Stop it.” He takes his brother by the arm. “Frédéric, up—”

  “Inside. Leave it.”

  “It? Are you crazy? That’s your son.”

  “That is no son of mine. Now in! In before I brain you again.”

  He didn’t argue. To his everlasting rage and shame, he let her, and he saved no one that night. Not the Monster Boy or Frédéric, lying in the cold dew among the slugs and crickets.

  21 The Sleeper

  The Monster Boy: It was he whom Rimbaud remembered that glorious night as the German guns played their lullaby of whuu-ump ump-ump. For that was the night, late in the war, when he, Arthur Rimbaud, Poet, finally broke out! Like war!

  Conveniently forgetting his sisters, he crept down the stairs, then down the darkened hall, past the room where the ogress slumbered. The kitchen door was unlocked, so leave it open, he thought—wide open. Let the Huns pry open her cold thighs.

  Two thin franc notes. No blanket, no food, no coat. In fact, besides the two hands stuffed in his pockets, the only thing the kid had was one fat wad of paper, two stubby pencils, and the little penknife he used to whittle them to points. No matter. In ecstasy he splashed through the bouncing, slapping rye, diving into what he came to call free freedom, thinking, This will be forever. Yet even then his more adult brain, the heckler, snarled back, You dope, you know you’ll only come crawling back.

  River flashing. Water rushing. Cold moonlit stones as he crossed it, swamping through cold black, knee-high depths. Then, heading for the guns, the excitement, after some three or four kilometers, look, over the hill—long, throbbing flames. Big guns with explosions so loud and low his ears popped. Wonderful! He whooped. He swung his arms. It was like dancing in the rain. And through the fog, farther on, here it was, the real show, boy: soldiers hunched over long-bayoneted rifles, rows of tents and campfires winking far into the distance. But God, the stink! Probably a thousand men, he guessed. It wasn’t an army, it was a beast, shucking fields and ripping down forests. And dumping its crap. Stinking crap piles. Crap everywhere.